Posts by Mast1 191 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Oct 2019
Sounds a bit like a UI design "feature" I recently met at a self-service checkout (UK).
Labels were mounted vertically, underneath the weighing scales and packing shelf, each about 75 cm off the floor.
But, as you approach, if you are looking for a free position, you are looking at the screen, about 150 cm off the floor.
By the time you get close to the position, and if you are tall, the shelf labels are near-invisible. They were pointed out to me by an assistant, being about 70% of the height of me, to whom they were obvious. Not her fault: the station design was poor. Tilted labels ? Or what about putting arrows on the screen where eye contact is first made with the station, rather than adverts ?
Can I suggest you get an old envelope (fag packets appear to be in short supply), and see how many "Dinorwigs" you would need to keep the lights on in the UK for say 14 hours, when the "wind does not blow and the sun does not glow".
My last guestimate was around 200. Sure batteries are an alternative, but the bottom line, as from above is "too little, too late".
We had a similar episode of an unattended mobile 'phone in an open office.
No interference/hacking required : just pop it into the office 'fridge.
Not a perfect sound-proof box (and radio waves get throug the seals), but it dialled the level down to "minor irritation".
I had heard rumours that some Cornish tin mines were considering re-opening due to the increase in the world price of tin.
Here is one from March 2023:
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/cornwalls-last-tin-mine-plans-8217474
TLDR : It says that the mine closed in 1988.
Maybe a mincomputer is still down there waiting to be re-booted (after receiving its "once-in-a millenium clean").
Oh dear, I had better not give up the day job. There was no intention to be a pedant, just TRYING to make a link between "ticks" and "fleas in the ear" in the context of people trying to erase ancient aphorisms. But thanks for the clarification anyway. Obviously, whichever way one uses the apostrophe there, one opens up oneself to getting a flea in the ear from a Reg commentard.
But at least Cybersaber thought it was (could be) a joke.
Yes, 500-3500 Hz on POTS worked OK-ish for decades because you have redundancy in speech as well as (usually) context to help you resolve ambiguities. Add in background noise, and the redundancy degrades, and so does the resulting accuracy of interpretation. Hence the need for Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo.......
The range above 3500 Hz is useful for resolving direction, as well as being less prone to corruption by reverberation, and so helps separate out competing sources. As for the remaining range up to 20 kHz bit, true for music, dog whistles, and mosquito tones, but there is negligible energy above 11 kHz, in even high-quality recorded speech.
........ speaks a person too old to hear above 10 kHz these days.
A wadge of cotton wool over the microphone would serve as a reasonable low-pass filter for speech.
The 80's saw a boom in the UK for people (mostly) in financial services taking a percentage cut of the money they made for their clients.
It was an interesting contrast to see those, such as engineers, who saved large sums of money for their company, surviving with a pat on the back.
But I'd still rather be an engineer.
re kinetic "imp actors"
Was it not a rugby antic a few years ago to throw people of diminished growth as part of a drunken "frolic" ?
Ah yes:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2011/sep/15/dwarf-throwing-england-rugby
Could that be what the Firefox spellchecker was alluding to ?
Whoever said that it was intended as 365 base 10?
For the pessimists, how about base 8 (245 decimal ), or for the contrary, base 7 (194 decimal).
BTW re acronyms for airlines below, allegedly related to passenger "care" :
Try Walking Across
Don't Even Let Them Aboard.
Hazy recollections are that it was supposed to be the screen saver. Presumably, it was activating on lack of keystrokes/mouse interaction, which was the state when running a simulator (Win95/Win2k era).
My main point was that feeding someone's "home office" vanity was costing me and my firm time and money. (and creating extra work/distraction to get it removed).
In a former job, one of my colleagues wanted to play that game of getting on the leaderboard so set up SETI@home on all of the office computers.
I left a hardware simulator running overnight. It was only supposed to take about 5 hours, so I could pick up the results and start work first thing the next day.
It eventually took about 17 hours, and so messed up a day's work plan. Not such an invisible cost.
I requested they be removed from every machine except at most, his.
Obviously this was in the days of a more liberal security & management policy.
See title.
Maybe yes, in the late 70s, but in answer to OP above, early 70s, no. But I was fortunate enough to experience a real Italian ice cream stall in the mid-70s. After that, whatever was on offered in the UK looked distinctly monochrome. Hence earlier comment. Fortunately, the UK market has moved on.
Rather than having Benny Hill as a computer expert who loads a rigged tape on the traffic-light control system, you now have a script-kiddy in their bedroom remote-bricking the traffic.
Loses a sense of the "drama" methinks. (Although, even by 60s sensitivities, aspects of the Benny Hill character were "challenging").
Yes, she has all the magnifiers, readers etc. The house is cluttered with them, but they have their phases of usefulness as her vision declines.
She started using computers about 35 years ago, after she had retired. Despite being retired that makes her an early adopter. Yet that was relatively too late. In my field we see the need for people to adopt certain technologies to combat the onset of disabilities, for which currently they will wait a further 10 years before seeking the technology. By that stage the chances of getting them to adopt it as part of their regular life (as easy as putting on a pair of socks) is declining.
So two questions for the "technology can solve the problem" crews
(a) is it as easy to adapt to as putting on a pair of socks ? [1]
(b) does it introduce concepts that are alien to their previous life experience ?
If the answer is yes to either then be prepared for low uptake.
[1] With apologies to those hipsters who still only wear sandals with no socks, even in the current UK weather.
My mother is registered blind, so she received an Alexa as part of a support package.
Sounds like a good technology solution.
Being blind she needs to have a good memory of where things are, and "who is in the house" is part of that.
When she thinks she is alone a dismbodied voice croaks for input, possibly from a room she is not in.
That is very disturbing, especially if elderly and frail.
It lasted about 2 weeks before she pulled the plug.
Tehnology that does not take into account psychology is doomed to low uptake.
A 15mm pipe comes out from under our house and empties into an external drain. There had never been any sign of water exiting from it.
It turned out that it comes from a drain cock for the central heating system. The drain cock is sited in the corner of a room, under plank-flooring which has been re-laid with no immediate access hatch, and to make doubly sure, kitchen units have been installed above.
How do I know there is a drain cock ? Well, the single access point under this floor is from an adjacent room, from where one crawls through a gap in the supporting wall under a doorway, the gap being 4 bricks high. One then does a sharp right-hand turn to crawl down a "corridor" between two supporting walls a doorwidth apart to find the draincock at the far end, and no turning area. Oh, and the local pipework and tap were all uninsulated. The ever-giving surprises of home ownership.
The talk here has been about UNrolling the screen.
Think of its utility the other way around.
At your office you select a desktop-relevant size.
But when travelling in a sradine can, as seat pitch and widths shrink (not just airlines), your preferred screensize impinges on your neighbour.
So you roll it up, as appropriate.
Think of it as a socially responsible electronic device.
Heard a story of a film scanner in a TV broadcaster. Converts 35mm film (what's that) into TV pictures.
Lots of whirring machinery for finger, hair & clothing entrapment.
So the device has a microswitch on a bracket detecting whether the door was open, and powering off if so.
Bracket is made of bent mild steel, and has progresively bent backwards as people have shut the door, possibly a bit too enthusiastically.
When it came to starting the film for broadcast , it would not roll. Quick thinking operator kicks his foot against bottom off door, and microswitch decides it is safe to roll.
Operator has to hold his foot against the door for the whole of the reel, otherwise his error will be "seen" by millions (big name film, national holiday time, pre cable/FreeView).
Thanks for a single-word definition. But my examples takes it a stage further : the customer, not just the labourer is now shouldering this risk.
Whatever happened to capitalism's mantra "the customer is king" ?
Perhaps one should now qualify it with "of the dung heap" after that ?
It appears that this is firmly entrenched business model: why have a printer at the airport when you can "persuade" our customers to use their own printer ? Ditto with
(a) requiring customers to have a computer to access their bank accounts (not great for those with disabilities)
(b) rather than a utility company building pumped storage, or their own giga-battery vault, get many customers to shell out $thousands on multiply duplicated technology in their own premises, and then become a network management house controlling all these.
The consequences are also that the customer shoulder the maintenance & repair costs, and also insurance against high energy-density fires (battery packs, or, in at least the UK, non-vehicular storage of fuel).
Yup, diodic flow of wealth.
I heard a story that the Psion organiser (early PDA) saved data in UVEPROM, ie unerasable while in device. "Deletion" involved flipping the 8th bit in an ASCII code, which was interpreted as not to read the file. This approach relied on the EPROM being much larger than anyone could reasonably fill purely by typing. Apparently the Psion was a favourite of the criminal fraternity who recorded their deals on them. Once apprehended by the police, correctly read, the Psion provided a nice audit trail.
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