Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
You're mixing up spacing of glyphs with their size. Courier may have its glyphs in similar sizes but printing them readably depends on the spacing being more or less right which a recalcitrant printer might not bother with, especially if it realises that Mr Dabbs is the user victim.
It was an occasional occurrence at the biological suppliers where I once worked. It was based in an old Victorian villa & there'd a few escapes of rats which had bred. Hollow walls, hollow floors - plenty of spaces for them.
There was a mitigating factor. One of the managers, in charge of preparing microscope specimens for schools, stayed behind one night with an air-gun and shot one. Realising that it had a good chance of being infected with trypanosomes which would give him a batch of slides he went off to get a syringe. When he came back the body had been dragged away, presumably to be eaten by the other rats.
We also have our own coronaviruses which have evolved along with us. In prehistory with small human populations with little contact between groups a newly species-hopped virus that was lethal would be unlikely to propagate far unless it evolved. In other words there would have been effective selection pressure in the past.
What's new about this one is that it's hit us when we've got large, densely packed population centres with large-scale fast travel between them. We need to find a new way of exerting selection pressure and vaccination is one way of doing that.
Even if the ploy was running out of time there's no excuse for publicising it like this. Far better to have said "brilliant operation by our agents to break into what was a secure system" etc. In the mean time set the guy up producing the next generation product.
Unless, of course it was really a break in and the dev being thrown to the wolves was singularly uncooperative and they're taking revenge.
One evening, long ago, when men were men and the University computers were made by ICL and had model numbers starting with 19, I was sitting the at a card punch when one of the staff came through taking a conducted tour of the computer centre so I tagged along. We went down into the computer room. Slightly embarrassed member of staff discovered the box (at least 6 foot high) whose door he opened wasn't the CPU, just some of the memory and thought the engineers must have rearranged them.
I remember reading, a long time ago, that the function of a Unix kernel* was to provide an illusion of place and an illusion of process**. Some people seem unable to perceive these illusions. I don't think it helps that modern UI (and that includes web) designers seem to go out their way to conceal them. UX designers, of course, are amongst those who don't perceive the illusions at all.
* Other OS kernels are also available
** The reality, of course, is a scatter of segments on a disk and slices of time on a CPU
Maybe where other monitors display "no signal" it should display "this is a monitor, not an iMac".
Maybe something like this should be the standard message on all monitors. "No signal" is a message tor techies who would just as easily understand the significance of the luser version: "If you can see this message you haven't switched your computer on. This screen is only your monitor. If you're not sure what your computer looks like follow the cable coming out of the back of the monitor and it should be on the other end. Not the cable that leads to the power socket, the other one."
7. Use in production.
It's only in 7, and even then only at large scale that rare, sporadic failures become recognisable. Even if you were lucky enough to catch one at the previous stages you wouldn't be able to reproduce it reliably enough to understand it.
"You might want to see a sparse CV. You might know what you are looking for. The guard droid, however, is looking to tick boxes and most job advertisements don't actually indicate which boxes need ticking. " etc.
Perhaps the solution is to specify what sort of CV you want to see, both to the guard droid (to whom it should be made clear their own job is on the line if they don't follow it) and in the job ad.
"replaced them with serviced accommodation for 40-50 seats."
I think this is the key. They'd better not be located in the cities, however. They need to be close to where people live. By the time the planners catch up with this it will be too late.
We've had a local neighbourhood plan produced. It would have been fine 100 years ago - everyone worked within walking distance of their homes. Fifty years ago the cracks would have been showing as the mills closed, their sites started to be built over for housing and people were starting to commute by car. Forward another decade and all those old houses with no off-street parking to facilitate charging electric cars will be useless without a return to local working - which isn't, of course, in the plan.
"it's a volunteer OSS project"
It seems we have to keep repeating this: there are published statistics on who contributes most to Linux. The main contributors are inevitably corporate. It's in Intel's interest, for instance, that their products are supported so they're always there are thereabouts at the top of the list. From memory Google and Red Hat are also leading contributors.
It's a lot cheaper for someone who needs an OS kernel that can be almost met by Linux to take it and tweak it than to develop from scratch and it's also cheaper to contribute their changes back than to have to keep applying them to every new version of the kernel.
It's called collaborative development.
"The main reasons for things like IR35 and similar rules designed by HMRC...."
I rather think the main reason is that HMRC staff are salaried employees. That's the way of working they understand. They prefer PAYE - a tax system designed by employees for employees. Anything else is foreign to them and hence automatically suspect.
