* Posts by kmac499

930 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2013

China's Shenzhou-11 capsule docks with Tiangong-2 station

kmac499

I've said it before but

Rocket Science Easy

Rocket Engineering now that's Hard;...... Congratulations and a safe return

Pair programming – you'll never guess what happens next!

kmac499

Complementary Coders.

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.

Cisco president: One 'hiccup' and 'boom' – AWS is 'gone'

kmac499

IT Evolution

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.

Virtual reality is actually made of smartphones

kmac499

Hmm the reality distortion field is strong with this one

Sony Ericsson p800 circa 2002.

It's biggest 'thing' for me was the handwriting recognition with a stylus on a touch screen,

Hey, you know what Samsung is also burning after the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco? $2.3bn

kmac499

Note 8 name already taken

Well my Samsung Note 8.0 is working a treat. (No I'm not trolling it's a 3 year old tablet.)

FT journo roasts channel leaders for spouting bullshit

kmac499

I once told a bunch of bankers that all they did, was rent money to a people for more than they rented it from other people. They were not impressed.

Robots blamed for wiping 10 per cent off the value of sterling

kmac499

Re: High frequency trading

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.

OK Google, Alexa, why can't I choose my own safe, er, wake word?

kmac499

Not for me..

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)

Google's hardware extravaganza: Ad giant takes on Sonos, Roku, Linksys, Amazon, Oculus... you name it

kmac499

T'other side of the coin.

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.

Good God, we've found a Google thing we like – the Pixel iPhone killer

kmac499

Worth reading even if only for the Jony-Ive comments, Which I suppose boil down to

"OK fanbois this is how it should've been done"

Just the battery and SD card to get right yet guys...

Oops: Carphone burps up new Google phone details

kmac499

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

Internet handover is go-go-go! ICANN to take IANA from US govt

kmac499

Re: It still seems to be working this morning.

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

Dirty diesel backups will make Hinkley Point C look like a bargain

kmac499

Re: Greens just don't understand numbers

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.

South Australian mega-storm blacks out whole state

kmac499

Re: Renewalols

Yeah; I've almost got my grandson convinced that he can tell if a local solar farm is turned ON because it's a sunny day. I'm waiting for him to ask me what happens if they turn it on at night..

kmac499

Re: Resynching generators

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.

kmac499

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"

HP Ink COO: Sorry not sorry we bricked your otherwise totally fine printer cartridges

kmac499

Re: HP still sells printers?

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

Redback sinks fangs into Aussie's todger AGAIN... second time in five months

kmac499

Re: Eek...

and as the old joke ends "You're gonna die Bruce!" said Greg to his recently todger-stung mate..

Ordinary punters will get squat from smart meters, reckons report

kmac499

Extra Ordinary Punters left behind as well

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.

kmac499

Re: Can you switcj on/off via the keypad?

"It's not off until it's got a padlocked off and the only key is in my pocket."

Plus If like me you've worked inside any big industrial kit (mixers and conveyors in my case) as well as the padlock I've even taken the fuses with me.

If we can't fix this printer tonight, the bank's core app will stop working

kmac499

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.

Oi, Apple fanbois. Your beloved Jesus Phones are pisspoor for disabled users

kmac499

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.

It's Friday – and that means one thing: Yup, Microsoft's TypeScript 2.0 is out

kmac499

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...

Microsoft deletes Windows 10 nagware from Windows 7 and 8

kmac499

Re: Too little, too late

Can you imagine how fast the MS update servers would melt if they offered an optional 'upgrade' from Win10 to Win7..

Will US border officials demand social network handles from visitors?

kmac499

Re: Stupid questions...

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.

HP Inc's rinky-dink ink stink: Unofficial cartridges, official refills spurned by printer DRM

kmac499

Re: if the same market exists for laser

We got a 14yo HP Laser upgaded with a few bits of Ebay (network memory and paper tray) 3rd party toner for £10 as our draft printer. For anything leaving the business a new HP multifunction Black\Colour laser. Beats inkjets for quality hands down.

Apple seeks patent for paper bag - you read that right, a paper bag

kmac499

"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)

WTF is OpenResty? The world's fifth-most-used Web server, that's what!

kmac499

Re: but the name

Maybe it's my internal accent but I can't get the "Louie Louie" song in Animal House outta my brain...

Skype shuts down London office, hangs up on hundreds of devs

kmac499

Skype to be an app on my TV (which has a webcam). This allowed for family chats across the world now gone..

Thanks again Redmond..

Encryption backdoors? It's an ongoing dialogue, say anti-terror bods

kmac499

Re: Donald Trump... well, who knows?

He's probably invested in the Chinese Quantum satellite experiment..

Evernote dumps its own bit barn, boards Google's cloud

kmac499

S'all my fault

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.

HP doorsteps Apple shoppers at the altar of dreams

kmac499

Re: Hey, we still innovate!

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.

kmac499

Re: Hey, we still innovate!

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.

GitLab snags VC cash, promises to 'Git-ify' the world

kmac499

Re: Does this mean?

I'll go with a "Grump" of gits; cos that's what you feel like if you loose your suppository.

UK oversight body tipped to examine phone snooping tech in prisons

kmac499

Re: "innovative countermeasures"

I'm betting holding the phone in a combination faraday cage and wave guide device to point directly at a known base station.

Yeah you guessed it yet another use for a Pringles tube.

UK nixes Land Registry sale

kmac499

Re: Sensible

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..

Apple: Crisis? What innovation crisis? BTW, you like our toothbrush?

kmac499

Not so Smartwatch

I'm waiting for the Pebble2 to arrive. Physically much the same as Pebble 1 but a much smaller bezel and the Sporty\Healthy sensors, for about a quarter of the crApple Watch price..

Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party

kmac499

Re: Fuck crApple.

"crApple" Luv It; right up there with crApita (tm) Private Eye

kmac499

Re: Bravo...

Why don't we all got to the "Tax Head Office" building in Ireland and watch the launch there.. A bit like the imaginary Museum of Curiosity on Radio 4; it sounds like it has an infinite amount of space. (or possibly infintessimal.)

Pains us to run an Apple article without the words 'fined', 'guilty' or 'on fire' in it, but here we are

kmac499

HOW Much!!!

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.

Sex is bad for older men, and even worse when it's good

kmac499

Re: Correlation does not imply causation

Based on the anecdotal tales of us older guys and our love lives. Where the hell did the researchers get a sample size large enough to be statistically significant...

Please please tell me where...

Hacker takes down CEO wire transfer scammers, sends their Win 10 creds to the cops

kmac499

Re: Make a phone call

I'll bet if the FCO received an email from the boss saying "You're fired, clear your desk" They would check it's authenticity; even if only to up their severance terms..

Nul points: PM May's post-Brexit EU immigration options

kmac499

Re: IT skills shortage

IT Job Advert

"Developer, sysadmin. support person wanted working from home.. "

Ok so your home is in Lithuania no problem; when can you start.?

When Irish eyes are filing: Ireland to appeal Europe's $15bn Apple tax claw-back

kmac499

Electoral Calculation

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..

Cooky crumbles: Apple mulls yanking profits out of Europe and into US

kmac499

Re: He can huff, he can puff, but he will pay

""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..

Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough

kmac499

Seen it all before

On t'original Star Trek. Mr Spock slotting neon coloured memory units into his science station.

(still wondering If I should mount my tablet onto a wedge of foam so it looks like the captains log.)

Tim Cook: EU lied about Apple taxes. Watch out Ireland, this is a coup!

kmac499

Re: The EU Commission has sinister plans to control tax rates across the continent

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???

FBI Director wants 'adult conversation' about backdooring encryption

kmac499

Re: Disregard for consequences

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.

Blink and you missed it: Asteroid came within 90,000 km, only one sky-watcher saw it

kmac499

zzzzzZZZZIIIINNNNGGGGggggg......... WTF was that?

Making us pay tax will DESTROY EUROPE, roars Apple's Tim Cook

kmac499

..."Would you take a job where the description of your duties said "do the right thing"?"....

I believe the medical professions (for humans and animals) aspire to this aim.