Posts by Yet Another Commentard 450 publicly visible posts • joined 27 May 2011
As "no pressure" is one atmosphere different from sea level- I doubt it would be a problem. Omega also supplied the watches to the Apollo crew - so they have done a few hours in a near vacuum, hot, cold, hot cold etc. AFAIK they all still work, 40 odd years on.
Lewis has already picked up on the single most useful feature of the Seamaster (not the Helium release valve, I have no idea who uses that) but the strap expansion.
I think the big problem is that it is designed around touch, which does not translate brilliantly to mouse. I’m playing with it at the moment, and there is an issue with multiple screens. I like the way I can direct the taskbar buttons to the screen the application is running on, but finding the corner of your “main” screen when there is another next to it is incredibly fiddly. If they insist on this method, it would be better to allow the “hot corners” to be moved to the extreme right or left screen. Unless, that’s simply an option I have yet to find. Oh, and turning it off/restarting is an unnecessary faff. Office must be better integrated, so Outlook as be the “mail app” and “calendar app” showing data through to a locked screen. For all I know Office 15 may do that. As for the lack of a “start” button, after an hour or two of annoyance, I don’t miss it I have a “windows” button on my keyboard. The problem is – that’s an hour or two too long for most users. That way lies another Vista.
I had to take an LC II to the Apple shop to see if they could mess with it and get it to boot. They were very nice, and could find all the technical manuals,but could not. That's not the point.
In the box was a series of pristine Apple Logo stickers from 1995ish. They were the apple bitten out bit, but in rainbow colours. The blue t-shirted masses nearly collapsed in fruitgasms over them.
So two points "Not even Apple fanbois take things that far" is wrong, some do. Second Apple has changed its logo through colour apples to minimalist single ones.
Downvote away...
Not that Guinness is beer, it's stout, but yes it is related. Legend has it that years back people would argue in pubs about the "highest mountain" or "heaviest tumour" or other miscellanea. In the days before the internet-onna-phone and Wikipedia to mislead all the brewing giant decided to publish a book for landlords full of this sort of stuff.
That book became the Guinness Book of Records.
Norris and Ross McWhirter RIP.
PS - good to see that in the photo you are both clearly not bowing to sponsor's pressure in drinking their product.
It would be, but you’d still have to clear a lot of it away to comply with the security clear desk policy. Back in the Dark Ages when my dad still worked his desk was like a bureau. At the end of each day he would pull the cover over his work, pens, (days long before computers) and whatever, locked it and left. Now I have to file everything (read – dump in a drawer), unplug all the electrics, clear the desk down, even if I am to return to the same spot the next day. So half an hour wasted every morning and evening. Ho-hum, you can’t stop progress.
It’s a bit like open-plan and hot-desking. Seems it makes me more productive to be in a noisy area with a half chance of getting a desk (whether booked or not), but my superiors work better with a permanent desk. In an office.
I am a little confused over the connection between ports, science and technology. The last two I see connected, even though I’d still rather have them separate, but ports? I am assuming this means the big things by the ocean where ships load and unload rather than difficult to reach holes in the back of a computer, or even funny numbered stuff I don’t understand fully in networking.
I know it’s off topic, just looks like a bizarre portfolio combination. Why not the Minister for Defence and The Arts? Or possibly Agriculture and Foreign Affairs?
What's the rationale behind that combination (genuine question, I am puzzled).
According to wiki (may or may not be correct) the GSM protocol interprets your 999 or 911, or 112 etc and routes direct to local emergency service.
I recall reading (probably even more incorrect) that UK switchboards will route 911 to 999 simply because our yoof have been dragged up on so much US guff they think that is the correct emergency number.
It's odd with so many standards around that the world still has so many different emergency numbers - surely lives, literally, could be saved by making it the same everywhere?
Perhaps a way of looking at this would be to compare the number of people desperate to live in Iran, trying to sneak in hidden under trucks and whatever (and not for military purposes) compared to the number desperate to live in the US, trying to swim from Cuba, run across the desert from Mexico etc.
Paper does have its advantages. Some things will be the same 50 years ago as they are today, so the textbook remains pretty much the same. For example most physical constants won't change. The date of the battle of Hastings is unlikely to be moved to 1974.
Moreover, the dead tree text books won't suddenly not work any more because the e-reader has been updated and is no longer backwards compatible, or the DRM has knackered your ability to look at it because you've done something unusual. Oh, and at the end of your first year at Uni, can you sell your e-books to the next year to get some cash back to buy the second year books you need?
I also think it worthwhile investing in hearing-aid maker shares. All those kids with their iPods on on the tube, I can hear the "tune" (very loose description) as well as they can.
In a rather odd way I await the first litigation against Apple (and Sony, for the Walkman) for damage to hearing following prolonged use of headphones attached to a playback device. Or somesuch. One can only assume Microsoft would be safe, because nobody actually bought a zune. As far as I know.
Now, being old I need to pop over somewhere else to grumble about prices, lack of respect, and above all, can't they play a tune you can whistle?
Clever. I like it.
A couple of things that I'd like to think about - where do we store all that filthy, polluted, stinking water when we pump it back to the surface?
How efficient is it to do this? I know we do some already, and it has to be more efficient that just letting the excess power dissipate, but what's the return?
Even more disturbing - what if you've flooded a pitchblende mine? The radioactive horror of it all.
I think the bit missed here is called a "marginal cost". That's the EXTRA cost of producing one more Watt from any point. For nuclear, it is almost zero. In essence you insert a fuel rod a little more, and watch a gauge. Nuclear fuel is "used" whether it's generating electricity or not, the decay just happens. Physics is like that. In other words it costs roughly the same to have the thing sitting idle as it does to be generating on full whack.
Consider a coal plant. If it is not being used, it's very cheap. You have to pay for labour and whatever fuel is needed to keep it ticking over. Once it needs to be used every Watt it generates needs a shovel (or whatever) of coal thrown in. The cost of the extra Watt is Very High Indeed. If a “shovel of coal” costs £1, and you sell electricity for £1.20 per “shovel equivalent” (I’ll call it a Watt to make life simple) you make a marginal profit of 20p per Watt sold. It’s not that simple though, because you have to pay all those fixed costs. Imagine they are £1million per year. To cover the costs you have to sell £1million divided by £0.20 Watts = 5 million Watts. After that, every extra Watt makes you 20p.
Now back to Nuclear. The fixed costs are higher, so let’s say £2million. Each Watt costs 1p to generate (remember, the fuel is a fixed cost, and in that £2million). So each Watt we sell makes us £1.19. We have to sell £2M/£1.19 or about 1.7million Watts to reach break even. After that, each Watt we sell makes us £1.19. At 5million Watts, where coal breaks even, we have made 3.3million Watts times £1.19 or nearly £4,000,000. Those numbers are made up, but demonstrate the point of why it’s cheap. The tipping point will be at a very different point in reality, but there will be one.
Having high fixed costs is economically risky. If there was no demand then the nuclear plant would have a £2million loss, the coal plant £1million. So the secret is to keep nuclear plants as busy as you can, selling as much electricity as you can. Enter the Interconnectors. These are links between grids, such as between France and the UK. It is almost exclusively pulling (or pushing, I dunno) electricity FROM France TO the UK, not the other way. Why? Well, it’s cheap for France to generate extra Watts to help us out, so it makes lots of money doing it. Going the other way, we with out unpredictable wind and marginally expensive coal plants can’t compete with France, so we don’t tend to sell that way. Unless there is some disaster in France or elsewhere in mainland Europe, and they need all the power they can get. This, by the way, also helps out the French tax payer and the French nukes in keeping French prices down.
That's the nuclear model, that's why it's so cheap - IT'S THE MARGINAL COST OF PRODUCTION, that far, far outweighs the hidden costs you refer to, especially as all energy sources have subsidies, and the costs of nuclear waste storage are not as expensive as you would think, in the context of the sums one is considering for power generation for a whole country.
Pedant alert -
Cyanide knackers the electron transport chain in mitochondria. It stops repsiration, or at least the useful bit in the Krebbs cycle. Same effect ultimately, a very dead organism.
I think you are thinking of carbon monoxide that irreversably binds to haemoglobin, it also has a greater affinity for it than either oxygen or carbon dioxide.
Interesting isn't it! Crystals self-organise and essentially self replicate. Alive?
Likewise, prions (as another mentions) are they alive?
The DNA thing is also interesting, a phage (or a virus come to that) can't replicate its own DNA, it cannot synthesise the bases nor does it have the machinery (transcriptase enzymes and ribosomes) to translate it into proteins (DNA -> RNA -> Protien. Enzymes, little biological machines, are proteins).
If DNA = life, would the strand of DNA in a test tube be alive? A corpse is full of DNA, is it alive?
HIV has RNA, not DNA, would that be "lifeless" with a "living" phage?
If an alien race arrived with a different non-DNA replication based evolution would they be alive?
I don't know the answer to what constitutes life, especially "at the borders" like this but I do like the thinking around it. In a similar manner, thinking back many millions of years, at what point did "chemistry" become "life"?
“They're the most abundant form of life on Earth – they have astonishing properties – and we know bugger-all about them.”
That’s not quite right on a few counts. First of all, they are not “technically” alive. They do not respire or reproduce without another thing’s cellular machinery, leading to a debate over what constitutes “alive”.
Secondly, we know some stuff about them. Even in the 80’s when I was a mere undergraduate the entire genome of phage lambda (E Coli phage) had been mapped, and its entire process at the molecular level well understood. We knew how it bound to the target, how it put its DNA in it, and then how each gene was expressed in sequence and what it did to hijack the bacterium and pump out more phages. There’s more to that than it sounds, it had to get one of its genes transcribed to to make an enzyme which would transcribe the next gene. Some genes ran “backwards” across others, and we knew how those worked too.
A human comparison would be Hox genes in embryology.
Feel free to look it up on wiki. Oh, wait...
By way of a reply, I would guess because we’d not been looking, or we’d been looking at the wrong bees and for the wrong thing. Bees have a complex lifestyle, but once pupated and out of the cell they are “house bees” for the first section of their lives, not leaving the hive at all. Eventually they graduate to “guard bees” who hang around at the entrance, and then, having learnt where the hive entrance is, they go off and forage. They then forage for the rest of their short little lives, usually dying in the field.
It would seem this fly attacks foragers, while they out and about, not while in the hive. It’s difficult as an insect to get in to a hive (wasps try, and after a short spell will usually reappear as a corpse), if the colony is strong. A weak colony will soon be overrun with other colony’s bees, wasps, or any number of other nasties).
Usually when you open a hive, even to check for disease, you do so during the day when the foragers (i.e. the infected ones) would be off foraging. The majority of the bees you see are young house bees. You do this because there are less bees there, so it’s easier to see what’s going on, and you get stung less. It also tends to be warmer, so the bee brood (bee eggs, pupae, larvae) won’t chill too much.
If the infection causes disorientation, then infected bees can’t return to the hive, so they won’t be collected for any sampling. As a rule bees out and about are not caught for examination, you have no idea where they are from. I do think the light thing is a red herring though, I once took a hive on the back seat of my car, it tipped and burst open as I went round a corner. The bees, all 50,000 or so, were a bit upset and flooded out. It was night, and I absconded from the vehicle at high speed. The guy behind me stopped, and the bees all made for his headlights, so I could scoop them back into the hive fairly easily. So, I think they may do it anyway. They don’t usually fly at night, so bright lights probably just confuse them.
Standard disease checks don’t look for these things, the big ones are all “external” so you look at the brood, or for mites you can see on the bees (varroa) or elsewhere in the hive (hive beetles and wax moths). If you suspect an “internal” disease you ask for that to be looked for, or just grab some bees and open them up. BUT you look for the disease you think they have, such as nosema (spores in the gut) or acarine (pull off the head and look for black marks in the trachea).
HTH. Interesting work in any event.
Not doubting here, but I am curious why our electricity is 15% more expensive than Germany.
Does anybody know (fuel mix, taxes, private versus state owned, ignoring carbon related stuff...?).
The reason for asking would be - why can't we do whatever the Germans are doing to make it cheaper?
It's hard enough being competitive in a manufacturing industry here, crippling us with power costs, a pretty basic requirement of making things, doesn't exactly help.
An excellent book, "Scared to Death" by Christopher Booker and Richard North looks at the exact feedback mechanism described by Mr O, with some very lucid examples (BSE, Asbestos, Climate Change being but a few).
It's interesting to note the difference between CERN's handling of some odd results, and CRU and, well, any data at all.
As does "I was detained at HM Prison Slade". Even though, in theory, the interviewee has served their debt to society.
Mental illness has an unreasonable stigma attached to it. Many brilliant minds have suffered from one form or another (and who I to judge who or what is "normal" in any event?) It is difficult to ask "really, tell me about that..." for fear of being far too intrusive. My medical history is between my and my doctor.
The problem is, no matter how hard we try to suppress them, deep down we have many prejudices that bubble up and act on our subconsciousness. Which is, as a fellow above notes, why interviews are so shockingly bad at selecting the correct candidate.
I would disagree on the two page thing. TLDR would happen. How many jobs have you had to fill over two pages? Fifty? There's about 60 lines on two pages. I don't need an essay on every job. I get CVs from people who are nearing 60, with many past roles, they can CVs on to two pages quite effectively. They just compress some and tell me what I need to know.
You need to work out what is relevant to the job you are applying for, not doing a generic CV. Usually I care about the most recent things, so last two roles need the detail. If the job you are after is very similar to the third then write more there and trim others. If you are contracting - condense it a bit for older stuff. Say "contracting from X until Y" and some notes on the overall things you did (SQL, storage, whatever). Likewise, I don't really care about details of working as a paper delivery executive or other summer job. I care you got up and did it, not really what you were doing. One line. That's all you need.
In short - some can sit as one line, just employer, role, dates. I can ask if I want to know.
I have no interest in a list of your A levels or GCSEs. Tell me how many, and how many A grades. Even the ubiquitous 34 GCSEs 19 at Grade A, including English and Mathematics is fine. Don't do half a page list.
Note - this is just my preference, I tend to hire grads, and experienced non IT professionals
(apologies if double posted, had a few password related issues)
Don’t forget YOU are also interviewing the employer. We seem to be stuck in this cap-doffing “I am so grateful that you would wish to see me sir” mode that people forget the employer needs them. Sure, you may need the job more than they need you (as there are ten other you equivalents sitting outside) but you must be certain that what you are about to be employed doing, and with whom, is for you. There are also ten more jobs for you that might be better…
If you can, get a sensible friend to mock interview you. Ideally one who is a recruiter, not even in your field is fine. Get a friend (women, for want of a gross generalisation, tend to be more astute at this than men) to look at how you dress, how you sit, how you stand, how you appear in front of people you don’t know. If a suit is needed and you never normally wear one, then practice wearing it. You’ll look daft pulling at your collar because you have not worn a tie since school, and feeling comfortable is pretty important. Once your CV is on the “interview” pile you still have to make the first impression, and an ill-fitting suit, bad posture, weak voice etc. all add up to the first impression. It can be hard to shake. A good interviewer will make you more relaxed, but be prepared for bad interviewers.
Prepare answers for questions such as “what are you most proud of” and “tell me about the last time you disagreed with a superior”.
Practice a good handshake – not wet, but not knuckle breakingly firm. If you have sweaty palms, try and work out how to make them a little less damp (wipe on trousers/skirt, leave hand open not clenched etc). If you are a bloke and a woman is interviewing you – don’t stare at her chest. Look at her. Oh, practice looking at someone’s eyes too, not Hannibal Lector scary stare-out, but we have a distrust of people who never look at you.
You will be forgiven for nerves, but being a gibbering wreck is no good.
Oh, and turn your bloody phone off too. As an interviewer I want you in the room, not answering a call from a mate, or updating your twitter crap. Speaking of which, did the last article mention making your Facebook page either completely hidden, or aligned to your CV interests? We check out Facebook from the CV name. Lots of dumb stuff on Facebook, and the CV is in the bin. We will not look past that which is open for the public, so we don’t do fake friend requests, but I am sure others will. Sometimes we leave it for the interview and ask if we should employ someone who… and display drunken FB picture of them vomiting on a cat, or mooning the queen, or whatever. The answers to that question can be very revealing. “So, are you proud of that?”
“No”
“Why did you put it on the internet then?”
“er”
Mr Vaz MP understands how research works. His early day motion on homeopathy (29 June 2010 for those who are interested), for example, notes that “there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence that homeopathy is effective”. As Lionel Hutz might say “hearsay and anecdotes are kinds of evidence”. As such simply writing “there is increasing evidence of a link between perpetrators of violent crime and violent video games users” is just an extension of the same principle.
PS – don’t mention the Hindujas (sp?), Salman Rushdie, that poor woman at the Met, or…well, just go and read some Private Eye…
You would be surprised what you can do with an old building (and enough cash). This one zerocarbonhousebirmingham.org.uk was done by a friend of my wife's, and is quite incredible. It's a Victorian terrace, all gutted, reworked, and has no heating at all.
A tad extreme for a DIY thing, but just goes to show.
I understand, as a fellow commentator above alludes to, that the issue is one of branding. When you are buying your "beverage experience" the bottle's branding must match the drink. So bottles have particular shapes and swirls on them. That way you will not mistake brand A for brand B because the bottle would be the wrong shape. This is obvious on, say, gin bottles. Of course many people could just use an arcane skill called "reading the label" to see what the contents are. Due to all these bottles it is, apparently, not cost effective to sort out which one goes back to which producer, it's just easier to smash them up and melt them down.
The chap/chapess above has it right. Everything should go into a "one size fits all" affair. I would change the theory a bit, so you'd have brown bottles for beer (I think that helps stop light damage the contents), green for wine (including fortified), clear for spirits, and a different shaped clear for soft drinks. You use the bottles the Government says (hell, do it from Europe so the whole darn continent has to abide by it), or you do not sell your product here. Each bottle has a 50p or £1 deposit on, and is rinsed and reused, not smashed and melted.
Not only is it greener, but you'd get kids actively collecting bottles from the hedges rather than dumping them there. And rioters might think "oh darn, I say, that's £1 I am about to lose" before making a Molotov. Okay, the last one is a flight of fancy.
When I was a kid there was this really nice chap who used to deliver milk in bottles to all the houses. In return we would give him money and empty bottles which he would take back to the dairy. There they would be washed and rinsed and refilled with nice new milk. What's more he had an electric vehicle that was charged overnight on the cheap rate electricity.
And we call this nonsense ecological progress?
Difficult. Wikipedia (may or may not be correct)TM reckons 15bn Euros on ITER, which is the main fusion, er, thrust. That is from all of the contributing nations, in total.
I can't [be botheredto] find data at how much we hosed on windmills and solar power, but the Grauniad says "The savings from the subsidy cuts [to renewable energy] are likely to be small – they could be as little as £400m at the lower end, and no more than £1.3bn." which implies that it's Quite a Big Sum we give to them each year.
ITER is about the same as an Olympic Games, or about one third of the subsidy we gave to the banks. That would seem to be a bargian. For the same price as a couple of hundred people poncing about in lycra, or the chief execs of one failed bank, we could have cheap, pollution free power for all.
Good to know our Masters are sorted when it comes to priorities.
Stop reading now - needless trolling follows:
PS - Apple will still claim the patent on it as and when it happens.
The whole Europe thing annoys me when it does this. I can’t see from a technical perspective how this would be feasible with any reasonable level of funding, nor do I see how it would be superior to actual police work. Invoking the bogeyman of paedophilia is a really cheap trick.
Personally I think the MEPs should start with a bit of transparency over their doings, comings and goings. As I recall the accounts for the EU bodies have not been signed off, due to potential fraud, for many, many years. The last chap that tried to map MEP attendance versus travel claims for them (and spouses) was jailed for his trouble. Indeed, a look here - http://bit.ly/rdnnsx (sub required) - shows the high probability of mis-statement in Member State returns. Off on a rant, but a few years ago we did some work for the EU. When we added up the area Italy claimed subsidies for Olive Groves, it was more than the entire surface area of Italy. We found a guy claiming for 300 head of cattle. Fine, but he lived in a flat overlooking St Mark’s Square. That’s small beer, and not Thinking of the Children, but each Euro wasted is a Euro that could be used to relieve child poverty, improve policing, education, healthcare or a hundred and one things more appropriate for dealing with crime than recording the internet on Yottabytes of storage.
I’m off for a pint to calm down.
Obvious mass-debater gag deleted.
Was this the one where he said (to a roar of approval from the crowd) "I wish everyone in the country earned a hundred grand [or whatever] like me?"
Popularist, but stupid. If we made the minimum wage £100k, can you imagine the price of bread, eggs, tube fares, mars bars... either we'd offshore everything, so no employment, or devalue the currency so £100k was worth whatever minimum wage is now.
I suggest he take a day reduction in salary every time one of his crowd has a day strike. it's nice to call it when you are not affected, is it not?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
