Posts by Ian Johnston 2622 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2007
They claimed that the school outreach programme was central, but I don't think that was ever more than a bit of CSR puff for sponsors wanting to hide the fact that they were splashing their shareholders' cash on a boys' toy. F1 in Schools has a far more coherent and far more interesting programme.
What's needed, I think, is a way to distinguish between the ideologically pure operating system which doesn't actually work and the running-dog revanchist version which does. I suggest that, in honour of the greatest single obstructor of free software, we call the former "GNU/Linux" (Generally Not Usable) and the latter "Linux".
Years ago my first attempt at installing Linux was putting Mandrake (iirc) on a machine which already had OS/2 and W98 on it. Those two played nicely, but the Linux install screwed my disk so badly I had to reinstall everything from scratch.
I posted to uk.comp.os.linux in search of advice and while a few people were very helpful, two or three spent a lot of time telling me that I was lying, that Linux couldn't do what I said it had done and that I was therefore obviously a paid Microsoft shill.
How charming it is to see some of that attitude persisting.
I've you haven't already done so, you'll now discover that because Amazon doesn't allow food items to be returned, there is no possible way to report them damaged on arrival. I get apple juice from them on a monthly order and when one lot turned up with two bust cartons I just had to grin and bear it.
I recently took a LaserJet 1100 to the skip when its paper pickup mechanism failed beyond my ability to repair with the few parts still available. Since it had been running continually since 1999, it did pretty well.
A few years ago I bought a cheap HP All-in-one DeskJet thingy. It had wifi. but setup failed and that's when I discovered that you got precisely one shot at it. There was no "undo" or "factory reset" facility, so if something went wrong with the setup there was no way to try again. It only cost £30 from Tesco and it worked OK on USB, but still ...
I now have a Brother laser printer which is a flimsy thing and probably won't last long. On the other hand, it cost me £60 and the LJ1100 cost (iirc) about £200, twenty years ago.
It's always been like that with radio telescopes. I remember being shown a Manchester University network map 30+ years ago, one link on which was labelled "M6Net". Of course I asked what this was - it turned out to be a graduate student driving from Jodrell Bank to Manchester every Friday afternoon with a boot full of 1/2" magnetic tapes containing that week's observations.
Manchester in those days had one of the national supercomputing centres, in large part to process Jodrell Bank data.
Years ago I was asked to have a look at program running on an ancient computer in a university's psychology department, running an equally ancient version of Unix. So ancient, in fact, that when I typed "man <something other>" it replied "If you need help with this, go and see Brian Kernighan in Room 3708".
I once managed to set my password on a university VAX to something which the password setter allowed as a new password but which it would not accept as a current one. Neither would the login system. Ah, the happy days when the sysadmin could pull down an OS source listing (in SNOBOL, I think) and work out how to sort things.
The Stanford Prison experiment proved and proves nothing, except that one particular group of people behaved in one particular way on one particular occasion. That psychology affords it the slightest credibility shows why the who field has a catastrophic replication crisis.
It's the Forth Road Bridge which goes <plink> every so often. The suspension cable were, as you say, woven in situ with around 10,000 strands of piano wire each side and are unrepairable. Its replacement, the Queensferry Crossing, has been designed so that any of its cable stays can be replaced without even closing the bridge.
It may have been a sex joke at first, but "gimp" as a derisory term for people with difficulties walking was first recorded by the OED in 1925. The development team know that perfectly well, and their decision to keep on using the slur was reported in El Reg fairly recently.
And, of course, if they want their software to be more widely used in professional circles (and there is no reason why they should want that, of course) giving it a sex-joke name really isn't any better than giving it an anti-disabled name.
"All critical systems required for matches to take place at Old Trafford remain secure and operational," it added. As such, today's game against West Bromwich Albion took place as scheduled.
A spokesman for the club said there was nothing further to add at this stage and as such would not answer questions we asked about the variant of threat the club was forced to defend itself against.
If there is one group which needs to be shunned by society even more than people who refer to "myself", it's people who use "as such" when they mean "therefore".
That audio conferencing does not? Where's the need to see the faces of those you are talking to?
Away from the superimposed circles of "Works in IT or STEM" and "Has ASD" in the Great Venn Diagram of Humanity, many people do actually prefer to see the person or people they are talking to. For the Aspies and the pyjama'ed, there's always "Turn off video"
To be blunt, given the easily obtainable detail on SpaceX's launch success, refurbishment and relaunch cadence, reliability and dramatically reduced launch costs in comparison to every other existing launch system
Last year they raised $1.3bn and this year $2.1bn from investors. It's easy to reduce launch costs when VCs are willing to make up the difference.
America is just weird. Where else would poor employment protection and exorbitant healthcare be vote winners amongst the poor? Sorry, amongst the temporarily inconvenienced millionaires. Would UK IT workers have been so keen to avoid paying their dues through dodgy contractor status, dodgy loans and so on if they had lost NHS access as a result?
Haitch is the Catholic pronunciation of the letter which proddies call aitch. Asking passengers to spell a word with That Letter in it was a trick of Belfast cabbies (who were mostly catholic) if they wanted to know whether they were driving One Of Them.
Since the stress is on the first and only syllable, it's "a haitch" or "an aitch", but never "an haitch".
The Victorians were terrified of sounding French, so they insisted on pronouncing the silent "h" at the start of French words like "hotel "and "history". However, they kept the "an" which properly goes before the French pronunciation, probably because they worried that "a hotel" would become "a 'otel" and then it would be all moral degeneration, dancing the can-can and the end of the Empire
They therefore invented a rule that words beginning with an "h" but stressed on the second syllable - like French, but not admitting that it was intended to cover French words, because Victorians did not show fear to Frenchies - should take "an" and keep the "h".
Words starting with "h" and stressed on the first syllable - hedgehog, heart, herd - were exempt and took "a" because the "h" didn't tend to disappear and the risk of Frenchness didn't arise.
Often claimed, but in reality no one country carries much weight, except perhaps Germany. At best we were the moderating voice against the socialist bloc, and now that we aren't there I'd expect the more vocal conservative countries to start making trouble.
Socialist bloc (with scary soviet-era spelling)? The EU has always been a driver of privatisation and free enterprise. It's not remotely socialist, which is why so many socialist wanted out, as well as the loony right.
We haven't even completed Brexit yet, and it will take years to show the benefits. There will be many issues and problems in the meantime, I'm sure. I seriously cannot see the UK ever voting to rejoin, since we would clearly not have voted to join in the first place if John Major had given us a choice in 1992, and opinion has hardened since.
We joined long before 1992. And it doesn't look as if there will be a "UK" to vote one way or the other within five years or so.
Are you also opposed to light switches? After all, you can just remove the bulb.
Similarly, I can turn my toaster off by not making toast.
Switched sockets are a concession to the people who believe that electricity can leak out of live sockets. And who unplug things anyway.
We have the right to remain silent. Demanding passwords contradicts this right, so ought to have been legally overturned.
Some people felt similarly about penalties for refusing to say who was driving your car when it was caught by a speed camera. That went all the way to the European Court, who okayed it.
Surely there has to be a competition between this crowd and Gartner to see who can "predict" the most nonsense
The MIT Media Lab used to be particularly good at this. Negroponte and his acolytes would predict absolutely everything, in the vaguest possible way, and then claim credit for the 5% which turned out to have some distant relation to reality, five or ten years later and quietly forget the rest.
The two big problems with Snap - for me - are the huge amount of disk space it uses and the need to update manually, there being as far as I can see no equivalent of apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. A further issues is lousy integration with Xubuntu, since only a few Snap applications offer to create /usr/share/applications/<name>.desktop to get the application into the menu system. And even when you do that manually, the next Snap package has a different name so you have to do it again.
sudo apt-get -purge snapd worked very nicely for me.
I'm sorry to rain on your parade but no, we haven't seen anything to suggest that 373K superconductors are possible, let alone likely and there is absolutely no reason to belief that such a material, if it existed, would have any practical use. HTS has been around for forty years now and the closest they have come to serious use is "Umm, maybe for antennas on the shady side of spacecraft?" and some embarrassed foot-shuffling.
This report is mildly interesting but misses out - possibly because it's unknown - the most important piece of information, which is "What's the critical current?" One of the reasons High-Tc materials have never taken off is that they all have lousy critical currents at 77K. Cool 'em down to 4.2K and things look much better. Since critical current usually increases linearly with temperature below critical temperature, an 80K Tc material (say) will have twenty times the Ic in helium that is has in nitrogen.
And if you're going to cool stuff down to 4.2K, you might as well use something Niobium based. Cheaper, stronger (those j x B forces), easier to work with, better all round.
If this turns out to be real (I first saw reports of room temperature SC in the early eighties) it is probably no more than a scientific curiosity, like YBBC, BSCCO and the rest of the alphabet soup.
Yet another example of holy wars over licences strangling FOSS projects. Anyway ... just 20 years? I was using StarOffice under OS/2 in 1996 and pretty good it was except for its insistence on using its own crappy "desktop" instead of PM. Have you all noticed what the LibreOffice executable is called ... ?
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