Posts by Down not across 1987 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2013
Went from a minor UK regional airport 30 years ago to Schipol
Not quite that long ago, but maybe about 20 or so years ago, best trips to Amsterdam were from Cambridge airport with Suckling Airways. I did quite a few day trips to our Amsterdam office and loved the ease and convenience of minor UK airport.
Everyone would go through upper libraries, the name of which I forgot, that made windows programming A LOT simpler and straight forward ... BTW, where have those libs gone ?
Few odd times I had any need to actually write anything for X11 myself, it was more or less go via Tk or hook into Motif. Libs are generally available for pretty much most languages and scripts.
I remember the green card lottery thing spammed across all the groups and realizing that was the future once people outside the academic and high tech/defense worlds that occupied the internet at the time were outnumbered 1000 to 1 by ordinary people.
Ah who could forget Canter and Siegel ...the inventors of spam. Mid 90s (ish). Those were simpler times, but yes definitely sign of the things to come.
Because for some inane reason the engineers that be decided to make the code to turn on/off be a toggle, not seperate commands. Probably to save a button.
Yes, even worse if same applies to input selection..
Even if they want to save a button, that is no excuse to at least have, and recognize, discrete codes so that with a decent programmable remote (like old Marantz for example, you can code it to use discrete codes even if supplied remote doesn't have buttons for it).
I still have old Marantz RC2000-MkII and RC5000. Admittedly not used either for long time. VM/Sky remotes usually can control enough basic functions on TV so that the real TV remote can stay in the drawer. As for hifi, many receivers have learning remotes.
I did look at the Harmony line, but the apparent requirement to be programmed via mothership over the net put me off. I can live with Setop box + receiver remote combination so didn't bother investigating further into possibility of programming them offline.
Your last sentence deserves more than just the one upvote I can give.
Sadly I don't think its fixable. It (or the marketing deciding its a good idea) needs to be taken behind the shed and shot. Why so much documentation and information needs to be hidden behind javascript and other crap is unbelievable.
I've installed used UNIX, XENIX (386 only) and earlier CROMIX (dual Z80 /68000) in the 1980s.
In the 80s, for x86 I used Mark Williams' Coherent and it was rather excellent (ran very nicely on i286 and earlier versions ran even on 8086 IIRC).It was also very reasonably priced unlike Interactive UNIX 386/ix that I did later use on some i386 boxen.
I've seen Power PCs running MAC OS9 at the latest, maybe 15 years ago? Not sure. What is a PowerPC 601 CPU used in?
I have a Quadra with 601 on a separate card (for some reason DayStar comes to mind, but it was long time ago and I can't be bothered to rummage for it).
It's just a shame that MS-SQL's interpretation of SQL transactions is so broken.
Transactions in Transact-SQL are not broken (disclaimer: I'm thinking Sybase here, but that is where MS SQL Server has evolved from). Sure you may get bitten by unchained mode being the default where you have to either set chained mode or explicitly begin a transaction.
I actually like the flexibility of unchained mode, you just have to be aware of what you are doing as it doesn't molly coddle you like say Oracle.
There is a big difference between "I can do that" and "I will do that".
Ain't there just. I excercise that on a daily basis. Plenty of "I could, but..." and also lot of my favourite "What is it that you are actually trying to accomplish?" Quite often it turns out they don't need what they're asking for at all.
I have had similar experiences of personal phone number abuse. I've since refused to give out personal number at all. If they want to be able to call me they can give me a phone. There is then the inevitable "what if we can't get hold of you on that phone, we need an alternative" get met with flat refusal. If all else fails, there is always the option of PAYG SIM that never ever sees a phone.
Latitude E7240, i5, 8G RAM ,256G mSATA SSD, 1920x1080 (sadly glossy touchscreen as it was only one with decent resolution), smartcard reader/NFC , wifi, 3G. Running Devuan nicely.
Still see new, unused keyboards, wrist rest/touchpad and other various spares on fleabay.
Looking at the current ultrabooks, the final stumbling block is always WWAN. Maybe I'm odd in wanting it just built in rather than rely on tethering, but choices are very limited (and I could buy stack of these second hand ones for what one new would cost).
I'd ask you too to tell me what's unrealistic about the UK's position in this trade talks but we both know that you can't answer that question, because the UK has been very realistic and very reasonable, quite beyond anything the EU deserves.
UK has expressed it is already unilaterally refusing to bind to the already negotiated 'divorce settlement'. Why should EU (or anyone) trust any negotiation with UK since there is credible doubt on its sincerity in keeping to any agreement.
You need to assist it by inserting pages that you have folded before and such. You need to validate the print head alignment, etc. pp.
My networked lasers (monochrome and colour) Just WorkTM and need no asissting. Their LCD panel tells if they're low on toner. In fact the LJ4700 display showsthe level of each colour toner so you can predict when its likely to run out.
And it doesn't matter if I print one page in 3 months or 30000 pages in one month. They work the same. No dried up heads, no "oh I'm out of ink", when the cartridge still has plenty in it.
Granted, they were made back when HP still made decent printers.
Have any pre-2010 SPARC machines? I gues they turn into pumpkins.
Lots. Many of them SBus. Too many according to SWMBO. Why yes, of course they all still run perfectly fine. No pumpkins, but they have turned many x86 boxes green with envy as they just keep running unlike the more unreliable x86.
Access is great... as a cheap front end to a proper database system. In fact I made a good living using it in exactly that way for a good few years.
Not it bloody isn't. Not sure if it was ODBC or something in Access in itself, but I saw it locking whole tables (instead of locking just the page) causing endless issues in multi-user databases when people used "access as a front end".
Burn it on a stake.
Yes the source code was printed (or may have been photocopied from a book, I can't recall). Which was legal to export. It was then OCR'd and I was one of the many volunteers who proofread the OCR'd files against the printout and corrected where necessary. Let me just point out that back in the day OCR was awful.. Anyway, the end result was a legal copy of PGP.
What has become apparent during this period of lockdown/WFH is that there's a level of middle management who are essentially redundant, lost without having to rush between "important" meetings, being busy looking busy.
They seem to have routed around that issue by ensuring ridiculous amount of conference calls. What seems to have been forgotten in all that, is to allow some time to actually do the real work that so much time is spent talking about.
Yes it was.
I was working remotely with PPP connection over a analogue modem way back in 20th century. Can't speak for RDP as I didn't work with Microsoft things, but was perfectly fine for my ssh sessions.Granted X11 over it was painful.
As for economical, at some point I had a Centrex line to the office so it was very economical (for me at least) to dial up with.
(The reaction is so visceral that General Motors found they couldn't GIVE away Vauxhalls in Australia/New Zealand in the late 1990s - having to phsysically change the badging on a shipment of ~1000 Vectras to Holden or Opel)
Not necessarily all bad. Holden badge seems to (fairly often) come with a V8 to replace whatever puny engine was in the original).
>> implement in ACCESS
Now that you mention it, I also like/use Access.
I hate Access. It should be burned at the stake. Perhaps it has improved over the years, but we had people using to to make front end to a real database (let's say Sybase as an example). Sure it works. For one person. The idiotic thing locked all tables.
disclaimer: This was over a decade ago so perhaps it has improved, but given Microsoft's QA, I have my doubts.
Of course, getting rid of the old white guy always getting as close as he possible could to gay jokes and 'fat girl' jokes etc*. was a pleasure, and his mate left thereafter, and then we were not only equally effective, we had better morale.
Ok, I'm just curious given the warm fuzzy ethnically diverse and by the sounds of it a good team, why was it necessary to mention the ethnicity of the "old white guy"?
Not to mention old is bit ageist, not all old people are narrowminded and stuck in the old ways.
With AI use becoming more common as an element of city services, Pasi Rautio, project manager of the Helsinki City Data, AI and robotisation project entity, argues that initiatives like these AI registries are necessary to build trust in government systems.
More ML than AI, but yes. Agreed, transparency is the only way to expect any trust. With some governments of course no amount of transparency will build trust as they have proven themselves to be untrustworthy and transparency is probably anything but.
Having said that, well done Helsinki and Amsterdam.
Neighbour has one.
Annoying thing. Why does it need to make that stupid sound on the outside, and so loud, so people who don't have (not want) one, have to suffer the noise. Surely whoever presses the button will see some visual indication.
Mind you, the phantom rings must've been silent as I didn't hear a thing.
They have warned that several high-profile projects in the works or recently completed have been backed or constructed by Chinese companies with connections to central government in Beijing.
They all do. And companies in US (or elsewhere) absolute have no connections to (or are definitely not influenced by) their relevant govenrment?
To do so, Starks laid out two recommendations for the FCC to take on. First, the commission should establish a centralized "national security inter-bureau task force" to review national security issues. The current watchdog system distributes issues to various bureaus, which "makes internal coordination challenging and risks inconsistent treatment of national security issues between different bureaus".
Oh, now I see. Need another pork barrel for mates.
BTW: Some Smart TVs now bypass your local DNS, to avoid DNS based blocking so they can still send back collected data (whether they show ads or not). Maybe some day they'll even come with their own 5G radio to bypass your network.
Surprised they've resisted stopping them working at all without a working internet connection.
My Samsung is sufficiently old not to do ads. It did go through a period with annoying banners when switched on telling this and that app/service was being discontinued. Apps were crap anyway so external box at cost of HDMI port was better choice for streaming so it got dropped off the network pretty soon.
I suspect the next so-called "Smart tv" I get will be heavily filtered off or most likely not connected to network at all (especially since so many seem to tied to alphabet factory these days, as if phone isn't enough already).
Lenovo promises up to 17.3 hours of runtime, although manufacturer estimates of battery life are invariably optimistic. The reality is almost always a few hours shorter.
You don't say.
Is that with processor clocked down to 4MHz and all cores bar one switched off and screen and radios off?
OKI LED printer. I can't recall the model from top of my head either.
I think I still have old Brother HL-1260 somewhere that was similar (well effectively a cube, bit larger than A4 though, maybe 1.3 x A4). That was rock solid too. And it had BrotherScript (ie. PostScript) as well as PCL natively supported without any additional expensive modules.
Quite. Hence after gotten totally fed up with ink jets (tried few different manufacturers) I obtained LJ4700 Colour LaserJet to my fleet of obsolete LaserJets from the era when they were built properly. Why yes, of course it works perfectly. It also redefined heavy... it is rather heavy beast. Lifting it alone is not advisable.
The LaserJet 4 was the complete opposite of your inkjet, those things were like tanks. I regularly used to run into them still in the late 2000s
What do you mean "was" ? I still have several LJ4M+ in regular use. Sure you will need to replace rollers and clean them periodically but I've found no need to replace them as they still print just as crisp as years ago.Might need to also change the fuser every 150k or so pages if you print that much. The EX+ engine is great and easy to maintain.
Think I still have a LaserJet III and Canon LBPII gathering dust somewhere. All made back when build quality was a thing. All still work.
Dunno. Might make it more bearable.
I still configure my PuTTY (if I have to use a Windows machine) to either P1 or P3 as I find those comfortable. Guess my eyes got used to them over 70s and 80s (and fair part of 90s).
You can pry my VT220s out of my dead cold hands. In fact I might have to source some spares just in case.
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