* Posts by Will Godfrey

5893 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007

Pen Test Partners: Boeing 747s receive critical software updates over 3.5" floppy disks

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Re: Honestly..

I've got some for the BBC B that are still going.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

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Facepalm

Re: Adding a comment sometimes caused compile failure

Bringing it ever so slightly more up-to-date

int store [256];

..

..

..

..

store [256] = // oops

China slams 'dirty' America's 'clean network' plan, reminds world of PRISM snoop-fest exposed by Ed Snowden

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Pint

Re: All money is theft!

Dunno who downvoted you. Thought I should put that right :)

Oh, and have one of these too ->

I got 99 problems, and all of them are your fault

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Unhappy

I agree to a point, and indeed have on occasion found that by being patient and not drawing attention to their ignorance, initially hostile people became my most emphatic supporters. However there are some who regard anyone who understands something they don't as an existential threat. You will never get anything but hostility from them.

China slams President Trump's TikTok banned-or-be-bought plan in the US

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Hmmm

While they are absolutely correct, there is a considerable element of karma here.

You think the UK coronavirus outbreak was bad? Just wait till winter: Study shows test-and-trace system is failing

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Facepalm

Re: Because the modelling has been so accurate thus far.......

I get the impression your Deep South has a slightly better* inbreeding system than our more isolationist areas.

* for some undefined value of 'better'

Wrap it before you tap it? No, say Linux developers: 'GPL condom' for Nvidia driver is laughed out of the kernel

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Re: NVidia has the money and manpower

They wouldn't just have to write their own kernel - no mean feat in itself - they would also have do so in a way that has an identical interface for the rest of the system... or write an entire OS and application level. I don't see that happening any time soon

Aviation regulator outlines fixes that will get the 737 MAX flying again

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Trust Boeing?

Not a chance! They are still trying to wiggle out of commitments, and I've no doubt at all that the bean counters will find ways to roll back the 'unnecessary' extra expenses.

A tale of mainframes and students being too clever by far

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

A question for 'Sam'

Did failure to complete the course impede your employment progress, or did it actually prove beneficial?

We give up, Progressive Web Apps can track you, says W3C: After 5 years, it decides privacy is too much bother

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Re: I wonder at what point I became a Luddite?

Got a spare room by any chance?

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Unhappy

Poison the well

It's the only thing you can do, and it would have to be done by piggybacking the mouse and keyboard, so the browser has no way of knowing you didn't enter the requests manually.

Venerable text editor GNU Nano reaches version 5.0 and adds the modern frippery that is scrollbars

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Coat

Sort of nano fan

For low level small text and bash scripts, it works well for me.

For anything of any size I go full GUI with kwrite.

s'pose I'll get kicked out of here now

'I'm telling you, I haven't got an iPad!' – Sent from my iPad

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Unhappy

The strangest are the long-term primary school teachers. I'm certain they get 'infected' with something from dealing with all those kids.

GitHub starts publishing roadmap of future features

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Meh

Playing safe

... ish.

Our project is also mirrored on sourceforge.

Once considered lost, ESA and NASA's SOHO came back from the brink of death to work even better than it did before

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Thumb Up

Never give up

That's the lesson here, and it applies to all forms of survival.

How Bude: Google's sole-financed private undersea pipe to make a landing in Cornwall

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Linux

Hmmm

This could be the thin edge of the wedge leading to a rather nasty walled Internet

Garmin staggers back to its feet: Aviation systems seem to be lagging, though. Here's why

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Unhappy

Difficult

I can think of only one way this could be stopped, and it would initially be very hard on the victims.

Jail time for whoever authorises a ransom payment.

Class move, Java. Coding language slips to third place behind Python in latest popularity contest

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Re: TIOBE Index

Agreed. I would suggest the only thing counting github pulls is good for is... counting github pulls. In fact I can't think of any reliable method of assessing coding language popularity. How do you count establishments that have their own in-house teams working on their completely closed systems? What about all the hobbyist Arduino users? Does its subset of C++ count, or is it a 'different' language?

Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline

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Unhappy

Re: Hand me no but(t)s......

My sympathies are with the security guy. He was just trying to do his job - although no doubt he was given a hard time. My guess is the security system was set up before the machine was installed, so it's the latter that should have been carpeted.

Fitness freaks flummoxed as massive global Garmin outage leaves them high and dry for hours

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Same Old

Why are people continuing to trust on these 'connected' devices, when there have been years of evidence they don't stay connected, but instead leak like sieves.

SpaceX pulls off an incredible catch, netting both halves of its Falcon fairing as they fell Earthwards after latest launch

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Pint

Great stuff

Looks like they only just made it, but the point is they did!

Bad: US govt says Chinese duo hacked, stole blueprints from just about everyone. Also bad: They extorted cash

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Facepalm

Re: One thing is for sure

Sleepers (of any kind) don't only sit under railway lines.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

So let's get this straight

Two individuals have been attacking world plus dog for 11 years, and have only just been discovered. If that's true, then it's either an incredible feat, or a woeful commentary on world plus dog... or both!

UK.gov admits it has not performed legally required data protection checks for COVID-19 tracing system

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Unhappy

I'm just so surprised

That was a lie - I'm practicing being in denial, as I think we're all going to need it.

See you after the commercial breakdown: Cert expiry error message more entertaining than the usual advert tripe

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Loss of advertising?

If so, then carry on, nothing of value was lost.

Imagine surviving WW3, rebuilding computers, opening up GitHub's underground vault just to relive JavaScript

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Not quite.

Assuming that anything survives, future people (creatures?) would first have to recognise that the objects contained, or were, representations of information.

FYI Russia is totally hacking the West's labs in search of COVID-19 vaccine files, say UK, US, Canada cyber-spies

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

If it's come from government it's a lie

Or at least hand-waving to draw attention away from what our government is doing.

SoftBank: Oi, we paid $32bn for you, when are you going to strong-Arm some more money out of your customers?

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

No Surprise

This is exactly what I expected to happen. I could see the bridge was out before the train even left the station. The only thing I wasn't sure of was the timeline.

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Happy

Re: "the test is designed to make almost anyone fail"

You just reminded me of of a time in the 1960s when I was applying for a job with Radio Rentals.

They presented a non working set (valve in those days), then told me to write down every step I took and left me alone. They were quite surprised when I asked for a second sheet of paper, and one of the guys sauntered over to have a browse, then went away rather quickly.

Eventually I finished and presented them with a working set, having found and resolved both faults. I was immediately told I had the job, which rather surprised me. Later I discovered that they'd only put one fault on it, but the set had developed a second one, and I found and detailed both.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Show the evidence...

Totally agree with this. Apart from anything else, job induced stress when you feel comfortable in your environment is totally different from the artificial setting of standing at a whiteboard and having every action being watched by a group of strangers.

As the FCC finally starts tackling its dreadful broadband maps, Georgia reveals just how bad they are

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

You can't put teeth in a sock puppet

Pokémon Go players fined for breaking down-under COVID-19 lockdown rules

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Unhappy

Re: Crazy

Less likely to come into contact - maybe. More likely to be from totally different places and hard to identify - definitely.

UK government marks 'at least' £115m for new Brexit systems against backdrop of chequered IT project history in customs and border control

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Holmes

O ye of little faith

With the combined benefits of our highly skilled negotiators, and cutting-edge government planning I'm sure our economy will be off the scale.

Er...

Downwards!

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Just when you thought it couldn't get worse

Need I say more?

Actually, I've given up on this, and my latest concern is how to get a regular supply of face masks.

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

My last job had old school recruiting.

Simple advert stating what the job was. Interview was with one of the engineers. Presented with a questionnaire with about 30 different situations to answer fairly briefly ranging from Electrical safety, to PLC programming. A couple of days later I got a call inviting me to have a chat with the boss. After about 10 minutes of quite unrelated chat, he said "By the way you've got the job. See you tomorrow."

The only reason I left (18 years later) was because I retired!

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

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Thumb Up

Re: Lovely.

Absolutely priceless. I can't upvote this enough! George Carlin would be proud.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Lovely.

Indeed. One might have a buffer that always handles whole blocks of data. This is likely to be a list of, err, blocks.

GitHub is just like all of us: The week has just started but it needed 4 whole hours of downtime

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Eggs and Baskets

For several years now we've maintained duplicates on github and sourceforge. OK, I know that only really works efficiently for a relatively small project, but it does turn "the sky is falling" into "tut-tut".

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

Not with webby stuff but an XML library

For years this had not been totally compliant, as it would accept XML with a blank line at the start (which apparently the spec says is a nono for some reason). Eventually they decided to clean it up, without bothering to tell anyone, and our code that had relied on the library exclusively suddenly failed to load any files.

It turned out, the devs hadn't noticed that their library was itself generating these blank lines on saving, and we had to do a hurried check for, and remove them when loading. I believe they eventually responded to the howls of protest.

P.S. We still make the check - just in case.

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Re: Session ID?

Exactly what I was thinking might be the case!

Hungry? Please enjoy this delicious NaN, courtesy of British Gas and Sainsbury's

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Linux

Re: I have a little collection.

But including your own errors is cheating.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: I am NaN

As I said on a previous topic:

Never provoke a nan, she knows enough about you to totally destroy your credibility.

Captain, the computer has identified 250 alien stars that infiltrated our galaxy – actual science, not science-fiction

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Upvote for E.E. 'Doc' Smith

Rather an old one actually. I was reading his stories with a torch under bedcovers when I was a kid.

I was convinced they were true stories!

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

Will Godfrey Silver badge

Translation|:

"Whaaa. You just popped my artificial reality bubble"

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Mushroom

Reality Check

Perhaps these do-gooders might like to think about the very real situation of the considerable amount of modern slavery. It's not called that though. One of the 'popular' forms is Zero Hours contracts - popular with the slave masters, that is. The victims don't have any choice.

When a deleted primary device file only takes 20 mins out of your maintenance window, but a whole year off your lifespan

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Seems like a proper who, me

Which reminds me, I was supposed to do a backup run yesterday

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Re: Once Flash finally dies

Well yes, but it's not the tool in the box you need to worry about, it's the tools that put it in the box.

Will Godfrey Silver badge
WTF?

This is just the one that was discovered.

How many more howlers are lurking in the code?

I doubt Barclays is worse than the other banks (nor better of course) so it makes me wonder about all the outages that occur and are never properly explained.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Meh

Wouldn't work for me

There is only one brand of yogurt I like. It's that or none.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

Will Godfrey Silver badge
Unhappy

About this 'Taking Back Control'...

I'm not seeing a lot of it. Our gubbermint don't seem to be in control of anything right now.