Posts by Tim99 2020 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008
Here in Oz, where we buy a lot of these for the iron ore mines in the North West, the preferred driver is a woman.
Women appear to treat the toys better, and as a result, it is reckoned that a typical years equipment maintenance costs up to $100,000 less than if a bloke was driving them...
Obligatory Douglas Adams quotation -
"Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls that are labelled in black on a black background, a little black light lights up black to let you know you have done it."
Hotblack Desiato, Disaster Area, and the totally black ship in "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe"
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=535094
Yes, but their propaganda may not have been that good. William (The Conqueror) was a Norman, and they were the same group as the Vikings, so perhaps they, as Aryan race, would have more in common with the Angles and Saxons?
Mines the one with the thumbed copy of Godwin's Law in the pocket...
[This guy came up to me and said, "Have you got a light Mac?"]
Reply - "No, this is the previous model PowerBook with a 17-inch screen."
or, "No. This is a ThinkPad X300 - I use Kubuntu, would you like to see it?"
or, "No. This is an Asus Eee - I find it works well on the beach."
Mine's the big check jacket with the music-hall stage makeup in the pocket.
Good comment paul.
As an aside - Flying types who swore allegiance to the King/Queen tend to call the kit an "aeroplane" or, if you don't have a classical education, an "aircraft". My father was an aircrew Flt. Lt. in WWII - He got upset about things like that...
A bit of fatherly advice was "Try to avoid leaving an aeroplane by parachute, unless the aeroplane is on fire". So far, I have not needed to follow this as a regular passenger on 747s.
"It's just a mainframe." Yes, I have been around long enough - I think that it's just as likely to be the 'centralization' v. the 'line of business/local user' computing thing.
Windows in corporate IT is now locked down so tightly (in a vain effort to keep it secure), that it might just as well be a mainframe - Or a large UNIX based system running X terminal sessions. All though a mainframe/UNIX system is unlikely to cark itself if a user does a clicky on a web-link.
I remember a DEC VAX/VMS product called 'All in One' from the 1980s. It allowed users to interact and collaborate with e-mail, word-processing, calendars and spreadsheets - The main difference was that it all happened with nice green/amber terminals. If you had a graphics terminal you could do charts and drawings as well. I could do pretty much everything that I needed with this suite. It took many more years to get functionality like that in the Microsoft world. The system's support requirements were typically 4 staff for each few hundred users, so obviously we couldn't have that...
Because I was 'scientific/technical/IT', I was allowed to get to all of this corporate goodness from a 'DEC Professional' computer (a cut down PDP-11). The operating system was called 'Professional Operating System' or P/OS - This name summed it up nicely - I suspect that it was one reason why DEC died.
I preferred it when it was the office of the Postmaster General (PMG). Then, you had no doubt whatsoever that it was part of the governance and social fabric of the UK. The PMG's employees were considered a part of the Civil Service.
When I worked in the Civil Service in the 1970s, staff were instructed to report to the nearest Post Office if they were unable to get to work (Say, as a result of transport strikes or inclement weather.). I did once, they gave me a cup of tea, asked me to count some stationary, and then sent me home.
There is a lot of data on this. Google "tricresyl phosphate".
If you need more info on toxicity look for the "Material Safety Data Sheet" for tricresyl phosphate. You will see things like "EXPOSURE LIMITS:TWA: 0.1 (mg/m3)" -Time Weighted Average - (This is the sort of level you get for materials that are known to be toxic).
Many years ago, my Dad gave me advice about politicians:-
They are mostly in it for themselves. You, as a voter have the choice of voting for politicians who were selected by very small groups of people to look after their interests. It is easy to recognise these people. They either smoke cigars and drink spirits in a small smoky room at the back of the Rotary Club (Conservative); or they smoke fags and drink beer in a small smoky room at the back of the Working Man's Club (Labour). These politicians are venal and corrupt.
Or you could vote for someone who has a burning desire to help people. These politicians are obsessive and very dangerous - They believe that "The End justifies the Means".
My Dad was an un-elected official who made Sir Humphrey Appleby look like a bumbling amateur. He was firmly of the opinion that most people really don't want much change, they just want their little lives to be a little better. Now that I am older, I suspect he was right...
Ref: Lord Acton - “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority."
Chris,
Liquids cool more quickly the hotter they are compared with their surroundings. So, for maximum cooling wait a few minutes then add the milk.
However, you are probably one of the iconoclasts who make tea with a tea-bag in a cup - Do yourself a favour and invest in a teapot. Making your tea in a cup will make it taste terrible. You really should put the milk in the cup first, then add the brewed tea. This prevents degradation of milk proteins which is liable to occur if milk encounters temperatures above 75°C.
Ref: http://www.rsc.org/pdf/pressoffice/2003/tea.pdf
Louis,
Benzene rings are planar (flat) because their electrons can be thought of as having a hybridization pi cloud. Six member saturated carbon rings like cyclohexanes, or nitrogen/carbon heterocyclic rings like RDX (Semtex), have chair and/or boat structures. The boat has both ends pointing up, the chair has one end pointing up with the other end down. The same molecule can alternate between the two structures. This is known as chair-boat hybridization.
Mine's the lab coat with the acid burns down the front.
Antony, I drove a DG Nova3 using RDOS. The machine was later replaced with a Nova 4C with a 25MB Winchester Drive. DG sent people out just to see it because they had never installed one with such a large fixed disc. The down side was we backed up and archived everything on 8" floppies - It was used to acquire and process data from mass spectrometers.
I remember that in the month I ordered it, I bought a 3 bedroom detached house in the UK - The Nova was about twice the price of my house, so say half a million quid in present money.
The disc unit was huge (19" rackable). You could see everything because the top case of the drive was transparent. Yes, obviously, the heads crashed on the HD after a year or two. The damaged aerofoil head had buried itself deep into the gouges in the platter. Of course these young-uns don't know that the heads in disc drives actually flew on the thin layer of air that was carried along with the rotating disc surface. I need to lie down now for my afternoon nap...
Nice one Stu. We pensioners might get a little tired in the afternoon because some of our brains have degraded from having to invent a lot of this computing stuff.
I can only sleep on a few afternoons, as I spend the rest of them teaching other retired people computing. No, I do not recommend anything from Microsoft.
Fortunately, I don't need to remember to turn on our home computers so that they are ready for use. Two of them are energy efficient Debian servers (<10 watts), and are on all of the time. The other two can be easily awoken from OS X's 'Sleep' mode.
As an aside, most of us oldies know the difference between "their" and "there".
I have a couple of these http://www.excito.com/products.html
One of them does this:-
Linux 2.6, Debian; Apache web server; Dovecot IMAP server (IMAP, IMAPS); Postfix SMTP server; Fetchmail (for fetching email from other pop or imap accounts); File server (http, samba, ftp); Download manager (bittorrent, http, ftp); Printer server; DAAP streaming media server (Firefly); UPnP streaming media server (Mediatomb)
The other one is used as a backup and for 'development' (Well, OK, playing with it.). You can also install most ARM Debian packages that you might want like MC, SQLite, MySQL (if you really have to) etc.
They each use < 10 watts. Both of them have current up-times of about 100 days.
A new one with more stuff is due out later in the year.
For goodness sake people. Learn SQL, then find one or two decent databases and stick with them. If you want to save a few quid, use SQLite to prototype and demo to the punter, and then upgrade it to PostgreSQL if you really need to. The upgrade is fairly simple.
If you really must use a framework have a look at Django, at least it is pretty consistent, scales OK, and uses Python, so you will be spared the pain that is PHP...
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