Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

It stopped being funny and started being reality.

Re: Realistically what's Plan B?

Plan B is to evaluate the feasibility of plans C-Z.

And then consider whether it may be necessary to construct plans α-ω...

Re: If LibreOffice provided anything even approaching an alternative to 365 in functionality ...

If that's what you want, then you're right - LibreOffice probably isn't the tool. But how many people are really doing that (and where Word really is needed and it's not being used as a bodge for, say. a wiki)? I'm sure there are some - but not most users.

Does it have to make economic sense? Or can they afford to produce a lot more chips and throw away the duff ones?

The USPTO is notorious for rubber stamping patent applications and letting the courts determine legitimacy. So I have know clue whether this is Amazon walking over a little guy or beating up on a patent troll.

Re: Meh

378

Re: Problems and solutions not welcome

At attitude that turns a £20million budget into a £130 overrun and leaves you with a non-functioning system.

You wouldn't look a bunch of trucks on offer and say, "None of these meet our needs, we're going to customise them to our spec." (Unless you're the MoD, that is.) It's obvious that, in addition to the initial costs, they'll be ongoing costs whenever maintenance is required. Ditto software. As soon as you customise, you have become a software house and are taking on the risk of managing the software you have commissioned and it's ongoing integration with the host product.

There is an issue as to why there is no COTS solution for English councils. They are surely are a big enough segment. But I imagine it boils down to them all having completely different processes so no system has a chance of serving them. So that, if a custom product is developed four council X, it won't work for council Y without either (a) substantial alterations to the software or (b) council Y changing their processes to match council X.

Re: Einstein was brilliant

That really wound me up because it's pretty much been obvious to every human---ever---that the further away something is, the longer it will take you to get there. And I'm sure a good many animals understand that too.

Even if we are talking about light, firstly, these aren't optical chips. Secondly I don't think anybody ever thought light travelled instantaneously from one place to another - only, until Maxwell (not Einsteiin) that light could be any speed - not a constant speed. And Einstein then suggested this speed was the upper bound for all matter. (And then got really upset when Quantum Mechanics did book keeping in violation of this rule...)

Re: Free Speech

Unfair. He also cares not to hear other people's free speech.

Re: I am completly reassured.

"Will you authorise me to access this data?"

"Yes."

"Great. Now I'm an authorised user!"

Re: So AI is one of two things

I imagine most of us here have the skills to flood Amazon with things like this. What stops us is we have consciences.

I've survived kV. (The breakdown field strength of air is ~3 kV/mm so any static spark you've been zapped by is guaranteed kV.) I imagine you could be killed at a few volts potential difference, if someone was determined enough. It's normally said to be the current that matters (I really wonder if it's really the power?) and high currents and high voltages tend to coincide, but it's not guaranteed.

Re: Ok Fruity....

Presumably Apple will ensure that doesn't happen. Apple have many vices, but they understand user privacy is one of their selling points and guard that jealously. If Gemini is on your iPhone, it will be on Apple's terms and under Apple's supervision.

I can just about get my head round generic TLDs. But one for each big corp? Not least because corporations, even Microsoft, change their names (Google => Alphabet. Facebook => Meta) or go bust. Someone will always want a `.books` TLD. But who's go to want a `.microsoft` one when they are ashes?

The cloud: a defence against bean counters.

"...many of its systems can't be restored due to their age. They will either no longer work on the fresh infrastructure or they simply can't get any vendor support after going end of life (EOL)."

That, however, won't be allowed to happen in the cloud. They won't be allowed to leave systems rotting ("because, funds...") and then find they can't support them when they need to restore.That problem will have to be dealt with when the vendor or cloud provider pulls support.

Re: First they came for the leap seconds, then they came for the leap days...

"Solar time where the sun is at its highest above Greenwich exactly at noon every single day."

But, due to the earth's orbit not being circular, the interval between this can vary by +/-O(15 mins). That's why we had to invent a mean day and mean time for practical day-to-day applications. There are just four days in the year when local apparent solar time and mean time are about aligned at Greenwich - as governed by the "equation of time". (Which, I guess, is an example of regularising our time keeping to make computing easier.)

"Every time atomic time goes too far ahead of solar time they insert a leap seconds. So you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point."

Yes, UTC is kept within 1 second of UT1. But UT1 is not a measure of solar time: it's a measure of the angle of the earth (the position of the equinox) remembering it takes about 4mins less than 24 hours for the earth to rotate through 360°. Let me quote the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac:

Although it would be possible to define a system of time measurement in terms of the hour angle of the sun, such a system could never be precisely related to sidereal time and could not, therefore, be determined by star transits.

I'm suspecting your 25μs is, anyway, the error in difference between UTC and UT1 (IERS Bulletin B, 12th Feb, gives the mean formal error UT1-UTC as 0.0253ms)

A consequence of this is the mean sun used in GMT isn't even the real mean sun - it's a fictitious one. (Hence the "about aligned" in my opening para.)

I also think it means your assertion that "you get a mix of solar time before the decimal point and atomic time to the right of the decimal point." is incorrect. I get what you're saying; it's not a bad mental model. But UTC is an approximate measure of what you call "solar time" (i.e. the earth's rotation) that is advancing in SI seconds as measured on the "surface" of the earth.

And the point is, as humans, we like that angle. IIRC, the historical record shows 1hr/1000 years is plausible. If the poles disappear quickly, it could get even worse. Nobody is going to accept to sunrise at midday. (Pre-millennial projections over estimate the number of leap seconds we would have. So maybe it will sign flip and go negative; I'm sure negative leap seconds will really piss everybody off even more.) But,drop leap seconds, and we'll either introduce leap hours or time zones shifts, and end up with timezones that are 18hrs off "atomic time". So we'll be saving ourselves some some work in the short term but creating a lot of pain further down the line.

"Was Wirth's Pascal ever garbage-collected,"

No, and I've just checked with google.

Re: He's kidding

"Compassion is somebody else's problem - not mine."

Re: So whose bright idea was it in the first place?

You can understand why businesses might not what to share processes with competitors - believing their process gives them a competitive edge. But that barrier doesn't exist for councils. They should have the same process.

Re: What the hell?

Yeah, my first thought was "will it even last till it's replaced (given the likely delays)?"

Re: Chilling Effects

My thought was a flag in the SIM that Android/iOS will pass on to apps. Asking for a restricted SIM to be replaced with an adult one, should demand stringent checks. Buying another SIM will mean changing the phone number. And constantly flipping between SIMs (in a single SIM phone) is likely to break the phone fairly quickly.

So, as parent, you just have to make sure your child has a single SIM phone with a restricted SIM. It's the job of the regulators to make sure Facebook et al honour the SIM.

Re: nuclear power in earth orbit

When I heard the headlines, I expected something like that (or a heavy duty RTG). Possibly to a power a maser (or space laser) because that solves the beam forming problem.

Re: My guess

You've got sidetracked into an argument about hard limits. The request is not that we set aside numbers forever, but that we maximise the delay before they are re-used. (With reuse measured in years, not days.)

This has the advantage that it reduces risk for all sites. I don't know how hard it is in practice, but these are changes that apply to a handful of large companies which operate in our legal jurisdiction, instead of world+dog. Even if what you say in other comments pans out, it seems a reasonable "defence in depth" strategy to do it anyway.

(Aside: I haven't used an TOTP app: If my only device is a phone, what happens if my phone gets stolen? My mum recently convinced her provider to issue her a new SIM using the existing number? Then what?)

Re: I see a serious issue with the idea

"Secondly - and more worryingly - what happens when (not if) a site gets hacked"

You set the payment level. You chose how much to interact with the site. The hackers can't control any of that: so if it's hacked, your payment doesn't change; it's the site owner who loses their money. This might incentivise them to focus on security.

Re: More helpful for expert programmers

So your definition of an expert is "knowing to call the sort method, rather than implementing a shell sort from scratch"?

Harsh, but fair. (Because, we've all known those "programmers".)

Re: Tesla warp erp

I'd go read the comments on latest update on the Birmingham Council story. And that's just one of many ERP fiascos that have graced these pages. And those are the ones we know about.

Anyway, building your own was advocated by some people as a solution.

Re: "poorly drilled rivet holes"

Something similar has worked for AMD and Global Foundries. (And could we argue Intel's failure to do so has cost them?) So it's not a complete no brainer.

But obviously they are very different industries - who else were Boeing going to buy from? Who else would buy from the spin off?

Re: I haven't read

"...for instance if 3 hours of your time cost more than the whole new motherboard"

You may have nailed it. In the good ol' days, the stuff was much dearer than our labour, so it was worth a lot of effort to fix it up. But the balance has shifted towards our labour, even at minimum wage, being dearer.