* Posts by ridley

473 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Aug 2008

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Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

ridley

Re: Backwards

"Again, a cheap Android tablet or even an Arduino gives a more reliable, focussed education platform than a 'easily fixed'"

Not really, there's a reason that Chromebooks/bases etc are popular in schools. Nothing needs to be updated, patched etc it just works, plus the actual suite of software is just superb for the school environment.

Currently I am at an office 365 school and trying to use it is like pulling teeth when you're used to Google Suite for Education.

Teams and One note? No thanks.

Different functionality with the app versions of word etc as

opposed to the web versions is such a block to teaching.

Give me strength.

Give me strength.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

ridley

Re: Think of the Grid!

I think you're being a little economical with the truth with saying you can upgrade your domestic supply to 350Kw, what exactly would be the point in doing so?

As you point out you could fully charge 21 100kwh cars with that supply from 11pm-6am.

Why would you want this in a domestic environment?

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

ridley

Re: Slower Version

It's not an urban legend.

I've seen what the IBM tech did no increase the speed of our printer at great expense, and it didn't involve any new parts and took seconds.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

ridley

Re: No imagination any more

Didn't notice a difference?

I did, the new one didn't let me change the team name, no doubt it does and has hidden it away somewhere but life is too short.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

ridley

Re: Child protection

I remember tivo or it's like introduced technology that filtered out the adverts from recordings but was taken to court as this was "theft" and the sw was banned.

Didn't stop me installing similar software on my tivo.

I miss my tivo 1 even 20 years later, way ahead of its time.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

ridley
Terminator

Or Futurama

(3 more days!!!, he'll have to be a Bender substitute for now....)

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

ridley

Re: gigaspandrels

Good News!

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

ridley

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

How does this get down voted?

Audio is most definitely compressed to a few tens of dB in the main, that's not controversial it's just true.

Vintage vinyl also suffered from the loudness wars, finding a decent recording became very hard towards the end of vinyl.

ridley

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

4db? I know most digital "music" is compressed to 10db but 4db?is that real?

ridley

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

It's all very nice having a large dynamic range available on digital audio.

It's just a shame that the audio engineers in the main choose to not use it, instead compressing the sound to a few tens of dB so it sounds "good" in the car or via crappy headphones etc.

Finding well mastered audio is pretty damn hard.

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

ridley

Whilst they're at it

Could they please take OneNote outside and do the decent thing.

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

ridley

Re: Starship hasn't had the most successful history?

Not convinced the launchpad survived that well given the amount of FOD raining down on cameras 3-400m away.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

ridley

Re: Bad design

When you try to open a MS365 file on your phone. You need to press an "open" button after a preview is displayed.

However, as the preview is loading a "delete" button is in exactly the same place as the "open" button appears a fraction of a second later.

Get the timing wrong and panic ensues.

Why MS, Why?

The years were worth the wait. JWST gives us an amazing view of Neptune's rings

ridley
Holmes

"Neptune is rich in heavier elements, and looks blue due to small amounts of methane in its atmosphere."

I am pretty sure that the JWST cannot see blue light and any blue in the image will be a false colour added for the benefit of us meat bags.

Russia: Hey, don't act surprised if we're still on the ISS in 2030

ridley

Re: Fear

I would be very surprised to ever find a sink on the space station, the clue is really in the name.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

ridley

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

Doesn't make any difference if a radioactive element burns or not, the nuclei are still radioactive no matter what chemical reaction they go through.

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

ridley

Re: And the answer to the question is

The cost of getting it into space and to the lagrange point is nothing compared to the cost of the scope.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

ridley

Re: I'm generally a fan of Elon Musk but

Love him or hate him you don't get to have had pivotal roles in the formation and building of three large global companies and not be an entrepreneur and visionary.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

ridley

Re: Deja vu again

Not really going to help when the car has been wrapped up, the battery connections are unlikely to be all nice and easy to unbolt.

TBH it is not that hard to remove a battery pack once it is upside down or on a lift.

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

ridley

Re: 56k

Dial up & Fax was alive and well in a field in Herefordshire recently.

#EMFCamp

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

ridley

Re: Are you stupid????

Best pack some form of umbrella then.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

ridley

Re: Trust but verify...

The app is long missed.

Scam, pyramid scheme, environmental disaster: Vivaldi boss shares his thoughts on crypto-coins

ridley

Re: Wall Street?

What tangible thing underpins a currency?

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

ridley

Re: 464

I used a 6128 to develop software to control a seawolf missile via a thermal imaging camera.

Went on to use it to develop software to help integrate a thermal imaging camera into the gunnery control computer on a T59 tank. We were selling the TI system the Chinese for resale to Pakistan.

Spent a year in Pakistan trialing the T59 with my trusty 6128, sometimes burning new ROMS beside the tank in the middle of the Thar desert, even with all the dust and 50+°C in the shade it never let me down.

Happy days

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

ridley

As a teacher let me assure you that they spend much more than a minute doing nothing.

Much, much more....

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

ridley

Re: Colour me impressed...

How can anyone give this comment a downvote?

Do you enjoy those compression artefacts popping up all over the place?

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

ridley

Re: Brilliant!

This reminds me of the situation at the school I work in.

We are an MS school and a MS system can become quite complicated to set up and maintain, esp for a sus admin of the calibre that a schools budget can afford.

We went O365 at the start of the pandemic, MS Teams/Onenote for remote learning is "sup optimal".

Two years in and we still do not have OneDrive installed, only the browser version. So no file manager integration...

We have been told that all our files are being moved into the cloud now, and we have been promised OneDrive "hopefully in 2022"....

How is this supposed to work?

(By the way why does file syncing take so long in O365? I mean, it can take hours at times. When I worked at a Google school syncing was near as made no difference instant)

What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul

ridley
Pint

Re: Playmobil reconstruction

He surely is

ridley

Re: Not again!!! The name is LEGO!!

The plural of Fish is Fish, but if you have different types of fish in a tanks you have different fishes.

Does that mean you can haves Legos?

Blue Origin employees complain of sexist culture that ignores safety concerns

ridley

Rapid progress

Compromising safety in order to make rapid progress?

This is Blue Origin we're talking about, right?

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

ridley

Same thing happened with the Amiga, especially when CBM released the A500.

Too cheap and too associated with games to be taken seriously, sadly. I still miss AmigaDOS

ridley

Re: Z88?

Was it to your mum?

ridley
Pint

The last Quantum Leap

RIP Sir Clive

Thanks for the thrills and spills.

I'll raise one of these for you tonight.

I can't help thinking there should be a ritual dodgy keyboard burning to help him take that Quantum Leap into the new DIM

Russia's Pirs ISS module scheduled to fall away, much like Moscow's interest in the space station

ridley

Re: 75 years gone

I think someone needs a word with H&S if you're going through 5 generations of engineers in 75 years.

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

ridley

Re: Forgive me for saying this...

Couldn't agree more, but TEAMS is Nirvana in comparison to its demon child OneNote esp the education version.

Microsoft if you tell me that if I put a document into this area it is read only, then please make it read only.

Oh and how on earth does OneNote even when minimised and not in use creep up and steal all of your ram? 25Gb is slightly over the top on a 32Gb machine.

ridley

Re: Responsibility

The EU have been known to find against this sort of thing, best complain to them.

Oh...

ridley

Re: "and in a few short years we were liberated."

Don't you just buy a Huiwei if you don't want those?

Biden order calls for net neutrality, antitrust action, ISP competition – and right to repair your own damn phone

ridley

Re: "if you buy a product, you own it"

Not if it's a Tesla, the mothership doesn't like unauthorised repairs and can shut the car down.

Lessons have not been learned: Microsoft's Modern Comments leave users reaching for the rollback button

ridley
Pint

Re: "Modern Commenting"

Have a beer for that one.

Cracked copies of Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop steal your session cookies, browser history, crypto-coins

ridley

Re: Open options

"Sadly I've not found a spreadsheet app that will handle very large tables"

Neither have the NHS

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

ridley

Re: Not necessarily.

The max take off weight of a 737-800 is 70tonnes.

I doubt that load sensors on the wheels could reliably measure that to within a few % (prob more) so about 1.5 tonnes.

A difference of only 1.2tonnes in the story but the plane close to the limits.

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

ridley

Re: Even in the 1980's

You did if you needed a record of something being imported in order to raise an invoice, as per the story.

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

ridley

Re: Hummmm sounds familiar...

I was a union rep a while ago and took my members concerns re workload to the "Boss".

Boss listened to me and then said that the company took workload issues very seriously and was working hard to reduce it. I asked for an example.

So Boss gave the example that they had been about to increase the working week by 5 hours but decided against it to reduce workload,

WTAF

Don't be a fool, cover your tool: How IBM's mighty XT keyboard was felled by toxic atmosphere of the '80s

ridley

Re: Not Cheap

In my days as a PC builder we were after some really cheap components for a really cheap loss leader PC (We hardly ever sold them we invariably sold up) but I was able to buy a 105 key keyboard from a UK based distributor for ......28p. Someone made those, boxed them, has a little manual printed, shipped them half way round the world to a distributer who paid duty on them and sold them to me for a profit...Even I was somewhat shocked at that price*

They weren't the best keyboards in the world, but they weren't as bad as the price implies either.

*This is the reason I really take Umbridge at having to paying £2 for a plastic radiator valve cap from your local three letter DIY store. They must cost them about a penny each. Grrrr

Rookie's code couldn't have been so terrible that it made a supermarket spontaneously combust... right?

ridley

Re: Money making exercise

In the mid nineties I ran a computer business. One day I had bought a lot, for me, of 1mb RAM chips for an order IIRC about 400 @ £4 each. Said order fell through which left me with a bit of a problem as RAM prices were falling at the time. I tried to offload them left and right and could get rid without taking a bath.

That night there was the Kobe earthquake taking out a large proportion of the globes RAM manufacturing capability....

I sold them about a month later for about £100 each :-)

Seagate UK customer stung by VAT on replacement drive shipped via the Netherlands

ridley

Re: I believe that Seagate disks are made outside of the EU

The receipt won't stop the EU customs charging you to import the item into the EU.

Hollywood drone pilot admits he crashed gizmo into cop chopper, triggering emergency landing

ridley

I disagree. It is illogical to give a lesser sentence if no one was injured, the crime is the same whether the accident resulted in injury or not, you should be sentenced for putting others in danger.

I am reminded of the bloke who fell asleep at the wheel of his land rover & went off the motorway. Bad luck meant that he went off just next to a railway cutting which he went down coming to rest on the tracks and he couldn't get off them. So he called the railway and as he was talking to them a goods train hit his car and detailed, by pure bad luck coming in the opposite direction at that. Moment was an express which collided with the goods train and one person was killed iirc.

Now if he had come off the road and ended up in a field it would be a few points possibly a ban. As it was he was sentenced to something like 20 years.

That just ain't right.

ridley

Re: Not really the brightest bulb, was he?

I am not sure Bout the police helicopters but the Huey pilot who write "ChickenHawk" used to make a clearing in the jungle bigger* to allow him to take off.

*When near max very take off weight or over you had to take off on the move to get out of your own rotors dirty air. So if you landed to do a pick up in a small clearing you wouldn't be able to take off from it when loaded, unless you made the clearing bigger with those big old rotors....

Windows might have frozen – but at least my feet are toasty

ridley

Re: ... their ability to understand why they should not do it.

Don't ask me how I know but you shouldn't use an old steel Mini wheel as something to wind your very long extension lead round.

Well not if you then decide to power a heater with the ext cord and cannot be bothered to unwind it all first...

BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss

ridley

Re: Parts of it date back to when fire was invented

We used to do that demo in the labs, with just a tablespoon or so of oil. Still very impressive with a flame up to the ceiling.

We ensure to mask off a smiley face etc on the tiles do the demo and remove the tape ;-)

Cannot ever think why we were banned.

(Maybe it had something to do with melting the fire detectors with one enthusiastic demo....)

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