Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
Just don't answer the phone. You can explain this later by saying you were too busy fixing the problem. Once the problem is fixed it's difficult to argue against that. A variation would be that you were too short-handed to spare anyone to answer the phone, something that will need to be addressed in the post-incident review. Alternatively just unplug the phone and explain that the problem had taken the phones out as well.
"Yo-- in Philly we say "scarfs RAM", and scoff at guys who talk different."
Regular English supports multiple meanings for words and doesn't resort to such tactics. That leaves me wondering how many words you have to disambiguate "set".
Mine's the one with both volumes of the SHorte Oxfrod Dictionary in the pockets.
"*No* possible editing power or functionality is possibly worth making me learn a new UI in the 3rd decade of the 21st century."
Well said.
Hence vi. That was what was the available editor when I started using Unix.* IME one of the best things about it are ex mode commands for making bulk changes. The notation has passed into common use here with expressions such as s/emacs/vi/g
I've just taken a quick look at your preferred tilde and rebounded promptly: grey on medium blue. These old eyes prefer the contrast of black on white with white on black as an acceptable alternative. I do take your point about CUA. It's been built into many GUI interfaces, at least to some degree, for a long time except those which seem insistent into drifting off into realms unknown.
* Not strictly true, the first Unix box was supplied without a few things including vi & C shell but had the Rand editor which I've never seen since. First day in a new job where it was vi rather than Rand was a slight panic,managed by vague memories of ex commands and an after-work dash to Dillons. The hastily bought book on vi is still in my bookshelves.
It sounds as if he's saying it's monotonic but not rectilinear. Even a non-mathematician like me can grok that. Doing it 4 dimensions - maybe a bit trickier.
And if you want a physical representation, think of an old surveyor's tape (it's probably an old surveyor who owns it). It's a bit stretched in places - the tape, not the surveyor (well, maybe the surveyor as well). As you trace along the tape the numbers get bigger all the time (monotonic) but sometimes the next number is further away and sometimes it's closer (not rectilinear).
Now you can roll it up but keep it safe - I may need it later to explain the difference between accuracy and precision.
It's not necessarily as easy as you might think. I have the Yorkshire part of Domesday as image, as an old translation from the Journal of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society and a massive Penguin paperback translation of the whole thing. The translations don't necessarily agree with each other while reading the original as image isn't easy and even then you're stuck with medieval administrative Latin. Then there's a paper of Stenton's from the 1920s where he argued that's what's written down might have been a misreading of the originsl notes...
I think some of what you list still falls into the busy-work category and some of the payments stuff could and probably already is be automated away. Then the more of these you have, the bigger the office to put them in and the more HR and facilities stuff you have and more layers of middle management. That quotation I picked out really says it all.
The root of this seems to have been Blair's notion that half the population had to go to university irrespective of whether vocational courses would have been better, This was far too expensive so student grants were replaced with student loans which doesn't really seem to relieve the public purse of the burden, at least in the short term, and burdens the student with debt. At the same time it raises the employment requirement to degree level where it was otherwise unnecessary and the two combined ensure that many youngsters, unwilling to take on the debt, are shut out of careers that they could have taken up a generation or so ago. OTOH we have a lot of graduates with degrees of no interest to employers.
It looked like a stupid idea at the time and has fulfilled that promise.
"Society as a whole is not set up to cope with people NOT dying, pension plans, superannuation, have limited capacity and are already straining in various countries around the world."
"It has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment.
So financially speaking, it's unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate." Yes, Prime Minister.
Because it was built in laboratory conditions the mirror was very precisely ground but to the wrong profile. Fortunately the profile was known which facilitated the production, under similar conditions, of corrective optics. So what happened in space was "just" field service fitting a factory-made component.
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