Posts by jake

Re: "Engineers forced to work around the browser's many, many foibles"

I was quite active in that timeframe. I made sure that our pages rendered quite nicely in all browsers by making proprietary bits & bobs "illegal". Didn't seem to hurt our WWW uptake any ... and in fact, it helped in that we got far, far fewer support calls.

Re: It's not dead.

"And I thought web browsing was meant to be standardised?"

It is ... as long as you're not trying to adhere to a proprietary version of that standard.

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. —Andrew S. Tanenbaum

I don't remember ever really using IE for anything important, other than showing newbies how to get online with the tools available on their computer (after installing the "Plus! package for Win95). And then promptly offering to show them how easy it was to download and install NCSA Mosaic, IBM's WebExplorer and Netscape as better alternatives. (The IBM version didn't last long, but it was a handy "authority figure" lever to pry people away from Microsoft in 1995 & 1996. Yes, even that early on when all browsers were primitive, the Microsoft version stood out in its abysmalness.)

Re: Where did they bury it?

"I'm in a dancing pissing mood."

FTFY

Re: Make it open source

Can we add blockchain?

Re: Thomas Tusser was right.*

Apparently it was actually said about Barnum, by David Hannum, in reference to Barnum's part in the Cardiff Giant hoax. Or so the story goes.

Yes, Tusser wrote a variation on this theme. Specifically "A foole and his monie be soone at debate, which after with sorrow repents him too late.[0]

My gut feeling is that one variation or another of the phrase has been in widespread use longer than humans have understood the concept of writing. It probably goes back to the thoughts of the first proto-shaman, separating the ignorant from their meager scavenged food because his cave or hollow tree looked scary. Cushiest job in Africa a couple million years ago, I'm sure.

[0] From: FIUE HUNDRED POINTES OF GOOD HUSBANDRIE. —Thomas Tusser, 1573 ... If you haven't read the works of Tusser, I highly recommend it. Makes you realize how very little Humans have changed in 500 years.

Re: NFTs have no intrinsic value whatsoever, but have sold for multiple millions.

Who said anything about art?

We are talking about NFTs.

Re: I approve

"Removing the total freedom of consequences is not a bad thing."

There is a time and a place. The teens trolling the adults on 4chan is all very well and good ... until the likes of the qanon gag winds up on the front page of the news, and idiots decide it is TRVTH ... and the kiddies egg the idiot adults on, causing it to snowball.

Re: I approve

You say that like a mantra. It's not.

Re: OK, I'll bite ...

Agreed. The fuckwits who presume to be offended on the behalf of others are themselves truly offensive. It's getting to the point where nobody can say anything about anything without somebody pretending to get upset about it in somebody else's name. Frankly, I find it grossly offensive that somebody might presume to be offended in my name. Be offended for yourself, by all means, but keep my good name out of your fantasy.

Sounds like yer puck's done slipped off yer spindle.

Re: It gets more fun...

"Moral -- let your ears be your guide."

Amen, brother.

Re: Beware sub par efforts

"this unit as sold will not make your grandparents Abba records sound worth listening to."

That doesn't mean much ... NOTHING can make abba worth listening to.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

It's the current battery in the vehicle. Makes no difference if new or old, it can take me 300 miles (or a 150 mile round trip).

Cloverdale to Healdsburg is about 17 miles. There are no services, and few houses, along that stretch of road. If you get stuck there, you are stuck. The mid-point is (roughly) 45 miles from where I type. The off-grid property is (almost) exactly 150 miles from here. Begin to see the problem yet?

If I were running such a swap-shop, I'd sell all the new battery packs to the highest bidder, and use the proceeds to purchase older "80%" units to swap into the vehicles of the suckers. This is a part of doing business, it is called "maximizing the return on investment". Share-holders tend to demand it.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

"But in few years of use your fixed custom battery won't be looking so great"

During the meanwhile, the stealerships are claiming 10 years of battery life. Most of today's kids (shall we call them "Zoomers"?) seem to change their leased cars out 4-5 times in that time frame. If not more. So perhaps the short-sighted twits will actually fall for this scam[0]. I guess we'll find out.

For the record, I don't have a battery powered vehicle, and probably never will. I make my own ethanol and methanol, and have re-tuned my petrol powered fleet to run off this nearly free resource[1]. I'm just playing devil's advocate.

[0] The same Zoomers usually pay more money in RENT than they would on a mortgage, so we're not exactly talking about the most brilliant of generations here ...

[1] The alcohol fleet will also happily run on E85, if needs be.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

I have better things to do with my time than have dealers unnecessarily swap out batteries. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Shirley many people traveling that kind of distance are on VACA and have a full trunk/boot? We're not talking something the size of a flashlight/torch here, you know.

Speaking purely for myself, when I make a typical 500 mile+ round trip in a day, I'm usually traveling full at least one way. Often both ways. No room for a "spare" battery.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

I don't drink soda. I do, however, make beer and wine. They pressurize themselves if I ask them to.

If you make your own soda (easy), you can do so without store-bought CO2.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Actually, internal components of IC engines ARE easy to replace. The only hard part (which isn't very hard at all) is making sure the tolerances are correct.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

"So your question shouldn't be so much about whether you'd be happy with a battery of unknown providence, but whether you'd be happy with it for now."

It's the same question, really. My existing battery will take me (say) 300 miles on a charge. How can I be absolutely certain the swapped (used) one will take me the same? The difference in range between 150 miles and 125 miles might not seem all that great to you, but to me it means running out of power between Cloverdale and Healdsburgh on the way home to Sonoma. Why would the proverbial Thinking Man accept this as "normal"? (The far end of this particular road-trip is an off-grid property with no provisions for charging electric cars.)

Especially seeing as the swap-station gets a brand-new battery in exchange for an older one. Sounds lucrative, to me.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

I note that you very carefully side-stepped the question. I'll ask it again.

Would YOU buy a brand new phone and have the dealer put an old battery of unknown provenance in it?

_{Edit: Now THAT was a strange typoe ...}

Re: Waiting for AA format

In a full-sized car, Shirley that'd be LARGER than you've ever seen.

And it's not a Phillips, it's a Frearson.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Would you purchase a brand new phone sans battery, and have the dealer fit an old, used battery?

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

Replacement battery stations are illogical.

Would YOU want your brand-new, just purchased last week, only charged once battery (which can easily be 40% of the total cost of the vehicle) replaced with one that's on its 1,000th charge cycle?

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

"In the days of typesetting by hand there was only one space after all punctuation."

Not in a properly prepared page of type.

When composing a stick of type, when you come to the end of a line, the compositor takes note of the final word, plus punctuation. If the final word, plus punctuation, fits the line being composed, the line is done. However, if the final word (plus punctuation) is too long, the compositor has the option of either hyphenating the word, with the hyphen being the last character on that line, or deciding the entire word will need to drop down a line. Either way, the compositor must now insert equal extra spacing between each word in the line, in order to justify the line. Note that these extra little bits of space must also be inserted between the period at the end of a sentence and the letter at the start of the next one, or between a comma, colon, semicolon (etc.) and the first letter of the next word.

So the spacing after punctuation varies, depending on how the justification works out.

Making these purely esthetic decisions is part of the art of hand-set type.

Re: Some things never change

"It was almost always easier to get it into plain text first, then sort it out from there."

That's why I always type everything out in vi, and wait until it's (nearly) finished before feeding it into a program to format it.

Which program? Depends on where it's going next.

::Insert mandatory "But ASCII-7 doesn't exist, there is only ASCII" gripe here.::

Re: Tab and return

"so you have to press the «return» key to return the platen"

What is this thing you call a "return key"[0]? My Royal has a bloody great lever on the left hand side that I have to shove to the right to return the carriage to the first column. It advances the paper a line, too, if I ask it to. Or two lines. Or three or four, depending on the preferences of whoever has control of the Big Red Pencil (and sometimes Blue).

[0] You must have one of those fancy-schmancy electric typewriters.

Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"

Nothing is fool-proof. Fools are far, far too ingenious.

Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"

"or did their photocopiers destroy the originals?"

Badly adjusted machines often tried ... I can't tell you how many times in the late 70s and early 80s I'd put a stack of paper in the machine, tell it to give me 10 copies, pick up my ten neatly collated & stapled copies ... and discover the originals were folded, wrinkled, torn, smeared with toner[0], and otherwise mutilated.

[0] On the originals side‽ WTF‽‽

Foil stamping and (foil) embossing and die cutting are also a good reason to get a Windmill, should you wish to pursue this as a fairly lucrative hobby. I have a friend who does wedding invites and the like out of his garage. Only works two days a week, goes fishing the other five.

You don't even need a cutter ... all the stock sizes (including pre-made envelopes) are available from your local paper dealer. Dies for foil (and foil embossing) are also available in standard "bells and birds and hearts" ... as is pretty much any colo(u)r of foil and ink. All you need is the one press, and a gift of the gab. Allow the Bride to "design" her invites out of the catalogs, she'll be absolutely thrilled with her very own custom order.

Note that the Windmill can handle very small sizes of paper ... Printing individual business cards with it is easy.

Bindery is an art-form unto it's own.

I didn't do it by hand.

I used vi as gawd/ess intended.

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

"That was an inheritance from 19th century typesetting, which used an “en” quadrat (AKA a “nutt”, which was typically around twice the width of a font’s standard word-separating space) as whitespace following the end of a sentence, even with proportional fonts."

Kinda. An em is equal to the height of the font. And en is half that. So for 16 point type, an en is 8 points. A quadrat is simply a non-printing square. An em-quadrat in 16 point type results in whitespace that is 16 points on a side. The en-quadrat in the same scenario would be 16 points high, but half that in width.

Or, as John Southward put it in his series of articles in "Printers' Register" from 1870 to 1871, reprinted in 1875 as "A Dictionary of Typography And its Accessory Arts" (transcribed by me, from the above mentioned 1875 Second Edition .... all typoes mine):

Quadrats

Pieces of type metal, of the depth of the body of the respective sizes to which they are cast, but lower than types, so as to leave a blank space on the paper, when printed while they are placed.

An en quadrat is half as thick as its depth; an em quadrat is equal in thickness and depth, and being square on its surface, is the true quadrat (from quadratus, squared); a two em quadrat is twice the thickness of its depth; a three em three times, a four em four times, as their names specify. Four ems are the largest quadrats that are cast. They are used to fill out short lines to form white lines, and to justify letters, figures, &c., in any part of the line or page. Four-em quadrats are rarely cast larger than Pica. English and Great Primer do not exceed three ems, nor does Double Pica exceed two ems.

In casting em and en quadrats the utmost exactness is necessary; they also require particular care in dressing, as the most trifling variation will instantly be discovered when they are ranged in figure work; and unless true in their justification, the arrangement will be so irregular, that all the pains and ingenuity of a compositor cannot rectify it. The first line of a paragraph is usually indented an em quadrat, but some printers prefer using an em and on. two, or oven three ems for wide measures, An em quadrat is the proper space after a full point when it terminates a sentence in a paragraph. En quadrats normally used after a semicolon, colon, &c., and sometimes after overhanging letters.

He then goes on to discuss circular and curved quadrats, how to properly join and justify them, and other interesting but long forgotten lore ... but I'll spare you. If you are interested in this kind of thing, I highly recommend you try to find a copy of the book mentioned above. (There was a reprint in 2018, but I'm sure it doesn't smell right. IYKYJK)

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

I do not know the term "nutt", as used in this context. Can you offer up a reference? I collect such trivia.

"Well done to the original typesetters for getting it onto the pages."

Just as an aside, composing with lead type is fun, and somewhat meditative. See if there is a Uni in your area that still teaches this arcane art form, and if so take a class. I'll bet you a plugged nickel you'll be pleasantly surprised. Perhaps even hooked.

Re: It can be worse!

"they wanted a three column layout"

One word: PageMaker.

The only reason I ever saw fit to use a Mac. Good for single page fliers, IOMs, student newsletters, brochures and the like. For anything more complex, I used LaTeX. Still do, in fact. Old & clunky, to be sure, but my fingers know it.

Re: Under construction

Shirley you mean <blink>Under Construction</blink> ...

As for being pedantic, I prefer "not forgetting history, lest we are doomed to repeat it" (to paraphrase Santayana).

Regardless of what the fanbois have to (not) say on the subject, there is a direct line of progression from the first two 1822 protocol connected & talking IMPs in 1969 to every one of today's pointy-clicky TCP/IP driven intrawebtube delights.