Posts by Stoneshop

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

The trick is to be the one who buys for the former and resells for the latter...

You'd have better luck with vinyl. Which isn't susceptible to bit rot as well.

Edison

claimed inventing the phonograph and the light bulb.

And made it stick through court cases.

Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye

Torches, get yer torches here! Buy three, free box of matches!

And ten yards of railroad track plus a pair of gloves with every five barrels of tar! Get it while it's hot!

Re: re: streaming services and content

And only on the umpteenth attempt do you get to have a file that is

- not from a DV camcorder (as if. Portrait mode smartphone, then cropped to roughly the landscape size the movie would have been in) sneaked into the cinema and having half the hairdo of the person in front obscuring the lower left of the view. Plus the sound of them eating pop corn.

- not having "Property of the Weinstink Company" all over the image

- not having Punjabi, Thai or Urdu subtitles hardcoded (of course it'd be Viet or something if you can actually read Punjabi, or every other such mutually incompatible combo).

- a regional cut that has had some locally-offensive scenes excised, dubbed in that local language and with no fitting subtitle file for that cut to be found.

Re: You know you're old when...

We have plug-in kettles in the US,

Yes, but the already feeble heating element in a Teasmade's kettle would only run at a quarter of its rated wattage when driven with 120V AC. Ohm's Law and such. The appliance circuit is to feed 240V to the kettle giving it a fighting chance to actually get the water boiling, which is essential to its functioning.

Wouldn't be a big deal for a Teasmade, the element could just come on five minutes sooner.

And with its synchronous-motor driven clock, the 60Hz mains frequency will provide for that.

You just have to calculate how much you have to set the clock back every time you set it, to have it be 5, or rather 50 or 500 minutes fast (see above) for the cuppa to start brewing on time.

A Teasmade wouldn't have been popular in the US because hardly anyone drinks tea in the morning.

Still they saw fit to start a war of sedition over tea.

Re: You know you're old when...

I have 2 in the attic, don't know if they still work but should do.

Just two? That's the number of Teasmades out the open here (kitchen/living room, and guest room). There are another three still in a moving box or other.

Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger

Re: Incorrect behaviour

Also, a robot finds sulking for a sufficiently long period of time taxing.

Unless they have a basement to sulk in, as a Rather Unhappy Vertical People Transporter.

Give every player an angle grinder.

Show the AI a few games of Battle Chess.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: What's the Orbit, Bob?

I see two links, one out in the open as a t.co link, the other one displaying t.co when moused over.

UMatrix blocks t.co by default.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: About a billion web pages have been authored to help

he contacts on SD cards are small and presumably made against tiny spring-like contacts in the phone, which sound very much like something that would be prone to intermittent failure through dust sand, grease, vibration, and so on.

However, those contacts are either sliding, in which case a remove/insert will wipe them clean(er), or the card lives in a flip-up cradle inside the phone, underneath the battery[0]. In the latter case, with the effort removing the card it will only rarely be removed and reinserted, but ot now lives in a fair bit cleaner environment.

[0] presumes a removable battery and a non-slab model phone.

Re: The Bit-Theory

You may also have bit sex when a collision occurs between a 1 and a 0

Commonly-known as bit-banging.

Yes, that slightly shabby beige macintosh, thanks.

Re: Flash yes car no

I'm waiting for a manufacturer to produce an EV which has a key, a couple of pedals, a "fuel" gauge and a speedometer and nothing else.

Our 2012 Kangoo ZE hits all those buttons. or, ehm, the lack of them IYKNWIM.

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

Written in Pascal, of course.

As it's an undead language?

Why not Algol-60, if that's the criterion?

Too apropos be would Forth, way the by.

before they have been able to rectify the error

Oh, and then consider the case where X has fully submitted all the required paperwork for him to be declared un-dead, the processes have been irrevocably set in motion and due to bureaucratic inertia and other reasons can't be stopped before completion, only fully finalising after his second death has administratively gone through.

Somewhat related, would people be required to register on Second Life after being digitally revived?

ringing up

There's likely a website connected to the magazine in question.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of it a telephone number may be found that might still be working.

If it is, it's likely to connect you to a "helpdesk" somewhere in India that can answer a few generic questions that could be said to relate to magazine subscriptions, slightly adapted to the magazine's publisher.

They sure as hell won't have the foggiest about how to cancel a particular person's subscription(s).

Re: "We never make mistakes"

Which makes me wonder: would you then get a next "last sacrament", or would you get a "truly last sacrament"?

"I'm not dead yet."

"This was your very, very, very last sacrament. I'm not going to give you yet another one. Ever."

"I'm getting better, I'm getting better."

"No you're not." *Thwack*

And the body of course.

It's definitely a total pain in the arse when there's no body, or at least some variant of "he was working at $factory[0] when it went up in flames and several people have since been unaccounted for, with no identifiable remains found[1]." There's usually a several-year wait before a person who's gone missing[2] can be declared dead for most legal purposes.

[0] clocked in, didn't clock out, confirmed to have been working in or around the most heavily impacted area.

[1] probably occurring less nowadays with current DNA retrieval technologies.

[2] and not presumed fed, unless it's to the Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

Not a problem at all.

"His national health ID card was no longer valid and his top-up health insurance was cancelled."

So, failing to keep his health topped up this problem will solve itself.

Re: The title is optional

So I took to writing DECEASED -- REMOVE FROM LIST

This doesn't help.

This house's previous tenant ran a small business building and servicing industrial cutting plotters. He moved out rather hurriedly, it turned out, and the first months of us living here the doorbell being rung by a bailiff looking for Mr. B were a rather common occasion. Quite a lot of mail was still arriving, and in one case a set of parts (which the sender was glad to get returned); we mailed them back with "moved out, current address unknown". Still not all of the mail stopped, and even when we learned of his demise a few years ago and started labeling the return mail with "ADDRESSEE DECEASED" in big bold letters two or three trade magazines just kept going.

Oh well.

Re: "We never make mistakes"

Well, you did.

It's the sacrament of "last rites"

Re: A disgruntled parting tenant who had her declared dead

MR. BROWN: Yes?

MAN: Hello. Uhh, can we have your liver?

MR. BROWN: My what?

MAN: Your liver. It's a large, ehh, glandular organ in your abdomen. You know, it's, uh,-- it's reddish-brown. It's sort of, uhh,--

MR. BROWN: Yeah,-- y-- y-- yeah, I know what it is, but... I'm using it, eh.

ERIC: Come on, sir.

MR. BROWN: Hey! Hey! Stop!

ERIC: Don't muck us about.

MR. BROWN: Stop! Hey! Hey! Stop it. Hey!

MAN: Hallo [As he takes something from Mr. Brown]

MR. BROWN: Ge-- get off.

MAN: What's this, then? Mmh.

MR. BROWN: A liver donor's card.

MAN: Need we say more?

ERIC: No!

MR. BROWN: Listen! I can't give it to you now. It says, 'in the event of death'. Uh. Oh! Ah. Ah. Eh.

MAN: No one who has ever had their liver taken out by us has survived.

Digital burglary at recruitment agency Morgan Hunt confirmed

Re: Computer + network = insecurity

or some code has a security bug in it.

"How many applications do we run that are susceptible to log4j?"

"Don't ask me[0], ask the developers at the various software suppliers."

[0] I'm supposed to install the applications and keep an eye on their performance, not even installing and configuring WebLogic itself. And networking are the ones in charge of the firewalls.

Re: I'd been wondering…

…what Bruce Willis was getting up to these days.

Well, he's suffering from aphasia, so while he may still be considering getting up to something, he's going to have a hard time expressing his plan to a co-conspirator.

Now, Ben Affleck and Keany Reeves ...

British recruitment agency Morgan Hunt

Don't they look for people with other first or last names? Or driving a particular brand of car? Seems like needlessly limiting your search pool.

BOFH: Would I lie to you, Boss?

Re: I can't recall

Amnesia, that's a small town in France back in the times of Asterix and Obelix, isn't it?

Re: A Tad Of Paranoia And A Pinch Of Preparation Is Always Helpful......

it's called a USB Live Session With Persistence!

The Boss will have trouble understanding everything in that sentence past 'called', increasing with every word. Never mind the rest of your suggestion, which is on the level of rocket surgery.

The overcharged cattle prod

Electrically as well as financially, of course.

Dmitry Rogozin sacked as boss of Russian space agency Roscosmos

Re: "Bluster and hot air do not make for a sustainable space program"

Hot air buffoonsballoons can reach maybe 20km, which is nowhere near space. And bluster won't make up for the remaining distance.

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Hacking for hacking's sake is all fine and dandy (and for the most part I'm all for it!), but I value my time more than learning something about a proprietary bulb interface that'll I'll never need again.

Quite likely someone has already done so. Downside is that the instructions are presented as a video, with a lot of irrelevant blather and the crucial bits whizzing by at warp speed.

Re: back-out

If SMA would fail it would be annoying to miss reporting on my solar panels,

You set up a cron job telling SbfSpot to read your inverter and stuff it in a local database; from that point you have several other ways available to present that data elsewhere.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Re: Surprisingly honest wording from Twitter

They were getting a freebie anyway

If you're not paying for a product it's you that's the product.

I said it's his best chance. I didn't say it would work.

IOW his least worst chance, actually.

Re: Where is the ROI?

$50Bn is the cost of a presidency, or a presidency in your pocket?

If you try to do so by buying Twatter. I'd expect there to be some other costs still.

Putin won't have paid that much getting Cheeto Benito into the White House, and the additional cost of the remote control option was just a pair of hookers and a couple of video cams (standard KGB equipment anyway).

Re: what that "drastic action" may be is unknown

It would just keep going round with you.

Only if you have the correct orbital speed for your altitude AND you just stick your hand out the window letting go of the marble without altering its speed in any way. Even then, given atmospheric drag (which is still present several 100km up), the marble will gradually lose speed which will cause it to undergo orbital decay, ultimately falling to earth and at least partly burn up.

Re: what that "drastic action" may be is unknown

Even a marble dropped from orbit can have one heck of an impact if it hits the ground...

But by and large it wouldn't.

Space rocks have to be a fair bit bigger than a marble if they would have to have a marble-sized remnant hitting the earth; most of it will burn up. If you start with a marble there may be several dust specs arriving at altitude zero, but I guess you' agree that their impact wouldn't be particularly impressive.

I guess that if you threw a marble out of the ISS its entry speed may be low enough that less of it will burn up compared to an honest marble-sized meteoroid before the remnant(s) hits the earth, but it will still be partly vapourised.

Everyone back to the office! Why? Because the decision has been made

Re: Scheme

Our group of about a dozen people handle second-line support for a variety of applications, although those are all related to trains moving from A to B at time T, and not ending up in C and/or at B at time T plus or minus $ANNOYINGLY_LARGE_DELTA.

Not every one in the group is equally knowledgeable about all the applications and the platforms they run on More than once I've heard a colleague take a call on a matter he was not very familiar with. Overhearing that, signalling a short interruption and bringing him up to speed or transferring the call was standard procedure at the office in such cases.

In contrast, somewhere the past week there was an incident caused by a disk reporting imminent failure[0]. The guy who handled it (both he and I WedFH that day) duly answered all the scripted questions the 'engineer' at HPE Bangalore regurgitated, taking over an hour to collect several MB of irrelevant data from half a dozen sources where I would have sent them the one logfile that really mattered with any repeated request for the other data flatly declined, and would have instructed my colleague to do the same had I known about the incident as it came in.

[0] nah. It's a RAID1 set with only a local swapfile on it (there's a much larger swapfile on the SAN), and the system is slated for decommissioning.with no active applications running on this cluster member any more. So urgency is roughly nil.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Re: Ordinarily

Any half-decent AI would have gone and shot itself after being fed the Windows and Office source, or at least taken the rest of the decade off and arranged for some extensive counseling.

Thus we know Copilot is not even a half-decent AI.

Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools

Re: I like 7Zip.

In brief, if the Russian armed forces were what most people (myself included!) thought they were and were supposed to be ie a well equipped, well-trained and well-lead modern army then I'm pretty sure that Ukraine would have fallen completely under Russian control inside a week or two.

Invading a smaller country that is at least at the same level technologically (but with lower numbers both for equipment and forces) needs a good strategy, and a decent assessment of what you as the invader are likely to encounter. Especially if that country has been very aware of your intentions, and preparing to counter it at all costs as defeat would mean just about total eradication of their culture and lifestyle. Having a 40 mile long column of vehicles driving towards Kyiv with little infantry support, expecting to be greeted as liberators with bread and flowers, is not a good strategy and points at a total lack of reality-based assessment.

But there is just so much evidence of the complete and utter incompetence of the current Russian military at all levels, and of corruption misappropriating funds that were supposed to maintain and update equipment mysteriously finding its way into individuals bank accounts, that no, there is no way Russia could win this war even if it could afford it for much longer, which I rather doubt.

There's also the Russian command structure (not limited to the army; it's everywhere): top-down, command-driven. Tactical problems and setbacks have to be reported to the commanders, who then have to think of a change, then give out a new set of commands which have to be carried out. Those commanders tend to be near the battlefield so they have a better view of the situation but are, as repeatedly shown, in a vulnerable position. In contrast, Western armies (and Ukraine has trained that way since 2014) tend to be mission-driven, leaving a lot of initiative with lower and non-commanding officers, with even the rank soldiers roughly knowing what to do if their squad leader is killed of incapacitated.

Ask yourself - why did the Russians employ Wagner Group?

Deniability. Oh, they have a Russian 'capo di capi', but that's just coincidence, no? Sure, they happen to turn up everywhere there's conflict, Syria, Libya, other parts of Africa, but that's just Assad and local warlords availing themselves of rent-a-guns. Nonono, it has nothing to do with a strategic or economic advantage for Russia, or rather, a couple of Russian oligargs. No, nothing at all, why do you think so? And now, as they happen to enjoy fighting there's a war on their doorstep now, so just a short commute. What's not to like?

Re: Not my problem

Unless the company is involved in war crimes or human right violations, I don't care what they do.

Someone I know works for a small organisation whose webshop was built and run by a Russian company. Whether or not they were supporting the war, there would be the problem of paying for their services, as well as the possibility of network blocking as a sanction being discussed early in the war, with the webshop then going black.

Turns out they had already moved to the US years ago (and they're pretty much anti-war, modulo the effects on people they know back there), so in this case it turned out to be a non-problem

the ability to take software and break it into dozens if not 100+ 1mb files

ARJ had that option too. PKZip caught on some time later, but ARJ had noticeably better compression anyway (15 to 20% smaller for nearly all binary files) and I stuck with that for DOS (and OS/2).

A trick I have learnt from dial-up days.

The first trick there was to use ZModem. Adaptive block size and resuming where it had left off after a disconnect.

BOFH: HR's gold mine gambit – they get the gold and we get the shaft

Indeed not.

Like Michael Jackson[0] I prefer at least twelve year olds, and restrict those to outside office hours.

[0] No, the other one.

Re: Favourite CPU socket?

With nixies (pandicon!), pixies, E1Ts or nimo's for data output.

Re: Unicycle test

Your skiing and downhill MTB racing always end in a lake?

First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?

I never was on LinkedIn, and still get the occasional link request.

Or LI requests mailed to role accounts that don't have, and never had, even the slightest hint of LI presence.

Best unwanted job offer I ever got was "horse breeder".

Alzheimer and Dementia care specialist.

Probably best to forget about a career path there.

Whatever hit the Moon in March, it left this weird double crater

Re: Bouncy space junk?

So, the double crater could just be from one end hitting the surface first and millisconds later the other end also landed, creating the second crater.

Likely the lighter top end hitting first with still the full mass of the rocket stage behind the impact creating the first crater. Then the body collapsing or breaking and the heavier motor end hitting the surface a short distance away creating the second.

Or it's from some transdimensional being getting bored watching a game of Brockian Ultra-Cricket and flicking peanuts into wormholes.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

the 'agreed' solution was for scrapyards to have a skip / container of sufficient size available

20ft shipping containers are plentiful, open-top ones maybe a little less so, but if you're going to use it as a smothering pit that's sitting in a dedicated section of a scrap yard you just need to cut a large enough hole in the top and not really bother with the full transportability requirements of a certified open-top. And if you smother with sand there's no worry of polluted water leaking out; the sand can be reused although it has to be stored in the meantime and probably cleaned occasionally. Neither of those is a big and tough to solve problem.

the scenario of a traffic jam of cars going up in a wildfire

Looking at what's left of a car, EV or not, after a wildfire there's little more to do than shred it and throwing the bits into a blast furnace with the rest of the feed. If you're talking about a mass fire after a motorway pileup you may have a point, but for those the number of EVs involved will likely still be low single digit for the next couple of years.

Re: Trains are less usefull buses

And you really don't want bus and train drivers working "gig economy" style for a couple hours morning and evening.

With trains that's less of a problem; a set can consist of 1, 2 or 3 EMUs but still needs only one driver. So the driver doing a 05:00 to 13:00 shift will not be idle (modulo their route roster) but just sit at the front of smaller sets outside rush hour. Of course you do need less other personnel on a shorter train, but those are jobs that are easier to fill and indeed can be offered as part-time though I'm not sure whether they are, more than occasionally.