Posts by Doctor Syntax 40471 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Yo-- in Philly we say "scarfs RAM", and scoff at guys who talk different."
Regular English supports multiple meanings for words and doesn't resort to such tactics. That leaves me wondering how many words you have to disambiguate "set".
Mine's the one with both volumes of the SHorte Oxfrod Dictionary in the pockets.
"*No* possible editing power or functionality is possibly worth making me learn a new UI in the 3rd decade of the 21st century."
Well said.
Hence vi. That was what was the available editor when I started using Unix.* IME one of the best things about it are ex mode commands for making bulk changes. The notation has passed into common use here with expressions such as s/emacs/vi/g
I've just taken a quick look at your preferred tilde and rebounded promptly: grey on medium blue. These old eyes prefer the contrast of black on white with white on black as an acceptable alternative. I do take your point about CUA. It's been built into many GUI interfaces, at least to some degree, for a long time except those which seem insistent into drifting off into realms unknown.
* Not strictly true, the first Unix box was supplied without a few things including vi & C shell but had the Rand editor which I've never seen since. First day in a new job where it was vi rather than Rand was a slight panic,managed by vague memories of ex commands and an after-work dash to Dillons. The hastily bought book on vi is still in my bookshelves.
It sounds as if he's saying it's monotonic but not rectilinear. Even a non-mathematician like me can grok that. Doing it 4 dimensions - maybe a bit trickier.
And if you want a physical representation, think of an old surveyor's tape (it's probably an old surveyor who owns it). It's a bit stretched in places - the tape, not the surveyor (well, maybe the surveyor as well). As you trace along the tape the numbers get bigger all the time (monotonic) but sometimes the next number is further away and sometimes it's closer (not rectilinear).
Now you can roll it up but keep it safe - I may need it later to explain the difference between accuracy and precision.
It's not necessarily as easy as you might think. I have the Yorkshire part of Domesday as image, as an old translation from the Journal of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society and a massive Penguin paperback translation of the whole thing. The translations don't necessarily agree with each other while reading the original as image isn't easy and even then you're stuck with medieval administrative Latin. Then there's a paper of Stenton's from the 1920s where he argued that's what's written down might have been a misreading of the originsl notes...
I think some of what you list still falls into the busy-work category and some of the payments stuff could and probably already is be automated away. Then the more of these you have, the bigger the office to put them in and the more HR and facilities stuff you have and more layers of middle management. That quotation I picked out really says it all.
The root of this seems to have been Blair's notion that half the population had to go to university irrespective of whether vocational courses would have been better, This was far too expensive so student grants were replaced with student loans which doesn't really seem to relieve the public purse of the burden, at least in the short term, and burdens the student with debt. At the same time it raises the employment requirement to degree level where it was otherwise unnecessary and the two combined ensure that many youngsters, unwilling to take on the debt, are shut out of careers that they could have taken up a generation or so ago. OTOH we have a lot of graduates with degrees of no interest to employers.
It looked like a stupid idea at the time and has fulfilled that promise.
"Society as a whole is not set up to cope with people NOT dying, pension plans, superannuation, have limited capacity and are already straining in various countries around the world."
"It has been shown that if those extra 100,000 people had lived to a ripe old age, they would have cost us even more in pensions and social security than they did in medical treatment.
So financially speaking, it's unquestionably better that they continue to die at about the present rate." Yes, Prime Minister.
UK government's plan to cement the nations place as "a science and technology superpower by 2030."
And where, we ask, are the ministers with the qualifications and capability to do that?
I suppose thy might bring back Matt Hancock. After all he had his own app, didn't he. That should be good enough.
Because it was built in laboratory conditions the mirror was very precisely ground but to the wrong profile. Fortunately the profile was known which facilitated the production, under similar conditions, of corrective optics. So what happened in space was "just" field service fitting a factory-made component.
I'd assumed they would mount an array of antennae in the focal plane so as to image an area of sky.
Nevertheless I don't see the point other than to gather statistics. All it would tell them would be where a couple of objects once were. It won't tell anyone where they went and where they are now.
"To be fair, I don't think those are questions raised by the posts being refuted here, just misinformation about operating temperatures that he appears to have debunked well."
He quoted a price for one alternative without without a comparison.
"A valid criticism of heat pumps may well be their high up-front cost, and also their applicability to old housing stock or existing hot water and central heating systems, which can be very expensive to overcome."
Unless there's a huge rebuilding of our housing stock (and just think of the carbon footprint of that) retro-fitting to old housing stock is a significant factor. A reasonable analysis has to start with what we've got and what we've got is a very large number of housed which were designed with other heating systems in mind.
As it happens my house was built to take a solid-fuel fired boiler and converted to combi later. It still has the cupboard formerly occupied by a hot water cylinder, the header tanks in the roof-space and some of the plumbing to connect them. It would need some plumbing work but would be feasible to refit those and going back to the header tanks might even mitigate Yorkshire Water's sometimes variable supply pressure.
But houses built from new to take combi-boilers won't have those. Getting them all into place will be difficult. There probably wouldn't be a space for the cylinder and unless some sort of collapsible header tank is devised there'd need to be some surgery on ceiling joists and if lofts are insulated at ceiling level there's a risk of freezing the tank and pipework. The alternative would probably be to use an ancillary electric heater for DHW. Reality is a bitch and which I suppose is why my original question about DHW provision went unanswered.
One point - I do understand that a heat pump can pump heat out of cold air - it's just a matter of supplying enough air. But how do they cope if clogged with snow or ice? It's not an idle question as the only feasible place to fit one here would face the wind direction from which most of the snow comes.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
