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Those of us from an even earlier generation can visualise the sub-editor sitting cross-legged on the floor with flowers in his/her hair trying hard to remember anything else but this mantra from "back then'*
*the '60's, kids
745 posts • joined 12 Oct 2010
Tangential but worth recording for posterity.
A well known guitarist with an avid fan base passed on.
The next day a whole bunch of new newsgroups had been set up. Purpose? When looking at the list of groups by name in alphabetical order the new ones formed, graphically, the words "Jerry Garcia".
“I never said a word.”
“Yes, he did, Your Honour. He admitted .....”
“Where is the bodycam record, Officer?”
“He snatched it, Your Honour, threw it on the ground and stamped on it. Hence the additional charge of criminal damage.”
Maybe I’m biased from (professional) experience with our wonderful London policemen some time ago but, put it this way, a Defendant with front teeth broken would have been charged with trying to bite the cop’s kneecap.
Got to be an actual IT angle here so it does not have to be a bootnote.
Rent-a-parent including a robotic one leads to the AI debate but there again I am old enough to pre-date the mini-skirt era. When I saw some of the Mum's (and their thighs) delivering the little kids to school I would have gladly swapped mine. (Sorry, Mum - kidding; and Freud can f*** off).
I wonder who in actuality was responsible for the poor market analysis, sales projections and pricing.
Easier question : who was not responsible? Given the breadth of such executive failures I nominate the tea boy, the janitor and night-shift security. Maybe a coder or two. They are the only ones justified in wearing a “Worn’t me” badge. Pretty much everyone else should do the mea culpa thingy.
Oh forget it. Nobody resigns in shame these days.
Ta, Dabbsy. Good choice, since we can look on in amazement that McCluskey and Co actually looked like that in the same way we can look back aghast at having the monstrosity which was Notes foisted upon us.
But Andy Stewart?? No, no, that was way below the belt. Now I shall be humming A Scottish Soldier all night. So - misery loves company :
https://youtu.be/SCSB_BiNSZo
A remark attributed to Gandhi : “Western Civilisation? Yes that would be a good idea.”
Otherwise you are free to hold your (not even tangentially relevant to the article) opinions even though they are completely justified only in the sense that a thousand Hollywood war movies are historical fact.
The era of the blast furnace is over and the era of the laboratory well under way. There were good reasons why Britain kick started the first, and why Silicon Valley was pre-eminent in the second. Here comes the next wave and Uncle Sam doesn’t like it. It started years ago when (for example) the latest feature from Nokia was replicated within weeks, or even days, by the energetic buggers in Shenzhen. Now it is unstoppable or, if as appears to be the case, the U.S. is bent on applying huge resources to preserve its diminishing advantages it will not be for the good of all.
Amen.
Probably the UK's best ever sex symbol. She and Patrick Macnee once had a record out called "Kinky Boots". One of Kenny Everett's Top 30 Worst Ever, but if memory serves it got into the Top 20, maybe even the Top 10 real Hit Parade.
Are we even allowed to say "sex symbol" or "kinky" these days? I guess nobody today understands the resonance of "Carry On Up The Khyber" either. On the other hand, Kenneth Williams' "fakir off" would most likely raise no eyebrows, even Matron's, who would probably use it daily.
The Senior Partner in a law firm I was with in a previous lifetime once said only half joking he wanted a neon-lit sign on his door saying "Fuck off".
Somehow I think he would have reported his email system broken and useless, perhaps on a daily basis.
Now that would be a "MeToo" movement for the rest of us.
Explains everything. There was a time back towards the '80's when more and more large companies were being run by "engineers". Fine. Indeed very fine when things were going swimmingly. Not when they were not. The typical engineer running a business with balance sheets and such could not rationalise the tanking in sales, ballooning of debt and mayhem caused by markets, customers and banks. "Me...? ME????"
My Dad was an engineer ("Hello World") but he was equally cynical of "engineers" who never had to plunge their arms up to the elbows into a bucket of Swarfega.
Spot on. And even earlier. Take a shufti when you have a moment at the Code of Hammurabi. Won’t take long ‘cos just a glance at the first few items indicates how many things you could be executed for back then*. Many subsequent cultures took the lead from it so it has influence all the way up to today.
*In a glaring omission, did not include using a mobile phone.
If anyone has already commented approvingly on the pic at the top I have not spotted it, so : good choice, AD.
Smart move of the film makers to choose a look-alike sound-alike young version* of Harrison Ford to do the interrogation.
*Clone? Replicant? Now, now - do NOT hijack this forum with a BR digression.
That was when FB, a simple social facility, following the decision of its bankers drooling over fees, agreed to list at US$100B+.
Then (1) the upper executive echelon inside FB were carried away in a total state of hubris and (2) they had to adopt one desperate measure after another to generate income to justify the hype, and the price. Item (2) was made easier because high-flying IT graduates* with the same dollar signs instead of irises flocked to FB and its incentive schemes expecting to get wealthy within 3 years or, hopefully, sooner.
*with apologies to the vast majority of IT graduates who maintain their prInciples.
My Jag has what I suppose is the same engine. Since I already have the base module I just need to bolt on the jet engine. There's a fixer-upper on eBay :
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ROLLS-ROYCE-G2-BUSINESS-JET-ENGINE-NON-OPERATIONAL-/273336101881?redirect=mobile
Anyone got a garden shed so I can get started?
Explanation for across-the-ponders : example of self-deprecating British irony.
Ugh. Do not know whether it was actually the graphics on a VGA monitor or (or as well as) splattering organs but I succumbed to something like motion sickness in less than 2 minutes. Is it any better on modern systems? Cannot try since just thinking about it makes me queasy. Ok so it was the blood and guts.
Today's internet was built on the back of advertisers' dollars, yes? Was there another way? I am genuinely interested.
We all or most of us pay a monthly stipend for the bandwidth, not that much different in principle from the days of ftp, gopher, etc but would we have had all the graphical and multimedia content?
Reminds me the thinking is that porn was behind the growth of VHS.
Any advance on ads, porn ..... ?
but memories fade, even about "embrace, extend, extinguish".
And the Browser Wars
And the DoJ case against Microsoft (q.v.)
At least MS have learnt : last time around they went with the NCSA Mosaic donkey. Now they are riding the competitor's thoroughbred.
P.S. I would not have wanted an Andreessen-controlled planet either.
Uhhh yeah? Thought that's how all US executives operate?*
So if sales are flat find another company to buy to hit the target by consolidating sales.
Even better make it an overseas company so the executives can go off for a jolly occasionally.
and again and again
*On the other hand I was a pimply-faced newbie in the City of London when I first heard the expression "window-dressing" to (cough! cough!) "improve" the balance sheet ahead of results time.
Good article. FWIW since it is tangential I took delivery of the Mate 20 Pro phone a week ago and I am mightily impressed, not just with the phone but in the sense that Huawei are making some very smart, coherent and thoughtful decisions to push themselves up the sales charts in both phones and PC’s.
Bound to be in fact already is political pushback against Huawei but if this gives the PC industry a much-needed boot up the arse it is a Good Thing.
P.S. 32.5 cm tall? You mean y.... Oh the bag is 32.5 cm. Phew!
The main statement : “ double-check whether anything had crossed my desk”. Smart move - making sure first there is no paper trail so she can say whatever the hell she likes. How could she not know?
She ain’t presidential material though: they are past masters at “plausible deniability” without so clumsily demonstrating how they achieve it.
Exactly. Coincidentally just before seeing this piece I was thinking of winding back a Mac Pro to an earlier iteration of the OS, under which a super-duper Esi-audio card not only worked but worked magnificently. Unplug/switch off the ‘net, plug in the drive with the FLAC’s/MP3’s and time to wake up the *****g neighbours. Now why would I need Mojave or W10 for that?
No, that’s not what I meant.
I know this is going to attract an inflammatory response and, tragic it is that so many infants are at risk, might I suggest it would be better in those places where the risk is greatest if the blokes were encouraged to keep their todgers under control?
Is what MS always say when they’re harpooning another user favourite.
Be happy : “The theoretical argument against democracy is, of course, that man being prone to evil, something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up to govern him; the people will corrupt themselves, but a despot or an oligarchy, when it has satisfied its corrupt desires, still has a wide margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent.”
I was stifling a chuckle nay a guffaw while writing that. Must be ‘cos I take comfort from MS’ protection against you corrupt bastards.
“Innovation” dates back to Ballmer - and he even remembers to say it again.
“Digital transformation” is a new one on me : count how many times MS execs use it in the next 6-12 months.
I wonder how much they pay the PR people to come up with these Orwellisms?
Same here.
That is to say I have forsworn getting another Crucial NVMe thingy.
Not because the one I got was crap (although eventually that was proven to be the case) but because I was too late (thinking the problem may be with my machinery - which is quite picky when it comes to NVMe - and then trying different formulations) to get help from Amazon, and when (per Amazon suggestion) I emailed Crucial to recover the ridiculous amount I paid they did not even reply.*
Once bitten .....
FWIW one of the things I tried was a PCIe adapter which takes NVMe SSD's. The Crucial one did not register. Threw it in the bin. Bought another - non-Crucial - and it is fine.
*P.S. I do not live in the USA so getting redress is sometimes too much of a PITA.
"the NeoOffice engineers have continually added improvements to NeoOffice that you will not find in OpenOffice or LibreOffice such as:
Native Dark Mode
NeoOffice > Open at Launch menu to open Calc or Impress instead of Writer at launch
File > Browse All Versions menu to restore previous versions of your documents
Native file locking to safely edit files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or network drives
Native Mac grammar checking
Native Mac text highlighting
Support for Mac Services
Native floating tool windows"
And :
WordPerfect support