Posts by WallMeerkat

Re: I love my Cherry keyboard!

Apple did used to make good keyboards, their old Extended Keyboards of the early 90s were up there with Cherrys for typing feel.

Re: Note to self:

If you find yourself in a startup that gets borged you may not have much of a choice.

"For those for whom ./configure && make is too complex."

You'd be surprised. People want a computer that just works, and don't care if it is Windows / Linux / Mac, so long as they can launch a familiar browser.

We have work experience kids in, ones who want to be in the software industry. Our first half day is usually spent teaching them CLI commands in a terminal window.

Re: PlusNet

With Plusnet too. On the rare occasions I need to get through, the Yorkshireman/woman on the other end of the line is polite, friendly, useful, and to be honest usually good banter.

Yes they're evil BT now, and I have my suspicions about my speed - downloading a Playstation game seems to take an entire day, but when I go to a speedtester site/app their QoS kicks in and there is suddenly a slight increase in speed.

But their customer service is a world away from the pain that was Virgin Media.

Re: AIG changed their name to 21st Century and continue in business today.

Is this the AIG that sponsored the football T shirts of the Manchester United football club?

(Prior to them being sponsored by an American badged/Korean built car manufacturer who had withdrawn from the UK just beforehand?)

Re: the Sentinel

Was it not a DOS game? If so, should run on Dosbox?

Re: One of their best products.

You do realise that you can buy spare USB wired keyboards for about a fiver?

And that modern apple keyboards aren't great for typing on anyway, worth investing in a decent mechanical keyboard to get any work done. Or even an early 90s Apple extended keyboard with an ADB to USB adaptor....

Re: Bank could go under

I wish I had 85k sitting in a bank account in the first place!!!

Went to the Irish Vista and 7 launches, got free copies of both. No first aid kit though.

Re: That sounds like the story of a madhouse

Or accept the counter offer, but if you stay a while be aware that future yearly increment / performance raises will be less than what may otherwise have been offered, until you reach the point where 2/3% yearlies would've beaten the one off 10% a few years ago to stay.

Re: Going to "Special Update Install Mode"

Used to be a PPC Mac was an incredible machine for running OSS.

In parts of Ireland a sandwich is a "piece".

So there was the old joke of the fella going over to the states, a burly police officer asks abruptly "Are you packin a piece?" to which the fella queries "I didn't know I had to bring lunch"....

VirtualPC allowed PPC users to run Windows, I'm sure there will be similar toolsets for dev/QA who need crossplatform functionality.

Re: Intel's would still be the longest-surviving Mac instruction set

OSX had always had a secret shadowy x86 build - NextStep based OSX prototype Rhapsody could run on x86, they kept this going until 2005.

This obviously helped with the transition.

So, it would be interesting to know if they already have OSX compiled for ARM - given the IOS branch it wouldn't be a huge surprise.

Re: Jaywalking

Used to confuse me too, I assumed it was something taboo like kerbcrawling.

Re: If we avoid US "English", will we be OK?

But then they went overboard and put "ass" everywhere

"Big ass truck" is just a large lorry

"Grown ass man" is just an adult male

Relevant XKCD etc.

Played with it in peecee wurld once, and once I got past the novelty of seeing Windows Explorer on a tablet I never saw the point of RT - especially as traditional Windows applications couldn't run on it, just a subset of ARM compiled MS store apps. The HP Touchpad was more useful.

Re: Feeling Old...

Ah the old boot disks for that game that, despite having an early-mid 90s adequate amount of 12mb RAM needed that extra 5k of base 640k.

Then realising that a menu driven autoexec.bat/config.sys would allow to do away with boot disks.

Re: I still don't get it

To be fair the C64x had a wonderful keyboard for typing on.

Until it stopped working.

Re: If Macs could read/write to NTFS partitions natively without needing a third party solution

I find I have a "dark ages" in my gaming collection from the late 90s, Glide games designed for the likes of Windows 98 that just won't work properly on modern 64 bit windows, nor on a VM.

Disposable society.

If something breaks there is no longer a want to repair it, just to throw it away and get shiny new.

Re: Worse to come

That's how Mega Bloks got started, used to be the cheap alternative to lego

Now they produce a lot of licenced sets - Call of Duty, Halo, NASCAR, Turtles etc.

Re: Broken monitor

"Who remembers the "Good old days" when you could steal the ball from someone's mouse..."

Ah the school computer labs, then the inevitable plea from the headmaster at next days assembly, made all the more amusing because he had to use the word "balls".

(Second only to the announcement that smoking in the loos would be cracked down on as he found "butts on toilets")

Re: Would that we could shut down Symantec entirely

They became Malware very quickly, especially when bundled on new machines with no straightforward clean uninstall procedure - surely that is the very definition of malware?

Re: Well at least

Screwfix uses a similar model to Argos, in that they have a huge amount of stock piled up for the size of the shop because it is all mostly behind the counter.

It saves on overheads etc. but like Argos (and indeed online shopping) you can't really properly see what you're getting until you're getting it. No big deal if you know what you want/need, but sometimes it was nice just to browse Maplins.

Re: Boro

Or Lough

Which should be pronounced 'lock' and not 'looft'