Posts by Ian Johnston 2929 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2007
I have a TomTom satnav. It came with lifetime map upgrades. After about three years (in 2019) it, like many other TomTom devices, stopped receiving map upgrades. This was because it had exceeded its service life, defined as "the period for which it receives free map upgrades". Can't be serviceable after they end, can it? Paging Mr Heller.
I am sure that it was a completely coincidence that at the next GPS week number rollover, which happened a month or two later, it lost all ability to tell the time. A cynic might suspect that TomTom realised they had fucked up the code and semi-bricked the devices rather than fixing them.
My parents had the last B&W 405 line VHF television rented out by DER in Scotland. Finally the company balked at the costs of keeping a technician trained to repair it (and the necessary spares) and bought them out of their rental contract for two hundred quid (several years' fees) plus the telly thrown in. It lasted another two years or so.
Sounds like yet another undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is, except that it is something to do with AI. The original was probably apocryphal, but also probably reflected real practice during the South Sea Bubble.
The one annoyance that riles me - irrationally, I know - is that on Linux, if FF is updated in the background by the package manager, the running instance of FF then refuses to load new tabs and demands to be closed and restarted.
Nothing irrational about that annoyance. That's why I dropped Firefox. It's not only that it won't load new tabs; it won't let you interact with existing ones, and so any work you are doing is lost. It's a cretinously stupid decision by the Firefox developers made even worse by the Xubuntu (in my case) developers who decided that there should be no way of declining or postponing upgrades, so that at irregular intervals you lose anything you're doing.
Chrome handles upgrades much, much more sensibly.
Like Linux distros revived by children, this is all very well ... but what are the chances that Zen Browser will be around in two years? Five years? However frustrating I occasionally find Chrome and however tempted I would be by a version of Firefox that worked, I'm certainly not interested in jumping ship to something which is unlikely to be around for long. I'm an "LTS" sort of person.
And humans don't do that? If a human being (say a student) is told by an authoritative human they trust (say a professor) that they are wrong, will they stick to their guns or will they scrabble around for another answer?
That is precisely how the children in the Orkney Child Abuse Scandal were induced to give the answers their social workers (trained by Evangelical Christians) wanted to hear. Tapes of the interviews are now used to train people n how not to question children.
It’s exactly like asking a French guy how many r’s in strawberry, and he answers “one” because he translated to French using google translate, and there’s one R in “fraise”.
Only if he has a very poor grasp of quotation marks. How many "1"s are in "121" and how many 1s are in 121?
As Emmett surveyed the situation, he noticed that every time a file was retrieved from a filing cabinet, the drawer slammed shut and caused the floorboard on which it rested to jump into the air.
The Trivector sat at the other end of the room – on the same floorboard.
I thought it was going to be Fred Colon waiting outside the door.
Nissan Micra K11s were notorious for failing to proceed because of a fault mass air flow (MAF) sensor. The cure was either (a) to buy a new throttle body from Nissan at the cost of a couple of hundred or (b) to remove the cover from the MAF unit, touch a hot soldering iron to three joints and replace the cover. I once got a very nice car for fifty quid because the owner despaired of getting it to run ... the repair took about ten minutes.
Exactly this. Any death such as this is tragic, none more or less so than any other, a human life is a human life.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee
John Donne (1572 - 1631)
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