Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Workplace Bullying

A lot of whooshes in those downvotes, I think.

Re: But it's up to us

"Zoom doesn't work on older computers (e.g. Vista etc)"

Zoom works on Linux. When SWMBO was running her patchwork classes remotely they met by Zoom and, of course, her laptop runs on Linux.

A problem shared is now somebody else's.

"dealing with a sales person"

Say what you like about crabs, but they're not fussy eaters.

Re: Alternatively. . .

I once spent a couple of very cold, wet, smelly days watching the contents of a pig farm slurry pit being pumped out* to see if any of the thousands of bones looked human. None did.

* Result of a false tip-off to the police. There were a few of those over the years in the search for Thomas Niedermayer.

Concentrated Sulphuric acid and 95%+ Hydrogen Peroxide potassium dichromate?

Makes chromic acid. We used it to disinfect used bacteriology kit. Very effective disinfectant. The H&S briefing for the lab assistnat was to simply drop a few sheets of filter paper into it so she could see them instantly disappear.

Re: Lime?

Lime's not needed. Just follow the carpet with a concrete pour. Next week the steel starts to go up.

Re: Shared printers

" It must be handwritten because it gets sent for handwriting analysis."

It makes a big difference when you have to be prepared to stand over your conclusions in the face of cross-examination.

Due to the organisation of the forensic lab my boss was also a questioned documents examiner. They kept strictly to comparing texts to say whether they had been written by the same hand. In terms of characteristics of the writer they weren't even prepared to say what the gender might be.

Re: Back in the early 90's

Obligatory https://dilbert.com/strip/1996-05-02

Re: Way Back...

"stuck them down in the new order"

Don't stick them, staple them. Easier to rearrange again. Downside: punctured fingers.

Re: Back in the early 90's

Along with Ashton-Tate.

Re: Amateur Opera Society Newsletter

Was it running on an Alto?

Re: "personal printing"

"intuitive icons"

Multilingual: equally incomprehensible in all languages.

Re: Way Back...

"Great, we could type up and print our own letters, then we had to send them to the typing pool who retyped them"

We had the same experience with witness statements which couldn't be on plain stationery (II|RC there were 4 different pre-printed variants to cope with single and multi-page statements). This was referred to as "sending them to have typing errors inserted".

Re: Dumb

"he could have started a legit company"

I've come across occasional cases where the only explanation seems to have been an a deliberate decision against making money legitimately.

Re: So we're feeling bad for the ad slingers now?

And yet advertisers complain are said to complain about ad-blockers eliminating the half that doesn't work. Or is that just the advertising industry? If the latter then I find it difficult to distinguish their morality from Zhukov's.

Re: How do you communicate?

And above all, don't suggest social networking.

Re: I almost want to...

...go back to CDE/Motif these days.

No problem - https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

Re: Jealous Gnome Devs

Maybe you're being a bit lenient.

Re: Nothing to see here ...

The thing that makes it routine is the presence of Gnome. It seems that every generation leads to at least one new project.

Re: Proof, if we ever needed it, of our weakness

"Motorola, Alcatel(-Lucent), Nokia, Nortel"

Upvoted but you make Martin's point. Those aren't the UK firms which had been killed off earlier.

Re: The only real innovation here ..

"Honestly, it is as if everyone has been wholesale acquiring marketing people from the cosmetics industry."

Gartner could supply the cosmetics industry any day.

Re: "have a role streaming video into cars to entertain their occupants"

"what is the poor front passenger to do ?"

Wear VR goggles of course.

Maybe those could be a fix for "Are we there yet?" - "Just pop these on & you'll be there already, dear."

Re: Time for something new

Once upon a time computers occupied large rooms. In the early days they needed a good stock of spare valves to be kept on hand. Nowadays you can put a far more powerful one in your pocket. It's called technological development. You may have heard of it. It enables things to be made smaller, better and more reliable.

One of our problems is that the naysayers had their way for a long time. We're now way behind where we should have been in terms of development and in the meantime we've been shoving huge quantities of carbonaceous fossil materials up power-station chimneys for decades so that (a) our descendants won't have those available as non-fuel industrial raw materials when they need them and (b) people are, if you haven't noticed, starting to worry about the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.