Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Shame we aren’t in Galileo?

"the less educated part of the country."

You need to include the over-educated part not just the intersect between that set and the set of politicians.

Re: Good

"British citizens are excluded"

Unless they were born in NI or have a parent or grandparent who was born there or in the Irish Republic.

"We had 10base2"

Yup. '95 sounds a bit late for a recently installed Token Ring. By then we were on our third Ethernet set-up although luckily enough the stiff hose-pipe variant was somebody else's problem. Maybe the installer wanted to unload some old stock.

Re: obligatory link to Dilbert

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

"The company's most recent accounts show it was a dormant company at the time of the offences, so it was trading improperly anyway"

In which case the directors will be on the hook anyway under the Companies Act.

"I thought if the purpose of a business was illegal, there was no shielding of liability?"

There isn't. But the first step will be to hold the company responsible. The next step has to go after the director(s).

Re: I wants one

But only if I could find a copy of the Z80 UCSD Pascal.

Re: Coding Tests

"My brother went for a job, in the late 90s I think. At a listed company. And was told his CV had to be hand written. Turned out they employed a graphologist to spout bollocks about what your handwriting said about your suitability for the job."

The interview is also your chance to evaluate the company.

"their email addresses are likely to be crucial."

In that respect they made a fundamental mistake in not setting up a .uk domain so they could continue to use email. Get the business going again and argue back at leisure.

"I mean, you could."

Ultimately the internet runs an a mutual agreement to trust a particular root service and sync all the mirrors to it. That implies that a mutual agreement to distrust it and trust one of the mirrors would be possible. If that were to happen the US would have the options, after all the shouting, of accepting it or cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

Re: Hold on a mo...

"This thing has been parked up for 3 years and nobody noticed"

Don't you believe it. The (non Register) vultures who run the local B & Q car park have been ticketing it. The fines are going to be horrendous.

"absolutely no possibility I was smart enough to distribute my coins but dumb enough to store my private keys in a single place, in my house"

There's nothing to stop him being smart in one aspect only. Remember he was also dumb enough to get caught.

Re: Daft or smart?

"Surely smarter than that?"

Not necessarily.

But are the Gardai and he really and absolutely sure the landlord didn't keep the paper?

"welcome back to port"

That's not port, it's beer.

Re: Stupid is as Stupid does

"To be what most would consider a "proper" rocket, you'd want fuel and an engine to burn that fuel, and control and direct the propellant."

What do you call things like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_%28spacecraft%29

"there's _NO_ way I'd accept a 6,000 year old earth"

I wish Alan Harper, one of his successors, had issued an ex cathedra statement about that.

"It was founded by a guy called Ken Ham"

I don't know about Ken Ham but South Ken has quite a good museum dealing with creation amongst other things.

Re: Instilling new timeframes of thought in a world beset by faster/shorter.

In 10,000 years it's going to accumulate a lot of leap-seconds.

Re: Beware survival bias

"Is there really such a thing?"

If there isn't somebody's missing a trick. A very lucrative trick. They'd be able to reissue cookery books with QR codes to scan to control the mixer.

Re: Beware survival bias

"it was built out of the best materials available and with the most precise mechanical engineering at the time of construction."

It was also built for a simple task. Add a perpetual calendar and day of week function and either (a) you have to be able to set d-o-w independently of the calendar or (b) you have to build in the correct leap year algorithm or (c) it goes out of kilter on 2100-03-01.

Re: It's worse even than this...

"But my company (and indeed my family home) is outside the UK and I was told I would be inside ir35."

That's an interesting one. I'd been wondering about what would happen if the contractors worked via, billed from and were paid by Irish registered businesses. It would, of course, depend on the terms negotiated with the EU but I'd think there would be serious problems if HMRC were to try interfering with commercial contracts with an overseas company.

Re: Serial overflow...

Something about this story reminds me of the saying about the bandwidth of a van-load of tapes on the motorway...

Re: One Per Desk

Did anyone other than ICL and BT (which is where I saw them) ever use them for actual work?