Iain Banks had this idea first (well close enough)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_(novel)
155 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2009
But is it wrong? Given publically available data to it the answer to 'an average woman of Afghanistan' is basically what it produced. It is going to be a merging of the images out there and 90% of them are going to be the iconic image so it is no surprise that the result is very similar to the original image but impressively facing towards the 'camera' which puts this in a different league to a simple copy. What about the other lesser influences to this image? Where do they stand? When it comes to copyright this is a minefield.
"500v supply by putting two adjacent 240v sockets in series." - Ouch, I see exactly how the thought process of your colleague went on this because if you think about it from a certain point of view it makes sense.
Sadly from another point of view connecting the live of one socket to the neutral of another would not have the desired effect!
I have also got to wonder why anyone was trying to get 500V from the mains. Wanting double heat from a portable heater maybe?
I left nearly 2 years ago after a epic fight and I still have all my virgin media kit in a cardboard box - locked TIVO, cable modem and a few RF connectors. I have tried to contact them to get them to pick it up but it always ends up with me being asked to give a 1..10 score on how good the pick up process was and the process ends there.
I might need to take it to the local tip to get it disposed of cleanly.
curl -I theregister.co.uk
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2023 00:37:17 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://www.theregister.com/
X-Reg-BOFH: pfy01gb
X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett, Lester Haines
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
CF-Cache-Status: DYNAMIC
Server: cloudflare
CF-RAY: 7d03631f09264599-LHR
I don't know when the omnipotent space glider wranger Lester Haines joined Terry Pratchett but so glad that both of them are there.
We had "the phone of doom". When a machine was on a long term test someone was given this phone overnight, the closer to work you lived the more often you had to take it. If the machine went wrong the phone rang and you had to go in to fix it and start it up again.
Always a stressful night (and unpaid) but luckily I lived a hour away so only had it rarely and doom never struck me.
I still have a box of virgin media kit awaiting collection from when I cancelled back in Jan 2022. It even includes a pretty good virgin media locked tivo box.
I have tried several times to get rid of it but there is no way to contact them and every attempt just ends up with them sending me a survey asking for a 1-10 score on how well the close of contract process went.
Answer is very badly. When I tried to cancel they kept finding dodgy reasons why they could not start the cancellation process or a few more days which would have pushed me into a extra month of billing just after hugh price rise. Eventually I got them to cancel before this date but by the end their excuses were getting increasingly desperate.
I was renting and at the time had paper electricity bills that came quarterly which I always paid on the time. After few years I received a red bordered final demand saying that the bailifs are due imminently. When I contacted them they said that I had not paid 2 bills in a row and looking back at my records I discovered that they are right and this was because I had not received any bills.
It turns out that in the small print of my last posted bill they said that they were switching me to a online account and this would be my final paper bill but I had only read the bill part of this and paid it without even looked at the next page full of text. They eventually admitted that I had never logged into the account, this final demand was not preceeded by any postal communication and they had not made it clear that they had decided to stop posting me bills and that I had not agreed to this change.
I was very stressed as I was just in the process of buying my first house so if this had landed on my credit score I would have been ruined.
x86 CPUs are working as hard as they can on instruction ordering, branch prediction and then there is the entire groups of spectre/meltdown/... that should be grouped and called precognition bugs all of which consume transistors and power. Most of this logic of this is known to the compiler so it should be able to take the one off hit in creating efficient code instead of letting the CPU do it on the fly.
Hmm - I think this has been solved before at least twice (RISK and dare I say it Itanium)
I must admit to 'fixing' a leaking pipe somewhere at the back of my toilet by spraying expanding foam at it. In my defence the leaky bit was in some boxwork which would be very hard to take apart and the actual leak was out of site and even touch. So I just bought a tin of expanding foam, pointed the nozzle in the general direction that the leak was coming from and pressed fire. Most of it fell off and created a big stalegmite but it stopped the leak. I know at some point many years away someone will take that boxing apart and see this and I will feel the much deserved derision.
The ST and I think the Amiga had a 68000 and this did not support preemptive multi tasking, this was fixed in the 68010 onwards.
I agree about the sound chip in the ST - poor at best.
There was a non preemptive multitasking upgrade for the ST written by someone with no connection to Atari - I can't remember who wrote it but it was a one man job in about 1990. I just about remember his (usenet) post when he said that this is free to the world. Can anyone remember who this was? I used his multitasking for a few years and it was pretty good considering the hardware.
I think I still have my Atari ST Mega 4 somewhere - it was the peak of the 68000 based ST range. I upgraded to this from a 1040STFM.
Had many good times with this machine and after my BBC Micro it was a huge step up. In the last few years of using this I used Minix as a OS which lead to SCO OS (a unix variant with a bad track record) and then Linux.
I learnt alot from this machine.
I bought a trivial low power 12V plug in from Maplins (RIP UK supplier of electronics kit) about a decade ago. I plugged it into my wall outlet and there was a big bang and the main 32A breaker tripped. I removed it and there was a notch missing from the copper so proving the well known truism that fuses blow after the damage has happened.
I took it back to Maplins for a replacement and insisted that they plug the new unit into the wall there before I accepted it. She did so with notable hesitation and a worried look but it was fine
I was thinking the same. The wild west of IT has passed and we are now in a stable state where most things are done using established tools so the possibility of a bad command is greatly reduced. Clicking SnazzyExpensiveBackupSolution on the deskop is going to have fewer routes to disaster than a mistyped dd command.
I still do my backups with dd though so maybe there will be a post from me in the future but as I am careful then nothing can go wrong!
OK this one was feeble but in general I enjoy these and on a Monday my acceptance criteria is low so please keep posing them and I am willing to take the good with the bad.
I don't have any stories myself but I do know of someone who blew up the electronics of a significant instrument when at a antarctic research station at the beginning of winter with no possibility of repair for 10 months. This would have been a great Who? Me? but it is not for me to tell.
I was at uni in the era of overhead projectors. The single sheets were bad enough but one of our lecturers (I think it was thermodynamics) used the continual strip on rollers and slowly wound it on as he talked. He gave out no notes so every lecture was just frantically copying the content including graphs into our notebooks. It was basically impossible to keep up so the notes were very poor. He was explaning the content as it was passing by but we were far too focussed on copying to listen to a word he said.
In hindsight it might have been better to ignore the visuals and just listen to him but I really don't know as I never had time to find out what he said.
Our lecturer in stellar dynamics had the opposite strategy and on day 1 handed each of us a copy of the notes. From then on we listened to everything he said and annotated our notes as appropriate. Thank you Kaz Krynicki - you were great (sadly I just googled him and he died in 2019). No idea who the thermodynamics lecturer was.
Imagine you are the person at CERN who decides to send releases the press. CERN and the high energy physics community in general are very excited about the discovery of a X (such as pentaquark or splitting the thaum) with all the implications for the standard model / theory of your choice.
This person knows that they will be asked by the press to elaborate on the significance and maybe even give interviews about it.
Would you want to be the person who has to explain quantum chromodynamics to The Sun? It must be a tough job!
OK I accept the challenge.
Grand piano is about 500Kg. Lets skip over the messiness of colliding 2 of them and just throw a single piano to the ground at 99% speed of light. It hits with about 2.7E20J of energy which is about 67000 MT or 1350 times as big a bang as the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded.
Putting it another way a piano at 99%C hits roughly as hard as a 2E12 Kg asteroid coming in at a modest 15 km/s or about 0.0001 as much bang as the dinosaur killer of 65 million years ago.
There is so much confusion in the press between 5G the communication protocol (which is about as significant as talking in french instead of german) and 5 GHz the RF frequency. They just don't get it.
Whisper - no one tell them that 5G phones might run at well above 5 GHz - they might panic even more especially if they discover that the screen they are looking at emits radiation at 50000 GHz!
If a sahara country builds a megascale solar plant then they would become the next saudi arabia but with better long tern prospects. There will be nutters who want to blow things up for no good reason but this is always the case and solar is more resiliant to this than oil.
Basically the only thing holding them back is the culture of coruption in these countries (look at Venezuela for a example). If they can get things stable then sub sahara will be the super rich of the late 2000s and will leave saudi in the messy dust but sadly I am not optimistic. Corrupt countries seem to be very hard to reform. The sahara is the engergy source of the future but sadly politics and religion look like holding it back for many decades.