Posts by Adrian Harvey 162 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2009
Also, the extremely useful clock on the clock to see a calendar function has been removed for all but one clock. I know it’s the clock with the tray icons next to it in my head, but it still feels like playing three-card monte as I look for which of my three screens is number one today!
> Mac still had & could use the Control key for other shortcuts.
Sorry, but not at the time they defined those keystrokes, it didn't. The first Mac keyboards only had option and command keys. Terminal emulators on the Mac had to take over one or other to be control. Later Mac keyboards did add back a control key, which made connecting from them to the Unix boxes at Uni much nicer.
original Mac keyboard for reference So you can all see for yourselves.
> All 3.5" drives are standard. They dont have different RPM, if they do thats because they have a fault.
Not all. The apple ones for a start! They had variable RPM at different tracks to fit more data on the outer tracks of the disk (where there was more space) It approaches a Consttant Linear Velocity system (like a CD drive) but is stepped so there's not so many speed transitions. By this means they got 800kB on floppies that a PC could only fit 720kB on. (yes, I know you could tweak that...)
https://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/drive.html#mac14
Not really a translation- if you say those characters aloud, the sounds ‘Dieselgate’ come out your mouth! That character set too is the one mainly used for foreign loan words.
Though as various -gate scandals have nothing to do with gates, and Watergate had nothing to do with water I’m not sure which way you would chose to translate this anyway. Perhaps Japan has another naming scheme for scandals entirely? If so, perhaps we could borrow it! I’m tired of -gate already…
Only one more use of -gate should be tolerated- when Mr Musk messes up we have to have an Elongate!
Standard US sockets, cables are 15A, so at 110V that’s ~1600W max kettle power. In the UK kettles are mostly 3000W so boil water in about half the time it takes in the US.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any - but they are less popular. Also, stove-top kettles are more common than in the UK - stoves have lots more power (or may be gas)
> Michelangelo was an artist, the pope who hired him obviously couldnt paint or sculpt...
Fascinatingly - Michaelangelo signed every one of the letters (progress reports, etc) he sent to the pope as "Michaelangelo, sculptor" (source: audio guide in the Cistine Chapel) as he didn't really want to do the painting! Carving things was his preferred work.
I wonder if that actually makes the management in this case smart? - they got amazing work that might not have been done had the worker just been left to his own preferences....
It’s actually an extract from a guitar piece called Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega. Though that itself may contain references to earlier work by Chopin.
See https://thenextweb.com/news/where-did-that-nokia-theme-tune-really-come-from
Some other detail is contained in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_tune
I wish the keyboard-based hub was common too! But the USB standard makes it tricky - a standard keyboard only has a low speed cable on it (the kind you can’t buy - they must be moulded to the device). And a hub would need high speed as the downstream interface might be connected to anything…. And to take that further - what happens when someone plugs in something other than a mouse to that port - say a USB drive? And it goes slow…
Now I’m wondering what a keyboard&mouse set would be like if the mouse was hard wired to the keyboard and only one cable to the PC…
I always liked the touch that there were in fact 2 kinds of cables, low speed and high speed. But you were not allowed to sell low speed cables….
Because low speed cables were only allowed where they were permanently moulded into the device using them (for example, a mouse, or a keyboard).
Most of the advantages of having a cheaper, lower spec cable for the things that only need slow speed. None of the consumer confusion!
I told my kids that joke when I found an old 3.5” floppy in the attic - my daughter’s reaction was ‘what’s a save icon?’ Growing up in an age of Google Docs and the like she had never seen or used a save icon. That means to some kids even knowing what a save icon is makes you ‘old’. So actual floppy disks are 2 ‘generations’ back I guess….
( note : for the US people it's 56K not 64. )
Not strictly true - the US B channel standard was still 64 bit, but they stole 1 bit from every 6th byte to use for signalling. Giving 62.666kbps. Ok for voice where the loss of the least significant bit from the occasional byte was imperceptible, but, as you know, if you can’t sync with the stream to know which bits will be robbed, you wind up having to treat every byte as 7-bit and you max out at 56k usable. .
Ok, pedantic mode on…
“ even 0xF0000 to 0xFFFFF was reserved in some boxes.”
0xFFFF0 had to be reserved at the very least as the intel 8086 processor used it as the bootstrap address on power up - it generally contained little more than a jump to the real startup routines, but it had to be there. One of the defined methods for rebooting a PC was to JMP FFFF:0000 (segmented addressing = 0xFFFF0). See Intel_8086_Overview.pdf
“It is IBM PC HARDWARE DESIGN. If you had more than 640 KB the memory from 0xA0000 to 0xFFFFF the memory was "shifted up" by 384 KB. Still remember himem.sys or EMS?”
IBM maybe, but not the PC - the PC could only address 1MB. So it couldn’t really be “shifted up”. EMS involved “shifting sideways” where a segment of memory would be swapped in and out of the upper address space so you could access more than the 1MB, but not all at once.
“ They used a Julian date format and had forgotten that 2000 was a leap year, so on day 366 of the year the computer crashed.”
The Julian calendar had all centuries as leap years. Gregorian made centuries not leap years unless divisible by 400. So either way this was just a bug.
Yes, really! The FAT file system directory table did not include the dot. It had two fixed-length fields, one of 8 characters (the name) and one of 3 characters (the extension). So shorter names were padded with space characters that are ignored. See https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/fs/fat/fat-1.html for details on the file system layout on disk.
How exactly the command line functions and DOS interrupts (function calls) treated those special cases is an interesting question though….
But eliminating something means that you have discovered it to be impossible. You don’t eliminate it whilst it is still possible! And that’s what Holmes meant. Once you have assessed all the possibilities and eliminated all the ones that turn out not to be possible then the one that is left must be the answer even if it feels unlikely.
When were you a child? In 1947 there was a Polio epidemic in New Zealand, and all the schools closed for a term (as well as no Cinemas, public meetings, etc). All the children were enrolled in Correspondence School, and the work posted out to them. One of the radio stations was co-opted and and certain lessons were broadcast at fixed times. So, for example Form 3 English might be 10-11 on Wednesdays.
I’m sure the latest tech has made it a little easier, and more interactive, but it has been *possible* for a very long time.
Icon because it’s a teacher... and because I’m being pedantic about the word possible so I can tell my anecdote :-)
I don’t think VMWare uses the “recompile model” at all anymore. That model was only necessary to overcome limitations of the x86 model that not all privileged instructions were trapped when running outside ring 0. Some simply failed or just behaved differently. VMWare rewrote those on code load so they could be emulated. Commentators had been saying for a long time that virtualisation was not possible on x86 due to architecture limitations. And the chip designers didn’t see any demand. Once that loop was closed and the architecture extended, VMWare moved to using the hardware virtualisation as it has higher performance.
I don’t know what happens if you run VMWare on a really old CPU now - it may still have the software virtualisation code lingering somewhere, but I suspect it will just refuse to run....
Anyway, a long way of saying that the original VMWare model is probably not necessary on any other CPU as they have had the benefit of seeing the x86 issues and avoiding them.
I know Powershell syntax is odd in some places, and I'm not very keen on it, but the concept of passing the pipeline around as objects is clever and powerful. It avoids having to re-parse data (and, speaking for myself, often incorrectly or without correctly dealing with all the corner cases.)
Are there actually any other shells that implement this concept? Cross platform too?
I really hope that the little comment about this as a “security” item isn’t Edge picking up the Chrome model for this where it’s hacked in somewhere low level in the code and doesn’t understand the difference between local file paths (which really are a different domain) and remote file paths (which are just another protocol), nor between corporate controlled web sites (which may even be running on the same box as the file server) and untrusted sites. As a result simple integration between web apps and legacy stuff either fails, becomes complex and a whole new kind of security risk, or forces users onto IE. I’m sure it was done with the best of intentions but Chrome has been causing me nightmares on some recent projects.
Pendatic I know, but New Zealand uses the US keyboard layout as dollars are the currency and English the most spoken language.
(Ok, even more pedantic, there is a keyboard setting for Maori language that changes the back-quote key to a macron compose key, but I argue it’s not the “New Zealand” layout )
Icon: closest for pendant
I seriously hope it was Halon, not Halogen. Halogens (Flourine, Chlorine, Iodene, etc) are highly reactive and would be an “interesting” choice for a fire control system. Good for the BOFH though, very effective for wrapping up stories.
Icon may well appear on Halogen cylinders.
Divers get the bends because the solubility of a gas increases with pressure (actually partial pressure - that is the pressure of that gas alone). More gas dissolves in the blood stream under he higher pressure at depth, and then tries to suddenly form bubbles as the pressure is released when the diver surfaces,
Very similar to soft drinks, but if is the gas is dissolved there aren’t bubbles, microscopic or otherwise. It is only when the ceases to be dissolved that bubbles form.
Incedentally was the beer warm or cool for the test? The liquid temperature has a significant effect on CO2 solubility that’s why there”s no carbonated tea. (Well, not hot tea)
From the photos it looks like the magic keyboard is gone, replaced by an ordinary inset keyboard - is that right?
I have a 3rd gen at work and the keyboard, unlike most other laptops is not set in an indented tray so that the tops of the keys are level with the case and trackpad. Instead the keys all retract when the lid is closed so they do not brush the screen. This helps Lenovo to provide reasonable travel on the keys whilst keeping the machine thin. A much better solution to thinness than the Mac one where the short key travel made the keyboard painful to use (your opinions may vary)
The keys also retracted when in tablet mode which helped you not to type on the back of the computer by mistake as you hold the tablet. I remember the thinkpad butterfly keyboard, so this trick bought back happy memories:-)
It generally surprises people to learn that Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are not in fact a form of picture writing. They are in fact a fancy font used for monuments and the like. Each picture maps (roughly) to a syllable and a word is composed of several syllables. A simpler font was used for everyday writing.
It was long assumed to have been word-pictures (like Chinese or emojis). But after the Rosetta Stone unlocked the language this was found to be a misapprehension.
> Not sure what you mean here.
> Assuming you mean raising corp tax levels?
I wasn’t suggesting anything about the level - it’s a few years since I lived there and I don’t know what the current UK rate is!
However I understand that UK dividends are taxed at a low rate separately from the Corp tax paid on the profit, and the poster I was replying to was suggesting fixing that by eliminating Corp tax.
The system in NZ taxes the dividends as Income at the same rate as any other Income you may have. The Corp tax that has been paid is offset against that tax amount owing when the dividend is paid (the process is called imputation) and any additional Income tax still owing is deducted as the dividend is paid.
There are a few corner cases that are dealt with in the tax return and there’s no equivalent to National Insurance in NZ - so that would add complexity, but as a system it’s much fairer, more consistent and harder to exploit than the UK one.
1. is not completely necessary - you could simply allow corporation tax paid as a credit against the income tax payable. This is what is done in Australia and New Zealand ( they call it imputation tax credits). Doing it that way prevents tax optimisation by means of withholding the dividend- the Corp tax is still paid and only the step up to income tax rates is held back until the dividend is released.
Assuming we’re talking about the pro, you’ve got the tax calculation wrong. GBP 1049 inc VAT is GBP 874.17 ex VAT (at 20%). I think you may have taken 20% off rather than reversing out the 20% added on perhaps?
Making it US$1080 at the current cross rate. I suppose 8% more is not the end of the world, and it won’t cover your airfare to go over to a sales-tax free state and buy one - but still annoying!
Maths pedant rather than grammar - but I’m sticking with that icon even though it guarantees I will have made an error in my post too!
> (yes it is legal, although not very smart, to do 60 along those lanes).
It was pointed out to me, many years ago, that the speed limit is not the only law that limits your speed. Charges such as dangerous driving, and the parts of the Highway Code to do with stopping distance apply too. It is very likely to be illegal to do 60 on said lanes. Just not a breach of the speed limit regulations.
Sadly there seems to be an increasing trend around here to treat the speed limit as an indicator of road quality, and assume all parts of a given road are traverseable at its speed limit...
Icon because it’s the only road sign on offer =======>
I expect there are quite a few of us, but what bothers me is that I thought how clever curses / ncurses was - a library designed to give you api based access to the screen and hide all the termcap/info mess. We seem to be full circle somehow...
However, having a protocol for remote display / network transparency of terminal apps is a good thing. I hadn’t realised some of the remote access services were scraping hidden console windows to make some apps remotely accessible.
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