Posts by Ned Leprosy

Mumbles

About the only certain thing is that it wasn't very clearly pronounced. I can see how the first and third occurrences could be mistaken for "fuck", though going on to conclude "that's definitely what it said" is perhaps taking it a bit far.

Re: employment contracts

I've wondered the same thing myself. I've had contracts that have stipulated "thou shalt not work in the IT industry for three years following your departure" that left me wondering what I /should/ be doing: stacking shelves at Tesco? Spending three years dead for tax reasons? As it was, I just made it clear that I didn't agree to that and several other bizarre clauses (being responsible for dead co-workers was another) and nobody felt like remonstrating with me, but reading stuff like this I'm rather glad I did amend my contract. Even if it's not enforceable, I can do without the threats and other aggravation.

Re: "It is a mistake to equate the US Government with the American People."

Sad to see you got so many downvotes for your effort: I agree with you and have seen that as much as the U.S. gov't has repeatedly screwed us over whenever it gets the chance, in stark contrast, the U.S. people have often acted with kindness and sacrifice. Some of us appreciate that, and the occasional reminder is no bad thing.

To the person objecting to the name "PershingDriver", I suspect it references the tank rather than the general.

But as far as the article's subject matter goes, I'm glad the EU has told the U.S. gov't to mind its own business. And maybe it'll earn it more respect than it did successive UK leaders and their habit of brown-nosing them.

Re: Hiring and old HP hand

Pretty much in complete agreement with you there; what surprises me is that someone disagreed strongly enough to downvote your comment. I'm genuinely curious to know what on earth they objected to...

Re: So much for internal security

"Oh wait all those Nigerian cleaners with fake visas got caught."

I'm too knackered to work out whether or not that was a serious comment, but virtually every office I've worked in has had its resident kleptomaniac. The cleaners are often the first to be blamed, but in every occurrence, thefts have tended to occur well before their shifts started. Even when there are keycard-controlled booths or turnstiles people will still try the "someone must've just wandered in off the street" because they don't want to accept that one of their colleagues is a tealeaf.

Re: Is there an English translation?

Good to see the spirit of DEC is still alive and well at HP!

Obviously when I say "good" I mean "extremely sad", but you get the idea.

The more things change, and all that

Much the same thing here when I graduated 20 years ago; my qualifications got me six months' manual labour in a factory! It was a little galling seeing endless tech companies bemoaning the lack of candidates with work experience whilst none of them were prepared to offer it: "come back when you've been working for one/three/five years" being a common response to the dozens if not hundreds of applications I sent off. It was at least small consolation that my situation wasn't unusual, though.

I think most galling of all was being given the choice to do a "useful" HND in computer science or an "alternatively useful" degree in sociology: I went for computer science, only to subsequently find literature from local tech companies typically boasting that all its staff had degrees - but all in sociology and the like. In one particularly egregious example I don't think they had a single technically-qualified member of staff on their IT team.

I'll be the first to admit that not all IT graduates have the sun shining out of their collective arses, but some of the metrics used to recruit staff are even more questionable. Though I also have to admit some of the best staff I've worked with started off as secretaries and receptionists.

Hats

I don't currently own any hats. I'm tempted to buy a bunch of them for a laugh but considering how successful the petitions site was, I suspect in the long run I'd just end up with a load of headwear that I don't want.

Paying Sky to be spammed

We currently have a Sky subscription, but thanks to their ludicrous amount of advertising on something we already pay (a lot) for, it's always been on a knife-edge. I suspect that, like us, people subscribe not out of acceptance but thanks to the lack of choice where ad-free channels are concerned, but I can't see the day is that far off when we'll stick two fingers up at them and save ourselves some money and aggravation: even pre-recording stuff and fast-forwarding through the crap every 10 minutes gets old fast.

A rationalised tank

"2.) Europe currently has 3 MBTs under development (EuroLeopard, Leclerc, Challenger). WASTE. Rationalize towards a EuroMBT."

They try to do this on an occasional basis, sometimes involving the Septics too, but it never quite works out thanks to conflicting needs (or at least political machinations in the guise of conflicting needs) tending to drag a workable specification all over the place until it breaks. Even when they just try to adopt certain common standards, such as the "need" for a multi-fuel engine, look what happened: the Chieftain ended up with the export-crippling (albeit technically quite interesting) L60 at the 11th hour while the Germans stuck with their much more workable diesel and the Americans with petrol.

The current situation of technology-sharing is probably the least worst solution, even if it does leave something to be desired, and even then there's the risk it might go in the wrong direction such as suggesting that the Challenger II should use the Rheinmetall gun because of its "increased lethality"; which may be true, but it's something where the cynic in me wonders if it's just because the Americans and Germans use it - though admittedly in part because to my untrained eye it looks a bit of a one-trick pony and, well, the traditionalist in me says it should have rifling, dammit!

It isn't helped in that countries often tend to be rather parochial about this sort of thing, and in the case of the UK the random application of the rationale "it's the best because it's the most expensive" seems to factor in, too. That said, I genuinely quite like the Challenger II. Just a shame it doesn't get more international sales...

But in contradiction to everything I've just written, the British Army historically have certainly not been averse to importing some of their best weapons: looking at small arms, for example, some of the best examples were foreign designs, such as the Bren, the Vickers (even if Sir Maxim did much of the design here), the Lewis, pretty much anything made by FN... though there does seem to be a certain national pride regarding the tank. Nearly as much as subsequently moaning about our own designs! (And "guilty as charged, m'lud").

Based on the Color Computer?

Was the Dragon actually based on the Tandy Color Computer or just similar to it? I remember this was a bone of contention at the time, with some people claiming it was just a repackaged CoCo and others asserting that any similarities to computers living or dead was purely coincidental.

I suspect both are products of the off-the-shelf BASIC they employed to run on the 6809 which presumably rather limited the supporting chips that were in use; I remember bemoaning the consequent use of the 6847 graphics contraption rather than the BBC Micro's much more capable 6845, for example, but that's rather getting off the point.

All-party halfwittery

I agreed up until the point where you politicised it. But "same shit, different name" arguments aside, we do seem to be facing a major "something must be done" scenario. The question is if anyone will do it on our behalf.

Creeping featurism

I suspect you may well be right here. If I remember correctly, much the same thing happened with DLC; I may have some of the exact details wrong, but I seem to recall EA's position progressed something like this:

1. Customers who sign up to our online services thus proving they have a legit copy will be rewarded with extra free content in addition to the game.

2. Customers who sign up will gain access to the parts of the content we removed from the retail copy prior to release.

3. Customers who sign up will be able to buy the content we removed from the game prior to its release.

Of course the sales they settled on in version 3 of their "DLC vision" turned out to be very expensive for a given amount of content compared to the original normally-priced game and require the use of their proprietary non-refundable points-based system with its own exchange rate.

Suddenly doesn't sound like such a great deal. Especially as the pirates can still get the lot for free.

One difference...

I can't tell the difference either (well, between a high-quality ogg and flac in my case) but one thing I did learn to beware of is the problem converting from one format to another: if yesterday's mp3 is re-encoded into today's ogg which is then converted into tomorrow's flavour-of-the-month, you end up with a sort of digital analogue (pun unintended) of cassette-to-cassette recording, where the losses will soon become apparent.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when I decided to go down the flac route years ago: not just because I had to buy more of the then expensive storage, but I'd already encoded a large chunk of my collection twice, first into mp3 and second into ogg. But in hindsight I'm glad I did: the tools for generating mp3s, oggs or whatever aren't exactly transparent, but it's nice having the option without the niggling thought at the back of my head, "I'm going to have to do all that again one day. And so many of them are scratched to buggery."

Re: Evan Harris

That's because, whatever one thinks of his personal agendas, he was a totally crap MP, only answering a lamentable 7% of his correspondence in 2008 for example. As someone in his constituency, I'm glad to see the back of him; I'm no fan of the Conservatives, but hopefully his Tory replacement will actually do something for the area rather than spend all their time getting their face on the telly.

More a case of privacy intrusion

I think I've become deaf to the concern about paedophiles supposedly on every street corner thanks to the tabloids' unhealthy obsession with the subject, but for the sheer scale of the disregard for other people's privacy, I hope they throw the book at the scrotes responsible.

@@An interesting idea

"And Disney should be free to take a Hans Christian Anderson story for free, turn it into a cartoon and own the copyright for ever?"

Yeah, this is something that really sticks in my craw: "we got rich off other people's copyright-expired IP, but we don't want anyone else doing the same". I dunno what I think is worse, Disney's "copyright expiry's for me but not for thee" attitude or the fact that so many people have grown up thinking that Disney's crassly saccharine retelling of old tales are the genuine article.

As an aside, who's been downvoting every response that calls for a modicum of balance? Own up!

ISO9000? eek!

My memories of this thing aren't especially positive: it seemed to generate a heap of unnecessary and irrelevant paperwork that did nothing to improve coding quality, which actually suffered due to having substantially less time to spend on it and its associated procedures.

Maybe I've just suffered especially bad implementations of ISO9000, but my experiences of working through it being introduced are two-nil to it being entirely counterproductive.

Though I'm certainly not arguing against quality control in general, and competent project managers with the relevant planning and cat-herding skills are worth their weight in gold. Speaking as an end-user as well as a programmer, I'm as aggrieved as anyone at companies that take the "can't be arsed, it'll sell anyway" approach to quality assurance.

Not just in the US

> "In Europe you would legally have difficulty working the types of hours that is often expected in the US. There is almost a macho culture of working long hours for the sake of it - obviously still receiving a 40h paycheck. Then there is the 2 weeks of personal vacation."

Well thank random deity for the 48-hour opt-out then, that handy little slip of paper often stapled to (as yet unsigned by the prospective employer) contracts or which the hapless employee is menacingly coerced into signing amidst mutterings of the never-to-be-seen-anyway bonus payments and the ever-looming redundancy programme. I've frequently witnessed people pressured into putting in dozens of extra hours every week for nothing more than the tomfoolery of presenteeism.

The four or five weeks' holiday is nice, though... if you can actually get to take it. Even though some unused holiday can be theoretically carried over, some managers are adept at making their staff jump through such hoops to negotiate when they're allowed to take it that it may as well be as tight-fisted as their US cousins' fortnight off. Of course the time spent at work instead of on one's contracted holiday is about as productively spent as the not-so-voluntary unpaid overtime, i.e. not at all.

I'm just bemused about how all this sort of foolishness came to be accepted as normal.

Re: Maybe...

> "being taken over by BT made them shit."

I'd like to blame BT, but I don't think they're the culprits here: and though BT aren't exactly paragons of good customer service either, they're probably still a big improvement over what Dabs' customers had become used to. Dabs had become pretty diabolical a good couple of years before BT appeared on the scene in 2006. Or rather a bad couple of years, if my memories of trying to get them to take back defective stock are anything to go by... Dabs must've lost a lot of customers during that time due to their habit of jerking them about.

Cream Soda

For some reason I misread "Soda Stream" as "cream soda": the thought of a sort of weird barley wine whisky hybrid mixed with cream soda is... well, it's... actually, words fail me.

Words don't fail the Soda Stream contraption I had as a kid, though: it was made of fail, as was that horrid, bitter, syrupy diarrhoea substitute that you'd get in place of cola. That the perpetually almost empty CO2 cylinder would half-heartedly make even more flat than before it started. The '70s were great, but the Soda Stream didn't really contribute to their greatness.

Er, where were we? Oh yeah, frightening beer. I think I'll view that one as a spectator sport.

Re: can it understand Geordie?

Actually this technique was used by radio operators during WWII to confound German eavesdroppers whose English language skills tended to begin and end with an understanding of RP: though not guaranteed to trip them up, it was still reputed to be rather effective.

Re: Sylvester McCoy

In spite of his random wibbling on politics, I always thought he had the potential to be a decent Doctor, if only his scripts weren't almost uniformly appalling and the special effects budget consisting of whatever Blue Peter had assembled the previous week. The only likely conspiracy I see is Michael Grade arranging for it to be crap so he could say "look how crap it is! Let's cancel it" because he personally disliked the show.

Well thanks for this article: I now have the stirrings of some memories of post Tom Baker Who. They're not pleasant.

Eric the title

> "In fairness, 14-odd years in IT and the best boss I've had to date was a woman."

One of my best bosses was also a woman. Mainly because she never turned up, other than the one occasion she announced she was now in charge. Six months of bliss, not being interfered with by one of our legion of PHBs.

There does seem to be a better correlation between the effectiveness of a boss and their (in)attendance than any other factor, at least in my experience.

"Real" RAM vs. "toy" RAM

That's all very nice, but since my budget stretches to toy computers, toy RAM is what I end up with. Lots of reasons not to like PCs, but lots of currency-shaped reasons not to buy something better.

Search engines

> "And if you read The Register you'll know that Bing is a copy not only of Google"

I know it's probably not what you meant, but I wish people wouldn't conflate "Google" and "search engine": they were far from the first. I'm not sure what was, but DEC's AltaVista was one of several that predated them. And I wilt whenever I hear Usenet/newsfroups/whatever being referred to as Google Groups.

There's nothing new under the sun, but some are more tenacious than others at sticking their brand name on it nonetheless.