Posts by Pompous Git

Re: Gilgamesh sued Apple

"And not actually a king either, assuming he existed."

From the OED:

" In OE. the title appears first as the name of the chiefs of the various Anglian and Saxon ‘kins’, tribes, or clans, who invaded Britain, and of the petty states founded by them, as well as of the native British chiefs or princes with whom they fought, and of the Danish chiefs who at a later time invaded and occupied parts of the country. Among the Angles and Saxons the kingship was not strictly hereditary, according to later notions; but the cyning was chosen or accepted in each case from a recognized kingly or royal cynn or family (usually tracing its genealogy up to Woden). With the gradual ascendancy and conquests of Wessex in the 9th and 10th c., the king of the West Saxons became the king of the Angelcynn, Angelþéode, or English (Angligenarum, gentis Angligenæ, Anglorum), and the tribal kings came to an end. But there still remained a King of Scotland, and several petty kings in Ireland. In European and other more or less civilized countries, king came to be the title of the ruler of an independent organized state called a kingdom; but in mediæval times, as subsequently in the German Empire, some kings were really or nominally subordinate to the Emperor (as ostensibly representing the Roman Cæsar or Imperator), and a King was held to rank below an Emperor. In reference to ancient times the name is applied, like L. rex, Gr. βασιλεύς, Heb. melek, to the more or less despotic rulers not only of great dominions like Assyria, Persia, Egypt, but of petty states or towns such as Jericho, Ai, Mycenæ, Ithaca, Syracuse, and Rome. It is still applied to the native rulers of petty African states, towns, or tribes, Polynesian islands, and the like. "

Re: We use base 10 for a reason

"Moreover, you could subdivide a pound into 960 farthings."

And they were still legal tender... Save up enough and you could buy a penny ha'penny's-worth of sweets on the way home with your dad's Sunday bottle of cider from the offie.

Re: Strangely enough ...copyright complications

"Image copyright is horribly complicated. The maker of the image owns copyright in the image. If someone is permitted to take a photo of the image then they have copyright of the new image, but so (usually) does the original photographer!"

Ain't that the truth? I'm a member of the Australian Copyright Council and beneficiary of royalties therefrom.

The photograph in question is old enough the photographer is more than likely dead. Nobody knows who the photographer was, or if they do they've stayed schtum for a very long time.

Re: Special cases

"Pythagoras noted a number of special triangles, such as 3:4:5, that have integer ratios in base 10."

The Egyptians beat Pythagoras to it; they used 3:4:5 for land surveying. Heck, I used it a lot when building my home 14 years ago.

Re: Strangely enough ...

"Wikipedia isn't public domain - we can't just lift their stuff."

The photograph of the Plimpton tablet isn't "their stuff"; it's in the public domain. Wikipedia lifting stuff from the public domain doesn't mean it's copyright Wikimedia Foundation no matter what Jimmy Wale might believe.

Re: Copyright

"If you had access to the physical tablet, you could take your own photos, and you would own the copyright in those photos (or release them public domain if you so choose)."

There are images already in the public domain, so not much point. I suspect HkraM was only trying to get a laugh...

The Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322

Re: "Kraut" ? really ? in the 21st century ? after 70 years ?

"I think it's time to put down the "Commando" & "Victor" comics and grow up a bit ?"

Back at you. I've been called a communist, a fascist, a pommie bastard, a Jew, Fat bastard, and many another epithet [too many to mention]. The only thing I object to is being called too late for dinner.

Re: Dance Biscuits?

"Surely, you mean Disco Biscuits?"

Oh noes! Then someone's bound to redo Lou Reed's Disco Mystic (Shirley the worst song he ever recorded). And now it's playing in my head; you've done my brain in!

Re: Pill Colour

"I've never seen the left raise their hands in a salute gesture"

Opening your eyes might help...

"Hmm.. at one time, those who where "lefties" were left-handed."

Still are AFAICT. They're a sinister lot and need to be downvoted at every opportunity!

Re: Microsoft should be prosecuted....

"WTF? How on earth are they discriminating on the basis of any of the following with regard to windows updates (the subject in hand)?"

5. Age [I'm definitely getting too old for this shit!]

6. Disability [I have great difficulty coping with functionality being defunctioned]

7. Gender reassignment [Your guess is as good as mine]

8. Marriage and civil partnership [Everytime MS fucks me over I froth at the mouth and rant, thus threatening the stability of my marriage]

9. Race [I guess it's a race to see who can use up my Internet bandwidth quickest – me or MS]

10. Religion or belief [Windows/Mac/Linux is a religion for some. Get over it.]

11. Sex [I'm male. That they do this to females as well is no excuse.]

12. Sexual orientation [I'm hetero, but MS keep shafting me and I'm expected to provide the KY jelly.]

Re: Don't F***ing talk to me about W10 upgrades

"This week the complete and utter b****tards have pushed me in excess usage charges by downloading 6+GB per PC"

Funny you should mention that. MS pushed 3 redundant copies of w10 onto my computers. The one I resented most was via mobile wireless to my lappy while I was on holidays. That's when I decided to give Cinnamon Mint a try and it's still the only OS on my Zenbook. That stopped MS pushing their unwanted crap very smartly.

"Microsoft really do need to invest in a dictionary."

No, they need to invest in creating a decent os, not the POS that's w10.

Mrs Git's "new" lappy kindly donated by The Gitling has w10, fortunately with the Classic Shell. After faffing around attempting to get w10 to see the printer on my machine, I discovered PC settings where the identical dialog miraculously worked. Still won't join the homegroup though. Sees the homegroup, requests the password and then spends many minutes cogitating before declaring that it can no longer see the homegroup and offering to create a new one. FFS! There are more important things in life...

Re: Indie

"A thylarctos plummetus killed me once. It was a nasty death."

Are you now a zombie? Curious minds would like to know...

Re: Why religion? Why political stripe?

"If you consider Thomas Aquinas "pre-university". I wouldn't.

As for the rest of yours: Oh, wonderful. Yet another pointless, irrational debate attempting to draw the conversation away from the point."

Despite my having read Aquinas's Summa (definitely not pre-university) I cannot recall anything remotely resembling "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Evidence required.

Er, you introduced angels into the debate jake, not me! Your statement had as much relevance to this thread as my pointing out that modern physicists believe black holes emit working television sets, and leather-bound volumes of the complete works of Shakespeare would have had.

Re: Indie

""My" beach is in the top 10 beaches of the world - the only one in Europe. "

Only beach in Europe? How sad... You ought to come and visit some of Australia's sometime... We've got spares , but you're not having them.

Re: Why religion? Why political stripe?

"The exact phrase didn't exist until fairly recently, but the concept was debated at least as early as the 11th century."

At the pre-university level, maybe. Mostly it's used to denigrate the creators of great cathedrals that are still standing. Milan for example, built 600 years ago. Then there are such "trivial" inventions as:

* The mechanical clock

* The printing press

* Gunpowder

* Water and wind mills

* Spectacles

* Public libraries

* Improved quadrants and astrolabes

* The stirrup

* Mild steel

* The crossbow

* The mouldboard plough

but you knew that already, didn't you?

Re: Indie

"Maybe next time try something equally Welsh, like pizza?"

Potato and leek soup? Dragon pies? Yummy :-)

But as you note potatoes are hardly native to Wales, nor are dragons; they're Chinese.

"More seriously, do you visit Micronesia to sample hamburgers and hot dogs washed down with a Budweiser at US air bases?"

Holy fuck! have a care there jake. Some of us have sensitive stomachs.

Re: Indie

"Welsh is easier than Irish!"

There was a Merkin tourist and his wife in a restaurant in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. They were arguing over the pronunciation of the place and the bloke asks the waitress how to pronounce it. The waitress leaned close to him and said, very slowly, The Penrhos Arms.

Re: Why religion? Why political stripe?

"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

As any fule kno, angels lack extension and mass so a scholastic's answer would be an infinite number. Of course that's not scientific. Anders Sandberg presented a calculation based on theories of information physics and quantum gravity, establishing an upper bound of 8.6766×10⁴⁹ angels.

There's zero evidence that any scholastic theologian ever debated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It appears to be of considerably more interest to modern physicists. Go figure...

Re: The King is a Fink

"The Wizard of Id is still running"

Spook: "Same swill, different day..."

Re: "alleged exclusion of evidence [snip]

"I keep hearing this guy as well"

The uploader has not made this video available in your country. Well, fuck you too then...

And your title is too long...

Re: Wasting the courts time

"you have a court system that feeds [on] this type of behaviour,"

FTFY...

"Don't know why you've been downvoted. My boss has insisted we implement a "4D" strategy for email"

There are people in IT who see their role as preventing the worker bees from doing their work efficiently. Note all the badmouthing of sales by those oblivious of the fact that without sales there's no revenue stream which is where their wages come from.

Outlook might not be the best CRM out there, but since it comes bundled with Office it's certainly the most widely used. Not that the majority of Outlook users know they have a passable CRM that can make their workflow more efficient if only they had the training...

Re: The Usual...

"IF YOUR SHIT IS IMPORTANT, DON'T STORE IT IN AN EMAIL FOLDER! If you're treating an email folder as though it is a filestore, you're not competant [sic] to be using the computer."

Shouty, shouty! So where would you store emails that are sent out on a regular basis in response to email queries about your work, or business? In the days of typewriters we kept such documents in the form of photocopies in a filing cabinet when we were responding to snail-mail. Presumably you would have had the typist typing each one out as the queries arrived...

Re: how difficult is it?

"switch to pine for a week"

and forget about:

* working with your POP account

* MIME and OpenPGP email security support (only the guilty need encryption?)

* Unicode support (who needs to communicate with "furriners?)

* creating HTML emails with a visual editor (you need to insert HTML codes by hand)...

"outlook has never implemented a single-key "I'm done; file this email" button. "

That's because Outlook can't read your mind. Right click, choose Quick Steps, choose a Quick Step which can do any of several things such as:

* generate an email to the team,

* mark as read and move to a particular folder,

* reply and delete...

Re: People are paying to download this?

"Surely anyone can arrange to record a few minutes of silence to an audio file?"

So you can be sued? Silly boy...

Re: Not limited to iPhones

"not so much ZZ Top, though...."

Now that is bad news... Not so much Zappa, or Spooky Tooth either I imagine.

Re: Plagiarised..

"The John Cage piece 4' 33" is purely meant to be "played" live - the ambient sounds that the listeners become aware of, are meant to be the "music"."

It goes a little deeper than that I suspect. Cage meant us to think about such things as location, performance... It almost certainly inspired such pieces as Symphony of Australian Birds and that wonderful track by Jeff Beck where he plays a duet with a blackbird. It's good to be challenged sometimes methinks...

Re: So why is the 32 bit version twice the size

"It also reminds me of a vacuum tube (valve). It is a container filled with nothing. It doesn't matter what size it is, it is still filled with same amount of nothing."

I can't buy that! I've been told that the vacuum of outer space is far emptier than the vacuums we create on Earth's surface. IOW, neither are truly empty. In any event, when I studied physics, I learnt that what I perceive as a solid is no such thing; it's mostly empty space with a few atomic nuclei dispersed throughout.

FWIW, my various 4'33" silences vary in size from 587 KB to 206719 KB though they all sound the same. Nothing at all like Cage's 4' 33".

Here's one with a full orchestra

Death Metal Cover by Dead Territory

When I suggested to my late friend Lobby Loyde he do Cage's 4'33" he said, "go fuck yourself" and played this instead.

This isn't the original or at the time...