Re: In hindsight
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"If adding more borders was such a bloody good idea, everybody would be doing it."
Best hope you stuff does'nt come from scotland then....
3404 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2008
Go buy a decent 3rd party router , and set the VM modem to 'cable only' mode.
Makes a world of difference, as the crummy belkin of doubtful vintage I use as a 3rd party router gives far better wi-fi coverage in the house that VM's inbuilt one... plus it does'nt do random drop outs every so often
oh no second... trying several 100 thousands pounds worth of industrial equipment.. and you're the sucker programming it.
And you hit the oh no second.... and you dont know if its just gonna trip out with a wimpy error message, or attempt to spin the robots arm around at 6000 rpm because you forgot the unclamp command.....
ah... the joys of proper programing.... ;)
About time these new 'disrupting' industries were brought back to earth with a heavy dose of reality.
You see the use of 'gig' workers is nothing more than using casual labour for jobs, the old docks practise of hiring people by the day springs to mind where 200 dock workers would have to turn up at 7am to start work only for the dock owners to say "we only need 50 today" and those 50 would get 1 days pay and no benefits, the next day it might be 150 workers needed or none.
My boss could use such an employment method to cover the high demands periods, but to his credit he wont, he'll say to the temps "I need you for 4 weeks work", and 4 weeks work is what he'll pay regardless if demand slacks off or we complete the job in 3 weeks, but we haven't needed temps in ages(partly covid , partly the level of automation)
As for uber.. suck it up and pay the benefits, it you cant make a profit , then maybe your whole idea is crap, especially when so many older taxi firms seem to be in business....
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"The Republican Party seems to be composed of idiots."
No it isn't, its composed of some very clever people bought entirely by the corporate lobbies
hence bills like this.
How do they get the votes in then? easy... use words like 'freedom' 'patriotism' 'flag waving' 'evil socialism' , 'low taxes' , "support our troops" and then claim the democrats are going to enslave the population in gulags, force everyone to worship <insert whatever is seen as evil of the week>, and kill all our babies.
soldering that bad was when I was a 16yr old apprentice... and it was me doing it shortly before having my instructor kick my arse and being made to do it properly.
And that was'nt even on stuff expected to fly (except when the instructor got really pissed off and threw it out of the window)
Its not my boss is an old stuck in the mud.... its just difficult to get a 5&1/2 ton robot through the front door, let alone the noise it creates while running will keep everyone awake 24/7.
Love to be able to do the CAD bit of my job from home, sadly having to sort problems every 5 mins means I'm stuck at work.......... forever...
and tell farcebork to get lost.
If they pay someone to write news articles and publish them, no problem
If they pay the news sites for links to articles, no problem.
If they think they can grab everything on the internet for free, then publish it with ads and get money for those ads, farcebork can f off.
And their ad algorithms suck anyway.... enquire about the best place to buy a new PC, get PC ads in your feed for the next 3 months.........
I have pointed out the stupidity of that move by Germany, because when they need extra power (such as the past week) its either generated by nuclear (in France) or by burning the most polluting coal on the planet from Poland.
I could write a decent fiction novel using the above plotline, sadly the publishers would reject it as "Unbelievable... nobody is THAT stupid"
ahhh you mean expensive workers,
because you cant take a burger flipper for example out of the grill on Friday and have him being able to produce chips on Monday.
You will have to train them,, and thats before even building any fabs.
All of which takes money, which the companies wont spend in the US because to build a fab in a 3rd world country, and staff it at 3rd world wages with 3rd world contracts(12hr shifts Mon-Sat anyone?) is a lot cheaper than having to comply with health and safety, working hours things, and enviromental controls too
Trouble is that 90% of the population fit nicely in the the '50 yrs of wage slavery' catagory.
ok its good for the 9% your other son fits into(they just make him want more expensive trinkets and junk so he ends up just as broke and in debt as the other 90%)
All amazon are doing is supplying stuff at the cheapest price they can get away with and not caring whether suppliers can make a profit,
What defines us as a society is what to do about the likes of amazon et al.
Do we allow them to exploit their workers to the nth degree or do we force them to treat their employees as human beings? and if they can treat 1 employee as a more valuable than gold, and the rest of them as disposable slaves , what does that say about amazon as a company....
we getting the flood of applicants to us engineering types (we're the E bit in STEM).
Oh yeah we're looked down on even by the IT guys locked in the basement where the servers are kept (mind you, cant blame 'em... today's activities at Roaches 'r us injernears were fixing a burst oil hose , mopping up said oil spill, removing the oil contaminated coolant from the sump, cleaning the pickup filters while I was there and refilling.... and that before the complaints about oily hands on the new laptop started ... )
The problem is that all technical type jobs require people to be trained up to do them, which takes time (and money) and said techies need experience at coping with the job whether its writing a recursive program to do a backup of the current databases or repairing said hose without complaining(too much)
Much easier to waffle on in a non technical role while noticing that manglement all seem to be from the non technical side and paid way more than the techies.
plus its easier on the brain/cleaning bill than struggling to debug code/get the damn hose to fit even if its the same damn part number as the busted one. grrrrrr
Only if you run the servers...
But what is 'free' in free speech? do you allow anything you agree with to be published and anything you dont like to be censored?
I once posted on farcebork a picture of 100 toilet rolls with the caption "Covid-19 spreads via toilet rolls" (posted in response to the great toilet roll panic of march 2020), within seconds it had a "fake news" sticker slapped on it by farcebork.
Next comes along someone whos posted up something along the lines of "dominion voting machines were rigged to reject republican votes", this posting remains up and unfiltered even now.
So it seems that farcebork does exercise editorial control of whats posted on the site, therefore already falls outside section 230.
But going back to my first point, who sets the rules as to whats allowed and what is'nt...... because if you just ban people for being racist twats, you can't challenge their thinking with "Then how come you were cheering on those black guys playing for England last week"
I can only upvote this once, but I'd cheerfully upvote this 1000 times.
In my game , there are no bugs in the code, if our boss wants 20 000 widgets made , then the code must be right.
We test.. and we test, and we run slow motion tests, verify tool paths, verify the robots are coming in and clamps are firing in the right order, because its not a case "oh well.. whats a bit of data loss?" but the likelyhood of pieces of metal being fired out of the machines if we get it wrong.. (and yes, it does happen)
Again with our customers, they know if they screw up, its not a matter of "oh well lets patch it", its a case of "oh f*** the landing gear is staying up because numb nut didnt design the correct clearences when they sent the parts to be made"
Until software is treated as a proper branch of engineering, you will always get the bugs, but the correct mindset in the first place will say "we will get bugs.. but we will test them out of existence before the product has a chance of losing all your data/flying the aircraft into the ground"
escalated quickly.
From "lets get these vaccines out" to export bans, threats, and throwing various Irish treaties out of the window.
Just goes to show that when you appoint someone into a position of power , that does not mean that they are any more qualified for the position than someone voted in by us mere plebs.
And remember the head of the commision was appointed, she was "elected" to the position because the EU parliment got a list of condidates for the job that was 1 person long, and while she was the head of the German defence department, she proved rather useless at that job too.
And if our government had 1 ounce of common sense , they should be saying "You can have 100% of our output of the vaccine after our population is jabbed(or we have enough doses in stock to jab everyone)"
yesterday .... jeez the no waving of a card.... the horror of having to put the card in the machine and type my PIN on an ikky keyboard (paise whatever for the foresight of rubber gloves )
oh well... back to cash it is... wont be long before we're exchanging rocks again
Wheres the 'end of civilisation" icon?
the hold on to it crowd.
My last phone (galaxy S3) lasted until the battery died and the USB charging slot was knackered (I could replace both and have a usuable phone ) and I went for a samsung galaxy J3... based not on technical capabilites , or on contract price etc etc , but based on what was the smallest phone that could safely live in my jeans pocket.
Its worked very well and even though its coming up on 4yrs old, still holds a charge, does the job and I see no reason to change.
But then I'm an old fogey and not impressed with the need to have the latest 'bling'
And it can play missile command too ... eeekk smart bombs :D
Yes been there ,been on the receiving end
Assurred that the house had 2 rings and the upstairs ring had its fure removed....attempted to disconect power socket only to have my best electrical screwdriver explode in a blinding blue flash
Upon recovering my eyesight and ceasing to swear at the hapless houseowner who'd employed said 'sparky'.... I found there was only 1 ring and he'd wired each of the ring into 2 different fuses.....
2 years later when the kitchen was rebuilt , I found further work.... a spur off the ring, feeding into 2 more spurs and a further spur off of one of those.
Feeding things like kettles, deep frier, washing machine , cooker oven.. etc etc etc.
Ended up rewiring the entire place
Flames .. because the houseowners were lucky their place didnt go up in them
I often wonder at the levels of thought involved in posting stuff on the internet
Do people take a considered approach to their typing, or simply bash out the first thing that comes into the head.
there is NO freedom of speech if you are using someone else's printer/website/cloudy computers to publish your speech, you have to agree with the terms and conditions when you buy their service, and if the terms state "No hate/racist speech" and you put something racist up, they have a right to terminate your use of their services
As for the whole "other people have a different viewpoint" thats a bit rich coming from someone who seems to support the whole "stolen election" thing when more people of another viewpoint voted for a new president and you went "whaaaa not fair"
Anyways , as the US has a new president in charge, I guess its time to do 2 things, sit back and relax now an adult has the job, and look up stuff I can use to make fun of Biden
Have a nice life
But just like F1 suspension structs , they are very storng and very rigid in the direction the forces are ment to go. in other directions... not so much.
for example, take the blade edge.... its not designed to go through anything but air, put a drone in the way and.... who knows.... once you've got a crack forming in the blade from slicing the drone in 1/2, its very easy to see that crack spreading across the blade due to the action of the blade during flight... and oh look 4 mins after impact the end 15 feet of the blade goes off for a wander by itself.... at which point gravity takes a very great interest in the chopper (gravity gets scared away from choppers by the noise.. thats how they fly.. any less noise and gravity comes back)
Thats a very false idea.
The 1st amendment states that the government cannot restrict the peoples right of free speech.
However amazon is not the government, what you put on there has to agree with the terms and conditions of the contract you sign with amazon.... so amazon can pull the site if its hosting something thats outside the terms of the contract.
There is nothing the US government could do if parler bought themselves some servers, an office, and started running the service from that.
mentioned he was on a PAYG deal with his phone, a quick look showed that he was paying about £25-30 month for it. And not being technically very alert, thought that was a good deal.
Sim only contract from 3 (surprisingly) 12 quid a month 12 gig of data and a shedload of texts/phone calls, and I'm damn sure theres better deals to be had out there.
Oh and steal the work's wifi for updates/ large games ;)
only applies to the government.
If you sign up to use farcebork or twatter or amazonian forest servers , then you have to abide by the T&C they say.. as they are private organisations not government. dont abide... they have the right to pull the plug (just wish they'd done it sooner)
As for Trump, most of the US citizens I know (from both democrat and republican sides ) are all of one opinion..... what the hell is trumpy still doing in the white house....
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"I wonder what would happen if modern "developers" were put on 1970's / 1980's (or even 1990's) systems and told to write a stock control application (or a spaceship flight control program). You only have 1MHz of CPU, 128K or RAM and a 20Mb hard disk. Users are connected via RS232 terminals of a variety of types and in a variety of locations and you can't claim FrAgile development methodologies and you can't access the Internet to research things. The space spec would be far lower."
Seems a pretty easy challenge , I'll do the low level RS232 comms section first since thats what I'm good at heh.
Although considering your idea to be a valid one, I think it would be better if the application under development should be motion control of large bits of machinery, or critical flight or nuclear plant control stuff.
Write bad code here and you will kill people, that will teach 'coders' to do stuff right, and then make manglement personally liable for any bad code that gets through QC as well.
might make people sit up and pay attention, but then it all falls back to cost.... bid to build a website, sub it out to the cheapest coders you can find, pocket the money and move on.
Java, smattering of C/C++, Basic (hah) and Z80 assembly, also Heidenhain TNC, and Fanuc ISO code and mastercam(spit)
In my job, you have to do it right, theres no second chances with "Just run the code and hope", that way lies much insanity (and a shedload of very expensive machinery lunching itself), we have to test, and test again, and then make sure we've even specified what tool holding to use (gets fun fitting a 40 mm dia tool down a 30 mm hole at 10000 rpm... and yes we had someone do that).
But thats the correct way to program/design our work, theres no short cut, no publish and hope, and it always boils down to how much the company is willing to spend on skilled staff...
Its more fun just to lean against the machine , and then say "Its about to blow up"
The nay sayers will chorus, and about 20 secs later it goes down
Impressed a machine salesman/tool seller after his 1/2hr speech about how this new tech was the dogs balls and save us umpteen 100's in production.
Started the test job, it did 1 part and told him "it wont do 2".... "naaaayy it will do hundreds of " <BANG>
Exit salesman stage left.
sometimes its good to be a geek
The original idea of the EU was the european Iron and coal confederation
A plan put forward in 1948-49 to tie french coal/iron ore production to germany's steel production, binding the french and german economies so tightly together that any attempt at war would destroy their own country first.
Because europe had been trashed twice in 30 years at that point by french/german rivalries (and thats not including the wars in the 1800's too ......)
Trade yes... but political union without the consent of the governed....no
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"you couldn't have free trade with the EU unless you conformed with the EU's laws"
Funnily enough, the stuff we send abroad has to comply with US* regs.... or it does'nt go
we have no say on what those regulations are, nor any vote on who gets to set the regulations in the first place, and yet we trade with the US very successfully
We make the product(well part of it) it gets assembled, tested, exported. And hopefully money comes back.
If the product goes into the EU (which it does), then it has to comply with EU rules, if they change the rules to specifically exclude the product, then they will be excluding 2 or 3 rival US products as well....
*insert any number of countries here
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"Yes you can install Steam for Linux on Ubuntu or even Fedora but it is a load of faffing. This isn't even remotely as easy to do as it is on Windows."
Ermm for mint its
Click software manager
Type steam into search box(assuming it does'nt pop up on the menu of programs)
Click install button
Login
Windows
Goto steam website
Download installer
Find where IE has hidden the installer
Run it
Login
Hmmm not much choice there really is there...
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"I can't believe the large-mass, high-capability Ariane rockets would also be used for nuclear ICBM rockets. Not only are they hugely over-capable, most liquid fuels, even if not cryogenic, are highly-corrosive, can't be stored for long periods in regular tanks. Solid rocket fuel is much better for ICBMs."
In the first days of ICBMs it could take 20hrs to fill and prep a missile to launch with liquid fuels ... which is fine if you want to fire at the enemy 1 day after you've said "stop within 24hrs or you'll die"
Sadly it came to notice that you could secretly fill your rockets up, fire them at the enemy and he gets 8-10 mins warning before his rockets get blown up... hence the need for solid fuel rockets that could launch the instant the pyrotechnic ignition charges go off inside the thing.
Arriance rockets as ICBMs? only if you're aiming at the alien moonbase on the far side and they've got laser guns to shoot down incoming rockets
I think that the secret service will carry him out of the white house at 12.01 just after Biden starts his term, as trump will have returned to being a private citizen and therefore not authorised to be on US government property
Of course he can kick and scream like a 3 yr old.... but once Biden is sworn in, the US military aint gonna listen to trump.
I think in 4 yrs time , its going to be amazing how many republicans will being saying "trump? I never supported him"
wearing had been mandated in March , did we have enough masks to supply the NHS AND the population?
Was there enough manufacturing to make the masks?
If the answers to the above questions are no, who would you suggest gets priority in being supplied with a mask?
In any case, given the speed the UK borders have been closed by various countries.... its strange how when the Wuhan virus jumped from china to outbreak in Italy back in Feb/March, no one jumped up and shut the borders/closed travel down.....
Oh well back to waiting for me jab