Posts by Martin Gregorie

Re: Peter principle

That said I haven't seen a bio/resume for her and the CIO so just an assumption

Career summary is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Archuleta

She looks to me like a pure political appointee.

In summary: she worked at a Denver law firm, but there is no indication of where she got a law degree or if she has one. She worked for the Clinton administration, was Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation and was National Political Director for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign before being made director of the OPM in late 2013.

Re: I am a tad jealous

The Glasflugel Libelle is IMHO one of the most elegant gliders ever built. That thing just looks stunning from every angle. Absolutely - I thought that as soon as I set eyes on one. Not only that but, with the exception of weak airbrakes, they handle as well as they look and slip really well.

The only downside is that it's too sleek and compact for me to fit comfortably. Bad luck, but there's still hope for you. One of our instructors has an H.205 Club Libelle, which he likes a lot. The cockpit is a lot roomier, the canopy is hinged, it has powerful trailing-edge brakes and they cost about half the price of a Standard Libelle and look a bit like a Schumanised H.301 with a T-tail. The only downside is a fixed main wheel, but from what he says, the effect on XC performance is minimal. If you want to know more, you can find my e-mail address on my website (linked from Lester's article).

Re: Picking the nit...

T34 was way superior to PzKpfw IV (better armament, larger tracks)

Quite, and this was acknowledged by General Guderian, who almost got shot when asked by Hitler what he needed to win the tank war, by answering "A T34 factory". At that time the Germans didn't have the technology to build T34s.

It was the first tank to have fully welded hull and the first to have a gun turret mount that was wider than the chassis, and hence carried a bigger gun than the Panzer IV. It used Christie suspension, as used by faster amour and those wide tracks helped a lot - there are photos showing T34s driving easily past a Panzer IV that had sunk immovably into the same bit of softish ground.

Re: Que?

Now, in the UK do we hear voices of dissension or derision about the Raj and what England did in India to the Indians?

Arguably, the Raj was at least neutral and probably beneficial in its overall effect on the Indian subcontinent:

- it left a unified country[1] where it had found a warring collection of kingdoms, principalities and empires.

- it left a common language. Many Hindi speakers won't speak Tamil and vice versa, but both groups can and will talk to each other in English.

- Indian Rail is an immensely valuable legacy of the Raj, along with the Post Office and a democratic system of government.

[1] IMO the Partition was the Raj's biggest mistake. Would the Taleban exist if Partition hadn't happened?

I have spent time in India, travelled in most parts of it, and have read a fair bit about its history. As I've never been to Africa and so have no relevant experience, I won't comment on that topic except to remark that no European countries seem to have behaved well there.

@1980s_coder

Never used a Transputer, but saw a demo or two.

It was impressive all right: I've seldom seen revolutionary new hardware vanish so fast or so completely.

Re: No banking if Java didn't exist

I like Java, but their premise of "There would be no banking if Java didn't exist" is ridiculous.

Exactly. Banking runs largely on COBOL.

Re: "probably impractical for anything more than a couple of Mills & Boon paperbacks"

...and impractical for a few other reasons other reasons, such as COST and time constraints.

Assume that a drone with a book dangling from its claws can manage 60 mph and has the typical drone endurance of 30 minutes. This sets two physical limits:

1) it can only deliver within 15 miles of its take-off point because its range at 60 mph is 30 miles and it is flying an out-and-return mission.

2) The delivery flight will take 15 minutes from take-off to delivery. This leaves just 15 minutes to receive the order, pick and pack it and get the parcel to the drone port. Otherwise they can't meet the 30 min order-to-in-your-hands target. For this to work reliably they'll need a warehouse at every drone-port.

So, far from letting them sack their current delivery drivers, this cunning plot is likely to need even more people to staff the matrix of warehouses and drone-ports covering the country: these will include delivery drivers to keep the drone-ports stocked with best-selling items, a crew of pickers and packers plus drone operators and mechanics at each drone-port and, of course, a management team for each drone-port.

Doubling or quadrupling the drone's range and/or performance doesn't make a lot of difference to the practicality of this delivery method.

Re: Reading books - wats dat ?

Ray Bradbury had something to say about this too.

See "Fahrenheit 451" with its thought police and the suppression of all fiction apart from Hemmingway-style realism and all entertainment apart from mindless 24 hour soaps.

For those who can't or won't read there's a passable film version....

Re: Copyright law only

I'm entirely in favour of copyright, but why should anybody get compensated for something they created 43 freaking years ago? Especially if it isn't their own work, but merely something they bought.

IMO copyright should be like a patent: it should have a lifetime of, say, 25 years or until the creator's death, whichever is longest, and should be non-renewable. I fail utterly to see why anybody or company should continue to benefit from somebody else's work after that.

Re: I don't understand it

Why is it always near midnight? ...in this case because, though things may not get nasty for some time, we're very close to the point where the our fate becomes inevitable no matter what we do in the future.

We're probably already past the sustainable human population, but is anybody taking notice apart from, amazingly, the Pope? And, even he's not about to admit that two kids would be a lot better than three or to promote contraceptives.

I still don't see any serious attempt to de-carbonise energy production outside of China, and even there they're only doing it because their hand has been forced by a country-wide smog problem that rivals Victorian London. Carbon sequestration is a bad joke due to its appalling overall energy efficiency and a severe lack of very long term guaranteed non-leaking storage. No serious attempts at producing enough low or zero carbon energy, such as desert-based solar-electric or thorium nukes, to replace our current sources are evident, which means they're 20-30 years away at best.

Re: Focus on HTTP/Web breaks everything else

There's also the fact that example.com, example.net and example.org are required by the IETF to be unresolved, which is something I've used in tests in OSS projects. Tests that turned out to fail on Verizon fibre connections, because ISPs getting search revenue is more important than working applications.

All three resolve domains and ping from here as 93.184.216.34, which is registered to a resident of Santa Monica, CA so is unlikely to be anything to do with Virgin's munging. If you look at them with a web browser, they all show the text:

Example Domain

This domain is established to be used for illustrative examples in

documents. You may use this domain in examples without prior

coordination or asking for permission.

And, as a link on this page says they are IANA reserved domains and adds that "These domains may be used as illustrative examples in documents without prior coordination with us. They are not available for registration or transfer", I think you're wrong in claiming that they should not resolve. Did you check your assumptions before posting?

Its an ASK-13 dual seat training glider flying out of Booker, and now on the ground there. They usually aero-tow, so that was probably somebody taking a high tow for the last flight of the day. BTW, did you notice that you were seeing a FLARM trace rather than radar?

Re: Not broke

I agree with the first poster in this thread: the flashing as I slide my mouse over the second level menu bar on my way to the top-level bar is very irritating. I also dislike having pictures associated with the top-level menu bar hide the second level bar.

However, my main beef is that the contrast in colour between an unread article and one that has been read is far too small. It doesn't have to be as big a change as the old blue/scarlet switch, but the current black/dark grey switch is almost impossible to see at a glance: black/dull red (seen already) would make scanning for new articles a lot easier.

Re: Lakes of methanol and ethanol

In your dreams. The lakes are methane as the article said and ethane, not ethanol as the article misprinted, plus (much) smaller amounts of assorted higher molecular weight alkanes. These are flammable, or would be if there was any free oxygen in Titan, and definitely not intoxicating.

Re: Licence required?

More worryingly, assuming this report was accurate there's nothing illegal about what they were doing. We had a presentation on drones at work as part of our attempts to figure out if we need to be worried about our aircraft hitting them.

Since you say you're in the industry, you should know that it is not legal to fly any model aircraft above 400 ft or inside controlled airspace. Drones weighing under 20kg that aren't licensed for airwork and being used for it come into the same category as model aircraft. They are covered by CAP 658:

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP658%204%20Edition%20Amend%201%20June%202013.pdf

Sounds like it would be a good idea for you to read CAP 658. Same applies to anybody else who has a drone and isn't a BMFA member and a member of a model aircraft flying club. I hope you've got third party insurance for that drone.

The main thing that occurred to us was that we could do exactly what the drone operator in this case was doing without breaking the law. - what makes you think he wasn't breaking the law? If you still think its legal, I suggest you have a word with that American idiot who put his drone up to 3500ft straight through his local class B airspace and then posted the video on YouTube. Its a safe bet he didn't enjoy his mandatory visit to the FAA. Do that here, get caught, and you'll be invited to Swanwick for tea and bikkies. You're unlikely to enjoy the experience either.

Re: Location within museum

I agree with both the pevious posters - dumbed down and stuff locked away.

Locked away: when I visited the Science Museum earlier this summer I was looking forward to seeing the Difference Engine run (I was there at the wrong time on my last visit a lonh time back), but now its hermetically sealed into a glass case so that it can't be run even if the museum wanted to do so.

Dumbed down: there was only a very scrappy notice about its purpose, some summary descriptions of prototype parts and drawings and absolutely no attempt at a coherent explanation of how it worked or what the Method of Differences is all about. Humpf!

Re: "Unbiased" search results?

Any search that is not "biased" is not a search. That's what a search engine does, is to winnow out the wheat from the chaff.

Yeah, sure, but is it still unbiased when links to its owners other businesses appear, by magic or pure coincidence of course! near the top of the first page along with more links the all those who put money in their hands? How do you know this can't or won't happen?

Re: No Bacon?

Bacon isn't usually eaten in India or the Middle East. If you've ever seen pigs from those parts or know what they are fed on the chances are that you wouldn't want to eat bits of them either.

Re: FFS...

You'll be fine flying any drone for pleasure provided it weighs less than 7Kg, you don't fly it above 400ft AGL, within an airfield's Air Traffic Zone, in controlled airspace or anywhere close to houses or people and it must be in clear line of sight for the pilot at all times. You can even carry a camera provided its used purely for your own enjoyment: sell an image and you're doing airwork, which needs licences, type approval for the drone and a qualified pilot. These are exactly the same rules that apply to any model aircraft.

CAP 658 lays down the rules for flying model aircraft, UAVs and drones in the UK. It covers both private and commercial use. You can find it here:

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP658%204%20Edition%20Amend%201%20June%202013.pdf

or go to http://www.caa.co.uk and search for CAP658.

Re: a Texas favorite: Armadillo Eggs

Looks good and certainly worth trying, but a translation or two would be useful, so:

- I wouldn't even think of starting from a British sausage - too much bread and other fillers in it, but a pack of pork mince would be a good starting point. So, what goes into an American spicy sausage? i.e what should be mixed into pork mince? Chilli powder and black pepper? Garam Masala? Something else?

- what is Bisquick? Is this just a self-raising wholemeal flour or something more complex? I assume 'C' is an abbreviation for 'cup', so you mean 1.5 cups of Bisquick.

- Shake and Bake sounds like dried breadcrumbs, but how much of it is there in a 'package'?

Re: Experian

Exactly my experience with Experian!

So, I signed up for a credit report to see details of this supposed loan, didn't recognise it at all, and cancelled the 'free' trial account as soon as I'd saved a copy of their report.

Colour me unsurprised. If HMG is going to use that shower for identity verification, all I can say is "God help us all" because bugger all else will.

Re: Eighteen nines? Utter nonsense

With enough redundancy...

They've told us how much redundancy they use - just two copies of the data plus the ZFS checksums which, unlike RAID 5 checksums, can't be used to recreate a corrupt block or the content of a dead disk though they do guarantee to spot corruption. Given that stored data is merely duplicated, there's no point in more than duplicating the rest of the supporting hardware and power supplies.

Like others, I find 9^18 reliability claim incredible: the probability of simultaneous failure of the disks holding both copies of a piece of data has to be much higher than that. Put it another way, even the best fault tolerant kit, with every component at least duplicated and the system configured as a geographically distributed system don't claim more than 9^6 reliability, so whats going on here?

Apple wasn't even the first to sell a microcomputer

I guess you weren't around in the '70s when the fledgling Apple company (3 guys) were literally building new stuff, hardware and software, in their garage

Well I was and I remember seeing commercially built microcomputers (home computers if you prefer) on sale in the Computer Store on Broadway in NYC in the summer of 1976. These were machines made by IMSAI, MITS and SWTPc. All used add-on cards to extend the basic machine, all could be programmed in assembler or BASIC and some were fitted with 8" or 5 1/4" floppy drives, though they mostly used green-screen serial terminals or ASR-33 teletypes for their user interface and were based on MC6800 or Intel 8080 chips rather than the Mostek 6502 that the Apple 1 used.

All of them were on sale in 1975, so they all preceeded the Apple 1 (April 1976) by at least 4 months. All were on sale a good two years before the Apple ][ was announced.

The microcomputer an Apple invention? I don't think so!

Re: Opting out?

I had a quick scan through the docs on the care.data page Andrew linked to, and found the following:

- in Pathfinder Proposal 1, section 2 (Options):

3d "what happens if [the patients] have already opted out and"

3e "their rights to change their mind at any time"

- notes from the care.data meeting on 25th of June:

Page 3 under "Fair processing principles" I found this gem:

d) Opt out/in - this is not a legal issue/right; but is a fair processing issue so has to be included

I'm going to be totally pissed off if these bloated bureaucrats think they are going to make us opt out for a third time or simply decide to ignore opt outs. Given the attention that their masters in Parliament give to public sentiment or to doing anything they promised to do in order to get elected, I wouldn't put it past care.data to do either or both of these things, seeing that they seem to be, in the words of FZ "Totally commited to the fifty bucks".

Re: This is a good thing

...provided that it means we get a fully supported Linux-RT kernel. However, building a proper real-time Linux, i.e. one with deterministic response times to external events, is almost certainly going to mean big changes to the kernel, not just reimplementing the process scheduler.

Re: Nothing new.

But surely member states have nothing to hide and therefor nothing to fear

Probably true, provided you exclude the donations to our elected reps and the parties they belong to from companies which want to hide to effect of their lobbying on the taxes we have to pay (because they don't) and the laws we have that benefit them rather than us.

Re: Yeah that's what Linux was missing!

NONE of the existing mainstream linux partition managers are 'good enough'. fdisk and most of its ilk can't handle devices over 2GB due to the limitations of MBR.

Are you sure you mean Linux and not Windows here? The Linux fdisk utility is perfectly capable of handling bigger partitions than 2GB: I just ran it up to check. I usually use cfdisk because I prefer its user interface.

Re: I don't know much about big engines

Ever see the old Sunbeam with inline crankshaft in action? Every time the rider changed gear the bike rocked from side to side, so I reckon that you'd need to open the throttle really carefully on this monster or the bike would end up sliding down the road on its side with you perched on top burning your bum on the exhaust.

Sensible bikes all have transverse crankshafts to avoid this problem.

Re: Big and not clever.

Word for Windows (version 2 or whatever) did NOT do the job.

IMHO the last worthwhile version of Word was Word for DOS 4.0. It was fast, even on a 12MHz PC-AT, blindingly fast on a 40MHz 386 box, and significantly faster than Word Perfect at operations such as 'go to end of document'. But, by far its best feature was that you didn't ever need to lift your hands off the keyboard or use the mouse. You could mouse round if you wanted, but that wasn't necessary because function key usage was very well thought out, e.g. hit F8 and the current word was selected, hit it again and the sentence was selected. Third tap selected the paragraph. Fast. Simple. Memorable.

Word 5.5 slowed things down by adding crappy drop-dpwn menus which were slower than Word 4's function key system. Word for Windows completely stuffed productivity by making a grab for the mouse a mandatory and frequent distraction from keyboarding. Yes, I know it has 'keyboard shortcuts' but can you honestly say you remember or use more than a couple of them?

In fairness, Libre Office suffers from exactly the same mouse-centric problems as do most graphical text editors (gedit, I'm looking at you).

Me? I use vi when I have to and microEmacs the rest of the time because its entirely keyboard-driven multi-buffered editor and so is the fastest way to input, edit and compare text files. Its also OSS, written in ANSI C and trivially easy to port between OSes and hardware architectures: took me 10 minutes to have it up and running on a RaspberryPi.