Posts by Anonymous IV 782 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011
On my officially-mandated exercise session, I was walking along the canal towpath when I passed two dubious-looking individuals sitting on one of the benches. This is what I overheard:
First yokel: "Do you know why that Boris Johnson has caught Covid-19? "
Second yokel: "No, why? "
First yokel: "It's because he shut down all the pubs. It's karma! "
"Bob's" story is so reminiscent of...
With torch shining bright he strode on in the night
'Til he came to the room with the safe.
"Hello son, I hope you're having fun."
"You've got it wrong, sir, I'm only the cleaner."
With that he fired, the other saying as he died,
"you've done me wrong." It's the same old song forever.
> What is "Bing"?
Bing used to be a manufacturer of a fizzy drink available in East Kent (at least) in the latter half of the last century, notable for the swing metal, ceramic and rubber stopper used to close the bottle, if not for its taste.
What a pity that they (probably) didn't trade-mark the name, which would have prevented MS from using it for a search engine...
We had occasion to buy a whole bunch of Duracell CR2032 CMOS batteries for some second-hand PCs we'd bought.
* taking off the PC system unit case, removing the old CR2032 battery - 10 seconds
* cutting round the 'child-proof' blister pack (two layers of plastic) - about a minute, and a LOT of effort
* inserting the new CR2032 battery and replacing the case - 10 seconds
The plastic shroud is so tough and so close to the battery that you stand a good chance of actually cutting the battery. In any event, after a few of these replacements you're left with very sore fingers.
Perhaps the firm should be renamed "DuraPackaging"?
> I only have vague memories of working on these types of machines from my time at Durham University, using both an System 360/65 and a System 370/168
In the early 1970s Durham University used to make use of Newcastle University's IBM 360/67 which ran Michigan terminal System (MTS) time sharing. The link between Newcastle University and Durham University was described as costing "a diplomat's ransom"! But presumably you are referring to a slightly later era?
A very similar account to this story was posted in November 2016.
I won't repeat my tale of the Amstrad PCW8512 diskette drives, similarly affected by direct sunlight...
> > Barclaycard had just laid off everyone in the IT department...
> > Someone had, at some point in time, left a floppy in the drive
> I suggest that these two statements are related.
You forget Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Quite some time ago there was a situation where a network group, part of <Huge Bank PLC>, based loosely in the southern half of the UK, were completely unaware of the existence of a second network group doing identical work, but loosely in the northern half of the UK.
(If you had worked in IT for <Huge Bank PLC> this information would have come as no surprise...)
When I read the headline I thought, "Oh goody! Andrew is going to do an article about the inimitable and irreplaceable (and irreplaced) Sarah Bee, former Moderatrix of this parish, and greatly missed." But sadly no, and even more sadly he, too, is going.
Royal Baby guff can never compete with these exponents of the keyboard.
If your PCs/laptops were powered on any time over the last three days (from 5 March onwards) it's highly likely that Chrome has already updated itself.
If you need to check a bunch of them, then use
dir "\\<pcname>\C$\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application" /ad
on each PC, and look for the folder named 72.0.3626.121
Or perform the equivalent in PowerShell!
It's another one of those opaquely-funded groups which try to change government policy at 55 Tufton Street.
That seems a very limited ambition. Do they intend to extend the scope of government policy changing to the rest of Tufton Street? The whole of the London Borough of Westminster? London itself? Further? I think we should be told...
Look up "Microsoft Truetype core fonts for the Web" (or variants thereof), and download them.
This will give you Andalé Mono, Arial, Arial Black, Comic Sans, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Verdana and Webdings.
Bask in Microsoft's 2002 fontal generosity!
[You knew you wanted Comic Sans...]
> I remember as a puny undergrad having to use the hideous terminals Programming Simula/67 and Fortran
They were perfectly decent terminals - for the time. I'm surprised that you didn't program in Algol W and 360 Assembler rather than Fortran and Simula. But I suppose things were made easy for the undergrads of that time... <evil grin!>
"Several years ago" we installed PDP11/M micros in our offices in various towns in England. These were given three-letter names, usually the first three letters of the town name, like BRI for Brighton.
A new office was opened in Bristol, but the machine name was already taken.
The obvious three-letter name (containing two Ts) was vetoed by Management (boo, hiss), so it had to be called BST.
There is a story that Tony Benn once sent out advance copies of a speech to the news agencies, leading to several newspapers commenting on it. However, he gave a completely different speech to the audience! This enabled the arch prankster to rant on about the lying and corrupt press making out that he had said things which he didn't say. Only those virtuous reporters who had actually bothered to attend could have reported what he had really said!
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