I've said it before but
Rocket Science Easy
Rocket Engineering now that's Hard;...... Congratulations and a safe return
930 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2013
Done it a couple of times for short periods and it can work. If you match the pairing the properly.
I am not a keyboard wizard my typing speed and accuracy are slow compared to most others even with automatic syntax checkers. But what I think I am good at is mid-sized algorithms. I don't mean the Ins and Outs of tournamanent sort vs bubble sort or the big stuff of client server architecture, but ways to arrange classes into methods and properties that allow for generic design and re-use of code.
That's not me being arrogant, but because I don't write code fast, I tend to think of ways that mean I can write less code.
When I've paired with others who are keyboard wizards the net result has been worthwhile. They tend to write lots of lines of code quickly to acheive a result. It also means we can try ideas and accept or reject then very quickly.
I have been continually amazed at their production rate whilst on occasion I've had them say "How did you think of that?"
LIke all things doesn't suit everyone all the time but it can definitely have a place.
In the beginning was a '0' and the great computer scientist in the sky said "No use let's add a '1' then we can really get going" and it's been a bit down hill ever since then.
IT kit has followed an almost Darwinian path, but instead of it being the fittest wins, it has been the cheapest useful combination of processor\memory\display\comms wins, . with each new technological\enginnering advance enabling a new <ahem> paradigm to take over.
Which is fantastic for the marketeers and Businees Bullshit shovellers.
So we've gone from big iron tended by priests fed by punched cards to terminals to minis to desktop machines to tablets and phones with high bandwidth comms enabling t'internet and bit barns. What happens next? Dunno; if I did i would be sending this from my yacht parked off my own desert island.
But I'll bet it will be a combination of cheap capable hardware with a rearrangement of the current paradigm, The big fear for me of Bit Barns is not so much that the company will go pop but that the infrastructure will be hacked and trashed burning the Barn down.
Buy from X and sell to Y in the nanoseconds before Y realises what you paid for it and you get your 1/1000% profit. Which means in order to make it worthwhile getting out of bed for, you have to sell gazillions to make a few measly million..
I'm all for people buying and selling stuff to each other but if there was ever a case for the Tobin Tax High frequency trading is it. Can I suggest as a possible twist the rate of tax is inversely proportional to the length of time you hold the assets. so the longer you hold'em the less tax you pay.
Until I can change the phrase I won't use one, at least on my phone I can use a button to put the phone into alert mode before I speak my question. So how about a remote button say on a watch, now that would make a smart watch useful.
(BTW anyone remember 'BOX' in StarCops back in the late 80's)
Hoarding of user data bad. Temporary use of data to build a profile for advertisers who are paying for my free websearches, apps etc?? , if I felt that bad about it, other search engines are availiable.
But in all honesty how many of us have actually bought some stuff as the result of a 'targeted' ad.
Must Have Min spec
Swappable battery
SD Card
Decent camera that is fast rather than a giga-pixel pretend SLR
Headphone socket
Bluetoof, Wifey, GPeas of course and NFC for Android pay
LED Flash cos I use the torch function a lot
Nice to have
FM Radio
Water Dust resistant
Infra-Red Blaster for remote controls
OTT
Big HD screen pretending to be a telly
Stereo speakers pretending to be a Hi-Fi
Yeah well; if and when it starts to get a tad expensive and we in the UK are banned from watching pro-celebrity Morris Dancing videos; we can always hold a referundum and "Take Back Control".
(Well it worked as a slogan last time... )
Then to align phone numbers and IP numbers we can renumber everything starting with 44.0.0.0
The sadly lost David Mckays "Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air" should be required reading for anyone interested in energy. All his observations are beautifully argued with quantitative figures. with nuclear being a big part of his solution (it's still downloadable btw,).
As far as the UK becoming a world leader goes, Buying in Uranium based PWRs is just dumb, the weapons proliferation, waste and extreme operating environment they use are just too expensive to manage. Thorium cycle machines seem to solve most of those problems and if we were to go into partnership with China and India that would be a world beater
If that is too ambitious I reckon that the technology and manufacture of renewables generation is pretty much worked out, but storage systems at the local level are still up for grabs. In the same way as every small town had it's own gas-works in the 19thC maybe a local storage\smoothing works for electricity could be a growth industry for the 21stC
There's even room for a bit of synergy, if we had molten salt thorium reactors and molten salt storage a lot of shared technology.
Well this thread has improved my education, I have seen this syncing done in a minor way as a portable (twenty foot container size) Genny was spun up for the grid engineers to do some work on a small industrial estate.
It always explain why in the USA there are huge AC-DC-AC inverters to cross link regional grids across the country. breaking the grid size down a little and "insulating" one form another.
Just to prove I know nothing about heavy duty electrical generation..
Raher than the grid syncing to the first spinning generator back up, would it be possible to have a defined time to sync to as defined by a GPS signal or the like.
Along the lines of "At the third stroke it will be 11:57:00.00000 and top dead centre precisely"
Our print quantities are small and primarily text, the previous inkjets were for ever drying up and any sizeable colour print had to be hung out to dry and then ironed flat (well almost.)
Consequently we've got two HPs, a 15 year old monochrome laserjet for draft use and a new multi function color laserjet for posh stuff. But Oh dear, the HP bloatware that comes to 'manage' your images etc is a complete nightmare.
Inkjets are great for photos but if I need any doing I'm going to a high street or online print service
AFAIK those of with our own personal nuclear powered electricity generators, i,e, solar panels; will be left behind as well, The current range of smart meters can't handle the export of power generation.
Which is double dumb as they would allow the grid generators to get a measure of how much solar power is being produced so helping to manage the grid. Also solar PV owners tend to be energy savvy anyway and would be the most likely users to be early adopters of gadgets like smart fridges.
Well considering that a chain aka line printer could keep up with the output log I'm guessing it didn't generate a huge i.e, 1Mb or more of data which I expect would be the limit of the cheese platter style disk drive unit I guess the system was using.
BTW line printers were really awesome for doing charatcer based artwork on.. If you could handle the noise.
Add a third party gadget to your wheelchair ?? Err Some of my wheelchair using chums have more than one chair, indoors, outdoors urban use and the occassional rufty tufty off road job. (Which; if youre listening Fiona; I would love to have a play with btw)
But that's the crApple attitude again, as they have thought of and 'designed' the absolute best experience (til' next year) anything or anybody outside the reality distortion field is a heretic and doesn't really matter.
Strong typing at the poit of use is vital, Loose typing when passing things around is sometimes very useful for making generic code. Particularly with classes. So a function could generate a data handling object of say type objCustomer or objSale or objProduct which inherit from a general type clsTable.
This enables you to pass objTables around the system at will using the generic clsTable:methods but the precise 'table' used by that object only becomes important and visible at the point of use.
Might not suit the computer scientists amongst us but it works for me...
My social media is pretty boring mainly photos of Dogs and Motorbikes; what I'm really worried about is the subversive literature I've got on my book shelf. It's a book by an author despised in some areas of the US proposing an alternative theory which contradicts and denies their world views.
Yes its that great page turner "On the Origin of Species" by Mr C. Darwin
BTW I don't suppose it would make any difference but I do have a biology degree.
"It just goes to show that where patents are concerned there's an infinite amount of piss to be taken."
Which I believe is the traditional use of a gusset; to provide wiggle room around piss-holes and arseholes in undergarments; quite appropriate really.
(BTW Looking forward to Bag7 without handles)
I was late into Evernote (and I'm still not convinced it or anything else do exactly what I want), but at least I could use it across multiple devices. Ooops no down to two devices, Ooops now on G-Cloud. how long before Google buy it outright I wonder.
What is my silver bullet app? Some sort of mashup between free-mind/plane, one/ever-note and a self linking auto-wiki. Enter the data once and view it in any of those fomats.
Yes I'll give you that one on the Apple ][, but I would argue that was down to St.Woz rather than St. Jobs. Whether you think Steve Jobs was a perfectionist or a control freak out to make a fortune, the products which have followed offer very little that is different or first to market.
Err since when did Apple 'do' innovation...Here a few Apple innovations and what had gone before.
The original MAC All in one Computer :vs Commodore PET
Apple Lisa and LaserWriter vs GUI Xerox Star System
Newton PDA any number of devices
IPod Other MP3s were already available Archos, Rio
iPhone , Sony Ericsson p800,p900 etc
AirPods , well who would have been dumb enough to build those.
What Apple do 'do' is industrial design and closed proprietary systems. Oh and huge mark-up Now if HP wants to follow that Lenovo will win.
Too right;; As we discovered when we paid off our mortgage and I asked the bank for the deeds
Me: "When do we get the Deeds"
Bank: "You don't; They've been dematerialised" (their exact term)
Me: "What like in Star Trek"
Bank: "No they've all been digitised and sent to the Land Registry"
Me: "So there is no paper document showing the plot or my ownership"
Bank : "No"
I'm all for digital records, ease of search, conveyancing etc. but it would have been nice to have been told this was happening and have the option to have the original, even if legally useless, paper returned to us. Needless to say I can order a reprint from the LR for a fairly hefty fee £80 or so for a document which I believe was my property anyway..
Air Pods? A pair of physically disconencted earphones small enough to drop down the sofa or be snaffled by the Dog, once you drifted off to sleep,for £129 . My whole phone cost less than that and I got a pair of earphones with microphone included.
BTW I'll bet you can't buy them individually if you loose one.
The Irish Gov't may well consider a simple calcuation. The population of the Republic of Ireland is about 4.6million. Apples supposed back Tax is 14.5billion euro by my reckoning that's gettng on for 3,000 euros per head OK so Apple will never pay anything like that amount this side of the apocalypse, but it could be tricky for the TDs to argue that nothing is due at all..
""and medical science is working to eliminate death.""
"That's just so you can keep on paying taxes"
Meanwhile Accounting 'Science' is applying to the Supreme Court to repeal the laws of physics and mathematics...
i.e.
The wave function of a Head Office does not collapse even when someone looks for it.
1+1 = whatever we say it is..
Well maybe Mr Cook could arrange a meeting with commisioner Vestager at the 'Head Office' in Ireland where all the profits weren't made, with a few interviews with the HQ employees to clarify a few points...
Shouldn't take too long eh Tim???
It's the American attitude to the "Rule of Law". It's not that law is in place to organise and regulate a civil society, but the Law is in place to protect 'Me' from all the wrong doers out there and ensure 'MY' personal rights and freedoms come what may.. Hence the knee jerk reaction to litigation when anyone feels wronged, and raining retribution on the offender totally disproportionate to the original offence. (e.g. the multi-million dollar law suit from a lady spilling unexpectedly hot coffee she had jjust bought in her lap .)
Consequently anyone charged with enforcing the Law has a sense of almost divine right to do whatever they see fit,
Might I suggest the FBI and friends turn their investagatory powers onto the guys who ran the mortgage fraud of the 2000's triggering the financial crash. I'm sure there will be some juicy emails to find.