Posts by trog-oz
39 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Aug 2011
If you're ever lost on the Moon, Ordnance Survey now has you covered for Apollo 11 anniversary
Why does that website take forever to load? Clues: Three syllables, starts with a J, rhymes with crock of sh...
UK transport's 'ludicrous' robocar code may 'put lives at risk'
Big data at sea: How the Royal Navy charts the world's oceans
5G can help us spy on West Midlands with AI CCTV, giggles UK.gov
Happy birthday, you lumbering MS-DOS-based mess: Windows 98 turns 20 today
Re: The ONLY things going for it were
I kept 98 SE until XP Service Pack 3 made XP usable.
I always felt SP3 slowed it down too much and XP SP2 was a point at which M$ should have stopped developing o/s, the other being W3.1 and W2000 (with service packs). NT4 wasn't bad, mostly because it didn't do anything.
After XP, IMO M$ o/s's got more and more bloated and slower and slower. I did some bench marking once and found W7 ran a quarter the speed of XP and W8.1 a twentieth.
As to W98, I had to upgrade my relatively stable W95 machine to it, and the box was never the same. Crashed several times a day.
Activists hate them! One weird trick Facebook uses to fool people into accepting GDPR terms
Commodore 64 owners rejoice: The 1541 is BACK
Microsoft's latest Windows 10 update downs Chrome, Cortana
Re: GIMP is pretty good
No CMYK, but if you know what you are doing, GIMP can record and replay actions, there are a shed load of plugins available, and you can get some PS plugins to work. At work I have the latest version of Adobe Suite available to me but I prefer to use GIMP as I find the user interface much better. The price is unbeatable too!
MPs: Lack of technical skills for Brexit could create 'damaging, unmanageable muddle'
Re: But it will be worth it
"And we'll be getting blue passports.
But I don't want one of those newfangled blue passports. If I can't have a proper black cardboard one, then what is the point of Brexit? Of course, the black passport will be inscribed
Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State
Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty
all those whom it may concern to allow
the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance,
and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection
as may be necessary.
Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!
New coding language Fetlang's syntax designed to read like 'poorly written erotica'
Germans force Microsoft to scrap future pushy Windows 10 upgrades
Ubuntu Linux now on Windows Store (for Insiders)
Hundreds of millions 'wasted' on UK court digitisation scheme
Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death dead in latest Windows 10 preview
That naked picture on my PC? Not mine. The IT guy put it there
When I was in a similar position...
I work in schools and some time ago, a student came in asking me to look at his laptop, which had been loaned to him by the school. Finding it full of porn, I had to report it. Normally, this would go straight to the principal but in this case, the chap's mother worked at the school, so I told her instead. I doubt he'll ever look at porn again!
Dodgy software will bork America's F-35 fighters until at least 2019
Remember Netbooks? Windows 10 makes them good again!
World finally ready for USB-bootable OS/2
Re: What problem will it solve ?
"I'm currently struggling to run Linux Mint as a VM under a Windows 10 host using Virtual Box"
Is there any reason that you're not running Mint natively?
I feel a bit left out, as I have never actually seen a computer running OS/2. I was working on Pick systems back then. I think I'll have a look at the demo and see what the fuss was all about.
GCHQ wants to set your passwords. In a good way
Mad Max: Fury Road – two hours of nonstop, utterly insane fantasy action
I saw it Friday and I agree with the author of the article that it was 30 minutes too long. Also, the story was boring, there was too much cgi and absolutely no humour. There have been less jokes in each successive Max film, and we have finally reached zero. Where are the classic one liners such as "I am the Nightrider. I'm a fuel injected suicide machine. I am the rocker, I am the roller, I am the out-of-controller!", "Greetings from The Humungus! The Lord Humungus! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!" or "Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... Dyin' time's here."? Only Nathan Jones saved this film from being a complete waste of time. In the next installment, I think the script writers should kill off Max in the first couple of minutes and devote the rest of the story to Rictus. Or better yet, put it out to pasture. Some things should not be rebooted.
Snapper's decisions: Whatever happened to real photography?
Film cameras have a very long life
I regularly use an Exakta Varex VX, of 1952 vintage, which is 7 years older than me. I also still use my first "proper" camera, a Ricoh KR5 which I bought with my first pay cheque in 1979. My newest film camera is a Pentax LX of 1982, which I bought second hand in 1999. A truly beautiful camera to use. I very much doubt even the most expensive DSLR will be viable after 65 years. I think I'll stick to film. I do have a happy snappy digital, but if's really junky and the Kodak Brownie Starmite that I was given when I was 7 or 8 feels much nicer. Shame 127 film is almost impossible to find as I'd love to use it again.
Microsoft WINDOWS 10: Seven ATE Nine. Or Eight did really
RIP MSN Messenger, kthxbai. Microsoft finally flicks on KILL SWITCH in China
Thirteen Astonishing True Facts You Never Knew About SCREWS
Brimingham screwdriver
My Dad was a Brummie and he always called it a Yankie screwdriver. He owned a couple of Yankie screwdrivers (which I now have) but he always called those pump screwdrivers. One of our favourite pastimes was seeing how many No 8 S/Ts we could get spinning like tops on the bench. I don't think we ever counted them, but I guess we got around 30 going at once. When I show this trick to people they are amazed but most can't do it.
'Burning platform' Elop: I'd SLASH and BURN stuff at Microsoft, TOO
The importance of complexity
Dev writes comments as limericks and other coding secrets
I'm childish too
"Whenever I have a queue of files I prefix the field names FQ:"
All of my quicky shell scripts contain :
for f in `blah blah`
A lot of the production scripts do to! Back in the day, I was a COBOL programmer, and every one of my programs contained variables INSULT and INJURY, just so I could ADD INSULT TO INJURY.
Is the IT industry short on Cobolers? This could be your lucky day
Typical "rc" bollox
I've never obtained a job using a "consultant". They are just salespeople, full of hype and buzzwords and low on action. When I hire staff, I gets lots of head hunter companies calling and I tell them to sod off! I suggest they get the prospective candidate to send in a CV directly. I'm also very good at spotting CVs written by professional writing services; these go straight into the bin.
The article is full of this typical hype and poor use of language.
"... that when you say your last job was fiveyears where you used..." WTF does that mean?
"...toxic symmetry..." WTF?
"Talking about re-architecting is a high risk strategy..." WTF!!I assume this means replacing one system, with another is fraught with problems.
After 35 years in the game, the legacy furrow has served me well and I predict it will do so for the remaining 10 years of my career. I've never had a problem getting work, always using a mix of the old and the new.
Linux in 2013: 'Freakishly awesome' – and who needs a fork?
The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Billionaire baron Bill Gates still mourns Vista's stillborn WinFS
Search engines we have known ... before Google crushed them
I've always gone for shorter URLs
I've always typed everything into the address bar, so opt towards yahoo simply because it is one character less than google. When I discovered that Ask Jeeves could be accessed via aj, I've always used that. I wonder how many keystrokes I've saved over the years?
Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK
Australian managed to change all it's road signs to metric in 1970 and it's a bigger country than the UK. We have more signs as well. At a junction there isn't just a sign telling you how far to the next place (like here in the UK) but distances to all the places the road goes to. The little men did it in a long weekend too,.
Employers' group: New comp sci GCSE driven by vendor agenda
Old news
I started working in schools 9 years ago as ICT technician and even then the mood was (not helped by BECTA) that schools should be training students in the use of M$ products, rather than teaching transferable IT skills. The school that I was working at ran Linux on the student desktops; this was an initiative pushed by IT staff. The school was very innovative in this regard. The other staff waged a constant battle to have Linux removed from the school as they thought it was damaging the students prospects. After I left, Linux was removed and all student desktops replaced with MACs.
The school also ran a scheme to get each student to leave with an ECDL and while the initial 6 students on the scheme did get the ECDL the scheme was dropped by later management as they didn't see the benefit of an industry recognised qualification.
Daily students just need a web browser and an office suite and the operating system and products are irrelevant. It could be argued that they don't need IT at all; a pen and paper was good enough for me, and there is a surprising volume of written work still required, especially in English and modern foreign languages. As an aside, when I was school in the 1960's and 70's, if you broke your arm, you wrote with the other one. Nowadays, if kids break their arm, IT are expected to lend them a netbook so they can do the work.
The school that I work at now is entirely M$ and the students really do have no knowledge of alternative technologies. Neither do the staff.
HUD's up! Ubuntu creates menu-free GUI
what??
"In a video demo here (beware – it downloads to your desktop)"
It didn't download to my desktop, it just played in the browser, and I am using one of Bill's inferior operating systems too!
I can't see HUD being of any use to me. Since I've installed my PC, I know every application that is on there and where on the menu it lives. I also know how to access every application from the command line. The only problem I get is knowing what application to choose to install. For example, I used to use kuickshow as an image viewer, but when I upgraded from KDE3.5 to KDE4, kuickshow didn't work. I don't see how HUD would work any better than Google in helping to decide on gwenview.
Beeb rescues old Who episodes
Linus Torvalds dubs GNOME 3 'unholy mess'
KDE4 has the same usability problems
I have similar experience to Torvalds. I've always used KDE; I like KMail and KOffice, etc and I loved the KDE3.5 desktop. When I installed Fedora 11, I went through great pains to install KDE3.5. It worked wonderfully. Sometimes, we watch BBC iPlayer and rather than huddle around the PC monitor, I plug the PC into the TV, configure X for two monitors and watch the program on the TV. Recently I upgraded to Fedora 15 and bit the bullet and went for KDE4. I found it to be unusable. When trying to use BBC iPlayer, the picture would constantly pause for 3 or 4 seconds, while the sound carried on playing normally. I didn't want to upgrade my hardware just to cope with KDE4, so I upgraded to IceWm. KDEapps play nicely with it and it is very quick.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
