Posts by mlvj 6 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2013
I have a family member that works for Tesco as a personal shopper - i.e. collecting the items requested.
On one of her first shops, they were in the drinks aisle, and the final item was "swimming pool", at the other end of the store.
...my family member could not be bothered with that extra walking, so the pool was substituted for a bottle of Tesco sugar free orange juice...!
NOT JUST MY FAMILY DOING THIS THEN!!
I am assured that was a one-off.
I live in Somerset - not too far from Wells, Radstock, Shepton, Frome - but with about 2.5 miles of copper between myself and the nearest FTTC enabled cabinet.
I am really sad that this is considered the final 5% - and that there seems to be soooo many of us in this situation. The OpenReach man on Radio 4 this morning was talking about the final few percent being incredibly hard to get to, without water supplies...
Connecting Devon and Somerset are nicely responsive to queries - but the only thing that they are offering are vouchers towards satellite broadband - which just seems rubbish to me.
Grr.
For those that say "why do you need more than x%" - why would anybody want more than 640KB RAM?
4K streaming is coming, for a start. Multiple people in the same house will want to do that.
I personally was shocked and horrified.
This is a seriously big event. It is different to terror attacks, but that does not mean that I cannot feel shock or horror. I was at a festival when the result had been announced, and at that festival, a lot of political speakers (mainly satirical admittedly like Jeremy Hardy, Marcus Brigstock, Steven K Amos, Shappi Korsandi, and so on) - all presented a shocked and horrified set.
In 1990, one of my first roles after leaving university (Mathematics with Computer Science), was to design and implement a set of algorithms to simulate aircraft flying around as part of an air traffic controller trainer.
This involved going back to the university library, reading up on applied mathematics algorithms, and then implementing some approximation methods. I had about 5 pages of equations which then needed to be implemented.
The simulator ran on Apple Macintosh machines, and was written in Think Pascal.
I had about 200 milliseconds in each second to provide the x, y, z, and speed, for 200 aircraft; the rest of time each second was for others to do things like handling the UI and fluffy stuff like that.
It was a really hard, but really rewarding exercise.
After that, the next job involving algorithms was in 1999, implementing a set of algorithms to aid the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer plan their supply line - again, a really satisfying job.
Other than that, in 23 years, that is it!
