Posts by MonkeyCee 1257 posts • joined 16 Apr 2013
HP Laserjet 3, 4 and 5 series are the best. Utter tanks. There was a LJ4 that had flipped it's page counter at least three times and still kept chugging along.
They were both the best HP products, because they were great, and worst, because they didn't die.
The modern clones are not as good (plastic instead of metal gears etc) but are still nice solid machines. Brother does some, I'm sure there are others.
The HP4 really should win some design award :D
In general, unless you have a very specific need, inkjets are a waste of money.
A mono laser is about 40 bucks new, and should be plug and play (may have to check with current PrinterSpoolerMadness).
Colour lasers are nice, if you want that sort of thing.
Inkjets are just money makers. Check out most stores: 100 inkjets, 2 laser printers. Guess which one they make their money on :D
Even if you need a proper inkjet, it's often cheaper to outsource your printing to a professional shop.
Just to note, it does look like it was an actual bitcoin farm, as compared to GPU or other ASIC farms. Since a lot of times BTC = crypto in the media, it's nice to have them be accurate for once.
There's a couple of pictures up, a close up of a couple of units that are labeled S9, and look like Antminer S9's. Larger shot of about 60 units.
S9 should bang out 2-3 quid a day, while eating 30 kWh. For comparison, that's my entire mining setup (~50 per day) for a single unit. My PV array does about 60kWh, before I get the hair shirt chest beaters.
What I'm curious about is how so much power (50-100 kW units) can be drawn without the power company noticing. Then again, they will insist blind that meters are correct, even when they clearly are bonkers.
One? Belgium could lose three governments and still function. For a certain value of function.
Things not working and working are the order of the day. Well, chaos of the day :)
It has seven governments, of equal standing. A marvel of witlof social engineering ;)
I grew up in the UK countryside. There were plenty of work guns around on farms, and you never messed with them. I'm not sure exactly how it was spelled out, but you got to use them in a controlled setting, you didn't just help yourself to them. Like power tools, or a vehicle. Shooting rats is quite fun for kids :D
Both of those places have pretty tame wildlife. You can leave your dogs outside.
There are plenty of places in the US where, as I understand it, the local wildlife is a little more testy. In general, I'm inclined to listen to the people who live on a farm on how best to deal with it. Be that on firearm safety or child labour :)
Is this a particular state in Oz?
s 10.4(2) of the Criminal Code 1994 (Cth):
A person carries out conduct in self-defence if, and only if, he or she believes the conduct is necessary:
to defend himself or herself or another person; or
to prevent or terminate the unlawful imprisonment of himself or herself or another person; or
to protect property from unlawful appropriation, destruction, damage or interference; or
to prevent criminal trespass to any land or premises; or
to remove from any land or premises a person who is committing criminal trespass.
@Hague - The point is that you're supposed to stay at home.
The provision to "do exercise" means you can leave your home for a walk/run/bike, for health and all that. It doesn't mean "go for a walk" a la the middle classes, where you drive to the Walking Place and go for a stroll.
Either you're getting essentials or going to work. Other than that, stay home, go outside in a private area if you have one, so the poor buggers who don't can use the nearby public areas.
I'm a climber. It's perfect climbing weather. I could get into my local gym for a sneaky climb. But I don't go and do it, because STAY THE FUCK AT HOME.
@AC - Bollocks, Corbyn's skill lies in his ability to hold his seat and the leadership of the labour party whilst being unelectable due to a combination of how he is portrayed, how he reacts to that, and who he actually is.
He would rather be in charge of labour and them never be in government than step back and let someone more palatable run.
I mean, I agree with him on many areas politically, but even I have so many doubts. Same deal with Hillary Clinton. The debate has been poisoned before it began, it sucks, but a decade of slowly dripping poison will kill a politician's mass appeal.
That Cummings exit is magnificent. Totally made my day. Had the Benny Hill music playing over it in my head.
"A client couldn't find one who could do the work in a reasonable timeframe"
Or wasn't prepared to cough up.
I currently work as a housekeeper for a big (20k staff) cleaning company . Hotels are all closing, so our usual 18 FTE team is currently 2. Which tomorrow includes me.
There are about thirty five people on the teams, and everyone has as much work as they can handle if they are prepared to clean hospitals, police stations and various other public areas. A number of these contracts have been classified as required for the emergency. So if the cleaning company has to fill these roles first.
So much like the bog rolls and rice, almost all the normal cleaners are already booked and paid for. Plus if you're doing it yourself, you can use products that are not safe for us to use daily.
"I regularly have to correct the grammar in both English and German for native speakers. "
General observation, speaking a language like a native, rather than fluently, means you speak it "wrong" in the right way. Hence why written language is trickier (and requires more formal grammar) than spoken, since you can't just miss out certain words and get the point across.
Same way there are several different versions of English (British, American, Indian) that are mutually intelligible, conversationally similar, but when written start to differ more, due to the "higher" level grammar rules, such as structuring arguments, different levels of formality etc.
So exactly what is and isn't correct grammar differs by context and culture.
Since I'm usually the native speaker on a projects, I tend to view it as clarification rather than correction. Especially when it's getting the tone of a piece right.
"Smartwatch owners love their calorie-counting gadgets, but they are verrry expensive"
I did sort of miss any mention of that in the actual article. Not sure why you'd use a watch, since taking a photo of everything you eat works quite well.
It's the same way a food diary helps by the fact you actually pay attention to what you shove down your gob :D
These days I'm moving enough that I can use the traditional one of how hungry I am. Plus all climbers eat like hobbits :D
"If this shirt delivers on its promise without any showstopper-sized downside, I'll be in the market."
They already exist, give a wee google. 30-45 euro a pop, labfresh and underarmour are pretty good.
Personally I go for thick cotton ones, wear them for half a day, hang dry and biff them in the freezer. If I'm outside and sweaty then merino, but they are not a cheap option. Plus if keeping warm is an issue, then smelling of sweat isn't.
Then again, these days I do housekeeping, where everyone is sweating by 1300, and bouldering, where everyone is sweaty.
For me the obvious red flag is "why are they selling me anything?"
If you have something that another person (Monster or Coke in this instance) will pay $23 for, why would you sell it for less? If you need funding to actually create the product, great. But then any buyout offer is bollocks.
As for money refunding, I've given that promise to people giving me seed/angel capital. But as a personal guarantee to make them right, rather than part of the investment. I've certainly sold shares at $10 each that were later bought out for $100+, along with ones that ended up being worth $0.0001. I couldn't promise either result at the time. Certainly never sold shares for $3 that I was expecting to get $23 for....
Plenty of investment schemes are just there to fleece people who are bad at math.
I'll go to the counter or the screen depending which queue is shorter. Main advantage of the screen is tha if you know what you want, you can get it through nice and quick.
Biggest issue for me is that people are SLOW on the screens. Like look through the menu twice kind of thing.
Admittedly BK can usually just ask "how many cheeseburgers today?" for 99% of my orders :)
"I wouldn't fancy being hit by that as a fleshy pedestrian."
It's a truck. Even getting tapped by a tractor that's not hauling anything isn't going to be good for a meatbag. If it's hauling something then it's going to be worse. The cab is designed to allow to driver to survive when if it hits something at 60mph with 100+tons. Do not step in front of it. Don't pull in front of it and brake.
Fortunately they are in the main driven by professional drivers, who take proper care and attention, who will lose their livelihood if they have a stupid accident. Thus they are, in general, less danger to pedestrians than your average car or van. Pedo guy obviously isn't a professional driver, so is probably more dangerous. Especially as using the tractor to go out to eat is.... weird.
"mental health isn't a subject for ridicule"
I actually read it as gallows humour. It's about the only way you can talk about it sometimes. Even just acknowledging that other people also genuinely think "Fuck it, I'm done" and then get on with it can help.
Stoicism is the exception, not the rule. Life sucks, and sometimes there doesn't seem like a way out. In the same way a drowning person just needs to breath but can't by themselves, a person in a depression needs to reach out for emotional support, but can't by themselves.
I've missed the signs, and I've had to bury too many friends who took their own lives.
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"Advertisements are a halfway house."
In most jurisdictions, advertising has rules. Yes, they can be misleading, but they can't be outright false.
As an example, Red Bull settled a false advertising claim as the product didn't give anyone wings, and the claims of improvements in concentration are not backed up by evidence.
Since Facebook/Google et al are the ones selling the ad space, then they are liable for not making outright false claims.
@Ian agreed.
While the issue is technically an IT failure, it's really a management failure. Probably starting with doing it on the cheap. Having done a spot of IT admin in K-13, you can solve it by either getting better servers, networking or technical staff.
Often the tech lead is a teacher that kind of took over stuff, with very mixed results. Stupid long log on times (~3 minutes assuming your teaching staff and students are all logging off and on in the same 10 minute window) is clearly an issue with profiles. Mapped drives should be very quick on dedicated hardware.
The staff logging issue is also solved by giving everyone their own device. Or the departments. Or both. Or having a local log in for the smartboard/projector desktop.
There are so many ways of solving it, that the lack of accountability is the issue.
Oh, and if it's a school in NZ, then your BOFH might even be one of the clowns who's IT estate I've had to dissect and rebuild.
"At which point they bring out an organisational chart and say "Precisely where on here does it say you have authority to give me instructions?" "
Typically the answer is "I have no authority to give you instructions. however, these are not my instructions, but the CEO/Board/Army/you boss's instructions, please take it up with them." if they start trying to boss me around, I point out that unless my box in the OC connects directly with theirs, they don't get to boss me around either.
I've said it to a judge, who pretty much doesn't have a boss. Not so much "you will obey" more "if you don't follow these steps, we can't assist you when your email fucks up". Also pointed out he was violating the letter of the law, but that he was the expert on these things.
Also said it a CEO, when he tried to skip the usual channels. Even got an apology for that one, written by his EA who was on leave that week, so he'd been allowed to handle his own correspondence :)
@diodesign <pedant> The logs show the driving software thought she was either a unknown, pedestrian or bike. When it thought it was a bike, it thought it was moving, in the left hand lane </pedant>
Perhaps the changing characteristic is what made it unpredictable, since it seemed to lose the history each time it changed the classification.
Jaywalking is an American thing anyway. Hopefully they'll have a "don't run down pedestrians" mode ofr the rest of the world :)
"However the shares can be used as collateral for loans, which provides a lot of scope to invest elsewhere."
As I understand it, that's pretty much how shares (and investments) generally work.
You buy it as cheap as possible. You never sell it. Ever. You rent it out, you borrow money against it, but never sell.
"At some point I may go back to the venerable Model M I have."
Like all tools, quality really lasts.
There are plenty of modern versions of the model M, pretty much anything built with Cherry keys is good. The knock offs aren't bad either, and you can usually replace WASD and any other high use keys with the genuine article.
Plus having a mechanical is the best way to get yourself a private space in the office,. since no-one wants to listen to you hammer away all day :D
"why do we need so many fking houses??"
Residential land is worth massively more than any other. A lot of what was a walking distance industrial site on the outskirts of town a century or two ago is now part of the town itself.
New industrial sites are built on farmland (lowest value land), and the workers commute there.
Even running an office, it's probably not going to be allowed in certain residential areas.
The cost of rent or mortgage drives the demand for housing.
@ JetSetJim - in the UK, if you are in a vehicle then the cops can require you to prove identity. Not just the driver.
The UK civil service wanted an ID card. It's a very unpopular concept. So in true Sir Humphrey manner, ID is not required, except for purchasing booze, cigarettes, driving, using public transport, opening a bank account, renting property, get a job etc etc.
So in practice the UK has ID cards, but not explicitly. In the same way the UK police are armed, but only voluntarily.
In Belgium you need an ID card to buy booze and fags from vending machines. Which is surprisingly convenient at times :D
@Sir Spoon - I think the point is missed. Once the story is out, that it's not true, but people want it to be, means it will be "true".
So a certain gammy ex British PM, red snappers and rock bands, hamsters and rock stars back passages and so forth are clearly unproven, but pass for accepted truths.
It's more about confirming a persons world view than convincing a skeptic.
40, amicably divorced, own my house outright, one kid.
I learnt how to configure, repair and support PCs because I played games on them. I got my network chops setting up LAN parties. I've gotten countless jobs and customers from gaming connections. I would not have an IT career without gaming connections.
My PFY cut her teeth making minecraft servers on a paper round budget. She put it on her CV. Builds the most reliable boxes. Better than me, but don't tell her I said that.
IT often feels like my hobby turned career. If Elite 2 hadn't required me editing autoexec.bat and config.sys then I'd have never been put in charge of the blinken lights.
"Works in places like Finland"
Or Germany. Or Scotland, for your first degree anyway.
It's almost like education (and property) in the UK is deliberately used to stratify and impoverish society, and that wasn't working well enough, so they kept upping tuition.
Personally I went for the Netherlands. 2k per year tuition, courses taught in English.
@ Det. Evil - Thanks, couldn't be bothered looking up the numbers, but suspected something like this.
Source claims it costs companies $0.10 per Gb.
Based on numbers above:
HP charge $250 for +128Gb = $1.95 per Gb
MS charge $400 for +256Gb and +8Gb RAM. Say $50 for the RAM* so $350 for +256Gb = $1.37 per Gb
Dell (on sale) charge $50 for +256Gb = $0.20 per Gb
Apple charge $200 for +128Gb or +256Gb on 13" and iPads and $400 for +256 on 15", giving $1.56 or $0.78 per Gb
So while only Dell is going competitive on it (given it's a sale price too) Apple Mac Pro and iPad Pro are the next cheapest per Gb upgrades.
* why they don't just chuck it in the base unit too and bump the price by $20-30 I don't know...
"Trendy shiny shiny hipster smartphone on one side
Slave Labour Pain Machine on the other..."
Unfortunately pretty much all technology, clothing and food (and their disposal) in the Western world has it's costs kept down by said SLPM.
There are more slaves now than at any time in history. Convicts are paid a few quid a day for real work.
"Makes you think that some of the EU countries haven't quite grasped what "EU freedom of movement" means."
Makes me think you don't understand freedom of movement, or how immigration is in fact still in control of the UK.
Freedom of movement means the same rules apply to locals as to other EU citizens. In many EU countries (France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium) you have to register with your local municipality. So you can get the exact same catch-22 for a local as well as an immigrant. The UK doesn't do this for the locals, so can't do it to the EU immigrants.
For the Netherlands it goes like this:
In order to have health insurance, you have register at an address
In order to get a job, you need health insurance
In order to rent a place, you need a job
So unless you can plonk down 7 months rent (and fuck yourself out of any rent review) plus deposit, buy a house, or have a place to permanently live (ie you have to be evicted if you don't choose to leave) you're kinda fucked. If you can get a job, the company will usually sort everything for you.
@Tom7 - I found that in London walking from A to B was often the quickest way.
You should be able to walk 3 miles an hour with a full pack over rough terrain for 8-10 hours. 5 miles an hour with a day pack on pavement for 2-4 hours is about right.
So @low res, try walking. It'll probably take about twice as long as your scooter ride (~30 minutes) but you're already walking 25 for your tube commute anyway.
Quite frankly the bloke deserved to get prosecuted.
You've got to ride to the conditions. That means dealing with pedestrians. Yes, they will do dumb things, and you've got to be able to stop in time.
I ride through a tourist trap a lot, and since there aren't a lot of cars people wander in the street. So I don't get to ride much above 15 kmph, so I can slam on both the brakes when they walk backwards to get a better shot.
The chap was riding at 20kmph, with only one brake and no bell. IIRC it wasn't the first person he hit either.
" Also possible that helmets don't help as much as you'd think, although I wear one to cycle."
According to the Dutch, helmets on bikes don't help much, hence why they aren't required. Lights do make a difference, and are required. And will get you stopped and fined.
Often see the mountain bikers riding home with their helmet on the handlebars.
"One theory is that they make your head a bigger target "
Yes, and that for low speed impacts or falling off smacking the helmet into something applies a shearing force to the neck. High speed accidents or high momentum (clipped by a truck etc) aren't helped by a helmet.
"An anecdotal favourable estimate of a helmet's utility is that it prevents half of possible fatal head injuries,... so cuts death risk by 25%. "
The Dutch disagree on that. Of the ~200 cyclists killed each year on the roads here, if they had all been wearing helmets, the toll would be adjusted by 0-5. So cuts death risk by 2.5%.
The majority of those fatalities (~65%) are people over 65. So avoid being old if you're going to come off your bike.
"Our science teacher had a lovely lilting Scottish accent, just the type you would expect from a very kind grandma"
I had a lovely Scottish grandmother who was my statistics teacher in high school. This is in New Zealand, in a school with a lot of pacific island students (Samoan, Tongan etc). It was my second day there, so I didn't know everyone's name.
Halfway through the stats class, one of the island boys was clowning around, and the teacher sighed, and said "Please sit down, fucker".
Took me until the end of the week to find out the chaps name was Phuka.
"The Single Market and the CU are not the same, although plenty of people think they are"
You are completely correct. Specifically members of the EFTA are in the SM not the CU.
They are all in Schengen*, had to draw that Venn diagram in an exam once. EFTA and EUCU are exclusive sets, Schengen and CTA (UK and Eire) are exclusive sets, Eurozone is a subset of the EU which is a subset of the EUCU.
However, I do feel that many Leave voters would feel the same about EU membership as EFTA membership. Notably following EU laws in many areas, EU courts ruling on laws, free movement of people, paying into the common fund, all while not having any MEPs or a seat on the Council of Ministers.
* I say that there are fiddly bits that aren't, but the bloke marking my exam was looking for a less pedantic view, and told me as much in class
" Where votes only count if they produce the results the Establishment wants"
That's cute. The notion that if the establishment wants something you get any sort of vote in it. You get coke or pepsi. Douche or turd sandwich.
Did the establishment want a change to first past the post voting? Fuck no, primaries and local party committees are far easier to control. So you got to choose between the 4th best and 6th best proportional representative systems, or keep the current unfair but understood system.
Did they want Brexit? Hell yeah. Otherwise it would have mentioned customs unions. Given that there was a lot of talk about free trade, and that is inherently the point of such a union, it would imply that both sides are in favour of one. Not so, apparently.
"To state that "Parliament does not negotiate with foreign governments" is wilfully misrepresenting normal relations with other countries as adversarial."
I'm sorry, but you've missed the point entirely.
Parliament literally does not negotiate with foreign governments. Foreign parliaments do not negotiate with foreign governments. Parliament is the legislative branch of the UK government (like congress in the USA). Congress does not directly negotiate with other countries, that's an executive function under POTUS, State or Defence depending on how kinetic the negotiation is.
In the UK the government is formed by the party with the support of the majority of Parliament. The government is the executive branch, and does things like negotiate with other governments, make treaties, fight wars. Usually declaring wars is part of the legislative branch, along with writing laws and raising taxes. Which are pretty much the definition of sovereign.
Much of the insanity of Brexit has been the lengths that the government has gone to keep Parliament away from the business end of things, and how willing certain MPs have been to let them have the rope in the hope that the mass hangings will lead to a socialist paradise in Islington.
TL&DR: Parliament doesn't negotiate with foreign governments in the same way you don't bury the survivors of a plane crash.
Given how technocratic Cummings et al have been about it all, they could just take back A50 on October 30th, then send it in again on the 31st.
Then they claim they're starting the "real" negotiations, starting the clock anew, without any annoying "pre existing deal" to work from.
If they keep brinking it, the market correction won't be as sudden. So 5-8% devaluation every six months rather than 35% at once.
They caused this crisis, they used it to get power, and they can make go away with a stroke of a pen. So I'm hoping they are "just" using this as a parliamentary coup rather than actually trying to leave the EU in the manner designed to fuck the UK the most.
I'm a remainer, I live in mainland Europe. Can totally understand why the UK could leave. It just seems that no deal is worse for the UK than any deal.
I would also quite like to hear what the UK parliament has to say about the Irish border. I've heard what Eire has to say, what the EU has to say and what the US Congress has to say (please respect the Good Friday Agreement) but exactly what is the sovereign power in the UK going to decide to do? Border in NI, border in Irish sea, agreement to open borders (and thus regulatory alignment).
In fact, rather than the government negotiating with the EU and then failing to pass Parliament, perhaps Parliament should first agree on a deal. seems to have worked for the EU. I mean, they somehow manged to get 27 sovereign countries to agree on May's agreement (not saying much, largely it's agreeing to existing treaties and current laws and promising to play nice in the future) but the UK can't agree on the Irish border, let alone the rights of it's residents. How hard is it to say "Yes, we'll keep the Irish border open. Because there are about three acts of Parliament specifically about that, nothing to do with you".
"1. Unlike all previous holders of the office, he appears to be using it to enrich himself"
I think the issue is that he's doing to enrich himself while in office.
Pretty sure most of the Presidents were subsequently enriched by their service to their country.
CIA intelligence briefings for life is worth quite a lot by itself.
"Chicken sexers can do it by eye. They are trained by another chicken sexer who simply tells them whether they are correct or not and, after a while, they "get" the pattern."
I do it by picking them up, and tossing them in the right bin. You can also do two at a time, one in each hand. To me the feathers feel different, and the chick "sits" in your hand differently. So I can tell, but no way to teach it to someone. I'm pretty accurate by eye, but not 100%. So I don't get to teach someone by poking them with a stick :D
The interesting thing with it is you can try and train a robot to do it, and you can get it very good at it, but for whatever reason getting it to 100% hasn't been achieved. IMHO it's a case of "moar sensors" but considering you can get pretty much any human up to 100%, using a meatbag convoluted neural network is still superior.
Icon for the processor coolant.
"Can you just throw drugs in somebody's shed and get them put away forever on ten different charges? "
<pedant> No, because you don't get put away for a long time on charges, only on convictions </pedant>
Yes, in the sense that possession of certain substances over a certain weight can get you arrested and charged.
Yes, it can be used to fuck up someones life. Why beat a dude up, when you can plant an ounce and get the cops and the system to do it for you? Why kill someone, when 200g of coke/smack hidden in someones house and a tip off or favour from the cops doesn't get your hands even a little bloody.
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