Posts by Vic 5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
> Does the military fly with vulnerable systems ?
That would be the wrong question, and give rise to very misleading statements.
The proper question would be "Does the military *rely on* vulnerable systems?"
Just because you have a vulnerable unit for compatability, it doesn't mean it's your only manner of obtaining that information...
Vic.
> I would never knowingly rent from an outfit that has to "pick you up" from (presumably) the airport.
No - they pick you up from wherever you want to be picked up from.
So when I last hired a car from them, they came to my house and drove me down to the rental place. Two days later, when I returned the car, we did the paperwork and they drove me home again.
It's a good operation, IME.
Vic.
> let's say that it's so strong that there's no give or elasticity in it
None at all?
OK. you pull on it. You manage to move the bit at your end. But the force you use causes the whole of the wire to accelerate *incredibly* slowly - far more slowly than your end of it does.
The result is a broken wire.
Vic.
> Also it shouldn't be terram I don't think, now I look at it, as nothing is happening to terra.
It should be terram, but it should be "ad terram"[1], as it's motion towards the Earth. Ad always takes the accusative.
Vic.
[1] Possibly "ad Terram", even, but I'm not going to get that picky...
> I can't think of any time that I've scrawled something that looks remotely like my signature
In the days before chip&pin, I had a bad hand injury. I could not use my right hand at all.
Using my card at supermarkets was fun - I would tell them that I could not sign, and they'd sya something along the lines of "oh, just try with your left hand". What I signed bore no relation whatsoever to my real signature.
I still got my stuff...
Vic.
> it should be retained by a merchant ... if it's damaged.
It won't be.
I've been using a damaged card for months. I've even told the cashiers to be careful because it's falling to bits. Not one has even mentioned retaining it.
I've got a replacement this week :-)
Vic.
> copyright infringement despite what Big Media companies like to claim is a civil not criminal matter.
It is in England and Wales[1], if performed in a commercial setting.
Section 107 is an evil piece of legislation...
Vic.
[1] Not sure about the rest of the UK, and I can't be bothered to look ATM...
> Threatening public officials with violence for doing their job is wrong.
Indeed.
However, at the moment, we only have those officials' word for it that they have been threatened. I wonder if the judge will force them to produce evidence of such threats in court before allowing them to censor any documents...
Vic.
> My kids much prefer to get their hands ... dirty with REAL paint, or real clay
David Hockney said something similar on Radio 4 one evening. He got into something of a rant about computers in general.
I was quite surprised to see the comments elsewhere in this thread that he now uses an iPad...
Vic.
> and even then about a quarter of the machines just won't be working
Acquiring PCs is trivial. I was at a customer yesterday who was throwing out about 30 P4-grade machines because they are moving all the engineers (for an office refit), and this is the stuff no-one could justify hanging on to any more. I dragged a Core Duo machine out of the pile, and that will be my Fedora machine next week.
The tricky bit, IME, is to get schools to go looking for such kit; when I worked in a school, no new PCs could be acquired unless they came from RM. So PCs were expensive, and rarely bought. And almost always a shit spec anyway.
Vic.
> The opportunity for saving money on textbooks
... Is zero.
> having richer / multimedia content
Why do you think that increased spoonfeeding leads to better education?
> monitoring and assisting pupils more easily and personally
Tablets make no difference whatosever to that.
> Or perhaps it's better to have a teacher scratching chalk on a blackboard for the next 50 years?
Better than having tablets for every child? YEs, I'd say it is, actually.
Vic.
> Retraining them to use (say) Ada would impose a cost
And wouldn't obviate the problem, even if it would mitigate it to some extent.
Ariane 501 used Ada. Read the incident report to see why relying on the "safety" aspects of a language is such a bad idea when the beancounters come to call...
Vic.
> linux still being nowhere near to even match OS X on the desktop
I keep hearing this, but I don't get it.
I've got Linux machines. I've got OS/X machines. I prefer the former - by a large margin. I just don't rate the OS/X desktop.
It's rather more profitable, though...
Vic.
> First, x86/Windows is not the future.
It is for some while yet.
I've install G/L and other FOSS in numerous places. I do so either because it out-performs the non-Free alternative, or else it fits with the customer's budget.
I'd guess about 70% of such installations survive; of the other 30%, some are replaced becuase they're "different to what we know[1]" or because some local monkey has turned up with a cracked copy and installed it for a tenner...
We might not like Windows, we might not like x86, but they're going to be here for some time.
Vic.
[1] This is often the most bogus excuse ever. I've had people, for example, *insist* that then needed IE rather than FireFox, and have crowed loudly when they eventually got IE about how they were right all along. And yet a glance at the title bar of the window you get when you press the blue "E" icon still says "FireFox"...
Air NZ once offloaded me and a 1/2 a dozen other staff in HK in order to fit more mail on the plane. The bastards departed with 15 empty seats.
They may have needed to...
With aircraft, there is a maximum take-off weight which must not be exceeded. Besides that, extra weight means a longer take-off and a longer landing[1]. If there's insufficient runway at either end, the flight is off...
Extra weight will also mean increased fuel burn - and that's not always a nice linear relationship. It might be that the extra weight of "staff" passengers would cost far more in fuel than the tickets were worth.
Vic.
[1] For light aircraft, every 10% extra weight above nominal means a 20% longer take-off roll and a 10% longer landing roll. That's cumulative with other penalties, and they soon add up. See AIC 127/2006 for details[2].
[2] Yes, I'm studying for my Air Law exam...
> A lot depends on the quality of the sound system
*Everything* depends on the quality of the PA. And the bloke driving it, of course.
People seem to get obsessed with the power rating - that's power *into* the speakers, not SPL out. There is a *huge* variation in the efficiency of different makes of driver.
Additionally, many people cannot tell the difference between "loud" and "clipped"...
Vic.
> I honestly don't know anyone that distributes doc files anymore.
Then you cannot know many people.
Whilst I would love for open formats to be the choice for document interchange, it's simply not the case. People *demand* .doc[x] files, even when they are entirely inappropriate for what is being done.
So while I usually submit PDF files when I can, there are times when to do so would be to ignore the instructions given by the customer. And that means I run the risk of not even being considered for the job.
To date, LO has been sufficient for my needs in this respect.
Vic.
One my Dad told me was donkey's years ago, back in the 405 line days, when you had different sets of coils in the TV and just couldn't tune them to another station easily.
Yeah, that's not actually the case...
This guy, an engineer I'm guesing, hacked his TV so that it could only watch ITV. TVL or whatever it was back them took him to court and he got fined.
Were that to happen today, he'd get fined. The license is for owning equipment capable of receiving live broadcast, not for watching the BBC.
Vic.
> I don't know of any other phone that functions as a full remote SSH terminal
ConnectBot on Android does a good job of it.
I haven't tried X forwarding with it :-) But port forwarding works brilliantly, and it's how I connect to my mail server - key-based authentication to get into the server, then port-forward the SMTP and IMAP ports.
Vic.
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