Posts by J.G.Harston

English language fail

There's somebody at the door.

What do they want?

Re: And again, SNAP

Most likely the suit yelled "Ow! *your* rubbish equipment has shocked me, you;re fired!"

Re: e er what's the difference

If you're going for command aliases, surely you'd make them unambiguious.

e for edit

d for delete

b for browse

Golden Brown is disk JJR1 here.

Re: Hmmm... decisions decisions

The Assemblies don't use STV, the councils use STV - and only in Scotland and NornIrn. The Assemblies use AMS.

Re: more of everything that I've been taught in GUI design to avoid

Things like: don't use colour as your sole signifier of information. That yellowy-green is going to be indistiunishable from that greeny-yellow and will confer no information unless it's being used as a background highlight to the actual information.

Re: BBC

"So what you are saying is that brexit voters like killiing people."

No, the other way around. People who like killing people are more likely to vote Brexit.

Voting Remain doesn't make you a chalet bitch in thrall to cheap labour, but being a chalet bitch in thrall to cheap labour is more likely to make you vote Remain.

Yes, but you should never have power outlets wired into the lighting circuits.

Re: There is an easy way round this

Define "fair amount".

On most printers the language is soft selectable, so anybody should be able to write a printer driver that starts up in US ASCI and when a £ is wanted the driver sends ESC<lang><uk>#ESC<lang><us>.

Hmmmm..... ESC R if I recall. ESC R 03 23 ESC R 00

A pedant writes. That should be:

Do not log off or close this application!

It's the same with the Windows 'updating' dialog. Makes me want to dig through the code and correct it.

Re: It's worse than you think...

I remember that - years'n'years ago, so probably an Open University lecture combining mapping and probabilities.

To quote Captain Pickard: Why doesn't somebody look out of a damn window!

Edit: Bingo! The reference to the OU here !

Wow. 1984. I feel old....

Indeed, I've been looking at an integer-to-decimal routine I've written, and am annoyed it wastes 40 bytes on a table of power of ten on top of the 40 bytes of code, and have been twisting my mind to try and get rid of the table. I think I've managed to dump the table and replace the divide-by-tens with multiply-by-fives-and-shift and push the digits backwards onto the stack.

Re: That's not The Internet, China.

Marx said he was never a Marxist.

Re: recommend Witch? magazine

I was always confused in school by the teacher insisting that there/their and they're were homophones. (and to and too).

Re: Jeez.

Jailing the Birmingham Six was just an error, delete and move on.

No, this is an application of *LAW*. You can't just "oops" and delete.

Re: And that degree ...

And an "IT"/"Computer Science" degree is nothing to do with programming. If you're hiring an automotive engineer, you don't fish from a pool of people with driving licenses.

Re: Are you now, or have you ever been ...

Is that you, Proteus Vex?

Re: "That would not be... convenient"

"A very brave choice, Minister"

And it's also the nonsense of: WE INSIST you stop using IT equipment, oh and by the way your ENTIRE FUTURE requires you to know how to use IT equipment.

I learned to type by just experimentally typing rubbish poems and stories.

I learned to speak by experimentally babbling random stuff at other people.

I learned to read by experimentally reading anything I could get my hands on.

I learned to code by experimentally writing random programs.

I learned to drive by exploring the countryside at random.

How *DARE* you experiment with something, and by the way you WILL NEED to be able to use that something in order to stay alive in future.

Re: But where's the IT angle?

I have a 3.5tn license, and did delivery work one summer. Never again.

Re: Computer O Level

I've been testing a text version of Star Trek over the last few days. I'm desperately struggling to remember how to play it!

Re: Just About There

It was one of PTerry's works that said something like:

In the 1960s it was 10 years away, in the 1970s it was 20 years away, in the 1980s it was 30 years away, the future was actively receding.

Re: "[Microsoft felt] the 32-bit version a safer choice for most users"

Ditto, in Win7 I could type: win //myservername/path/to/my/files return and bang! there. On Win10 it's win //m swallowed up while start menu opens //myser search box opens, bugegry off dammit, //myserver hold on why don't we search the network, no!! dammit /pathto/my/files wait 30 seconds errorbox dammit, it's swallowed one of the / characters. ARGH!!!