
Sounds familiar
" mostly involved helping the librarian to dust shelves and replace books. She did those jobs so well, ,"
... that now she is the ruler of the Queen's Navee.
214 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2020
How fast it is economic to have a train run depends on the distance you expect it to travel. Britain is small compared to France or Germany; Switzerland is even smaller, and distinctly knobbly.
The design of the HS2 was predicated on the longest possible domestic run being from London to Glasgow or Edinburgh. Once you are in Scotland speeds are necessarily lower. What killed the HS2 was that BR expected to run it through the Channel Tunnel, but no-one told RTZ, who were building(?) the tunnel. The shock waves of a 400kmph train entering and running though a tunnel would shatter the passengers' ear drums; once the train had to slow down to around 120kmph the whole thing became uneconomic.
BTW I was present when the mismatch of expectations came to light. It was at a Sunday afternoon tea, not a formal review meeting.
For about 10 years I worked on this "predictive" mapping, starting from when it was just Cellnet (remember them?) until it was the whole world.
The important point to note is that his data is *computed*, not surveyed. Depending on the radio planning tool in use, and what the signal level the operator calls "good" coverage (anything from -90dB to -120dB) the output is at least partially fiction.
In Switzerland they used to use (25 years ago, dunno about today) a radio planning tool that did not take account of terrain. Go figure.
"And when it comes down to it, switching between Fahrenheit and Celsius (which was called centigrade in those aforementioned BBC weather reports) is a trivial mental trick if you don't need to-a-fraction-of-a-degree accuracy."
For the range of temperatures used in domestic ovens F = 2*C is good enough. The difference between fan and non-fan ovens is greater than the conversion error.
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" => "The Vodka is good, but the meat is poor"
"Out of sight out of mind" => "invisible idiot"
Neither of these is real; they were made up by a journalist poking fun at early efforts at machine translation. Machine translation still does not really work; machine *assisted* translation is useful, and is used by professionals.
"Wouldn't it be funny if the drug smuggling routes are used to smuggle stuff pass tariffs?"
Don't forget that that the Boston Tea Party was caused by the **abolition** of tariffs on tea, thereby putting the tea smugglers out of business. And possession of a keyboard is not an indictable offence, unlike possession of a kilo of heroin.
"In 2018 these nutters got modern (Gentoo) Linux running on a 486. It took 11 minutes to boot to CLI."
At some point I had a batch of diskless 386/25 machines. I managed, eventually, to get them to network boot to a GUI. I don't now remember dates or the Linux flavour; possibly Gentoo, and it would have been at least 25 years ago.
Obviously I did not build the kernel on a 386/25; I had IIRC a 486DX2 dual processor for that. Working out which part of their filesystems could be common and what had to be private to each processor was entertaining.
BTW my shrink says that I am now fully recovered.
"The bigger reality is that the average consumer doesn't have the time nor money to pursue these sorts of things. Just to consult with a blood sucking lawyer for an hour can be a week's pay. "
If the retailer does not respond satisfactorily, just copy your correspondence[*] to Trading Standards; they wield a big stick. Alternatively, Small Claims Court: costs time but no lawyers.
[*] You did do everything in writing, didn't you?
" you will hit is all those who have an expensive property, bought 50 years ago or perhaps inherited, but very little income, who will then have to sell it to pay the tax on its value."
And then become homeless because they cannot afford to buy another property with the money left over after tax. And they certainly can't rent, what with having to pay increasing rent on a fixed income.
"If you are never going to need it, you may as well be paying to archive and curate dust"
Every company has lots of data they are never going to use, but are required by law to keep - sometimes indefinitely.
(Of course, they can wind up the company; that eliminates the data retention obligation.)
"And there is probably a lot of data that doesn't really need to be encrypted at all."
The trouble with encrypting just the important stuff is that you are firing a signal rocket to tell any attacker just where to focus his energies.
You cannot hide the needle if there is no haystack to hide it in.
COBOL and RPG are both very good at what they do, but neither is intended for writing compilers or OSs. RPG, in particular, does a job that is hell to program in C/C++/Java; the skeleton that you have to wrap around the actual guts of the report generator is many times the size of the actual job.
FORTH, on the other hand, is a mathematician's delight but a programmer's nightmare.
"Blair and his acolytes seemed all to share the delusion that once you legislated against a thing then that problem was instantly completely solved "
Not just Blair. All governments seem to think that every problem can be addressed by legislation, and they fail to look at the underlying sources of the problem. In practice, what they largely do is to0 create new crimes and new criminals - or a workaround that evades the intent, but not the letter of the law. The use of encryption on one's own machine is an example of such evasion..
A classic example was that supermarkets used to change the price labels on their goods. After a campaign in the press this was outlawed. Shops responded by not putting prices on the goods, only on the shelf, and these could be and are changed regularly. The legislation merely hastened the adoption of barcode readers.
"what is the improved waiting in the wings replacement for COBOL"
I have no love for Cobol (I worked with it for too long), but I do not know of any modern language that does what Cobol does - and does well.
Yes, I know it's verbose, clunky, has over 1k reserved words, has no real standard ....
It depends on the jurisdiction. IANAL but as I understand it in the UK a limited company protects the directors and shareholders from financial liability, but not liability for dodgy behaviour. In France I believe it is the other way around. In NL, I dunno.
But which dialects of Fortran or Cobol? One estimate put the number of possible *standard* Cobol dialects at over 100000, even without implementor defined features.
Then you have to take into account changes in the way that the language interacts with its environment: character encoding, buffering, disk file format, system calls, in Cobol f'rinstance how does one mark a deleted record ...
Migration aint easy - even if one does not have to do it in a rubber dinghy
"why would you install works stuff to your own equipment!?!?"
Regardless of the current discussion about out of hours calls, you should always keep clear water between your work equipment and accounts, and your personal stuff. If you don't, you open yourself up to accusations of unauthorised access and other naughty things.
So, no dual SIM phones; always two separate devices. Ensure everything is air-gapped.
Me, paranoid? You should see my collection of T-shirts.
"US style fast food outlets started pushing the coffee and looked at you funny if you asked for tea"
My experience is that they cannot actually make tea as they do not have any means of boiling water. The hottest they have is about 95C, not nearly hot enough for tea. When I tried to argue the toss at a local Starbucks, the answer I got was that they have to follow rules set by head office, and those rules do not permit them to have boiling water. Go figure.
A local hotel is prepared to put a jug of water in the microwave*, so at least their teas has some flavour.
* I can feel from here the shudders of certain folks at the thought of making tea in a microwave.