Posts by Antony Shepherd 55 posts • joined 6 Feb 2008
If you're doing something that involves a lot of entering numbers, then a number pad is an essential thing.
If you're not entering lots of numbers a lot of the time, then dispensing with the number pad saves a lot of space on your desk.
That said, while I don't enter a lot of numbers these days I still miss a number pad on my crappy wireless Mac keyboard. I also miss proper keyboards with proper keys - which this logitech ain't.
The problem with this particular keyboard seems to me that the keys aren't concave and there's no rake to the keyboard.
*sigh* - I still think the absolute pinnacle of keyboard design was the IBM Model M keyboard. I had one of those at work once and it was a pleasure to type on.
My sole experience of Occam was writing an program in it for an assignment at the University of Essex back in t'day. The whole concept of defining program structure by the number of spaces at the start of a line struck me as THE MOST obsessive nonsense ever.
This is probably why I've never got on with Python.
Incidentally, has anyone noticed that the loudest voices for return to office work are coming from Subway and Pret?
Also from the people who own lots of office space and are terrified their property portfolios will drop in value when businesses don't need large offices any more.
Good to see someone else mentioning that book, it's a good read and I'd recommend it to anyone. There's a great bit about how at one time they bought a load of cheap American calculating machines, so they'd convert all their figures to decimal, run the figures through the calculating machines, and convert the results back to the original non-decimal units, and that was still quicker and more accurate than doing all the calculations by hand.
From there LEO was just the next step.
Electrical discharge? You don't know you're born.
I had a small printer/plotter which used a roll of paper slightly narrower than a bog roll and four small ballpoint pens, so when you printed out a program listing it had to write every individual character!
To be honest, it was kind of fascinating to watch it writing stuff out. For a while, at least. Less so if I was printing a long listing!
It was badged as ORIC but I believe it was made by Sharp.
I had a Black Watch. Actually, I had several.
It'd work fine for a few months, and then one day you push the button and it shows you the time is something like "47:89".
Send it back to Sinclair, then a few weeks later another one arrives. It works fine, then one day... and so on.
Think I got through three or four before i gave up and bought a Casio.
I'm still kind of hoping that Betelgeuse went supernova around six hundred and thirty odd years ago so I'll get to see the result in the night sky.
Although it'll be a lot worse than the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, that's for sure.
(does not know what a Hrung is, nor why it should collapse on Betelgeuse seven)
What I would like to see from this is stuff from the archive which probably wouldn't sell well enough to merit a DVD release, but could be put on this site as a cheap download instead.
I loved the More Death and Horror sound effects record, but I swear I was hearing the sound effects from it in EVERYTHING for years!
Max Sang is talking complete nonsense.
I've stalled an aircraft deliberately on many occasions as part of PPL training!
Throttle back, keep pulling back on the controls to maintain altitude as speed drops. Ten knots above the stall, the alarm goes off, and if you keep pulling you'll enter a stall, where the airflow diverts from the top of the wings and you lose lift drastically...
Nose forward, throttle up, and away you go. No harm done.
This is only a problem if you do it at low altitude and don't have time to recover!
Now, some T-tailed aircraft had a problem with airflow over the elevator being obstructed, but the Cessna 206 is not that kind of aircraft.
The great thing about the GR Digital range is that Ricoh give you a hell of a lot of control over the picture taking process, more than most compact cameras do. Sure, it's a small sensor so you get noise at higher ISOs, and it's a wide angle lens so you need to get closer to your subject, but within its minor limitations it's a fine picture-taking machine for the reasonably serious photographer.
It's compact and pocketable, more pocketable than any micro four thirds camera (I can just about fit an Olympus Pen E-P1 with 17mm pancake lens in my pocket, but it's not comfortable), feels sturdy and well made.
As far as Alan Firminger's remarks, I think most of the delay with compact cameras comes from autofocus. The GRD can be focused manually - also they have a fixed focus modes, where you can set infinity focus or 'snap shot' focus (a few yards away) reducing shutter lag to practically nothing.
The only problem I've ever had with my original GRD is the long time it takes to write RAW files. Ricoh have completely fixed that, it seems. If my old GRD gave up the ghost, I'd seriously upgrade.
Not impressed. My 60GB iPod is close to full with music alone, and I would have quite happily replaced it with an iPod Touch, except they've only increased them to 64GB, which I'd probably fill within six months of purchase.
So I still won' t be buying the iPod Touch any time soon.
I've still got a stash of 80's era PCWs up in my Dad's house, next time I'm up there I must dig through a few, if only for the comedic value of the old adverts.
Admittedly I did stop reading it a long time ago after it had become just another PC of the month magazine.
Yes MrJOD, I do remember the Microtan 65, that was my first computer too.
OK, so it's a long time since I read a bible, so correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Jesus kick the moneychangers out of the temple, and tell a rich man to give up all his worldly goods?
Somehow don't think he'd be too keen on an investment company operating in his name.
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