roryirvine

कलdiscuss

Good point - all those incandescent lamps must have put out huge amounts of heat.

Similarly, the stereotypical giant plasma displays in old-school telco/ISP NOCs made for a properly toasty environment. I know one ISP in the early 2000s who had to bring in a spare datacentre aircon unit to reinforce the puny office system which was completely unable to cope by itself.

roryirvine

परसोंdiscuss

Honestly, picking up some shifts at a local coffee shop might help. Or doing some fine arts night classes.

Or if he's lucky enough not to need to worry about money for a while, then spend half a year doing Peace Corps or some sort of voluntourism project. Walk the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail. Spend a week in the second-largest city of every country in Africa, in reverse alphabetical order. Whatever.

His current situation isn't making him happy. So try something very different for a while, get some perspective, then reassess.

roryirvine

परसोंdiscuss

That actually sounds like the worst of all possible worlds!

It's infrequent enough that most systems won't bother implementing it, but a big enough time difference that it absolutely must be handled correctly at the right instant.

You'd be setting yourself up for a millennium bug-sized panic every century. And as soon as that the generation that experiences one retires, their successors will start saying "there's not going to be a leap minute for the next couple of decades, and there's no chance our code will still be running then...", and the cycle will repeat. Again and again and again.

The leap hour proposal is better because if it really is still relevant in however-many-thousand years, we can do a long-term plan to handle it which includes giving a century of notice.

roryirvine

परसोंdiscuss

My recollection is that, from 1992-ish onwards, traditional 2400 and 1200/75 modems actually became more expensive than 14k4.

The reason being that the older standards were used for specific enterprise applications (eg. travel agent viewdata required 1200/75, remote data reporting often ran at 2400) and generally used the most expensive branded modems (Hayes, Microcom, Multitech/IBM).

It was the vendors in the tier below that (Telebit, Supra, USR) that drove the increasing baud rates (often ahead of standardisation) - and it was their products that the no-name vendors cloned and sold at bargain-basement prices.

The difference was pretty huge in terms of user experience. At 14k4, your typical Apogee game was easy enough to download on a whim, but if you were stuck on 2400 you really had to want it.

roryirvine

6 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Possibly ozone, generated by the corona wire - the printer will have a filter which is only good for some (large) number of duty cycles.

Very few domestic / small office printers will ever hit that number, but for a ~20 year old model, it's possible yours has. The service manual suggests it's rated for 50,000 pages (as are the drum and roller), but unfortunately isn't replaceable.

Time for a new model?

(The canonical print shop smell is ozone - imagesetters produced way more than a laser printer - together with solvent from the inks and lots and lots of stale coffee. Possibly mixed with cigarette smoke, depending on just how long ago you're talking about...)

roryirvine

8 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Mandating that the analogue system be kept limping along in parallel would not be a cheaper alternative.

roryirvine

8 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Should you not then take responsibility for the additional sick leave taken by your colleagues as a result of you exposing them to your infectious diseases?

It's quite possible that the total sick leave you've caused is substantially higher than it would have been had you simply stayed home when ill.

roryirvine

8 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Why couldn't it have been penetrated with policy?

As you note, Europe did this quite successfully with successively-tighter diesel emissions standards for new vehicles being introduced every few years since 1992. Other countries - China, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, etc - have either adopted the Euro standards wholesale or tweaked them slightly for their local market conditions.

That was backed up by measures such as testing individual vehicles for continued compliance at their annual inspections, banning commercial vehicles that fail to meet recent standards from using public roads, charging private vehicles which fail to meet recent standards when they enter dense urban areas, and scrappage schemes to mop up the remaining non-compliant vehicles.

It took a while to produce results, but eventually resulted in pretty dramatic improvements in air quality - and we now have good evidence of improved health outcomes, particularly in children with asthma or other respiratory conditions.

Perhaps too late for the US to start now given the switch to EVs, but it ought to be kept in mind for the next time a "we can't possibly do anything about this" issue comes up.

roryirvine

10 दिन पहलेdiscuss

In my experience, people do sometimes still use am/pm for whole hour times ("4pm"), especially in informal writing.

But it would be beyond bizarre to write "3:59 pm"

roryirvine

10 दिन पहलेdiscuss

"number used once" wouldn't be the first definition of that word which springs to mind for most people in the UK.

roryirvine

10 दिन पहलेdiscuss

I suspect it was England and Wales only.

It was never shown in NI, which had its own Milk Marketing Board. Scotland had a separate one too, so probably didn't get them either.

roryirvine

10 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Oxford spelling, en-GB-oxendict, is a nice halfway house - it uses the same -ize spellings (where etymologically correct) as American English, but doesn't have the simplifications (eg. colour->color).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling

roryirvine

12 दिन पहलेdiscuss

He has clearly brought the company into disrepute. The appalled reaction of so many of their customers is ample evidence of that.

It doesn't really matter how that's happened - it wouldn't be the donation that's the problem from the pov of corporate law in other countries, it's the fact that a company director has harmed the company.

roryirvine

12 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Does Swedish corporate law not have the concept of bringing the company into disrepute?

In the European countries I'm familiar with, company directors are held to a higher standard precisely because they represent the company and have a duty to avoid damaging it through their private as well as public acts. Is Sweden really so very different?

roryirvine

12 दिन पहलेdiscuss

They've lasted longer than I thought they would, especially after they were destabilised so badly by the initial (likely deliberately vindictive) layoffs back in 2023.

It's such a pity - Bandcamp was hugely important in the 2010s, and ought to have been able to continue building on that success. They remained profitable until well after the acquisition, but Epic and Songtradr decided to destroy it for very little gain.

roryirvine

14 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Why would you expect a Polish psychiatrist to understand the differences between different versions of a diagnostic manual used only in the US?

roryirvine

14 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Exactly. People are genuinely angry that the social media giants seem to have known for years that their products are harmful.

And, more so, that they've had a decade to reduce or mitigate the harms but have consistently (some might think deliberately) failed to do so.

So now we have the sledgehammer of legislation being wielded to do the job instead.

It's not an ideal outcome by any means, but what did people think was going to happen?

roryirvine

15 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Not even the whole of the UK - really only England and Wales (as a singular entity, rather than individually).

The rest of us know it only for its impenetrable jargon ("They've risked a woggle on the silly midden!"), the grating public school chumminess of the commentators, and a rumour about a puerile "joke" which may or may not have been told on the radio coverage in the early 1980s.

Honestly, it's a sport I suspect I ought to like - full of stats and strategy - but it really does seem impossible to follow unless you've been inculcated since birth.

roryirvine

16 दिन पहलेdiscuss

Back then, I was working on a project for a mid-market investment bank which aimed to build a self-service platform to host more "standard" python apps whilst still allowing them some of the benefits of what TFA refers to as Bank Python (speed of deployment, ability to spin up short-lived experiments with minimal hoop-jumping, structured data model, etc).

There was certainly a widespread understanding that doing things the "Bank Way" made recruitment difficult, and they hypothesised that it was also a significant drag on their ability to turn around new projects. The main goal of the new platform was to provide an alternative way of doing things which would allow them to quantify that drag.

I know that the pilot was completed, and it went on to a more widespread deployment - but my involvement with it had already ended so I can't say if it actually proved their hypothesis / provided the quantitative data they wanted.

roryirvine

17 दिन पहलेdiscuss

The same thing happens in English literature of Dostoevsky's period - upper class characters might be referred to by substantive title (sometimes in two different forms), subsidiary title, courtesy title, surname, first name, job/rank/office, epithet, nickname, or even pet name.

To add confusion, the choice of which to use is usually context-dependent (time period, age, status, situation, relationship between characters) but sometimes the author will switch between, say, title and surname within the same paragraph simply as a matter of style or to avoid repetition.

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