Posts by druck 4205 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
I'm pretty sick of the food bigots on here that every time KFC or McDonald's is mentioned feel the need to bleat on about how bad it is. No one is saying its the best food in the world, or suitable to eat every day, but a lot of people enjoy the occasional fast food meal. If you don't like it, just don't eat it, and STFU.
Which is all very exciting, save for the fact that it’s generally agreed that useful quantum machines are years away and that when they arrive they’ll be extraordinarily expensive to acquire and operate.
If they ever arrive, but in the meantime here is a simulation of how we hope they might work.
One of the first mice for the BBC Micro was the large and expensive AMX rat, I couldn't afford that so, bought a cheaper one to connect to the user port. It featured the real mouse layout, of buttons at the front and a tail at the back, before they realised the lead kept getting trapped under your wrist. As it was cheap the traction of the ball was poor, so it would only work well using the rough side of a bit of hardboard as a mouse mat, and the plastic case was so thin sunlight would confuse the sensors, requiring a mod with some black tape. But it worked, and was so much better than a joystick for precise control on screen, it revolutionised my use of the computer.
Its normal for some SOC makers to have closed source drivers for the proprietary parts of their chip. It would be a lot different if the you couldn't get hold of the documentation or reference code for the ARM core in the SOC, unless you were device manufacturer paying large sums to nVidia.
Windows 8 gets a lot of hate as its hard to see beyond the abomination of the start screen, but replace it with Classic Shell, install the Aero theme and what you get is very much like Windows 7, but a better Task Manager and File Manager progress boxes similar to Windows 10. But unlike Windows 10 Microsoft only made two versions 8 and 8.1, and has otherwise left it well alone, so no worries about about them having broken everything each morning. Yes, somethings are in the stupid charms setting crapolla, but the vast majority is still in the Windows 7 style Control Panel. Plus its supported for another 2½ years.
Upgraded today, and no issues with the upgrade itself.
Note that in Mate 20 (and Ubuntu 20) Python 2 is no longer installed by default. All my scripts were already Python 2 & 3 compatible, but the shebang's were still set to usr/bin/env python', so they either need to be changed to python3 or install python-is-python3
I've never found upgrading painful. I did come late to the party only starting with Mint 13 (the first with Mate as default), and have been upgrading in place ever since without problems. I'm sure as soon as the option appears to go from 19.3 to 20, that will be smooth too.
My Raspberry Pi 4 running a Raspbian Buster image that started off as Wheezy on a 256MB Pi B, and has been run on every variant since and upgraded in place for each release along the way.
I do make sure I have backups before I start though!
Be aware that the transformers in dual wall sockets tend to be very inefficient, some even operating when nothing is plugged in. This can mean a lot of heat needs to be dissipated, and how successful that is will depend on the type of wall it is fitted in. A thermal camera shows they only thing worse is an old inductive dimmer switch, and even they are only active when the light is on.
There are much better ways of recovering a deleted open file, than crashing the system and hoping fsck recovers it. I did it the other day on Linux when I deleted an open log file, it wasn't very important but I got it back anyway. I believe even on Solaris the file handle will be under /proc/<pid>/<fd>, and a quick google shows the fsdb command will help in this situation.
My first digit camera was an Olympus 1.3Mpix with a slide out lens cover, which took so long to start up you'd miss the photo, but an improvement on the previous bulky ones containing a floppy disk! My last Olympus was a SP-550UZ, very compact 18x stabilised zoom which was great for taking pictures when flying.
My favourite though was the C-2100UZ which had one of the last CCD sensors before everyone went CMOS, it was only 2Mpix and ate batteries in minutes, but was more sensitive than anything I've had since, able to use fast shutter speeds even at the maximum 10x zoom in low light. I remember buying a 64MB Smartmedia card for it in Changi airport in a 2 hour stop off in Singapore on the way to my first trip to Australia. It cost a huge amount, although cheaper than 32MB in the UK. It increased my budget to an average of 6 photos per day for the month long holiday!
Sadly they didn't have anything I liked last time, so I've now got a Fujifilm X-S1, a huge beast of a 26x zoom bridge camera, but the advantage of lots of external buttons to go straight to a feature, rather than spending ages navigating menus. It enables you to get much more out of the camera.
The best example of 'Envelop' being the Microsoft Research centre in Cambridge. It's sole purpose being to suck in promising Cambridge graduates and let them play with toys, rather than going on to setting up their own companies producing superior products, which lead to Acorn and many others.
