Posts by Vometia has insomnia. Again. 567 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2021
And largely British e.g. the Tizard Box as well as being a major contributor to the Manhattan Project via Tube Alloys et al, then being promptly locked out of it until it turned out Britain had more tech the US wanted (EMP-resistant nukes, IIRC). Eisenhower claimed he """lost""" their copy of the agreement to continue joint research, but he claimed lots of other things too.
I wouldn't mind living next to a nuclear power plant. I mean I almost do what with Harwell and Culham being nearby, or at least their ghosts; and I still have a pair of AERE tweezers: God knows what they were previously used for, but I still use them to pluck my eyebrows because decent tweezers are impossible to find.
I quite liked ESQL/C back in the day; I did some serious development with it, as well as some useful side-projects but with the latter my manager insisted they be rewritten in 4GL because it was The Future™, in spite of my cow-orker (who was the only 4GL programmer I've worked with before or since) telling him that in her opinion one of the main requirements was impossible to accomplish using Informix forms. AFAIR the project was canned as a result, which was quite an unusual gaffe for someone who in all other respects was the best guy I've ever worked for.
I'm quite sad that one passed me by. Actually typed "pissed me by" in mistake, probably the memory of UK.AC.HAT students' choice of snakebite & black (halves of cheap lager and cheap cider mixed together with cheap blackcurrant in a cheap glass... or often a cheap plastic if it was The Font) and usually ending up covered in puke. Guilty as charged, vague memories of a very drunk and now painful Vommie trying her best to de-vomitify the toilet cubicle using probably most of the toilet roll and to little avail. I don't usually talk about myself in 3rd person but that way I can imagine the story as if it happened to someone else; anyone who isn't me.
I'd incorrectly assumed it must be smaller as I reasoned that's where the smaller 25ml "floz" measure comes from when it's something expensive; I was going to say "like spirits" but actually can't remember where I've seen it; it seems used to calculate some oddly arbitrary bottle sizes where decimalisation remains the gift that still keeps on giving after 50+ years (not that I'm against it per se, just the lack of dealing with some sharp practises). Though going the other way, a proper pint glass has to be be around 600 ml as it's supposed to contain 568ml of actual beer and the head doesn't count towards that.
Anonypoo sez:
Back in the days of clackomatic typewriters I recall fabricating a diaeresis by over striking with the double quote key (") which probably led to its extinction in English on the buggerit principle.I suspect this coincided with the extinction of typing pools and the diacritically inclined were faced with DIY document preparation "Zo[ALT]+0244 ô bugger! ... Zo[ALT]+0246 ölogy ... sod this for a game of soldiers."
It seems that the compose key has largely fallen out of fashion of late. It's the modern (as in c. 1980s) means of typing, backspacing, and adding frilly bits and I use it a great deal; especially handy as my late gf's name had an e-with-flair in it even though she'd given up trying to type it correctly herself (mostly as a lot of online crapps still don't know what they're doing with UTF) but how else can one type Spın̈al Tap's name correctly? Unfortunately a lot of font-rendering also messes up combining characters, forgetting the width of the previous one, so the n̈ will look wonky on some screens and not others.
Unfortunately there's eleventy billion entries in XCompose and I keep adding more because "that seems handy" and then have to keep looking them up because I chose something neither memorable nor sensible. But I also chose sensible shortcuts such as a+6 for â and u+2 for ü because throwing the shift key into the equation made it even more likely that my mistyping would have its usual irritating effects. One of the worst is the Portuguese' love of ã, which is now a + #.
I've just been reading about Goch; it hadn't occurred to me to consider how it might be pronounced. Which of course probably varies a lot anyway, even simple things "ich" ranging from kinda "argh" to "eh". And my German sucks without all this general confoundment und scheiß; how's it pronounced in Geordie?¹ That'll be the correct way.
1. Not Mackem, obvs.
Same happens in the UK. The local health trust, effectively a privately run company, murders its patients. That isn't a euphemism: they're more interested in the results of their unethical medical experiments and the life of someone with PTSD is cheap. Local coroner, i.e. a judge, has apparently been burying case after case for years. Certainly buried my girlfriend's, rubber-stamped the verdict before the funeral had even happened and more than six months before the sham "hearing". The amount of gaslighting I've had from both the Great And Good™ as well as the majority of "common sense" types who thoughtlessly believe them has been surreal and unpleasant. Which is why this shit is happening more and more.
I thought it was his predecessor; someone so dull I forget his name offhand, but the one who introduced and enforced this absurd internal market malarkey that broke everything. Not that I'm trying to defend Wanksock, in fact I feel a bit dirty diluting any of his well-deserved ire.
Turned the reset key in the wrong computer. :| The one that the C-suite secretaries used. As much as I might try to defend myself because the then ops manager had decided in his wisdom to mismatch the computers and their consoles, it was pretty careless. I realised when I had it at full lock.
Also left a call to a comedy "panic" script in the sysadmin login to wind up the day-shift ops staff. Then, inevitably, something actually important cropped up and while I was dealing with it I forgot all about my prank and went home. The night shift triggered it and called out the emergency engineers whose manager didn't see the funny side. My manager did a good job of protecting me from the fallout, thankfully (for me), but my teenage years seemed to extend through most of my 20s too.
Yeah. If there's not enough to go round, I don't see the plebs getting any sort of priority, just higher prices and an ever more unreliable supply. People hark back to the power cuts of the '70s as "the bad old days" (as a kid, a couple of evenings lit only by candle-light was kinda cool) but this will probably end up worse and it'll potentially be forever.
fwiw I don't think they're *actually* paying you: apart from the unlikelihood of you accepting such a deal, I don't think they have the PR skills. My reaction was probably more a case of this now being all anyone knows of a once innovative computer company and feeling a bit sad; then again, a decreasing number of people outside of the various oldies and curmudgeons have heard of the likes of DEC either. :(
I'm also of the opinion that the C-suite culprits of all involved as well as the politicians who are still dicking about with this should be treated harshly. Maybe I'm becoming vindictive in my old age but I'm no longer as against the death penalty as I used to be; for people like them, especially the politicians, I'd like it brought back as a reminder that power should come with responsibility and consequences.
I think that's being optimistic tbh. They didn't even bring out the well-worn "Lessons Will Be Learned™" rubber stamp when my gf was murdered by staff at the local hospital because there're too many important people with vested interests; especially research, lots of money changing hands, so there's zero chance of getting an investigation. The Post Office scandal will never be adequately resolved, same as all the others which invariably drag on for decades because tptb know perfectly well that the complainants will eventually run out of money (and life).
The Register unfailingly includes this line in any article about what I'm half inclined to start calling The Fujitsu Scandal as it feels rather contrived. Is Fujitsu paying you to say "Fujitsu is obviously blame-free in this unpleasant business and is the real victim here"?
Unless one of the Great Unwashed needs it and will be told it was either "taped over" or given a copy that appears to have come from an original VHS recorder on tape which has been in constant use for 43 years and never had the tracking adjusted; and from a black and white (or rather murky and slightly lighter murky) camera that's never had the lens cleaned.
Sounds similar to the method used by CI-based VaxClusters back in the day, especially the HSC storage control units: DEC knew interrupts were computationally expensive and kept those generated by traffic to and from the HCSs to an absolute minimum whenever possible. I often wondered why e.g. NFS often felt oddly sluggish in comparison and realised that may be at least one of the reasons.
I'd really prefer it if everyone started calling bribery what it is rather than euphemisms like lobbying, hospitality, strategic partnership and so on. These problems could be sorted out at a stroke if bribery wasn't made effectively legal by calling it something else. :|
Larger tanks often have an auxiliary engine to generate electricity so they don't have to run the main engine to do so. IIRC, the Centurion used a 1,000 cc Austin or Morris engine to do the job, though their crews often complained that it was the most unreliable part of the entire vehicle so they'd end up having to use the 27 litre main engine to generate electricity. Smaller tanks like the Scorpion didn't, which is why their nice E-type engines were often shagged out in fairly short order due to running them at full speed all the time to keep the turret's batteries charged up.
I know that Ferdinand Porsche was obsessed with electrical drive systems, typically involving air-cooled petrol engines, but they seldom worked that well. Whereas Merritt's regenerative steering did: its only fault was the fancier controls he tried to implement when it made its debut on the Churchill which just added more things that could break (and did), which is why British tanks reverted to brake levers thereafter, but still connected to the new steering unit that could do fancy stuff like turning on the spot; shown to good effect with Comets managing to navigate the twisty little roads in German villages where the Shermans got stuck. He wryly observed that the Germans copied the system from a captured Churchill and their implementation on the Tiger et al made it more complicated. With the anticipated results.
I've never really used PCs except for gaming. It took me a long time to even realise what the VT220-style compose key did: for many years I'd press it by accident when I missed the space bar and then it'd seemingly lock up the keyboard for the next couple of keypresses. I eventually discovered it was configurable in the terminal settings so redefined it as escape, though that had much the same problem.
But I was also "that person" who took an age to wean off ed and use vi. I was originally taught to use emacs but the reams of documentation didn't highlight the actually useful bits like global search and replace, and ed was basic enough that it was easy to find stuff like that.
Now the only problem is finding all those 8-bit characters and their "what code page is it?" malarky typically display as something weird on UTF-friendly applications so I'm constantly having to update them. And then I get to play the "so what's it supposed to be?" game... D:
I hate flat keyboards. I'm not even that keen on stepped keyboards and prefer the C64's curved profile, though I wasn't so fond of its mushy (or dampened) feel. Probably why I liked the Model M so much when I first encountered one. Which is, ironically, a membrane keyboard, just with a fancy mechanism on top.
One thing I remember from the early '80s computer boom that I haven't seen often enough (in fact I don't recall seeing it anywhere else) is the Atari 800 which protected the reset key with an immovable bar across the top and bottom to lessen the risk of it being pressed unintentionally: only the middle part moved. Dunno why that sort of thing wasn't more commonplace; perhaps fingernails (I always kept mine short) but more likely the manufacturers being tight-arses. DEC's approach was (eventually) to move it out of the way at the end of the function-keys; IIRC the key next to it didn't do anything particularly useful so it wasn't likely to be pressed by mistake.
Yeah, it's the likes of Dow Jones that use the three-letter symbols rather than Lloyds high-street banking. I hadn't really thought about it back in the day, but I'd no idea what half the relevant symbols actually are (well, probably much more than half; I see one every now and then and I'm all "oh, that's what it looks like."
I dunno what I'd do without the .XCompose file. Though I still have to keep adding to it because I can never remember so many of the existing sequences; and even when I can, some of them seem to be particularly awkward and/or prone to typos: I'm glad I rarely have to enter anything in Portuguese, ã is particularly irritating and if I'll always mistype part of it unless I look at the keyboard in the process (yeah, I'm still a terrible typist at least 45 years after first experimenting with a typewriter; partly the same reason I play bass instead of guitar too, it's harder to get the wrong string, though I still manage).
I tried using a rugby player to get a door open, since someone had forgotten to authorise our key-cards for a demo or something. The magnet holding it shut can't be that strong, surely. He was a big lad but he just bounced off. We tried him a few times but no joy.
Seems none of us were creative nor light-fingered enough to think of the more interesting solutions described.
It might be expedient to make programmers actually bother to check return values: I once worked with someone whose code never, ever did this, whether it was malloc or anything else. No error checking, no sanity checking, nothing. They'd previously worked for a software house whose stuff I'd used around the same time and I still had painful memories of its habit of crashing often. Now I know why.
Rust isn't going to fix this sort of bad coding. It may avoid some pitfalls but it won't turn bad/lazy programmers into awesome ones; on the contrary, judging by the fanboyism, it'll just cause Volvo Driver Syndrome.
Investment was being wound down as far back as the '60s. They started haemorrhaging talent way back. Just as the AGR design had pretty much got to where they needed it and they could recoup the investment costs by building the dozens planned, Thatcher canned it completely. JET has been underfunded since the outset which is why it's perpetually 10 years in the future. Unfortunately so much UK tech is like this: wonderful ideas canned just as they're about to really take off and the technology is given to someone else to sell back to us.
Mozilla still found the time to remove the "excessive complexity" of allowing the user to turn off auto-select-all when you click in the URL & search boxes. Lots of people have complained and some git at Mozilla keeps on defending the removal of user choice on the basis of "consistent UI across all platforms" which is a rather odd way of looking at it. And quite annoying too. Pity they don't spend more of their time fixing bugs instead, especially the seemingly worse-with-every-release memory leaks.
Nobody seems to remember Orkut! I have (semi) fond recollections, but also of it being one of the slowest webshites in existence and it'd give you a randomly-long IP ban if you tried to reload. But it was still kinda fun for a good long while until it started to go wrong (mainly the perennial problem with lack of effective moderation) and finally when Google inevitably got bored and killed it.
They were still harassing me about my gf being reassessed six months after she died. They knew she was dead (not least as I used their own system when it happened) and I'd told them multiple times but they wouldn't relent, until they eventually sent a letter saying a decision had been made, but not what their decision was nor even what it was about. Atos predictably joined in with the bastardiness and their inter-personal skills were the expected bored-sounding "not our problem to deal with".
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