Posts by Steve 114 368 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
Huge thanks for actually reading the report. This stuff is genuinely difficult, and well-meaning 'committees' have, to my personal knowledge, floundered for 15 years+ in trying to make constructive and responsible use of anonymised health data, in a way that any other industry (aviation?) would have (equally defectively?) cracked years ago.
My experience (when L'Etoile roads were wider there and thus more ambiguous) was that you could proceed with curses unless your front wings were actually touching something. I once ate a whole Camembert while politely seeking, in a pale blue Ford Anglia, to exit that ultimate roundabout without contact. Engine seized on the way to Dieppe, but 'those were the days', and we knew where to put some oil (when clearly indicated).
I 'downgraded' all my elderly cousins' computers to Win10, becuse they needed looking after and Microsoft seems to have taken the point. They have no secrets worth uploading, and with Anti-Beacon and Classic Shell, plus an XP-looking screen, they seem happy. Of course I insist Mint is on dual-boot, but they never use it, because their familiar programs aren't there. And I think I've had to turn off Win10 'fast boot', else Mint can't see NTFS after a Win-crash. Is that so?
The Catholic church for some reason demands chastity. To judge from schooldays, there are some chaps who are repelled by their own nascent inclinations, for whom it is no penalty to forswear 'girls', but who feel compelled to go out and do good in the world. How do you filter them for priesthood? Better to be honest with yourself, I'd say, but still it's a problem for Vatican HR. One I know was ejected 30 years ago (yes they did 'discernment' even then), and nowadays has great fun in life, and remains a kindly soul.
Old Dell, Sony, HP, Samsung laptops here all worked thus: spare drive, clean Win7 SP1 install & activate (no updates), Win10 loaded from stick, DVD or online, success first time. Ancient Sony with 1 gig memory is faster (er, less slow) than it's ever been with XP. Now they're all logged free for Win10, back to the old drive until such time as I think I want it.
Haven't had one cousin's 'upgrade' fail. Each had Teamviewer on already, and it came back on-line to me before the Win10 user-choices screen, which let me do that, and then Anti-beacon, and ClassicShell. 14 other things to fix swiftly for each of them and they hardly know it isn't 7. Real snag is that some older working programs disappear for some reason, but they work again if you reinstall them.
Never one to miss a freebie, I cloned my HDD and ran the 'update' from 7 on that. (Not bad, but it silently ate some fully-working programs, so I can't keep it). I think that will have on-line 'registered' my device for 10 for life. Now the Win7 HDD is safely back in, does anyone know whether the 7 registration will self-destruct in due time?
If at an EU conference you are invited to join the Dutch table, you will enjoy the very best jokes (in English). If you have fluent French, you may be able to join their table, where you will be handed a (virtual) hand of playing cards illustrating philosophical concepts to be used in debate, and be invited to take polite turns to play. Even juniors can win a hand, but should not expect to be taken seriously unless they have also been to a 'Poly'. And that's only technical conferences.
We didn't vote to 'leave the single market'. We voted to leave the 'European Union'. In theory (if not in prospect) there could still be 'free trade' in goods - and there never has been in services anyway. And I haven't heard we're leaving the (very different) 'Council of Europe' and its silly offshoot the ECHR. Pity.
They're now what Tandy was then - place to browse while the wife's queuing in the Post Office. Except that staff (in ours) are quite knowledgeable. When they interrupt your reverie, they sometimes can force a decision on whether you could actually incorporate the not-quite-spec widget you can see or not. No excuse for making suppliers pay protection money though.
My father fought Hitler and his Far-eastern allies, and later tore Stalin's picture out of my scrapbook. Now I wonder who the genuine Brit nationalists are, and whether my southern-counties 'Brexit' prejudices (after many years of genuine techno-fun and good food in BXL) count for anything. Please, vote in the current Referendum - we need to know what you too think.
I've moved several friends to Win10 on purpose (because they won't look after themselves) and not had problems, even on older kit. EXCEPT that the upgrade silently omits a random selection of older programs, that work perfectly well if reinstalled, or at worst - in compatibility mode. Go on, give us a tailored list of what's missing! As a result I can't recommend auto-upgrade to anyone.
Our mechanical 'Comptometers' (and a few 'Marchants' for the really expert girls who were qualified to multiply) were noisy on steel desks, so they sat on thick hairy felt pads. When the first big 'electronic' calculators came in, same size, the felt pads were retained by habit, and blocked the ventilation. If you put pies on top at coffee time, they'd be piping hot by lunch. Met a few nice girls that way, who warmed my pies. Down in the PCB shop they had Paxolin ovens which were much better, but only run by blokes.
Wherever I go on holiday, there is atmospheric, ethnic, music which is locally popular but not 'pop', sung in local language, and no US-Engrish fakery, with local musical conventions and rythms, typically by girls who are well worth viewing (maybe men too, if that's your thing). That's what EuroVision used to be, when it was interesting, and was about 'songs' not commercial potential. Now it's a waste of space. Wogan's gone too. Cancel.
Mine's 24 volt signalling, latest controllers 2015, with all the bells and whistles and extra valves the spec permitted. No one in the UK understands how it ought to work, and I've soldered a nice big relay in the 240-volt valve side to get it to do what I want (which it does, now). Try interfacing intelligently with that!
I've just 'upgraded' a cousin's Win7 to Win10 as a sick joke, carefully deleting 'windows.old'. To my surprise and discomfort it works quite well. Sure, I spent an hour on Classic Shell, making it look like XP, shrinking icons and arrows, SpybotAntiBeacon, killing 'Bing', Cortana, and all the other nonsense. Sure we should worry about Microsoft charging in future - but Win10 does seem at last to be more goof-proof than some. If a third party could one-click-bundle everything needed to make 10 look like XP (with a free file explorer that works), I might take GWX Control Panel off other cousins' machines.
I don't 'Game', so Linux Mint is entirely satisfactory. Except that it only prints on one of my 3 printers (and then doesn't offer the options available with Windows drivers), and no scanners of any generation work at all. Hardly Linux's fault if mfgrs don't bother much with drivers, and there's probably a kludge if I looked, but... 'work must go on'.
I wanted to transition my music from a Brennan, which is fanless but a bit glitchy on ripping, to a 'Cocktail' (or whatever they're called now) which has a much better UI but an unobtrusive fan. In practice, the white noise from that, and mystic rumbling from the table it's on, makes quiet music unattractive - I'm planning heat pipes and a radiator instead. Meanwhile it's back to the loyal Brennan.
After trials, I'd recommend 10 to all uninterested cousins if, and only if, there were a one-click option to make the desktop look exactly like their old 7 (or XP). Sure I can do that with a long session on Teamviewer, but it's not my idea of family fun. (Anyway, they've all got a Linux Mint boot disk now, in case of disasters).
Same story here with an HP netbook (Atom?) I use as a kind of literate multimeter. Win7 Starter (pathetic), shifted to SSD, upgraded seamlessly to Win10, works faster than before. Can't say I like it, but I haven't tweaked it as I need to see what innocently-upgrading cousins are suffering from.
'Paperless' has always been plain silly. Use IT wisely, but in the chaos of wards and GPs, some things WILL be written on scraps of paper, napkins, chart traces. And everyone (er?) can 'write', whereas not everyone can type, or find the things they want to say on kludgy drop-down menus and disease codes. Ask people how they work, and then decide how to handle reality. Else it's a forever cycle of 'won't happen'.
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