Posts by Andy Miller 162 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2008
A friend of mine grew up in Abingdon UK and went to school by bus. One day, on arriving at school he found that he no longer had his school bag with him. Meanwhile, the RAF had spotted a suspicious item next to a bus stop on the edge of RAF Abingdon, sent in a robot and given the bag a couple of blasts with the shotgun....
According to the docs on Github "Ć is a programming language which can be translated automatically to C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift, TypeScript and OpenCL C."
A new one on me, but then I'm very old....
"Security NEVER made anything more performant, available, or reliable." Really?
If you can stop those crypto-currency miners running on your network edge boxes, don't you get a performance boost?
If you can stop ransomware slingers encrypting your data, doesn't your platform become more available?
If you can filter out DDoS traffic from real traffic, don't you get more reliability?
Up until now I believe the policy has been two years support from launch, new version of each model once a year. So just before the new model you were effectively getting 1 year of updates. This puts the effective years of support to between 3 and 4 years, which is doable.
A couple of times I'd ignored Samsung as an option, because:
* I needed a phone now,
* the existing model had been out 11 months,
* I wasn't going to wait for the new one
* I wanted more than 13 months of updates.
I had one colleague who always complained about the heat. One morning he came in early and super-glued the thermostatic valve on the office radiator shut, but still he complained.
At some point he decided to stop drinking coca-cola by the 2-litre bottle full. Soon he stopped complaining about the heat, and actually closed the window....
In a previous century the company I was working for wanted to port their software from HP Rocky Mountain Basic workstations to these new PC things. We hired a sub-contractor to assist, which involved loaning them one of the large and expensive optic fibre test machine that we made.
At some point I got a whiff that the subby might be having cash-flow problems, so I suggested to our TD that it might be worth us moving the kit back to our site. The subby could carry on working on it, but in our office. So the TD and I get into the biggest car we could borrow, and set off for the subby.
Shortly after, we are sitting in the subby's MDs office, and the MD was denying that there was a problem, when the secretary pops her head round the door to say that there are a couple of bailiffs in reception. The MD kept the bailiffs talking whilst me, my TD and the subbies software engineer passed our large optical instrument and the subbies development machine out the window, into the car and away....What fun !
"Turbo Pascal didn't make you pay for its dev environment, nor did Borland ever do that"
Apart from confusing the product with the company, my copy of Byte from 1989 shows Turbo Pascal going for £99, or £169 for the Pro edition. They did do a free version later in the Windows era, but that had a limited licence and Microsoft had a similar edition.
This placement makes a lot of sense when you are leaving and turning the light on. When you're coming in and groping for the switch to turn the light on, line of sight is not that relevant. Motion sensors for lights people... At least this story has made me feel better about taking out all the customer support gateways....
I recall an undergraduate experiment that required refluxing from boiling petrol. The instruction clearly said to use a water bath. Most of us used the electric water baths. One genius got a large (glass) water bath, and stuck a Bunsen under it. The fumes crept over the edge, and soon his desk, his lab-book and his hair was alight. He was put out before he suffered any lasting damage....
Not in the server room, but one of my colleagues used to work on his mini in the barn we rented for noisy engine tests. This was after hours and in his own time, so not an issue. Until one winter evening, whilst removing the radiator, his hand slipped and his arm got jammed between the radiator and the front of the car. Luckily, the hand-brake was off, and he managed to drag the car across the barn to the phone, and contact a another colleague who came and extracted him.
When I was working for a TV equipment manufacturer, one of the image processing scientists had a film clip that they used for image quality testing. To decouple the image from reality, this was turned upside down. One Friday we went down to his office to see if he was coming to the pub. He wasn't around, but this clip was playing on a rather expensive, broadcast quality monitor. We decided to fix this by turning the monitor upside-down (hard work, those things were heavy). When he reappeared, it took him a couple of minutes to spot what we had done. We all had a laugh, and then turned the monitor back over. Then we realised that the screen had become magnetised, and there were nasty colour fringes everywhere. A couple of degausses helped, but didn't cure it.
What was to be done? We went to the pub. When we came back the monitor had settled, and we were all very relieved.
I share your reservations. To make it work the airlines are going to have to put some effort into streamlining the time from check-in to take-off, and landing to check-out. With a small, business-class only plane, mostly full of frequent fliers, this shouldn't be beyond the wit of person. Even BAA may not worry too much; business travellers spend most of their time in their lounges, so there may be little point in holding them for 2 hours in an over-priced shopping centre.
We've got five phones, four tablets, two kindles and an smattering of wireless headphones and keyboards. All micro-USB. Cables and chargers all over the house and in both cars. Any device can be plugged into any charger.
The thought of going back to having one device where I have to hunt down The Cable was the only reason I passed on the Nexus 6P.
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