I mentioned (in the rhyming slang bit) the term "pony" meaning 25 - there are other terms depending on the size of the bet. Does anyone know any others?

> I mentioned (in the rhyming slang bit) the term "pony" meaning 25 - there are other terms depending on the size of the
bet. Does anyone know any others?

Yeah, sure. I know that a 'ton' is 100. There's a 'monkey' which I think is 40. Should be plenty more.

On the same topic, where did the bookies language of 'tic-tac-toe' come from?

A monkey is �500 and a Bullseye �50.

Welcome, hotlegs.
Not asking!
I'm betting you're from Great Britain, as my
computer has a dollar sign--no symbol for the Pound.
We do have what we call a pound sign, though: #.
Amazing, some the "little" differences!

Do you also call a # a "hash"?

Actually, you don't have to have a pound sign button on your computer. All character symbols can be found by holding ALT and typing numbers in the numpad. For example the � is made by typing ALT-156. ����

Strange - on my system it is ALT + 0163

Thinks: are there dialects of ASCII?

> Strange - on my system it is ALT + 0163

Thinks: are there dialects of ASCII?

No! ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information Exchange (Interchange) and is a STANDARD! Despite the 'American' it has been adopted worldwide. However, there is an exception to the rule. Certain non-American characters may be displayed using different key combinations depending on the type of computer or the Operating system. This is especially true of Unicode which incorporates Chinese characters and Kanji. Standard ASCII goes from 00-127. After that the standards are defined for the characters but the coding system is more liberal to allow more flxibility in larger computers and less stringency in smaller ones. This means that not all of your computer's memory will be taken up with useless extra characters. The reason that you had to tyep a different number to Jazzoctopus is because you had an extra few characters on your computer than he had on his. Check them out.

Try the ASCII code for 'A'. This should be 65. 'a' is 97 regrdless of the type of computer.

Only tangentially connected if at all, but why oh why are the numbers laid out differently on telephones and calculators?

Bingley

> Only tangentially connected if at all, but why oh why are the numbers laid out differently on telephones and calculators?

Oh, now you've done it. I used to sleep at nights but now I feel a bout of insomnia coming on at the thought of that one. When I read this I happened to have both on my desk. I can't think of a logical reason for the differences but the two evolved at different times. Calculators (in mechanical form) have been around since the 1960s (possibly even earlier) and I suppose the companies who manufactured the machines adopted their own standards for reasons similar to those by which the QWERTY standard was adopted in most (but not all) countries for typewriters (and now word-processors). I can but guess that those who used the earlier machines (cashiers, accountants etc.) approved of the bottom-up approach to number crunching on mechanical calculators and this practice was maintained when the calculator world went electronic.

Push button phones have only really been around for the past twenty years and I presume the position of the buttons are primarily for the benefit of those with poor sight. The logical sequence of numbers from top left to bottom right reflects the Western method of character reading. You may have noticed aswell, that there is a small raised dot in the centre of the number '5'. This aids the quick selection of numbers for poorly-sighted users and helps to distinguish numbers from extra buttons on extended key-pad phones.

I've only just noticed that the number pad on my keyboard (laid out like a calculator) is the opposite was to the numbers on the telephone right next to it - and I probably use both without really looking at the keys. Then I always did walk round in a dream.

.... What I really want to know is - why do our two Honda cars each have the windscreen wiper on different sides of the steering wheel. I can cope with different makes being different but the same make! Anyway, I digress ....

> .... What I really want to know is - why do our two Honda cars each have the windscreen wiper on different sides of the
steering wheel. I can cope with different makes being different but the same make! Anyway, I digress ...

Now you really go too far, Jo! Check out this website to satiate all of your curiosities: http://www.howthingswork.com/

It may not contain everthing you want to know but it's a pretty cool site.

Can one ever go too far?

Without wishing to add to your insomnia, Rubrick, but ATMs are laid out the same way as phones, but no raised dot in the middle (or not in the two I checked). If I remember rightly ATMs first arrived in the seventies, before push button phones, so were the phones following the ATMs? Of course this just pushes the question of why the difference further back.

Bingley

> Can one ever go too far?

'Course not, Jo. Your enquiry was just a bit on the tricky side, that's all. Was the site any help??

>Was the site any help??

It was very helpful, thank-you. Unfortunately I've been reading up about "why Christmas" and keep forgetting why I went to the site in the first place!!!!

I'm also able to make the � with ALT-0163. Perhaps the creators of ASCII decided that � was important enough to need two ways to make it.

Ok, this is my second post in a row, different subject in the same thread, but oh well.

About there being no raised dot on the 5 on ATMs: Most ATMs, where I live at least, are drive-up accessible. Now, if you need a raised dot to find the 5 on an ATM, you shouldn't be driving in the first place.

>� with ALT-0163

My idea of important would be the make the � sign ALT-001. If it only comes in at ALT-0163 it isn't exactly in there with the big guys is it?

Why do calculators and telephone keypads have different layouts? Because of the alphabetic requirements of the latter.

Imagine a phone dial that looks like this to match a calculator:

7 | 8 | 9
pqrs| tuv | wxyz
--------------------------------
4 | 5 | 6
ghi | jkl | mno
-------------------------------
1 | 2 | 3
-------------------------------
| abc | def


The letters are out of "order" unless you have the number 1 in the upper left corner and the 9 in the lower right corner.

Ted

>I'm also able to make the� with ALT-0163.

this probably doesn't warrant much space, so I'll try and keep it brief: the original 7-bit US ASCII code didn't allow much room for expansion so there soon developed several national versions (all these were controlled by the ISO 646 standard); this was very messy and was superceded by the ISO 8859 alphabet soup which is an 8-bit standard in which the original 7-bit ASCII truly was standardized and the various national versions were incorporated in the expanded set; this is now being replaced by so-called Unicode (ISO 10646), which is the de facto HTML standard -- our confusion is that there are many undefined codes, in this case (decimal) 0163 is the official code for the � while anything else you may discover is highly untransportable and could change momentarily.

>Because of the alphabetic requirements of the latter.

Very true.

I remember having a phone number of MAI 3363. It wouldn't have translated so well to a keypad.

Momentarily

Does that mean "for a moment"? Would it be worth changing it for a moment?

>Does that mean "for a moment"?

not invariably -- YCLIU.

Thank you Ted, that makes sense.

Bingley

I agree! Merci beaucoup, TEd! And welcome--hope to
see many more from you!

�

��
Well ferhevinssake! I did it, I did It.
.. I didn't think I'd do it but indeed I did!

Hurrah. I have tried the code someone gave me with no luck at all..... just went and re-tried and guess what! everthing is working!
+ � � � � � � � oops 0155 os supposed to be the cent sign not a � (?) � oops again, now 0155 wants to be an oe instead of a pounds sign. � now that was supposed to be a yen sign and now lets try 0146 for an AE mushed together � HA got an '

there is no help anywhere. is there.
sigh

Another way to get a non-keyboard character is simply to cut-and-paste it from where someone else has used it.

a partial list here, for that purpose:

� � � | � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �

� � � � �