palordrolap

This was the in the UK over a decade ago, back in the bad old days of migration codes and everything being underpinned by BT Openreach who basically had their arm twisted to allow other ISPs to exist and use that infrastructure. And even then they guarded everything jealously (and sometimes incompetently, but that’s another story).

We didn’t sell telephone lines, so every DSL we sold was on an existing POTS line that each customer already had. Most of our customers wouldn’t have known about getting a separate POTSless line even if that was possible at the time. And the customer in question certainly didn’t.

They had it installed on their company’s one and only telecommunications line. Of all the hundreds of customers I dealt with over the years, it only ever happened the once… although we did have to warn at least one other customer off the idea when it happened to come up in conversation.

Once upon a time I worked for a company that provided DSL internet.

One day we got a call from a customer complaining that they had no connection.

We investigated and discovered that their line had been completely cancelled from under us and ask the customer what happened to their telephone line.

They said they had set up VoIP on their internet connection, and thus no longer had need of their telephone line and so they cancelled it.

The telephone line on which we had provisioned their DSL internet…

“No more hand-written code” sounds to me an awful lot like “we don’t need that telephone line any more”.

The real shame here is that the fall-out won’t be as sudden and the people who ought to be getting the brunt of it will manage to squirm out of any responsibility.

Eigengrau. It’s what the brain fills in anyway when there’s no visual input, so it wouldn’t be a distraction if that’s all I could see.

I’d have plenty of extra problems, but that, at least, ought not be one of them.

French makes me wonder how well those movies could have worked with Jean Reno or JCVD in the role.

What accent did you imagine him having?

Look man, I don’t fully understand it either, but whether it be for the meme, for irony, for long-standing fandom, whether someone has a mad crush on, or wants to be Miley Cyrus as she was, as Hannah, or as she is now, or some other reason inconceivable to those of us outside its sphere of attraction, it exists.

And at least it isn’t Omarchy.

I made the same mistaken assumption not too long ago. HML did die for a while, but it’s been resurrected. It’s a little odd as choices go, but as an Ubuntu derivative it’s probably not deserving of its “review” in the video.

I was about to trot out the old “English needs diacritics argument” but then realised that “reade”, “readd”, “leade” and “leadd” would solve the problem the ways we usually do it.

What if we call it “Smarter Than Trump”?

because some languages allow you to write statements  
    that wrap over multiple lines
        in order to space things out that would
            otherwise be crammed onto one line,
    so for the compiler to know when the statement ends
        a character is needed so that it doesn't think the next line
            is part of the previous;
statement number 2 goes here

Without that semicolon, you might have continued to read “previous statement” which makes sense at first, until the words that follow.

Without the allowance for multiple lines in one statement, that second physical line makes no sense at all, despite the first one making perfect sense on its own.

And without the spacing, the run-on sentence would be a lot harder to read.

Sometimes you have to write code a particular way. Here I was making a point. In a programming language there are other reasons.

Off-topic: I tripped on the (first) name “Cennydd” in the article until my poorly developed Welsh orthography skills kicked in and I realised that that’s pronounced “Kenneth”.

Amusingly, though perhaps not for Cennydd, Google Translate is confused by it and translates it as “Cynthia”.

I did not expect to see a revival of the ancient “Internet Exploder” burn today.

The closest is probably " ʇʇo "

Fun “can’t unsee” fact: The word " off " looks like someone doing the Thriller dance.

Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V for copy and paste come from non-Unix (I’d say Windows itself, but they may have stolen it from elsewhere), and so it makes sense that those two keys have other special meanings under Unix and its descendants.

Specifically, they mean “Stop what you’re doing” and “The next character is to be entered without special meaning” in most shells, the most common programs that run, often as the main program, in/on a terminal.

As such, most terminal emulators in Linux GUIs reserve those keypresses for their Unix-y functions. Most of the good ones move copy and paste to Ctrl+Shift+C and Ctrl+Shift+V instead.

MS-DOS and Windows command prompts also inherit their use of Ctrl+C from Unix, by way of 86-DOS and CP/M, and were in there long before Microsoft adopted Ctrl+C for copy in a GUI, which is where those other Insert-based keybinds you mention came in.

For an example of Unix Ctrl+V, try echo hello[Ctrl+V][Ctrl+H]world in a Linux terminal shell and press Enter. You’ll see the command as echo hello^Hworld and when you press Enter, it will display hellworld, because that embedded Ctrl+H is a backspace.

It varies. Right now Crazy by Patsy Cline (technically Willie Nelson, but Patsy made it famous) is what springs immediately to mind. Although I’d prefer an instrumental version because the lyrics don’t quite fit.

On another day, I might pick the Gnarls Barkley song by the same name.

Like many others here, you’re getting my upvote because you’ve expressed a valid opinion, even if I happen to quite like the drink in question.

You get this comment because a bunch of people either don’t get the distinction, or are put off by the profanity. Not really sure which.

Disappointed that “Pork Radio” didn’t make the cut. He must have considered it.

Was confused for a second, because I don’t generally think of peanuts as having a shell, but then realised that you must mean the outer pod / husk that they’re sometimes sold in. We call the whole things “monkey nuts” here.

… but despite the fact we have a name for the whole thing, we only eat the peanuts inside.

Someone who was 18-25 in 1976 is 68-75 now. I’m not sure how many of them are here in the Fediverse, but I guess if I’m here, who was born around that time, maybe there’s a couple of them lurking.