Posts by Roopee 319 publicly visible posts • joined 5 May 2015
I wish I could give you more upvotes - @Pascal and several other commentards have missed the point that you are making, which is that making manufacturers pay means making consumers pay, as opposed to repairers, recyclers and do-withouters - or any other non-consuming taxpayers...
I’ve never understood why iMessage shows Apple messages in blue - I’ve never seen a blue apple, lots of green ones though, so it’s always been counterintuitive to me. Also, more importantly, why can’t I decide for myself what colour my messages are...?
Mine’s the one with my daily apple in the pocket (usually red incidentally), and a purple iPhone in the other pocket :)
They don't really need to look at the date on the cable - if "your friend" wants to convince someone that the work was done before 2005 then you, sorry he, needs to have a stash of red and black cable - using blue and brown T&E is a bit of a giveaway since it only became widely available around 2005 when the 2nd Amendment of the 16th Edition of the Regs mandated it for new installations in line with European colour harmonisation. Jus sayin'
I do too, now, but back in my early days of DIYing (before I qualified as an electrician) I drilled through a twin & earth buried in plaster where it shouldn't have been... not only did the bang throw me off the stepladder but it also unwelded the tungsten carbide tip from the masonry drill bit I was using!
One of the first parts of the electrical inspection/testing exam I took (C&G 2391 if memory serves) was to choose an appropriate set of testing tools from a collection that included some very inappropriate items; neon screwdrivers such as you inherited were definitely the latter - completely verboten! Something to do with how dangerously they can fail if I recall.
I too have one, but only because it's a handy little screwdriver with a useful pocket clip - I prefer to trust my approved Megger and Fluke equipment when my life is on the line...
This sounds somewhat like a new "blue sky" spreadsheet product I saw demoed at some trade show or other in the early 90s. I can't remember its name but it was by one of the big names and was very expensive; DEC or HP I think.
The sales video included stuff about visualising numbers as organic metaphors such as ripples in fields of wheat and suchlike...
I cut my teeth on black-and-white, DOS-based, 2-Dimensional SuperCalc 4 and was immediately hooked on the whole idea of spreadsheets. When 3-Dimensional SuperCalc 5 came out, it was the best thing ever! Excel has NEVER been properly 3D!
I then had to use Lotus 1-2-3 v2, and it seemed like a major backwards step (it was). Astounding to me since it was the overwhelmingly dominant market leader. However 1-2-3 v3 WAS properly 3D and redressed the feature balance, but when its Windows version came out (just as Windows 3 was starting to be used) it was so clunky and buggy and slow is was virtually unusable whereas Excel had a really slick, mouse-friendly UI. Therein lay the reason for 1-2-3's demise and Excel's rise to dominance, IMHO. The obvious choice for people who loved the concept of Windows was a GUI-centric spreadsheet, and Excel (having started on the Mac) was just that. It wasn't that Excel was the best at spreadsheeting - it certainly wasn't, and it might not even be now.
I was a trainee accountant at the time and spreadsheet expertise plus general IT savvy) was my competitive advantage...
Lotus Improv went one stage further - but it was too little, too late. I actually bought myself a copy of Improv just to try it out, and I was impressed. I still have the install floppies...
Mine's the one with a huge stash of 1990's business application floppies in the pockets!
You are way out of date!
I stopped working in primary schools over 10 years ago but at that point every school that I went in, and most others in the UK I believe, already had a large interactive whiteboard in every classroom front and centre!
There may have been a blackboard around in some rooms but they had already been sidelined as a teaching aid.
Icon - similarly anachronistic :)
Not quite correct - yes, there are regulations, but no, the fuse is not rated to the appliance, it is rated for the cable - according to the regulations (I'm thinking in particular of BS 7671 in the UK, but most international regs use the same principles as ours do, for obvious reasons). Sometimes an electrical designer will specify a lower fuse for a circuit, but the cable (including adjustments for installation conditions) is the limiting factor, not the load.
It is tempting to think that she was stupid because she didn't read the prompt, but plenty of commonly used apps ask thar question if you simply open a file to look at it, and then close it again without making any changes. The program itself might have made changes invisible to the user (e.g. to metadata) but the user isn't to know that.
In those situations it's the designer(s) who are stupid, not the user.
Excel springs to mind...
Not the 72-plate (< 1 year old) A6 I had as a hire car last week - all HVAC controls were on a touchscreen low down on the centre console.
The car had several annoying features, one of which was that since I wasn’t the owner I couldn’t set myself up as anything other than guest and it reminded me about this fact every single time I started the engine, requiring interaction with 2 separate screenfuls of text each time.
How about a review of free (beer) type 1 hypervisors, particularly their suitability for a homelab setup?
I was thinking along the lines of one to a handful of nodes, a few to a few tens of VMs, some sort of backup.
Points of interest might be ease of setup and management, ability to run on cheap/old hardware including laptops and other lower-running cost devices, ease of troubleshooting and backup, availability of help, that sort of thing.
I've already made my choice - Proxmox - but not before going down a blind alley with non-vSphere ESXi for a couple of years. A useful comparative review highlighting the likely problems and pitfalls would have saved me a lot of time and heart-ache!
For my (lack of) money, Proxmox VE is head and shoulders above its competition in all the above respects, especially when combined with Proxmox Backup Server, although the latter is somewhat more challenging to setup.
Hope that helps.
Cheers!
I am trying to love Linux, really I am, because I now hate Windows (I used to love it, back in the days when the usual business desktop was DOS), so for years I've been distro-hopping looking for an alternative to use as my daily driver to replace Win7 when I eventually have to...
I've tried various Ubuntus, Mint, Zinc and Zorin - all mentioned in the article, but my favourite so far is MX Linux. So far it is ticking lots of boxes for me - but of course YMMV.
I was wondering @Liam why you didn't mention it, since it was thanks to your recent review of MX-23 that I tried it?
Only because we (GB) invaded (i.e. annexed) it a little while ago. In my humble opinion (and quite a lot of people would seem to agree) we should give it back, like we've done with the rest of the world that we annexed and pillaged for resources in the name of "empire" - India et al...
Icon - GB used to have the world's biggest pirate fleet.
I concur with the several recommendations to buy a Brother - I have 2 (old mono laser + newish colour laser) and both are excellent and have no-fuss drivers for network printing from just about any OS (including mobiles). Their inkjets seem pretty good too, from what I’ve seen at clients.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
