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Traditionally, the answer is the location of the post office
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Some places that could be the defining point. Larger cities may have several post offices, making it ambiguous. Smaller places may not have a post office (here in Norway we are making great efforts to completely kill the postal service!).
There are several other options: I have mentioned the church tower, the railroad station and the city hall. In Norway, lots of towns are located on rivers, with a town bridge connecting the east and west, or maybe north and south part of the town. The midpoint of the bridge is considered the midpoint of the town/village.
So: There are so many alternatives for identifying the center of a city / town / village that you cannot state one as The Rule.
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Yeah if you have more than one, the GPO is probably in that town. That was historically true, post offices are disappearing here as well.
Norway is ace, BTW. Saw Rammstein and went to a burger restaurant run by the guys from In Flames
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Christian Graus wrote: went to a burger restaurant run by the guys from In Flames
2112 is next to my office in Gothenburg, which incidentally does not lie in Norway. 
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In most Aussie cities it's the GPO, also used as zero point for road distances.
Not long after I moved to Sydney ('burbs) half a century ago, I happened across the Obelisk of Distances[^]
Apparently when it was erected it was roughly the centroid of the then settlelement.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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I believe it is the location of the largest Post Office that has been used traditionally.
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that IS an interesting question.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Given the other responses you might also ask who gets to decide which spot to use (regardless of how)?
Might also be relevant to wonder what happens if that is some landmark that ends up moving in the future?
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Wikipedia lists the city centre for most cities. You can click on the link and see precisely where it is, on your fav map/satellite website. As for London it is neither the GPO nor St Paul's cathedral, it is in the middle of the street, just off Trafalgar Sq, as mentioned by many. In Stockholm, it is not a building either, it is off centre in the square facing the Opera.
By what administrative method these were picked? Good question.
EDIT:
It may also be noted that the GPS coordinates on Wikipedia, do not include the "last" decimal. By last I mean the last explicit decimal in the ensuing URL, on Googmaps. One can change this "last" decimal and see pin move a few metres. This rounding might explain why the pins are displayed near, but still off, significant landmarks.
"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"
modified 14-Nov-23 17:35pm.
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Or altitude. At lease with Denver we actually have a special color (purple) in Coors Field and on the steps of the capital building indicating 5280 feet above sea level.
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#Worldle #661 3/6 (100%)
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜↗️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨➡️
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🎉
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr
that weird part of asia
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I <insert words="" i="" don't="" want="" peoplle="" to="" know="" what="" am="" thinking=""> angry.
In the past, I could plug in my phone and copy photos off of it to MY disk drive. Not today. Today, it gets automatically uploaded to the cloud on my Windows Pro 11 laptop. Anyway to stop it? Nope? Anyway to access the device itself? Working on it.
The information sharing and pillaging is out of control.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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and it's all trying to push me to network storage, one drive, blah. Die you bastards.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I disconnect from the network at all times when I am not actively doing network operations (such as browsing CP). All my text editing, software development, photo/video editing etc. is done off line. I am still on Win10, with no plans to switch - which would require me to buy a new PC. I guess that even Win11 allows you to open 'Network connections' as a small window in the screen corner, and doubleclick it when your need to check something on the internet, and right click / Disable when that task is done.
My first network experience was with 110 bps (!) modems. In those days, we pre-punched our emails on paper tape before calling the BBS, reading in our paper tape and having all mail from others, including entries in those BBS discussion forums that we participated in. Later, when modems reached 1200 bps, we could send emails stored in disk files, and others' discussion entries were stored directly on disk.
So to me, being online only periodically works perfectly fine. I do not think that it limits my work at all. If I need any net service, it takes a doubleclick to open the net, and closing it is almost as simple. So rejecting that rather cloudy storage option is straightforward with me.
Another thing is that some of my writings, and some of the photos from when I was the daddy of a little girl, would have to be encrypted if I were to store them in any cloudy storage. As long as I keep my family photo archive on offline disks, there is no real need to encrypt them. At least not in this country. If I were to move to GOC. I guess that I would have to encrypt even the disks in my home.
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No, in the beginning was a db25 serial port, and thost made yer own cables man. And booted up the old pdp 11/70 by throwing pretty plastic pink and purple switches on or off in ancient octal. If you did that right and made your cable right minding rts and dtr handshakes if required, you might get the holy boot scriptures to come out on the teletype.
Someone will come along and say how soft we had it doing the former and all about the punch cards. To the card punch coders, Dilly - Dilly!
modified 14-Nov-23 8:20am.
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I have a vague recollection that the 20mA current loop on the ASR33 I used at school had a different connector - possibly a DB9, and that was a relatively modern interface, having been introduced in the 60's.
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Alister Morton wrote: that was a relatively modern interface, having been introduced in the 60's.
That didn't seem likely to me...man was I wrong. You were a bit off as well.
D-subminiature - Wikipedia[^]
"The D-sub series of connectors was introduced by Cannon in 1952"
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I meant the 20 mA current loop became common sometime early 60's
The Cannon connectors were much older, yes.
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DE9 - B denotes the shell size </pedantry>
<°}}}>«<
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Well, yes, and to be fair this connector shell was the old style metal casting with a retaining wire loop; not sure what designation that would get to be honest.
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Ron Anders wrote: booted up the old pdp 11/70 by throwing pretty plastic pink and purple switches on or off in ancient octal
True story: A class in college (early 1980's) used PDP-11/05's. The bootstrap was 80 words, stored in a core memory board. Sometime student programs would wipe the board, and you had to put the bootstrap back in using the panel switches. I had to do it a couple of times, and it took me about 5 minutes to make sure it was correct.
There was one guy in the lab who did it so often, he could set all 80 words in under 60 seconds  .
Software Zen: delete this;
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I ran into the push toward the networking stage with MS trying to push everyone towards subscription based Office. You have to look and dig, and sometimes argue with your vendor, but there IS still a LTSC (Long Term Support Channel, ie, "stand alone, non-subscription based" version of Office. I had to find it myself, argue with my vendor about the availability, until they finally found it and offered it to me.
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Yes.
I suspect that if Microsoft wants to continue to sell to governments, all governments, then they are always going to need an option that doesn't require accessing the internet.
That would be there will be cases where there is not internet by design/regulation/law.
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Funny story - there was a time about 4 years ago when our internet suddenly went to sh*t - as in sometimes it was fine, other times it was totally unusable. This went on for a week, until I noticed that the rubbish performance started just after my son woke up in the morning. Then it occurred to me that the start of the troubles coincided with a new laptop he'd bought. So then I took a look, and I realised that the Windows installed on that system was set up to upload the contents of the user home directory to the new fangled "One Drive" system, supposedly for backup purposes. Of course, my son had around 30GB of gaming data stored in that directory, and we were still on ADSL at the time (A standing for asymmetric, upload speeds being a paltry 100kbps or so), so this was going to take a month of Sundays, and of course ultimately fail, because MS is not generous enough to hand out multi GB of data for free. I had to google the sh*t out of that problem to find out how to disable this on his system.
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I ran into the same thing with my wife's computer. It solved itself when Microsoft filled up the folder all by itself.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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