Posts by David Woodhead

Re: Small Welsh town of Newport?

Monmouthshire or Pembrokeshire?

Re: I once had to do something similar in a Skoda...

About thirty years ago, I had an Series 1 E-Type (1965) which had a tendency to overheat at the slightest provocation. The trick with the heater was not much use either. Replacing the original 4 bladed fan with a modern 16-blade fan solved the problem for good.

Not a very interesting story, I admit - I just wanted to boast that I owned an E-Type....

Blimey - this is my second Skoda related post in 30 minutes. Anyway: my boast is that my three year old Skoda Superb automatic estate is very slightly faster to 60mph than a 3.8L E-Type, which was always my ultimate benchmark for a whizzy car. (It's not nearly as beautiful as an E-Type though.)

Re: Appropriate Licensing

Volkswagen Auto Group was the only maker where I found a decent selection.

And bizarrely, the VW Audi group also makes the finest automatic gearboxes (DSG) available, in my humble opinion. If you opt for the steering wheel paddles you can drive it as a manual if you wish, but the automatic mode is so good that it will shift better than you can.

Unfortunately, Ford messed up the dual clutch gearbox market in the US by putting out a poor version which had a lot of problems in the Focus, so the concept never really took off over there. You're still stuck with torque converters.

(Disclaimer: I am a Right-pondian with a Skoda Superb 2 litre petrol automatic. Best car I've ever owned, apart from the touch screen interfaces which were designed by an autistic chimpanzee. I have no connection to VW Audi.)

Re: Turings?

Goodness knows what an English based person would say to a Scottish £100 or £1 note.

"Hello Mr £100 note. Would you like to come home with me?"

I think the fork should be called...."MONKEY FIST!"

I seriously recommend that you don't type this into a search engine.

That is all.

Re: Thickness

They only have to look achingly cool on the desks in hipster offices. Then the new owners can aspire to be the exiting, disruptive digital natives that inhabit such offices.

If only they were 'exiting' rather than 'exciting'. Too much to hope.

I just find this whole smaller / slimmer / cooler / throw it in the tip thing so depressing, from a personal and planetary viewpoint. I repair and enhance *old* technology for people in our village and surrounding area, trying to give them something which is faster, cheaper and more usable than anything they can buy in a shop or on the interwebs. They appreciate and thank me for it, for which I'm grateful, but there's only one of me around here and huge landfills of stuff that passes me by and which no-one cares about.

Sorry about that. I need to go and shout at some clouds now.

Re: only a few minutes in

@captain veg

He spelled it perfectly, but punctuated it incorrectly.

If you're going to be a grammar pedant you need to be pretty damn sure that your post is flawless, or you leave yourself wide open.

*Smiley face*

Re: Wash and Rinse

Respect!

But I want to find out how this played out. Did the new manager get you to fix it, or was he sufficiently competent to take it in house? We need to know.

Re: I with

I support a number of people locally with Galaxy S4s, which you could not remove from their owners' cold dead hands with a chisel. They all make phone calls, communicate on WhatsApp, and do internet and email stuff, with no desire to do anything else. New battery: no problem. £3 flip cover: no problem. SD card: no problem. Fits in the average pocket: no problem.

What the vendors want to sell and what these users need do not intersect at any level. We all understand that they are not the target market, so we local support people look after them. Hello out there. Someone has to do it.

Sorry, /rant. Have a good evening y'all.

Re: 12 inch CDs?

... a little thorn ...

You may jest. Back in the 50s my father had heard that playing 78s with a steel needle wore them out, as indeed it did. So, at the right season of the year, he would go out and collect a year's worth of blackthorn (sloe) thorns which he used instead, changing them after every half dozen or so uses.

I have no idea whether this was better or worse for the records, but I do recall being amazed the first time I saw the almost shameless luxury of records being played with needles that you actually had to pay for.

Re: Been there, done that.

And then there are the jokers that put a piece of clear tape on the switch end of a cable just for laughs. Took a while to troubleshoot and find.

That's a hanging offence, or shooting, or something involving large sticks with nails in the end.

There is no court in the land which would convict. Enough of us have been there.

Re: I've worked in Finland before

Too cold for you? Have your business meetings in the buff in the sauna (that's sow-na for the uninitiated).

Is that sow as in distribute seeds, or sow as in a female pig?

Re: Bring back VMS Standard Date/Time...

MON means it's a Monday.

I'll get my coat.

Re: "Remediate"????

Jesus saves, but Moses invests.

Re: Because most Tesla drivers are not pilots.

Then he would also think that an automobile does exactely what it says: Moving on its own. Bu tthat's not the case, is it.

Ah, so you think it's likely that anyone would know that the roots of the word 'automobile' come partly from Greek (autos - self) and partly from Latin (mobile - moving), would parse it accordingly, and would therefore modify their behaviour based on this? Right.

And it's 'exactly'.

Re: This...

Ah, QuickBASIC 4.5. I still have the manual and diskettes, just in case. It's all been downhill since then.

Re: I want some of what Musk is smoking

Hello Lee,

I love you and want have your babies. And the last time I looked I'm a man. Oh well.

All of this is blindingly obvious if you've had anything to do with software development, in any field, and have been paying attention and been responsible for anythng critical in the real world. I've been there, and the whole AI concept frightens the life out of me.

To quote John Denver: 'It turns me on to think of growing old.' Actually it doesn't, but it's a relief.

Re: "WTF do you think you're doing?"

When I began my Computation degree at UMIST in 1974 we newbies were shown their little computing museum which included, among other things, an 80 column hand card punch. We were all suitably impressed: gosh, how far things have move forward etc. etc.

Three years later, when I started my junior programmer job at ICL in Reading, the first thing I was given was ... my very own hand punch and a much photocopied document showing the finger shapes for each character. Apart from being seriously underwhelmed by the level of technology, I also remember being vaguely revolted by the decomposing rubber keytops which had absorbed the grimy sweat from many years of finger prodding by coding oiks.

Ah, those were the days. At least I never had to sellotape a chad back in to avoid repunching a card.

Re: They should stick to mice and keyboards

@updraft102

Over the two years, I probably exchanged the mouse 15 times. It would last a little over a month, and then the side button would break internally and come out ...

Just before the warranty ran out, the store apparently discontinued the mouse, so my last exchange didn't work. They ended up refunding the purchase price of the mouse instead! I can't remember if they refunded the cost of the warranty too, but I ended up getting a couple of years of mouse rental for at most the cost of the warranty ...

So how much of your life, to the nearest hour, did you devote to getting two years free use of an unacceptable mouse, rather than one which performed as you wanted?

Re: Important 'cause...

Although I do agree, the exact words used when I realised what was about to happen was "oh F***", then had the crash. Not the most eloquent of potential final words ...

But certainly the most popular in the history of the world in those circumstances.

Whatever next, removing the colour black and using the hex code for it?

Zeroist!