Posts by CrazyOldCatMan

Re: "rich history"

I'll stick with Shaw. About as mediocre as most telcos in a lot of ways

It's like the reasons for using BT: "they are not as bad as some of the others".

Of course, in the technical paradise that is the UK we have lots of ISPs - some of whom have A Clue(TM) and also understand customer service..

(Zen - I'm looking at you)

Re: Parochialism

Cymru, Gymru or just plain old Wales

Well - the C/G things is quite understandable (the letters mutate according to context). The Wales bit is to cope with the poor benighted ones that don't speak Welsh :-)

(2ndOldestBrother has recently added Welsh to the other languages he speaks [Spanish, Portugese and some French] on the basis that our mother was from Wales. I have no excuse for learning some Gaidhlig other than Runrig)

Re: Proof that emojis don't work

They were exiles from England pushed out by the Saxons, some went into Wales, other into Cumbria

All of Britan (at one point) spoke one variation of the Brythonic langauges (maybe apart from the Picts - we don't know enough about Pictish to make that determination although it's likely it was). What happened with the Saxons was cultural and linguistic domination of the areas that they conquered and the bits that they didn't (Wales, parts of Cornwall, The Highlands, Cumbria) carried on speaking the same languages that they always had (with some cross-fertilisation from Saxon/Jute/Anglic).

Brittany is slightly different - the influx that lead to Brittany speaking a Celtic language started in (probably) the 4th century - possibly on the orders of a British chieftan that tried to himself up as Roman Emperor and settled Celtic troops there. There was more migrating during the Saxon invasions of England but they joined an already thriving Celtic community that had already displaced a lot of the previously-Gaulish culture.

Of course, France being France, Breton isn't recognised as an official language in the same way that Welsh, Cornish, Gaidhlig and Gelg are.

Re: Proof that emojis don't work

chthonic

Amusing mis-spelling of Brythonic - "chthonic" usually means "underground, of the darkness".

Re: Proof that emojis don't work

Kingdom of Alba was formed by an alliance between the Scotti, the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons

Neil Oliver (BBC archeologist/historian - good at his job hence relagated to BBC4) has just started a series on the history of Scotland.

The first one dealt with the formation of the kingdom - essentially it goes like this:

1. There are 4 separate kindoms (Picts, Gaels, and two lots of Britons). A Gael is exiled and ends up in the Pictish kingdom where he (eventually) becomes the Pictish kings right-hand-man.

2. Said exile then self-promotes himself to Pictish king by the traditional route of disposing of the current Pictish king and brings in lots of his Gaelic friends to help run the place and gradually sets about supressing Pictish culture.

3. The old Pictish kings kids were away in Ireland (staying with their aunt who had married an Iriah king) during their fathers assassination. They grow up safely in Ireland but, during the process, become more Gaelic than Pictish.

4. The kids grow up and, with the help of their uncles army, invade Pictland and remove the head of the usurper. The oldest kid becomes king.

5. All the Picts expect the new king to revert to being Pictish - this doesn't happen since, by this point, he's more Gaelic than the Gaels.

6. Later on, the kingdoms merge and, since the two biggest ones were Gaelic, the merged kingdom is largely Gaelic, including in language. Of course, the southern kingdoms then got invaded by various Angles and Jutes and their language replaced by a sister-language[1] of Anglo-Saxon (which later became Scots).

Which nicely accounts for the reasons why the only Pictish that remained was in place names since the language fell out of general day-to-day use.

It's a process similar to what happened in England when the Saxons took over - the language changes not because the incomers kill off all the previous inhabitants but because, in order to deal with officials and nobles, everyone has to learn the language that the officials and nobles use and the old language gradually dies out leaving only place-names and various loan-words.

Very well worth seeing.

[1] Don't ever suggest that Scots is a dialect of English! They are quite clearly sister-languages with an amount of cross-fertilisation. And, if Old Friesan was still around, there would be three sisters.

Re: W98 was OK, but W95 and USB ..

reasonable TCP/IP support came later

We used (from memory) Chameleon TCP/IP. Seemed to work OK although we did have issues getting the network bindings to work (it turns out that binding order *was* important! Who knew?).

dialup setups

Trumpet Winsock. It (mostly) worked..

Re: More chaos

Valentine's days

Wazzat? The day you buy a WW2 cruiser tank?

(Fortunately, t'missus doesn't do Valentines either. And she's put up with me for about 32 years so I can't be failing *too* badly.. We do, however, take the week off around the time of our wedding anniversary)

Re: sad mac

switching the left and right mouse buttons over.

After my dad got diagnosed with Parkinsons, he ended up having to use his mouse with his left hand[1] since his right hand no longer worked very well.

The first time he asked me to fix his computer after that was (momentarily) somewhat confusing..

[1] He also had to learn to write with his left hand since he no longer had the dexterity in his right hand.

Re: We once...

audio prompts

Audio prompts are (outside of clear use-cases like visually-impaired computing) the foetid droppings from his satanic majesties very own herd.

Especially 'jokey' ones that the mouthbreather the other side of the office insists is "just a bit of fun". It might be (concievably) 'fun' the first or second time but, by the 200th turn is merely an invitation to going postal..

Proper people turn the Windows sound effects theme to "none" and leave it that way.

Re: It's tricky

Howard Hughes

Every time I see his name the line "there's Howard Hughes in blue suede shoes, smiling at the majorettes smoking Winston cigarettes" springs to mind.

Yes, I was exposed to Genesis fairly early on in the development of my musical taste. And, looking at the genre listings of my musical choices my taste hasn't changed much.

Re: I'm not trolling

"the deep state"

I remember when we just used to call it "the Old Boys network"..

Re: Uncharitable

once she'd gone, it turned out the country wasn't really up for that kind of "discipline" any more

Indeed. The vegetables revolted after she got savaged by a dead sheep.

who liked their narcotics (legal ones only)

I like my legal narcotics too - they enable me to move when my arthritis is really bad..

(If you consider codeine a narcotic)

High ?

Or, as one UK-based NFL analyst used to say "he got high, but not in the Ricky Williams' sense"..

(Ricky Williams being an NFL running back that freely admitted smoking dope.)

Re: The constitution is not supposed to be optional

otherwise not carry out such orders

Part of the training for British Armed Forces used to be (probably still are) in the concepts of "illegal orders" and that no service person is required to follow an illegal order.

Of course, yer average squaddie may not totally understand the concept but you would hope that someone promoted to be an NCO would. A commissioned offier *must*.

Re: So lemme get this straight....

Sounds above board to me.

Well - if you don't (successfully) get prosecuted for it then it *must* be OK..

Re: Deep State is as Deep State does..

uniquely right wing

First time I've heard of a Green Party politician being called 'right wing'..

Re: Deep State is as Deep State does..

if politicians are getting dumber, or it's just me getting older and more cynical

Yes.

Or, in slightly less paranoid[1] worldview - politicians are running out[2] of 'serious' issues and so are now concentrating on lesser (but hopefully vote-grabbing) issues.

[1] Even if you are less paranoid, they are *still* out to get you. You just don't notice..

[2] As in "la la la, we can't see those issues"..

Re: What the hell is C++, Java, C# and the other drivel?

Proper blokes use assembler

Pah! Assembler is for the weak! *Proper* warriors directly flip the individual bits with their minds to produce code!

A good programmer should be able to code in few languages, and choose the tool for the job

Same is true of deciding which OS to use..

Re: "It is written in Perl"

El Reg’s been around the block

Which is a polite way of saying "but you're *old*" :-)

(AKA - it's not the age, it's the mileage.).

but it is conspicuously not cross platform

So - MacOS, Linux and (via openswift) Windows isn't cross-platform? You can also use Swift on Android but (needless to say) Google conspicuously won't help you and it's not full-featured yet.

Re: High level GC languages increase productivity

I object to being called shill

That'll be a hurricane-force *whoosh* then..

PROCessor HOT

Yes:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-BD-PROCHOT-that-causes-the-CPU-to-throttle-What-can-I-do-to-permanently-disable-it

Re: Re. Data Streams

Either that or someone *really* screwed the pooch on that last firmware update

It could equally well be both. This is Microsoft after all with a history of bad firmware updates for the Surface/Surface Pro lines.

Re: FTFY

Intel's reference design glued *badly* between two layers of shiny

FTFY.

(I know Apple have had their design fails (latest being the butterfly keyboard) but, generally, their heat & CPU management is good. Although my wife does complain that my old MBP (rebuilt for her with just Windows 7) gets very hot underneath - and in a way that it never did with OSx)

Re: "400 MHz almost unusable"

I wouldn't buy or recommend MS laptop.

OldestBrother recently wanted to buy a laptop to replace his (business) one that had died (some sort of 17" Dell that he bought about 6 years ago).

His searches had got him down to two that he liked - a recent Dell (touchscreen, foldable to become a tablet-format, hi-res screen) or a Surface Pro 6.

Once I'd finished telling him about the various issues with the Surface Pro (some of which we've had foisted on us at work) he bought the Dell. And is entirely happy with it.

(I did comment that both the units would cost about the same as an equivalent Macbook Pro but he's never used MacOS and his CRM programme isn't available in MacOS).

Re: "sometimes I'll just be browsing the internet with only Edge open"

Ahh. Aha.

Remember, correlation isn't always causation..

(Except, probably, in this case..)

Re: 400MHz = normal power saving?

mid '90s the Acorn RiscPC 600 ran very happily at 30MHz

And the old BBC Micro ran at (strains to remember) 4Mhz?

It seems (entirely subjectively) that computers haven't really sped up at all. Yes, I know that there's lots more going on in the background and the applications are several orders of magnitude larger and more complex but still - some speedup would be nice.

Re: The problem is

years, no, decades of abuse

AKA Stockholm Syndrome.

Re: Private/Public land

they ignoring the boundaries when configuring their cameras?

Something that they are clearly also ignoring is GDPR - biometrics (like your face) quite clearly come under the heading of PI - which can only be collected after explicit consent is given, even in a public place..