Posts by Tim99 1412 posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
But that assumes competent programmers (old farts who can write stuff with uptimes of months) and systems that allow hardware to run indefinitely with adequate backup/dupication. Get with the (Cloud) trend - "When it falls over - Just restart it" (every couple of hours/days).
I nearly put a Joke icon, but I didn't >>=======>
A long while ago, one Saturday morning, I was trying to set up a punter’s Exchange Server on a MS SBS. I had followed the documentation but could not get the server to connect to the internet. MS support was hopeless and told me to try the punter’s ISP, iiNet (originally started by two people in a garage). I phoned technical support and spoke to a gentleman who asked a few technical questions. I told him that I couldn’t get Exchange to connect - He went through the documentation with me, but still no joy. I told him that it was the SBS version, and that we needed it as a SBS fax server too - He thought that it should be possible, but it was the first time that they had come across it. He said that they would get back to me. Before he hung up I asked if he could give me his name - Micheal Malone (the Managing Director). About half an hour later he got back with a suggestion that *worked*, and stayed on the line while I checked it. He then asked how long I expected to be on site (a couple of hours), and phoned back about an hour later "to check everything was OK"). He left after iiNet had become the second largest ISP in Australia; and as is often the case, the service seemed to go down after a techy founder leaves and the sales and marketing bean-counters take over.
You can buy a SiliconDust HDHomeRun and turn it into a real Portable TV with Channels. If you have a spare computer (a RaspberryPi will do), and pay an annual subscription it can run as a powerful DVR that works on most clients. With the included Comskip software recordings can be watched without commercials - Most of our TV watching now happens free of adverts. Thier support is pretty good too... No business relationship... Just a satisfied customer... YMMV...
I bought a SiliconDust HDHomeRun Connect TV head and record shows onto a computer - It supports the "comskip” video commercial detector. Our SOP is to record a few programs, let comskip run for each recording, then play them back later. Most 60 min programs (after the ads are removed) now run for 45mins.
I feel your pain. I have just bought a LEOWE TV, the sound is awful - I’m wrestling with an HDMI ARC to analogue audio converter to get sound into a pair of (expensive) 20+ year old B&O active speakers. Apple TV is on another HDMI port. Nothing worked; but after resetting the TV back to factory settings, the sound now works, but the picture breaks up if I use the TV remote to change the volume of a movie from the Apple. So far the only fix is to turn the TV on with its own remote, then put that out of reach, so I only use the Apple remote, which is set to control the TV sound volume; but at least the sound is listenable now…
About 50 years ago I was a Scientific Civil Servant. After doing the job for a while I was trained to interview applicants, and was told a great truth: Most interviewers make up their mind about a candidate in <45 seconds, they then spend the next 45 minutes reinforcing their opinion. I left the job before I had to interview anyone.
I’ve done the MS Access/VB Classic Integer 2 byte database autoincrement field (mis)assignment (32,767) instead of 4 byte long Integer (2 billion). Everything works up to the 32,767 record; then everything dies - Usually after the system has been running OK for a while and the punter has signed it off…
I'm surprised, I am elderly and have mild brain damage that affects my hearing, I could tell.
It is not as though I played it through Hi-Fi either (Apple 21.5 iMac, internal speakers!). Admittedly I used to go to live concerts, and have a "golden eared" wife (Linn LP12/Naim, until we had to sell it after the brain damage) - Are people just used to crap and that is what they are comfortable with?
This might explain why I'm struggling to get a retailer to take back an upmarket TV with a "Hi-Fi Quality sound bar" which sounds awful - Most of our elderly friends agree, one said it sounds like you are in a cinema or a "home theatre" (and not in a good way), but younger people seem to think it is OK. A quick test with white noise shows a lumpy response in the human vocal range with a fast high frequency drop off, interestingly, connecting decent quality speakers to the analogue output shows a similar effect, so it seems it is the audio amp.
>>=========> Because that is what the TV sounds like...
I was rear-ended on the motorway when my vehicle was stationary (a pedestrian ran across the carriageway about 5 vehicles in front and I was the last driver to stop). The driver of a car about 50 metres behind was on the phone and "didn't see that the traffic had stopped". Even though he applied the brakes, he hit my car at about 50mph. I was wearing a seat belt, but had a major concussion caused by my head hitting the back window (my seat collapsed). I'm fairly sure that in a major accident the driver and passenger could finish up anywhere, particularly if they are not wearing a seatbelt.
For cross-platform, and don’t mind paying, XOJO might be worth a look (it used to be REALbasic).
Caveat: I stopped using VB at V4/5, but it was OK for prototyping screens to show to a punter. The included Crystal Reports was dreadful, and used a lot of memory - Surprisingly for simple CRUD applications with reports, MS Access was smaller and faster. We started prototyping with Access, and left a prototype with a customer (intending to move them to Oracle or whatever), until he said "Why is it just a prototype? We have tried it in production, and it is OK"; we moved him a SQL Server 4.2/6.0 backend (stored procedures, transactions, etc.) In 1996 we used the same ideas with the Access runtime, and sold them as shrink-wrap - I’m retired now, the company is still around, and they are still in use (with the current versions of Access and SQL Server). They work well for up to 50 concurrent users and 10s of millions of rows…
Yep, years ago I took a (holiday) trip with a company car from Perth to Derby via Carnarvon, Karratha, Hedland, and Broome with a few side trips (>8,000 km in total) with almost no traffic lights.
On the other hand, two weeks ago, I went on a shopping expedition with Mrs Tim99 from Mandurah to Osborne Park, via Melville on Highway 1 (~80 km) and would have gone through >50 sets of lights.
The population of WA is ~2.6 million, with >2.1 million living in Greater Perth.
About 1992, I commuted several times a week through the suburbs for about 10 years, but the City of Perth certainly had roundabouts before that. Possibly the first ones were the on the Causeway crossing Heirisson Island in the 1950s, but I’m not sure that they count - They are/were teardrop shaped as the main bridge carriageways weren’t crossed by traffic. Anyway, they were only for the posh people who could take a vehicle into the City :-) These days the Island has traffic lights so people "know" when to move.
I now live in a retirement village, and a number of "rural" residents will take a 6 km diversion to avoid one a couple of kms away that has a minor road crossing a dual carriageway.
Yes, and when WA introduced one of the first suburban roundabouts (Yangebup?) most of the locals stopped at the white line and waited for somebody else to move. Sometimes the traffic was stationary on all four entrances and only moved when a driver who had the right-of way waved the next vehicle around the roundabout across...
In the Old Dart, I find that when this old fart is in a hire car with unfamiliar controls, the High Wycombe roundabout is "challenging" - Instead of signalling appropriately, the windscreen gets wiped,...
"Or WordPad?" : A very long time ago we asked our Microsoft Rep if we could have a version of WordPad with a spell checker (We thought we were large and important). He told us that if such a thing was available no-one would buy Word. I laughed thinking he was joking, he wasn't.
I'm retired now and use TextEdit for many things, sometimes I even turn on "Make Rich Text". If I need anything fancier "Pages" will do for most of it.
I agree. I rotate 3 TM backup disks, which have saved me from self-inflicted brain-fade on a couple of occasions; in particular being able to put back deleted emails. BUT, because I have earnt my paranoia, I have 3 Rotated Carbon Copy Cloner bootable back-ups too.
The half your age +7 was sanctioned by the church in feudal times. The rationale was that males could (and did) marry at 14, and females at 12. These were typically to consolidate political ties between important families. Children could be betrothed at 7 years old. This would mean that two 14 year-olds could get married. It then worked out at 20&17; 30&22; 40&27; 50&32; 60&37; and 70&42. This may well have been because of relatively low life expectancy; likelihood of death in childbirth; and high mortality rates for children, and the need to ensure succession.
A group I was in had a similar concept we called "fire fighting" management. Everybody spent so much time rushing from one incident to another "putting out individual fires" that there were no resources to fireproof the business.
After running a couple of businesses, I expanded that idea to try and quantify it - My model was based on the 80:20 rule, along the lines that once you reached a 20% stuff-up quotient you’d spend 80% of your time and resources on the 20%. It appeared to have been frighteningly reliable.
My (handwritten) passport from the 1970s has "Government Service" in the relevant field. It probably covered everyone from the nice lady at the Post Office who sold you a stamp to David Callan. I think my favourite classification at the time was "Gentleman", which meant access to sufficient wealth to not need "employment".
" But I don't see any way of doing that without making professional development so onerous that 90%+ of software companies fold, and the rest start charging 10x current prices."
"You make that sound like a bad thing" (Gene Hunt - Life on Mars). See also: Sturgeon's Revelation"...
I use DDG, and can't remember the last time I used Google directly. DDG supports bangs! which are reasonably anonymous: e.g. searchtext !g does a Google search; searchtext !w a Wikipedia search. There are thousands of others...
Old/Middle English wifman - "female adult person", via "female head of household" became wife. "World” also from wer; meant age, or concerns, or affairs, or interests, or business, of male humans - Perhaps we should replace that with “global"?
Make and female connectors, could we call them plugs and sockets? Asking for a friend.
I offered a colleague some "Gentleman’s Relish" on toast, when he claimed the superiority of Vegemite. He didn’t finish it, and the subject was never mentioned again...
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