Posts by Wensleydale Cheese 1381 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2011
"Why stop at hydrogen. Convert it into an alcohol (preferably with CO2 extracted from the atmosphere), and you can deliver it via the existing infrastructure & use barely-modified existing engine technology."
See Brazil for an example of ethanol as fuel, but Apparently it's not going as well as it used to (Washington Post Article from 2014)
"Hydrogen is a ridiculously expensive and impractical transport fuel. The yank DoE alone has invested $3 billion in 'hydrogen economy' research over the the last 27 years and come up with approximately nothing useful."
The DoE should have a look at what the Swiss Post Buses are doing.
Swiss Hydrogen Bus and Refuelling are “CHIC”
And yes, these are still in operation and expanding to other areas in Switzerland.
"Can someone wiser than me please enlighten on what on Earth the deer analogy means & why that's chosen as the great selling point?"
It probably does make sense if you have experienced a deer jumping out onto the road in front of you.
It happened to me once, on a narrow country lane bordered by dry stone walls, meaning limited opportunities except for braking.
The deer's actions were quite impressive, it jumped down from the hill on the left into the middle of the road and in one leap cleared the 5 foot wall on the other side.
If it had landed on the bonnet instead, it would have caused serious damage.
"(c) implementations for dumb-phones that use time-bounded codes sent via SMS are not user-friendly* (had the SMS turn up about 4 hours after it was requested, and the "usable window" for it had expired)"
I've also experienced the situation where there is no phone signal indoors, which involved going outside and walking until reception kicks in and the SMS message arrives.
By the time I got back to the computer, the code had expired.
Yes, it's called Excel
Excel specifications and limits
For "Excel 2016-2013"
Total number of rows and columns on a worksheet: 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns
I'll just leave this here:
Speculation that Amber Rudd wants to be PM
What are her leadership chances? She came fifth in the latest poll of party members, with 7.5%, after Boris (21%), Jacob Rees-Mogg (15%), David Davis (14%) and Other (18%).
"Personally, I would not risk it. I had only one instance in use outside lab work (my mom's house) and even that just got disabled and replaced by a proper adult bind + isc dhcp server combination running on the razzie which controls the cctv."
Noted and thanks. I've been trying dnsmasq out on a Raspberry Pi, but find the documentation somewhere between hard work and impenetrable.
I've used bind and isc dhcp server before and will probably be more comfortable with those.
I think "Tivoli" means a fun-fair / "amusement park" but not in English?
"The VAX compiler therefore optimized the FORTRAN code down to a signle NOP instruction and linked to an empty executable, which finished in 0 seconds."
The VAX-COBOL compiler wasn't anywhere near VAX-FORTRAN in terms of optimising code, but it could still surprise you.
On one occasion I was trying to do something similar with large arrays, but the COBOL simply decided that anything not referenced wasn't required. Passing the appropriate variable(s) to an external routine brought in at link time was the only way to fool the compiler.
"Back in the '80s of Big Bang London there was the story of DEC being asked by a non-customer if they could supply a copy of the OS. They asked what it was for. Someone had found a presumably surplus Micro-VAX tossed into a skip."
It was around that time that second hand MicroVAXes could be had for as little as £10K, and my thoughts turned to setting myself up as an independent developer.
It turned out that these were extremely hard to come across, because when the initial purchaser upgraded to something else, the MicroVAXes would get handed to another department within the same company, rather than released onto the second hand market.
"And that is why you should have an external system monitoring and alerting, not rely on kit on just one site."
This is where, back in the day, using external systems to monitor serial line console output was a good idea, aka "Out of band" monitoring.
The network stack could throw a complete barf, but the messages coming out of a bog standard serial line would still get to their destination.
"So, if you work for 25 years at Acme Co and end with a £50,000 salary you will get a pension of 25/80 of £50K or £15,625 p.a less tax. To achieve this you are like to have paid in approximately 18% of your cumulative salary over the 25 years. Assuming you started on £25K and increased linearly to £50K you will have paid in £175K which would then take approximately 12 years to get back, assuming you live that long."
Comparing that with the scheme I am on (not in the UK):
It's calculated from the total you have accumulated. Interest does accrue over the years on that sum.
You get 6.8% p.a. of the final value as income, so that £175K would result in a yearly pension of £11,900. Because interest does accrue while you are building it up, £175K of contributions will turn out to be a decent bit more by the end, even at quite low interest rates.
100 / 6.8 is 14.7 years, so more years to get it back than the Final Salary scheme you describe.
Swings and roundabouts between the two flavours. The final salary scheme probably comes out better in times of high inflation, but only if salaries keep up.
P.S. That 6.8% figure was undoubtedly calculated by actuaries, based on life expectancy of pensioners.
"Scheduling" tests never works because Operations will subvert you by shifting the workload elsewhere. That causes the servers, fans and CRAC units to idle which means the power load you're switching won't be representative of a real failure condition.
I can well believe that.
Related, and seen somewhere on Youtube recently:
"Staff will treat Penetration Testers the same way as they do auditors. The natural inclination is to hide anything embarrassing; they won't tell them everything."
"Authorisation revoked or not renewed, and you are out of a job, house and probably bank account too."
deportation threatened, child benefit stopped, driving licence revoked
A Japanese woman living in London with her Polish husband has been threatened with deportation, had her child benefit stopped and driving licence revoked even though she is lawfully in the country under EU law, it has emerged.
You probably won't realise unless you have been through the process, but there's an international agreement about driving licences across civilised countries.
If you become resident in a new country for a long enough period, your existing driving licence can be surrendered in exchange for a local one, and you can do the same again if you go to any other country that has a reciprocal agreement.
The UK could be on extremely dodgy human rights grounds if that revocation results in a licence which is worthless worldwide.
"Cash in the pocket from now on?"
Hang on to your cash. This dash to digitise payments is dangerous
"A decade ago isn't long enough to account for IR35. That must have been something else."
According to a recruitment consultant I chatted to in the mid-80s, some Sir Humphrey decided to make a name for himself and force contractors off self-employment status, form Limited Companies instead, and be liable for both sides of NI.
As any accountant worth his salt would tell you, typical contractor rates at the time didn't warrant going the Ltd Co route; at those turnover levels self-employed status was more appropriate.
"Thanks for telling everyone your trick. I'm sure it'll be picked up by the rule-generators shortly."
Back in the day we had a discussion about obfuscating Usenet email addresses to thwart spammers, but still make them decipherable by humans who wanted to reply directly.
What many didn't realise was that it would only take one glance from a competent regex programmer to devise a rule to grab the correct address for each scheme suggested.
"GDPR is not compatible with high chancellor rees-mogg. "
Someone's very busy editing the Wiki entry for Jacob Rees-Mogg
Here he's "A member of an established Somerset family of coal mine owners", in later versions that's disappeared.
"All the more reason to pursue the directors for liabilities, if they're stripped of any profits then they wouldn't be able to afford to start up again"
There is provision somewhere in the law to bar them from being company directors, though I have no idea what specific offences can trigger this.
"Unless you can analyse and predict data patterns in your live data, a system will never be properly tested until it's seen the real database."
A recently reported example was where two girls had the same first name, last name, date of birth and they were born in the same city. IIRC, it was a student admissions system that got tripped up by that combination.
"I don't know what this word means, I'll just SWiG it", or "has someone got a moment to SWiG for the nearest pizza joint?"
Swig is an existing verb:
swig |swɪɡ| informal
verb (swigs, swigging, swigged)
drink in large draughts: Dave swigged the wine in five gulps | [no object] : Ratagan swigged at his beer.
noun
a large draught of drink: he took a swig of tea.
"Why isn't Dover a building site by now?"
The Irish have started on projects to upgrade cargo facilities at the southern ports (Rosslare, Cork and Waterford) to handle additional import/export traffic directly to France.
Plus there's another project to hook up the Irish electric grid directly to the French grid...
"The likelihood of any passporting for Eu in the city if there is no data deal is NIL."
And from the main article:
the UK will need a deal in place for “when the clock strikes midnight on March 29 2019”.
Should we look at setting security certificate expiry dates at 2019-03-31T00:00:00 ?
4.5% is, IMO, very optimistic. Unfortunately.
As calculated in my other post: 0.046 %
Very low, but probably more typical.
Dale Vile ... said that established support teams accumulate experience, understanding and a collective knowledge of "tips, tricks and traps" that could not easily be passed on outside of the existing environment.
"The concern is losing this institutional and cultural ‘memory', particularly for more specialist teams. This can make the difference between an efficient peer-to-peer support experience for the customer, and script-driven hell, no matter how well-trained the outsourced resources happen to be."
This. Absolutely this.
"The only question really is how many users out there who run MS Office are local administrators and thus make it worth while running the attack."
Every Soho user who has set up their own network and accepted the out of the box default of Admin rights for the first user created on each system?
The best part in this story is the $1.8 millions of stocks sold by three executives 3 days after the breach was discovered, and the answer of Equifax when asked about it: "The three executives who sold a small percentage of their Equifax shares on Tuesday, August 1, and Wednesday, August 2, had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares"
Three days and the executives not knowing about it suggests a flaw in their management reporting processes.
"The Secure Key being limited to 8 characters must only apply to the Business banking app (not entirely clear from the article) as mine is over double that in the consumer version."
Are you sure about that?
Back around the turn of the century I thought I was using a 12 character password for my ISP, but as I later discovered, it was silently ignoring all but the first 8 characters.
"And one thing that Python does really, really, well, is let people wrap libraries written in other languages and interface them to Python. If there is an existing library written in C, Fortran, assembly language, or just about any other statically compiled language, you can probably interface it to Python without too much trouble and with little run-time overhead."
With memories of how much work can be involved with that in other environments, this is truly useful.
"Although I use it a lot, I cannot respect a language where white space is a critical part of the syntax."
In my early career I used programming languages where certain things had to go in certain columns (Fortran IV & 77, Cobol, and even more so RPG II), I really can't get worked up about this. Yes, it's different, but with some applied thought, it really isn't so difficult to comprehend.
"Move a line of code in or out by a space or two and it either becomes part of a preceding conditional clause, or is removed from it."
BTDT, but the run time diagnostics usually catch the mistakes I make. Regular commits with a version control system have saved a lot of grief there.
Also note that on the Mac platform, both TextWrangler and BBEdit give you the ability to take a time-stamped snapshot every time you save a file (not enabled out of the box - see Preferences -> Text files -> Backups for that). This is invaluable for those files which don't justify their own version control environment, although I'm increasingly finding myself using version control in areas I traditionally didn't (e.g, system configuration files).
"Given cable companies historically low regard for the property rights of house owners, I can understand their issue."
The mess that subcontractors made of the beautiful York stone pavements in the village I lived in 20 years ago are a lasting testament to that.
"How are these people still in business if they're so dim?"
They are part of the Liberty Global plc empire.
Its cable services pass 55.8 million homes, with 28.6 million customers or 59 million RGUs (video, internet, and voice subscribers)
Or in this case, pass slap bang in front of some of those 55.8 million homes.
P.S. RGU = Revenue Generating Unit, which is the phrase they use internally instead of that old fashioned word "customer".
Yours sincerely,
an ex-Revenue Generating Unit
Bitter experience says they won't get very far with the planning permission route.
A relative once tried to get a neighbour's extension vetoed on the grounds of it blocking out their living room light and got precisely nowhere.
The planning permission laws are very much in favour of property developers, to the detriment of existing residents.
Scientific American had "scientific" surveys done that proved that most of its readers were rich executives likely to want to see ads for BMW's, Rolexes and high-end liquor...
If a bunch of highly qualified scientists can't work out how to fudge the system, I'd be very surprised. :-)
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