Posts by jfm

Re: Bogus

Bit late to this but ln(1) exists to create hard links (by default, or symlinks with the -s flag) on UNIX-like systems, so unless I'm misunderstanding you, "no OS" is a bit sweeping.

No it isn't. Many people assume the autistic spectrum is from high-functioning to low-functioning, but that would be a continuum —shades of grey.

there are many areas in which people can diverge from neurotypical: think of each one as a colour of the rainbow, and of each person with autism as having their own colour palette. THAT'S the spectrum.

Re: Perhaps Ofcom will take inspiration from the Home Office

> one wonders how there's any time left for effective governance…

There clearly isn't any, based on the performance of this government.

> phrases involving piss-ups and breweries don't fully convey how useless this guy was.

Perhaps you want the rather cruder Army version: Couldn't organise a fuck-up in a brothel.

Re: Got to love 5x9's uptime

I've always found that more useful in the form "pi megaseconds is a millicentury" (31.4 Ms in a year, which is within 5% of the actual value), and for quick estimations, 30 megaseconds—and knock off as many zeros as there are 9s in the reliability.

Re: Aaaaargh!

I used to see that in recruiter spam on technical mailing lists when I first moved to South Africa (may still happen, I don't know):

"Hi. I'm looking for a resource with the following skills…"

I'm convinced Google's voice recognition (and indeed Assistant) are an elaborate but not especially funny practical joke. I'm a British migrant to South Africa, living in Cape Town. In recent weeks I've asked my phone to navigate to a place about ten minutes' drive away. Imagine my surprise when the response was "the fastest route is via the Trans-Saharan Highway. Your journey will take approximately 7 days and 14 hours" (it wanted to take me to somewhere in Britain).

A few days later, I said "Call Jeannie" (my ex-wife, in my Contacts so that I can discuss childcare arrangements). Without any attempt to check whether it had guessed right before dialling, or even give me a list of possible matches , it out me through to La Trini, a restaurant in Barcelona, Spain (I have never visited the restaurant, the city, or indeed the country). This would indeed have involved a six and a half day journey including a section of the Trans-Sahara Highway, but a two-week round trip drive for dinner seemed a bit excessive…

Re: Missed opportunity

This is why recipes in some of my older cookbooks have two sets of measurements, metric and imperial, and you're warned not to mix them, because the conversion involves both rounding and adjusting to make the recipe easier to use either way. For example the recommended dry-weight conversions in one book are 1 oz : 25 g; 2 oz : 50 g; 4 oz : 100 g; 8 oz : 225 g; 12 oz : 350 g; 1 lb : 450 g.

Again: it's an unsigned integer. The test (i >= 0) is always true. In fact I'd expect the compiler to optimise it away; and I can see why it would also warn that it doesn't make sense.

Re: Fore!

The US Attorney for South Texas—the senior lawyer for the federal government in the South Texas federal court district. Acting in that role, granted, but hardly a random South Texas lawyer.

Re: Reply all

I've always liked the response by the Cleveland Browns' lawyer to a silly complaint:

Dear Mr. Cox:

Attached is a letter that we received on November 19, 1974. I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters.

Very truly yours,

CLEVELAND STADIUM CORP.

James N. Bailey,

General Counsel

Re: I must express my opposition to this

It may be reluctant, because he's probably saying "I do not want to lose the company's protected status with respect to liability"

Are you misunderstanding §230 of the CDA? It was passed specifically to protect information services from liability in general for external content, AND to allow them to edit or censor some content without creating such liability for all content. Short of the law being changed, nothing Facebook do or don't do can create liability or remove the protection. (Obviously there are exceptions, eg for illegal content.)

Re: Also deals in milk as well as alcohol

Dunno, but it's not a feel-good story…

Re: The past is another counttry.

SU bars were usually cheaper, yes—but not at Edinburgh in the '80s. The Students' Association (non-NUS-affiliated) had a policy of selling beer at pub prices and using the proceeds to subsidise cheap hot meals, so when you'd gone through your grant cheque ("What's green and takes 3 hours to drink?"), you could eat for next to nothing at the Student Centre.

Re: Switch provider, and refuse payment

Agreed re driving tests. I recently (for reasons of emigration and bureaucracy) had to sit a local driving test. I walked into the driving school, said "I've been driving for 30 years but I need to learn to pass the test", and did exactly what I was told until I did pass. (The instructor said I was a much easier student than the younger learner-drivers, who don't listen.)

Re: Oh really?

I'm in South Africa and paying in ZAR for a .org I've owned for going on 15 years. I can assure you that any large increase will be extremely painful.

Re: Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35

Yes, I remember as a university sysadmin we were talking to a security vendor and having to explain patiently that at a university with several thousand inquisitive students, most of the threats to our network were internal.

Re: Yay!

There's also The World's Shortest Political Quiz (arranged as a diamond rather than a square).

Just how many editors, desktops, filesystems, etc. do you really want/need?

One (of each) — but not necessarily the one you chose.

Re: how about stick to the original intent of 230

As I replied to someone else who claimed this a few months ago:

This is nonsense. Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy, decided in May 1995, was the court case that found that editorial control by a service provider changed them from a distributor of information, without liability, into a publisher with liability. Within months (Feb '96) section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was passed to /prevent/ service providers from becoming liable if they screened or moderated content, and indeed encourage them to do so.

In other words, you've got section 230 exactly backwards.

Re: Dolt

I'm assuming the Gold status is for quantity, not quality.

Re: Changing Wallpaper can have career enhancing effects

Inverting the sense of mouse movements isn't nearly as bad as rotating by 90° — mouse up moves cursor left &c.

Re: "I've been a customer of theirs since 1999 when they only sold books"

However, Chinese companies have already been found guilty of putting lead into almost everything under sun, including milk formula.

I hadn't heard about lead but I do know about melamine being added to formula and petfood because it was detected as additional protein by protein-content testing. (I believe the tests now used can tell the difference).

In South Africa, many parking payment machines accept your parking ticket for cancellation, and your debit/credit card for payment. They have one card slot. After 17 years here I'm just about over the brief panic every time I use one (how does it remember which card to rewrite? Especially since it takes both, processes them and then returns them, all through the same single slot).

Re: Ambivalence of complexity

Indeed. Hence the name of a group I ran for a while in Durban, The Programmer's Art, which combined meetings to discuss programming languages and paradigms with frequent pub visits. We never worked out whether we were Artists or Artisans but we had fun debating it over beers.

Or skilful application of an angle-grinder to the earth pin of a white plug (allegedly).

Re: Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

South Africa uses a plug with the same pin pattern as a UK plug but with cylindrical pins. A plug for a protected circuit is red and has the top of the earth pin ground flat. The socket fitting is also red and the earth hole has the same flat-topped part-circular shape so that a standard white plug won't go in. I've even seen installations with two protected circuits, red and blue, with the plane at different angles.

Re: Is this the best that the USA can come up with ?

No. Google "doctrine of speciality" (or specialty for leftpondians). Extradition in international treaties prohibits adding any charges beyond those in the application for extradition.

Re: But he actually has a case...

This is nonsense. Stratton Oakmont v Prodigy, decided in May 1995, was the court case that found that editorial control by a service provider changed them from a distributor of information, without liability, into a publisher with liability. Within months (Feb '96) section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was passed to prevent service providers from becoming liable if they screened or moderated content, and indeed encourage them to do so.

The safe harbour provision is 230(c)(1) which reads:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Re: took the day off

Written in Perl by any chance?

Re: TBF...

Billy Connolly (who was with 15 PARA for a while) summed this up well in this song, "Sergeant, Where's Mine".

Re: Just a reminder

ObXKCD

Re: Green Credentials

Surely the justification for the glue is ease of recycling? Instead of lots of fiddly little screws, you just pop the thing in an oven so that the glue melts and it drops neatly into a pile of recyclable components. That's the story anyway.

Just to extend the quote and violently agree:

they can slot in these sorts of interesting elements as required on the day, and making it clear what's important to readers…

If you want to know what's important to me, ask me: don't try to tell me.

FWIW, what's important to me is all the stories, in chronological order.

Actor/Actress [was Re: Correct translation]

This sort of thing led, more years ago than I care to remember, to the following correction in the Guardian:

A rigid application of the Guardian style guide caused us to say of Carlo Ponti in his obituary, page 34, January 11, that in his early career he was "already a man with a good eye for pretty actors…". This was one of those occasions when the word "actresses" might have been used.

Re: You don't cancel a successful program

I think it was Simon Slavin, years ago, who said that Microsoft is a cross between the Borg and the Ferengi. Unfortunately they use the Borg to do their marketing and the Ferengi to do their programming.

Re: Gets out key spec list needed for me to upgrade...

6) Security & OS updates?

Should be #1. When the Moto g5 was released I bought one to replace my original Moto g. It was supplied with Android 7.0 and has had no version updates and only occasional security updates in the 18 months since its launch.

I won't be buying Lenovo/Motorola again.

I've seen problem reports (especially networking issues like "The Internet is down!") referred to as Layer 8 problems.

Re: Dates

NATO did (and presumably still does) have a different convention. Things didn't happen at midnight, they happened at 2359 (or less commonly, at 0001).

Re: ICO angle

The proverbial version is a ton. 112 hundredweight.

20 hundredweight. 112lb in a cwt.

Yes - I heard, years ago, the almost-instaneous time interval between hitting ENTER and realising you shouldn't've described as an ohnosecond.

Re: UK gov impact studies (again)

I forget where I first heard it but I think the expression you need is "policy-based evidence-making".

Re: 'be at 20C by 06:30' @AC

Sensing whether a space is in use and saving energy accordingly is not always straightforward. Many years ago, my battalion was training for a deployment. This involved lectures to 600 people, and the only sufficiently large space was the gym.

Some bright spark had improved the energy efficiency of the gym by installing movement-controlled lighting - after all, people are always moving in a gym, aren't they?

Thankfully the Regimental Sergeant-Major had a solution to the problem of sudden darkness 5 minutes into each lecture: instead of the usual barracks-cleaning and other punishment details, the day's defaulters were lined up at the back of the gym to do PT and keep the lights on.