Posts by DoctorPaul 336 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jul 2018
Who remembers the "Wheeltappers and Shunters Club"? The wheeltappers did what it says on the tin, go around the yards tapping the wheels to detect cracks and chips. Why? Because faulty wheels damage the track. Suddenly there are two different companies running the track and the trains and the train companies have no incentive to keep checking wheels as they don't pay for the damage caused to the track. British Rail were crap, but at least you knew who to sue!
What a piece of engineering! First saw Concorde in about 1964 - my uncle was a draughtsman on the project.
Joint build between two countries, one using metric, the other Imperial was one thing but then I learned that at full chat the fuselage was about 18" longer than when it was at rest on the ground. Any engineers out there ready to take that on? Every element of the fuselage needing the same coefficient of expansion - including the controls.
And while I'm fondly reminiscing what about that classic photo of Concorde at Mach 2 above the Atlantic? Taken from a UK jet fighter that I believe needed an in-flight refuel just to get there, managed to keep up for the minute or so that it took to take the photo, then had to return to base. Concorde just kept pootling on to New York, for an interesting definition of "pootle".
I'm lucky in that respect, as I'm not completely left-handed nor ambidextrous. I write with my left hand (plus use a spoon or toothbrush) but use my right hand for things like a mouse, hammer, saw etc. Being right armed and left eye dominant, archery proved tricky when I tried it at school.
Sometimes I wonder just how my brain is wired!
Re-planning "on the hoof" was one of the classic AI problems (the travelling salesman problem being the absolute classic) that we were trying to solve when I did my PhD in the late 80s. Specifically sorting out the knock-on effects on airline schedules when a flight was delayed or a plane taken out of service unexpectedly.
Damn right! I was a founding partner of Salamander Software in the early 80s and our first game was produced using audio cassettes duplicated at the local audio store and labeled by us sitting on the floor using a John Bull printing outfit that was basically a DIY rubber stamp. A year later our product was on the shelves of stores like Boots nationwide.
I currently pay them for broadband but that's only because I was with Shell Energy who were bought by Octopus then sold on to TT. Don't fancy paying them a crippling exit fee, plus I use my own router, pi-holes pointing at Cloudflare and domain at Mythic Beasts for email. As soon as the contract expires in August they won't see me for dust!
Reminds me of what happened to me here in the UK some decades ago. Working from home (luckily) when suddenly there was a problem with the electric supply. Not a power cut, very much the opposite thanks to water ingress out in the street. I'm guessing it was something like getting next door's phase of the mains hitting the neutral of our supply and so bypassing the fuses. Every light on every appliance was *very* bright and the whole house was humming! Cue a sprint to the fuse box to throw the main switch. If noone had been home then I very much doubt if the wiring, or indeed the house, would have survived.
The big change between the old Purchase Tax and the Value Added Tax that replaced it (here in the UK) is that PT was only charged once, at the final point of sale, while VAT is charged at every step of the production process. So the quarry charges VAT when it sells the clay to the tilemakers, they charge it when they sell the tiles to the DIY store, which then charges VAT to the final customer. The thing is that every member of the chain except the final punter is also VAT registered and reclaim any VAT on their "inputs".
As a builder, I would expect you to be VAT registered to be able to claim back the tax you pay. Mind you, then you would be forced to charge VAT on the entire bill to your customers so it very much depends on who you're building for. It would price you out of the bottom end of the market for sure. In any case, surely you just quote a fixed price for the job rather than buy the tiles and sell them on to the customer as an invoice item?
My darling late partner was a child in London during the war and took part in the IWM project including doing a piece to camera and being on site for school visits. She was in her 70s at the time and was highly amused by a comment from one of the children - "I can't believe that you're that old, AND STILL ALIVE!"
Thanks for remembering Kent State.
Quick summary for those who weren't around at the time. Student protests on campus and they end up sending in the National Guard. Fleeing students shot in the back. Four dead. Check out Ohio by Neil Young to get a flavour of the times. My first year at University of Sussex (1970) I made friends with an exchange student from California, his school buddies were coming back from Vietnam in body bags.
It's not legal here or anywhere in Europe because the sharp edges and lack of crumple zones make it a danger to pedestrians. Interestingly that lack of crumple zones means that the WankPanzer will inflict similar damage on the occupants of said vehicle (I use the term loosely) in the event of a crash.
Oh, they're irreparable too so insuring one might get to be a challenge.
That's been my setup for quite a few years - pair of pi-holes and Firefox running uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger. Looks like I will be investigating LibreWolf real soon now. Oh and shout out to fbpurity for allowing me to continue using FarceBook to keep in touch with family and friends.
Before I moved to Privacy Badger I tried using uMatrix for fine-grained script control but every time I wanted to make a purchase on a new website I found that I needed to repeat the payment process five or six times whilst adjusting settings, often resulting in a failed payment or even worse a duplicate payment. Would I be right in thinking that NoScript will have the same issue?
Try Mythic Beasts as a hosting provider, as recommended by denizens of this 'ere forum.
I'm retired now, so needs are minimal. Three quid a month (including VAT) gets me basic hosting with PHP and a MySQL database and unlimited email addresses, although catch-all redirection means I just need one mailbox to support an effectively infinite number of email addresses. Need to register somewhere? That email will be yourcompany @ mydomain.whatever.
My previous provider got subsumed into the GoDaddy empire and, as I don't do business with fascists or slaughterers of wildlife, I moved my hosting and that of my few remaining pro-bono clients to MB. While I was transferring mailboxes from one to the other I had both providers webmail clients (Roundcube in both cases) open in adjacent tabs in Firefox so thought that I would compare their search performance. MB returned a result in 10 seconds or so, GoDaddy just span it's wheels for a minute or so and then timed out.
Edit: forgot to say that their tech support is exemplary as well.
Is it only me that has to use a pair of pi-holes? I set up one but after a week or so it locked up and so took down my home network. A router expects a primary and a secondary DNS anyway so I just bought a second pi to make up the pair. That has worked perfectly for many years, including a couple of years where I forgot to do any maintenance or updates at all.
When I last looked at the logs, one of the pi-holes would do all the heavy lifting for a number of days then things would flip-flop to the other one for a while, I assume because the first one had had a lockup. Running on a pair of 3b's.
As a programmer who also had the knack for being able to "talk to normal people" (we all know that the very best programmers are kept locked away from the actual clients) I found a useful niche as a sort of translation layer between the techies and the sales bods.
It got to the point where I was sent out with the Sales Director on sales visits to prospective clients so that I could head off any attempt to offer functionality that I knew we couldn't actually deliver. And on occasion got to be the hero for saying "yes we can do that" to a function request that the client thought was tremendously difficult but I knew would be easy to implement.
What always amazes me is the sense of entitlement from some users of *free* software. You've been given it for free FFS!
Quick example from Raydon's firmware update for Humax satellite boxes. Some muppet comes on the forum to say that it's a crock of shit because you have to perform a soft reset in the web interface in order to activate recordings set that way. It's a hardware limitation of the platform you plonker.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and prove it"
So so true.
As the son of a technically-illiterate Polish immigrant I was lucky enough to receive a grammar school education and then a university degree where I received a grant, including the fourth year that I needed after indulging in the social life of the University of Sussex in the 1970s!
A few years later I not only got a grant for my MSc, but it close to doubled the standard grant as I was now a "mature student" returning to education. That was followed by 3 years as a Research Assistant and Fellow but that was technically as an employee of the college. My outlay? Precisely zero.
Read it and weep millennials, you have my utmost sympathy. There is no way that I or my siblings would have received our university education today. Quick example with the benefit of hindsight, the first bike I got for Christmas was second hand and too big for me but that's all they could afford.
Hmm let's see. In 1980 or so I was working for a company that had developed a prototyping system for microprocessor real time applications. Plug together units such as i/o, relays, a/d converters via edge connectors, get coding (in MicroVera as I recall) and get the system running. When it's finalised, take the artwork for the relevant units, cut off the edge connectors, join them up and you've got the circuit design for your custom controller.
And what were these controllers used for? A little thing called "process control", you know, like running whole factories. Not bad for a toy.
Very much this.
I spent all but 3 years of my working life as a freelancer and pretty much the first thing I did was a voluntary registration for VAT as I turned over way less than the threshold. All my clients were businesses so it had no effect on them as they were all VAT registered, and getting the VAT back on all the shiny kit I bought myself was a no-brainer.
One word of caution. The accounts are straightforward enough but being VAT registered means that you will get the occasional VAT inspection. Do not mess with the inspectors! They have wide ranging powers and I seem to recall don't even need warrants to undertake searches, so make damn sure your accounts are up to date.
Precisely the conclusion that I came to in a Religious Knowledge essay at school when I was about 13 (so 1965). It didn't go down well with the teacher but I think that he genuinely feared for my soul.
Many years later I am definitely a heretic in many ways and proud of the fact. Really enjoyed walking through St Peter's Square in Rome with my Cathar cross (that's an equal armed cross) on display while none of the faithful got the reference. 700 years ago they were burning people like me at the stake in SW France, or simply massacring everyone just in case. Quote from what they did in Beziers - "kill them all, God will know his own". And they did.
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