Posts by Kubla Cant 2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
It's a nice afternoon for a rant, so I'll take the opportunity to sound off about the abomination that Micros~1 have made of the solitaire patience games in Windows 10.
Today it starts with a hideous banner announcing "National Solitaire Day" and encouraging me to play as many games as I can. "Get Double XP EVERYWHERE!", it screams (capitalization sic). I thought Windows XP was obsolete. And why would I want it doubled? "Visit Facebook to see how close we are to beating the record!!" - an invitation I find easy to resist.
I always elect for random deals, because that's how card games are supposed to work, Micros~1. But it insists on progressing me through "levels". So the random deals at Level 31 are harder than those at Level 1, are they? How do you know, if they're random?
Worst of all, of course, are the ads. Micros~1 seem to have worked out my age by spying on me, or maybe they just conclude that a taste for solitaire patience is a symptom of senility. So I'm sent ads for funeral services and teasers about things for "seniors". They think I'm susceptible to local enthusiasms: "People in St Ives are going mad for this smartwatch | funeral service | life insurance". I assume this is a lie. And there's a bizarre category that shows a picture of some long-forgotten celebrity with a link that says "You'll never guess what X looks like now!". True enough, but why should I care?
It would be bad enough if they just showed the kind of ads you see on TV or in print, but the solitaire patience ads have a distinctive intimate wheedling tone that I find especially obnoxious. I'll certainly never buy any of the stuff they're promoting, and as for the funeral services, I'd sooner be dead.
The default browser on the corporate Windows build is IE11 - seven years old and doubly superseded. Every time it starts up it displays that stupid message about removing add-ons to speed up browsing. Other browsers just get on with it, but IE has to waste time putting the blame for its crapness on somebody else.
Not an error message, but I can't miss a chance to complain about the box used to edit Windows environment symbols. The one that mostly needs editing is the path, which on many systems is about half the length of War and Peace , but you're given a titchy little box to work in.
The Stack Overflow survey results are more than a little weird.
No insult intended, but vim isn't really a development environment that is comparable with IntelliJ (both on 25.4%). Notepad++, which is more popular than either, is a handy tool that I use quite often, but I've never thought of it as a development environment.
And there's something odd about the dominance of Microsoft tools. I'm sure Java is more widely used than C#, but Visual Studio is more popular than the three main Java IDEs.
just as you consider holiday pay and sick pay as benefits then a permie might consider being able to work only half the year and saii in the southern hemisphere during winter as a massive benefit
An employee benefit is something that you get in addition to your normal remuneration. I've never seen a contract that offers sailing (in either hemisphere) in addition to a daily rate, and I don't suppose you have, either. A contractor who chooses to work only half the year is sacrificing half a year's pay. Any holiday taken is paid for out of taxed income.
It's a sad fact that some people's work is more highly paid than others'. Tax regimes that aimed to do more than slightly moderate this disparity haven't generally worked out well.
Back in the 60s, a friend who occupied a cottage on a twisty lane was woken early one morning by the sound of a commuter rolling his Mini on to its side in the front garden. The driver got out, called "Sorry, can't stop - see you later", pushed the car back on to its wheels and drove off. He returned to offer compensation for the damage that evening.
Around the same time, I knew someone who swore that the easiest way to underseal* a Mini was to put something soft on the ground and turn it on its side.
* Cars of the day were apparently made of Weetabix compressed to look like steel. If they got even slightly wet they disintegrated.
The mantra with many operating systems is "If it completes silently, it worked"
In the long-ago world of 24-line terminals, the last thing you want is to scroll valuable history off the top of the screen to accommodate the output from some chatty utility.
$ cd ~
We are now in your home directory.
Have a nice day!
$
Remember the hatred for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation doors with Real People Personalities.
Some crossword clues are quite fun, such as “Leonard McCoy’s nickname”
I'm struggling with this. "Leonard McCoy" is an anagram for "demonocracy", but there's an unused L, and no whole-meaning component.
Apostrophe S is often used to introduce ambiguity between "is" and the possessive, so this may be meant to be read as "Leonard McCoy is nickname". Perhaps there's an anagram that means nickname?
"McCoy" could mean "real"?
"nickname" anagrams to "mink acne", but how does that fit?
No. No idea.
we're not entirely clear what rem StartCOM10Check.bat is intended to do
I'd guess the batch file has its name in a comment at the top so you can tell what's running. But the path under which the batch is invoked in the previous line seems to start with an underscore, so that isn't actually its name.
Agreed, Bad Blood is a terrific book. I'm surprised you found the picture of Holmes attractive. The best that might be said of her is that she's a tragic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. But she seems to have been an obnoxious employer and a thoroughly deceitful business person.
I thought the same, but I think the story describes an attempt to run all the workstations from a single network folder.
The first PC network I set up consisted mostly of diskless workstations booting off the network. The server mapped the MAC ID to a 1.2Mb read-only network resource - you could just about fit a Windows 3.1 on a disk that size. The main problems were instability resulting from the need to shoehorn the network stack into extended memory, and the excruciatingly slow performance caused by keeping the paging file on a network drive.
A few days ago everyone in the office where I work received an email asking them to clear their desks because the cleaners would be using a special anti-coronavirus spray on them. The odds and ends at the back of my desk had been there for some time, so removing them exposed a thick layer of dust.
I can report that the cleaners have apparently managed to apply the magic prophylactic spray every day this week without disturbing the dust.
So it's not always the cleaners that do it.
is the Vax the server or the vacuum cleaner?
When I first saw a Vax vacuum cleaner I commented on the hubris of a manufacturer apparently naming a humble domestic appliance after the VAX. Twenty-five years on, and not only is the VAX no more (superseded by the Alpha, and who knows what since), but DEC has followed it into oblivion. Meanwhile, the Vax keeps sucking.
I seem to recall some computer* that only had a single floppy drive from which it booted. When running, the system would control the floppy, allowing programs to eject disks when they needed to. If you wanted to do so yourself, you clicked a desktop icon or something. The drive would eject as part of an orderly shutdown.
The problem, of course, is what happens when the thing is unexpectedly powered off with a non-boot floppy in the drive. No doubt there was a simple way to get it out that was well-known to experienced users of these computers, but when you have no manuals, and it will be several years before the Internet is generally available, it's a bit of a challenge.
*Early Apple Mac? The decision to have a drive with no eject button because it looked cool seems consistent with the bonkers single-button mouse.
There are lockers at many co-working spaces but these have been baggsied long ago; by whom is a mystery to all who work there.
The baggsers have doubtless moved on to proper jobs, perhaps on other continents. When I retire I plan to tour the City to see how many of my bike locks are still in place outside offices where I once worked.
The fenland rivers are mostly higher than the surrounding country. The peat in the fields has contracted because of the removal of water, and it was apparently common to set fire to it in the early days to enrich the soil.
Water is pumped up into the rivers from field drains. Originally the pumps were powered by windmills, then by steam engines, then internal combustion, and finally electricity.
Interesting idea.
I'm no expert, either. But half a mile from my house are the Bedford Rivers, two canals constructed in the 17th century to alleviate flooding in the Fens. They aren't much used for navigation, probably because the area they traverse is very rural (and not very picturesque, to be honest).
As far as I know they've worked successfully for 350 years. There was bad flooding in 1947, but that seems to have been caused by failure of a flood bank on the Ouse upstream from the drains.
I can't resist the opportunity to enumerate some of the things I hate about coding tests:
The FizzBuzz test is so hackneyed that it's more a test of the person who uses it than the interviewee. Whenever I've been asked to do it I've concluded that I'm being interviewed by a bunch of amateurs, and this has generally proved to be true on the occasions when I've taken the job.
There is a tiny subtlety: sloppy solutions tend to do one unnecessary division.
I had the head-back problem a few years ago, so I asked my optician for a pair of varifocal (I'm guessing that's the same as "progressive") glasses where the lower part is reading-distance, and the upper is correct for screen distance. They solved the neck-ache problem and they've outlasted two pairs of general-use glasses. Highly recommended.
the Netherlands where people are legally permitted to choose any of their first name to be used as their calling name (provided they stick to it afterwards)
I only have two given names, but I'm called by the second of them. As far as I know, the UK doesn't apply any legal constraint on which of them I use.
VAXes named Hera and Zeus... VAXstations Eos and Io... terminal servers (remember them?) Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia.
A subsequent generation was named after Norse gods, at which point people started saying that the IT department was staffed by Nazis.
When you record face to face in one of their shops and tell them you are doing it, the conversation on their side is almost non existent
Not disagreeing with your general point. But if I was working in a shop and somebody came in and started to record a (possibly confrontational) conversation, then I think I'd be pretty tight-lipped too.
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