Re:Not quite the same as today's ATMs.
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Barclays system wasn't quite the same. From Barclays you got six slips of slightly stiff paper - thinner than normal punched cards but thicker than a cheque. They were about the size of a cheque but with some holes in them. Each of them could be exchanged for £10, in a plastic clip.
The process was as follows:
You first typed in your six digit PIN. This caused the drawer in the centre of the machine to unlock and open a little.
Then you pulled open the drawer fully and positioned your slip on some pins in the centre of the drawer.
Then you closed the drawer and waited whilst the machine chugged and whirred a bit.
Finally the drawer would unlock and open a little again. When you pulled the drawer fully open your slip would have disappeared and a plastic clip containing £10 in £1 notes would be sitting in its place.
I can still remember my father's number - 08 75 86. I don't suppose there's much chance of identity theft by quoting it now.
John
Re:You still have service fees?
on
ATM Turns 40
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· Score: 1
Try going to any motorway service station, or any ATM inside a convenience (corner) shop. I had an odd experience on this front recently. I was driving a school minibus and the boys asked to stop to get some fast food. We stopped at a shopping area (not sure what else to call it) on the outskirts of Reading, and the boys rushed to use the cash machines before going for burgers. I stopped to read the notices on the 3 machines (which was more than the boys did). The middle machine of the three had a notice saying, "This machine will not charge", but the other two had much smaller notices saying that they did charge.
I don't know whether it is a deliberate attempt to deceive punters. There was little about the machines to tell them apart, and it seems odd to have two which charge and one which doesn't. Who's going to choose the charging machines if fully informed about the situation?
Twenty million licenses sold already is "no evidence"? That's more than all the active Linux and MacOS machines out there in just a few months. You think there are fewer than 20 million Linux boxes in use? Where on earth did you get that idea?
for the purpose of the contest it's probably safe to assume they meant weighs 150kg on earth No - they meant what they said. The kg is a unit of mass and the mass is the same wherever it is.
then of course by carrying half the weight you need to be 4x as fast, becuase of the fact you have to make the journey there and back to collect dirt to move it. Huh?! If you're carrying half the weight then you need to do twice as many trips. (You need to do a round trip for each load regardless of size.) If you carry half as much you only need to be 2x as fast to move a given amount in a given time.
If you've never heard the graunching noise which a hard disc drive makes as the computer "forgets" your last week's work then you haven't been working with computers long.
Why are they giving extra lessons instead of making maths A-level a requirement for placement on a science course? RTFA
Because funding for your university department's course depends on how many students you can recruit. If you turn down students on the nit-picking grounds that they aren't qualified to do the course then you lose your funding. To survive you have to take under-qualified students and then try to molly-coddle them through somehow.
Since they never meet, how are you supposed to determine what the 'angle' between them is? It's a perfectly sensible thing to ask for. Effectively it means, "If you move one of the lines to touch the other, whilst keeping it parallel to its original direction, what then will be the angle between them?"
I admit I haven't bothered to work it out. Using vectors and calculating the dot product of the two might be one good way.
The Department for Education and Skills said more pupils were studying maths.
Now, tell me if I need remedial classes in English, but it sounds to me like more pupils are studying maths, i.e. the opposite of fewer. No - your problem is that you are expecting a degree of honesty from the Department of Education and Skills. They think absolutely nothing of a bare-faced lie like this. To give another example, when asked they insist that most maths teachers are in favour of coursework for GCSE maths. If OTOH you ask a group of maths teachers at an examiners' meeting you will almost certainly get 100% opposed to it. The government and some schools are in favour of it because it allows students to cheat and thus artificially inflates grades. Teachers are opposed to it for the same reason. The solution is simple in the eyes of the government department - just lie about it.
In 2004 the pass mark (i.e. the mark for a grade C) in the EdExcel higher level GCSE maths exam was, wait for it... 13.5%. Without the benefit of coursework they would have had to make it even lower to achieve the improvement in passes required by the government.
To do A-level maths you have to study 6 modules. Up until a couple of years ago, these consisted of three pure maths modules (P1, P2 and P3) plus a choice of three applied maths modules (Mechanics (M1, M2), Stats (S1, S2), Decision maths (D1, D2)). The problem is that most students start 4 A-level courses and drop one at the end of a year after their half-way exams. By this point the students have realised the difference between a real A-level like maths and the joke A-levels like Media Studies. The maths involves serious learning and the Media Studies doesn't. They therefore choose maths as the one to drop.
In an attempt to stem the losses, the exam boards did a really blatant bit of dumbing down. They took the three pure maths modules, threw them up in the air, chopped out a few arbitrary bits, and re-assembled them into 4 new pure maths modules (labelled C1, C2, C3 and C4). The requirement to study six modules could now be met with these 4 pure modules and just 2 applied modules - they'd reduced the work by a sixth. "Oh no, it's not dumbing down" - my arse.
As a maths teacher it really makes me sick.
The only bright point that I can see is that universities (or at least, some universities) do know the difference. If you study proper A-levels like maths and further maths, and turn in a couple of As they will value them much more highly than As in the noddy subjects.
Also, the oldest person alive in America today has been speaking English for about as long as the oldest person alive in England. So I'd say no citizen in either country can claim that they speak more original English than the other. True, but that's addressing a different point from the one which was being made.
The point is that "The English language" is just that - the language of the English. It doesn't matter what the history of it is. Americans speak something very similar to current English - similar enough that the differences can be ignored most of the time and it can be referred to just as "English", but it nonetheless isn't the English language because it isn't what the English speak - just like Austrian German isn't quite the same as the German language.
What always puzzles me is why Americans want to pretend that their language is someone else's. There's nothing wrong with American English - why not be proud of it and call it what it is?
Even better - use a Slug (NSLU2) as the always-on device. I've measured a Slug plus 250 MB USB drive at 10W continuous. I'm still working on my low-power setup, but it looks like the slug will be waking up a Mini-ITX main system when required - that uses 40W with two DVB-T tuner cards in it.
This compares to the predecessor single system which uses about 90W at idle.
I thought the UK consisted of Britain, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. It sort of used to (assuming that when you said "Britain" there you meant "England").
Great Britain is the island which contains three countries - England, Scotland and Wales. The full title of the UK is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Go back 100 years or so and you could chop out the word "Northern".
Incidentally, the "Great" in "Great Britain" has nothing to do with greatness - it merely serves to distinguish between Grande Bretagne and Petite Bretagne, which is on the other side of the English Channel.
The chunk which you're quoting you've taken out of context. It refers specifically to modified versions of the original work and describes the circumstances under which chunks of that modified version might be distributed under a different licence. It's thus not relevant to the issue under discussion.
GPL doesn't allow you to distribute closed source software with the GPL lisenced software Nonsense. Users of the GPL have no authority to make such a restriction and there is none in the GPL. Remember, the GPL is a licence not a contract, so it can't restrict what people can do with other stuff, only what they can do with the stuff covered by the licence.
(The reason why other distributions don't have codecs and drivers with them.). The reason is slightly more subtle than that. The GPL does not allow GPL-licensed code to be incorporated into a larger work where other parts of the work are under a more restrictive licence. There is much debate about whether a device driver with a closed source licence is a derivative work of the kernel, but most distributions err on the side of caution and don't distribute them.
Gordon Bennet! What a phenomenal amount of fuss about how Dell would make the source available. How many typical Dell customers are going to want the source? Practically none.
All Dell would have to do is set up a titchy ftp/http server (an NSLU2 would do) and stick the source on it. This meets the requirement of making the source available, and if anyone ever actually downloaded it they could go out and buy themselves ice creams.
To the human ear, they are effectively simultaneous if the lighting crack is close enough to the observer. Considering how LOUD the director usually chooses to make the thunder Speaking as one who has been in a house struck by lightning I can attest that:
a) It's loud b) There is no perceptible delay between flash and bang
It sliced the roof and did the electrics no good at all.
The real problem is that Word must without fail remain 100.0% compatible with every previous version, down to the pixel. Pure drivel - the incompatibilities between one version of Word and the next are too numerous to count. People might expect this level of functionality, but they've never received it from Word.
Slashdot Mirror
The Barclays system wasn't quite the same. From Barclays you got six slips of slightly stiff paper - thinner than normal punched cards but thicker than a cheque. They were about the size of a cheque but with some holes in them. Each of them could be exchanged for £10, in a plastic clip.
The process was as follows:
You first typed in your six digit PIN. This caused the drawer in the centre of the machine to unlock and open a little.
Then you pulled open the drawer fully and positioned your slip on some pins in the centre of the drawer.
Then you closed the drawer and waited whilst the machine chugged and whirred a bit.
Finally the drawer would unlock and open a little again. When you pulled the drawer fully open your slip would have disappeared and a plastic clip containing £10 in £1 notes would be sitting in its place.
I can still remember my father's number - 08 75 86. I don't suppose there's much chance of identity theft by quoting it now.
John
I don't know whether it is a deliberate attempt to deceive punters. There was little about the machines to tell them apart, and it seems odd to have two which charge and one which doesn't. Who's going to choose the charging machines if fully informed about the situation?
John
Think about it.
Does this mean SCO can sue IBM for not including their copyrighted code in Linux?
If you've never heard the graunching noise which a hard disc drive makes as the computer "forgets" your last week's work then you haven't been working with computers long.
ITYM "That's what NTFS was designed for".
HTH
Because funding for your university department's course depends on how many students you can recruit. If you turn down students on the nit-picking grounds that they aren't qualified to do the course then you lose your funding. To survive you have to take under-qualified students and then try to molly-coddle them through somehow.
I admit I haven't bothered to work it out. Using vectors and calculating the dot product of the two might be one good way.
Now, tell me if I need remedial classes in English, but it sounds to me like more pupils are studying maths, i.e. the opposite of fewer. No - your problem is that you are expecting a degree of honesty from the Department of Education and Skills. They think absolutely nothing of a bare-faced lie like this. To give another example, when asked they insist that most maths teachers are in favour of coursework for GCSE maths. If OTOH you ask a group of maths teachers at an examiners' meeting you will almost certainly get 100% opposed to it. The government and some schools are in favour of it because it allows students to cheat and thus artificially inflates grades. Teachers are opposed to it for the same reason. The solution is simple in the eyes of the government department - just lie about it.
In 2004 the pass mark (i.e. the mark for a grade C) in the EdExcel higher level GCSE maths exam was, wait for it... 13.5%. Without the benefit of coursework they would have had to make it even lower to achieve the improvement in passes required by the government.
To do A-level maths you have to study 6 modules. Up until a couple of years ago, these consisted of three pure maths modules (P1, P2 and P3) plus a choice of three applied maths modules (Mechanics (M1, M2), Stats (S1, S2), Decision maths (D1, D2)). The problem is that most students start 4 A-level courses and drop one at the end of a year after their half-way exams. By this point the students have realised the difference between a real A-level like maths and the joke A-levels like Media Studies. The maths involves serious learning and the Media Studies doesn't. They therefore choose maths as the one to drop.
In an attempt to stem the losses, the exam boards did a really blatant bit of dumbing down. They took the three pure maths modules, threw them up in the air, chopped out a few arbitrary bits, and re-assembled them into 4 new pure maths modules (labelled C1, C2, C3 and C4). The requirement to study six modules could now be met with these 4 pure modules and just 2 applied modules - they'd reduced the work by a sixth. "Oh no, it's not dumbing down" - my arse.
As a maths teacher it really makes me sick.
The only bright point that I can see is that universities (or at least, some universities) do know the difference. If you study proper A-levels like maths and further maths, and turn in a couple of As they will value them much more highly than As in the noddy subjects.
The point is that "The English language" is just that - the language of the English. It doesn't matter what the history of it is. Americans speak something very similar to current English - similar enough that the differences can be ignored most of the time and it can be referred to just as "English", but it nonetheless isn't the English language because it isn't what the English speak - just like Austrian German isn't quite the same as the German language.
What always puzzles me is why Americans want to pretend that their language is someone else's. There's nothing wrong with American English - why not be proud of it and call it what it is?
Unfortunately, Green and Blacks is now a subsidiary of Cadbury.
Even better - use a Slug (NSLU2) as the always-on device. I've measured a Slug plus 250 MB USB drive at 10W continuous. I'm still working on my low-power setup, but it looks like the slug will be waking up a Mini-ITX main system when required - that uses 40W with two DVB-T tuner cards in it.
This compares to the predecessor single system which uses about 90W at idle.
I bet you're glad you posted that as an AC.
Great Britain is the island which contains three countries - England, Scotland and Wales. The full title of the UK is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". Go back 100 years or so and you could chop out the word "Northern".
Incidentally, the "Great" in "Great Britain" has nothing to do with greatness - it merely serves to distinguish between Grande Bretagne and Petite Bretagne, which is on the other side of the English Channel.
The chunk which you're quoting you've taken out of context. It refers specifically to modified versions of the original work and describes the circumstances under which chunks of that modified version might be distributed under a different licence. It's thus not relevant to the issue under discussion.
HTH
Gordon Bennet! What a phenomenal amount of fuss about how Dell would make the source available. How many typical Dell customers are going to want the source? Practically none.
All Dell would have to do is set up a titchy ftp/http server (an NSLU2 would do) and stick the source on it. This meets the requirement of making the source available, and if anyone ever actually downloaded it they could go out and buy themselves ice creams.
a) It's loud
b) There is no perceptible delay between flash and bang
It sliced the roof and did the electrics no good at all.
HTH
John