Re: And, Crilly...
Define "e-mail"?
Oops, wrong Clinton.
1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013
"...shall we continue this tomfoolery or is it sufficiently apparent already how ridiculous nitpicking what "from scratch" means is?"
Yes, by all means, go on.There are lots of unanswered questions. Where did your gramps get a graphite pencil from? Mine used to tell stories about the excitement of seeing one.
Ridicule should't be an issue here. Surely we're long past that.
"building a computer from scratch is actually fairly easy, basically a nice weekend afternoon project."
That's an interesting definition of 'from scratch'. In times of yore, it meant starting with a pen and paper, followed by bag'o'chips and a soldering iron.
My own first attempt took about two years. Once I got it debugged and working (can't really expect 50+ chips to have no duds among them), I kind of lost interest in actually using the thing. So there. There's always the next one to tinker with.
"Without these, we would be back in the mid-to-late-90s world"
Uh-huh. Would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Rhetorical dig of course.
HTML was quite sufficient for pure information delivery. Which in turn was/is sufficient for a numerable group of people. Those who fancy Web 2.0 interactive malarkery were a bit neglected back then. Not anymore.
"of having to press the big old HTML SUBMIT button in order to have anything on any web page change and full-page reloads for any change to the page content"
Good for a frequently changing page. But why use a metric fuckton of scripts in the otherwise static page? Often messing with the page loading, thus preventing people from getting to the information therein.
Let's sum it up tidily: healthy use of whateverscript is tolerable, abuse is not. And it's usually the abuse that causes bad blood and angry comments.
"does anyone on this site actually follow the register on facepalm/twatter/tumbleweed-plus/rss?"
Tumbleweed does ring a bell. One chap tried to follow it on a bike, but could not peddle fast enough. Oh, tumbleweed-plus was something else? Really ought to get my coat then.
"If the Reg is any indication of speed, then I can only shake my head in dismay & disbelief"
El Reg isn't that bad. And still allows to read stuff without JS & plugins enabled in the browser.
Now various support sites... Hit the page, grab some coffee. Look at the little cogwheels spinning. Have a sip. Still loading. One more sip. OK, here's the page. About f-ing time. There's a shedload of pages to go through, and only so much coffee one could ingest during the day.
What did those scripts really do? Oh. So two people have shared the page in Facebook and one in Twatter. Zero for Reddit, Tumbler, ButtPlugg, Wankr and other 37 social connectors. Gee, it seems that this RAID driver page isn't as popular as one may have thought.
No, I do not want to participate in the satisfaction survey. You really wouldn't like the answers.
"If anyone is still operating a Chernobyl style reactor they are completely insane"
Quite so. Sosnovyi Bor is definitely still active. Smolensk and Kursk too. Ignalina is closed, Chernobyl buried. A dozen of active blocks then?
However, latest incarnation of RBMK (in Kursk) has negative void coefficient.
insp.pnnl.gov/-profiles-reactors-rbmk.htm
"Bollocks. All diesel sold in this country must meet an official EU standard."
Yes, it must, and usually does. Except for some rare mishaps - counterfeit diesel from a shady supplier, contamination in the station tank, local prats having a bit of fun with pumps.
Point is, car diesels are easy to kill with a lousy fuel. Tractors and other rugged diesels can take more abuse.
But hey, if bad fuel is forbidden, then it's all good, not a single thing to worry about. Only a theoretical discussion then.
"Also, I have no idea if it economically to remove the nitrogen compounds from diesel."
Assuming you were talking about sulphur, not nitrogen - yes, there are ways to do that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrodesulfurization
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claus_process
But I remember reading somewhere about a desulfurization plant in Sweden blowing to smithereens. Lots of nasty stuff flying about.
"This raises an interesting point. If European diesel normally has a low nitrogen content than US diesel"
Are you sure you didn't mean sulphur? In this case your post would make a lot more sense. Historically, oil from the North Sea has had a very low sulphur content, but oil from places around US has few orders of magnitude more.
"EVERYTHING is specified, designed, signed off by lots of senior managements"
Yes, but do they always understand what they're signing off?
Mind you, I'm not arguing with the general thrust of your argument. Lone shark defence is rarely plausible. In this case even less so. VW management has taken credit, not to mention bonuses, for increased profits. It's not unfair to ask them to take responsibility for any dubious methods used in the way to profit. Found a cheap way to meet emissions target, have you? Have you?
Could be one, could be many. Pennypinching and management pressure are powerful factors. There's no easy way to know who has cut corners too much. Or stumbled way too deep into the software-defined-reality.
Yes, higher budget helps to achieve goals in a decent manner, but still, high pricetag doesn't necessarily mean quality.
"someone who doesn't want office is probably the best candidate"
With a caveat: someone capable, yet immune to the lure of power. That's a truly rare breed. And there is no way of knowing it beforehand. Their virtue shall be known only when they've stepped down by their own will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus
"You assume the car and/or its engineers can't figure these out at some point."
And you seem to be assuming that all potential problems are detectable and avoidable by technical means. Which isn't necessarily true.
To pick one example: a logo with four rings. It's an internationally recognised warning sign for elevated traffic hazard. Albeit unofficial. There's a strong likelyhood that an object with four rings will undertake reckless maneuvres with no advance warning whatsoever, so it is wise to have extra safety margins around such objects. But in automated systems, there is no chance to see this bit of 'knowledge' accounted for.
"The good news is that driverless car does stop."
Unless it starts to execute high-G maneuvres at speed, as frequently envisioned by forum-dwellers. What could possibly go wrong? Robocars are so bloody good at everything they do, unlike those pesky meatsacks.
What was the last grand vision few weeks back? Aye, seem to remember. Robocars should gather situational awareness from each other, and collectively plan an evasion route. Through the oncoming traffic if needed. Or up the chimney.
/troll.jpg/
"Lumia 1020 still beats the latest Iphone or Samsung hands down and it's 2 years old!"
And you're not the slightest bit worried about that? Samsung et al have done several high-end phones since that. Where's new Pureview?
Little birds are singing that MS has had a brain drain, and there's nobody left to design that kind of camera. Sad, if it happens to be true, but not very surprising.
"disabling login will leave history and messages intact"
True. But the mod explicitly said "and does not have an account now" - well, that's not the case here, account is still defined, posts are readable, haven't gone anonymous.
Maybe we'll hear something better next week.
I believe I've stumbled upon some deleted accounts. In such cases, link to user's posts will not work (can't remember if it's 404 or some other message), but posts under articles are still there, albeit now anonymous. AFAIK only Eadon got all his posts deleted.
Shadow Systems seems to be quite intact. Can't determine whether his login is blocked or not, until he makes another post.
What did Tim do now? Ruined somebody's scientific consensus?
While I do not necessarily agree with all his arguments (and a good thing it is too, something about freedom of opinion or somesuch), I'll never support calls to silence him. Or calls to silence you, should these ever rise.
Please, everybody, keep writing. We may not know where a word of wisdom may land, we may not know what kind of fruit might it bear someday, if ever, but that shouldn't keep us from trying to say wise things once in a while.
Sorry, memory bypass. Or perhaps a severe case of repressed memories. Floppy interface is far from easy to reproduce, it's an unholy mix of analogue and digital.
Should have remembered a student project to do a WD179x clone for a CP/M micro. Resulting board wasn't much smaller than a 5.25" drive itself, required lots of calibration, and could read double-density floppies on a really good day. HD 1.2MB / 1.44MB formats are yet another layer of complexity. Eh, gory days.
IDE, on the other hand, is mostly a software operation, it requires only 3 TTL chips to implement.
True, MFM interface is not terribly complex. But why bother, when most PC motherboards up to Pentium 4 era have FDD and IDE interfaces on them. Unless there's some fun to be had in building such a thing.
I'm keeping a venerable PIII server around for such necessities- it has an ISA card slot, assortment of PCI slots, COM & LPT ports, floppy drives, IDE, Ultra160 SCSI. Oh, and 12x Plextor SCSI CD-writer is frequently able to read a faded CD that's quite unreadable in newer drives.
For 3,5" floppies, very useful thing to have in a toolbox is a TEAC FD-05PUB USB floppy drive. True classic, most widely supported by BIOSes and operating systems.
Well, those old floppies and CDs are not becoming any younger. I'd suggest that it's about time to salvage all useful files from old media.
Other half is rather serious. Gold is much less susceptible to electrochemical changes. This becomes quite important in high-frequency and high-power applicatons. For audio, silver may suffice.
www.academia.edu/3730278/Degradation_of_power_contacts_in_industrial_atmosphere_silver_corrosion_and_whiskers
"Since the helium is needed for pressurizing the RP-1 tank as well, it seems it still needs at least 1 route out of the LOX tank, so I think the "reduction in penetrations" point doesn't seem valid."
Why? RP-1 tank could have its own helium tanks inside. That'd avoid a lot of troublesome plumbing.
There is no known way to disable WPBT. Except for avoiding W8, W10, and post-2011 UEFI versions. Which is not always easy.
seclists.org/bugtraq/2015/Aug/55
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=234840
As for Lenovo's ill-conceived LSE (basically an extension on top of WPBT),there are UEFI updates available to disable it.
support.lenovo.com/gb/en/product_security/lse_bios_notebook
Note: no Thinkpads on the list. Only consumer-oriented shinies. Newer Thinkpads may also stink, but for entirely different reasons.
There's also this marvelous exchange:
A: "Well, Peter - can I call you Pete? - the principle of the connected society is that all parties to the transaction have a clear understanding of their role in it and its progress towards an ultimately successful completion at which point a committed transaction can trigger an API-driven response resulting in a zero-touch high-efficiency payment execution in the cloud ..."
Q: "You can't call me Pete, because I'm David. We still haven't settled the question of legality, though."
A: "Oh, look, I'm sorry Pete, I have to be on stage in three minutes, but I'll be happy to field your question offline. I'll get my girl to reach out to our lawyers and get you in touch."
m.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/29/enough_with_like_an_uber_for_x_already/