Posts by Neil Barnes 6265 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
I've tried most of the big supermarkets; Kaufland has a pretty good range along with Rewe and Edeka but sadly no sign of the British cheeses I like. Just bloody Cathedral City. I've made my own bread for donkey's years and also occasionally cheese but it's not easy to get a decent analogue of the stuff I like.
Missing something.
These Germans[1] just don't understand that cheese should come in 200g crumbly blocks with the name of a bit of the UK on them - not individual slices of extruded cheese product. Sometimes individually wrapped.
I love living in Germany, but I am missing Leicestershire, Wensleydale, Lancashire, Stilton, Caerphilly... 'Cheddar' made in Ireland somehow doesn't cut it.
[1] OK, they're pretty good with sausages and beer. I'll give them that.
Selling your location history to third parties and silently notifying law enforcement agencies on demand are only two of the services we provide our customers!
In what possible way does logging someone's location for longer than the duration of the call provide a service to the customer? Even if the customer is slurping data twenty four hours a day, there's still no reason to maintain history for eighteen months. Five years' retention is frankly ridiculous.
When one has, say, an external monitor attached to a laptop via a USB-3 (and an external docking station), how is the video transferred? As an uncompressed bitstream? Compressed bitstream? Instructions to a video chip in the docking station?
It's something I've never really thought about, but it occurs to me that once you're driving a couple of 4k displays, there's a lot of bits being sent *somewhere*.
(Question brought about by a recent installation of a 4k monitor which supports only 30Hz on this Dell laptop/dock combination, where a 2k monitor runs at 60Hz).
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1483/pg1483-images.html is an instructive tome on the subject of writing and inks; well worth a read.
Somewhere in there is the point that US goverment documents were becoming unreadable only a few years after their being written.
Micrometer sized pixels on a two metre wide screen rather implies two million pixels across, no?
No doubt that's why they need "α (Alpha) 9 Gen5 AI Processor and advanced picture algorithms to deliver lifelike images "; it joins the heady ranks of displays whose designers believe they know better than the content creators how an image should look.
I mean, does the price of the gas change while that delivery truck is in transit?
You're making the mistake of assuming that the 'free market' reduces prices to a minimum courtesy of competition. That is of course what the proponents thereof would like you to believe, but, in observed fact it actually *raises* prices to some figure technically known as 'all the market will bear'...
I think I may have posted this recently, but in (at least this bit of) Germany, fuel stations are required to inform an official body within five minutes of changing their pump prices, and that body makes the prices available to e.g. web clients on grounds of transparency.
https://ich-tanke.de/tankstellen/super-e10/umkreis/14469-potsdam/
Presumably, the exception is to print out a copy of the timetable on paper and stick it in a frame?
Most of the bus and tram stops around here (Potsdam area) have LED matrix signs that list the next few things stopping, with active advert screens generally on the vehicle itself (where they're comprehensively ignored, since the majority of passengers actually pay attention to the world outside and know where they are).
Curiously, my local petrol station has huge e-ink displays to show the current price (it can change ten times or more a day).
I was playing today with a spare laptop which happened to have a never run W10 on the hard drive.
My word it was depressing.
The installer kept trying to persuade me to allow it to use - even in the absence of an internet, how? - any way it could think of to let it identify me so that 'suitable' adverts could be sent. You don't want to log in to your MS account? It's much better if you do! No! May we report your location? No! May we use your location to personalise your adverts? No! May we send full status reports home? No! Well perhaps we can use the minimum status reports to personalise your adverts? No!
And much more in this vein. And recall, at this point the network - wireless - had not been authorised. Yet before this farrago began, somehow something had managed to update not only the BIOS but also the management engine hidden processor - how?
I don't know what's going on there - and I can see mechanisms for most of it - but it all seems so damn pointless. Certainly none of this bullshit occurs when I stuff a penguin in the same place.
I recently watched a video from a chap who'd replaced the carb on his seventies V8 and replaced it with one from a lawn mower, with a little electronics jiggery pokery I failed to note in detail that corrected the mixture. He reduced his consumption to - IIRC - the low forties and was still able to cruise at seventy plus.
Didn't sound quite the same, somehow...
To all those youtube videos of people dragging old electric cars out of barns where they've been sitting twenty years, and trying to start them - only to discover that (a) the mice have eaten all the wiring and (b) that they can't find where to squirt the starter fluid.
The grubby overall, obviously --->
By giving their citizens something they've already paid for.
About time too. But:
- will access be available for non-US citizens/residents, and
- when will the UK do the same? And the EU? And all the other university publications out there?
It is *extremely* frustrating that one can search - as a private citizen - for a paper easily, to be led to a paywall of lesser or greater height with absolutely *no* guarantee that the paper will answer the question you're asking.
And yet, unless one spends weeks poring over CPU specs, there's very little clue about the relative speeds for a generic workload on, say, a laptop system. These days I tend to settle for 'laptops aimed at managers are always faster than they need to be' and the approach seems to work for my admittedly low expectations.
But isn't it a trade between functionality and simplicity always? Having had to 'work' with thousand page documents with hundreds of random styles added apparently at random a text/word processor that effectively requires the use of textual metadata styles is a delight.
Though its obvious that as the end result of LyX is print ready output - and to be fair, it can get to be hard work if you need to include detailed tables - then it's not the 'text with bold and italics' which I agree is a halfway house rarely encountered.
But who is the owner? We've seen too many cases in recent times - particularly in the software and streaming arena - where you thought you bought something, but mysteriously it stops working at some later date when the manufacturer decides it's not raking in enough profit.
Black brown red orange yellow green blue violet grey white? The problem I've always found is that the mnemonic is no easier to remember than the represented values... with the possible exception of Richard of York gave battle in vain, which was drummed into me at a very early age.
To be fair colour coding has kinda dropped out of use with SM components.
Yes. You are taught that if the checklist is interrupted the you start again at the beginning.
In the UK we are taught a mnemonic which - rather ironically - I can never remember, even after flying nearly twenty years... but I make sure I do the same things in the same order every time before I fly.
The pilot and passenger in the case you mention were both very lucky.
One does wonder how the pilot missed the big REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT tags on his preflight inspection... I don't know how they manage these things, but perhaps there is (or could be) some sort of plugboard into which all the removed tags must be inserted to give a green light when they're all in?
(Curiously, I saw a paraglider harness only yesterday which had a big red strap marked in large letters 'INSERT BEFORE FLIGHT' which struck me as kind of not quite right (not that it shouldn't be inserted, but that the warning was somehow wrong))
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