YOU SUCK: the venting thread

[rurwin]

It's not just students. It's also one half of a couple leaving their trolly in the middle of the aisle to join their partner in a deep discussion over which joint of meat to buy on one side, leaving a third of the aisle free for two-way traffic which is quickly blocked by a elderly lady with a total inability to choose between varieties of yoghurt.

(Other ages, genders and motivations are available and maddeningly frequently encountered.)

[rpdom]

It's not just students. It's also one half of a couple leaving their trolly in the middle of the aisle to join their partner in a deep discussion over which joint of meat to buy on one side, leaving a third of the aisle free for two-way traffic which is quickly blocked by a elderly lady with a total inability to choose between varieties of yoghurt.

(Other ages, genders and motivations are available and maddeningly frequently encountered.)

This. Plus don't forget the staff who leave a metal cage of empty cardboard boxes in the aisle while they attempt to stock an already full shelf.

(Shopping trip later today. Trying to decide between Aldi or Asda).

[Burngate]

(Shopping trip later today. Trying to decide between Aldi or Asda).

Try Waitrose - you get a far higher standard of aisle-blockage

[mikerr]

I tried ordering the weekly food shopping online
- but bizarrely they have a much smaller selection,
and also substituted "similar" items at delivery time.

The complete opposite experience from buying tech goods online/instore.

[hippy]

Distressed drivers in the dead of night who borrow your car jack and wheel brace then drive away with them when you aren't looking. The cheeky buggers just abandoned the old wheel in the gutter as well.

Not sure that beats cowboy builders who come round to look at a manageable problem, deliberately make it worse, and now requiring a costly immediate fix. What really sucks is it seems impossible to find any workmen these days who aren't cowboys.

[jamesh]

Distressed drivers in the dead of night who borrow your car jack and wheel brace then drive away with them when you aren't looking. The cheeky buggers just abandoned the old wheel in the gutter as well.

Not sure that beats cowboy builders who come round to look at a manageable problem, deliberately make it worse, and now requiring a costly immediate fix. What really sucks is it seems impossible to find any workmen these days who aren't cowboys.

Mate of mine is a leccy - he's not a cowboy, so if you need a leccy in darkest Cambridgeshire...Also know a decent bathroom/kitchen fitter. Both came in to the businesses later in life, so didn't have the standard 'rip the customer off for every penny they have' apprenticeship.

[abishur]

How could anyone think that "tap to click" is a good idea for a touchpad driver? Synaptics are f******* insane, "tap to click" is f****** insane. Also when I switch "tap to click" off, can it bloody stay off permanently and not magically re-engage?

Wait, you can turn off tap-to-click?? How have I missed this until now? How many times have I been writing something, only to want to delete a typo, and oops, the mouse thought I clicked it even though I was nowhere near the touchpad and now I've browsed away from the chunk of text I just wrote! I cannot wait to turn it off on my work laptop.

[DougieLawson]

Wait, you can turn off tap-to-click?? How have I missed this until now? How many times have I been writing something, only to want to delete a typo, and oops, the mouse thought I clicked it even though I was nowhere near the touchpad and now I've browsed away from the chunk of text I just wrote! I cannot wait to turn it off on my work laptop.

The hard part is encouraging the stupid driver to remember your choice. It's most annoying when the system tray icon goes into hiding and tap-to-click magically gets turned back on. I normally end up having to reboot to get the system tray icon to re-appear.

Dear device driver, play nice.

[Burngate]

Easy option: glue a piece of plastic over the touchpad. Rather less easy: dive in and cut the ribbon.
Both work - I've done them.

[DougieLawson]

Easy option: glue a piece of plastic over the touchpad. Rather less easy: dive in and cut the ribbon.
Both work - I've done them.

Those suggestions don't fix the "tap-to-click" problem, they fixes the bigger "I hate touch pads" problem. I don't hate my touchpad because it doesn't irritate my wrist joints in the same way that a mouse does.

It's never been the same since we moved away from the IBM model M keyboard. In fact it's never been right since we moved from from the seven colour (green, blue, red, white, pink, cyan turquoise, yellow) 3279 model 5 display and before that the very lovely 3278 model 2 green screen. It was a downward spiral from the first emulator on a cut down IBM PC with an IRMA board.

[aTao]

Easy option: glue a piece of plastic over the touchpad. Rather less easy: dive in and cut the ribbon.
Both work - I've done them.

Those suggestions don't fix the "tap-to-click" problem, they fixes the bigger "I hate touch pads" problem. I don't hate my touchpad because it doesn't irritate my wrist joints in the same way that a mouse does.

It's never been the same since we moved away from the IBM model M keyboard. In fact it's never been right since we moved from from the seven colour (green, blue, red, white, pink, cyan, yellow) 3279 model 5 display and before that the very lovely 3278 model 2 green screen. It was a downward spiral from the first emulator on a cut down IBM PC with an IRMA board.

Just shows how wrong right can be. "I'm right, I'm always right, especially when I'm wrong"

Could be worse though, theres always Toshiba's little rubber widget in the middle of the keyboard, or micro trackball.
Now just run along and buy a graphics tablet, or are pens to old school?

[Burngate]

Those suggestions don't fix the "tap-to-click" problem, they fix the bigger "I hate touch pads" problem.

True.

Just shows how wrong right can be. "I'm right, I'm always right, especially when I'm wrong"

But I'm never wrong! Well, hardly ever, to quote Gilbert (or was it Sullivan?)

[rurwin]

In fact it's never been right since we moved from from the seven colour (green, blue, red, white, pink, cyan, yellow) 3279 model 5 display

Since this is the venting thread...

colours rant.png (74.9 KiB) Viewed 3705 times

[Ravenous]

The pink looks more like Peach to me...

[aTao]

The pink looks more like Peach to me...

Both eyes?

[DougieLawson]

In fact it's never been right since we moved from from the seven colour (green, blue, red, white, pink, cyan, yellow) 3279 model 5 display

Since this is the venting thread...

colours rant.png

Sorry, I don't get what you're on about. Can I have some of the stuff you're smoking?

Proper terminals connected to real computers have seven colours on a black background. Fisher Price "toy" computers running Windows have 16million colours.

[rurwin]

Sorry, I don't get what you're on about. Can I have some of the stuff you're smoking?

It's Breeze by Omega Vape, but it's not smoking and I doubt it's relevant.

Proper terminals connected to real computers have seven colours on a black background.

But none of them are "pink".

Fischer-Price computers can show pink, but the colour you are referring to is Magenta. Pink is a light (desaturated with high brightness) red. It contains a high red component and equal measures of blue and green. Magenta is an equal mixture of red and blue with no green.

[aTao]

Sorry, I don't get what you're on about. Can I have some of the stuff you're smoking?

It's Breeze by Omega Vape, but it's not smoking and I doubt it's relevant.

Proper terminals connected to real computers have seven colours on a black background.

But none of them are "pink".

Fischer-Price computers can show pink, but the colour you are referring to is Magenta. Pink is a light (desaturated with high brightness) red. It contains a high red component and equal measures of blue and green. Magenta is an equal mixture of red and blue with no green.

Skating on thin ice there... Just suppose the phosphors on the screen arent primary colours...., say the blue and red have a bit of green in them.. what does that do to your magenta? Ohh, it turns it pink!

[DougieLawson]

But none of them are "pink".

So why do the bytes 0x42 followed by 0xF3 in a 3270 data stream generate something called "pink" text?
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/gut ... ipt.1.html

And with my favourite database and transaction manager the code to define coloured fields on the screen uses "PINK"
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledge ... ldstmt.htm

Someone in 3270 development in IBM Kingston, NY clearly didn't know their "pink" from their "magenta".

Also I should correct my earlier item, it's "turquoise/turq" not "cyan".

[rurwin]

That's not the worst of it.

Magenta doesn't exist.

We see Red, Green and Blue. We have three sorts of cones on our retina, each of them is sensitive to a different colour and the zones of the spectrum that they cover overlap to some extent. If two cones activate, say the red and green cones, then we will assume that they are seeing a colour that lies between them in the spectrum, where their sensitivities overlap, which is of course yellow.

But if we look at the spectrum, violet is beyond red, green and blue, it isn't between any of them. So it can't be created by mixing any of them.

Obviously seeing violet is useful, and evolution has found a way. In one of the masterful kludges that abound in nature, the red cones have a secondary sensitivity to violet, and the blue cones still have some sensitivity there too. So if the red cones and the blue cones are both activated, but the green cones are not, our eyes and brains assume that the colour must be violet.

When we mix red and blue to make violet, the colour that we construct is not violet. Its spectrum is two peaks in red and blue with nothing in violet. We are giving our eyes a peak in the red cones primary sensitivity zone and they assume, because there is also a peak in the blue cone's zone, that the peak must be in the bit where the red and blue cones overlap. But it isn't. To our eyes it looks indistinguishable from true violet but if our eyes were built just slightly differently we would not see it as violet. Creatures with very different eyes, or aliens with a different evolution, probably won't.

Magenta is a reddish violet because the blue cones are more sensitive to violet light than the red cones are. You need more blue than red to get the balance right to make a colour that looks like violet.

There are a huge number of colours that we cannot see. Our eyes assume that everything is a single colour peak. There are infinitely more colours that are truly a mixture of two (or more) colours, but we are entirely blind to them. All we see is the average. But in the case of violet it is worse than that; we are creating something that isn't there. Magenta does not exist.

[rurwin]

Someone in 3270 development in IBM Kingston, NY clearly didn't know their "pink" from their "magenta".

I knew we could come to an agreement.
More likely, the salesman in charge of approving documentation didn't take physics or comp sci, or assumes customers are idiots.

[Burngate]

Red light plus blue light makes magenta, but some people couldn't spell that so they called it pink.
It wasn't helped by NTSC choosing an orange phosphor instead of a proper red as the Europeans (mainly German) did - their excuse was the lack of efficiency of the available red phosphors

As for calling cyan turquoise, what's CuAl6(PO4)4(OH)8·4H2O got to do with computers?

[Burngate]

Magenta doesn't exist.

Or maybe it does but violet doesn't exist ... but that's getting way off into philosophy.

If I sit beside a camera, and my eyes tell me what's on the screen matches what's in front of me, are they the same colour, or are they both wrong?

If what's in front of the camera and me is a bottle of Galiano, and the label looks violet (or magenta) to my eyes, but the monitor shows it as blue, which is right?

Probably depends on how we define blue, or violet, or magenta

[Ravenous]

Magenta doesn't exist.

Just to add - apparently a very few people (one or two percent of women?) can see in the infrared. But this is only predicted by genetics; and as far as I can tell nobody's done a study to prove it yet.

"Tetrachromatic" is the word, apparently.

Oh and another thing - we're all sensitive to polarised light (in special lighting conditions).

Enough distraction; Let's get back to ranting!

[r3d4]

You can go into a shop in Ankh-Morpork and order an artistic temperament with a tendency to introspection. What you actually get is hit on the head with a large hammer, but it keeps the money in circulation and gives people something to do.

Perhaps not so far from the truth

It is your socio-political duty to buy stuff. The Economy is God, without The Economy you will have no lights no health, no food, no caves even. Without Investment there will be no development. (Linux does not exist, open source is an illusion).

*looks around*
Err, did I enter the wrong room?
Seriously, all of the above is why I try* to work for board and lodgings only.

*some people insist on rewarding with cash, makes em feel better.

"The Economy is" well summed up in this 'Unpublished Private Eye article' : http://nicholaswilson.com/unpublished-p ... article-3/

Looking on the bright side... could this be the start of the 'moneyless "New World Economy"' as discribed in popular sci fi star trek , moneyless because everyone is in debt ! *manic expression*