Posts by Dan 55 15445 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jun 2009
I still prefer the original Panorama/Tab Groups extension which got brought into Firefox and then unceremoniously dumped in Mozilla's continual efforts to turn the GUI into an empty interface with just one button in the middle.
There is a similar extension, but it's less polished than the original because WebExtensions is gubbins.
I was convinced support was removed, but after searching around a bit when I should have been working it turns out the first Windows Insider builds did not support floppy drives but then support was brought back and I guess news of it going spread more widely than the news of it being brought back.
USB drives still work in Windows 10, but the classic floppy drives connected via a ribbon cable inside the PC case don't work unless you add the driver. Linus also talked about knocking classic floppy drives on the head. Unfortunately USB drives can't read anything that isn't a 1.44MB PC-formatted disk.
If it goes wrong then it's the protocol's fault, not yours.
Although if you followed the protocol and it went wrong and you wrote it in the first place then perhaps you don't have a get-out clause. But even then following the protocol looks better than just mashing buttons.
Date windowing should just be for user input at the keyboard where the year is immediately converted and the user can see if the wrong century was chosen. Nobody's going to stop getting their pension at -12 as a result of moving the window.
But by not moving the window, it will cause problems at around 2030 or so.
It's a clever enough solution alright, but is it understandable 2000 years later when they're debugging it?
After all, films tell us the future will be built on old code.
MS' crime is the window hasn't kept up with the current date, it's probably remained the same in Outlook for two decades.
This is assuming that the only date windowing happening now is for user input and everything works behind the scenes... I'm sure it does, right?
Icon is for "depending on who you believe" in the article. They still know how to wind up commentards of a certain age when they want to despite the po-faced new house style (they're turning into Ars Technica...).
I can only assume they mean the "to gain benefit from (something); profit" definition of benefit, the consumers being the consumers of said data (big tech).
Deploy something that doesnt work as the forced replacement to what works, terrible idea.
Insulation already works, green already works, nuclear already works, fossil fuels and gas generally do not come from stable countries and have no long-term future.
Also before them. Remember Clegg not wanting nuclear, or labour backing out of it.
Labour signed off on eight reactors before leaving office in 2010.
This isnt just a Tory thing, this is politicians. This is the last bunch of governments.
The last four governments were all Tory in the past 12 years. There is currently one reactor being constructed which will be delivered three years late, two proposals for construction, and three which have been shelved. That's your 12 years work. This on top of "cutting the green crap" and shutting down gas storage so that Centrica could play the middle man.
The preferred solution of the Tories, after lobbying and donations, is more of the same - continue with fossil fuels and gas which are at end of life and give billions in taxpayers' money to legacy energy providers who already have record profits. If that is not open corruption then I don't know what is.
This is where I think we disagree. We cant move on from fossil fuel until we have an alternative. Nuclear is an alternative if thats what you mean but cheap and plentiful energy is necessary for civilisation.
We will not invest in an alternative until we have an alternative? There might be a problem with that plan.
The reason for the profits is due to state idiocy. The state mandated green and left us energy insecure.
To your other point - no, actually Cameron screwed up, then after that Cameron screwed up again, then after that May screwed up. If the country had gone in the opposite direction (nuclear rollout, green rollout, more storage) we wouldn't be in this position.
At every decision Tories gonna Tory. Here's another: the entire energy bill "help" announced by Truss (the little we do know about it - taxpayer giving £120bn to energy producers which no other country is doing as far as I know, every other country has gone the windfall tax route) came about after the wife of a former BP executive donated £100,000 to Truss' campaign.
It stinks to high heaven. The UK is in this position because of wanton incompetence and corruption.
My solution is pretty simple, generate electricity and provide enough gas to keep people alive and well.
We hold these three truths to be self-evident:
1. Gas supply is low and currently comes from unstable countries. Any proposal to try and find more sources of gas is merely flogging a dead horse as it is a finite resource close to being exhausted anyway.
2. By now energy producers should have divested away from unreliable sources and they haven't.
3. Energy producers are charging energy suppliers record high bills to generate record excess profits. Clearly energy suppliers are acting as gatekeepers and profiting from it.
This can be fixed by:
1. Investing in non-gas energy sources on energy producers' behalf if they won't do it themselves. That means no further gas and also no further fossil fuels, because both are evolutionary dead ends. We choose not to access these because in two or three decades we'll be in the same position again.
2. Changing the energy market so it doesn't follow gas spot prices so suppliers pay less to producers.
3. Any loan from the state/taxpayer bailout to lower bills is just passing on the wealth of the nation to energy producers who will just add it to their profit line, and taxpayers will be left with a loan to pay off which is completely the wrong course of action. Taxing energy producers excess profits and using it to hold customers and business' energy bills down at no cost to the nation or to taxpayers is the right way to do things.
Other quotes:
Will they or is that projected? Why is that? And is that bad? This comes back to supply and the security of the supply.
It is bad because they are tanking the economy in pursuit of their own profits. This is not a true free market and if no action were taken then the UK would get plunged into recession.
So we should increase tax on suppliers when we want them to invest in more supply... to artificially reduce the price of energy bills causing greater use of the limited supply? While I agree with other sources of energy I am not sure we agree on the types of energy generation.
They've already had the chance to invest knowing supply is limited and they've screwed up, instead they've decided to profit from the current scarcity. There should be no qualms about relieving them of their excess profits which comes from end customers bills going through the roof, they need to learn that this course of action isn't profitable.
"This is a supply issue... we wish to keep gas going."
No, we don't wish to keep gas going if there's a supply issue, that's just postponing the inevitable and a recipe for continued unsustainable energy costs in the future.
Also, UK energy producers are forecast to make excess profits of £170bn. Windfall tax that, allow them to keep the profits they were perfectly fine with before, and use that excess profit to hold energy bills down and accellerate other sources of energy. That way the state is not in hock to energy producers for all perpituity.
But as it seems you've cribbed Tim Worst-all's back-to-front homework, I guess you think that this perfectly obvious solution is unreasonable and being in hock to fossil fuel energy interests is a wonderful thing.
What I wonder, seriously, is how any PM manages to get through the incredible confusion of competing claims on their attention and concentrate on any one problem long enough to make a decision or get anything done.
Not to worry, the PM has a cabinet of competent ministers they can delegate problems to.
This doesn't appear to be true, whether it affected Jobs lifespan is another matter.
The UK has no option but to sell gas on to EU countries in summer and has to import from EU countries in winter precisely because it has no storage as it flogged the last of it off in 2017. This is hardly a virtue.
Centrica thought it would be great for their profits though and their chums in the government let them go ahead and sell off an important piece of national infrastructure. Any other country would ensure they have the storage to store cheaper gas in summer and use it in winter.
MacOS is in this respect at least still more or less the same as the first OSX that I encountered in 2006 when I switched.
That's what you think you remember but they've been boiling the frog:
A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard - Addendum
Follow-up: the feedback on my articles about Snow Leopard, and more about user interface design
I couldn't disagree more. Between 85 and 2000-ish, a developer could get the GUI right if they were observant enough to pick up how the standard software worked, were armed with their particular GUI's bible, and cared about their own software's look and feel.
Nowadays not even the creator of a GUI can follow their own rules and we have UX designers who are more interested in sparking joy than following a style guide, and thus we are left with the unusable mess on our desktops that we see before us today.
Oh FFS, for some reason I had it in my head that it was 11ºC for every 10ºF, but it's 5.5ºC, i.e. my half-remembered rule was 11ºC for every 20ºF. So I worked out 90ºF with a unit converter and wrongly converted 80ºF in my head.
So that's my fault, icon for me.
And this is from someone who is supposed to be passingly familiar with ºF (someone from the UK), so I'm not sure what the new house style of Fahrenheit must look like to 95% of the world. I guess debating units of measure increases reader engagement though, and that's what counts.
CBS affiliate KHOU Channel 11 reported at the time that many customers returned to find their homes approaching 80°F.
I only assume the temperature was encoded in imperial hogsheads per nautical gallon because El Reg didn't want the rest of the world to know that this means 21ºC.
If this is how air conditioning is used in Texas then I'm not surprised there are so many brownouts. If the outside temperature is 32ºC as it said at the start of the story then setting the air conditioning to 25-26ºC is perfectly fine. It's supposed to be your house, not a fridge.
"Meanwhile, in downtown Lie-sester-shire, an hour and a half's drive northwest outside of the capital London, England, firefighters contained a four-alarm fire at a warehouse reported by a local area man to the tri-county area's emergency response number. Local TV news station WBBC reported that..."
I think assuming the readership were familiar with local language and nomenclature and showing weights and measurements in imperial and metric so everyone could understand them was more practical that what's going on at the moment.
Because 6 months ago Mr Putin
No, energy prices started rising in the beginning of 2021.
Infographic - Energy price rise in 2021
Also, in a market where tomorrow's price is set by today's fossil fuel and gas spot price, the solution will not be found in more fossil fuel and gas.
Last time I tried to make Open-Shell work on Windows 11 for someone (tell me, why did you bother to update to W11 in the first place?), the smaller Open-Shell menu icon kind of floated above the real W11 menu icon and it was a 50-50 chance which one got clicked (this was with the W11 start menu aligned left).
I tried to make a transparent PNG but the size and position is scaled oddly and I couldn't get it right. I also tried to copy the W11 start menu logo and again I couldn't get the scale or position right either.
Please Open-Shell people, just make an option which makes a suitable start menu icon for Windows 11 next to the other three start menu icon options.
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