Posts by John H Woods

Re: I just want a good rPi laptop

If you don't want to do hardware stuff, why not run Raspbian x86 on a cheap Intel laptop?

Re: Autonomy was always a strange proposition

I found one of their powerpoints once on an old system and "read" it with a strange fascination --- it was like the Voynich Manuscript: looks like it should make sense to someone but eventually you have to consider the possibility that it's all just a big joke.

Re:"Banks and building societies are, in my experience, the worst offenders ..."

Yep,

Certainly they spent a lot of the last decade phoning up and asking security questions. Don't know whether they still do and I'm just on an 'awkward list' of people who never reveal any information on any incoming* call.

*it's still 'incoming' IMHO if you made the call because someone texted or emailed you the number.

Re: Its late stage capitalism at its very finest

Indeed, which Adam Smith warned explicitly about and which members of the Adam Smith Institute appear to have forgotten about. Loads of self-declared "fans of Adam Smith" I have come across accuse me of quoting Marx when I quote Smith to them.

It's a great shame because Wealth of Nations is a surprisingly good read (and free, of course!)

Re: Hello RSI

Presumably you could use a softer surface, like a mouse mat? But it looks to me like you could touch the desk as lightly as you wanted - perhaps not even at all...

Re: "Now I know bob hates systemd, I'm starting to think it might not be all bad."

Even a stopped clock ...

Re: Due diligence not really required...

Absolutely - but it does raise the question as to why they couldn't

Re: Elon Musk

At the risk of repeating myself, Elon Musk is a P[A]EDO --- Person [Allegedly] Exporting Detritus into Orbit.

Re: Also SpaceX

Shush, this is about NASA, let's not mention the Person Exporting Detritus to Orbit.

Well ...

It would different because that's just one vet who's dropped it down a well.

This is why pen and paper is so good. I'd have had a portable printer pumping out mini vacc certificates.

ZFS

I have 4x8GB drives in RAIDZ2 and use ZFS snaphots. Snaphots can only be deleted by root and root can only log in on local TTY.

I have a full backup so would quite like to test ransomware resistance ... What's the best way of getting deliberately infected?

Re: Thankfully..

Anyone who mentions "The Gold" can usually be safely ignored

re: "nearly 50TB of storage at raid5"

If you care more about saving a few $ than you do about the data, yes; but otherwise ~35TB at RAID6 (or, better, RAIDZ2) would be a lot more sensible IMHO. But my guess is that most of this data wasn't stored anywhere ...

that, and ...

... there's only a finite number of rats

Re: scan a map

Can we scan e.g. OS maps and train an AI to read the contour lines? Might not even need an AI, just start in the top left corner and count the number of times you cross the lines of the correct colour?

Re: Lots of us are chimeras

Female (XX) mammals are chimeras, because of the Lyon effect, where either the X from the mother or that from the father is inactivated at random yielding a 50:50 mix of cells. (think tortoiseshell cats).

But what about this chap?

EDIT: I see Fruit and Nutcase beat me by an hour

Re: For a given value of two in politics

Upvote and pedant note: next time use a sum of >5, because, where the numbers are written to 1 significant figure (or 0 decimal places) 2+2 can legitimately be 5, or even as low as 3.

Re: Isn't this also usually followed by...

EMACS or death, personally

Re: Spaceship operator <=>

So is it the case that

a <=> b

is the same as (a < b) - (a > b) in languages where conditionals evaluate to 0 or 1 for true and 0 for false?

Re: Habitual glasses wearer

" I’m 54 but have the heart of a 30 years old"

That's nothing, I'm 52 and have the body of a 20 year old. Just hoping my wife doesn't volunteer us for "Love Your Garden"

Re: An RPi as a desktop computer ?

Most laptops couldn't hold a candle to that spec either!.

Re: AI Go.

200W seems a bit high, you'd need over 4000 kcal/day to sustain that.

1 MET*, at normal rest, is about 1.16 W/kg: I think you might get to 1.5METs (140W for an 80kg person) by thinking hard but I doubt you could break 2.0 without a lot of fidgeting (be an interesting experiment though!).

* Metabolic Equivalent of Task

oh yes...

... but white text on red background is yet more horrific

Re: Ha ha here's my Dating App for very busy people with only one day a week to spare.

Thursday is 'R' as any fule no

Re: manglement is ... mostly screwing, the choice is between the pooch and up.

or the PA

Re: BS1363 - probably still the safest domestic sockets in the world :-)

and the most dangerous plugs for the barefoot

"IBM's problem is it is managing the company to please Wall Street"

... and they are far from alone in that

re: but also probably much harder to determine?

I would say it is probably easier to determine, though less pleasant. One is estimating when evaluating number of particles ingested, but a weeks urine and stool collection would probably give pretty accurate figures for excreted particles, as I suspect the exhaled, perspired and shed totals are relatively small.

Re: So, basically what Visual Basic and Delphi could do twenty-four years ago already?

and, at the risk of being a bore, what some Smalltalk implementations could do a decade before that.

Re: Network congestion slowed them

Indeed - it's somewhat surprising to this non-expert that they don't

Re: it's hard to beat a decent soundbar.

I agree with this but, at the risk of another slew of downvotes, there's no getting away from the fact that there are decent soundbars. Whether they are value for money (the Yamaha YSP-2700 costs £600 and that buys you a lot of conventional stereo) is another matter: but if you want an approximation of 5.1 without speakers everywhere (not my preference, by the way, I'm a 7.2 fan!), this is, IMHO, the way to go.

The particular use-case I have seen, with a couple with markedly different hearing abilities, works well: with a loud seat and a quieter seat on the same sofa. Also it's worth pointing out that a lot of 5.1 -> 2.0 (stereo) converters aren't strong enough in the centre, with the result that dialog (especially for the hard of hearing) becomes harder to make out.

There's a challenge...

... as I understand it ...

A DLL is loaded into the context of a running process whereas an EXE creates a new one. Multiple programmes (EXEs) can use the same libraries (DLLs in this case) and this increases code maintainability.

A DLL can't be 'run' though, because it has no 'entry point' where execution would start --- so windows services, which are effectively DLLs (so that they can share elements of their functionality) have to be loaded into an actual executable (which allows them to be started and stopped etc.). That executable, designed to run windows services, is svchost.exe

Why are there so many? Because there are so many windows services. Although a single svchost.exe could run all the services, a misbehaving service could take it down and all the other services it was running would terminate as well. So the many windows services are grouped into related functions and each group is run by a separate svchost process.

*pure*

methane is odourless but it does tend to pick up smellies. And obviously they deliberately scent it (with ethanethiol, iirc) for safety reasons.

Re: Bus?

I am reminded of that little ditty to remember declensions: Motor Bus

Re: The process is the punishment

I also found it extremely unlikely, but using searching instead of guessing, I found this in an official government publication

"33 per cent of males born in 1953 had been convicted of at least one standard list offence before the age of 53."

Re: Definitely of Interest

... and gaming is even less niche