Posts by Peter Ford 386 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2007
I thought most Country Music generation was one of the first use-cases for AI - analysis of the genre would suggest that this has been going on (with a few notable exceptions) for about 30 years.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman had a formula but at least they managed to make the voices sound different.
I always wrote on the kit itself with a sharpie: a few times I've gone to a cabinet and found all the sticky labels on the floor...
Sharpie is still not foolproof, I guess, and harder to change when a change is required.
A device that was actually out-of-use would usually have the word DEAD in red sharpie on it if I'd been there. If not, I'd be doing a proper check to see what it was...
The company I work for appears to use Macs as the default - I don't know anyone in the company who uses a Windows machine (although there may be some lurking in upper management of accounts or something), and our IT team seem to know what they're doing with JAMF or whatever they're using.
Pretty much all of our documentation and management is through cloud-based things like Atlassian, Slack and Google, and we use Zoom for conferencing etc.
The tech stuff is all cloud (AWS etc. and other providers, source code in GitLab), usually running Ubuntu Linux increasingly on ARM processors, so Apple Silicon MacBookPros are great for dev work.
And my M4 MacBookPro sits very quietly on my desk with several DevContainers and other stuff running, whereas my wife's Lenovo with Teams running sounds like a hairdryer.
I worked for a internet agency in London - no dress code at all (shorts, t-shirt and bare feet were OK in the summer), but we had a client that I visited occasionally that were much less relaxed. The real pain was that we often visited them on a Friday, and it was inevitably a dress-down Friday where they were expected to pay a charity donation to dress down. So, even though I'd dress up a bit (polo shirt or rollneck) I'd get stung for a tenner...
The political system that you are calling 'communism' has never really worked on a national scale.
The few countries that claim/claimed to be communist were nothing of the sort - just another form of dictatorship.
The name Nazi came from the first two syllables of the National Socialist party - German speakers would pronounce it that way. So, they were Socialist?
The Soviet Union, led by Lenin and Stalin et. al., were also 'Socialist' - it's the second 'S' in USSR. Again, more of a dictatorship, driving the normal people into poverty to enrich a few.
The People's Republic of China - communism? In their version everyone gets a job, but only a select few get any wealth. To some extent that has changed and they're now more capitalist than anyone, but still persecuting minorities.
Venezuela - definitely claimed to be Communist, but I don't think they shared out the oil wealth very equally.
Cuba - they're very communist: everyone is equally poor, except the people running the place. Same goes for North Korea.
Which communist government has actually killed more people than Hitler's Final Solution?
I don't think communism has killed many people at all, but fascism pretending to be communism has done quite a lot of damage to the communist ideology.
Working for a small company, I was effectively always on call.
Being the only system admin I made as sure as I could that things wouldn't break, and of course in a small company there was not too much to go wrong.
Of course it only ever actually happened when I was on holiday. Three times.
First time when I was staying with relatives in Canada (I'm UK-based): luckily the chap I was staying with had a Mac that I could SSH into the system and sort it out.
Second time I was on a yacht in the Hebrides. That one had to wait, but it was a simple talk-through a restart operation with the boss.
Third time was a proper breakdown while staying with the in-laws at Christmas - massive RAID array failure (RAID-6, but three drives failed in a cascade...). I could SSH in and recover enough to keep emails going, but it also had to wait until I could get replacement hardware and physical access and then recover from off-site backups. Again, small company and Christmas was a quiet time, so we got away with that.
Now I work for a bigger company with more critical systems, and we have a rota: twenty-odd people taking the first call and a bunch of people who will work out-of-hours to fix something if they have to...
Firstly, if you're not capable of telling if the car in front is not moving, then there's a problem with you being in control of a vehicle. At least in the UK, and barring any other evidence of dangerous driving by the car in front (brake checking or reversing unexpectedly, for example), if a driver rear-ends the car in front it's no fault of the driver in front.
Secondly, there is no legal requirement to move as soon as the lights change (or whatever else blocking the way has cleared) - a green traffic light means 'proceed if it is safe to do so'. Also, the UK has an extra phase in the traffic lights (red+amber) that shows between red and green that gives drivers time to prepare to move.
Thirdly, a driver is considered to be in control of their vehicle unless they are parked with the engine off: handbrakes are part of the control system.
Fourthly, the handbrake has to be strong enough to hold the car on a slope - it used to be tested on a slope of up to 16% gradient but these days is more likely to be tested on rollers - so doesn't need to be as strong as the normal brakes. Even if something rear-ends hard enough to overcome the handbrake, then it's not going to move far. Having had a claim for one car being pushed into another while both were stopped on the road, your main brakes are only as strong as the grip of the tires...
I don't think you'd pass a UK driving test, but I suspect a lot of drivers around the world wouldn't - hell, a huge proportion of people in the UK fail it at least once.
Having two daughters that have passed their UK (manual) tests in the last year, it seems that using the handbrake is now much less of a thing - they seem to be taught to keep a foot on the brake unless they need a hill start. I suspect that they're being conditioned to be able to transition to automatic transmissions and electric drive system that are likely to be in their future.
A scrapyard somewhere has one of my 12mm spanners. I was trying to extract a light cluster from my Ford S-Max, and the sound was more of a clang-rattle rather than a ping, but it was in the bodywork for a few years before the car was eventually written off. Either that or it dropped out on the road at some point...
I think I'm with you on this: How many people are actually looking at any of this data that they have collected?
Targeted advertising is already confused by having a mixture of adults and teenagers on the same NAT address, so in our house any adverts that do slip past the pi-hole are not well targeted to whoever receives them.
This heap of data is mostly worthless bollocks - certainly the management of most companies is not intelligent enough to do anything productive with it. The biggest worry is that some AI in the future will be let loose on it and actually start making headway with it all. I guess that's when SkyNet happens...
A good many of the shopping malls were built on land owned by the Church of England, meaning they would have to abide by covenants on the land, such as not opening on Easter Sunday. Not sure if that's still the case.
Some of the other big landowners in England were the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge universities - there is the story that you could walk between the two universities entirely on land owned by their colleges. Again, probably not the case any more.
I set up the HP-UX cluster in the my Ph.D. lab with TTTE names - Gordon was the Big machine, Edward, Henry, James and Thomas were the smaller ones. When we got a shiny SG Iris in the lab the Prof said we had too many boys names and it needed something more feminine - if there had been two new machines they'd be Annie and Clarabel, but in the end the purple case (and the fact that it was a Crystallography lab) resulted in 'Amethyst'.
Slightly later, OUCS had machines named as colours, and the main multi-user servers were 'black' and 'white'. They were superceded by 'sable' and 'ermine', which somehow transitioned to a mustelidae theme and there was (I think) a 'wolverine' and a 'weasel' after that...
The company I moved to had Arthurian Legend names - Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, Morgana...
Later when I took on the system admin of that company, I went very boring and used NATO phonetic alphabet names for the sudden proliferation of VMs
There is only one issue stopping me getting a BEV - the price of buying it. I've always bought cars cash: £5000 for a small one and £10000-12000 for something bigger. I don't have £40,000+ cash lying around for a new one - even the small BEVs are more than £25000 at the moment, and there's very little second-hand stock of BEVs, apart from crappy Leafs with knackered batteries and Teslas that are not far from new price.
I worked for a chap who disliked his first (of three) given name, so in anything useful to him he went by his second name.
On surveys, questionnaires, internet forms, etc. he used his first name, so spam, and sales calls would alway ask for his first name - a useful filter for phone answering...
He hated his third name even more - I'm not sure he really admitted it's existent beyond the initial letter.
Or even a saxophone.
A horn is a musical instrument with some sort of noise generator at one end and a conical bore to the other open end: the conical bore means the tube is gradually getting wider along it's length so if you straighten out the curves it would look like a cone (although chopped off at the top, I suppose)
So horns include all of the saxophones (where are single reed generates the noise that then resonates down the horn), and the brass horns like the cornet (lit. little horn), French horn, E-flat horn, euphonium, tuba, Sousaphone etc., but *not* the trumpet - that has a cylindrical bore that only flares at the bell.
As for the cor anglais (English horn), that's not a horn or English...
Even with a digital watch you can imagine where the hands would be. With a bit more effort it works in the dark: if you can see the Moon you can work out where the Sun would be based on the phase and then determine where North is (actually, determining South is easier, but then you just go the other way...)
Of course, if it's too dark to see the Sun but clear enough to see the Moon, chances are you can see the relevant stars for your hemisphere...
I have an AOC monitor that has one button, on the bottom edge, that lights up green when the monitor is on. If I press it in certain ways I can apparently adjust stuff, but it also functions as the on-off button.
I leave it on - it's working fine at the moment, and I dare not press the button to turn it off in case I press it wrong and mess up the settings.
I probably have a manual somewhere, with three pages of English instructions buried among 4795 pages of other languages.
There's at least one more, Ben Cruachan near Loch Awe in Scotland, on a similar scale to Dinorwig.
But you're right: digging tunnels big enough to pour a lake down a mountain through turbines is hardly less infrastructure than a bit of railway track. I suspect the train doesn't quite match the power generation capacity of a big pump-storage system.
There are plenty of examples of railway locomotives in Europe that can run on either electric pickups (two different types in the UK) or diesel. For a locomotive, where weight is not so much of an issue, it works just fine.
I also see that there is work in hand to make battery locomotives too - for some applications like trundling along over long distances a diesel battery hybrid might make sense, especially if the batteries can be charged from overhead or third rail pickups at locations where power is accessible, and also from regenerative braking.
But I don't think the USA has an appetite for rail travel in place of flying or driving...
Age discrimination is certainly not a given - I just got a new programming job at age 52 and the team is almost all middle-aged men, including two other new hires of a similar age to me. Anyone discriminating on age is going to miss out on a lot of experience, but I guess young people are cheaper...
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