* Posts by Pompous Git

3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014

Facebook is abusive. It's time to divorce it

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Re: What I find even more sinister...

"As an experiment, I created a fake FB account (using a brand-new fake email address) and was quite disturbed by the accuracy of the 'people you may know' offerings"
Interesting. I will see what happens when my newly created email hits the DNS servers.

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Re: And some are ...

"Don't worry, friendship is neither necessary nor implied."
Not at all worried and I suspect friendship would be a distinct possibility if we were on the same continent. I use the word "friend" in a distinctly different sense than FB "friend". Back when the Interwebs were considerably less crowded I made several international friends. One came all the way from Canada to help build my house and another from the UK ostensibly for the cricket, but got bored and came to visit me instead. One even settled here just last month.

Live long and prosper...

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Re: And some are ...

"As long as it's not sweet, buttery or oaky ... Winery/winemaker/vineyard/vintage?"
I'm actually quite fond of buttery in my chardonnays. As for vintage, this is merely chateau cardboard I'm afraid. De Bortoli who do that better than most and it's far too young albeit nicely dry. Would you prefer I go to the cellar for some Cassegrain or Rousebout Rousey?

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Re: There is a compromise

"I have an FB account, under a very false name, with a very odd profile and history, that I use when I need to, mainly for posting and reading about events in our community shop and other local groups."
Now there's a thought... Thanks [evil grin]...

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Re: Well-said, Simon

"That link doesn't work, it has a trailing ""

Try this If he hates men that's his problem and doesn't seem to have any bearing on the issue in the headpost.

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Re: And some are ...

Indeed and being the World's Most Pompous Git was something of an achievement :-)

I'll take a pass on the beer since I have a glass of semillon chardonnay to hand and I raise it in salute!

BTW, when did I become your godfather???

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"People are narcissistic and cheap."
Some certainly are, but I suspect not the majority. Some are conceited and contemptuous, but we won't go there... yet...

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Well-said, Simon

Also worth reading Mark Pesce on the Farcebook issue:

Why I quit Facebook (and you should too)

IBM: Remote working is great! ... For everyone except us

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Re: Is it just me, or is this "retro" trend appearing in workplaces ?

"There is always resistance to progress."
Regression is more than resistance to progress...

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Re: Is it just me, or is this "retro" trend appearing in workplaces ?

"I wonder if there's a shadowy cabal of fuel suppliers and car manufacturers behind it - possibly aided by coffee shops ?"
Or the knock shops around the corner from the coffee shops?

Today's bonkers bug report: Microsoft Edge can't print numbers

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Re: And all the students that get stuck with Windows S!

"and all this time I've been thinking of United as a bunch of pricks for overbooking"
I only think they're a bunch of pricks when they beat Liverpool!

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Re: Optional Title

"I can fairly easily get my digits into three distinct positions, so that's 59048."
You can also have palms facing towards, or away from you, hands at waist, shoulder, or head height...

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Re: Windows 10 printing in general..

"I'd have to agree that printing seems to be like something Microsoft's devs slapped on after waking up with a hangover the morning of the release date and saying "Oh shit dude, we forgot to do printing!""
I have relatively few printing problems in Windows, I suspect because I have a Postscript printer. At least in Windows I can choose whether to print in colour or monochrome in the Print dialog box. Cinnamon Mint requires opening a web browser to choose the correct setting at the printer. There is no option in the Linux Print dialog box to do this.

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Re: Colour me unsurprised

"I don't know how many Publisher users have color-managed workflow, including profiling monitors correctly."
Probably zero, or near as damnit.

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Re: Colour me unsurprised

"Surely true black can be rendered in RGB, with a value of 0,0,0?"
No, it's a sort of muddy dark brown when printed. Black ink/toner is also a lot cheaper than cyan, magenta and yellow.

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Re: "Surely true black can be rendered in RGB, with a value of 0,0,0?"

"Once I would have found Publisher a welcome addition to the Office suite, now it's mostly a useless toy.

...InDesign CC is too expensive for occasional use."

Back in the mid-90s after I finished a group training of MS Publisher, one of the clients, a young girl, burst into tears. When I asked her what the problem was she explained she had been tasked with producing a monthly newsletter and that she now knew she'd never have enough time.

So, we did a cost-benefit analysis of using MS Publisher versus Pagemaker. A Pagemaker licence back then was well north of $AU1,000 and hiring me for a one-on-one training a further ~$AU400. Publisher may have been "free", but time is money. The cost difference looked like being amortised in 3–6 months.

As with most of my Pagemaker clients, the YL brought her first finished work for my perusal and very good it was, too. It helped that we had created a number of templates for the job during her training. The time-saving exceeded our original estimate.

The first book I created with InDesign more than justified the cost of the licence. The time-saving versus a low-end DTP tool can be quite dramatic. The book had over a thousand footnotes, only one of which had the required full stop at the end. Putting those in manually would have been a chore, but the GREP in InDesign made that a trivial task.

Hint: I purchased my first Pagemaker licence second hand for 20% of the RRP. That meant I paid very little more than for a "new" low end product.

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Re: "Surely true black can be rendered in RGB, with a value of 0,0,0?"

"The end result is that MS now have no serious DTP package and 2 laughable ones."
That deserves more than the single upvote I'm giving you...

Australian Taxation Office named as party preventing IT contractors being paid

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Re: @ Red Bren

"Since you can write a cheque upon anything"
Back in the early 1970s I used to sell my paintings and drawings door to door. One prospective customer was out of cash and cheques so I told him to write it on a piece of toilet paper. He did so and was clearly suppressing a smirk presumably because he thought I was wrong in my assertion that he could do so. The teller at his bank initially refused to take it, but on my insistence that she ask the accountant for direction did so.

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Re: Be aware...

@ Truckle the Uncivil

Happy to stand corrected. It was what I was told by a lawyer I did some work for many years ago. Initially the cashier refused to cash the cheque (it was crossed), but when I said the magic word "wages" she said "Not a problem!" and promptly cashed it.

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@ James 68

After I wound up my business, the ATO spent 10 years harrassing me for $830 they claimed I owed. Eventually they put a collection agency onto the case and for the umpteenth time explained to them that I did not ow the ATO any money. The collection agency gave me a phone number at the ATO in Canberra. The person I spoke to checked my records and exclaimed "You don't owe us; we owe you!"

Several weeks later, just before Christmas I received three cheques totalling somewhat more than $1,000. They paid interest on the outstanding amount. Ya win some, ya lose some! So it goes...

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Re: I know who will have first dibs

"I think in Aus it's staff first, then tax, but Im not sure of the details.??"
It's secured creditors first — bank mortgages etc, then unsecured creditors. Employees have priority*, then ATO, then everyone else. Each category is paid out in full before the next. The contractors here are in the last category so unlikely to be paid in full if the company is liquidated.

* Capped if you are a director, a relative or the spouse of a director.

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Re: The tax issue may explain how they were able to do it

@ DougS

I believe in the earlier thread there was mention of other income streams the business has. Think of loss-leaders in supermarkets. Or my offering a 15% discount for payment up front when I was contracting for that matter. There's no way I'd have made up the difference on 30 day invoices. But I did solve my cash-flow problem.

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Re: We OBVIOUSLY are missing big chunks of the story. . .

"Authorities like to have bully power when it comes to squeezing the peasants, bugger pesky due process.."
Back in the late 90s we had provisional tax for self-employed people such as myself. The ATO sent me a bill for ~90% of my anticipated income for the forthcoming year. That was rather more than I could afford to pay so they levied interest on the unpaid amount. Come the end of financial year, the ATO refunded the "overpayment" I had made, but kept the interest on the extra I had "owed" them. They are complete and utter bastards.

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Re: Be aware...

"In the uk, it's damn near impossible to "cash" a cheque, you have to pay it into a bank account and wait for it to clear "
If it's a pay cheque the banks are required by law to cash it here in Oz.

Gamers red hot with fury over Intel Core i7-7700 temperature spikes

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Re: Within parameters

"Time for a lie down and a cup of tea."
Have some sympathy to go with it; I believe it helps ;-)

I'm only a grammar Nazi when editing, otherwise I "forgive them for they know not what they do". When English classes stopped correcting spelling mistakes and grammar they created a generation of illiterates. Getting upset doesn't help much...

PS I also noticed I omitted an apostrophe in a post I made in the small hours. Oh, the shame of it!

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Re: Within parameters

"For every 10 deg above 25 deg junction temp you loose 50% of the life at 25 deg, this is well known for all designers."
No idea why that was downvoted! Have an upvote from me :-)

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Re: Stress

"Ah, memories of old G4 and G5 Macs only working if you pushed on the motherboard."
Not to mention picking up and dropping the Apple III, as advised by Apple support, to get it going again!

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Re: self destruct feature?

"Thank goodness for AMD coming back into the arena."
Let's hope that their new CPUs come with decent chipsets...

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"so they are saying they know about it but it's expected !!!"
Like the excessive temperatures reached by their first 1 GHz chip?

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Re: "opening a browser or an application or a program"

"I've called them apps since the days of DOS and 8.3 filenames because they went in the apps directory, as opposed to the tools dir, pics dir, docs dir, db dir etc."
Most of my DOS-using colleagues called them programs, or proggies. Application was more a Mac-user term.

My proggies/applications lived in the BIN directory* and naturally my batch files lived in the BELFRY.

* Except for those that insisted on living in the root dir.

US copyright law shake-up: Days of flinging stuff on the web and waiting for a DMCA may be over

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Coat

Re: Contemporary Hollywood films do not pass the threshold of originality required by copyright

"Well if I needed to infect and bring down an alien Computer, Windows OS would certainly be my weapon of choice"
Only works if the aliens are stupid enough to be running Windows.

Mines the one with a copy of BeOS in the pocket...

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Re: Copyright duration

"Why should a work be protected for so long, especially if made early in life? It would perhaps be best if an author not be allowed to rest on his or her laurels."
There are two sorts of best sellers. There's the utterly forgettable sort that sells well for a few months before the next best seller in that category comes along. Then there are works that sell modestly, but continue to sell for a very long period because they have some non-monetary intrinsic value. Why should the latter be penalised because they didn't write a pot-boiler instead?

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Re: Lawyers arguing for money over sound and light waves

"Long strict copyright prevent people from contributing to the world."
What complete and utter bullshit!

From the EP Seahorse Bells

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Re: Contemporary Hollywood films do not pass the threshold of originality required by copyright

"Some, like Independence Day, contain stuff to hit any techie's funny bone"
Try being a historian watching period dramas... TV is worse than Hollyweird.

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Re: *Sigh*

"We Australians have told Hollywood to make their products affordable and on time and film piracy will come down. Did they listen? No. Instead, "
I just wait and purchase DVDs second-hand if they aren't available from the lending library for free.

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Re: Lawyers arguing for money over sound and light waves

"The really telling thing here is that pictures and sound recordings are meaningless, valueless waves."
You sound just like the dude who tried to persuade me that Shakespeare contributed nothing of interest to the world.

systemd-free Devuan Linux hits RC2

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"I take this as a good principle of modern design: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.""
This is of course the canonical translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's words: "Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher". (Terre des Hommes, 1939). Missing are the words "It seems that" from the beginning of the aphorism and that quite changes the meaning of what Saint-Exupéry wrote.

Perhaps we can set against it another aphorism: Appearances can be deceptive.

Some of the best examples of "good, modern design" occurred in the UK after I left in the mid-60s. Towering concrete edifices to house the workers that Bill Bryson described as the "Fuck You school of architecture".

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Re: Easy answer.

"The lack of downvotes on your post is probably because it's not a pro-system post, even though you seem to be thinking it is. ;)"
I am neither pro, nor anti systemD. I am however quite entertained by the discussion :-)

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Re: Easy answer.

"You see manure. I see next year's veggies."
No, we both see next year's veggies. For a decade I made 25 cubic metres of compost a year for my market garden. It's just that in the late 19th C there was a vastly greater amount of manure in New York, London, Paris, Sydney etc. Far more than was needed for vegetable production. The piles of manure on vacant blocks in NYC were reported to be up to 20 metres high.

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Re: Easy answer.

"People have been known to die in horse-related accidents."
The death rate from horse accidents in the major cities in the 19th C was considerably higher than that from motor cars today. Possibly because falling off a motor car is considerably rarer than falling off a horse. The only horse I know of that carried humans internally was built in Troy...

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Re: Easy answer.

"If you watch some period drama from the days of the horse look at the nice clean streets and ask yourself if the historical reconstruction was accurate."
What's even more amazing about those period dramas is there's not only no horse manure, there's not a sparrow starver in sight!

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Re: Easy answer.

"News must have been delayed where you were brought up. I'm a good bit older than you and cars had already replaced horses here."
I was brought up in Nuneaton, Warks. Working class so new books were a luxury denied. Most of the books I read were published in the 19th C. Heck, the words of Aristotle I read were written ~2,500 years ago!

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Re: Easy answer.

"And look at the mess they have caused."
Motor cars solved the mess problem.

"The main problem, however, was manure. A horse produces between 7 and 15 kilos of manure daily. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced nearly 1,200 metric tons of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. In addition, each horse produces nearly a litre of urine per day, which also ended up on the streets.

....

Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure."

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Re: Easy answer.

"Yes, really. I took my Percheron & buckboard to the feedstore to purchase chicken feed just this afternoon."
You're a man after my own heart, Jake :-) However, just because some few of us preserve the old ways, doesn't mean that the vast majority give a damn.

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Re: Easy answer.

"Motor cars have not replaced horses."
Really?

Late 19th C London Omnibus

Spend your paper £5 notes NOW: No longer legal tender after today

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"I suspect that cash will here for long, long time to come unless that banks and card processors massively reduce their cut of every transaction. "
It's amazing how often you can hustle for a discount when you pay by "poor people's credit" (cash).

Back when cheques were the thing I used to write cash cheques for local use. A gratifying number either remained in circulation, or got lost each year.

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Re: £5 note issued in 1957 had a strong purchasing power

"The average weekly wage was £7.50"
Pretty certain my dad didn't earn anything near that. He was a machine-tool engineer on piece-work.

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Re: Palm Oil

"When will these vegan dreadlock toting flip flop wearing tree huggers think of the trees?"
Or the orangutans!

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Re: I had no idea

"Our money isn't made out of paper. It's a paper/cotton mix."
Paper:
"A substance composed of fibres interlaced into a compact web, made (usually in the form of a thin flexible sheet, most commonly white) from various fibrous materials, as linen and cotton rags, straw, wood, certain grasses, etc., which are macerated into a pulp, dried, and pressed (and subjected to various other processes, as bleaching, colouring, sizing, etc., according to the intended use)..."

IOW your money is (was) definitely made out of paper.

Windows 10 S: Good, bad, and how this could get ugly for PC makers

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@ Kiwi (was Re: Linux)

"I said "greater range". You may have a specific use case for programs that require Windows where you cannot find suitable Linux equivalents. "
I have several specific case uses where there appears to be no Linux equivalent, or the Linux "equivalent" is shite. Unless you know of a source that alternativeTo doesn't know about. This has nothing to do with MS Office or web browsers.