Posts by Little Mouse 1524 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Dec 2014
I chose not to take either daughter into the machine room at work when they were growing up, even though I really would have loved to have shown them around.
Sadly, one would have been utterly compelled to press the forbidden buttons (and still would, as an adult) and the other would have been compelled to rub it in her sister's face if she'd been the only one allowed in.
Kids.
It's not just the need for "likes". It's the relentless self-censoring that takes place because they live in a world where they cannot afford to make any social faux-pas for fear of becoming the next Star Wars Kid or Greg Wallace. Thanks to social media and other people they have to be on their guard 24-7.
It's literally been etched into their growing teenage brains. They've not known any other way of thinking.
As a CS student in 1992 we learned all about the impending Y2K issue. A year in industry was also a part of the course.
I did my stint at ICI, and inherited a bunch of home-brew software modules from the guy before me. The year field had still only been allocated two digits, but the Y2K problem had been simply offset with some basic arithmetic hand-wavey programming.
IIRC, it should all collapse in a heap in 2075...
Totally this - Because they can't actually simply be hoping to get rich by "inventing" the e-moped.
a: it's been done already
b: not that many people want them* (anecdotally from where I'm sitting anyway)
(My eldest daughter has an e-moped. It's an awesome bit of kit, and totally "green". But when she tried to sell it on after a couple of years' use she didn't get a single sniff of interest)
"How on Earth can anyone, other than those afflicted by terminal daftness, expect a public broadcaster to explain AI etc to an effectively illiterate polloi that are barely able to use their smartphones?"
The same way they always do it:
- by getting a couple of the key characters in Eastenders to discuss it "really naturally" </sarcasm> over a cup of coffee.
" an estimate of how long it would take before a catastrophic collision occurs"
What counts as "Catastrophic"?
Presumably, two Starlink units taking each other out would qualify, and the world will keep turning. But then again, I guess it's the resulting mess that counts, not the actual loss of the individual hardware/service.
20/20?
I don't even remember what it ran on (Presumably either DOS or VAX VMS, as that's mostly what my company used back in 1994)
I just remember my boss getting a severe bollocking when the bean counters realised he'd shelled out big bucks for a 10 year support contract for it.
(Edit: A quick Google shows it was VAX)
Wood burners are like mini black holes. You drop a bit of mass in them and get bathed in toasty radiation.
(And WTF is the story with those fans that people think are blowing the hot air around? They can't work, can they? Sure, it'd be nice to have the warm air forcibly propelled into the room somehow, but the blades are only spinning because the hot air is pushing on them, not the other way around, Shirley?
Can anyone correct me on that?)
In a similar vein although a bit off-tangent to the article.
Not too many years ago, if anyone in my dept attended a technical training course, the non-technical boss would expect that person to email a summary of it to the rest of the team afterwards. That email had to contain only the three most important things you learned, bullet-pointed.
Because that way everyone would benefit from the new technical knowledge.
Sarcasm was absolutely not allowed.
Totally agree. the little things matter, especially if it's one of the first things every customer sees and looks at quite closely.
So maybe the chef can cook, but who's got their finger on the day-to-day running of the place? That shabby menu might be indicative of other corner-cutting behind the scenes - Who can tell?
You were 100% right to prioritise fixing that.
Canaries?
As a supporter, I clicked on this link expecting to read an article about a rudderless company who publicly humiliate themselves week after week with appallingly bad displays of incompetence, cheered on by a clueless board that will blindly drag them all down the toilet if changes aren't made pretty damn soon.
Instead I got this.
"At the same time, another Brit telco, Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), is also rolling out massive MIMO support"
Since O2 merged with VM, their support function has disappeared down the toilet. A shame, because it was genuinely quite good 10 years ago...
So they can rollout whatever they like now - They'll never drag me back.
grumble mutter grumble...
"With just days remaining until Microsoft discontinues free support"
The Reg appears to have chosen to ignore the fact, but Win 10 EUS updates are available to all* non-business users for another year. The only** caveat is you need to have a MS account to qualify.
* May not apply in some Regions - dunno - but Europe/UK are well served by this.
** But you may need to jump through some technical hoops if you run Win10 Home, as activating EUS requires an account with local admin rights, which could be a faff for non-techies running Win10 Home edition (No "Local Users & Groups" snap-in!)
Wuh? Seriously?
With 1.2M visitors a year, this doesn't read like some "Tiger King" back-street Zoo. Yet they thought it was OK to hold onto personal data for for 25 years?
The "no need to complain" and "as we worked through this challenge together" made a nice change from the usual boilerplate response though. Nothing to see here!
The one thing blocking us from going full Linux at Mouse Towers is Mrs Mouse's dependency on Excel. She's a proper "power user" - someone who actually regularly uses those features that the rest of us are barely even aware of. She 100% needs it for work, but maybe less so for the home accounts etc.
So we're spending the next few weeks trialling Libre Office to see if it's good "enough" and compatible "enough". For 99% of people I'm sure it would be...
Fingers crossed we can finally cut the MS cord before the enforced Win11 shitshow begins.
I know we're not supposed to mention him anymore, but Scott Adams' "Build a Better Life Stealing Office Supplies" came out around the same time I got my first office job and it's always made me chuckle.
How was it possible that he could know this new group of strangers that I'd only just been introduced to so well?
Relocating is for young people with no ties.
Anyone with a family or established ties to their community is going to be far less likely to give up what they do have for a company with a famously bad culture of poor job security.
Its just IBM's ageist layoff policy - but more subtle this time.
My Pixel 7 smuggled a "Smart Keyboard" feature in under the radar a little while back.
The first I knew of it was when WhatsApp kept suggesting responses for me each time I got a message from someone. But I couldn't even read the message that they'd sent me because it was covered up by the inane reply that my idiot phone thought would be the perfect response, which I had to close before I could even read what had been sent to me. Every fucking time. Seriously annoying.
It took a few weeks before I realised that it was actually my phone's OS sneakily inserting the responses into the App on my behalf - and not what I had assumed was a seriously poor UI choice by WhatsApp themselves.
"I'd probably turn off the external lights"
I dunno - Stealth can backfire if not thought through properly.
Back in the days when getting home at 3:00am would incur the wrath of parents, a friend of mine had the bright idea of killing the car engine whilst still on the approach to the house, intending to just coast into the driveway, minus engine noise and lights.
Unfortunately he was also minus power steering, made an unholy mess of the lawn and hedge, and woke everyone up in the process.
A very long time ago - back before I had graduated Uni and my IT career had even begun, I was earning beer money doing evening & night-shifts at a Mobil petrol station across town.
During my day-time induction no-one had thought to show me how me how to turn the outside lights on when it got dark (I mean, obvious, right?) In hindsight, moving a big lever switch to the "Off" position was never going to be the correct choice. In my defence, I was young, stressed, feeling a little bit out of my depth, and the big switch was very compelling...
I had to wake my boss up at home (No idea why he was asleep - it can't have been later than 22:00), and he did a sterling job of stepping me through the site power-up process from memory. Apparently if I'd left it 5 more minutes before ringing him, the pumps would have lost their internal config and needed re-programming.
Somehow I kept my job - I even got a reputation for being one of the more reliable members of staff, which might go some way to explaining why you don't see Mobil around any more...
"Apparently it is the processing ... that extracts fairly decent images ... augmented by a fair bit of "filling in" the missing bits"
We're probably all familiar with a lot of famous\traditional optical illusions - Our brains are clearly hard-wired to fill-in and augment visual input in some quite specific ways.
I've often wondered if anyone has ever scientifically concluded exactly what the brain is trying to achieve in these cases. Have any papers been written up that draw conclusions regarding what is going on with each specific illusion? What real-world scenario is filling in imaginary black dots into a lattice of white criss-cross lines actually replicating (and presumably conferring a Darwinian advantage in doing so...?)
"physical optics ... are actually pretty rubbish"
An actual biologist can call me out on this - I'm possibly regurgitating complete bollocks - but as I understand it:
You can't keep your eyes completely still, they are constantly moving very slightly. That means your brain gets lots of slightly different "lo" res images that it can effectively upscale to give the impression of higher detail.
"the bigger problem is that all the screens get rearranged"
100% this. Oh, and technical stuff keeps changing behind the scenes, too. Like actual, technical, stuff
It makes documenting even basic tasks & processes almost impossible. Well, OK, documenting them is easy. But try using that bulletproof tested step-by-step document 6 months later? Hah! Good luck with that.
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