Posts by J.G.Harston
382 posts • joined Wednesday 4th March 2009 12:19 GMT
Version twenty-flipping-one??? I "updated" to version 8 only a few months ago.
Arqiva's an odd entity. It used to be the BBC/IBA transmission network and morphed into Castle Holdings and then into Arqiva as a private entity responsible for the monopoly core infrastructure of the UK transmission network. They're sort-of Network Rail or National Grid - it's difficult to apply normal private sector expectations on them. Forcing them to operate as a normal private commercial entity would probably result in the transmission network system collapsing.
So, they're changing from taxing /content/ to taxing /media/? Why the change?
Re: Pointless argument
When it's being waved in your face how do you know it's not loaded? A gun is ALWAYS loaded, whether it is or not.
oh - plus a bullet!
All John Steed needed was a wooden fence, a nail, and a rock.
Re: I wonder how much of the opposition matches mine?
Ah, no. If you want to *re-enter* this country you need a passport. You can freely leave this country at any time without any documentation whatsoever. Whether any other country will let you enter them is another point, but you do not need any for of ID to *leave* the UK.
Re: HOW DARE YOU!
I actually wrote a couple of utilities so that you could load and save data in blocks just like the Beeb: http://mdfs.net/Software/Spectrum/Coding/MCODE1.TXT
Posted in TARDIS materialises in Sydney
Re: Meh
One hundred kelvin metres? What's that a measure of?
Re: Ammunition
When somebody is waving it in your face how do you know it's unloaded?
The first rule of guns is a gun is ALWAYS loaded.
Posted in Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness
Flame in three, two...
Isn't is Star Trek: Into Darkness?
Posted in Star Trek: The original computer game
Re: Dumb Merican Question
It's a common typo. The correct word is "numeric", but your fingers think "number" and helpfully insert the extra 'b' for you, which you then can't remove 'cos there's no edit function here.
Posted in Star Trek: The original computer game
When we were kids we had to deflect cosmic rays into the core store to knock electrons into different orbits to change bit states.
I know I definitely write better code now than I did 30 years ago, unfortunately, employers refuse to pay me to do so. Contrary to their adverts calling for experience and competence, they actually insist on inexperience and incompetence - as evidenced by the products I end up having to use.
Re: Well
Public libraries - ooo, I remember them, swept away in the last lot of cuts.
Re: HMRC
% not allowed , so stops me entering 40% of this income is mine
- is not allowed, so stops me entering my address as 20-22 Main Street
£ not allows (WTF???), so stops me entering the first £500 is carried from last year.
( ) not allowed
: not allowed
; not allowed
Plus the fact that I have to try and remember a password I last used TWELVE MONTHS AGO! I've ended up doing my returns in August so I can do a paper submission.
Simple fix. Get rd of all the scripting that says
if browser.version < 6 then crash
if browser.name != iexplore then crash
if hostos != windows then crash
etc.
You should just bloody well serve the content and not care what is asking for the content. It's the USER who specifies what's going to happen to the content, *NOT* the author.
Re: telnet
No I can't only an administrator can do that, and I have no "business case" for a telnet client or for access to the telnet port through the firewall.
Yes, very tasty.
Brain functionality fail
But how do you prevent yourself using knowledge that you gained in any experience anywhere?
If somebody learns how to do long division/tie their shoe laces/type with more than two fingers/index into an array/code for matrix multiplication/learn that yellow on white is effectively invisible, no quantity of non-disclosure contracts is going to prevent your brain using that knowledge in another environment, unless you have some sort of mind-wipe technology like Jonny Mnemonic.
Ok, crush the SD card and put it in the scrap smelter, but essentially throw read/write RAM devices away because they are full.
Exactly this problem came up at work today.
User: Central Government requirements require us to log this data, but the datalogging SD cards are getting rather full, but I can't delete old files after emailing them in without Admin access.
Corporate Security: Local Government requirements require us to prevent write access to external devices to prevent security issues.
User: But that means at some point the datalogging will fall over.
Corporate Security: We've prevented write access to external devices to prevent security issues.
The solution we've come up with is: throw away the full SD card and buy an empty one.
Google is an America company, I'd expect it to be paying taxes in America, not the UK.
"will be a blow to the 7 million Brits who are not on the internet."
Which will increase as more people lose internet access at home (defined by the DWP as a unneccessary luxury) and local libraries are shut down (defined by Eric The Pickle as an unnessessary luxury).
Re: 2299th birthday, surely?
"Worse than that, how many days are in the year you are calculating?"
Irrelevant. If Archimedes was born about 25 days after the spring equinox, and the earth has orbited the sun 2299 times since then, then that is 2299 years ago.
Re: real savings?
No, oil heating is almost universal in rural areas.
(Based on my experience living in rural Aberdeenshire)
Re: All hail the climate God!
"cost per KWH..."
Kelvin-Watt-Henries?
Ten-pounds notes can be used to fund terrorism and paedos, so you'd have to ban them as well.
Runs on banks? Speculation in tulips? Nah! In Hong Kong we have runs on Cake Shops!
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19971126&id=h3IxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=7A0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6706,4649427
Re: And woe betide if you don't have *exactly* that specific version of the language they want.
You have SquiggleBlob 3.31? Sorry, we need somebody with SqiggleBlob 3.32. Bugger off.
Re: What's next?
Outsourced to Capita? I wish! I'm a contractor with E working as a subcontractor to H working as a subcontractor to Capita as a subcontractor to my local council.
35% *more*? Try 50% *less*.
Re: Take a look
...and that's EXACTLY what I want, proper Ordnance Survey mapping, not Google's abomination. Now, if they could just get the A-Z mapping outside London, and zoom down to the 1:2500 and 1:1250 OS plans, it would be perfect.
Re: I remember streetmap...
"Google provide better ones"
Phftftt!!!! Have you actually LOOKED at Google's maps? They're CRAP. Streetmap provide proper Ordnance Survey mapping, with proper detail. All Google's maps are are driving route maps.
Hurray!!!
At last, somebody's developing constant-acceleration engines, as compared to the constant-velocity engines we've been relying on for the past half century. At a constant 1g you can get to Mars in a day or so.
Authors don't "offer" books to libraries. Libraries just go out and purchase whatever is available. If an ebook is available for purchase, and a library choses to purchase it, it will, no intervention by the author required at all. Somebody here seems to be completely confused about the direction that purchase transactions go.
"Over-qualified grads are being forced into unsatisfying jobs which don't suit their skills"
I actually read that as graduates coming out of university with a bit of paper, and going into the graduate professional job the bit of paper has theoretically qualified them for, and discovering they weren't actually sufficiently skilled to actually do the job.
Well, that's been my experience of recent fresh-faced new intakes into software engineering positions.
"busses"? What are busses? Plural of "buss" - a big slobbery kiss.
"a bank going bust ... by lending too much money to people who couldn't repay it"
And how do the government want to rebuild the economy? By insisting the banks lend more money....
Re: This is a reasonable request
"Any source of means to pirate" ?
So, any method of communication between humans.
You first.
Amazon.com Inc.
Is Amazon /really/ incorporated as it's /internet/ /address/???
Re: Can someone enlighten me
We don't need them. It's the Windows 'dump everything in My Documents, subdiretories, what are they?' culture that has infected everything like a plague.
Posted in Why does our galaxy spiral?
Ye cannae change the laws of physics
Of course arms form, have they never seen a line of children holding hands forming the radius of a circle moving in a circle? The outermost stars would have to move faster than the speed of light to keep up with the inner stars and prevent arms forming.
Obligatory SF reference.
TimeLines Inc? Wonderful, I'd like to book a holiday in the summer of 1938 in Mexico please.
Re: Another Microsoft advertorial?
"The correct solution is a business continuity plan"
A couple of months ago there was a power cut in our city centre - only lasted about five minutes. Almost all the shops closed crying "the tills won't work, we can't sell anything!!!" At the Post Office they were recording transactions in a paper notebook. The first transaction was taking the notebook out of stock.
Re: You think doctors have it bad?
"A friend of mine was a counsellor (of the personal, not local government kind)"
The local government type is a councillor, not a counsellor.
Tho', that didn't stop somebody coming to my local councillors' advice session and start discussing deeply personal emotional issues with me...
I'm a software engineer, but years ago also qualified as an electrician and plumber to get some money in. I now spend most of my time claiming I've forgotten everything I ever learned about plumbing and electrics to try and hold back the freetards.
Kessel Run?
"it averaged 500Kbit/ses"
For how long? That's a speed, not a volume.
Re: Recently made unemployed.
I hear you. After being unemployed for almost three years, on the point of bankruptcy, having county court judgements for being too poor to pay my debts, I was a few days away from losing my internet access (and thereby ability to search for and apply for jobs, and the ability for people to respond to me), and seriously contemplating selling the tools of my trade or losing them to bailiffs (and thereby not even be ABLE to do a job).
After 1200 applications I gambled that an interview seemed more promising than the 12 others I'd had and borrowed money from my ex-wife to be able to stay alive long enough to hear back from them and get the job, and then borrow some more money from her to be able to stay alive long enough to get my first few pay packets.
Hurray! In only 84 months I'll be completely out of debt!
And then another six(?) years to get the CCJ wiped.
Suboptimal surveying techniques
"17 per cent of the taxpayers it quizzed remained offline. ... Many of them were from the more vulnerable groups: disabled, poor or elderly"
If they're taxpayers, then by definition, they're not poor.
And why restrict the survey to people rich enough to pay tax, they should survey every strata of society regardless of their financial status.
