Posts by Will Godfrey

Not coming here

See title.

Won't help at all

The entire UK infrastructure is falling apart. There are leaks all over the place - one I remember was there a whole year before it was fixed. The electricity supply in my road is borderline, but instead of actually replacing the whole cabling they added bridging cables from one side of the road to the other in attempt to average the load for both lines. The roads and pavements themselves are a disaster of humps. dips, patches on top of patches and tyre destroying pot holes.

Oh, and if that's not enough they are building blocks of high-rise flats on every square yard of land in an area that already gets brought to a standstill every weekday rush hour.

Pot - Kettle

Photon-ically Challenged

Unbelievable

So how long till the baddies work out how to fake a hot patch?

How could anyone think this was a good idea?

Preidictable

We in the UK needed to distance ourselves from the USA the day that exorbitant war loan was paid off.

Rightly or wrongly, much of the world regards us as the USAs vassal, and therefore equally guilty of their unprovoked attacks on world + dog.

???

What is a 'math' and where can I find one?

Is there a mathematical way to do so? If so, please let us know. I'm usually reasonably good at maths.

Quite believeable actually

So-called "intelligence" organisations have a long history of totally bizarre and off-the-wall activities.

Intersting.

The Ardour devs have always been very thorough, and their software is huge. I wonder if they forked the entirety of gtk2, or just the parts they currently use. i wouldn't surprised if it was the former.

Crazy

Are they trying to get everyone to dump Windows?

Fox guarding the henhouse

See title!

It's an addiction

typically...

"Hmmm. That doesn't look right. I'll just..."

6 months later.

"Oh! Wait! That's just shown up this. Better sort that out too."

One of my colleagues got physical

Many years ago in the CRT days, he took the back off one. Loosened the scan coil clamp and slightly rotated them, then put everything back together. The individual who's machine that was done to was a general pain in the arse to just about everyone in the company - including the maintenance bods, so it took a surprisingly long time to find and fix the erm... fault.

Hmmm

I've got quite a lot of passwords and pass phrases that I've created over a number of years. They are all completely different and to the best of my knowledge none have been compromised.

I consider being creative is the key. Such as the phase:

noklipy Ofaic jamwopPy

P.S. No I haven't used that one anywhere.

They are not stored in a password manager but on two USB sticks which are only inserted when a password is actually needed - some I remember anyway.

I have one important password that's only stored in wetware, and if it's ever lost then I have more important problems!

I would like to say I'm surprised...

... but I prefer to tell the truth.

Wait. What?

Is it April fools day already?

Good in parts.

MIDI was overdue for an overhaul, so in many ways this is a considerable improvement. However it also makes it possible for manufacturers to create walled gardens. As well as a variety of transports (just about all currently available ones!) a manufacturer can build a wealth of complex unique controls which they are under no obligation to publish.

The saving grace is that to be compliant the kit must be able to fall back to MIDI 1, which has all the primary controls specified.

About time too

Is there anything, anything at all that Microsoft can't screw up?

{coat because I left MS years ago}

Not so strange

Railway stations are a remarkably hostile environment to anything electronic.

The first problem is brake dust - it is very fine, almost invisible and quite simply gets in everywhere - even inside a closed computer in the station booking office. Then there are the massive electromagnetic fields created by the trains. As well as all that, you have very wide temperature differentials and swings. Finally there's vibration... A lot of it!.

For a while, I worked for a company that was involved in the early days of railway electronic systems.

Priceless

This sounds like the voice of someone who's been stung by insurance companies in the past.

Found some of these on the 'net some years back then added some myself.

When you're doing 70 in the outside lane of the motorway the car will randomly drop into 'safe' mode and reduce the speed to 20MPH.

MS-RAC mysteriously knows where you are and what you ran into before you even call.

Engine trouble? Just execute a Ctrl+Alt+Honk and the car repairs itself - but all the controls have been swapped..

It's almost impossible to pull into a non-Microsoft petrol station.

Now only takes 10 minutes to start.

You have to reinstall the engine once a month.

After stopping you have to wait 15 minutes before you can get out of the car.

Despite reassurances of improved security from Microsoft, hackers can easily gain entry by simply using the door handles.

You can't lend it to someone else; they have to purchase their own.

Beat me too it. That 'one' is obviously to be avoided.

Single point of failure

The project I work with was manually mirrored to github {mmmfty}{mmmf} years ago when sourceforge had a whoopsie. Since then we've manually kept them both in sync. It's no real effort and gives us a bit more confidence.

Thanks for this - I think!

I'd forgotten just how high the shit pile was... and how long it had been piling up.