Re: spot the difference
OOps I lied - the Sinclair Scientific says 3.14159 and the calculator itself thinks pi/2 is 1.563
8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I've disabled Snap and will continue to do so. I find it very instructive to git clone and make and then wonder about all the bizarre libraries people use. It often speeds things up enormously because the snap is never configured for 16 threads or whatever CPU/GPU I'm pissing about with,
That's when experience meant you didnt write things experimentally - you pretty much had the code or whatever worked out in your head and debugged there before opening a new file. And you could move the cursor to anyhwere in your file by some keystroke involving line number and position on the line...
It came at a time when the major problem in computing was segmenting in DOS/Windows. I imagine if someone had stuck 16 of these on an IDE card and written some games/graphics handling software for them we would be in a different world now. The company seemed to go for MOD and big customers seriously restricting the number of people to get to play with it and make inroads into a new world.
Its easy to diss the company's handling of their product in hindsight, many wrong turns were taken in the 80s - 8088 for the IBM PC and not the 68008 is probably the worst - but these toys were new and no-one knew what games they'd be used for, and who would have predicted games would have more effect on PC development direction than millions of engineers and scientists and a few warmongers!
Seem to have about 10 of the bloody things. Mind you they seem to be fragile little unrepairable buggers - nearly broke my wrist trying to plug in something into a socket that already had an earth pin in it more than once.
What is fun is some chargers seem to be pathetic - good for overnight phone charge, and others will do it in a couple of hours. I may have to get some of those glasses with magnifiers and led lights so I can read the microscript on the chargers before use!
I have a feeling it might be possible to write language dependent keyboards. Code is ideal for some predictive text and I used to use swiping commands 40 years ago so it should be possible to come up with some multi-fingered commands for inputting language features. I guess I'll need to write it on the PC to start with!
I was in the town of Malcesine on Lake Garda when they had a festival. They simply held the sticks of rockets in their hands to launch them. Hundreds of men were doing this - possibly due to the rather nice 12p a bottle RIcc.io Rosso Spumante local red champagne with a plastic cork. Never quite had the guts to try it myself despite seeing so many people doing it without any signs of injury.
I didnt say do the work you were set. Just do something. My motto is laziness is the mother of invention so if I cant bring myself to do something I've been told to do cos my bolshie switch is jammed on hard I'd write some code to make my life easier - often the code I'd been told 'we dont have time to write so do that the inefficient way without it'. Or just some code that intrigued me. Just something to keep you active and the day passes far more quickly than swinging the lead. I'm not a team player but if making things easier for the team will make my life easier then so be it.
So why did China deliberately overfly Taiwan this week? Have no doubts they regard Taiwan as theirs and they will do what they can to get it back CF Russia and Ukraine. Its not what YOU think its what they think and China thinks Taiwan is theirs by right.
We had one dept in a dark corner of the building that ran their own little obscure system and ran their own backups to a tape machine. When called on to help with a problem I was rather surprise to see the absolutely drop dead gorgeous girl in charge of backups pop the tape out and put it back in again. Turned out they'd only got one tape and when the system got big enough to need two tapes they just popped the tape out and put it back in again when the machine asked for Tape 2. Not surprisingly the problem was solved and due to the application of the absolutely drop dead gorgeous girl in charge of backups protocol the whole thing was solved with immense dedication and thoroughness, Indeed the protocol even now slows my typing to a crawl as no PFY or even BOFH wanted to leave her presence faster than necessary or even consider incurring her displeasure. In her 'defence' she was actually very good at her job bar the backups, which were probably handed over to her to prevent PFYs getting lost or malfunctioning for the rest of the week,
At one time I got my broadband from a small ISP that eventually got swallowed by someone larger who then stopped the mail server so me@oldISPdomain.com stopped working. There are several accounts on various systems around the world that I cant change the email to because it sends a confirmation mail to the old address before allowing the new one, and of course they never read any mail sent to their admin account!
I use Thunderbird and its generally pretty good. I've been on googlemail since 1999 and only rarely use the web interface - generally only when its decided it wont let Thunderbird access it and I have to re-connect. One 'trick' I use to avoid spam is I still use @googlemail.com and not @gmail.com. almost all spam seems to use gmail for some reason which makes it really easy to filter.
I worked for an international company. I simply put all the text in a DB table with a language column. The I created some stored procedures to read the text from the DB in the chosen language, defaulting to English if the chosen language wasn't there. A procedure to show them which text wasn't there in their language and a user that had the rights to modify their language comments.This of course worked in English too so the salesbods didnt have to get on my back every time they came up with something stupid. Did the same with CSS for their view of the site for the webs stuff.
No professional translators required - everyone got control of their stuff and I didnt get woken up at first Adhan in Istanbul. Giving people responsibility for their part of the business has many many benefits.
A yankee friend of my dads got a Rolex and it was pointed out to him that he was still wearing it while helping us wash up after another drunken dinner and he said 'Its waterproof to 660 feet' and my mum pointed out it was half full of washing up water. He indignantly returned it to the shop who refused to accept it leaked and said be must have left the button out. It took him an hour of argument for them to get a glass of water into which the watch was lowered and rapidly filled. About a year later it turned up in the shop again with 'no fault found' and he wisely demanded another glass of water for the faultless watch to bubble and fill.
Never have too much confidence in your product or you're whole company can look arseholey.
Why is it a shitty idea? I manipulate documents using a variety of methods. I dont use Acrobat but running a script within Acrobat is no more stupid than running one outside of it. Its running acrobat I would have concerns about, well that and using Pointless Document Format. It seems more a case of crossing that bridge when we back up several decades and hit it again.
I think its more likely they realise that if they want their gpus in the big machines it might be better to let the people who make the big machines have a chance to add the optimisation for the big machines so they can sell a few more to people who might want to make their own big machines,