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Re: Reminds one
Non-English keyboards? Be glad you get non-English character sets. In my day we had 7-bit ASCII and maybe EBCDIC. And we liked it.
Uphill, both ways, in the snow, etc etc.
(Yorkshireman icon -->)
3856 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
At least 20 of us, myself included, are glad you couldn't resist.
Although I suspect the young'uns around here won't have a clue as to what you're riffing on!
Yeah yeah, OK, I stand corrected. Surface has a perfectly honourable tradition of enverbification.
I wrote my comment from behind a red (october?) mist of rage. What I meant to write, I think, was "Surface as a neologism for Reveal/Show/Present? Aaaaaaargh!!"
Thank you for the tactful correction.
I wonder if an effective test for a suspected live deepfake would be to have the subject hold up a life-size photo of their “claimed” face - or even a random other face - in front of them, and see if the image jumps/distorts at all as the deepfake algorithm tries to map onto an unexpected set of reference points?
I had a VCS, although I can't remember how many switches were on it. On/Off, Black&White/Colour, and I can't remember any more than that!
But I agree completely with the author's comments about Combat. Finest game suite ever devised for total subjugation of one's younger brother. Whether at the Tanks or the Biplanes sub-games, I humiliated him in a manner that can only be described as "total pwnage", as I believe the hep young cats say these days.
How could something with a resolution of about 20x15 and a palette of migraine-inducing hues that made the ZX Spectrum look like 4K HDR, be so much fun?
Hey, Cortana, what's the English translation for "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Afonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu" that I just saw on a road-sign?
Hey, if it helps, this site's journalism gets my approval. I for one wish Andrew O and Lewis Page still wrote for the Reg, because their pieces were always well-written and thought-provoking - even when I didn't agree with the premise. I'm pretty sure AO liked to bait his readership occasionally by being deliberately contrarian, just to kick the metaphorical hornets' nest and stand back sniggering...
Plus, doesn't "more radioactive" equate to "is radioactive and dangerous for much less time"? IANANRE but that's my understanding - that generally, you can have waste that has a long half-life and is slightly radioactive for long, long periods, or you can have waste that has a short half-life and is very radioactive, but for a manageable length of time.
> After all these years, has "Resume from Suspend" ever been fixed on the Pinebook Pro, Pine Micro?
Well, from reading some of the comments above, I infer that Pine Micro has worked around that issue, by making the Pinebook Pro permanently woke.
I'm reminded of the exchange between Michael Caine and Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on the subject of the former's wine cellar.. something along the lines of
"At least you can drink the wine!"
"No, I couldn't drink them, they're far too valuable."
"Fine! Well sell them!"
"Oh no, I couldn't possibly do that, they mean far too much to me..."
Well yes, cardboard was the OEM factory solution.
The better solution for the Mini enthusiast was to take a Marigold rubber glove, cut the fingertips off, feed an HT lead through each finger-hole and ziptie the glove around each lead and the distributor. Total waterproofing.
You've reminded me of this delightful Punch cartoon from February 1940.
> For those who are interested...the electric typewriter keyboard was basically an array of push switches on a grid - the hardware was a ribbon cable soldered to the grid
Awww... of all the ways to do it, that is the most boring and sensible one to choose.
I was hoping you'd say your company's product was a Heath-Robinson/Rube-Goldberg assemblage of actuator rods and solenoids that was clamped to the typewriter keyboard to press each key as necessary!
This world is too dull.
Replying reeeeeeeeeeeally late to this thread (because it was referenced from a July 2022 "On Call" story). Greetings to you all from the strange and futuristic world of 2022. But I digress.
Your Agnus Dei story reminds me of my favourite classical music anecdote.
There is, as some fules kno, a choral piece by the 16th-Century English composer Thomas Tallis named "Spem in Alium", which is Latin for "Hope in Any Other". It's a beautiful piece, and frequently performed by choral societies.
...Who, distressingly often, mis-spell it as "Spem in Allium".
Which would translate as "Hope in the Onion"! So if you see any confused musicians wandering round worshipping shallots...
> - 20 colors of silicone bumpers to chose from
Nice, but ITYM “car will be made entirely of Gorilla Glass and magnesium alloy and will look exquisite, but will scratch and chip as soon as you drive through a light drizzle, so at a very reasonable cost Apple will sell you their own or 3rd-party silicone car-brascorsets that will protect the bodywork at the cost of making your exquisite new vehicle about 2x the size and resembling a hideous safety concept car from the 1970s”
ITYM “Veblen good”. Definition for anyone who isn’t familiar with the term.
I'm tempted to make a flippant remark along the lines of "yes, and the 30,000 black hats worldwide who have root access to your PC really appreciate the availability of the printer too..." but I won't.
Because I'm better than that. And also I'm sure you're smart enough to keep the machine air-gapped or otherwise protected.
Including Ten Pund notes made by Mitchell and Webb, with credit cards that improve on the originals by being made of cheese?
Anyone else remember when computer software manuals were printed on green or red paper to try and deter little Johnny from having his dad duplicate the manual using his office photocopier?
Beta Basic for the ZX Spectrum is one I particularly remember - black ink on dark red paper. Barely readable by humans, never mind photocopiers. And using that replacement BASIC without a manual would have been a PITA.
(Pint for the author of Beta Basic. It was awesome and was what should have been in the Speccy's ROM from the get-go.)
It has no cloud dependency. No DLC, no microtransactions. Doesn't send telemetry or push "exclusive content from carefully-curated partners". No enforced updates. No mandatory account creation. No social media integration.
Please, at least tell me that it has a Modern UI where text and controls are indistinguishable from each other (and the window background) and there are dark patterns to steer you away from the useful options?
Spidey-sense tingling. Does not compute. Error! Error!
Reminds me of Bernard and Manny drunkenly discussing their impending fortune:
"Manny, we are going to be ve...very rich."
"How rich, Bernard?"
"Oooh... uncontrolib... incontinently rich."
"Success will bring problems! I don't want to wake up in rehab with Shergar!"
..and it just gets sillier from there.
I made a joke in another article's comments a few days ago about systemd taking over every aspect of the linux platform, and ended my comment with hyperbole along the lines of "some distant future version will even..." (here, I racked my brains to think of something as far away from init scripts as it was possible to imagine) "...handle DISK PARTITIONING, hahahahaha"
Only for a fellow commentard to point out that yes, systemd now handles disk partitioning too.
Truth, stranger, fiction, etc etc.
Stretching your (well, Sir Pterry/Neil Gaiman’s) analogy perhaps too far, I wonder what the Them would make of the Goats’ Cheese, Marionberry & Jalapeño ice-cream I bought from the somewhat hipster-ish Salt & Straw last week?
I'm about 40 minutes away from Portland Oregon, one of the country's tech hubs. I'm just off a major highway, with a town of 100K people about 5 miles down the hill from me and another town of similar size about 8 miles in the other direction. Neighbors all around. This is not the back end of nowhere by any means.
Right now I'm paying $150/month to a local niche ISP for a microwave relay link that bounces off a dish down in the valley and gives me maybe 14Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up on a good day. It does at least have the side-benefit of dropping the occasional cooked-from-the-inside eagle onto my lawn (just kidding, nature lovers).
So, yeah. I'd like to get the previous version of the standard, never mind Rosenworcel's new improved one. 100/20? In my dreams.
Go to hell, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon... and especially Ziply, who keep spamming my phone with unsolicited texts advertising their fiber service even though they don't serve my area.