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Entries Tagged as 'Computing'

Bloody Windows

August 18th, 2016 · Comments Off on Bloody Windows · Technology

I have a laptop. I know. Everybody has one these days, but I can remember when that was something to brag about. It is 6 or 7 years old but should still be OK for basic tasks. The trouble is that it doesn’t get used very often. I fired it up yesterday for probably the […]

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Technology nil, Skuds 2

May 19th, 2015 · Comments Off on Technology nil, Skuds 2 · Technology

I got my user ID and password for the Town Hall network today, so I popped in after work and got myself all set up so I can now get to the emails from home. That is going to make everything a lot easier from now on. I think I got to it in the […]

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A blast from the past

January 27th, 2015 · Comments Off on A blast from the past · Life, Technology

While looking for something in the system32 directory of a Windows 7 computer the other day (I still can’t quite bring myself  to call it a folder) I came across the file pifmgr.dll It was a bit like when you are on Facebook or Linkedin and see the name of somebody you knew or worked […]

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The Turing Test

November 17th, 2014 · Comments Off on The Turing Test · Technology

The concept of the Turing test has been cropping up a lot on the news lately, due to the current film about Turing and a competition hosted at Bletchley Park. For some reason it sparked off a whole bunch of thoughts.

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Computers do it faster…

September 3rd, 2014 · Comments Off on Computers do it faster… · Technology

…but people do it better! I was quite amused to see the BBC news at lunchtime. At work we have it on screens in the lobby, with the sub-titles on. The sub-titles are, I am pretty sure generated by some computer speech recognition software, and it was having some trouble with David Cameron at PMQs. […]

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How not to do a Turing test

June 16th, 2014 · Comments Off on How not to do a Turing test · Technology

There was a lot in the news last week about a program that supposedly passed the Turing test. I’m not so sure about that, for several reasons. First of all, I don’t think that Turing ever proposed a test as such, but rather made a statement about it being forseeable that one day a machine […]

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The pace of change

October 19th, 2013 · Comments Off on The pace of change · Technology

I think we have all heard of the concept of ‘internet time’ , which is a sort of technological version of dog years, and we talk about how everything seems to progress much more quickly now, and take it as a given without thinking too much about it. Today I made the mistake of thinking […]

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Today’s bright idea #2

August 28th, 2013 · 4 Comments · Life, Technology

Todays’ bright idea: a new open source file format for CVs. In the old days a CVwas typed up on paper and physically posted. Now they are done in (usually) MS Word and more often emailed or uploaded to an employer or agency’s web site, but people still think of the CV as a document […]

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The way we were

September 4th, 2012 · Comments Off on The way we were · Life, Technology

At the moment I am re-reading a humorous book about computers from 1996 called Dave Barry in Cyberspace. I have quite a few of his books and like to dip into the ones that are basically collections of his newspaper columns every now and then because they are light reading and more or less timeless. […]

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Technologically challenged

November 24th, 2011 · Comments Off on Technologically challenged · Life, Technology

For the last few days I have been wrestling with technology. My PC died over the weekend and I spent a couple of days trying to resuscitate it, then a few days deciding what to replace it with. I finally forked out on a new one on Tuesday when trying to use the laptop annoyed […]

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