Damn, I thought the answer was Hitler and was about to invoke Godwin's Law
Posts by Dick Pountain
230 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2008
Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place?
HPE Storage crows: All the array-slingers NVMe for my SCM
Indian call centre scammers are targeting BT customers
Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial
One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass
Re: Confused units
Indeed: a person crueller than I might consider the whole piece innumerate tosh. Thoughts do of course have "physical weight" (what other sort is there? Spiritual, literary I guess). The firing of a neuron occurs through passage of many neurotransmitter molecules across a synaptic gap, and they have a finite molecular weight.
Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash
Automated, insight cannot be: Jedi master of statistics was good – but beware the daft side
Lean in and pivot: Even Steve Jobs didn't work alone, startup boy
Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party
Microsoft's Windows Phone folly costs it another billion dollars
Inside Nvidia's Pascal-powered Tesla P100: What's the big deal?
3D printers set for lift off? Yes, yes, yes... at some point in the future
Remix OS: China's take on an Android operating system – but for PCs
Google screening missed hundreds of malicious Android apps, researchers say
Meet the original Big Data, TED Talk, Thought Shower Futurist
Good article, both parts. As for this this half, about defending individual rights against the "plantations" of Google and Facebook, I'd say that we already have the perfect model in the public road network. A neutral state builds and maintains the infrastructure, paid for by taxation, which individuals are then more or less free (within certain safety regs) to use their cars, cycles, motorbikes, lorries, busses on. The railways, since privatisation show the pitfalls of the other model, where private interests monopolise sections of the infrastructure.
This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs
Oh Bollox!
I'm in the habit of using "Bollox!" instead of "Hello World!" as my first program example when reviewing a new system (blame my upbringing). Back in PCW days, around 1983, was given Tandy's Model 100, an early handheld computer to review, and time being short had to take it straight to the photographer's studio. Regrettable it still showed "Bollox!" clearly on its small LCD screen, but no-one noticed till after it was printed. Reprinting is surprisingly expensive.
Typo in case-sensitive variable name cooked Google's cloud
Camel-case makes for more readable naming conventions in large programs - eg. significant lower-case prefixes like eFoo, eBar, eZot, sFoo, sBar, sZot. That's a separate issue from whether or not to enforce such distinctions with case-sensitive compilation: there are strong arguments for and against. Either way, a smart IDE ought to warn about variable accesses that differ only in case.
From Zero to hero: Why mini 'puter Oberon should grab Pi's crown
Hasta la Victoria Siempre, GDS! This is not the end, no way
Devs, welcome your EVIL ROBOT OVERLORDS from MIT
KRAKKOOM! SpaceX Falcon supply mission to ISS EXPLODES minutes after launch
Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?
Why is that idiot Osbo continuing with austerity when we know it doesn't work?
Couple sues estate agent who sold them her mum's snake-infested house
Microsoft to TAKE OUT THE TRASH in the Windows Store
Ding-dong, the cloud calling: The Ring Video Doorbell
Astroboffins perplexed by QUADRUPLE QUASAR CLUSTER find
Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election
Boffins turns landfill WinPhones into microscopes
It's the FALKLANDS SYNDROME! Fukushima MELTDOWN to cause '10,000 Chernobyls' in South Atlantic
Caption this: CERN needs pic tags. Serious answers only, kids
Mono Magic: Photography, Breaking Bad style
Re: It is techno-Luddism
Seconded. Who wants to wait a day and spend a fortune developing rolls of film that only have one worthwhile pic on them, again? Just take your digital SLR (or probably buy an old Sony Alpha as cheap as a film camera), set its P mode to Black & White, then like Novatone says, think about your composition as if you only have three tries.
Quantum computers have failed. So now for the science
HELP! Windows Phone update 8.1 broke my Lumia
All the smartphone companies are losing it - I just had the famous Lollipop problem with a Nexus 7 2012, and Apple had a similar debacle a few years back. The complexity of the hardware is running ahead of ability of QR to keep up and breaking the previously friendly remote update model. Only real solution is to provide equally friendly roll-back to stable version (on Android it's a techies-only image download and manual install).
None of them want to do it, because secretly they don't mind these bork-fests, which scare people into buying next gen hardware and thus prevent Windows XP-style log-jams.