Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Then, if for you silly money for software means any sum above zero, that's another matter."
Money becomes silly if it's more than the S/W's worth. If all I need to do is rotate images of SWMBO's patchwork back and forth to get the orientation right and them crop them for here weekly class handout then 150 of any currency units above pence is going to be silly.
Definitely +1 for Pinta. Kolorpaint can also be handy.
I regularly have to prepare images of SWMBO's patchwork for her class handouts and Gimp gets used for rotating the images backwards and forwards to get optimal orientation - and yet somehow Gwenview seems easier for the final crop.
I end up using a combination of all four - in Gimp the simple and complex are often equally obscure to work out.
This light at Cragside appears to have no electricity supply.
https://i2.wp.com/heritagecalling.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/cragside-lamp.jpg?resize=358%2C361&ssl=1
In fact one of the contacts is the copper base it stands on (the body is cloisonné enamel on copper) and the other is a wire dipping into a small bowl of mercury. Lifting the lamp turns it off, setting back in its correct position turns it on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq2G4JIWbEw
"the mercury sphygmomanometers were deemed ‘too dangerous for the students’"
A few years ago I was recalled to my GP. They'd taken my blood pressure on their electronic gubbins which was subsequently found to have been out of calibration so they had to redo it the old-fashioned way. There's a lot to be said for instruments where you can see exactly what it is you're measuring against (e.g. the traditional chemical balance) but the lure of a number (so it must be right) on a display is too strong for some people.
"Liquid mercury is not very dangerous unless you spread it over a wide area "
The second carbon-dating system in QUB used a chemistry based on acetylene. As it tends to explode at pressures of about one and a half atmospheres the entire gas processing line was run at below atmospheric with a mercury manometer at each step so that if the pressure got too great the manometer acted as a pressure release valve. IIRC the surface of the mercury in the pots was covered with oil.
I used to buy stuff from the local shop for more pounds because buying stuff over the internet took too long. Unfortunately, by the power of the leveraged buy-out, my local Maplin is no more. And conversely I find myself wasting time going to a local shop* when it would be quicker to have gone to the net first because the local shop doesn't have whatever it is I'm looking for anyway.
*Although recently a local shop did point me to https://www.screwsline.co.uk/ when they didn't have what I needed.
If you remember Windows pre-95 the icon for the button at the left of the title bar had on oblong on it (I suspect it was an image of a space bar because I think some incantation involving space could substitute for it). It was said that a good tester could look at that oblong and see a minus sign.
"the wrong buttons were pressed"
These days it becomes difficult to distinguish the button from anything else on the page. Or the button is further down the page, below the several inches of white space that extends to the bottom of the screen. Or work out which bit of text is a link and which isn't because the User Experience Designer has gone to considerable lengths to ensure they're the same colour.
All because of style over function, style is a matter of fashion and fashion dictates flat design.
Designing an interface takes knowledge, intelligence and thought. Anything cobbled together with crayons is an experience even if the adjective in front of it should be "bad" so a User Experience is substituted for a User Interface.
Place the blame where it belongs.
"Even the smallest of changes to an aircraft triggers a huge chain of events in motion, with each event starting its own chain and so on."
The correct way of doing it is not to get it wrong in the first place. Then there are no costs for making a change and no costs, human and financial, from not doing so.
Governments are particularly prone to that outlook. I think it's because they make laws which are supposed to be obeyed so there's a presumption that they will be. The evidence given by the existence of a large law enforcement system is overlooked. There's also an assumption that laws will be obeyed in the way they intended - it's the sort of thinking that sees nothing could possibly go wrong with back-doored encryption.
"I must re-read the Yes Minister books again."
One or other of them should be a set book for GCSE English. Every year. They're now sufficiently old to be considered classics (which they always were, of course) and far more relevant than the classics Dickens and Jane Austen were in my day.
BTW Lossiemouth was a warning to Bernard that it might be his diet.
The first two episodes of YPM were on BBC4 the other evening. It doesn't seem to be part of a plan to rebroadcast the lot.
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