Posts by Pompous Git 3087 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2014
I still have my Grandfather's slide rule, and occasionally use it. It does not need sunlight. It will work in any light by which you can see it.
My grandfather never needed one since he was a pavier. However, I still have mine from high school; an Acu-Math No 400. While the slide rule might work "in any light by which you can see it" sadly my eyes won't. I need to use a magnifier...
Welsh people are ancient evil entities from a dimension beyond human understanding
Depends on where the humans are from. There was a Merkin couple eating in a restaurant in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwll-llantysiliogogogoch and arguing about how to pronounce the placename. To settle the issue, they called over the waitress and asked her. She said, ever so slowly, "Bur-ger-King".
Is it really that hard to Find/Replace the name with <Redacted> and re-publish ? Seems to me that going back over the text and covering each occurrence of the name with a black rectangle is a lot more time-consuming, on top of being totally inefficient.
When denied access to the appropriate software you do what you can. My last employer (government) did precisely that.
The issue is that Microsoft have persuaded the hardware vendors also to drop support for older versions of Windows
MS must have been doing this for quite a long time. The Adaptec SCSI driver that came with my Canon FS 2710 slide scanner only worked with Win2k using a workaround they never published or WinXP. The driver doesn't work under Vista or Win7. Canon have never released an updated driver.
I have never purchased another Canon product.
I recall an issue with Windows 95 where it wouldn't run on certain high speed AMD processors.
AMD K7; I had two. The problem was windows installer code running "too fast". Shitty coding. There was a workaround. The problem never occurred with NT4.
Granted, no-OS machines exist on desktop PC:s from small "garage assemblers", or you can buy a "barebone", but getting a usable laptop with no OS is hard.
Obviously, you never tried. Do you really believe that corporate purchasers purchase their PCs with Windows and then pay extra for Volume Licensing? Here's how to purchase a laptop without an OS from Dell:
http://www.geek.com/chips/buying-a-dell-without-windows-is-not-easy-but-possible-1302452/
It's a rare day when I don't find myself on it to check one piece of trivia or other and it's just plain useful to satisfy my vague need to look things up which aren't important enough to rigorously fact check.
To give the Wiki-bloody-pedia its due, it's slightly more useful than that. When you get to a certain age, it makes a useful reminder for recalling stuff you knew well once upon a Disney, long, long ago. And if you feel the information is suspect, the references at the bottom make a useful start to further fact-checking.
Where do you go to check that something on Wikipedia is neither opinion based nor controversial?
Go to your nearest reference library. Talk to the librarians; they are specialists in sourcing information. Sadly, here in Tasmania our librarians are slowly being replaced by "library technicians" who often can't tell you whether it's raining or Tuesday.
I think we should put a moratorium on fertility research until we can figure out were to house and employ the humans that we already have...
Speaking personally, I don't have any people. While Leviticus tells me I can enslave people from Victoria, both the Federal and Victorian governments frown on this. I certainly have enough work and food for slaves.
I think the reason that English and Spanish are more prevalent has more to do with all the genocide that the Brits and the Spaniards committed around the world than it has with the language itself...
By that argument we should all be squeaking some Australian aboriginal tongue. They managed to completely eliminate the Lake Mungo people and the Kow Swamp people, two hominid races that weren't descended from mitochondrial Eve. The latter were still around 10,000 years ago and resembled H. Robusta except with even bigger teeth.
However, you are also absolutely wrong about not knowing the relative incidence - violence against women perpetrated by men is much more common than the other way around.
This is true, but doesn't address a deeper issue. Women usually incite another man to physically abuse their abusive husband. Then there are men who are physically abused by other men for any of a number of reasons. Men are physically abused far more frequently than women, but according to the publicity, it's only violence against women that is a concern.
Domestic abuse isn't just a man hitting a woman. Both parties in a relationship can be abusive.
With men it's usually physical and with women emotional. Local case was particularly sad. Woman informed her friends that husband was shagging twelve year old step-daughter. Husband of one of those friends shot the alleged paedophile and hid the body. Some years alter the killer experienced remorse and showed the police where the body had been dumped.
In the ensuing court case, the woman admitted she had been lying about her husband shagging her daughter.
one women is killed by a current or ex partner every three days
Usually it's onbe woman, or many women. But what I really can't get over is the concept of a woman capable of coming back to life after being killed, yet for whatever reason doesn't run away to avoid being killed again. Maybe it's addictive...
Behaviour in the natural world are not always things that are acceptable in human society
My favourite is a species of flea where when an amorous male flea comes across a female flea already being penetrated by another male flea. He then inserts his prick through the carapace of the male flea and his semen kills the other male's semen and goes on to fertilise the female. Perhaps Big G has a particularly warped sense of humour :-)
The Branch Davidians didn't get into trouble for being a cult, but for breaking other laws.
According to the Wiki-bloody-pedia:
On July 30, ATF agents David Aguilera and Skinner visited the Branch Davidians' gun dealer Henry McMahon, who tried to get them to talk with Koresh on the phone. Koresh offered to let ATF inspect the Branch Davidians' weapons and paperwork and asked to speak with Aguilera, but Aguilera declined. Sheriff Harwell told reporters regarding law enforcement talking with Koresh, "Just go out and talk to them, what's wrong with notifying them?"
Probably not the time or place to debate this, but there does seem reasonable grounds for suspicion that this was a case of the US government testing the limits of what they could get away with. In any event, I don't have a horse in this race being neither religious nor a Merkin.
Phillipa of Hainault was 14 when she gave birth to the Black Prince
in June just nine days before her sixteenth birthday. Maybe she never had a fifteenth year ;-) Edward was himself less than two years older than Phillipa. Phillipa had been chosen to be Edward's bride by his mother.
It must be remembered that until The Enlightenment children weren't children in the modern sense; they were treated as miniature adults. I recall reading these many years ago of one of the French kings' childhood. At the age of six he slept with a chamber maid in his bed. This wasn't just to keep him warm; she was expected to amuse him by playing with his naughty bits. Different times.
Thanks for the thumb down :-)
Checking, the age of consent was 12 in 1540, not 13. It was lowered to 10 in 1576 before being raised again to 13 in the early 19thC. In the American colonies, the age of consent was 7 and as late as the mid 1960s remained so in Delaware. It was perfectly legal for a man to have sexual intercourse with a boy or girl who had attained the age of 7 years.
You forgot that the Church of England was established so a king could dump his current wife, as the pope would not grant him a divorce, then marry a child.
Pope Clement VII was at the time the prisoner of Charles V. Thus Clement was in no position to agree a divorce from a close relative of Charles. I don't recall Clement ever marrying, never mind a child. Catherine Howard was 17 when she married Henry. The age of consent back then was 13 IIRC so she was hardly a child.
Takes over two hours for it to start even pulling in any updates then it usually craps out after installing them on the reboot and has to revert and by the time you are back to the desktop, 4 hours have been wasted. Been going on for a good few months now.
Good Lord! I remember that behaviour and thought it was peculiar to my machine. Only saw it once because it was then I decided to install Mint.
Except for admin work & some dev/prototyping tasks, what advantages do you see in Linux on the desktop that would counter its many disadvantages
No covert usage of all my Internet bandwidth and no resetting of my preferences without my permission. Speaking personally, I find the disadvantages greatly exaggerated. YMMV. I still have a W7 VM for some apps, but in truth have hardly used it during the last three months.
If you are an engineer, do you use "weight" when you mean "mass" with your colleagues?If you are a statistician, do you talk about "precision" when you mean "accuracy"?
Clearly not. But I can read and it says on my desktop, right now, ""Linux Mint 17.2". And a couple of metres to my left is a bookshelf where there is a manual that clearly says on the spine "SuSE Linux 7.1 The Handbook". Perhaps you could take up this "misuse" of terminology with the people who manage these distributions. In the meantime, as pedantic as I can be at times, I'm more than happy with the colloquialism. When I use the term "Linux" most will take that to mean an operating system and clearly, a kernel is not an operating system.
I've been using Linux, mostly SUSE with KDE, for years now and have to say that with very, very few exceptions, it is easily as good as MS.
Does SuSE still come with a little green lizard pin? I've been wearing the one I got with 7.1 now I no longer do MS stuff for a living. When people comment, it gives me a chance to recite the following doggerel:
A habit obscene and unsavoury
Holds the Bishop of Wessex in slavery
With maniacal howls
He deflowers young owls
What he keeps in an underground aviary
But the Prior of Dunstan St Just
Consumed with erotical lust
Raped the Bishop's young owls
Those precious little fowls
And a little green lizard what bust!
I've also noticed that when working alongside other (usually Windows only) IT guys, the good ones will inevitably have a command shell open - many things are just faster and easier that way, especially when you deal with hundreds of differently configured machines.
More reliably, too. Xcopy and robocopy do a much more reliable job than Win Explorer. Recently became a convert to Beyond Compare and that beats both hands down. My licence covers Win, OS X and Linux for a very decent price.
I was flailing about randomly
I know the feeling. It was a lot worse 15 years ago when one distro saw my scsi adapter, but wouldn't connect to the Internet. Another couldn't see my scsi adapter, but did let me connect to the Internet. I never did get Corel Linux to do anything useful and found myself banned from its support forums. So it goes... I never did manage to get Samba to share my printer (PostScript) and the Samba devs told me they shared theirs from an NT WS box.
There's nobody these days that can do this anymore.
Not contracted to a mainstream label such as Sony/BMG perhaps, but I think you are too pessimistic. You just have to go hunting...
I'm saddened too by Bowie's demise. I have enjoyed his work since the late 60s. None more so than his collaborations with Eno.
They certainly can't afford to move to Apple stuff!
A curiously inaccurate statement unless you mean that people should purchase the cheapest and crappiest PC they can find. I purchased my Mac Mini just after a new model came out and the shop wanted to shift the last of the old stock. While it's true that it wasn't as fast as a decent PC at the same price point, I never noticed. Browsing the Internet and checking email doesn't exactly stress the hardware. It was also one hell of a lot more stable than WinXP.
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