[Bradford] New IT Stuff podcast up - 080415

[Stuart Brady]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 05:58:49PM +0100, shi wrote:
> If you've missed the live broadcast of IT Stuff on BCBRadio last week, you
> can listen to it here (podcasts are posted a week after the live broadcast):
> 
> 
> *http://itstuff.org.uk/blog/ITStuff080415
> <http://itstuff.org.uk/blog/ITStuff080415>*
> 
> 
> Summary: No Periscope or political content, all paid content removed on
> Raspberry Pi Store, VAT mess, Salman Rushdie & Goodreads, NQ Vault,
> cyberterrorism on UK Air Quality Monitoring, get out of jail with an email,
> Windows Update being a killjoy. Git is 10, Microsoft is 40, join the
> Bradford Art Crawl by tweeting photos to #artcrawl with location shared.

Bit late saying this, but I loved the bit on Windows Update being a
killjoy.  "Hilarious", indeed!  Those who don't know what I'm talking
about should listen to the podcast!

The Salman Rushdie Goodreads thing is also brilliant.

I can't even begin to imagine the pain of dealing with pounds, shillings
and pence in a 24-bit word on an ICL mainframe.  I'm fascinated though
and want to know more about the packing of the data.  I must be some sort
of masochist.  Anyone who dealt with this first time around must dearly
want to forget, though.  Alcohol probably helps temporarily but you only
wake up and remember this stuff again in the morning!

I would probably want to store pounds and pence, with pence as an 8-bit
integer between 0 and 239, and then deal with expansion into shillings
and pence as needed. :D

Cheers,
Stuart