Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Paint

I've tried that, and it refuses to answer.

You would think intelligent software would recognise that I terminate it whenever I see it running. Ha ha!

Re: Cockup or conspiracy?

All special advisors should be handed over to the Taliban, or the Norks.

Re: Bring back flowcharts

There are 'subroutine' boxes that summarise a lot of logic, and allow a global view of the program. E.G.

Init

Doit

Exit

Boxes have little boxes, item by item; little boxes have lesser boxes, and so ad infinitum.

Re: MAYBE THERE NEVER WERE ANY BISCUITS!!!

"Many many years ago, in another life,"

I once jokingly referred to a previous job as a previous existence. Later that day, a Hindu co-worker privately asked me if I had been serious about that previous existence.

Re: as we don't know it

Bacterial life seems to have begun at least 3,500 million years ago. It was another 1,000 million years before eukaryotic life appeared, and another 1,500 million years before worms began leaving fossil trails. So a very long time to really get going.

Re: Bicentennial

I wonder what England will do in 2066.

We should have done something in 2010, the 1600 anniversary of the end of the Roman Occupation, but didn't.

Re: Nota bene

And another thing, it is a great pity there is nothing like One Note in Libre Office and other products.

Desperate

"management being drafted to help answer phones"

Gosh, that really is desperate! Obviously something had to be done.

Well said. IPv6 was conceived in a total lack of engineering realism, and is only alive today because of all the efforts to force it onto people. Scrap IPv6, and design an IPv7 which includes IPv4 as a proper subset.

The real place for a successor to IPv4 is not the core of the Internet but in large private networks.

Tritium has a half-life of about eleven years. So, hot stuff if you keep a lot of it about.

They don't listen

SODGR, sod yer. Mexit will need PPE graduates to listen to the techies, and that would never do.

Re: try the real world

If you are using Excel properly, you assign a data type (text, date, floating) to each column.

Re: Science prize

Yes, science is infinite. But that does not mean every scientific paper needs to plead for more.

I am a scientist, and not religious.

Re: We who are ignored

You are right that it began as a hypothecated tax, but that was changed. If it were not for World War 2, Winston Churchill would be remembered as the finance minister who raided the Road Fund.

But all that is just playing with words. We motorists pay more tax because we use cars, and we are entitled to demand decent roads in return

Re: maps?

With a lot of people, maps don't work.

Re: The scandal continues

Send them to prison first. Let them appeal from jail.

Re: Test, test and test again

Or is it a 'used the cheapest bidder' problem?

Re: If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

"We had to take a decision, so we decided to wait and see".

Re: Thought Experiment

You should repeat that experiment a thousand times. It would probably happen once. The probability of it not happening is 0.37. It might happen twice, but probably no more than that.

The one sure prediction is that randomness is unpredictable.

Re: how to do it in half a dozen mouse clicks

WYSIWYG in MS Word and its competitors were a major upgrade to the markup languages previously available. Who remembers runoff, unless like me they have bitter memories? Latex was another cross I had to bear for a time.

But WYSIWYG alone leads to large documents that are inconsistent, as the article and Mr Barnes both note. Styles and themes are a major upgrade to WYSIWYG. As others have noticed, however, few people know how to use styles and themes.

I have also met spreadsheets where the author inserted a hand-calculated total rather than using the spreadsheet to add things up.

I once went down to the dustbin area of the flats where I live. Someone had used my dustbin as a lavatory. There are four pubs close to these flats.