You really wonder how some of these people manage to breathe.
Posts by J.G.Harston
3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009
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What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?
Yes, I did just crash that critical app. And you should thank me for having done so
Re: The ultimate test
Just today I was having to teach a retired social worker how percentages work. The fundamental basics of "if you start with 100 and you add 2%, what do you get?" (gets piece of paper, does complicated 100 + 2*100/100 calculation.... reaches for calculator...) I was trying to explain why 12 months of 5% interest is 1.05^12, and she was complaining about the "1.05", and I was trying to start from first principles of "add 2% is identical to times 1.02" by example. 100. add 2. 102. How would you do that by multiplying? etc.
"This is fundamental basic school maths"
'Oh, we didn't do capital stuff like interest rates at school'
"Ok, this is basic school rabbit breeding problem. You're a non-capitalist communal shared-ownership co-operative subsitance farmer collective, and start with 100 rabbits, each month 5% of the rabbits breed another rabbit. This is PRIMARY SCHOOL STUFF!"
It's tax season, and scammers are a step ahead of filers, Microsoft says
Re: US Only
The corollary to that is when tax is taken off before you see money enter your bank account you subliminally see the money in your bank account as "your" money, you don't see the tax taken off it so it becomes invisible and you have no intuitive concept of how much the government is syphoning off you. People hardly ever look at their payslip, they just see the money in their bank account. All those numbers are just uncomprehenisble numbers. Money in the bank is money in the bank.
In my last by a couple contract on about £25k, going through the numbers showed about 45% was disappearing before it got into my bank account. If the mass populous had to write a cheque for that amount every year there'd be riots. Look at the difference between how people consider council tax, which recently was 15% of my income, and income tax, which recently was 45% of my income. You have to pay council tax out of the money in your bank, so you see it and feel the pain. You never have to actively pay income tax, it's invisible. And there's always the demand/assumption that "other people" pay income tax.
Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments
Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech
...one thing that could help tackle both of those issues would be mixing residential and commercial, with shops and businesses at street level and flats above that
That's the one thing that's stopping me selling up my shop&flat. Because I *believe* that retail centres should be mixed with residential above and I should be participating in the community by helping to support the community.
UK minister tells telcos to share telegraph poles if they can't lay cable underground
Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in
Intern with superuser access 'promoted' himself to CEO
Eeek. I had a brief job in 1991 where we similarly all had admin level accounts. In fact, it was worse than that. Everybody was told to log on as user root! I thought that sort of nonsense had been killed with fire.
Using that access, I created my own log-in to keep a few files. Having been given zero indication of what I was supposed to do in the job, I spent my month or so there browsing the source tree and documenting magic number offsets into data structures as #defines.
Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway
Re: ECDL
And it's fraud. A license is something you have to possess that without it you are breaking some law or contract. There is no such thing as criminally operating a computer without a license. This isn't the Soviet Union. It's very basic competancy certificate. It's essentially a School Leaving Certificate.
Re: The first one is free
Worse that that is recruiters and HR that you send your CV, covering letter, and completed application to..... WHO CAN'T EVEN SPELL YOUR NAME CORRECTLY. Y'know, the name that's there on the ******** screen in front of them in all the documents I've sent them
Move to Spam, add to blocklist.
Re: Hypothetical Example
Yea glods! Yes, I've had the "the director calls, says it's urgent" thing. It's 10:58, the director can't get the OHP working for the 11am meeting. Well, he should have turned up a bit earlier to check the facilities before the meeting started, OR SCHEDULE AN UNDERLING TO DO THAT FOR HIM. Don't you have any organisational structure?
Dint get that job.
Supermium drags Google Chrome back in time to Windows XP, Vista, and 7
Brit chip industry wonders if UK budget will put its money where its silicon is
It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date
Hear Hear! Back in 1990ish I'd written 6502 code that correctly converted dates to days-from-400year-epoch (which then gives you day-of-week by MOD'ing by 7), and increment-this-date-to-next, all working. (Converted it to PDP11 a while back). Being a finite and managable set of inputs, it was easy enough to code some scafford to run through the entire set and check the output was correct. Dunt people do testing today? Or even basic sums?
City council megaproject to spend millions for manual work Oracle system was meant to do
Re: It's like a localised Brexit.
Sheffield says hold my beer.
If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage
Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours
Re: Flexi time
And I don't blame you. But this simply isn't a thing in the UK.
Ha! I had one job for about three months where I had no idea what I was doing until I got there at 8am. Quite often I would arrive at the Leeds depot and be told to report to the Nottingham depot. Impossible to plan, impossible to work out a schedule.
City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M
Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?
Off the top of my head there are three electoral roll managment products that a) all talk to each other, b) are robust, and c) came sround through highly tightly specified core functionality, discussion between suppliers and customers, and customers changing processes to make things work.
My local council has just been merged with five others, and part of that was merging six electoral rolls using (from memory) two different systems. First year: run the old systems while creating a naming scheme to uniquely identify each entry in six different sets; second year: run from the merged system while creating naming scheme for the unified dataset; third year: rename each entry to the new name scheme.
Included in that has been six local by-elections and one Parliamentary by-election, and everything can continued to run perfectly.
The Oracle fiasco seems to be a One Huge System problem.
Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?
Central government? Gawd!
My experience isn't at whole-council level, it's in elector roll and GP patient databases, and in these areas suppliers coordinated with their customer base to develop their systems and - *crucially* - the customer base changed their processes to converge on a smaller core of functions. Some big councils need to have their arse kicked and be forced to modernise and consolidate processes to reduce the amount of one-off custom spec modifications.
Yes, I hate "computer says no", but in some instances yes, computer says no, *you* change. Eg, we don't print three copies of letters, post one, and file the other two. The "filed" letters are just simply left inside the computer system.
Crowning glory of GOV.UK websites updated, sparking frontend upgrades
Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings
"just imagine how hard it must be to live in countries that don't have to replace every single postbox, government form, uniform and banknote every time the head of state changes!"
Such as the UK. My local postbox is a VR one, banknotes are changed very few years to keep up with note fraud, government forms are changed whenever the content in them changes, uniforms change whenever some HR spod wants to give a millinary contract to a mate.
Self-taught-techie slept on the datacenter floor, survived communism, ended a marriage
Re: Daily!?! RFC begs to differ
There's two types in the UK, one for finances and other for medical.
Advice I agree with is: have "must be two" for finances and "any one" for medical. That way you're protecting financial stuff from rash rushed decisions where finances never need to be rushed that fast, but allowing medical decisions to be done quickly where such decisions sometimes do need to be done with urgency.
Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner
Re: Fork
I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't share address space", but very definely in early Unix your current process executed in memory from 00000 upwards as seen from the process in memory from 00000 upwards, and fork() created a process which executed from 00000 upwards as seen by the process sitting in memory from 00000 upwards. for (a=0; a<1024; a++) { printf("%02X ",*a); } would display the process's code in memory from 00000 upwards.
Re: No DLLs
The problem is the plethora of programs that not only need v1.6 but need *exactly* v1.6 and die on a later version. Functionality should be >=needed not =needed. A program that requires v1.6 should - nay, *MUST* - work on v2.0. A program that depends on bugs in a particular version of support code, and dies when the support code is impoved, is broken code; similarly later versions of support code that kills working functionality of its earlier version is similarly broken.
Re: We need a new Unix
I think confusing the GUI and the operating system is confusing things. The GUI shouldn't be seen as, or be part of, the operating system, the GUI is the graphical user interface with which the human user access the functionality of the operating system. People have been sucked in by pointing at the Window GUI and saying "that's Windows", when Windows is the operating system, but named after the functionality of the GUI that users use to use it.
Days after half a billion Asians went to the polls, Big Tech promises to counter 2024 election misinformation
'Crash test dummy' smashed VIP demo by offering a helping hand
Reminds me of how I found out I had a weird blood pressure oddity.
I was having a routine checkup as part of a voluntary "collect some data" thing. The medic attached a cuff to my arm attached to a fancy automatic tester thingy. "Just stand there while it takes your pressure".
Ok. Closes eyes and relaxes. Oooo, that feels oooodddddddd.....
CRASH! Wake up on floor surrounded by fragments of fancy tester thing that I'd yanked off the table as I passed out.
A few years later as a pre-op checkup, I mentioned this to my doctor as he prepared to take my blood pressure with, yes, another automatic thingy. "I think I'll pass out if I'm not sat down". No, it'll be fine.
CRASH!
It's now highlighted in my medical notes: patient must be seated when BP taken. I've no idea why they previously asked me to stand as my home test kit specifies sitting, and whenever I've seen BP taken in films and wotnot with the old stirrup pump and valve kit, the patient is always seated.
.
It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down
Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it
IT in the sense of "it uses electricity so it's IT".... I was contracted to electrically fit out a small office extension that had been created from converting a garage. Sockets, lights, etc. Did so, a small ring of sockets ready to patch into the existing system. "When can I turn the power off to wire in the extension? I need about an hour." Never, nobody's allowed to turn the power off, it must be on continuously.
"Ok, enjoy your new office."