Posts by Peter Ford

Re: Failure

Not a failure.

Just "Another partial success" as Dr. Piehead would have said.

Re: Being polite is great

The person I'm most likely to be contacted by to help with things I used to do when I worked for them probably doesn't have enough money to pay a decent hourly rate. That's the main reason I'm not working there any more...

Re: Obsession with colour printing is the problem

I can honestly say that I have never seen an inkjet printer that uses RGB ink.

Or any other sort of printer. They're all CMYK. Even the fancy wax printer things that we had in the 90s in our research lab (can remember what they were called)

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

The apropos command works on my Mac:

% apropos pdf

snmpdf(1) - display disk space usage on a network entity via SNMP

Not much use though...

Re: Ok, I'll be down vote bait

My biggest gripe with MacOS (I've been using it for dev work for a few years) is that you can't do everything with a keyboard shortcut. There isn't even a 'Open the menu on this app' keypress. Unless I'm missing something?

I can't spell 'contanier', which is a bugger when a lot of our stuff is on Docker...

Re: @Korev "Well the Z in Regomised is still there..."

I still have a 'Hacker' polo shirt with a Union Flag on the sleeve...

That explains the missing iPhone 9 and 10, at least: 9 would be scary and 10 would float away.

Re: A long time ago...

I think I'm with you on this: How many people are actually looking at any of this data that they have collected?

Targeted advertising is already confused by having a mixture of adults and teenagers on the same NAT address, so in our house any adverts that do slip past the pi-hole are not well targeted to whoever receives them.

This heap of data is mostly worthless bollocks - certainly the management of most companies is not intelligent enough to do anything productive with it. The biggest worry is that some AI in the future will be let loose on it and actually start making headway with it all. I guess that's when SkyNet happens...

Re: Expose

A good many of the shopping malls were built on land owned by the Church of England, meaning they would have to abide by covenants on the land, such as not opening on Easter Sunday. Not sure if that's still the case.

Some of the other big landowners in England were the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities - there is the story that you could walk between the two universities entirely on land owned by their colleges. Again, probably not the case any more.

Re: Was that sheep (singular) or sheep (plural)?

You'll be wanting https://what3words.com/sheep.sheep.sheep - in Detroit

Re: Fallback fault-tolerant

If they were from Sunderland, that's pretty much the same thing

Re: Just as I was thinking of buying one...

Find a second-hand intel Mac Mini and put windows / linux on it...

There is only one issue stopping me getting a BEV - the price of buying it. I've always bought cars cash: £5000 for a small one and £10000-12000 for something bigger. I don't have £40,000+ cash lying around for a new one - even the small BEVs are more than £25000 at the moment, and there's very little second-hand stock of BEVs, apart from crappy Leafs with knackered batteries and Teslas that are not far from new price.

Re: What a coincidence

Surely the point of this simulation kit is to work out how to do it safely. If Ocean Gate has done a decent simulation, they might have had a better outcome, or more likely a more expensive ticket price...

I think it might be easier to replace the micromanging managers with robots - I suspect ChatGPT can already replicate most of their behaviour.

Re: Unique keys

I worked for a chap who disliked his first (of three) given name, so in anything useful to him he went by his second name.

On surveys, questionnaires, internet forms, etc. he used his first name, so spam, and sales calls would alway ask for his first name - a useful filter for phone answering...

He hated his third name even more - I'm not sure he really admitted it's existent beyond the initial letter.

Re: He's toast

Had a similar problem, but the solution was to cover the stupid smoke detector in the kitchen with tin foil...

Re: This is so cool (no pun)

Fish still need oxygen.

On Earth enough dissolves in the water from the atmosphere and underwater plants.

On an icy moon I'm not sure where that oxygen comes from, especially if there's a thick crust of ice over the top and pretty-much no gaseous atmosphere.

Re: Aaah, unfortunately paywalled

I think the article said that the piezoelectric effect of the materials they have so far is an order of magnitude less than quartz, so probably not great...

Re: Don't get me started...

Or even a saxophone.

A horn is a musical instrument with some sort of noise generator at one end and a conical bore to the other open end: the conical bore means the tube is gradually getting wider along it's length so if you straighten out the curves it would look like a cone (although chopped off at the top, I suppose)

So horns include all of the saxophones (where are single reed generates the noise that then resonates down the horn), and the brass horns like the cornet (lit. little horn), French horn, E-flat horn, euphonium, tuba, Sousaphone etc., but *not* the trumpet - that has a cylindrical bore that only flares at the bell.

As for the cor anglais (English horn), that's not a horn or English...

Re: Content

"Computer is running an update process that cannot be interrupted by you and anyone else under any circumstances."

Oh yes it can...

Perhaps 'must not' would be better.

Re: Or you could...

More or less straight down my street, which is a pain because it means I had to add some blocks to stand the dish off the wall a bit to get the alignment.

Re: *article paid for by Google

And in most cases didn't get up after lunch for at least an hour after the Britsh had finished

Re: Bad design

I have an AOC monitor that has one button, on the bottom edge, that lights up green when the monitor is on. If I press it in certain ways I can apparently adjust stuff, but it also functions as the on-off button.

I leave it on - it's working fine at the moment, and I dare not press the button to turn it off in case I press it wrong and mess up the settings.

I probably have a manual somewhere, with three pages of English instructions buried among 4795 pages of other languages.

Re: energy storage ... pulling a train of concrete blocks ...

There's at least one more, Ben Cruachan near Loch Awe in Scotland, on a similar scale to Dinorwig.

But you're right: digging tunnels big enough to pour a lake down a mountain through turbines is hardly less infrastructure than a bit of railway track. I suspect the train doesn't quite match the power generation capacity of a big pump-storage system.

Re: Waiting on Moore's clock

I thought DNS was pretty mch an industrial-scale compute job, so either this is an oxymoron, or they truly mean 'really really big'. It's probably been planned for years and now there are facilities big enough to handle it within the time-scale of a Ph.D. project

Re: It's not time to railroad

There are plenty of examples of railway locomotives in Europe that can run on either electric pickups (two different types in the UK) or diesel. For a locomotive, where weight is not so much of an issue, it works just fine.

I also see that there is work in hand to make battery locomotives too - for some applications like trundling along over long distances a diesel battery hybrid might make sense, especially if the batteries can be charged from overhead or third rail pickups at locations where power is accessible, and also from regenerative braking.

But I don't think the USA has an appetite for rail travel in place of flying or driving...

Re: Discrimination comes in many forms

Age discrimination is certainly not a given - I just got a new programming job at age 52 and the team is almost all middle-aged men, including two other new hires of a similar age to me. Anyone discriminating on age is going to miss out on a lot of experience, but I guess young people are cheaper...

Re: Legal issues

It seems to be a thing, especially among Americans, to avoid using words like 'died', like it's unlucky or something. See also 'toilet'...

Re: Bollocks statistics

It doesn't take into account the 2 hours in the middle of the day running/cycling/kayaking/swimming during everyone-else's vague definitions of lunchtime.

I reckon I can do four hours in the morning (starting from the time I'd otherwise be setting off for work), two hours of exercise in the middle, make a bit of lunch to take to my desk, and then do four hours in the afternoon (up to the time I'd otherwise be getting home).

So if I were in meetings at the ends of that day, it would look like I was working 8am to 6pm...

Re: There’s more than what meets the eye

They said that sort of thing about Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump.

Re: Quantum idiots.

At least while they're in prison they wouldn't be cocking up everything else for the rest of us. I'd say the cost of dinner with the prison governor would be saved a million times over by keeping them out of government decisions.

Re: Fond memories

My Dad had a Morris Oxford too - it was written off after a minor collision with a Mini caused it largely to disappear in a puff of iron oxide dust. The Mini was unscathed...

Surely that's a radio station?

Re: THE Newport Bridge

Pretty sure the Newport Bridge on the Tees is no longer capable of lifting, which is a shame. I did always think it amusing that the two proper transporter bridges in Britain (that Warrington one is a bit pathetic) were both near Newport.

As a Middlesbrough native, I was also amused when a young lady pinpointed my accent to the Welsh Newport. "Well, you're almost right..."

Re: A contrarian view

This is true absolutely right. However, where it falls over is that the previously 'reassuringly expensive' brands are also on this downward spiral. They are capitalising on their reputations and now make stuff that is slightly less nasty than the bargain-basement kit, but costs 'reassuringly expensive' money. And can't be repaired any better than the cheap stuff.

So where you previously had the option of 'buy cheap, replace often' or 'buy expensive, last for ever' you now only have the choice of which logo you want on your kit. Nobody makes the reliable things any more - even if it was profitable it's not *as* profitable...

Re: The light..

I have a monitor (an inexpensive one) that has one button and one light. I believe there's some way of using that one button to access menus and configurations, but it's also the on-off button.

I connected it up and it just works - when the Mac it's connected to sleeps the screen goes dark, and when the Mac wakes up the screen comes on again. I haven't dared even try turning it off - I might end up in a maze of twisty menus, all alike.

The problem here is not enough cones - the US (and most of the world outside of the UK) is not very good at marking temporary road layout changes.

In the UK any significant road working is surrounded by an army of cones, signs, flashing lights, and usually vehicles parked at the ends of the work areas. A self-driving car would not even consider trying to get into that lane if it was properly marked off.

Re: Great Idea BUT sh*t implementation

Further to that, where I am in Kent there are many smaller lanes that work as short cuts and alternative routes, but around March/April there is a rash of road resurfacing (presumably something to do with budget needing to be used or newly available).

So they put up a sign saying 'ROAD CLOSED AHEAD'. But that could mean:

'The road you are on is closed just around the corner',

'The road that turns off this road that you were not planning on using is closed',

'This road is closed about five miles past the last alternative route you could have taken'

or

'The road was closed yesterday but we forgot to remove this sign'