I notice Meta is becoming more desperate and now sending out historical posts from me. They are from about 15 years ago and personally I find it intrusive that they are pretending to be posts directly from me.
It's bound to be somewhere in the T&Cs that they can plunder my old thoughts, but I'm finding it disconcerting.
Our fridge freezer has so many new ways of giving.
It came with the house and was/is a high-end Siemens device. The original one lasted about 5 years and 2 days, so it was out of warranty when it failed. The refrigerator part stopped making things cold. It's my first ever fridge failure. We had a Zanussi for 25 years.
The expensive man who we'd called out explained that the cost of fitting a new compressor was almost the same as the cost of a replacement fridge unit. And if they replaced the compressor they could not warranty the resultant device. So much for making repairable white goods.
We looked at replacements and because our fitted kitchen uses 'hinges' instead of 'sliders' the choice was very limited, particularly as we needed the doors to align on the replacement.
We found a choice of one device that could fit the bill and we had two very nice technicians from John Lewis come along to fit it. I'd wondered about doing it myself, but when I realised how long these two industrious guys took to puzzle it all out, I was relieved to have paid the extra to have the new machine installed.
The thing is, it's a stress purchase. If I'd somehow got a new device which had more functions / lights /shelves then I could have persuaded myself that it was an upgrade.
But no, it's a downgrade. The shelves look cheaper. We actually reused some inserts from the older fridge for purely cosmetic reasons. It's impossible to stand milk upright in the main section. The moulded-in shelf stays are not suitable for sensible shelf spacing.
At Christmas we had the drama of not being able to fit everything inside. It has a smaller capacity than the one we replaced. The Munich-based manufacturers advertise on telly with a bearded man fitting a large marrow into a fridge.
It's all lies. I want to shout at the TV.
The fridge just doesn't have the capacity. I could understand if they'd built it to be more energy efficient (e.g. with thicker insulation) but no, it's still got a terrible energy efficiency rating.
So every few weeks we have a little therapeutic rant about it. And today, I couldn't even get a litre of gold top milk to stand up in the door.
It was too tall.
It occurs how much time I now waste doing this. With a combination of a security gateway, a firewall and a sandbox, plus around 1,110 unique passwords, it's just the waste of time of it all.
Press here for more information.
I've just seen the respectable example cited of using AI to analyse the shirt a man is wearing, when the man comes on and tells me how white my shirts can be but, he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me. But if he did my AI could recognise the shirt and order one just like it online.
Crazier than the Bonzos. Ask Mr Stanshall.
Spoken intro by on-the-street reporter:
Hello, well that was the sound of Roger's Wah Wah Rabbits. You heard them eating endive there. That's very cheap at this time of the year. But now here in Willesden Green...yes, brrr...it's a bit chilly, but no matter, because we're going to talk about shirts!
I'm going to take you right away straight over to the Earls Court Olympia to watch the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt even
Good morning. Could I have this shirt cleaned "express," please ?
Yes, that'll be three weeks, dearie
Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Well they're shakin' my shirt all over the place But it's been thrown right back in my face Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt
New horizons in sound now as Roger plays a solo on the electric shirt collar Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt?
It's not what you think. It's a compact bright orange AI device that's like a smartphone but which only has AI functionality. Scroll wheel, microphone button, camera. Tamagotchi on steroids maybe? Or the AI part of my car's speech recognition?
It's an interesting take from the folk who made those build it yourself synths.
Among Trump critics who’ve had run-ins with his security, complaints include unnecessary force, discriminatory profiling and removing people from events based on little more than their appearance.
The press must love it, for the number of stories it can generate.
As Britney might say:
"Oops, I did it againI played with your heart, got lost in the gameOh baby, babyOops, you think I'm in loveThat I'm sent from aboveI'm not that innocent"
Back in those days it was all paper tape input, but you can see the outline architecture of a von Neumann machine, which is filling an entire room.
We had venerable Elliott 803 in my first computer room. It was transistorised but similarly arcane and had paper tape input, along with the 39-bit word (don't ask). It only had 4096 memory cells I seem to remember and needed to be programmed in Autocode. We didn't have mag tape, but it supported 35mm film coated with magnetic material, by Kodak.
Then the Elliott 503 came along with Algol to write Apps and the rest is, as they say, history.
It's worth noting that this heyday of invention was largely from the International Computers Limited ICL stable: Elliott, Marconi, English Electric and Leo (Joe Lyons corner houses). The business-focused part of this group in turn became part of ICL - a 10%-nationalised company formed in 1968 by Harold Wilson's Labour government, whilst the automation parts of Elliott went to GEC - the company which would end up briefly running Dragon Data before the the latter's collapse in 1984.
GEC would eventually end up as part of British Aerospace - BAe Systems, whilst ICL was subsumed by Fujitsu in 1998, although it kept its name until 2002.
ICL (and later Fujitsu) continued to win many government bids with their COBOL-running competitors to IBM's machines- some say it also staved off antitrust.
COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These domain weaknesses resulted in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability. It was designed for clerical programming with forms...
Many said that ICL's new range (2900) was better technology, but IBM had the marketing clout.
In Europe there are IBM buildings adjacent to major German organisations with processing centres. In the UK I can think of Fujitsu across the road from big government processing centres.
