Posts by Old Used Programmer 633 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2010
That's the first mention I've seen about what the AA gun actually is. Not that it being a Krupp 88 would be surprising, but the new reports have been remarkably coy about it.
(Mildly interesting datum about the Krupp 88mm high altitude antiaircraft gun.... Traverse, 360 degrees--no surprise there--elevation +90 degrees to -15 degrees. Yeah....it can shoot *below* it's own horizon level.)
My niece worked at specialty steel fabricator. When they replaced a bunch of PCs, they took the drives out to the fabrication yard, neatly laid them out on the ground and then brought over a crane with a "magnetic hook" rated for 50 tons. Lowered the hook over the drives and turned in on.
Apparently, this caused all the drives to stand up on end and wave back and forth until the hook was turned off.
Checking random drives afterwards showed nothing on them, not even formatting.
If we could get all the people buy stuff to (a) not buy anything that doesn't have some minimum iFixit score (and the required score could go up over time) and (b) insist on standard parts, the companies making repairs difficult to impossible might see their businesses shrink or go away in favor of ones that will meet those criteria.
The internet firms *love* standards. Lots and lots of standards. Standards are a wonderful thing, because there are so many to choose from.
Yes, I understand your point.
What I'd like to see would be a single standard for videochat so they 'd all be interoperable and one could use what one liked and.or run best on ones system. Then the different providers could duke it out on how well they could make it work and what additional features they could provide that users actually want.
It's the business model invented King Gillette. Sell razors at or near giveaway prices and then make your money selling the blades to go with.
A few years ago HP threw a hissy fit because people weren't buying their massively overpriced cartridges. So they announced that they'd sell the printers at a profit. (Big part of the reason why what was a $400 HP-2055dn is now a $650 HP-2055dn.)
We had a cat that liked to lie on top of my CRT with his front claws hooked just over the edge of the bezel. So, not wanting the vents blocked, I cut a piece of plywood to size, put a couple of standoffs on the back and put that on top of the monitor, leaving a clear 4+ inches of space over the top vents. The cat was still happy to hang out on top, but now without the possible adverse consequences.
One sort of like that I was able to provide a solution for (and it wasn't even my job).
Huge--for the time--expensive (ViewSonic) CRT monitor. Lousy image. The actual problem was an unshielded power distribution panel on the other side of the wall. The Powers That Be were unwilling to spend what it would have taken to properly shield the panel. So I suggested a somewhat better graphics card for the PC so that the refresh wouldn't be 60Hz. That was done, cranked the refresh to 85Hz. Rock solid image.
Southern California (e.g. Los Angeles) inserts a definite article before Interstate Highway numbers, such as "the I-10" where in northern California (e.g. SF Bay Area) doesn't, such as "I-80".
No idea why (or why not), but you can tell a transplanted newscaster by which way they do it.
I had a go around with the guy who wrote the date routines at I company I was working for. On the first pass, he had 1900 as a leap year. I pointed out that that was wrong. On the second pass he had 2000 as NOT a leap year. So Pointed out that error (I'd given the correct--Gregorian--formula the first time). On the third pass, he got it right.
What I want to know is...If the localization in Linux is NOT an English speaking country, is the date shift between Julian and Gregorian calendars correct for that country?
Eben responds to posts from time to time. He also responds to comments on the blog posts. Still, for a problem with the forums, I'm mildly surprised it wasn't Liz Upton responding. She is, after all, Director of Communications, while Eben is CEO...of the wholly owned subsidiary, Raspberry Pi Trading (Ltd.).
(One can see why the Uptons staunchly refuse to have a "smart speaker" at home...listening in.)
For the only thing I do to which that might apply--a convention registration system--360 days out of the year, I am the only user. The other 5 days, it's physically moved to the convention hotel and entering new con members into the system is done by volunteers under my direction.
So why would I put it in the cloud and risk having the system go down because the databases can't be accessed?
I certainly won't claim to have eliminated all SPOFs, but I've gotten down to relatively few and for most of those I have spare equipment to swap in to cover.
One company I worked for had a problem with PCs disappearing. A company employee found a system for sale at a flea market that was full of company software. Eventually, the "problem" was traced back to a night shift security guard who would back up his car to the loading dock and fill the trunk with PCs.
One of my more common specific product searches is when someone in a forum I read and comment on regularly has a problem, but hasn't given the specs of the device causing the problem. So I look it up to see if I can find any clues to what is going wrong. No intent to buy the item or anything like it.
I was recently watching the stream from a particular web cam. It went down "due to technical difficulties." The next day, the company running it got to the site to try to find the actual problem and fix it. They found the problem and that it couldn't be fixed. The web cam is in Iceland and was overrun by a lava flow.
As I recall, the received wisdom was that IBM would simply pay claims for less than $10K as not being worth fighting. Over that, and they'd call in the Nazgul to fight it. Just to keep down the spurious clams, every now and again, they *will* fight a less than $10K claim. So it's a case of...feeling lucky, punk?
A story told my sister by a work colleague...
A company he had worked for was sending source code decks of *cards* of large FORTRAN programs to a company in France. The programs would fail to compile (throwing all manner of errors) when they got there. Eventually, after several rounds of this, they sent a programmer carrying the box of cards. He was rather horrified when the French customs inspector decided to take a few of the cards from random places in the deck as "samples" to keep. did explain the problem, though.
Well before the widespread information age, my son (now mid-40s) did a science fair project of designing a nuclear bomb. It rather upset a physicist who was one of the judges because it came very close to being a workable design. My son was in 7th grade at the time. (He'd gotten the required mass of the fissionables to within a factor of two, working from publicly available sources.)
I would argue that the reduction in power requirements has driven IoT, not the other way around. A lot of what drove, at least in the US, into reducing size, weight and power requirements was the inability (at the time) to get much mass into orbit. The US space program *had* to make major weight (and, thus, power) reductions because we lacked sufficiently powerful boosters at the time.
I have maintained for decades that nearly anyone can learn to program. However, there is a vast gulf between knowing how to program and being able to hold down a job as a programmer.
The rudiments are useful pretty much across the board. Those who actually enjoy programming and show an aptitude for it can move on to make a living at it.
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