Posts by Adrian Midgley 1

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

Those are called ...

Moles.

See also Bat.

Paging technology providers: £3m is on the table to replace archaic NHS comms network

They dont work very well

and each call is an interruption.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: Fixing the wrong problem

Piping into less is super, if you are going to read it on screen.

Less so if it is to be piped on into something else - sed or wc eg

Re: The real reason for fairly small line lengths

Findings which apply to people in general may apply less to programmers, the set of attributes that gives aptitude may imply capability to handle longer lines than average.

Resolution and aperture

Short-sighted people mostly know that looking through a pinhole brings more distant objects into focus. In eye examination that's a way to distinguish refractive errors from other losses of resolution (bearing in mind that some people cant read even if they hadn't left their spe tacles behind)

Pinhole cameras are famously in focus at all distances,

Camera (etc) lenses begin to lose definition due to diffraction through an aperture when the aperture gets more comparable to the wavelength of the light.

Hence Ansel Adams at all could call their group f60 with their 10*8 cameras (which use long focal lenses) and I have to be wary toward f/22 with a 35mm camera.

The good eye sees sharper with a small pupil.

Bad eyes, with central cataract, less so, and all eyes need light.

Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC

Ryzen for a few years on my

Linux desktop machine.

Goes nicely.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Aha...

As given in the reference, the ability to decrypt was developed after the invasion.

That may well be true.

How indeed could they.

Vint Cerf suggests GDPR could hurt coronavirus vaccine development

Re: Useless

It isn't (another) flu.

And balls.

Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit

Cover?

It is easier to launch a projectile from the Earth's surface to any other point on the surface than to put one in orbit.

Maintenance over what is expected to be a long period is easier in the surface.

Deorbiting to a specified point from orbit is both harder and slower than a single trajectory from thd ground.

Keeping a satellite weapon safe from interference us non-trivial.

No, the point of orbiting a satellite is that it demonstrates the ability to hit anywhere on the surface (mass and orbit have some subtleties there) and that it allows observation of geavirstionzl variations along trajectories.

Wonder and satellites

Theres value to looking up and seeing satellites.

Everything OK with Microsoft? Windows giant admits it was 'on the wrong side of history' with regard to open source

Earlier than thd beginning of this century

A bit of rewriting history snuck in.

Date FLOSS to 1984 or sl.

Re: Exterminate! Exterminate!

And the chunks of the web written by Ftont Psgd, with its curious negative left margin, showed up find in IE, which oddly ignored negative values to thd left margin setting.

Google is a 'publisher' says Aussie court as it hands £20k damages to gangland lawyer

OTOH some clients

might think he could understand their problems.

Sueball claims Tesla solar panels are so effective, they started fires at Walmart stores

Re: $deities have a sense of humor

Your figures are surprising.

You can put the panels through an immersion heater if you prefer, no need for inverter.

Looming ventilator shortage amid pandemic sparks rise of open-source DIY medical kit. Good thinking – but safe?

Re: When you have nothing...

Cape at Warwick made ventilsyirs.

You might be surprised to hear that electronics, and even electricity, are not necessary components.

The Mamley is an old design, not ideal for ICU, which uses the incoming gas at 4 Atmospheres to blow a bellows with a brick on top, when thevadjustanle hook pulls the outlet valve a breath is sent.

Re: Counting

I dont think that would work.

It probably shows spraying with disinfectant or the traditional quicktime.

Microsoft frees Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 from the shackles of, er, Windows?

Re: @Snake - Microsoft shooting itself in the foot?

OEM Windows isn't free

Brother, can you spare a dime: Flickr owner sends mass-email begging for subscriptions

Re: Photos, Safe? Really?

Safe as in not lost.

Join us on our new journey, says Wunderlist – as it vanishes down the Microsoft plughole

FLOSS

then...

Physicists are rather giddy after creating a rare type of laser using laughing gas

I never did want

a cyclotron in my car, but now ...

How small can they, could they, be?

UK Home Office: We will register thousands of deactivated firearms with no database

Re: "no requirement of 'registration' for deactivated firearms"

Given, in the article.

It is a list I think is best kept with a a block of thermite next to the data storage, just in case it becomes inconvenient to pass it on to a new regime.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Re: And we wonder why people want to exit the EU

Big ones. Similar in size to the EU.

The USA one was built by the federal government of a grouping of 50 states.

Oh good. They're looking for an NHSX CTO. Hopefully they'll see off 'snake oil' pushers, says GP

Alas

yes.

(Private Practice means something else, BTW)

Army Watchkeeper drone flopped into tree because crew were gazing backwards

Not registering something that did not happen

is not a failure.

Re: From a different article, same subject, similar failure:

Do you have reason to think this doesn't happen to some extent?

Concentrating after a snooze

Rather easier than after 7 hours of driving, actually.

£250m fund for NHS artificial intelligence laboratory slammed as tech for tech's sake

We can't do expert systems...

But an opinionated system could be quite useful.

Turn out some hinting engines for it.

Best to send the programs to the data

If you have a question, better to formulate it and send the program to the data, receiving back only the answer.

Here's to beer, without which we'd never have the audacity to Google an error message at 3am

She may find

an article written by other GPs and specialists, and editable by her.

Or she may find something poured out by managers.

No

There are several levels below.

Our hero returns home £500 richer thanks to senior dev's appalling security hygiene

Re: Passwords with long lives

In my experience some database passwords have not been changed.

He's coming for your floppy: Linus Torvalds is killing off support for legacy disk drive tech

One per network

I kept a usb floppy drive for some years, ready to use.

Meanwhile the NHS carried on buying one per machine. Odd.

I finally used mine, to image some old floppies onto hard drive, in case.

Azure consultant to sue Google for linking his cached pics to cloned site, breach of copyright

Re: I don't understand all the ramifications, but...

Not in England.

Could you point to relevant law or case and jurisdiction, please?

Re: I don't understand all the ramifications, but...

Your examples are not public places, therefore if the owners say no photos, no photos.

It isn't a copyright thing, primarily.

Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike

Supercolliders and guitar strings

These are some of my favourite things.

There's a reason why my cat doesn't need two-factor authentication

Re: Free movement

Schengen area yes.

Tesla driver killed after smashing into truck had just enabled Autopilot – US crash watchdog

Re: what does a plane autopilot do?

Autopilots were not programmable in their early years.

Re: What's the point?

And yet, there are fewer deaths now than before cars hot gadgets.

A real head-scratcher: Tech support called in because emails 'aren't showing timestamps'

Re: Top-posting makes sense unless you're reading your emails weirdly

Have you ever written a letter in reply to a letter?

I know it is old technology.

Re: Still frustrates the #$@~!% out of me

It was actually to annoy the Merkins after they revolted.

Techie finds himself telling caller there is no safe depth of water for operating computers

Sky Marshal...

Was the rank Robert Heinlein invented for someone who had both commanded a capital (space)ship and an army Division, and would direct combined operations.

Starship Troopers.

So, imaginary in that variety.

Core blimey... When is an AMD CPU core not a CPU core? It's now up to a jury of 12 to decide

The core is not the whole apple

If a core has to have all the parts of a CPU, then the word is redundant.

Core means the central essential parts.

NHS England digital boss in hot water over 'puff piece' written about her future employer

That is

Balls.

Are you sure your disc drive has stopped rotating, or are you just ignoring the messages?

as much significance as the first.

What's 23 times the size of Earth, uncomfortably warm – and has astroboffins excited?

d

d

Re: "too hot for life at 150°C" ?

Chemical stuff tends to double with each 10 degree (C or K as you like) increase, so 150 is quite a bit more than 122, but indeed perhaps not impossible.

Google to add extra Gmail security … by building a walled garden

Point mail.

Is what I called a prototype I made last century, aimed at not emailing file attachments, and counting how many times they had been downloaded.

The people who emailed Word files didn't want to know.

China's loose Chang'e: Probe lands on far side of the Moon in science first, says state media

Dark {side||Ages}

The darkness alluded to is in our minds.

As with the Dark Ages. The sun rose, but the records fell apart, and we can't see what happened.

Re: Spot the 'deliberate' mistake in the video

Was this the Chang'e 3 simulation?