Posts by Stoneshop 5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
I've always found it strange that Starbucks, a coffee company,
As you've noticed, they're not despite them saying they are.
They extract money from customers under the guise of extracting aromatic hydrocarbons from coffee beans resulting in a dilute suspension, liberally adulterated with various inexplicable additions, resulting in something that's almost entirely but not quite unlike coffee.
First computer programming course in University (1977) was in ALGOL-60, the next one in Pascal. That one stuck for quite a while, with Borland's TP being available for PCs (and their 'treat it like a book; you can make multiple copies, but use only one at a time' license) so offering you a cheap-ish, personal environment. Started using Turbo C a couple of years later, but kept going back to TP for bigger programs, although all that were just hobby projects. Professionally it was mostly VMS command files, Unix/Linux shell scripts and more recently some Python.
A lot of commentards mention there being buttons, one of which might be the one to hit to mute the sound. And those pumps being run by the big oil companies.
The only petrol station I know that has video ads on their pumps is one owned by a local fuel vendor (a dozen filling stations or so around the region). It has no sound, no buttons and just a small selection of static ads for local businesses (including themselves). Occasionally there's a video of the innards of a pump working to put fuel in your tank, still without sound.
But this may have changed in the past year as most of our filling-up is now done via a Mennekes Type 2 socket near the front door, and filling up the diesel has been reduced to maybe a quarterly event.
Which should be a standard, non-negatable feature on every compiler.
It will of course cause much wailing and gnashing of teeth in every Agile-infested software 'development' department. Let's hope the sackcloth, ashes and hair being torn out help to dehipsterize these vile dens of depravity.
Those were gleaned from Colossal Cave, but as "Zork bore about the same relationship to Adventure as the splashiest arcade games do to the little white light that bounced through the primitive Pong" (a quote from the Boston Globe, 1984) invoking 'XYZZY' or 'Plugh' probably didn't quite have the same effect. Or had different prerequisites before they actually worked.
Never played Zork, but I did play Colossal Cave on a DECSystem 10, via a modem, acoustic coupler and a portable hardcopy terminal. Later on my own PC under OS/2, and there's still a Linux version lurking in ~/advent/
There's a ThinkPad Butterfly with a deceased mobo waiting for sufficient Round Tuits to be turned into a ButterPi. I figured that I'd need some flavour of ATMega to sit between the keyboard and clitmouse and the Pi. I'd also have to replace the screen with one that the Pi would be able to drive without additional conversion, so probably a HDMI or DSI panel which would result in a 16:10 or 16:9 screen ratio, not the original 4:3. Upside would be built-in wired and wireless networking, USB2 and 3, and a fscking lot of space for batteries.
Not really. If (in .no/.se/.fi) you have two summer homes less than 100m apart it's considered crowded. In .dk might be a little less.
Although the house on a barren rocky plateau in northern Norway, with no other human-made structures within 10km either way might be considered a little extreme even by local standards. Or the person living there was building and testing the loudspeaker stacks for Disaster Area,and considered it prudent to not cause a serious number of casualties when nudging the amps off zero.
But you still want to be able to use different names for units when there's several orders of magnitude difference between them, like the linguine and the brontosaurus, or Wales and DRCongo.
The fundamental work on defining the Lockdown is still in progress, being somewhat hampered by the lockdown, and the TrumpFlounce is rather variable[0], so not that usable as a basic unit (like the Lunchtime).
[0] especially since it's clearly strongly observer-dependent.
For about half the price of these iWheels you can get an aluminium robotic tracked vehicle chassis. Add a few quid for the motor controllers, an Arduino or Pi, some odds and ends to put a plateau on it and a few beers to lubricate the building process, and you can have an autonomous MacProMover. No more manual pulling like the plebs do, just command it to move to where you need it.
The same frequencies are used (and were used by analogue colour television for decades at thousands of times the power.)
Nope. Telly used (and DVB-T does still) carrier frequencies roughly between 60MHz and 850MHz, with a few gaps. Mobile phone networks used 900MHz at first, but have since moved to 1800MHz for 2G, and 2100, 2300 and 3400MHz for 3G, 4G as well as the 5G networks currently being rolled out.
A politician playing to populist sentiment with such cheap gags is nothing but an ignoramus if he then turns to experts to bail him & the country ( the people) out of a difficult situation for which he is partially responsible for laying the foundations of.
I'd call that being a hypocrite, not an ignoramus. Although people, and especially politicians, can easily be both.
Siemens Gigaset TAE1000.
I also have a FritzBox VDSL modem that offers 2 POTS lines for internal use even when you don't have POTS service, but the TAE1000 is a box on the wall (or behind the cupboard) near Ye Olde Analogue Phone, actually talking DECT to the base station. You do have to scour eBay and the like for them.
Particularly considering the current pandemic, I don't see a bright future for shared workspaces.
Well, maybe they could retrofit sprinkler systems, insofar as they are present, with the antiviral agent du jour, and run a cron job to trigger them once a day.
Will likely discourage people from leaving papers and laptops on their desk overnight too.
What the version of COBOL originally used has to do with it is entirely beyond me. COBOL programs compiled 40 years ago on IBM mainframes will still run today. Assuming the source code hasn't been lost (this is actually a genuine problem) it can be recompiled with the current compiler, usually with no changes.
Also, programmers that are well-versed in a particular language can usually adapt to older versions on the same class of systems with little effort. Maybe they'll have the occasional "Oh wait, that won't work here." moments just like you'd have with C, Perl or Python when working on an older code base. And the incantations to compile and link the code will not be substantially different from the previous build on that system, if at all.
I've written Pascal on a DEC10, a VAX and, using Borland TP, on PCs. With the latter you get all kinds of options for screen manipulation that you don't readily have on a VT100, but no-frills line-based I/O needed little conversion, and I didn't need to touch the main processing routines when I moved stuff from the VAX to a PC.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
