Posts by Philip Hodges

Shortages, price rises, recession: Tech industry preps for hard Brexit

Re: And all we can do...

"It is critical" is meaningless. So is "it really is time".

It is no good if we "move on" ever closer to doom.

The price far exceeds any promised or actual benefits.

People thought the 1975 referendum was a one-time vote.

Neither the 1975 nor the 2016 referendum was binding.

The wording of the question in 1975 was "Do you think ...". A large majority thought, and voted to keep the 2 year old status quo.

In 2016 the voters were asked for an opinion, without having to think. They were not told the true price. They were not asked why or how we should suddenly unravel 46 years of status quo and leave.

Surely common sense and prudent housekeeping can be even more important than trying to respect every idiotic outcome of an imperfect democratic process.

On the third day of Windows Microsoft gave to me: A file-munching run of DELTREE

Re: Not a good look here [gnawed electricals]

Any Mk Golf can have electrical problems if it is parked in the open where a stone marten can chew through the wires and hoses.

That scary old system with 'do not touch' on it? Your boss very much wants you to touch it. Now what do you do?

Re: Insurers, banks, board of trade, government... [COBOL is modernish]

Some of us are as short in the tooth as COBOL, there's no need to be an insensitive clod.

Parliament takes axe to 2nd EU referendum petition

Re: Anti-democratic?

EEA only mitigates about half that financial fallout, according to the treasury analysis (compares EEA / bilateral / WTO). It's still huge. People were told that leaving to "take back control" would save money. They had no idea that they were in fact voting to be so much worse off.

For pity's sake, you fool! DON'T UPGRADE it will make it worse

US International keyboard layout

What works well enough for me is to install the US International keyboard layout on every Windows instance, delete all the other layouts so that individual applications cannot unexpectedly revert due to some inadvertent hot key combination I didn't bother to disable, and warn colleagues / family not to touch my keyboards while I am logged in. To do accents in Windows I just have to remember to hit a dead punctuation key instead of the Mac's Option key. I also install a picture of the layout as desktop wallpaper so that I can find a degree symbol or a euro currency sign.

Intel 'underestimates error bounds by 1.3 QUINTILLION'

Re: obligatory

No, just neatish.

Charity: Ta for the free Win 8.1, Microsoft – we'll use it to install Win 7

The irony is that even without being asked the live tiles happily show unwanted distracting information in a tiny window surrounded by other unwanted tiny tiles, but when given an explicit request and the run of the full screen with 1024 x 600 pixels it isn't enough for TIFKAM and they refuse to display anything at all. Fortunately, real time updates that I consider irrelevant or distracting can be turned off. I could choose a scaled display resolution, but then the real applications I use all the time look wrong.

Reality check: Java 8 finally catches a multi-core break

Re: Just a question: "utilize"?

how about: "I finally found a utilize for that chocolate teapot".

Apple admits to Mavericks iWork cockup, promises rescue

storm damage

In German it is not a "Scheiße Sturm" or even a "Scheißesturm", they seem to have adopted the English term so it is "der Shitstorm".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shitstorm

Anglicism of the year 2011, Word of the year 2012.

Apple scrambles to fix buggy Mavericks apps

Re: From my experience

It might be annoying, but the blame is correct. Exposing a bug in someone else's software is great during the test phase, but is not very clever in a production release. They should be humble and they should be very concerned, no matter how relieved they are that for once the defect was not in their own software, and that it has been found.

[There have been at least two cases where Apple software was indeed responsible for disk corruption: having to boot in safe mode to repair a disk before journalling was enabled by default for OSX was no fun, and going back another decade there was the black dot System 7 fix.]

Pop OS X Mavericks on your Mac for FREE while you have LUNCH

Re: snow leopard is cool, no need to insult it

Of course I asked but they still refused point blank to support current platforms. I guess they don't want to run an extra test cycle just to stop people laughing at them. The joke gets better: their product is mostly written in Java, so goodness knows why any part of it still has to be architecture specific. I can only imagine that they had a contract to build and test versions for exactly three architectures, and their customer hasn't realized there is only one version under the hood and they are being ripped off. I only wanted to run it on a more recent machine because it was annoyingly slow on the older one.

I know I didn't use the word "universal" in one of the precise Apple senses, but I think it is still appropriate with the conventional meaning. I've got a few carbon and classic applications I'd like to put through their paces on a 64 bit intel machine too.

snow leopard is cool, no need to insult it

There is one excellent reason to be a "complete laggard" and "still back on Snow Leopard". In a single-step downgrade you can get to Mavericks and lose Rosetta and break universal applications written for it as recently as not even three years ago.