Posts by Doctor Syntax 42420 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"As for radioactivity - well Carbon has several common isotopes anc the process of burning will often result in some localised concentrates forming.!
Carbon has one common isotope, 12, one fairly uncommon isotope, 13, and one more uncommon isotope, 14. It's only the last which is radioactive (weak beta) with a half-life of 5,000 plus years. C14 is produced at a fairly, but not entirely constant, rate in the upper atmosphere by the action of cosmic rays on nitrogen so its level in the atmosphere and hence in living things is fairly constant. Coal has not been a living thing for millions of years old and any remaining C14 would be well below the limits of practical detection.
"Some places in the world have a background even more intense than that of Pripyat if you aren't digging trenches."
I was surprised to find that when my daughter was buying a house here in the Pennines that the building society required a radon check. I was even more surprised to find that we're entirely radon free here - it's not as if we're sitting on top of granite. And on the subject of granite, the carbon dating lab in Belfast used distilled rather than deionised water to get rid of the radon in the public water supply from the Mournes.
"And occasionally, they'd get confused and all end up in a pile against the wall"
There's a story that one of the automated transit carriages at some airport (?Gatwick) went missing with a load of passengers and was discovered repeatedly going through it's automated carriage wash.
"He’d used it at his previous place and was a huge fan. "
I've come across that one before. At one point I and a BA put forward a case for adding warehouse management to our existing order-processing/stock management system. It wouldn't have been a big addition given what was already there. It was turned down. Presumably TPTB decided warehouse management wasn't needed. They also decided the business analyst wasn't needed.
A few years passed and a new warehouse manager was appointed. He must have his favourite warehouse management system bought for him to run on the VMS box (something they hadn't foreseen was coming down the tracks). There was all sorts of sales weaselling going on about how it would be compatible with our Informix on Unix system . It had all the promise of conflicting versions of stock levels on the two systems.
At that point manglement decided they didn't need me either so I didn't have to cope with the mess. It was some time into my post-retirement freelancing career that I cam across a similar - and possibly the same package on SCO and discovered what the weasels had latched onto to twist into their not entirely outright lie.
From this I learned that it is worth walking round the techies at the beginning and getting their view of the problems. A common comment was "We've told management what the problem is, but they don't believe us"
Of course. Price determines value. Techies'* comments are priced according to techie salary scales which are well below those of manglement who are receiving the reports.
Any consultant worth his salt knows to identify and ask those who know. They can then add value by boosting the price to something that can't be ignored.
* Or any of the coal-face workers.
" There was so much anti-nuclear brainwashing by the so-called "Greens", so many newsfeed propagating the propaganda, so few educational efforts that now France has to reopen coal power stations which are an ecological disaster to compensate."
There is absolutely no excuse for the amount of fossil fuels we've shoved up power-station chimneys during the whole of my adult life. None. The technology was there to use and to develop during that time. With a sensible approach to deployment we'd have had reactors a few generations more advanced than we have now.
"What was wrong with just storing it ?!
Or selling it. That takes care of the potential return shipping cost. The purchase cost would have to have been written off anyway so it can be offered cheaply as it's then all profit. The original vendor, faced with the cut-price competition, will be less inclined to accept orders for unlikely looking quantities without checking.
"no one uses a real email address any more"
I do and it's occasionally used to take discussions off-group. It helps, of course, that using my own domain it's a dedicated address I can kill and replace immediately if it's abused. But, as I've said, experience shows it's not a concern although this might be a sort of reverse network effect; as long as most people don't use real ones real ones don't get skimmed.
The filter I'd like to see would be one at MSP level bouncing messages with reason We do not accept emails with noreply in the From: or Reply to: address. That, of course, assumes that businesses check their bounced messages.
It would also need a black list for other addresses that prove to be no-reads when emailed.
My biggest problem is marketing departments of big organisations sending me emails that I don't want. Worse, they're the sorts of emails that train their customers to click on links.
The latest really bad one was from the RHS of all people - click on this link to vote for resolutions at the AGM. Undoubtedly this, if clicked, is going to require the member to log in provide their log in credentials to a fake site. Of course it also has plenty of other links to train members to click on malware delivery sites.
OK, the RHS is one thing but the most prolific offenders are banks and building societies who have most to lose by training their customers to fall for scams.
"Two shitty groups of people kicking each other - works for me."
One thing that annoys me is the emails from different Indians, sometimes even on the same day, with identical texts offering web or mobile development services, SEO or whatever. It looks as if some spammer is conning people, who probably can't afford it and certainly don't know better, that there's money to be made in leads generation and is selling them a service: email address, text and probably the actual spamming as a package. And probably a list of real development companies who are probably fed up with the victims contacting them to try to sell leads.
I've now varied my usual "Prospective Supplier Questionnaire" for them. This starts by asking very reasonable questions which should make them realise how unconvincing they look - things like their register company name, domain and company web site. Assuming they're suckered in to try to answer it goes on to leave them in no doubt they've been sold a crock. The latest version points out explicitly that the only money in leads generation is selling people like them leads generation spamming services and the money's made from them. Where I get multiple messages together it goes to all addresses, non-blind to give them a chance of getting together to deal with the scum if that's possible.
There's very little genuine email comes via my ancient Hotmail address but a decade or more ago it was used on Usenet so it gets a good deal of this sort of crap but Hotmail is pretty good at dumping it. I see it's there when I occasionally look to check if any genuine mail has been dumped there. For a while I felt these spammers, shaing such interests would be interested in meeting each other so I'd reply to spammer 1 with a message along the lines of "This sounds interesting but I haven't time to deal with this now. Please contact my colleague spammer2.".
I'm thinking of reviving this. Some genealogical newsgroups keep getting spam from pimping services. Next time I get a Hotmail spam which looks as if it has a booby trapped spreadsheet or whatever I may give them the address of one of the pimps and hope the latter get taken down.
Oddly enough the address I've used on Usenet for the last many years never gets spam. Nobody must be skimming Usenet addresses these days.
After my mother died we rented out this house for a while before moving in. One of the tenants was training to be a CofE priest. We kept getting alumnus type bumf from his college for a long time and kept sending it back as not known at this address. I assume Crockford's directory is still on the go so they really should have no excuse for not finding his current address.
Eventually I rung them up saying there would be a £10 handling charge in future and I would go to the small claims court if it wasn't paid. It stopped.
What I'd like to know now is how QUB alumnus office have got our current address to send out stuff to both me and SWMBO.
"What is disappearing is their role as the tool that allow end-users to customise and update their OS. Instead, they are becoming the tools that vendors use to build the distributions."
Somehow I doubt that will appeal to the market. What happens when a significant vulnerability is found in some library. Do we wait until RedHat or whoever roll out the next ISO to install and reboot, just like a Windows update?
I got caught with that one once. On joining the company I got given responsibility for a product which had been a director's first venture into C from Cobol which wasn't a good start. What made it worse was that the implementation wasn't fit to be sold as it stood. It had been developed in conjunction with a client who was obviously happy to let any one in any part of the organisation see the entire data set, not just the parts applicable to their job.
In trying to straighten that out I ran into the director's abuse of the C pre-processor to create macros that were a bit Cobolish - let's call them Cobollocks. That would have been OK if I hadn't needed to change some instances; in the end I ran the whole lot through cpp and made that my starting point.
Then, while I was starting to unpick the rest of the spaghetti in order to partition user access, sales promised a new customer that it would be more or less a drop-in for their existing application. Looking at that application I could see that our database design wasn't that close a match to the way it did things. Fortunately I managed to escape after a few weeks.
"why did you let the marketing cockwomble survive long enough to complete the sale?"
The operative word here is "let". Short of terminating them with or without extreme prejudice before hand the sale would have been completed before anyone else even know about it. The salesman's mode of operation is sell first, tell afterwards and never ask.
See here for some examples from last year:
https://thedebrief.org/iss-russian-thruster-glitch/
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/29/22600306/uncontrolled-firing-from-russian-module-causes-brief-tug-of-war-on-international-space-station
When it's attached to the ISS it doesn't matter whether the module is manned or not - the whole ISS is manned.
"My criticisms of Linux are mostly concerned with duplication of effort"
Do you not have the same criticisms of duplication of effort in the BSDs? Is there less effort involved in producing a BSD than in a Linux distro?
The BSDs all maintain their own kernel development whereas Linux distros take a kernel from the single Linux kernel team. An LTS type distro such as Debian will run with a kernel for the life of the release (current Debian is 5.10 although 5.15 is also an LTS kernel and 5.17 is the latest stable). Does this give them more work in keeping an old kernel updated? I don't see why it should providing it's an LTS version that the kernel team is still supporting.
A Linux distro takes its libraries and applications from various upstream sources and has to keep the various versions in-line so they plat nicely with each other. Is this different in effort or even in nature from the ways the BSDs do things? While the basic Unix libraries and utilities have their own heritage different to the GNU versions other material will be taken from the same upstream projects in both cases.
I think it's time to take another look at a BSD if only as a backstop against systemd worming its way so far into Linux as make Devuan unsustainable.
