* Posts by midgepad

280 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020

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I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

midgepad

I've seen modern Shakespear

on stage.

It is not clear that a film cannot be remade.

midgepad

When did we get zip-

-ties?

midgepad

Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked

American manufacturers knew who Deming was and wanted nothing to do with him.

Obviously if you drop a ball and it lands right of centre you move the dropper left, best cars in the world, etc.

midgepad

Since it is about ownership and ephemera ...

I recall a suggestion that the American revolt was also driven by people with a desire to keep breaching copyright.

Their descendants have changed their view.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Now 100,000kg smaller

midgepad

Is your house tidy?

Both are needed, and a reduction in entry plus an increase in removal go nicely together.

There's a linkage there to William Gibson's SF novel The Peripheral, if you need something to read.

midgepad

Parking a couple of these off those estuaries might help.

The post is required and must contain letters.

midgepad

Re: Units, Please

In the Pacific, how many Whales to the Wales do we expect?

And is a porpoise a mili-whale?

NASA's Lunar Orbiter spots comfortably warm 'pits' all over the Moon

midgepad

Abseiling and jumaring

Sort out the going down and getting back out, and more easily using lighter gear than on Earth.

Choosing a vacuum-tolerant rope is an exercise I suspect has been done.

Pitons, screws, rock anchors, Friends and chocks only depend on finding something solid in walls or slopes or above to belay.

If the floor is the interesting bit then wheels, treads and steppy things should suffice. Boston Dynamics may soon have a Lunar Rover.

How to get Linux onto a non-approved laptop

midgepad

Separate drive

For /home

And mount onto a /home that has the install stuff on it.

Not a laptop, although multidimensional laptops may come back again.

Need baby formula? Buy a pregnancy test at Walgreens

midgepad

One step in anonymising supply

People buying pregnancy tests and passing some on unused may be useful in breaking the chain of identification, which should be broken.

And sample milk going to food banks isn't bad either. Half tonne lots would be even better.

midgepad

Re: The Data Enfamil Purchased

Or you could say no.

Counter person didn't think it up.

We've got a photocopier and it can copy anything

midgepad

Australian rural addresses

At least in Queens land seem more rational, where the house number is the distance along the road, in metres.

UK lays world's longest autonomous drone superhighway

midgepad

Helicopter medevacs?

Apart from, large Tallis buildings not being the obvious best occupants of an air route, don't they all have helicopters flying in and out occasionally and at rather short notice?

Presents interesting conflicts to control and deconstruct that.

Crypto miners aren't honest about power use – time for a crackdown

midgepad

Re: So ...

It is done in an atmosphere I and you share, and affects all their neighbours on the whole planet.

midgepad

This is a perfect use case for orbital

power satellites powering orbital server farms.

Also banishing the activity from Earth's atmosphere is entirely reasonable and desirable.

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

midgepad

Less embarrassing than it looks...

Ships take ages to build then last a long time.

Aircraft are built quickly, but the design is still improving - we have not been doing them long.

And, having built the ship, the Navy like to play with it a bit and make sure they can make it stop, turn, go, float.

And more subtle activities before which you'd be over-optimistic to fly difficult aircraft onto a different off it.

Festina lente isn't any unit motto AFAIK, but beats sinking or crashing.

midgepad

But if you can find a use for another

Then building one or two more to the same pattern, using the choices that worked, is quite sensible.

So, letting two teams do observations at the same time, getting science done quicker, doing the projects that were almost good enough for the limited facility as well - reasonable.

Making a long baseline interferometer?

Getting the spare ready.

Building one with a couple of somewhat tested improvements and additions.

Putting out a tug there, maybe. But that's new engineering, to try out nearer Earth.

NYC issues super upbeat PSA for surviving the nuclear apocalypse

midgepad

Bicycle precision

Last month I photographed some bicycles. One had the white splash on the back mudguard which (as well as other clues) suggested it had been in use during WW2.

You may be thinking of some shiny aerospace gadget with electric gearshifters, disc brakes, and the like.

Ordinary ones last well, have interchangeable parts, and with z wrench and cynicism can be made to grind on for a very long time.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

midgepad

Soldiers used to open bottles

using magazines. Sometimes that damaged the magazines leading to failures to feed etc.

Solution, build personal weapons with a bottle opener on the side.

Similarly, making dure there is a computer to hand that doesn't matter might be wise.

Problems for the Linux kernel NTFS driver as author goes silent

midgepad

Re: Hang on a mo ...

Microsoft didn't exactly write NTFS did they?

Came in from another system with its maintainers IIRC.

midgepad

Re: Hang on a mo ...

No, you appear to have said that.

And it isn't true.

If you need an NTFS driver in Linux, nobody can stop you arranging for one to exist.

That isnt a guarantee that anyone will help you.

If we don't need one, the utility of FLOSS or Linux is not diminished.

Your logical flaw is visible on inspection.

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

midgepad

User hate

They like the ststem built on Windows?

What happy workers you have.

midgepad

Printer started some of it

Going back to 1984 a Xerox printer annoyed a techie user with its closed source driver.

Hence, GNU.

My current Xerox laser just worked. The previous one was timed out by the Apple user going to 64 bit.

Yes, I could have replaced it with a daemon and z system printthis directory, but not in the 5 minutes allowed.

midgepad

Re: Linux "Desktop"

The core property of Open Source licencing is that nobody can prevent you from fixing something you want to that nobody else has decided to work on.

For values of fixing from your spare time through paying an individual offering a prize or setting up a big company to do it.

Theres a difference between inability to prevent, and doing what you want, but don't be confused.

midgepad

Website

Shiny is nice, but function is important.

The IBM System/360 Model 40 told you to WHAT now?

midgepad

Re: Read canaries ... How I became Director of the Secret Police

The details on returning, of who had not murdered her, are redundant to that use-case.

midgepad

A different sort of source error...

I wonder how they'd have reacted on reading "Danger, drop and run!" on a small metal tube.

Discussion and demonstration best avoided.

midgepad

Re: No rude but I always laughed

Where is Mr McBride, now?

Win 11 adds 'requirements not met' nag for unsupported hardware

midgepad

apt

now.

Microsoft datacenter to heat homes in Finland

midgepad

Cooling shut down half the time?

Seems optimistic.

Also, when would you mot build the worst case cooling ststem for your DC?

Too much heat: open some windows.

The right to repairable broadband befits a supposedly critical utility

midgepad

Dryer, 30y

My next one will move heat with a heat pump.

I suspect the bearing I just replaced at the back of the drum of being technology cynical even 30 years ago, though.

UK criminal defense lawyer hadn't patched when ransomware hit

midgepad

Re: A satisfying but bad precedent

IANAL nor a commissioner, but I strongly suspect that if you have the patch on a test system and a notebook or log or mjnute or SOP indicating you are testing it, any criticism would be much more muted than in this case.

For a reasonable duration of testing.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

midgepad

I think Lyons got it right, build the business and the computer and software around each other.

But IBM sold to generic managers better.

Ah well. The rest is becoming history. That book is well worth reading.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

midgepad

Requires

actual walking round, going and seeing,

Management function.

Not always successfully done in NHS some years ago.

Chip world's major suppliers of neon gas shut down by Ukraine invasion – report

midgepad

Theres a bit of Neon in

the atmosphere.

Take some CO2 out while you are at it, please.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

midgepad

Have you tried opening those files in

Libre Office instead?

Experimental WebAssembly port of LibreOffice released

midgepad

That's quite a big

Web page.

NASA's InSight probe emerges from Mars dust storm

midgepad

They are quite tough

Launch accidents shouldn't break them.

But the isotopes of Pu that work them are in short supply, and expensive to make.

Securing open-source code isn't going to be cheap

midgepad

Demonstrating their pride: incentive

Not my area, but you can't usually show off how good the code you wrote for company A when you look for a job with company B, can you?

Unless it is open source, of course!

So, there's some potential incentive to have a chunk of good code done well which you can show specific individuals.

And if there have been other people jn the project picking out infelicities for you, it may make you look even better.

midgepad

The concept is far from meaningless, but it means ...

Availability of source code doesn't ensure that it is read or understood or corrected.

But...

Availability ensures that faults cannot* be denied, ignored, or kept unfixed.

All of those occur with closed source not because of its inferior philosophical nature, but because companies misbehave. There may be no programmer to hand. The direction and marketing may prefer to sell faulty software than to spend money fixing and reissuing it, the (new) management may not understand, believe, or care...

That's a quality worth having, but not automatic salvation.

* short of your copy of the compiler being dishonest as is theirs. Scary compiler attacks.

UK pins hopes on 'latest technology' to whittle down massive National Health Service waiting lists

midgepad

Paying and using student nurses

Project 2000 must have had something good about it, but turning nurse training into a way of producing nurses who owe more money than nursing usefullh pays wasn't it.

Give nice sensible people who want to care for people, and by all means do complicated stuff with gadgets around it, a place to live, some money, and some nursing to do with blocks of classroom stuff, and a debt-free qualification and you'd be using a system which worked well.

Giving them something called a degree and a big debt to pay off and you are, demonstrably, not.

It may feel like an investment to a banker, but it shouldn't look like one to society.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

midgepad

Thumbs and automation.

Well no. You may be someone who read Jacob Nielsen's article on it and agrees that better thumbnails often come from cropping, moving the frame, and then shrinking, thean from mogrifying a batch to turn 3000 pixel images into 100px thumbs.

A thumb needs to do two of thd image things well, to grab the attention of the viewer, politely, and to convey the most important nature of the image.

Brains are still good at that.

midgepad

That wasn't the software, it was the OS

No idea what MS wrote the blue bits of W95-8 with, indeed probably not something new, but that wasn't the application, I think.

Possibly it should have looked for space and remarked, but that's another matter.

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

midgepad

Print spoiler

Is how I read that.

Although CUPS has its own entertainments.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

midgepad

Re: Inrage and outrage

You may care to consider ehat the ends are in a conversation between me and my bank.

I'm one, the bank is the other.

Version 7 of WINE is better than ever at running Windows apps where they shouldn't

midgepad

Canon DPP would be nice

I'll see if Canon's raw photo processor runs on it.

Up till now it has been disappointing.

Less than PEACH-y: UK's plant export IT system only works with Internet Explorer

midgepad

SA in FF

Works fine, on Linux.

A fifth of England's NHS trusts are mostly paper-based as they grapple with COVID backlog, warn MPs

midgepad

Re: NHS is screwed anyway

Balls.

midgepad

Re: "improve productivity in an organisation severely short of staff"

The initial ones were written by various people.

Academics interested in how (GP) medicine is done, buyers of pharmaceutical information (and one use area for gp systems was for dispensing practices, who needed something like a pharmacy ststem)

And then jobbing GPs with an interest in solving particular problems in their work.

While the records were on a drive in the building, alongside similar information jn larger volumes in paper packets, the threat and security models were fine, thanks.

Moving ask the records for half the country onto two systems at four data centres, and linking that to Dominic Cummings, Tufton St et Al, a little different.

The computer industry has given us its thoughts rather later than Hipocrates wrote down his, and we've been developing them since then, thanks.

midgepad

Wild guess here...

Male, white.

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