Posts by Julian Bradfield

Re: There should be removal instructions or a removal script

Read the uninstall instructions - depends on your system.

Re: changes to things like police and military uniforms, and signage on official buildings

As of the opening of Parliament in November, Charles hadn't even replaced the late Queen's cypher and crown on his own Admiral of the Fleet dress uniform epaulettes.

Re: outSHONE

"dived" is correct in proper English. Historically "dive" had both weak and strong past tenses (Old English déaf, dyfde, Middle English def, defde), but only the weak survived. "dove" is probably a modern reinvention of a strong past tense.

"speeded" has been around for a while.

"lighted" is also a weak past going all the way back to Old English (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: "Me lihtede candles to æten bi.")

"shined" as a weak past goes back to Middle English, but it didn't survive after 1800 (as intransitive) in modern British English.

Another low usage recommendation: 1pmobile. You have to top up by £3 a month to keep the number, but the credit doesn't expire. I use typically £1 or £2 per month (of data at 1p/MB); when I'm actually going to use non-trivial data, I buy a one-month data bundle.

Re: No it isn’t

I grew up on MVS, as filtered and made manageable by Cambridge Computer Lab. If other old farts haven't yet noticed, you can now sign up to IBM Zxplore, and get to learn the real thing on real z/OS systems! Of course, these days, you can do it under Linux if you don't want to use proper MVS.

Re: I suspect the one word answer is "idiot"

"signing the official secrets act" is merely a way to make sure you can't try to plead ignorance when you're prosecuted; you're bound by it regardless. (I found my "signing" the other day...)

I still regret that when it was withdrawn I decided that the cost of one of the last flights was too much for me...

Re: Convicted of Treason

Despite the patent fact that he had committed (high) treason by compassing the death of the Sovereign, he was not actually charged with treason. He was charged with the lesser offence of attempting to injure or alarm the Sovereign, from the Treason Act 1842. Whether the motivation for introducing this offence was as you say, I don't know - but it appears the policy you describe is still being followed. Had he been charged with treason, he'd have been liable for life imprisonment.

Re: IPv6-mostly?

Time to get a new ISP ?

Re: Ah yes - the "there aren't enough charging points" defence...

There are many services that will ship/store your teenager's things. My son uses sendmybag for carriage, and lovespace for vacation storage, and takes the train with just his cello and laptop.

Re: Mixed Feelings

Cav - psychopaths have distinctive brain characteristics. So do taxi-drivers (at least in places where they have to have the Knowledge). Detecting differences in brain structures tells you nothing about whether the difference should be called a mental disturbance - that's a social judgement.

Perusing (i.e. keyword scanning, since it is *way* beyond my level) the paper, it's an Fe(II) ion.

Re: breaking the rules

The CERN article says "pairs of electrons or muons" ... which I imagine is to be understood as "electron-positron pairs".

Re: Does rate limiting mean anything to anyone ?

Depends how much you like using your resources to slow people down. Me, I blacklist (with DROP) the IP address on one failed login to my mail server, for 24 hours. I typically have 8k banned addresses at any one time; that's quite a lot of log-in attempts being blocked (and not filling up my log file). And with a bit of luck, they spend some time trying to establish a connection before giving up.

Re: There are burgers?

I only noticed it a few days ago, when I was looking for BOFH. At least now I know where to find columns.

Re: Anyone can edit Wikipedia?

Where on Wikipedia is a "viewpoint" relevant? Were your "truths" verifiable, or were they "your truth"?

Re: Huh?

It's usually said to be to prevent the cooker tipping forward.

Have these bureaucrats ever tried to tip a 100kg range cooker? (Or indeed accidentally move it.)

Re: I recall a science fiction tale

Asimov (I remembered), "The Monkey's Finger" (I had to look up).

Re: TAI = UTC + 37 seconds, am I missing something?

I'm fascinated by what you mean by "do some actual research". Could you explain?

Yes, of course the world has been much warmer in the past. There's a difference between temperature shifts taking millions of years (or even thousands of years), and those taking a few decades.

Re: Tricky things, computers. I didn't get where I am today by seamlessly migrating systems

You used to be right, but over time we've slowly abandoned more and more of the in-house stuff and moved to using central university systems. It makes sense, really, provided the central systems have most of the functionality of in-house and the increased workload is not too high.

As for advising the centre on how to procure and install a large complex system...they don't want to know.

Re: The situation in Ireland is perhaps more interesting

Don't know Ireland, but guess it's similar to the UK, where the situation is concisely described here:

https://www.gov.uk/dismissal/reasons-you-can-be-dismissed

in what way is this "any reason at all"?

Re: 8-{ Wot, no migration planning?

If we had petty cash, things would be much easier. But in my 35 years at Edinburgh, there has been no such thing as petty cash.

Re: Pranks and things

Recalls this famous one:

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/cambridge-news/how-cambridge-university-pranksters-managed-17836295

Re: Concerns

The "internet" doesn't see or think anything. A small number of *people* think about it, the vast majority of *people* read the content, whether it's in British, American, Indian, Canadian or international (which used to be mainly British in spelling outside South America, and is now a random hodge-podge depending on the country and even individual school of the E2L speaker).

Re: The older the OS...

Forms of "old" with final -e are given in the OED from about 1200 to 1530.

Re: Bank Accounts

I remember a friend's (parents') number from the 1980s, whom I only called once, I think. I remember it because it was the old days when we used to say the number on picking up, and for some reason "Aberystwyth tri pedwar chwech pedwar" stuck firmly in my brain ... (I speak no Welsh, but know a little about it.)

strncpy is also not safe, because it doesn't force a terminating null, which can cause all sorts of trouble later. I use to define strmcpy to do that, but now my system at least has strlcpy provided to do it.

90% accuracy by the month? You don't live in Scotland, I take it. (Looking out the window doesn't work either - it can look the same at 10C or 20C.)

Re: Depends

Not werman. Wæpman (a person with a weapon, fnarr fnarr). At that time, woman was wifman.

Zed was a line editor on the University of Cambridge IBM mainframe, in the 80s. It even acquired an approximation to a screen editor by means of a front end running on a BBC micro.

It was a pretty good editor for the time...

Free/subsidized meals and light refreshments are not taxable if they're available to all staff, so I'm not sure why those above had a problem...

Re: they never considered checking that a clearly valid email address was already in use

Depends what you mean by validate. From what I see in my logs, this usually means (a) seeing if a RCPT command passes (luckily they seem to be ok with 4xx replies, since I greylist), and (b) checking that a RCPT with random local-part is rejected. That is some form of validation.

I haven't had a problem with gmail, but outlook has a hard-to-find and tedious process to get addresses de-blacklisted, which I've gone through three times recently, as I shifted both my main and backup servers to different providers. (Not OVH, as it happens.)

Re: Orwellian nightmare

"Yes". Agreed, nobody believes strong Sapir-Whorf: language does not *limit* your thinking. But weak Sapir-Whorf (language influences your thinking) has been demonstrated in many forms. Changes in language can affect prejudices, though they can't eliminate them.

Re: Money can't buy maturity

Cavēre, like most transitive verbs, takes the accusative (hence cave canem), so "beware of the buyer" is cave emptorem.

Sometimes it was also used with ab + ablative (cave ab emptore). But never with dative.

Re: Science

Not all academic research is Popperian science. This was computer science, and it's well known that any subject whose name is two words one of which is "science", isn't.

More seriously, there are many scientific statements that can be proved (beyond reasonable doubt, because after all we might be in a simulation). The existence of white swans, for example. What's difficult is proving universal statements. This article is about an existential statement.

Re: A puzzle about random numbers.........

You don't wait. You decide *before* performing the experiment that you'll do twenty tosses, and the probability of error you're happy with. You get 20 heads - the probability of a distribution that unbalanced is 1 in half a million; if that's less than your suspicion threshold, you declare the coin biased.

Same way as always - to another of the same, or to tape.

As a point of fact, the US does extradite its own citizens. Sacolas is the first declined request since the treaty started in 2003.

Re: Clearly it should be millepedes or millepeda

I think you should understand "pace" as "double pace" - left foot to left foot.

Re: Vixen

The professionals class this as a "maybe". One suggestion is that the IE root of "fuck" is 'to strike' (as in Latin pugnus 'fist'). German ficken 'to rub' may or may not be related. My emeritus colleague Roger Lass wrote on this: R. Lass ‘Four letters in search of an etymology’ in Diachronica 12 (1995) 99–111. Unfortunately we don't subscribe to old issues online, so I can't read it.

Re: Not a commercial system but...

Try pipewire. Still has a few rough edges, but I'm happily pulseaudio-free on both laptops for the last three months. And it provides pulseaudio compatibility.