Posts by John Brown (no body)

A very expensive optional extra that few owners opt for as they don't see the point.

Re: Theres nowt wrong

"Admittedly missile command is on my phone"

I've never seen or played a version Missile Command that's anywhere close to playing the original with a trackball in the arcade. And I've played versions on almost everything since the TRS-80! Keyboards, joysticks and touchscreens simplyh don't cut it. A mouse is a barely acceptable user interface for the game.

Re: Swapsies

There were often times when something made it into the charts that the usual TOTP audience didn't like and it showed in the reactions. You'll notice there's very few shots of the audience. There was also a period where for "reasons", the audience were like that through the whole show.

Re: 64 colours?

Yes, also why the very low res 320x200 VGA could look so good at the time because the "massive" colour range meant no dithering required so could appear to higher resolution than it really was. Of course, that only really applied to people who'd not experienced the earlier home computers which were so more more advanced graphically speaking, than the PC of even many years later :-) For many people, a PC at wotk with 4 or 16 colours at best was there only confrontation with a computer back then, making VGA a revelation!

Re: Angel Delight

Not here in my little bit of England either :-)

On occasions, the shelves are not as full as usual, but it's hard to tell if that's lack of goods coming in or people "panic buying" to some extent. There may well be missing products, but not of the stuff I'm interested in so maybe I just haven't noticed. On the other hand, for multiple different reasons, prices are rising noticeably.

Re: Printer Cartridge

"My round trip to remove said orange sticky label thing was only about 50 miles and it was during the day,"

I had a the same experience with a commercial customer. In my case it was a 250 mile round trip. But it was a nice sunny day and the customer location was a nice seaside resort :-)

5 minute fix, a couple of hours on the beach "for lunch", then a leisurely drive back home over the moors :-)

Re: That's one heck of a long day out!

Sounds almost as long as the Captains bath on 'B' Ark. I wonder if any yellow plastic ducks were involved?

Re: Blue flash

"It was always a mystery to us that he could never 'fix' something and then just leave it working for months or years, like the rest of us."

Maye he's moved on and is a dev at MS these days? Possibly working on NOTEPAD.EXE :-)

Re: Dear NHS - Get well soon

On the other hand, so long as your health insurance is up to date and full cover (expensive!) then you can walk into your doctors, be diagnosed, have a CAT scan same day, and be booked in for surgery, possibly also same day.

In general, in the UK, unless they happen to spot something that is a matter of life or death, you just get added to the ever lengthening waiting lists. But at least that applies to everyone (unless you "go private") whereas in the US, if you don't have insurance, you may be lucky to get treated at all.

"For years, various governments have tried to impose IT from the top but this has usually met with resistance because the "IT" didn't solve problems."

As an employee in an IT company, I have sympathy with that. We also have top down management in relation to IT "improvements" that generally make our lives more difficult. So long as the big bosses get their pretty graphs and reports, and they are "better" than the ones they used to get, then that must be win for the company, yes?

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

The 1 year thing predates New Labour and Tony Blair by quite some time. IIRC, up to a year and you were still classed as temporary labour. If you were on a temp contract and you worked past the one year anniversary with out starting a new one, your contract was, by default, a permanent contract with all the attendant rights. My father was at Reyrolles on a rolling contract like that.. They were effectively "sacked" every 364 days and then, in the main, re-hired the following day. Although IIRC, anyone reaching the end of the second year were taken on permanently anyway. One of my first jobs was dependant on the as then Manpower Service Commission funding, supposedly on an annually renewable employment contract, but 12 years later, long after the MSC had been reformed and renamed twice and I was made redundant, I still got full rights as a permie because no one at the local council had bothered to keep up with the contract details (Likewise, we were always treated as permies after year one and got the usual incremental pay rises on the scale as well as the negotiated ones and the additional long service extra days holiday each year)

Re: That JV sounds odd

Yeah, fairly standard in those sorts of JVs. The problem here is that IBM made it impossible by refusing to lower prices so the partner had no leeway to work with. Usually, the deal is "we'll sell to you at a preferential rate so long as you guarantee to sell X units per year so economies of scale kick in. There are usually conditions on both sides to make sure the deal works and only utter incompetence from one of the parters triggers the penalty clauses.

Re: This was in the UK. In the US …

In the UK (and the EU and some other countries), there is some pretty strong and decent employment legislation to protect employees from ravenous employers. It's taken many years to get to this stage. Something US employers operating in those jurisdictions seem to have great difficulty in understanding.

Few US States come even close to that level of employee protection, but as so many States have different employment laws, you'd think a company operating in multiple jurisdictions with different employment law "at home" would have the ability to think that just maybe, in a whole other country, the laws might also be different.

Re: Justice is slow

"I though one of the remedies for unfair dismissal was get your job back? The tribunal might award him a job, lost pay and compensation."

That was my understanding too. Although why the employer doesn't also get an actual fine for breaking the law eludes me. If the tribunal is won by the claimant, then by definition, the employer is in breach of the law and an actual court appearance ought to follow. Or employment tribunals need to be given more legal powers.

Re: Funny ...

"Oh, and if you go to customise the cookies (on either site, just tried it) all the additional non-essential crap is off by default."

That's also the case with the vast majority of the reputable UK sites I use too.

Re: Ford C-Max

Clearly a fault that was present during manufacture, therefore covered by consumer protection law both now and then. Same applies to the Hondas in the article.

Age of the product does matter of course, but something like a car and it's built in device ought to be expected to last many more years than a cheap TV or HiFi,

Re: Where is it? Check this...

I since checked, and last night the coldest part of the sat was already reading below -200c. I'd imagine the temperature drop will slow down exponentially and those last 30c will take a lot longer.

EDIT. Maybe I was mis-remembering Fahrenheit temps from last night. It's currently at -198c

I also just had another thought. Is there any use being made of this temperature differential? I remember learning about and trying an experiment using copper an iron wire alternately joined at opposite ends and putting one end into the over and the other left out in the cold to generate a low voltage. I'm sure there have been large scale similar units using cold deep water and warmer surface temps too.

Re: Pedantic - slightly inaccurate

"All digital logic without a microprocessor in sight, and you can see from first principles how to decode the signal."

Also a starting point to building a Macravision[*]<??> copy protection defeat device.

* The one one that used to flash full white/full black across the top few lines of the frame where a Teletext signal would go, so as to screw up the picture/colour lock when copying VHS tapes.

Re: Ah yes

Yeah, the Red Button Service is so disjointed and appears limited, it's in no way a replacement for CEEFAX.

Re: Hmm

The USA have enough of their own paramilitary orgs to deal with :-)

Re: Hmm

"Was interested to see a geniune UKCA mark on a Blueair Blue 411 air filter we bought recently. Quite surprised that a company had actually bothered with the duplication."

IIRC, manufactures have until 2023 to change from CE to UKCA marks. In most cases, it's just a case of changing the mark as the standards have not (yet) changed. It remains to be seen if the UK will track EU CE standards as and when they change, or go down a separate track. At that point, it will be up to the manufactures to decide whether to have multiple product versions for home and EU markets or go with whichever standard is higher, thus matching both, possibly at a cost disadvantage in the lower standard market.

Re: Hmm

"Again, the annexing of NI does not improve on that situation, makes it no better."

Ummm...yeah. You might want to read up on your history a bit. It might not be a great situation we find ourselves in today, but your interpretation of the history of the island of Ireland and the British involvement is rather at odds with reality.