Muslim name?
What exactly is a Muslim name? Is it a name that some Muslims have?
1327 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2010
Disliking change for change's sake? Well, explain to be how selecting an MS app to make it the active window and showing the title bar to be just 1% slightly darker grey than an unactive window?
I liked things more when the active window was more obvious rather than impossible to detect.
What sort of improvement was that?
You don't 'own' the road because you paid road tax.
When was the last time you paid road tax? It was back in the sixties around fifty years ago when it was abolished.
The tax you pay now is just a fee enabling you drive that one particular vehicle that's in your particular name on the roads and nothing to do with the old Road Fund Tax.
I think that Microsoft have designed my latest vehicle.
The windscreen wiper control wossit arm thing is on the right hand side of my steering wheel but unlike everything else it's now top for off and not bottom and the gear lever has moved to a different position and the handbrake has moved to the other side of the driver's seat.
Further proof in that MS designed the vehicle: the buttons, knobs and such on the heater all move but nothing happens.
Exactly. Anyone remember Microsoft's Search? Anyone with half a wit would have refused to have that installed.
What would the point be of delaying the installation for ninety days? Any issues of it nobbling your machine's speed wouldn't have been fixed in that time. I have lost count of the number of updates and improvements which haven't been fixed at all and are still not fixed.
In my view it's clear: the user/admin needs to have control as to what goes onto each machine,.
@King Jack.
Not even electric guitar. Listen to the sound that Jon Lord used to get pushing his Hammond through a Marshall stack.
Mr Lord said that it took his techie many attempts to get the two to work together and blew himself up a few times in the process but the sound that Lord got out of that Marshall just tore the fabric of time and space apart.
Oh, sorry. Got all Hawkwind there for a moment...
This is why I have turned off my Windows 7 Update Service and then, if I wish, I can then go and find any real essential updates that I need.
Yes, I know that I got downvoted for this the last time I said this but in this game there are no assurances other than that something is going to bork your machine and applications. It may be a hacker or someone breaking into the machine or it may be an update which breaks everything.
At the moment I have taken the path which, for me, offers the least risk. That, alas, is the one with the update services turned off. And the stuff which I do my real work is only fastened to the internet for one hour a day and it does one thing on there: ftp to a known good site (my own) and then turns off. Yes, it's not foolproof but it's better than updates borking the machine and updates being not backward compatible with my applications.
For example, the later versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer isn't compatible with some of Microsoft's own software components even though they aren't even in the same ballpark of functionality.
Some of these updates and improvements are complete show-stoppers.
Some aren't but just a downgrade. I am still, for example, resisting the updates to Skype because the version that I am on is a lot better than the new hipster frappe-latte-chino bollocks that they're trying to foist onto me.
If I were to allow Microsoft to update everything at will then I may as well close up my business tomorrow and start serving petrol at the nearest garage instead. Except that I can't. My mate is already doing that.
The comparison is, of course, with tablets. These update all the time and I accept that. On the other hand, I don't use my tablets for essential stuff and never will.
This auto-update is nothing short of an ill-thought out presumption which should be dropped entirely.
...and if one is in the middle of a massive data run which takes hours and the last thing that one needs is a reboot when the CPU is thumping away.
After all these years MS still haven't thought to consider that not all users will be at their desks especially if the CPU and Page Fault count is going full tilt and has done with no user intervention for the past five or ten hours.
The latest from the Redmond HiveMind is that everyone is writing OneNote documents and can handle a five minute interruption whilst they go for a frappe-latte-chino and take their stupid beards for a walk.
How many of these updates recently have killed Office applications?
I had one humdinger of an issue recently which borked my Excel applications the security updates stopped any of MS' own Active-X controls working on their own products. The only way to fix the issue was to remove the update and, on my other machines, stop that update buggering up the system there.
And this wasn't just one single security update which did that.
So, back to your question: Why would anyone want a 'fix' to stop important security updates & fixes? the answer would surely now be obvious.
This is definitely a home cooking job as most of the shops that sell the uitsmijter are closed when the pubs close
Which is why living in Belgium was preferable. There's always something open somewhere.
One cafe I used to go to in the early hours was last closed during the Occupation. Even now if they have to decorate the place they move the detritus (that's a posh word for the likes of you and I at four in the morning) to the other side of the bar.
Belgium is much derided by its detractors but it's got its priorities sorted out.
The number of times that on work days in Antwerpen that I had a near fatal hangover and the only thing that I could face at lunch was one of these are just too many to mention.
Weekend hangovers, of course, were treated to a pot of mussels on the banks of the Schelde with copious amounts of either Hoogarden (in pre-Interbrew days) and/or De Koningk.
Thanks for the glorious memories.
(excuse spelling. It's the gin. Honest)
Not all of Norway is mountainous and riddled with fjords. When I lived in and around Oslo, I would come back to the UK and be glad to see some proper mountains in Snowdonia.
Yes, Bergen is on the edge of a rather large cliff but one would assume that the PTB would shove a transmitter above the city and the same for the major population centres.
Imaging that all of Norway is full of mountains and fjords is like thinking that all of Wales is like The Valleys.
What concerns me most is not the French protests but the comments above which clearly show that we've forgotten how to protest in this country.
No use marching on Whiltehall in the weekend when the mandarins are at home or the Cabinet playing croquet at Chequers. Of course protesting during the week, when it would be noticed, isn't allowed so instead the British public are permitted to shout at empty buildings when no-one can hear them.
Good on the French, I say.
I tried to verify myself the other week. My passport has expired but I still have a driving licence, council tax bills, utility bills and the like.
The first question: Do you have a valid UK passport.
No.
It then tells me that I am restricted to using only one of the verification agencies in their list and would I like to continue? I would and I did.
So I filled in pages of answers and then when I got to the last page where I was asked to fill in my passport details I came to a grinding halt as it seems that I really need to have both a passport and a driving licence.
I wrote to HRMC about this and then, weeks later, I got some bullshit response which made little sense to me at all. Needless to say that they didn't promise to rectify the issue.
The trouble is the old testament was written in Hebrew and the new in Greek. It seems unlikely they would use the same system. (It also sounds suspiciously like you're alluding to Roman numerals where L is 50 not 5000, and I can't see an "L" equivalent in Greek or Hebrew that has the value 5000.) It's possible this mistake happened when it was translated into Latin, but its more likely that what happened was distorted before it was recorded - much as rumours mutate today. The bible is "entertaining" gossip not factual accounts.
You are correct in pulling me up about the abbreviation "L". I apologise for that; it was my memory. The abbreviation was "lp" and thanks for pulling me up on that.
I found the gentleman's website and it is here where he wrote on this and it can be read here:
http://battlefieldreview.com/2ndAi.asp
The part of the page in question is this part (copy and paste coming up: I apologise for this but I think that it makes for interesting reading).
Some commentators have persisted in the ridiculous notion that there were 30,000 Israelites in ambush behind the hill west of Ai where the combat engineers hid, for this is what the Bible account says. However, we need to understand that the King James version of the Bible is the result of translation from Ancient Hebrew into Aramaic into Greek into Latin into English! While the main thrust of the Bible's words are not in question, some of the detail has been muddled. For instance, we know that many of the ancient Egyptian scribes, when copying numbers, for some unknown reason seemed to add an extra zero to the figures being copied.
Worse, the copying in much of the Old Testament was done anciently in a form of shorthand, in which it was the practice to simply drop the vowels from each word. And herein lies a problem: the word for "thousand" was elleph and the word for "warrior" or, in the Bible, a "mighty man" - meaning a regular soldier as opposed to a conscripted levy or a militia man - was alluph, and if the shorthand was employed they both became lp! Which is correct in this case? 30,000 or 30? Let's think about it for a moment - would it be possible to hide thirty thousand men less than five hundred yards (485m) from their target town with wide-awake watchers? No: the noise of their collective wriggling and belching would be heard a mile away! It has to be just thirty. Anyway, how many men do you need to set fire to a small and empty town? Again, thirty seems about right.
On the other hand, when the record says that Joshua sent 5000 to loop around to the right and hide behind his own command position, it only makes sense if, indeed, there were 5,000; what effect would five men have had, charging into the rear of the Ai-ites?
What we are saying is that to understand the records - of any war - it helps to first understand the way the records were made up, the mechanics of the recording. (For the record - pardon the pun! - it is interesting to see that the same numbers problem affects the story of the Israelites under Moses trekking across Sinai after leaving Egypt. In the Biblical book of Numbers the total of the people is given as 603,550 - and that's just the men over twenty years of age, quite apart from their families. At Elim were twelve wells; that's an average of over 50,000 men assigned water from each well. They'd die of thirst just waiting their turn to draw the water! If, however, we apply the elleph/alluph rule the figures change dramatically. This now translates that were 598 regular soldiers and 5550 other men available as instant soldiers when the need arose. Now that number, with their families, would have been able to survive the water queues at Elim. As we said, you need to understand the way the recorders worked. It also helps if you know the type of person who wrote the record; if a copy clerk in a monastery is writing about the technicalities of battle he's likely to get it wrong here and there; we need to read between the lines he ignorantly wrote.)
I think you will now find, if you look at some real academic researchers, that there is now not much doubt that Jesus did, indeed, exist. What there IS plenty of is doubt about his divinity. I.E. he was just a man like you and I.
I am of the opinion that he did exist. But he was a latter-day Che Guevara, Gandhi, Mandela character with bags of charisma who was eventually put to death by the leaders of his own people who refused to got off their own gravy train and join in.
There's one bloke whom I know is a religious scholar and even though he's deeply religious he's also a military man and he told me how a lot of the bible was mistranslated over the years from the shorthand by those later on who didn't understand military matters.
Intreagued, I asked him to continue. He told me that one of the shorthand for numbering had the letter L for thousand. It was also a short hand for well trained militia. Now, if one considers stories in the Old Testament which had, for example, five thousand soldiers sneaking into opposing towns or whatever then it makes more sense if one considers that it was five well trained soldiers.
Then we get to the sermon the mount. Taken literally having fed the five thousand with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fishes is clearly impossible. Okay, it's seen as a miracle in the bible but let's consider that these five thousand were five members of the Roman forces with whom Jesus met and talked with bringing with him five loaves and two fishes and it now makes sense. But where was the miracle here? Well, consider this a meeting such as we had here in the UK to get the Good Friday treatment going in which Mo Molem received lots of accolades for doing "the impossible". In short, a miracle.
And this is what I believed happened.
Of course your view may and most certainly will vary on this one.
I remember when...
Seriously I was visiting the computer room (they didn't have IT in those days) at the top of a chemical factory's stack somewhere in Teesside when an alarm went off after a particular vigorous shaking of whatever it was that they they were brewing under my feet when the Halon Dump went off.
It was like trying to breathe a brick wall.
Health and Safety evacuation procedures in those days involved thwacking me around the back of the head to get my attention and then shoving me out of the nearest door roughly.
All in all, an interesting day that.
I can't show evidence that I didn't kidnap Shergar (being only five at the time I have trouble remembering where I was) so where does that put me in your thinking?
And I am having a tough time showing evidence that I wasn't the man on the Grassy Knoll nor that I wasn't Commander Crabb neither.
Yours,
Lord Lucan
There is a house in the next village clearly designed by an architect who has embraced all things uPVC.
Not only the doors and windows made from the dreadful stuff but they've put a porch on the front with hideous uPVC columns supporting the whole ghastly affair.
This being North Wales it gathered the nick-name of "Ty Plastic" (Plastic House) when it was built about twenty years ago and today not only does it have the same nick-name but it's also a point of reference to any traveller in a series of directions.