Posts by Bob Dunlop 67 posts • joined 15 Sep 2008
"The rocky part doesn’t move that much."
A foot (30 cm) or more vertical displacement is not insignificant, it can upset GPS calibrations and similar. It's only the fact that the period is so long (12 hours plus) and that everything moves together that we don't notice it.
Increasing a delay loop counter by a factor of 20.
/* Always wait a long time 3.04 */
/* Native 386 code is very fast */
/* One fifth of a second at 12Mhz */
/* no waits with a test in the loop */
/* COMPAQ386 just rewrote the rules */
/* R.J.D 21 Oct 86 */
Have to say that being able to go straight to this comment after 35 years says something about how much this leap meant to me.
After 27 years we still didn't know the location of our supply pipe or external stopcock.
Last year mid pandemic a leak upstream of the in house tap forced us to get the waterboard in.
They acted promptly and with enthusiasm, but could not at first locate the pipe, dug a trench in the road with a big yellow machine at the obvious spot. Turned off taps by water troughs in neighbouring fields etc. Even dug out (at the suggestion of a retired water inspector) an as it turned out disconnected meter point on the golf course.
After ten days 180 degrees out from any direction expected metal detectors found the pipe and a couple of spares. In an hour a Polish guy (why are they all Polish) dug a hole, cut the pipe and fitted a brand new plastic stopcock. The original has never been found.
Just think of the man hours (at one point we had six people on the job) that could have been saved by a simple plan or map.
Still suspect we're stealing our water from the golf course's metered supply.
Been using a couple for seems like 10 years, First with Tomato then DD-WRT, LEDE and now OpenWRT.
Software has evolved over time, now use a locally compiled snapshot with custom (stripped down) config.
I know their limitations and how to side step issues in the upgrade but starting afresh I wouldn't start from here.
Um drone deliverys to the Isle or Wight have be trialed with the first flight on the 9th of May.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52419705
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2020/05/drone-trial-delivery.page
Fixed wing UAV with a 100kg payload capacity, landing on a grass runway from the news footage I saw.
Not sure is it out of line of sight, theres a "safety pilot" at each end of the link and the flight is protected by a temporary (90 day) "danger area" exclusion zone.
I've stuck with paper as I swop between four different pharmacies including one 150 miles away depending on where we are shopping this week. So if I still have to go to the med center to get the paper ticket how is this gonna help? Oh yes the system will be more fragile as it'll depend on the pharmacists network being up.
I still remember writing a letter to my doctor asking then not to upload my personal data to the "Spine" so how's that gonna work ?
Long ago I had to make just one trip as the med center would dispense pills for me, now it's two trips, how long before it's three gas guzzling trips I wonder. One to pick up the ticket, one to give it to the pharmacist and a third to collect the pills.
Slightly older (just 9) but I remember the landing as late night and then the first boot on the moon as silly o'clock in the morning. One of the first if not the first time I was allowed to stay up all night on my own, mum went to bed around midnight. My dad couldn't be there as he was working on the BBC program in the Shepard's Bush studios.
Having pulled an all nighter i went to school and watched the repeat on the assembly hall telly. Amazing the resiliance of a nine year old looking back.
man breaks automated tests at 00:30
Joined when they only covered London and Watford.
Remember the phone call, had a brief discussion about modem/software compatibilty, then they gave me my login credentials and said it would go live in about 10 minutes. Almost as an after thought they asked me to send them a check.
I'm sure I remember working with processors that had separate code return and data stacks back in the 80s. All you would have to do is protect the return stack from all but call and return instructions.
Actually now I think about it the "shadow stack" is just like the old code return stack. They've just left a copy of the return address on the data stack as well so as not to upset compilers/debuggers that expect to see it there.
All MPs and BT employees above say "team leader" grade should have their broadband service at home and work restricted to the bandwidth and level of service of the lowest performing customer. Costs almost nothing to do.
BT "management" should have all business calls prefixed by a useless 10 layer menu system which if successfully navigated leads to 25 minutes on hold with a broken muzak player before a one in three chance of a random disconnect. Might be trickier to implement but I'm sure there'd be volunteers to build the system.
You just know that all these new meters capable of high accuracy will be calibrated on the knife edge of the old +-3% accuracy allowance. And we know in whose favour the edge chosen is gonna be on, it for sure won't be the consumer.
ps. My current meter displays gnuplot graphs in X-windows on my phone. Bet the new one won't be that smart.
Not so long ago Basingstoke and Deane required you to set up an account on their web site (providing numerous personal details like inside leg measurement) just to get the bin collection schedule. We'd phone the office and get them to send us a printed copy, no doubt at great expense, rather than fill in all the details.
The issue is now fixed and the bin schedules are open to public scrutiny, but what where they thinking ?
Yep another happy A&A customer here.
Was amazed when the ADSL speed was trippled to almost 11Mb/s by changing the wholesale line supplier from BT to TalkTalk. Same exchange, same copper wire. Just shows how happy BT are to sit on their a**e and leave whole communities with poor service.
The lecture was at the Lancaster Gate hotel London perhaps. 1990 I think. Part of the UKUUG "Unix the Legend Evolves" conference.
One thing I remember from that or a later lecture was that when they designed the Plan 9 C compiler the one ANSI requirement they didn't implement was K&R backwards compatability. After all if anyone had the right to do that, they did.
We have not received a leaflet.
When I presented the health centre reception with a written opt out request letter for the data protection official they didn't seem to know what to do with it or who that person might be. I suspect it was filed in the bin, I've certainly had no confirmation that it's been acted on.
Zero information about data-protection or this latest attempt to sell our personal data in any of the health centre public spaces.
I suspect scenario goes.
Dump plod clicks on attachment and gets caught.
To cover his embarisment desides to make it the cause for alert.
The Skype message is so last week, looking at my filter output it's all DHL alerts this week, actually they have been running for some time.
Using mutt/spambogo here so I guess I'm well insulated.
The Register - Independent news and views for the tech community. Part of Situation Publishing
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022
