Posts by J.G.Harston

Re: Don't forget mischief

Ooo, I don't like the fixing method. That screw is right in the centre of the "DO NOT!" protected zone, it would go straight through the feed cable. I'd fail any installation with those.

Re: What!?

let a password manager generate a strong and unique password

And how do I get into the password manager?

Re: Cop Out

You could even say it was the lingua franca.

Re: Hide and seek at El Reg

YA Miniscribe AICM£5. :)

I used to keep reading that at let mein.

Re: Ditch

At the start of the Great Lockdown my parish council started doing remote meetings. We started with Teams, but it was so crap we tried Zoom instead - and have kept doing so. £144 a year licence is quite affordable to use and a lot of smallers parishes.

There's loads of stuff Zoom doesn't do, won't do, gets wrong, is badly implemented, but it's miles better than Teams. Until last month it even still worked on my old XP Dev machine.

Ditto, when logged on as Admin the background is plastered with the word 'Admin' dozens of times. With the kerning and justification just ever so slightly annoyingly off.

Gawd, builders!

At one site I'd done the first fix electrics, routing all the power cables as per protected zones (straight lines in line with outlets) ready for plastering. The next day I found the plasters had somehow chopped through a cable, and in order to refix it had pulled it on a straight diagonal and just managed to tightly rewire it. So it was now "invisibly" routed (in an area I knew would end up with wall fixings being drilled in), and with strained connections. I sighed, chopped out the damaged cable, re-chased their plaster, and replaced it with a new length correctly routed.

surely ... those staff must have been doing something?

From my reading around, they weren't doing anything. Twitter strikes me as beleiving it's there to provide jobs to its favoured friends, not to produce a product.

Re: Faxing is often better

Dear pharamcist, your mission if you choose to accept it.

Throw out the fax machine and install a new IT system

And how many staff shall I terminate in order to pay for this new IT system?

AC: Where the hell do you live? North Korea?

Re: Au revoir but not goodbye

Yes, I keep one XP box running, as it's the only system that allows proper full-screen text mode when running PDP11 stuff.

Re: Easing of Visa requirements for Indian travellers?

Woosh!

Re: Intention is irrelevant

What the hell's a rental license? You need a quantity-restricted permit to engage in a contract? In the Land of the Free? ? ? ? ?

Oh yes, I agree that in-year adjustments are a bit messed up, but the once-a-year end-of-year submission works perfectly adequately enough. I suppose I could look at having the wrong tax code as a government-enforced saving scheme. ;) Not so good if your code is too low though. But at least they are sensible enough that if you owe up to £500 they just add it onto next year's tax code.

Re: The National Health Service

You do know there are 193 other health systems *other* than the USA's and the UK's, don't you?

Re: Prime Minister

Was he the last Rollo?

Re: Bad design

Even worse is the modern fad for printers to have a sole single unlabelled button. On/Off? Formfeed? Cancel? WTH does it do?

Re: Hong Kong Autonomous Region

Geographically, it's about the size of London. If you picture two Landranger maps cover London, two Landranger scale/size maps also cover Hong Kong.

Looking at the aerial views, it's surrounded by housing. So, which came first? The housing or the industrial facility? Why did they build a factory in the middle of a residential area? Or, why did they build loads of housing in an industrial area?

Re: @Kev99 - You will be surprised.

Rosetta Code has 539 methods, just for text output. There's a couple of hundred other code snippets for different scenarios.

Re: Multiple jobs

Same in the Far East. I used to do software development and systems admin during the day, then teach English during the evening. I only gave up the teaching because I was exhausted.

Re: Why is age verification an invasion of privacy ?

All the above use human visual face-to-face verification. For a computer to verify somebody, all it has to go on is the sole piece of data "I am 18+". There is *NO* other data to work on, *ALL* other supporting data boils down to a repetition of the single piece of data "I am 18+".

"added cursor keys"

You mean cursor keys were an after-market addition????

Well, thinking back, it was the same on the AppleII as well.