Posts by druck 4205 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
That's 13 people out of the workforce for up to two weeks (depending on how quickly they can get tested), from contact with just one person who tested positive. It will result in effectively a permanent lock down of everyone using the app, and at some point the money to pay to them keep self isolating over and over again, will run out.
I think you mean there is no other application that comes close to a spreadsheet in terms of usability, versatility and usefulness.
Excel is one example of a spreadsheet, with quite a few good features, but also a whole load of limitations and bugs, which my fellow commetards have only been too eager to point out.
@Bob. Locating your launch site near the equator has nothing to with the extra speed gained from the rotation of the earth, a few hundred mph difference from that is insignificant when you need 17,000mph to reach orbit.
The latitude of the launch site determines which orbits you can reach easily, i.e the latitude of the launch site is the minimum inclination of the initial orbit. To reduce the inclination to get to an equatorial orbit (for geostationary satellites) requires a lot more fuel for the transfer stage, the further north (or south) of the equator you launch from. That reduces the amount of useful payload the rocket can deliver.
Most of the Atoms were capable of running a 64 bit OS, but Microsoft restricted them to 32 bit Windows 7 starter. If you tried installing Windows 10 on them, they would default to 32 bit, but it was possible to do a fresh install of 64 bit Windows 10, it was hopelessly slow with only 2GB of RAM though.
My old N455 netbook has both 32 bit and 64 bit Linux Mint on it. The 64 bit variant is noticeably faster until you open a few tabs in the browser and it runs out of memory, the 32 bit one struggles on a little longer due to a few 100MB less memory usage.
You can't lay contract tracing at Johnson's door, almost every other county is doing it, and most of them they started before us.
You are right about all the false positives, and that's why the decentralised model won't work. The false positive alerts will automatically propage from phone to phone, and countries using it will be paralysed by a large amount, possibly the majority, of their population being told to self isolate, again and again and again. They'll never escape lock down.
The centralised model won't have any less false positives, but has the advantage but there is then control over how fast and how far the positive alerts can spread, so the country won't be crippled. Yes this will also limit the propagation of true positives too, but then the entire point of this isn't to find every case of the virus, its enable lock down to be ended and make people feel safe enough to go back to work.
Tesla's autopilot is clearly not perfect, but that should not be the bar to clear. Is it better than the average human driver?
Better than the average driver is nowhere near good enough, it needs to be two or even three orders of magnitude better, so it is a lower probability than a mechanical failure.
Everyone who drives non automated vehicles has had minor lapses of attention and knows how easily it could have lead to an accident, so are accepting to some degree of genuine failings of other humans. However, no one will ever accept a death caused by the failing of AI, is not something that should have been prevented.
As this includes vulnerabilities in applications as well as the OS, I suspect for Windows they have Office and Chrome installed, where their Linux has the most obscure and infequently maintained open source applications they could find in the distro.
I can't think of any other way they could come to such a conclusion, since there are security updates on a daily basis on all my Linux boxes, rather than waiting a month for Windows patch Tuesday.
Yes, one of the design goals was a 32 bit processor with as close to the simplicity of the 6502 as possible. So it had a very orthogonal instruction set (very few special cases), three operand instructions, register to register only ALU operations, and status flags as part of the program counter for easy stacking.
Compared to the contemporary 16 bit instructions sets (68K, 286, etc) it was an absolute joy to program in assembler, and resulted in blisteringly fast code. That initial advantage did come back to bite in the end, as most of RISC OS and quite a few large applications were written in assembler, and proved far more difficult to port to later ARM versions, particularly the move to 32bit PC in ARMv5, than if everything had been written in a high level language.
I'm afraid poor Teams performance for you is probably due to my children, after the school set it up for them to use. The 6 year old likes show his friends the screen when he is playing some sort of Minecraft spinoff on his tablet, and the 4 year old's friend likes to manically run around with her mum's phone, showing him the entire house right down to the insides of the toilet bowl. I have to say the video quality has been superb, just when you could do with a bit of pixelation - in both cases.
I started out developing on commercial Unix, but every place since that I've worked on Windows development I'd be lost without GNU tools. I started off with cygwin, but when VMware came out started using a Linux VM. I currently use Virtualbox on Windows 7, but also have a Windows 10 machine and WSL does most of what I want to do - I'll still keep a full VM around though.
We were doing 3D with BBC Micro's and LCD glasses back in the 80's, so it didn't require enormous GPU power! It used a standard 14" Cub monitor, and you stuck two sensors to the bottom left of the screen. The machine swapped images at a flickery 25 times a second, and square was plotted under the left or right sensor location to blank the LCD on one of the lenses. It worked, and hell of a lot better than the red and blue/green glasses stuck to the front of the TV Times, for one of the earlier 3D film fads.
It was the only board game I enjoyed as a kid. It should still be in a box I took from my parents house 11 years ago, but haven't got around to opening yet. Now I'm spending more time with the children it's an ideal time to rediscover it - as long as I can tear them away from their tablets!
For me the saving of Apollo 13 is a very close second to the achievement of landing on the moon. It really shows what man is capable of in a dire situation, from the quick thinking and ingenuity of those engineers on the ground, to the composure and resilience of the astronauts in the harsh conditions of the LM.
Quantum computing will always be 15 years away, unlike fusion where you can turn towards the sun and feel the effects of real fusion happening. We just need to overcome the physical challenges of recreating, and crucially maintaining, the conditions at the heart of a star to generate more energy than you put in. With quantum computing you have to overcome the physical challenges of implementing wishful thinking that the right answer simultaneously coexists with all possible wrong answers and will magically pop out at you with enough funding.
But radio isn't static like a TV set, you tend to take it to different places around the house to listen to while doing other things.
DAB is like a massive leap backwards in time, to before the transistor radio revolution in the 60s. You have bulky power hungry sets, poor reception, and most stations in mono ffs.
It takes nowhere near the same amount of fuel to slow a down a returning rocket, it's mass is far less and it still uses friction of the increasingly dense atmosphere on the way down.
It should be bleeding obvious watching a SpaceX launch - 9 merlins at full tilt on the way up, and on the way down a quick 3 engine burn to slow it, deceleration due to friction, and an even quicker single engine landing burn.
I remember when Foundem and their ilk and would infest the first dozen pages of all search results, and every link took you to some irrelevant crap which didn't even contain the search term.
Whatever you think of Google, keeping these link spammers at the bottom of the search rankings is the best thing they have ever done.
The 32-bit branch of the kernel has also been mostly shorn of the Year 2038 bug, with just under 17 years to spare before it lost the ability to keep track of time. ®
I don't mind the kernel being fixed, but hopefully there will still be lots of work fixing old user land applications, as I'm relying on that work funding my retirement - doubly so now the pandemic has wiped out pension funds and investments.
