Posts by Pen-y-gors 3789 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
Given the predilection for UK governments to want to see everyone's data, combined with ignorance* and the resulting tendency to pass impossible legislation to allow that, I have no plans to store any of my data on servers subject to UK law anytime soon. EU is so much safer.
* PPE at Oxford is not a good training for understanding anything technical.**
** Well, understanding anything at all, to be honest.
"Microsoft is already spending close to $19 billion a quarter on AI/ML infrastructure"
How? How on earth do you spend that much on a single research development project? For that money you can employ 100,000 'software engineers' duplicating each others' work and give them each a Cray as a desktop PC.
That was the first thing I thought too. Working with helium seems to be very tricky, and it also seems a shame to vent it off into space when it's so scarce.
I'm sure the rocket boffins have thought it all through, but why helium and not some other inert-ish gas. Nitrogen?
I always find the most satisfying answer is to let them get started then say "Hang on, there's someone at the door - I think it's the parcel I'm expecting. Back in a sec" then just leave them hanging until they give up (often 4-5 minutes)
A variation if they ask for to speak to Mr Penygors is to say "He's just seeing a client out, he'll be with you in a moment" - same result
I believe that this sort of thing is a very socially aware and kind thing to do, as it prevents someone else being irritated by them for a whole 5 minutes. And those minutes of positive karma add up. And more satisfying than asking them if their mother knows they work in organised crime.
This could be useful for Archives. It's not unknown for people to deposit granddad's "papers" with a local Record Office, said papers often containing a load of old floppies or even, gulp, 3" Amstrad disks. How to retrieve the content? Getting a working Amstrad PCW may be possible, but how to link it to more modern machines to transfer the data? Both of these solutions could be quite helpful.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
Some years ago I bought a Roberts internet radio, that used the Reciva service to provide information on available radio stations. It's a jolly handy bit of kit, lives by the bed, and tunes in to radio stations all over the world. It was not cheap.
Last year the new owners of Reciva announced they were shutting the service down. What does that mean? Expensive radios (almost) bricked. Mine still works to listen to stations on my 5 presets, but that's it.
I'm sure someone could have afforded to set up a new minimalist server that would have enabled the radios to keep working, even if it wasn't updated daily - Roberts weren't the only people using the service.
Oh yes, Roberts I believe offered a 20% discount on a new radio.
I used to work for a large insurance company. We had the usual complicated backup and recovery strategy, part of which was that a monthly(?) copy of the backup tapes of all our databases was sent down to London and put in a very old, very large safe, buried deep in the basement, and said to be immune to nuclear attack.
Given that our IT centre was based near to several likely targets of Soviet nukes, one had to wonder "Why bother?"
And would we really want to pay out on a load of life assurance claims?
"to put it bluntly, you can't cyber your way across a river."
Possibly not, but with good networks and drones, you can sure as heck stop the opposition getting across a river. Ask the RuZZians. And the same things can help you find and secure a good place for your engineers to build a bridge.
Problem in reverse.
Coming home to UK from Hong Kong about 30 years ago. No problem with the seating (managed to get front row with extra leg space) but it was the first flight back after the Miss World contest, and half the plane was taken up by the contestants - imagine the queues for the loos before we landed as everyone redid their slap!
But, to be fair, how many business people really NEED to travel these days? Have they not discovered Zoom?
And bringing back the great ocean cruise ships sounds like a pretty neat idea. S.S. Oriana from Southampton to Sydney via Bombay and Singapore. And the food's better than British Airways.
Biggest problem isn't peak demand - in many areas it's the network infrastructure will be the issue. This sort of demand is the equivalent of building a new small housing estate, which may require serious upgrades to the local substations etc.
...and for something that isn't used very much.
A large majority of EV users will charge their cars at home (or work, or the supermarket) where they can quite happily have a slowish charge that takes a few hours. The only real demand for 5/10 minute charges will be at motorway (or equivalent) charging points where people are on a long journey. And if you're putting several dozen of these on the same site you might as well install a mini-nuke next door.
So we have several impossible things happening before breakfast.
One problem though is that time crystals must be tiny.
How about we harness another 'impossible' thing - the humble bumble-bee? They work on a macro scale. I know it would be a bit cruel, but couldn't we hook them up to a mini-treadmill or fly-wheel?
"the photonics chip was able to categorize an image in under 570 picoseconds with an accuracy of 89.8-93.8 percent."
For a given value of 'categorise'?
a) There's a building in the picture
b) It's a picture of 17 Railway Sidings, East Cheam
a) There's a human in the picture
b) It's a picture of a soldier in the Russian 17th Motorised Artillery Brigade, who isn't a POW.
I've still not found a keyboard with an 'any' key.
But I do recall a problem in a CICS program. We had a report that the screen was stuck and just reloaded whatever the user pressed. There was a useful message, but it ended with "PF5 for Help"
(max 79 char message)
We had assumed that the user understood that PF5 was the function key. No. They typed in the literal PF5 and pressed Enter, which really twisted some knickers.
Ok, I appreciate that Amazon are evil incarnate, but one of the things that really, really pisses me off is Amazon Prime.
I would be happy to pay an annual sub to have free next-day delivery. But why do they bundle in all sorts of crap services that I don't want, which then go up in cost so they can 'justify' a price rise? I don't want to watch their crappy TV. Why can't I just pay £50 p.a. for the free delivery bit?
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