Posts by calmeilles

Re: The d in £sd

The shilling's symbol is the solidus ⧸ (U+29F8), derived from the long-s, ſ (U+017F) and is not a slash / (U+002f).

£4 7⧸8, four pound seven and eight. £1 10⧸–, one pound ten shillings. 2⧸6, half a crown.

Re: The legislators need to get involved

« their incompetence in re-enabling the account »

Lack of familiarity with the process.

Which is likely undocumented and untested… after all, it never gets used, right?

Re: That will be 244 people looking for a job very soon

My own, and therefore purely anecdotal, experience is that the stores are less durable, quality household goods and more shiny, shiny, bling.

You'd hope that retailers would have a good grasp of their market, and maybe they do, but if so I — middle class, middle aged, willing to pay for nice things — no longer seem to be it.

Re: home use printer that doesn't dry up between uses

I've no idea how the financial side works out though.

A quick Google suggests $prohibitive… though to be honest I didn't look far, stopping at the £400 set of inks.

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

"The keyboard is 530 millimeters (21 inches) by 210 millimeters (8% inches) by 100 millimeters (4 inches) and weighs 6 kilograms (13 pounds) each. The keyboard may be moved to service the machine."

<gulp!>

The classic one from the Geniuses is "But there's no way to recover your data."

Naturally this was not true. The simplest way was to remove the SSD from the old board and put it on the new one.

It is assumed that forcing life to conform to Apple's Genius Script was why they started soldering SSDs onto the boards.

Now there really is now way to recover your data... unless you have a soldering iron.

Re: Still SHIPping

No citation...

Ships generally get what is current, or slightly behind the current for stability and development time, when they are built and then stick with it. So ships running ancient OSs are no surprise.

Equally it would be unsurprising if the the newest built had some Win7 aboard... and downright gob-smacking if they had anything as old as XP.

Curiously this subject was addressed in this venerable publication less than six months ago. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/09/royal_navy_old_os_at_sea/

Re: Hmmmm

The price difference between any cellular and non-cellular device (not just Apple) is usually around £100.

For a Kindle Paperwhite it's exactly £60 but that includes lifetime (of the device) data use.

iPad you pay a premium to have a sim added and still have to buy a data plan of some sort do you not?

Re: * Orbits the Sun

An exoplanet or extrasolar planet, a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun.

Obvs.

Re: About 10Gb networking

More practically in a datacentre which did have CAT6a* structured cabling but did not have similar OM3 10 years ago*, even 5 years ago SFP+ switches and nics were expensive but readily available while 10Gb BaseT switches and nics were excruciatingly expensive and rare as hen's teeth.

Whatever the other benefits fibre was the only realistic choice for a number of years.

[ * I'm aware the CAT6a standard wasn't formally defined until 2009 ]

Re: OMFG, usage of the 'singular "they"' - ew

If it was good enough for Caxton it might be time to drag yourself into the 15th Century.

Page 39 line 3 https://archive.org/details/rightplesauntno4400caxtuoft

Re: Oh great, more places for hackers to hire

Just looked at mine, hosted on OVH. 21 in the last 6 days. None from OVH.

Anecdote or data?

Re: Invention Time

How would you do that? the AO should present a focused image to the CCD. How would a CCD correct an unfocused image?

In addition the large CCD camera will be just one of a number of instruments that will be attached to the telescope — 4 currently being built plus a fibre-optic feed, more will be developed. The adaptive optics technology on the mirrors means having to do the job just once and hopefully do it well.

The alternative would be to have correction systems on each instrument, some of which might not be suitable to such manipulation.

http://www.gmto.org/resources/

Re: Dissenting voice

I'm 53 and was taught both Imperial and metric at primary school. My sister is only four years younger but by the time she went there it was metric only so you're probably spot on with the 50 years demarcation.

Re: "And he would have got away with it too,"

You just can't get the staff these days...

Re: Users required to reveal identities

That's so they can write your name on the cup. Wifi access will require much more.

Re: Wonky math

Transposed the feet and meter figures. Silly billies.

Re: Worlds best tranducer, Worlds best microphone

"The unspeakably omnipotent members of the Complector Council were bound by nothing else save the laws of physics, and were generally held to be putting considerable effort into getting round those."

Re: It's all about balance...

If six floors are all that you have...

Re: IT sales

I know that when I tell vendor that the budget is £X they'll come back with an overspecced quote nudging £2X.

Weeks will then be spent paring down the spec and "negotiating" the discounts until I get what I wanted in the first place at the price I was prepared to pay.

Vendor's seem to think that this ridiculous process will endear them to you for offering an extra special "good deal" but it doesn't.

Amazingly however it still seems to work on whole classes of PHBs who will, with apparent sincerity*, offer congratulations on said "good deal."

The willingness to forego the stupid price/product merry-go-round is why Dell — through a re-seller — got my last order over potential vendors $c, $h and $i. I have no idea if that was good vendor or good reseller but I do know that enquiry Monday, quote Tuesday, purchase order Thursday resulted in delivery following Tuesday. 9 (7 working) days from interest to install will result in return custom.

[ * Yes, I know it can be faked: but few PHBs have the skill-set.]

Re: Direct wiring

Yup. At last gig it was the PoE IP-phones with pass-through for computer that ensured every desk had at least one live port from the get go. It was the 2nd device people who were the cause of patching.

Re: Looks like everyone is being a dick

> Koçulu seems to be less than professional and not particularly polite in his responses.

That.

Not impressed with Kik and not entirely convinced by NPM either.

But frankly when interacting with a community there's a minimum degree of politeness required and interacting with a business a minimum degree of professionalism.

Koçulu displayed neither and stamping his feet and taking his toys elsewhere just reinforced that impression.

The negotiation of publishing rights has yet to catch up with the EU's internal market.

Typically US/US English Language books will have three rights sales. North America, United Kingdom ( sometimes including Aus and NZ) and the rest of the world (with translations being another set of contracts). The details vary for other languages and origins but the principal is much the same, French being typically divided into France, N. America and ROW.

When you had the rights for one region case law said that it was okay to sell into any market to an individual but it was a transgression of another holder's rights to market a book in areas other than your own.

In practice this meant that a bookshop could order you a copy of an out-region work but could not shelve such copies for general sale.

Amazon's US and UK operations — on the advice of lawyers — has tried to replicate this model to stave off being sued by publishers who might claim their rights were being infringed and the same was done as other national markets were opened.

Unfortunately within the EU this is antithetical to the EU's borderless trade laws.

In my view it's long past time that the Commission shook both the retailers and the publishers out of their traditional practices and mandated EU-wide retailing which would in turn encourage similar scope in publishing deals.

Re: Rebranding?

It's not just immediate cash costs but also reputation.

Tender from Insight? Oh! Those guys who can't even keep their own data centre running...

From the 1817 Bonus Bill to the 2005 Gravina Island Bridge, two centuries of congress-critters buying the votes of the folks back home. Not a purely American tradition, but they must rank among its finest exponents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel

Re: The 'jumping ship' bonus?

"moving from a high cost relatively low volume house targeting pros to the mass market for hobbyists"

Really? As a hobbyist I'd maintained a licence for Photoshop through upgrades from version 3.1 onwards. The subscription model pricing is what finally decided for me that it was no longer justified for my light use.

I'd rather assumed that I was typical in this — and that work forking out massively for CC was also, suggesting that Adobe's only interest was the corporate market.

So I'd be interested to know if there is any evidence that this in not in fact the case and that individual users are taking up CC in large numbers.

Re: Easy

A terabyte is too much does strike me as an odd response.

If it's functional and affordable then surely 1 TB at £80/year is a better deal than say Amazon's 500GB for £160/year even if you don't expect to fill it.

Re: @uncle sjohie

In the UK there is funding for on-street residential charge point installations which means that in principal it's possible.

But it means getting your local authority to do it, which means the practice might be very different.

And nothing there will solve the bar steward parked in my spot problem even if you do manage to get one installed.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-funding-for-residential-on-street-charging-for-plug-in-vehicles-a-guide-for-members-of-the-public

Re: Government IT?

Yup. Moving goalposts are a problem everywhere but with government it seems to be ($numberofdepartments*$numberofmpsonthecommittee) orders of magnitude larger.