Re: Charge the chargers
"When the EU is going to do anything about the Chinese chargers being sold that don't meet any safety and electromagnetic emission norms?"
That's a job for trading standards, same as ever.
3710 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2009
"Apple also said it would harm innovation"
Bollocks. Moving to a UK-wide single electricity standard in the 1920s/1930s *BOOSTED* innovation as manufacturers weren't wasting resources making dozens of different versions of equipment. Moving to world-wide common "kettle lead" appliance connectors in the 1970s boosted innovation for the same reason. Probably a huge part of modern productivity and living standards arises from standard interchangable common parts.
Come to Sheffield. Get off the bus at Coles Corner, where Cole's used to be, then go down past where C&A used to be, past where the Hole In The Road used to be, you need to turn right where Marples used to be, opposite where the Yorkshire Bank used to be, pass where the Post Office used to be, we'll meet where Sheaf Baths used to be....
I've seen people, when given these sort of instructions, hover over the keyboard with a finger over CTRL and a finger over C and carefully send both fingers simultaneously towards the keyboard. I've even seen them do it with SHIFT. How on earth do they have no cencept of the way SHIFT/CTRL works as a modifier, that you would press SHIFT *then* WHILE SHIFT IS BEING PRESSED go hunting for the other key and press it.
HTF do they manage to type !"£$%^&*() ???
HTF have the actions that result when pressing various things on a keyboard not managed to filter in through their senses into their brain? This is at the level of never managing to notice what happens when you relax your bladder muscles.
The procedure checklist thingies* I write for building new devices almost always start with "remove from box". Although it sounds daft, it forces you to check you've got the right damn bit of equipment!
*I don't like calling them scripts, because to me that's a textual list of commands the the computer executes.
"So wages rise when there is a shortage of labour. But that then blows away the lies that having a massive reserve labour force of the entire EU didn't keep down wages at the lower end."
You've just destroyed your own argument in your second sentence with your first sentence. If wages are going up now, that can't mean anything other than wages were *not* going up then. And having a massive reserve labour force *does* keep wages down, as the entire history of self-organising employee groups have known throughout the history of guilds, unions, plaques, etc., where the aim - from the workers' side - is to restrict the supply of labour as much as possible to squeeze as much as possible out of the bastered employers.
"Brexit has closed the door to the world's top graduates. Hiring from abroad now incredibly difficult."
But wasn't that the entire point? UK employers point blank refuse to use home-grown talent, and cop out by strip-mining foreign countries for it instead. Close off that door and force UK employers, screaming blue murder, to actually get off their arse and use UK workers.
"Well, we had run out of space so I deleted some files"
That is sometimes (well, often in my experience) caused by crappy application software. It does:
errorhandler: if err=cantsave print "The disk is full - delete something"
instead of
errorhandler: reporterror; if err=cantsave print "Couldn't save"
I had this where the underlying error was "user account run out of allocated space", *NOT* "disk full". The solution was to credit the user with more space, not to go trawling the disk desperately deleting things, and wondering why the damn thing STILL wouldn't work with a disk 99.99% empty.
You'll rip my £10 Dell SK3205 from my cold dead hands.
Seriously - *hundred*-something quid for a keyboard, and one that doesn't even have proper full-travel half-inch deep keycaps? I was provided with a laptop at work, and immediately plugged a proper keyboard into it so I could - y'know - actually use it.
"One day, my pal set a small tray of isocyanate to melt over a bunsen burner in the fume cupboard, but before he could add it to the next chemical, he got called away on a phone call."
BZZZTT!!! There is no such thing as "getting called away" when you have an active chemical fume going.
So that just means there's a market niche for after-market add-on proper keyboards, like the ickle keyboard I plug into my tablet. Admittedly, yes, it's not a great typing experience, but it's hugely betterer than having half my content covered by an on-screen keyboard, and not having the keys you actually want (WTH are the damn cursor keys? HTF do I shift-move-select some text? Where's the damn Escape key?) and not being able to see through my finger-tip to see where I'm actually typing, and not getting any tactile feedback to tell me I have actually pressed something.
Argh! Don't get me started on bloody Teams.
I logged on as Admin to install Teams. Then logged on as me. And I couldn't run Teams. BECAUSE IT INSTALLS ITSELF IN THE USER AREA! WHAT THE BLOODY ****????
Get. In. The Damn. Program. Area. Where. You. Bloody. Belong. So. All. Users. Can. Run. You. Dammit.
"I used to play with old TVs when I was 12, (live chassis) and I knew that mains leakage feeling a mile off!"
Thank god, it wasn't just me! I used to think I had some wierd superpower, nobody would ever believe me that I could "feel" mains power, and I just taught myself never to mention it to anybody. Thank goodness it's just plain old physics.
Now, dare I tell anybody I can "feel" increases in air pressure? I can tell you there'll be a thunder storm an hour before it happens.
In the Hong Kong job I mentioned earlier, when setting up the network we couldn't get continuity from one end to the other. We went through the whole building checking all the ports. As it was a new install the cabling had been put in floor trunking, then concreted over as part of the shopfitting, with breakout ports installed in the floor as final fix*. We checked all the ports, couldn't find any problems. Until it occured to me that two ports were in a diagonal, and the trunking followed a grid pattern.
Looking at the "missing" corner, we saw a large, heavy display table. Looking closer revealed one leg smashed straight through the floor port.
*Of course, none of the floor ports actually matched up with where the desks ended up. Cue loads of power and network extension leads taped across carpets and up legs.
Recently Firefox has updated itself and borked everything. I've recently had to uninstall it and re-install it from scratch, and then re-install all my extensions. And then find out how to get it to display the bookmarks and previous drop-downs correctly spaced so that all the entries are still on screen instead of having to scroll all the way down to the carpet. And fix the toolbar - which still seems wrong, my muscle memory keeps taking me to the wrong place. And loads of other borkage that I'm too tired to try to remember, having spent a whole day getting everything working again.
Congratulations for doing some "doing" stuff successfully. We're now going to punish you by removing you from "doing" and making you do management.
I had a friend where this happened to him. He so successful as a programmer, his innate and enjoyed talent, they banned him from programming and forced him to be a manager, something he has no aptitude for or enjoyment of. Why do so many companies do this? Strip talented people away from using their talent and force them to do something they have no wish, aptitude, ability or satisfaction for?
"Given that the DD media was manufactured as HD but failed to make the grade"
That's not how that works. HD media has a completelty different surface coating than DD media. The grains are a different size, the magnetic coercivity is different. DD disks are *NOT* "failed" HD disks. A failed HD disk is a failed HD disk. It's like saying a 24" bicycle tyre is a failed 48" tyre.
I needed 15 metres of 25mm power cable for a remote supply feed. I went to the local wholesalers, paid the horrifying amount of money required, and the server then proceeded to start FOLDING IT INTO ONE METRE LENGTHS!!!!!!!!!!!
I've never moved so fast as I reached over the counter to grab it from his hands. NO!!!!!!! I NEED 15 METRES OF POWER CABLE, NOT 15 ONE-METRE POWER CABLES!!!!!
Is this a private Yorkshireman sketch, or can anybody join in?
The workhorse laptop I'm typing on I pulled out of a bin in 2013. Flattened the hard drive and installed Win7. It still runs perfectly fine. The hard drive is starting to get rather full, so I'm intending to splash out twenty quid on quadrupling the disk size.