Posts by TRT

Re: re: one thousandth of a DUP.

I can't help but think of this particular game.

But the best way to get the DUPs to go through the right door is to run at them... waving £1bn.

Re: Another Gibson Prediction Becoming Reality

ROOSTA: “Wormhole disco. Loudest noise on Betelgeuse. Free body debit for one night only.” What’s a body debit?

ZAPHOD: Oh you have been roughing it for too long Roosta. You missed out on progressive consumerism. Look, an old style credit card, you press the panel on the card, it makes an instant debit on your bank account and an instant credit to the shop’s account, right?

ROOSTA: I prefer hard cash. If you can’t scratch a window with it I don’t accept it.

ZAPHOD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but get this: body debit means you press this card and it debits all your molecules from where you’re standing and your body goes into credit somewhere else!

ROOSTA: In the disco!

ZAPHOD: Right!

ROOSTA: Escape!

ZAPHOD: Yeah!

ROOSTA: It’d better be a good disco.

ZAPHOD: Listen, if it was a good disco they wouldn’t have to give away body debit cards. Right Roosta, we are going to grove our way out of here!

Re: I think you will find...

most Americans call IT an ATM Machine.

TFTFY. ;)

Re: Extinct in ten years?

Where do you swipe it?

Re: Reg Varney from '70s sitcom On the Buses

He was in 'The Rag Trade' before that. And "The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery". And something called "Beggar my Neighbour". But most people know him as Butler from "On The Buses". I believe he lived in Enfield at the time - handy for the studios up at Borehamwood.

"cash dispenser"???

Hole in'th' wall.

Re: Oracle "Recycle bin"

"When you drop a tablespace including its contents, the objects in the tablespace are not placed in the recycle bin and the database purges any entries in the recycle bin for objects located in the tablespace. The database also purges any recycle bin entries for objects in a tablespace when you drop the tablespace, not including contents, and the tablespace is otherwise empty."

Not exactly crystal clear.

Re: In effect "traffic analysis" applied at the bus level.

What kind of noise do you get from multicore / multiprocessor systems?

Re: Who actually uses the router ?

That's what I do!

Re: 'front bum'

I thought that read 'front bump'.

I've always found this place to be mildly amusing as it drifts across my sat-nav screen when I reach the end of the M1.

Re: Any decent cistern administrator...

Could be a low level cistern error, though.

Chain *

I believe it's pond side slang for a device that corrects brown outs. I did have a couple that came over with some kit from the states many years ago, but I never used them because... 240V. Huge great transformer it looked like, must have weighed 15kg, with a couple of black boxes slapped on the ends, one of which contained a diode pack that looked like it could have rectified the entire National Grid and a capacitor of lethal dimensions.

Words for technological devices mutate over there. I had so many customers come into Radio Shack wanting new batteries for their convertor. Now a convertor is a cable TV box, but they call the remote control for that a convertor. And there are a dozen other examples of inaccuracy in the common parlance for things electrical.

--EDIT--

Ha ha ha. Brown outs.

Re: How would Storm know?

Ah, the wisdom of Solomon. Two men were accused of theft. Knowing that the punishment would be the cutting off of their hands, both men were terrified. Only one had committed the crime, but it was impossible to say which it was and neither would confess, both proclaimed innocence. Solomon was asked to intercede in the case, and he had his court wizard enchant two sticks of equal length such that they would grow a full inch overnight when in the presence of a thief.

In the morning, the men were fetched from their cells and the sticks were compared. Solomon declared that he had knew who the thief was so the sentence was carried out. Solomon knew the guilty man was the one with a stick an inch SHORTER than the other. Only one person knew who was guilty, the thief themselves, and in fear of the punishment they had seen the stick growing and had broken an inch off to avoid their fate. The honest man knew he had nothing to fear so left the stick alone.

So really Storm does not need to know who voted which way. The voter alone knows which way they voted, and that is enough. The mere threat of losing one's livelihood may be enough to influence a decision, subconsciously or consciously. Rationality doesn't come into it. Sticks do not grow an inch overnight, bosses do not know which way an individual staff member voted - this does not matter.

Have to agree that many organisations operate a monolithic structure where the ERP systems aren't flexible enough to do the job, but they're so insular and unmodifiable that for a rough and dirty report on, say, pay by gender, or pay by disability or amount of paternal leave taken, or percentage of students requiring special measures for exams, that it's often quicker, easier and within the DIY reach of a member of support staff to take the data through Excel to get the result.

So often I get asked, "How quickly can you get a breakdown of historic research income by quarter separated by the gender ratio within the lab and gender of the lead investigator?" that when I reply "Two days, including testing, once I've finished this epic piece of coding I'll get straight onto it for you." I get "I could do that in Excel in, like, an hour".

You have no idea (or maybe you do) how mind rippingly annoying it is to carefully craft a web-app front end to an encrypted database designed to keep all this kind of information safe only to be asked (1) to code an excel download option and (2) see those data appearing unencrypted in spreadsheets on the shared folders.

Re: Another reason to ban Outlook.

Outlook must be the only email system I've seen with a recall option. I obviously am wrong on this, but that's down to the fact that I've not seen every email system under the sun, only a few well used and popular ones.

Or complaining that the 17th ed regs mean that documenting the installation is now compulsory and it's easier to get the paperwork right by reinstalling the whole shebang from scratch than trying to reverse engineer it to prove the earth bonding is to spec.

Re: What about Oxygen?

I prefer Mars on ice-cream. Ah... the return of the Ice-cream Warriors.

Re: Alternatively...

My God! Why do you think the satellite industry is so heavily dominated by males? They'd rather design a space satellite navigation system engineered around near-quantum effects, precision components built to a tolerance unheard of and ruggedised to withstand the harsh radiation environment of space and launched atop multimillion pound rocket delivery systems, than actually have to ASK for directions.

The whole concept of GNSS came about when a rocket engineer's wife was nagging him to stop the car and ask the postman which was the right road for Weymouth town centre.

Re: Back-up must not be satellite

Did you watch that crap solar attack film on SciFi this weekend too? The dinosaur one was better (as in worse) but at least it had Dick Jones (Robocop) getting ripped to pieces by a dinosaur.