Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: primary Don't use anything musk related

"but he would support using nazi's? so that's a thing"

Umm...yeah, it is. Both The USA and USSR kickstarted their Space Race with Nazi rocket scientists.

Re: The other rescopes

Or, look at how long it took for SpaceX to go from almost bankrupt to routinely launching and landing Flacon 9's and Heavies and project on from what Starship may do this year and where they may be in 15 years time. It might well be a spectacular failure, but I'd bet on Starship succeeding over that time. Even if Starship is never able to land and take off again from Mars, I'm fairly confident it will be able to deliver a Mars lander that could take off again, whether by taking fuel down with it or by generating fuel on the surface.

Musk may be an arse, but SpaceX has been delivering, despite him.

Re: I never split the bill when I had my girlfriend with me on expense

Our company always books the hotel with a meal allowance. I can spend as much as I like, but if I go over the meal allowance, I get billed at reception when checking out. So there's no issue with taking my wife if I so choose since the company only ever sees the booking agency bill for room+allowance, never broken down into individual items.

The last time I was down in London, it was for a couple of days. I was asked to extend to 3 days. No problem, a small but decent hotel 45mins out of town 5 mins walk from the railway station was my digs, with a direct route to one of London's main stations, 5 mins walk from the job. I called my boss to make sure it was ok by him and he says "yeah, but stay another night, no need to travel after a full days work and it's coming out of someone else's budget anyway!" :-)

Re: failed meeting

I'd have thought a "major agricultural irrigation system" would be scaled in gallons, not pints. But then the US Gall is also different to the UK gall, so...erm...yeah, same problem, as you were :-)

Re: failed meeting

"If only Boris was still our illustrious leader you could have taken the Boris Bridge he planned to cross the Irish Sea"

Even by US standards, that would still have been a hell of a drive from Heathrow up to Scotland, across to Northern Ireland, then all the way back down to Dublin in the Republic of Ireland :-)

Similar here. Scored "nice" hotels a couple of times over the years, c£500/night, but rarely had the time to do more than enjoy a nice evening meal, sleep, a nice breakfast and then moving on. Not by any stretch of the imagination like the articles hero or many of the stories recounted in the comments, but still a nice treat :-)

Re: Not interested

"Thirdly, if a particular place gets a reputation for being mostly scam ads, the big legitimate companies, the ones with really big advertising budgets, won't want to be seen next to them."

I doubt they look for or monitor stuff like that unless it becomes such an issue that people start talking about it and maybe the media pick up on it and report it publicly on TV/radio etc.

Re: Not interested

"When sites become too enshitified folks tend to start avoiding them, "

Half of people are below average intelligence. There are lots of people out there that don't seem to understand what bookmarks or favourites are and always search for everything. Hell, I've seen people open search on Windows, enter "Google" into Bing, click the first result and only then search for what they are looking for, invariably by hopping between the mouse and keyboard because they still haven't figured out how the Enter key works in a form field.

...and then there is the disconnect between the InfoSec department and Marketing/Sales. InfoSec draw up rules, employees get trained what to do and not do, how to be more secure etc, and Marketing/Sales and HR are sending internal and external communications blindly ignoring everything, sending out "rich" emails breaking every guideline InfoSec are trying to enforce. And people then wonder why the run of the mill staff are confused over what is allowed and not allowed.

Re: China will soon match the west

"For now, what we observe is a Chinese elite that is fighting tooth and nail to get their kids in US universities. Not to mention Indians and others."

Apart from the "world wide big name" universities taking only the "best of the best", most of the best Chinese students opt for the best of the Chinese universities. Those who don't get a place there start looking at the rest of the worlds universities. And as someone else pointed out, it's go to Uni or do your "service" in the PLA.

Re: "the Morefine M700S isn't a great deal overall. " ... indeed

But they have a huuuge internal market. With or without a ban in Intel/AMD chips, it will be strongly encouraged to patriotically use the home-grown silicon. That will reduce prices quickly as production ramps up.

Re: Good enough

"- AI taking everyday consumer computing by storm. Look at Microsoft/Apple and how they're steering the industry in that direction."

As a great philosopher[*] once said "why are we spending money developing artificial "intelligence when the money would be better spent on dealing with natural stupidity?"

(A Grogu meme, as reported to me by my wife just this afternoon :-))

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

"Core I3-level tech" is a pretty meaningless term, since Intel have been pushing that branding for a decade and a half.

It's qualified in the article as 2020 core i3 tech, does that help narrow it down a bit for you?

Re: Probably not exactly a bargain.

"They will improve."

They will, but the question is how quickly? If China goes ahead with banning Intel and AMD, even a strongly worded "soft ban", that will artificially reduce competition and without the need to compete, reduce the imperative to improve.

Having said that, in the commercial world, even a 4 year old i3 equivalent is more than fast enough for most users who are using local "office" apps, server interfaces and "cloudy" apps where there isn't a need for high CPU throughput.

Re: I guess it's a plan. Kinda. Sorta. If you squint.

"and whether or not the US has the intestinal fortitude to spend the ungawdly amount of money it will cost."

You assume the US has that much money. Isn't China one of the US largest creditors, holding a significant amount of US debt?

Re: Honourable mentions

Agreed that code doesn't "rot" as such, but an abandoned bit of code can become useless if it can no longe be used because the underlying system as changed. So "code rot" is a reasonable short-hand for old code that may longer work without changes. On the other hand, I have code[*] that still works perfectly well after many many years of being abandoned because it's running on systems and OSs/ROMS that are equally as old :-)

[*] a TRS-80 clone and an Amiga 1200 :-)

Re: Nothing will prevent a bad actor putting a malicious version of a file with a sha256 next to it.

"That’s why you need to get the hash from the original site."

The point being, of course, if you are going to visit the original site the get the hash, why are you downloading the file from a 3rd party site in the first place? Go the original site and get the file AND the hash at the same time seems to be the most logical and efficient course of action.

Re: Meh

Kate offers any popular platform and also linux.

That's a back handed compliment if I ever saw one, especially considering it originally came as part of KDE on Linux :-)

Re: Meh

Just out of curiosity, under what use case are people opening up multi-100's of MB plain text files? Is that a common or fairly specialised use case? 4KB is generally regarded as a standard A4 (or US Letter) text file, so 300MB is about 75,000 pages :-)

Re: vegans

"My mate of 19 years was a carnivore..."

Did you mean omnivore? Or did he take a lot of vitemin supplement pills or become very ill?

"All CRT monitors (and most CRT-TVs) have their focus adjustment exposed on the back through a hole."

Asa field tech of the relevant era I can state with a fair level of confidence that CRT monitors of the DOS and/or Windows eras rarely had access to the focus control from the outside of the casing. Early ones from the 8-bit days and maybe early 16 bit days, sometimes did, but not always. Mostly it was internal and part of the LOPT.

Re: Don't follow the instructions

"Azure Portal, and every time I use it I discover that the Portal's UI has changed."

Ditto for pretty much everything MS related since auto-updates have been enforced, but most especially anything cloudy.

Re: Bogus

Injudicious use of any/all of join, append, assign, subst can cause interesting results when following a directory tree.

Re: Have they been hacked?

I don't think they are designed to last so long without power. Charge leakage probably. Use them every now and then and they should last a lot longer. I think. :-)

Re: Curious what the floppy replacement will be?

"They are used to replace floppy drives in all sorts of industrial systems as well as retro computers."

IIRC it was originally invented to keep old floppy based industrial sewing and knitting machines running as floppy drives wore out and disks became harder to source :-)

How about "any terms used in these laws will have the defined meaning as laid down in the oxford dictionary/Duden/(general spelling and meaning reference of the affected country) from 1990".

Unfortunately, many/most words in a dictionary have multiple definitions, not all of which are even similar. And then there's the words which have very specific meanings in legalese and are often entirely at odd with the general public's understanding of the meaning.