Posts by BenDwire 257 posts • joined 30 Jun 2009
The origin of "Gammon" comes from a BBC political discussion programme called "Question Time". A newspaper columnist observed that enraged audience members would become angry and red-faced, stating that they looked like gammons. Whilst I can see the funny side of that, the woke playground bullies that latched onto it have taken the joke a tad too far.
I'll write "OK Boomer" so nobody else has to bother.
I was recently involved in a large design project that baffled the engineering team as it was stupidly complex with lots of conflicting requirements. We resorted to a brainstorming session, drawing on all the white boards we could muster, and even sticking self adhesive ones to the walls. When we eventually finished, all four walls were covered in diagrams, and it was clear that someone had to document the end results. As a stopgap I pulled out my phone and use CamScanner to photograph each board and convert it to a multi-page pdf, then email it to all the attendees. I was quite impressed - modern technology can actually be quite good at times.
Simpler times indeed - I had a Win3.11 compter hooked up to our SPARCStation through the serial port, and could log in with a terminal program. Apart from the wonderful script I had that turned it into a cuckoo clock, I was also able to sample the CAD operator's very loud burping and play that back at random, or even replace the bongs on the afore mentioned clock. Oh what fun we had in those simple days ... and yes, I was the boss.
Honestly I doubt it would have been any more painful to just move her to Linux.
I made the choice to abandon windows when I decided to retire, as I couldn't be bothered to ascend the learning curve with WIn10. There was a lot of Duck Ducking in the early days, but now it's mostly settled down nicely. I like to keep my days interesting and grey cells active by using Debian Testing, but even then it *just works*. If I had to support another user it would be a trivial matter now.
Oddly enough I do have MS's Visual Code installed, and a few legacy Win programs on Wine, but I've managed to find decent native programs for everything else I need.
IIRC there was a case in the USA where it was judged that because someone had posted publicly on Instagram they had forfeited their claim to copyright. If that is correct, then this would set a rather uncomfortable precedent.
Oddly enough, I abandoned Facebook years back when they changed the terms such that any uploaded photo was theirs to do whatever they liked with. It’s bad enough seeing gurning pictures of crims and their victims all over the media, but I imagine they could make some serious profit from Clearview etc.
As a teen of the 1970's I have mixed memories of the food back then. I used to live on a diet of Angel Delight, baked beans and Smash (in separate bowls!) as my usually absent mother left me to fend for myself - ironically she was a social worker! But butterscotch? Nope. Any other flavour was fine, but butterscotch was too foul for words. Remember / Be aware that the 1970's gave us Vesta curries, pot noodles, liver sausage and spam fritters, so I had adapted to eat most things when required.
The standard of cuisine was so low it is considered a trip hazard these days.
I generally avoid anything that passed my lips in those dark days, and have so far lived to tell the tale...
Before hanging my 'scope probes up I used to use LO throughout my business, and at the end of the financial year made donations to the various Open Source projects we used. Admittedly not as much as a M$ licence would cost, but then again it's not M$ is it? I know I'm probably in the minority (I mean, I even purchased WinZip licences in the 1990's) but if only a few more business helped out it would improve the quality of the code no end.
Mine's the white one, like my clinical supervisors wear ...
Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s simply getting captured on film (or pixels)
I've been alive a long time, and most of my social network are not racist. We've be taught that people are equal regardless of gender or the tone of thier skin. That doesn't mean that everyone is as competent for a particular job, but that decision is purely down to ability.
However, I do note that a lot of people (e.g. influencers & celebrities) desperate for 'likes' seem to take it upon themselves to expose events that would have paled into insignificance in earlier decades. Rightly or wrongly, this is the new normal, and people need to think far more before venting off in public. But behaviour like this sells newspapers / generates clicks, so it's self-amplifying.
Let's be careful out there ...
There seems to be a reasonable percentage of commentards who have been touched by this 'condition'. My nephew was diagnosed with Dyspraxia and Dyslexia 25 years ago, and he's a very clever little nerd!! Has all the communication abilities of a goth, and lives in the same timezone as most vampires. Unfortunately he takes after me in many ways, as do my sons - none of us can spell, write, read music or dance. Most of us can press F7, fix stuff, play music and drink heavily - no all of us drink heavily! So are we the oddballs? Or are we the normal ones?
Anyway, to fix the WiFi on old kit, get an original 802.11b access point and set it up with the best security you can manage. You can turn it off when not in use to protect the rest of the network (or shove it on a VLAN through a managed switch). Just my 2p.
The mention of green screens reminded me of the early PC days when the monitor was monochrome, and either green or amber for upmarket CAD systems (Hercules graphic cards anyone?). I remember my CAD operator walking into my office and cheerfully sat down with a fresh coffee, saying that his screen just died, and therefore could do no more work until I bought him a new one. After assuring me he'd done nothing to cause the fault except tidy his desk off I went to have a look. Power LED? Check. Computer on? Check. Cables connected? Check. Keyboard pushed right under the monitor, touching the control knobs ... Ah! Restoring the brightness and contrast levels to a central position soon wiped the grin of the smug git's face ...
I'm sure many people will agree with you, but only those of us that are older / greyer / longer in the tooth / have no teeth left.
People simply don't want to bother with local storage. It's too difficult for them, and most youngsters don't even know how to open stuff that isn't in the cloud. Even an accountant friend of mine would rather trust his data to a paid Dropbox account than spend less money keeping it in a box at home.
I still buy CDs and DVDs which I consider to be an offline backup that I can pass onto my kids, especially as it appears than many classics are being "revised" or "no platformed" in case they offend future generations. George Orwell was meant to be a warning, not a blueprint for society.
Ah yes, but that expenditure comes out of a different budget you see!
As well as having a decent off-line archive, people could encrypt their own files by default, then at least the crims won't be able to leak anything meaningful? It's probably in the "too difficult for people" category though.
I think we all know that no-one is ever going to be properly held to account for this mess, but it may have had something to do with the latest announcement that many senior managers are going to be sent on their way. Good riddence to them, but I'd be happier if proper charges were brought, with convictions.
It's the sub-postmaster's families that have been destroyed over the years I feel sorry for.
My Samsung TV still can't use iPlayer, despite it being supported. Even the support department have run out of ideas.
On the plus side all my smart lightbubs have nice fresh firmware - I replaced it with Tasmota that allows cloud-free operation behind a nice secure firewall. I'm guessing that's not what the IoT vendors were hoping for ...
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