Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
I'm sure there will be a toilet roll provider who has decided to "gamify" arse wiping with an app that encourages you to record your arse wipes (maybe even a camera option to allow you to get your wipes rated)
"smart paper" to do a medical analysis whileUwipe?
I have a couple of 12v UPSs on my router and ONT on that same basis. Just beware of the ones from Eaton, the Li-Ion batteries in them have no over/under charge protection and all died after a year or two. I only noticed a month after the warranty expired, of course. I replaced the batteries with ones that have built-in protection, so far so good but I test them frequently.
For POTS phones, yes. Fibre, not so much. Local cabinets will have between zero and 4 hours backup, usually 1-2 hours. If your fibre makes it all the way back to a main exchange without any intermediate equipment you might be luckier... Most recent power outages have seen all infrastructure except POTS fail within a couple of hours.
Procurves have a lifetime warranty, and I was surprised how well that was handled. I found a few, many years old, lying in a dusty cupboard & reused them in a rack of lab systems where performance wasn't really an issue. After a while two of them indeed failed to restart after a power outage. Not expecting much I filled in the warranty form - and was pleasantly surprised to receive two new (well, refurbished) switches pretty much by return mail, with RMA labels for the two failed ones.
It was only ever going to cut about 15-20mins off a journey
That wasn't the main reason. By moving express trains onto dedicated tracks it becomes possible to run more stopping trains on the standard tracks. Otherwise they get in each others' way.
Next time you're on an overcrowded once-every-two-hours local train stumbling slowly along, think about how much better it could have been if the express trains weren't trying to share the same routes.
HS2 was badly managed, and costs should never have been allowed to escalate as they did, but it was, and is, a good idea.
there is lots of increased illness and death rates since their rollout
Not half as much as there would have been without them.
if they work why would you need to?
The fundamental principle that vaccines use is that reducing the severity of an illness and duration of contagion in a community will stop the spread of the disease (the famous "R" number << 1). It isn't an individual fix, it's a community protection, and only works if a sizeable majority of a community is vaccinated.
If you don't want to be vaccinated (be it COVID, measles, mumps, smallpox, or anything else), that's your choice, but please then stay indoors and don't put the rest of us at risk.
When the VAX-11/780 was first released, it came with a nice collection of languages (6 of them IIRC), all interoperable (i.e. you could write a module in VAX COBOL and another in VAX C, and another in VAX FORTRAN, and they would all link together, and allow you to call routines from one into any of the others seamlessly (and transparently).
Not quite. The VAX Procedure Calling Standard defined the basic interface but some languages pass arguments by value by default, others pass by reference, so you would sometimes need to know what format to use. That might mean dereferencing a C pointer to call a Fortran routine by value, or using %REF in Fortran to pass an address to Pascal. I don't remember any languages being bundled with the system, they were extra-cost products. The early systems I used only had Fortran77, we had no need for COBOL or C, and so didn't buy them.
However, an assembler was pointedly not included, because DEC didn't think it was necessary.
The VAX was introduced in 1977, I've been using them since early 1980 (VMS 2.0), and I don't ever remember seeing one that didn't have the assembler bundled with the OS. VMS 1.0 still shipped many PDP (RSX-11) utilities that ran in compatibility mode, but VMS 2.0 added many more native ones, many written in Macro-32, and they needed an assembler to build them.
Macro-32 bore really very little resemblance to Macro-11, (except perhaps for the name).
The instruction set was obviously different, but the syntax and lexical directives were for the most part copied from the PDP's Macro-11, with additional ones added for the extra VAX addressing modes. It made it fairly easy to swap between the two systems.
VAX/VMS assembler (there was, grudgingly, such a thing),
Nothing grudging about it. Macro-32 was an extension to the PDP11 Macro-11, and was provided with all VMS systems. Nice assembler, too, I wrote quite a bit of system code in it.
I don't recall there being if and for opcodes, though, are you sure you're not confusing it with Bliss, the "structured assembler" that was used to write much of VMS itself?
In C I once wrote a system that had structures preceded by headers with a 32bit unique ID and a 32bit length
A bit like VMS argument descriptors, from the 1970s? Available to C and every other language which used the VMS calling standard?
If the API is that bad and needs revising, create API version 2 and add in addition to the first version.
This. APIs should be versioned, especially in these days of dynamic libraries. Changing an existing API can dump you straight into dependency hell, the bane of any Linux developers life, where one component needs APIv1 and another needs APIv2, and you can't install both module versions at the same time.
An engineer almost certainly designed the product to be better than what was eventually offered for sale
Look at the PCB in cheap Chinese wall-wart supplies. You'll almost certainly find the holes & silkscreen markings for the interference-suppression components, but no such components fitted. After all, they don't affect normal operation and are 'only' required for the certification process, leaving them out for production saves a significant number of pennies (or fen I suppose) on each unit. Never mind that they can screw up radio for all the neighbours...
Cue all the ones 5 quid over the threshold or not having applied for benefits ever getting told "sorry mate, the computer says no for winter fuel allowance",
A bit like the NHS surgeons who won't do extra shifts because of the pension tax rules. A few hundred quid for another shift can land them with an extra £5k tax bill.
And many of those rules have been written to close loopholes.
That's the problem. Some bright spark of a chancellor invents a complex new tax rule, and the tax accountants soon find loopholes. Instead of fixing or simplifying the rule, the chancellor just adds new rules to close the loophole. Rinse & repeat, we get warts on warts on warts.
In the days before mobile phones I worked with a team that used a pager to summon the on-call techie. There was only an informal rota, and it became standard practice for them to check coat pockets before going home on Friday in case the pager had "fallen" into the pocket.
More people than ever before have learnt how to take part in video calls and other collab-at-a-distance tools since 2019. So the need has, logically, lessened.
Not necessarily. Maybe those new collab tools have just replaced pure phone meetings? They certainly did for my work, but didn't have much effect on our business travel.
three should have been the bare minimum
Adding additional seals would have either put them closer together, or increased the length of the joint. Both options would have changed the joint's characteristics and could have introduced new and different weaknesses or failure modes. There's no guarantee that the results would have been better.
I've come to believe that at a fundamental level a lot of the senior civil service or local government staff simply don't understand the field of computing.
Too many of the "senior" ones still come from a time where computing meant "data processing", so for them it is exactly the same as cleaning or maintenance. They probably still send their correspondance to a "typing pool" to have it written up. The junior ones are used to just grabbing an app from an online store. Neither of them have a clue of how it all actually works.
Good negotiation is about trying to fit two sides positions together in the most advantageous and least destructive ways possible. Unless you're Trump, in which case it's more about looking "strong" and shouting a lot, often achieving very little. But saying you're "a winner". I'd say there was quite a lot of that from the EU back in day too - and I still don't think there's been a huge amount of change.
Sadly very true. If the EU had been willing to just accept that the UK wanted to leave, even if they disagreed, and work to find the best deal for both the UK and the EU, we'd all be in a better place. Their determination to make sure that the UK regretted its decision to go blinkered them to the possibilities of a win-win, they had to portray the UK as the loser. Politicians are not diplomats.
The epithets are only used when one or more parties show such idiocy / lack of critical thinking that they are oblivious to an obvious pack of lies.
True, but I'm sure you could understand the non-EU point of view if you put your mind to it. Actually, no. I'm not so sure.
If you voted for Brexit (or Trump, Reform, FN etc) then own it.
I was ineligible to vote in the Brexit referendum, because I was living in another EU country at the time. How does that fit with your worldview?
But the “boo hoo hoo, they called be nasty names” is snowflakery pure and simple. There there, mummy’s precious little unicorn.
Nice bit of whataboutery, but it won't wash. You can call me any names you like, it reflects more on your sensitivities than mine.
I was very much a supporter of the EEC and it's predecessors like the Common Market & the Coal and Steel Community. They were extremely valuable in helping European countries put aside the post-war tensions and build a successful trading economy. They weren't perfect, nothing like that is, but they really helped build a strong and peaceful Europe.
The conversion of that into the political and fiscal union of the EU in 1993 was an unmitigated disaster for Europe, for multiple reasons.
The many EU countries have very different views on fiscal and social principles; some like the free market and others prefer protectionism; some prioritize individual freedoms, others go more for paternalism and solidarity. As a result much EU legislation isn't based on what everyone agrees on, but on whatever offends them sufficiently little not to reject it. It's why so much EU legislation has tens of thousands of words, to give sufficient ambiguity that it can be sold to all the varied voters.
That only leads one way, to the lowest-common denominator, and the result is the stagnation and mediocrity that has characterised the EU for the past 30 years. It's been left far behind by fast-growing countries like China and the USA, even non-Euro EU members have done better than those in the Eurozone. If the convergence criteria for the euro had actually been taken seriously things might be better, for the few countries that could have met them, but the way the rules were fudged to make it possible for so many countries to be absorbed led directly to the Italian and Greek crises from which the euro still hasn't fully recovered.
At the time of the Maastricht agreement few countries were permitted referendums. One that was, France, has always been a strong europhile, yet even it only voted "yes" by 50.6%. Briitish opinion polls showed people 65% opposed, but we had no referendum.
One of the most serious consequences of that was a very large portion of the population of EU countries feeling ignored, and without any voice. All the mainstream parties push the "more Europe will fix everything" line, so who can those unhappy voters turn to? Unfortunately the answer to that is that many turned go the extreme left and right, whose only common position was a dislike of the EU. We see the rise of the LFI and RN in France, AfD in Germany, Freedom Party in Austria, Vlaams Belang in the Netherlands, 5-Star and Fratelli d'Italia, etc. That's a very, very dangerous situation. If the EU doesn't start to take this seriously it will look very different in 5 years, and not for the better.
Cough. Yes, there is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_citizenship
That's not any form of true internationally-recognised citizenship, it's just EU window dressing, means nothing outside the EU. You can't get an "EU passport", nor pay "EU taxes", and if you travel to another country they'll treat you as a national of your specific country. It's a bit like Manchester United declaring all it's supporters as "ManU Citizens", sounds fun but doesn't mean anything outside the club.
turned out to be as thick as mince and voted for Brexit
It's possible to have a sensible discussion about the EU, but not with someone who either willfully refuses to accept that reasonable people may have good reasons for voting as they did, or arrogantly assumes "they don't think like me, so they're stupid".
one whose citizenship has been stolen
Citizenship is country-based, there's no such thing as "EU citizenship", if that's what you mean. If you prefer to become a citizen of an EU-member country there's nothing stopping you, of course. I know many British citizens who made that choice.
And before you start with the obvious comeback, I didn't vote for Brexit. I didn't have a vote in that referendum.
