Posts by skswales 98 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2013
Yes, DPA 2018 has indeed been modified by subsequent legislation, e.g. The Data Protection, Privacy and Electronic Communications (Amendments etc) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2019/419/contents). For several years they let the text of the DPA languish, but the one there now is current - https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2018/12/contents - including the UK GDPR.
I love YouTube ads. Last year they were pushing me a commuter yacht to get from my private island to fleet of Maseratis to whisk me to my fractional ownership jet. Oh, and the ThermoFisher-equipped biolab (2 1/2 mins!). I have also been recommended to purchase super-modern infantry fighting vehicles, to attend a military satellite exhibition, and a Finance Conference in Doha. And buy cat food, of course (zero cats at last count).
Our company had the misfortune to purchase one of their systems. Trying to fix said system on receipt, got through and was put in what I can only describe as a conference call with around six other folk support were trying to help at the same time. Support were so useless some of the callers got their fixes from the other callers.
My issue was hardware related. Monitor was poorly focused. Support's solution was to only run it in VGA mode. It was a 21" monitor.
I've had one of the 'speed sign recognition' cars as a courtesy car. Wrong far too much of the time. And GPS maps can't know what's right. I updated my satnav just before the car went out of warranty and quite a lot of the speed limits were wrong even then.
Up here a load of 20 mph signs were dropped seemingly permanently in place early on during COVID as the local council wanted to encourage people to walk locally on the roads without pavements. Of course the temporary speed order for these signs lapsed over six months ago but the council can't be bothered to remove them (I checked with them)...
I still have my Acorn-issued M2 book from the days when EVERYTHING was going to be written in M2.
Even just before Arthur 1.2 came out, Acron manglement were still talking of the OS being written in M2, just that we were 'still working on device drivers in assembler' - or rather that was the lie that they were being fed!
The code generated by M2 was 'interesting'. For some reason it seemed to avoid using R6. In the early days of Arthur, one of us had fouled up something sitting on TickerV with the result that R6 was being corrupted at 100Hz. BASIC went TITSUP almost immediately but AAsm happily kept going. Found it never ever referenced R6.
Other fun fact - clicking in the scroll bar with the right button scrolled the contents of the window in the opposite direction, so it was easy to quickly scroll back a page, look at something, keep scrolling forward without moving the mouse to opposite ends of the scroll bar. And here we are in 2022...
When I make payments on a business account, it attempts to verify the sort code and account number with the payee's name given. Somewhat amusingly, given GDPR, Data Protection and all that, it most often gives me the person's full name, which I was usually unaware of before. Some people do have very interesting middle names!
When school got an RM 380Z with a floppy drive, our head of maths (isn't it always) was convinced that CP/M only allowed single letter filenames. His SOP was to have one floppy disc per class, and assign a letter to each pupil. Some pupils had to share their letter, with predictable results... He thought it was wizardry when I showed him what was possible. Didn't ever change though, as it was written down.
