gerjomarty

I heard this on Radio 4 this morning, and I can't believe I'd never heard the story before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_(IT_system)

Horizon was introduced in 2000, and from then onwards unexplained discrepancies and losses began to be reported by sub-postmasters. The Post Office maintained that Horizon was "robust" and that none of the shortfalls or discrepancies in sub-postmasters' branch accounts were due to problems caused by Horizon. Sub-postmasters unwilling or unable to make good the shortfalls were sometimes prosecuted (by the Post Office's in-house prosecution team) for theft, false accounting and/or fraud. This was done on IT evidence alone, without proof of criminal intent.

I was wondering what everyone was talking about when a huge AOL cookie consent page came up for me first, requiring me to reject consent from a bunch of tracking cookies.

If this site doesn't actually track anything (and I stress I haven't checked), I guess they've just put the consent modal on everything they own just to be safe?

I guess this is because I'm based in Europe, given the majority of comments here.

One shortcut that I actually miss from Windows is the one that effortlessly moves windows left and right between monitors/screens.

I use Divvy to tile windows, but I really liked being able to flick a window very quickly over to another screen.

Navigating to the tutorials section, I discovered to my joy that _why was clearly involved in this in some way. The online book[1] is written by them in their inimitable style.

See also _why's other classic Ruby-related book, the Poignant Guide to Ruby[2].

[1]: http://evc-cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf [2]: https://poignant.guide/

Well worth a visit if you're in or around Cambridge.

Huge props to the person in charge when we visited for letting us upstairs to their usually closed storage space with hundreds of old games, magazines, and boxes of old tech.

While the mixed signage in the thread refers to the Metropolitan line part of Moorgate station, there's a similar mix going on in another part of Moorgate station, specifically the part that's the terminus for the Northern City line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_City_Line).

It's very anachronistic in terms of London stations - its platform design (and that of most other stations on the subsurface part of the line) is still in the "Network South East" colours and fonts, which for reference hasn't technically existed as a concept since 1994. Just think - a colour scheme now 24 years out of date!

It's a line that isn't on the main Tube Map as it's technically part of the National Rail network and isn't run by Transport for London, even though if you wanted to travel from Moorgate direct to, say, Finsbury Park, the Tube Map would have you believe you need to change at Kings Cross.

(Though mostly this doesn't matter as the vast majority of passengers are commuters from the northern suburbs into the City anyway.)

There's a nice set of photos comparing old with new here, note especially how little it's changed and how unloved this part of the station looks compared with the TfL part. https://www.flickr.com/photos/60539035@N02/sets/721577011132...

I really don't like where these manifesto pledges are going, and there isn't really much we can do at the moment to stop a Tory majority, going on the current polling numbers (yes, I know polls can be deceiving).

I think the only way we can combat this in people's minds is to come up with concrete examples of how it will adversely affect their privacy or daily Internet routines.

It's not available right now, but I recommend a BBC doc "Inside Porton Down: Britain's Secret Weapons Research Facility"[0], in which they showed nerve agents like this being created.

[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hx40t

Done!

I run FreeNAS on a HP Microserver, got 4 3TB HGST drives, and a stick of ECC memory to bump the box to 10GB.

Given that the OS needs to run somewhere, and one would rather use the 4 bays for drives in the zpool, I used the recommended method of running the OS from a USB drive. Sounded strange to me, but it's worked a treat. I saw that there are kits out there for replacing the empty CD slot in the Microserver with an SSD for the same purpose, but I'd rather not touch something that's working now.

I went for RAIDZ1, despite a lot of internet protestations about it, as I basically only store movies/music/Time Machine backup there anyway.

Been thinking about backup solutions for everything, but it all seems fairly expensive for what is essentially just backing up media.

To people recommending Plex for media streaming, I would actually recommend Serviio over it. It took a little extra setup in a jail, requiring some extra port downloads, but it works extremely well in it's DLNA streaming to my PS3. Where it shone brighter than Plex for me was it's support for transcoding and subtitles - it transcodes and shows all of my H264 video files with ASS subtitles with all of the style intact. It also supported PGS subtitles, but my piddling processor didn't quite match up to it.

The line going around is that recipes from new shows would be available for 30 days only, so I assume after the 30 days are up they would become unavailable.

I love this a lot, but every time I open it or switch back to it, it just makes me want to go and listen to Skee-Lo's I Wish.

I feel like the Corpus clock suffers somewhat by the fact that it's awkward to actually tell the time from it in daylight, as the blue LEDs that act as the hands are pretty hard to see unless it's after twilight.

mpv has a nice (and opinionated, which is good) guide for the things that matter to them: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FFmpeg-versus-Libav

The first time I ever travelled to the US it was through Shannon Airport, and at the time all of the flights to the US from Dublin Airport stopped off at Shannon first.

I had no idea about the history of Shannon Airport, and I thought it was so strange that it really punched above its weight in terms of international links, traffic, and size, relative to its remote location (the closest large city is Cork).

Glad I've finally discovered the reason!

For anyone interested in time zones, I had a terribly unproductive afternoon the day I started looking through both the time zone mailing list[1], and the raw zoneinfo files. I love the history that lies beneath all of the changes.

[1]: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/

I like the idents you've added as well. Was the style you used one of the styles on the American MTV? One of the big things I remember about MTV (Europe, at least) were the idents, including the track/artist ident at the start/end of songs.

I haven't been able to find a decent archive of them though.

Many fansubbers didn't know where to draw the line, or didn't have very good editors, so sometimes you got the situation where there were so many TL notes they were stacking on top of each other.

Others have noted the most egregious TL notes ("Keikaku means plan" and so on) but there are some other bad examples, including "This is a reference to..." (not even everyone in Japan is going to get references either) and even a few explaining what the English words they used meant.

There are many fewer these days, thankfully.

>jokes that rely on wordplay such as puns and malapropisms

While many disagree, I like translations that attempt to localise these. You can never get literal accuracy this way, but you can make a fun, entertaining and engrossing script. You might say it's not the job of the fansubbers to write the script, but it is their job to translate the one they have, and the best translations in my view are ones that take intended audience into account.

I watch anime comedies to laugh, not to read an explanation of what the joke is and why it's funny.

My opinion on this has changed over the years. I now tend to look at any translation which needs to include translation notes on-screen as having failed, usually because they explain something that isn't absolutely necessary to know, which isn't a good enough reason in my book to distract from the dialogue.

If you can't explain what you need to in the translation itself, just don't. Or include a TLNote.txt if you really must.

>“Now it’s all about who has the fanciest typesettings and who has the wackiest karaoke lyrics for the opening songs,” Nadelman pointed out. “They just want to have bragging rights to say this is their version of it, even though the same show will be available on Crunchyroll, or Funimation, or a number of other streaming sites.”

It is true that many fansubbing groups now (much like in the old days) compete on who has the flashiest karaoke and typesetting, but I'd say it's unwise to completely fob off fansubbing in 2015.

The article goes into more detail on this, but video quality and encoding is generally still better on fansubs than on streaming sites, largely because anime fansubs tend to be on the cutting edge of video encoding. MKV has been the container of choice for years, 10-bit colour has been around for a few years now, h264 encoding even longer. You could argue whether this justifies the illegal fansub, but there are people who will give this as a justification.

There are still arguments over translation. Crunchyroll and Funimation have their "good" and not-so-"good" translators. The question is - do you keep it literal (perhaps keeping some Japanese idioms and ideas intact, causing confusion for some in your Western audience and possibly breaking immersion somewhat) or go more liberal (translate some concepts into Western concepts, such that it may not literally match the original script word for word, but the idea will be the same). I tend to go for the liberal side because I want to be entertained, not frustrated by concepts I know nothing of, but as you could imagine the arguments are fraught. Comedy is an especially difficult genre to translate successfully.

Also, America is still provided for better than other English-speaking territories in this regard. What's most annoying to me is when a company like Funimation picks up English-speaking streaming rights for a show, then restricts that to US/Canada. UK/Ireland/Australia often gets left out in the cold with legal streaming like this.

I'm kind of happy that fansubs are still around to keep the legal sites on their toes.

While not very useful for planning to get around, this map shows all of the lines, junctions and platforms of the tube and National Rail in London, along with the dates the lines were constructed.

http://carto.metro.free.fr/cartes/metro-tram-london/

The problem we had when trying to push semantic versioning of our app to the rest of the business internally was mostly the fact that breaking changes necessitated a change in the major version, but the business and marketing side wanted control of when a major version could be released.

I can see their point, because going from, for example, 1.1.0 to 2.0.0, a user might well expect lots of new features, or at least a significant UI change, and not just "it looks and does the same except for one or two breaking changes".

The compromise was to have an architect's vanity number at the front of the Semantic version, so VANITY.MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH

Yes, the system going into "watching mode" with more than 151 Atomic Functions caused the illegal state.

It's interesting where in the flow the number of Atomic Functions was being checked against the theoretical maximum - surely that would be checked if you pressed "Select sectors" too, though perhaps with the correct higher limit rather than the incorrect limit.

Ah, indeed.

Interesting reading. The key points on how the incident actually happened I pulled out were:

- They had two links from their System Flight Server, one for redundancy if one goes down. Both went down at the same time, apparently unprecedented for them.

- There was a system limit for a shared system resource (Atomic Functions) that was defined twice in different systems, but with different magic numbers. The problem wasn't spotted earlier because a recent system change actually brought one of the systems close to the limit for the first time. (More military controller functions were amalgamated into NATS the month previously)

- There was a UX problem where the "Select sectors" button, which is used often, is placed directly beside the "soft Sign off" button, which isn't often used, and in fact was well known to be pressed by accident relatively often. It was pressed at the time of the incident, putting the system into an illegal state and hence triggering an automatic shutdown.

Problems that on their own you could argue aren't showstopper problems, but when triggered together cause things like this.

Don't forget the Minesweeper crossover fanfiction!

https://www.fanfiction.net/Minesweeper-Crossovers/441/0/

It took a long long time, but they eventually started.

DHH's keynote from the first day of RailsConf, in which he talks a bit about testing and the general perception of writing software as "science", is online here:

Part 1: http://www.justin.tv/confreaks/b/522089408 (starts at 11:00)

Part 2: http://www.justin.tv/confreaks/b/522101045

We seem to be feeling a bit lovely and very sexy at the moment. Makes you wonder in what context people are using these hashtags.

Northern Irish black taxis used to use this basic idea sans the technology. You'd typically get in to a taxi, ask what direction it's going, and if it was going roughly where you wanted, you'd wait until it had filled up with other people going in the same direction.

As you'd imagine, getting from the centre of town back home was fine, but it didn't quite work the other way.

Making this process more flexible by adding technology is a great idea, though it'd depend on the demographic of people who'd want a service like this and whether they actually have smartphones.