Posts by Doctor Syntax 42421 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"It's difficult to budget for replacements when the gubbermint keeps cutting said budget."
This is the trouble with buggerment budgeting. If you don't spend this year's budget next year's gets trimmed back to match. In this case it's probably "You're still using the old one so you don't need a new one.".
Remember that your laser fax/copier/printer is also a source of contamination. I had a client who provided a reprographics service at a client a couple of hundred miles or so from the main office. Why is lost in the mists of time but recovering after a crash required a floppy. I learned that it was a good idea to take a spare drive if I had to visit, the existing one was always gunged up with toner.
"is for BT to pay less to shareholders and more into the scheme."
Which they are doing and are committed to do for several years. The "more" amounts to several billions. The trouble is they're chasing after the ongoing missed income from the investments they should have made but didn't during the enforced contributions holiday.
"Here is a quick guide to where it all went wrong."
The article linked is about 10 years old (and also seems to have been written as an apologia for Brown). It doesn't include the effect of persistent low interest rates since then. Since the financial crisis nobody has dared put interest rates up so that pension schemes have been suffering from the persistently low annuity rates.
some company final salary pension schemes had so much money in them that they were stopped from taking pension contributions from employees
FTFY
They were stopped by HMRC who had a rather short term view of things, not a good idea when dealing with pensions. They made estimates of what they thought such pension schemes would need to meet future requirements and ruled anything else would be tax evasion. They were wrong. They assumed interest rates wouldn't fall.
Cue the cursed one again. He gave the BoE the task of managing interest rates aiming for a CPI of 2%. As a lot of stuff in the CPI was going over to manufacturing in China or wherever it stayed low so interest rates fell. That threw out all the calculations HMRC had made because the estimated needs depend on the projected returns from annuities which are tied to interest rates. The fact that housing costs were in RPI but not CPI meant that a blind eye was turned on the housing bubble.
And yet after the eejit was thrown out of office - years too late - he got some nice job in a US university lecturing on how to run an economy without mentioning that he ran one into the ground.
"if they could just sell a Windows compatible UI that sits on Linux that would be the best thing for everyone I believe"
You believe some strange things. MS have been progressively screwing up the Windows UI for the last several years. There are plenty who wouldn't consider it the best thing at all so scrap "everyone". .
"https://fossbytes.com/xenix-history-microsoft-unix-operating-system/
Not sure how accurate it is"
It seems rather muddled. The thesis is that MS dropped Xenix because IBM went for MS-DOS on PCs so they didn't need it. Given that Xenix was a server OS and MS-DOS a client that's a non-sequitur. Xenix followed by SCO Openserver, often with an application package based on Informix was a mainstay of a lot of small businesses with either green-screens or PCs as terminals. Until MS started doing server versions of Windows the two were largely complementary.
"Sorry, but after forced upgrade of RHEL5 to 6 (process also also known as wipe clean and start from scratch) few years ago just to be able to run LibreOffice built against some latest and greatest library I don't believe that."
After trying one of the Red Hat derivatives some time ago and having had similar problems compiling something I Googled around and came across a forum post where someone was asking about a similar problem. They were in effect told they shouldn't be compiling, their own stuff, they should just use the distro's version. I felt that someone was missing the point and I didn't think it was me. I left the land of Red Hat and haven't returned.
OTOH I suspect that often configs are apt to specify recent if not bleeding edge versions of packages as the minimum simply because that's what the dev has on their own machine rather than specifying the oldest version that provides the functionality, or at least the oldest version anyone's likely to have. That suspicion is confirmed when one then finds a binary download of the same version which runs quite happily in the environment which failed to compile it.
"Neeps with haggis of course aren't what the English call turnips, but are actually Swedish Turneeps, or swedes, which are lovely"
OK, total confusion now. When I worra lad turnips were the large yellow-fleshed veg used, inter alia to make turnip lanterns for bonfire night (Halloween? <spit>) and swedes were the little white jobs. Now it seems to be t'other way about. So I'm not sure what you're alleging the English call turnips.
Personally I prefer the big yellow-fleshed version and even better mashed with carrots.
But let's also hear it for kohl rabbi.
"I started with the Royal Mail, but misremembered the year I moved in to my current house"
There could also be a problem with Royal Mail not knowing the correct house. I discovered that PAF had the address wrong all the time my parents lived here. Off-hand I couldn't say whether I corrected it before or after we moved in.
"I am curious if the resistance to the notion of China pulling off this caper is due to academic skepticism "
I don't think it's resistance to the notion, it's just that it's difficult to square a story based on unnamed sources against such unequivocal denials. There's something distinctly odd going on. here.
"And before you say to tell your correspondents to just sent plain text, try doing that to someone over your head."
One of the joys of being retired is that there's nobody in that position. I have, in the past had the pleasure of pointing it out to some numpty from the Co-op that his email which consisted entirely of an image of text that it failed some of his employer's core values because it would be useless to a blind person who required a screen reader. I've also stood up in a shareholders' meeting to complain about bad email practice.
I'm reminded of a lesson I learned years ago.
There was a Software Tools exhibition at Olympia or the like. Being very new in the industry and enthused with all the AT&T stuff like Programmer's Workbench which was relatively recent I went along expecting to see all sorts of wonderful stuff to aid the developer. Nope. It was all stuff for management to measure developers and the like.
It was my first introduction to the fact that there were a lot of people who wanted to be "in computers" but didn't really want to do hard stuff like cut code. I encountered a lot of them as time went on. Provided I could avoid as many as possible it was still a fun 20 years.
