Posts by DJV 2662 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2009
I heard a similar second-hand story about that - programs and data loaded from paper tape kept being corrupted. It took them a while but the problem was eventually tracked down to a clueless newbie in charge of occasional paper tape loading - he was getting bored and poking the occasional extra hole in the tape with the point of a pencil.
I fully agree.
Unions are good when they are trying to raise workers from the hell of "minimum wage" employment with uncaring, greedy, money-first companies. So, I am fully supportive of the workers at Apple and Amazon trying to unionize.
However, those of us in the UK with long memories may remember the "closed shop" proposals of the 1970s when it seemed that the boot was very much on the other foot and militaristic unions ruled the country instead of the government (not that the current bunch do much ruling, preferring instead to party and line their own pockets at everyone else's expense). The very small family-run company I worked for at the time, who tried their best to pay a decent wage, lived in fear that, if closed shop was imposed, it would effectively mean they would run at a loss, which would kill the company.
So, unions are good in moderation - the other extreme is just as bad.
I make a lot of use of a great file sync program called FreeFileSync and I use it enough to have bunged the developer some ££ on occasion. One option is to make shortcuts to commonly used settings on the desktop - the file names it generates for these always amuse me as they have the format: Name.ffs_gui
It's probably an on-the-fly calculation that's similar to the amount of time showing to completion on a Windows file copying dialog - you know, the one that goes: 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 4 days 6 hours, 18 hours, 6 minutes, 23 years, 3 minutes, 2 minutes 50 seconds, 2 minutes 59 seconds, and then sits there at 99% done with "5 seconds remaining" left showing for around 10 minutes.
"Depending on your ISP, router, and so on, you might find that on your home network, your laptops, phones, and other devices have their own local IPv6 addresses"
I'm with Vermin Media - I suspect their planned date for switching to IPv6 coincides with the date of the heat death of the universe...
Absolutely!
20 years ago I was writing Java applets for websites (back when that was an actual thing). Even then I found Java's multiple file I/O handling ridiculously complex compared to plain C. It always seemed that whatever it was that I wanted to do with it was never handled by a single class in a simple manner. I pretty much abandoned the whole mess around 2001. Given the greedy way Oracle acts nowadays I'm glad I have very little to do with anything they make*.
* The one exception is VirtualBox, which I'd been using before even Sun took it over, but I am prepared to lose that should the need arise.
Back in the days of the Commodore 64 I'd memorised a short BASIC program that I could type into any shop's demo 64. It would first copy the ROM and RAM, POKE a couple of locations to keep it there and then change the SYNTAX ERROR message to something far less pleasant. Then I'd hang around looking at other computers while kids would bash on the 64's keyboard with the inevitable result that they'd get a syntax error - except, of course, they didn't...
Ah yes, one standard package manager. What could possibly go wrong...
You might under these circumstances:
* if you've died in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day;
* have ever volunteered for a lobotomy after several too many beers;
* be a politician and will therefore have had your common sense surgically removed;
* be called Larry.
Otherwise, no.
I had a recent experience on the Crucial website. Having been a customer with them for years, I therefore had an account with them which had worked fine the last time I'd purchased something (probably about 18 months previously) and they'd been sending "news/offers" emails almost weekly to that address ever since. So, I was rather nonplussed when, upon entering my email address, I received the error message "Invalid email".
Now, to me, that meant that somehow, it had decided my email address was not formatted in a valid manner so I entered it manually (instead of pasting it in as normal) in case it was croaking on some hidden space/tab or whatever. No, what they actually meant to say was that they'd moved to a new (and, in my opinion, far crappier) back end system recently and had purged all accounts that hadn't ordered in the past few months and so had no record of that email address. I complained but I don't think the message got through that a message more like "Email address not found on our system" would have been far more appropriate.
Sigh...
But do you remember the chaos in the 1970s when we had two VAT rates (in addition to the zero rate)?
The standard rate was 8% along with a "luxury" rate of, initially, 25%, which was later reduced to 12.5%. I was in the electronics industry at the time and the two rates meant that a component destined for a luxury item carried the luxury rate but if that SAME component was destined for a non-luxury item it carried the standard rate. Confusing or what?
Definitely a case of those imposing this madness not thinking things through properly - but when do they ever - sigh...
My thoughts exactly - I came here to post something similar.
Back around 2006 my cats used to sleep on top of my two CRT monitors (yeah, I know, cat fur down the back of monitors is never a good thing). It was hilarious the day I swapped the CRTs out for flatscreens as the cats tried to jump on top of them as usual but fell down the back instead. The disgruntled expressions on their faces was worth it!
Also applies to other countries. See:
* UK: Brexit.
* UK: Anything said by Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Priti Patel, etc.
* USA: Anything said by pretty much any Republican.
Terry Pratchett had the best idea:
“We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?”
“Why?”
“It saves time.”
Of course, that never stops people thinking they can change a file type just by changing the extension. I had that recently on a website I built for a client where one of the client's staff had "helpfully" renamed some PNGs to a JPG extension and then complained that some resizing code wouldn't work on the affected images. I added a "deep code" check along with a warning when images were discovered with the incorrect extension.
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