Posts by captain veg

My favourites include Babelfish (remember that?) translating bus from French as "drunk", and, more recently, Google rendering carrière as "career" when it should have been "quarry".

To be fair, bus in French is an informal shorthand for autobus and the same spelling can also be the plural participle of boire, to drink, and carrière is indeed a homograph which can mean either "career" or quarry, depending on context. Still, a genuine intelligence would understand that contextual distinction.

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Re: Do you mean the company who.....

I've never seen a single ad on Youtube, ever. I don't pay them a penny. I use Vivaldi with default ad-blocking settings.

I guess that my content choices (historical and technological documentaries mostly) represent an edge case that they haven't yet fully monetised.

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Re: Boeing

"Time for bed", said Zebedee.

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Re: speaking as a Linux guy

Work adopted Teams having previously inflicted Lync and its Skype for (ruining your) Business remix on us.

Teams was a great improvement for me, because there was a Linux version. Lync I had to run in a Windows VM, and the sound never worked properly.

There continues to be an unofficial Linux version, but no longer supplied by MS.

It looks like it's on its way to the great bit bucket in the sky. Recently it has been poking me in the face with annoying messages about how "classic" Teams is being replaced by new Coke, and that my "browser" (actually Electron) won't support it. It seems that New Teams will require Edge. Here we go again. It seems they're unable to learn from history.

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Re: There could be...

"they can't actually formulate a counter argument. So far, the best counter examples ..."

So can they, or can they not, formulate a counter example?

"Amongst our weaponry... are such elements as fear, surprise .... I'll come in again."

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Re: "Start Menu man Parakhin"

Absolutely. Anyone who needs more than a single pixel separation is just a waste of space.

A very long time ago I reprogrammed my Tatung Einstein (a fine, but overlooked 8-bit micro) to stuff two characters into each display cell. This needed an 8x3 bitmap matrix, which turned out to be enough to display ASCII characters adequately, if not prettily. In consequence I could display on-screen 64 characters in a line, which, with left and right margins, was about enough to produce acceptable hard copy on the 80-column printers of the time.

We used to call that WYSIWYG.

I still create UIs, when allowed, unsupervised, with minimal spacing, even though I use 4K screens (and insist that everyone should too).

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Re: I've met and talked to people who worked on Windows UX at Microsoft.

UX (in Windows or otherwise).

Superficially it looks like it might have something to do with usability.

It doesn't.

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Re: There could be...

> So instead of going to Settings>>System>>Display to change the resolution, you can hit "Win+S" type in "res" and it's the second search option.

And this why it will never be the year of Windows on the desktop.

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Re: The start menu was a completely asinine idea from the very beginning

Yes. We have all become used to it, however, so it has the force of idiom.

When I first saw Windows 95 my first thought was how much it looked like OS/2 version 2. Except that it (OS/2) had Workplace Shell rather than Start menu. Superficially, apart from putting minimised apps in their own folder, and the then revolutionary idea of using the right mouse button to reveal object properties, WPS was quite like a much prettier Windows 3.x,.

Later, in a new job, I had the pleasure of migrating from Windows 3.1 to 95. It was fairly uneventful, but, once up and running, W95 objected to the large number of entries I now had in my Start menu. Well, in Windows 3 I could, and did, group them in Program Manager folders. You decided to make them all first-level menu items. Don't complain to me.

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Re: Vertical taskbar in Win11

Turn them to portrait.

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terminology

I prefer the term made up bollocks.

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Re: Cat escapes from bag (again)

Incidentally, as a tedious pedant, I'm unable to overcome the urge to point out that NT5 was Windows 2000. Which came out 6 years before your conference presentation.

Sorry.

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Re: Cat escapes from bag (again)

They said the same about Windows 95.

It turned out to be DOS 7, which could do long file names, the Win32S subsystem that could already be installed in Windows 3, the networking from Windows 3.11 and a new shell.

Of course, for the average user the new shell *was* the operating system. So it was kind of true.

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Re: the reason we use compilers is to somewhat limit the number of stupid things we can do

Is it?

I find that the number of stupid thing coded by any particular coder is a function of their stupidity.

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Re: It's 2024

Agree completely. The number of times that I accidentally put a number into a variable that should have contained a string (or vice versa) is precisely never. No amount of compiler checks would make the slightest bit of difference.

Where static typing does offer a benefit it is that it makes it much easier for your IDE to offer help.

Real programmers use ed, of course.

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Re: Stolen Cookies

I suspect that this refers to accessing the interwebs by using your mobe as an access point, rather than the on-board WiFi.

That's what I usually do. For 1) it's highly likely that we are using the same cell, but my phone isn't sharing the connection with everyone else on the train, and, 2) I don't trust them.

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predicting health issues

The likes of Johnson & Johnson really don't care. They just want to sell stuff. Diagnoses, medical outcomes? Not interesting. Identifying potential customers susceptible to advertising? Gold dust.

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Re: Circular Reasoning

Isn't it obvious? Unauthorised users can do what they like so long as it is for unapproved purposes.

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Re: A gift?

> remainers seem too stuck in their groove to find a new tune.

Manifestly we were right. Why would we change?

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Re: A gift?

Let's not rewrite history. The awkward squad in the parliamentary Conservative party, i.e. the goons now in charge, rejected anything which might sully their pure "clean" Brexit. Advantageous to the UK, on any objective measure, was never a consideration.

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Re: A gift?

So far as I can tell from inspection of your post you didn't actually mention any other benefits.

Repeating a discredited argument doesn't turn it into two arguments.

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Re: A gift?

I too was living in France and still do. I've never heard any such complaint. On the contrary, in my experience most French people consider that passing on the Oxford jab was a missed bullet.

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Re: A gift?

> And yet at no point has a remainer managed to explain how the situation would have worked.

In exactly the way that it did work. Can you not grasp the meaning of the words "the vaccine arrangements were made while the UK was still subject to all EU regulations"?

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