Posts by Anonymous IV 844 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2011
The scrolling matrix signs in the waiting areas outside most of the departments of my local hospital show the current time.
This is exactly an hour out for at least a week following the change to or from BST, or until some IT bod notices (whichever is the longer)
I do hope that the doctors and surgeons do not rely on this time source...
> I've always had to do regular money laundering training as well as bribery and corruption training.
So you're now a fully-qualified money launderer, briber and corrupter, then?
I remember a secondary-school teacher friend of mine, looking in The Guradian at an advert whose headline was "Could you put together a Youth Offending Team?"
His response was, "Yes, quite easily. Give me about 20 minutes..."
> > When I was in sixth form, there weren't any computers!
> I assume you meant there weren't any computers at your school. Unless you were in sixth form over seventy five years ago! :-)
Seeing as the IBM PC didn't come out in the US until November 1981*, and in the UK the next year, I fear that your date calculations have a very large rounding error.
* I had the edition of Byte to prove it, but it got nicked...
Remarkably apposite word in this circumstance!
In faraway days long, long ago, when IBM used to provide to customers the code of their mainframe DOS/VS operating system on microfiche, and people actually used to read it, there was a complaint from a shocked and horrified manager who objected to the comment "Loop 1000 times, just for the hell of it". The next version of the OS showed a change to "Loop 1000 times".
> The electronic system now also requires me to sign the form at the pharmacy. Not sure why.
It is supposedly to indicate that you have received the prescribed items.
The member of staff who gives them to me just does a squiggle on the form, ever since I found out from Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) a few years ago that my signature is not required, and thus refused to sign it.
Gotta be a rebel in your old age!
She took an Open University course, and one of the TMAs was gibberish.
Andrew Orlowski took up cudgels on her behalf...
Having Googled unsuccessfully, I cannot find whether this name (and thus the generic '---Mc---Face') was an original invention of James Hands, or derives from somewhere else.
"Hands confessed that the proposal was not even new. He suggested it last year in a contest to name a new boat for Condor Ferries operating between Poole and the Channel Islands. The eventual winner in that case was the more sober Liberation."
Does anyone have any knowledge about the origin of the construct?
> "My test system [...] with [...] only 8 GB RAM."
Just a mere 8 GB, eh? And there was me thinking that Ubuntu (desktop, admittedly) would run in half a Gig of RAM...
I haven't seen quite so many howls of abuse about slow running, inexplicable problems, unmitigated horror, and so on, over the last couple of years.
Is this because UK banks have stopped recommending/requiring it, or (gasp!) perhaps TR has fixed all its problems? (Compare Microsoft...)
> The simple answer is that this was a contract created by civil servants that have never been out working in the real world and as such are clew-less but just write what the contractor wants them to.
I think that's the best bit of creative homonym spelling I've seen for a long time!
Even more impressive is that "clew" is meaningful to sailors.
> I'd like admin rights stripped from any staff the moment they hand their resignation in.
How would this help? If this is a known policy, then surely a nefarious individual would do all the naughty stuff before handing in their resignation?
(As you said in your first paragraph...)
Some time around MVT 18 on IBM mainframes, a trainee IBM programmer in the new version release team had a brainwave, and thought that he could reduce the size of the 4-byte IEFBR14 program used in JCL as a 'don't-do-very-much program' to just 2 bytes, so as to save 50% of the space it required, and have it run faster, too!
IEFBR14 consists of
SR R15,R15 ; set the return code register to zero
BR R14 ; branch to the return address in register 14
He removed the first instruction, so the contents of R15 were undefined, and could have any value. This caused considerable unhappiness to occur with all jobs.
It is not known whether the programmer's employment with IBM was continued...
> I wonder how you dealt with illiterates in high places.
They have PAs to do menial computing for them, surely.
<anecdote>We once had an IT manager who advertised for a 'Principle Secretary'. We thought this was a brilliant idea, for he had no principles of his own...</anecdote>
> I literally have over a dozen baby huntsman spiders in my bathroom. I have no idea what to do on account of the fact that I don't want to kill them but they are very skittish and their small size makes them difficult to corral.
So there is a new Australian simile, "like herding baby huntsman spiders", rather than 'cats'?
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