Posts by Ian Johnston

A four hour glitch after decades of reliable running?

Re: Great job!

Because everything is going so well with the Tories in charge?

Re: Compilers?

I used to use Open Watcom for OS/2. It's much nicer than the Linux version.

Re: Care?

Geologists define geological periods. If they define us as being within a new period than, by definition, we are.

Sure, but that would mean consensus, not a headline-grabbing fringe.

Re: I for one can't wait till this works

I don't think it's legislation as much as cars getting cheaper. When I was a student, 40 years ago, lots and lots of young people rode motorbikes, mopeds or scooters as a cheap way to get around. Nowadays the same demographic all has cars, and when you see a group of bikers with their helmets off almost all of them are well over 60. Motorcycling is an old people's activity now.

Coming next: One or two spaces after the end of a sentence?

Most of the time I find top posted far easier to read. It gives me the most recent stuff first and makes it easy to read back to a point when I know what's going on.

Do these techies insist on writing and reading documents only in courier?

We've never seen (and I hope we never have to) what the US military is truly capable of if the gloves come all the way off

They are excellent at indiscriminate slaughter and could do it even more effectively if they tried harder but their - and, I would suggest, your - mistake is in assuming that they would thereby win. They wouldn't.

That would be the one where they turned back before finishing the job in Iraq. Won the battle, lost - or ran away from - the war.

Re: Irony..

Actually, most of them had been creating persecution in their own countries. But hey, what was 20,000 dead slaves in the Mittelwerk between post-war friends?

Do you refer to "refuge seekers"?

Since "refugee" is well established as the term for people seeking refuge, I can't see why there should be so much fuss about "asylee" for "people seeking asylum".

Re: I miss AmiPro 3.0

I still have a bunch of Lotus AmiPro for OS/2 documents lying around. I haven't been able to read them for many years, so I hope they don't matter. AmiPro's worst bug - for me - was the incredible time it took to save a document with tables in it. More than five tables and the save time was more than the default autosave interval, which was Not Helpful.

From AmiPro I moved to StarOffice for OS/2, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice.

There is no bloody point in putting humans on Mars either. There is absolutely nothing they could do there which couldn't be done ten times better and a tenth of the cost by robots.

And it's not as if there is any point in having humans on the moon either, which is why NASA has been reduced to stunts like "first woman on the moon" to try and generate a bit of interest and a lot of funding.

Or a pineapple.

Re: "Autopilot"

Also don't forget that the autopilot in a plane is very simple. Keep direction, altitude and speed.

Autoland is a thing, and will put the wheels on the ground.

Re: There is no possible fix

Tesla sells the "full self driving" feature.

Which is simply a software update which encourages it to have a go at spotting "STOP" signs. That's it. That's "Full Self Driving".

Re: Risk tolerance

I think part of the problem here is that some drivers simply have a higher tolerance for risk than is healthy; self-driving systems are not yet fully autonomous...

And yet Tesla sell an upgrade which enables the system to spot "STOP" signs, and nothing else, as "Full Self Drving" ...