Posts by John Sager

Re: @John Sager

Ah well, I suppose an Ad Hominem will always close the argument. At least we don't get Godwin's Law on this topic.

Re: It seems evident that

Look at the graphs that have been published showing the divergence of all the various model predictions of temperature rise in the future. The actual outturn is right along the bottom of that divergence. The models are pretty much GIGO so far, and essentially all the doom & gloom is based on them.

Too many humans are awful, because statistically it includes idiots who don't know better and sociopaths who do but delight in buggering it up for everyone else.

Near where I live there is a lovely spring, impossible to get to in the summer because of the nettles & other vegetation but a sight to behold in winter. Some 'well-meaning' person put markers around so we removed them. Selfish? If too many idiots went too close they would collapse the sides of the spring pool and that would be that.

Re: End of Life

Seen any bridges, or nuclear reactors like that?

Re: Hardly on topic

I used to have to enter the first 16 opcodes by hand to make the machine eat the punched tape with program on it

Been there, done that, in the early 70s. Honeywell DDP-516. We didn't need to do it every time but that small amount of bootloader sometimes got corrupted - no memory protection there!

Re: Arrghh!

It's a standard tradeoff. If you have a signal modulated as, say, 64QAM, then that signal requires a certain signal/noise ratio to be received with a low enough error rate. If you double the data rate using 128QAM then you need, typically, 3dB more s/n ratio to get the same low error rate. Fibre systems work with more s/n ratio than strictly necessary to cope with equipment and fibre route variations, and in some cases some of that dB margin can be traded for extra bandwidth if the stats on the link say it can be done reliably.

Re: Linux Bros'

If you want to be able to do stuff then a CLI is essential, as Microsoft have very belatedly realised by introducing powershell. cmd.exe is/was no shell worth the name. On Linux I use the GUI for browser, email, file manager and an IDE but much of the rest is cli. I've got about 8 terminal emulators running over 5 virtual desktops on this laptop. Not all in use at once but they all have different CWDs for ease of use.

Re: Ours

It's a toxin to us in high concentrations, but not to plants & algae. And what's a toxic level? The atmosphere is about 400ppm at the moment. The partial pressure of it in your lungs makes it about 100 times that concentration.

Re: TomTom Lifetime Maps

My wife recently bought a s/h Kia with built-in satnav. Kia have a nice app (Windoze or Mac only☹️) that will download new maps for a large range of their vehicles, going back quite a way. So with the investment of a few Gb of my bb allowance and a bigger SD card, the car now has the latest maps (May 2022). Not sure how long they will support that particular model but I'm hopeful it'll be a while.

In stark contrast Audi demand £200 to update the maps on my car, and the satnav itself probably got made when Noah was alive!

Re: Years ago....

I remember seeing a document on this from the US Treasury back in the 90s. At the time I thought 'how stupid, why don't you just make greenbacks harder to forge?' But of course the US Treasury gets what it wants and so we get the pattern of little yellow dots that all photocopiers now recognise. I wonder if there are other features that, say, a FourierTtransform would show up that are also used.

I think if I felt I needed to do that I would go back to Gentoo. I used it on some of my test machines back in the day, but I got a bit fed up of the rebuild almost every day aspect. If I left it too long then I started to get sync issues between what I had and what the current build was. There's a lot to be said for LTS versions, and it's not very often that something I want to do needs stuff that's a bit more recent. As always YMMV.

Re: Clever

Not regular enough. An octahedron if you like pointy bits or a dodecahedron for something with a bit of magic (12 bits actually).

Left-ponders still use acre-feet as a measure of volume, particularly large volumes of water. At the outflow of Lake Tahoe there are stats on flow and lake volume in acre-feet.

Re: Woke Inc

I would expect SpaceX would want to hire staff on merit, disregarding colour of skin and/or sexual orientation, or indeed, sex.

Certainly if I were running a space operation like that, technical competence with the ability to work in teams and with all sorts of other skilled people would be far and away the number one priority.

I've used Xubuntu for many years, and will probably stick with it until I can't adequately vanquish another systemd dragon. I've used Linux desktops since I gave up a Sun workstation in the 90s, though Windows occasionally demands obesiance, most recently with a Kia satnav upgrade. But VMware handles that.

Re: Why a "retired farmer"?

I did that in my teenage pyro phase. A mate started work at a company making interior door handles for cars. As the colours had to match they had a warehouse full of pigments and yes, you guessed it, finely divided Al and ferric oxide. We filled a paint tin with a stoichiometric mixture. However fine powder traps a lot of air and we couldn't remove it - no vacuum pump. Anyway we lit the Mg ribbon & stood well back. Of course the trapped air expanded mightily so we got a magnificent sparkly fire fountain. Then the tin melted and we had molten iron running over the ground from the reaction & the tin. Lots of fun without the tell-tale bangs from other experiments...

Of course we would be arrested for that under anti-terrorism legislation these days. I assume there is a statute of limitations...

Re: Nous devons arrêter ces actions!

Even the Russians use СТОП. And of course ARRÊT doesn't fit on a stop sign...

Re: A country

I doubt the plastic ones wil disappear any time soon.

I've bought lots of stuff from Amazon for at least 10 years and I don't feel ashamed one iota! I also buy stuff from other places too, even visiting bricks & mortar establishments. The company meets a need, and is very successful at it. If there wasn't the need they would have gone bust.

That's the way businesses usually work. The successful ones spot a need and work to meet it. Businesses with a market that goes away go bust, voluntarily liquidate or find another purpose. Not much call for fletchers, thatchers and livery stables these days.

Re: One day...

Are you au fait with the argot in Ballet, or Ice Skating? Same thing here, it's words that have a specific meaning in that context. It makes communication within the discipline easy at the expense of giving outsiders & neophytes an education task. Some people see that as a deliberate rejection of outsiders but that isn't the primary intent in most cases.

Re: Gaping hole

There's your problem right there. If you have lost faith in the pols to 'do the right thing' whatever that is, then why should you think that a group of businessmen trying to sell advertising would do any better? Free speech is what it says - free, not hedged about with specific exceptions imposed by those in power who don't like being criticised, or who see threats to their income stream. And the multiple layers of litigation opportunities in the EU and elsewhere are a stupid cop-out.

Re: There Oughta Be a Law

It's probably not feasible these days. The receiver, decoder and screen driver chips all assume a CPU running a driver. It may be possible to run an event loop with no OS, but even a basic RTOS would give a lot more flexibility. I wonder how far back you have to go before the TV used a CPU to coordinate stuff. 70s?

V2V

This will help a lot. If a vehicle is just broadcasting what it's doing, like AIS on ships, then that gives other vehicles a lot of situational awareness to do useful stuff. Of course AIS can be, and is occasionally, spoofed so we start to get into authentication hell to avoid that, or perhaps not because it's probably not a real problem.

Re: A language they cannot read?

Part of the problem with existing models is that they are cruft upon cruft to many levels, so starting afresh is a good idea. I too wouldn't use a dynamically typed language that needs to be very optimised to be useful at scale. Since FORTRAN is still used for that type of fast vector program, it still would be a better choice than Julia. Modern FORTRAN now has a lot of goodies from modern language design - a far cry from my one-term course at uni in 1970 based on McCracken's book of that era!

Re: Trust but verify...

A friend had a copy of Roger's for project naming...

If you use a monotonic timescale, eg UTC, then accurate time periods fall out naturally on whatever date. Also logfiles should do the same. You can always get the time of day back after the fact from the TZ rules if that happens to be a factor in the log events. Now UTC does jump by a second occasionally, but so far it has never jumped backwards, so it's still monotonic even though a period measured over a leap second event will be out by a second. In practice who cares, except astronomers or spacecraft navigators.

Re: So, American Trade wars work?

I think the planning and execution cycle for this would have started well before DJT thought about being President. I expect advancing their own independent capabilities in many areas is a long term goal of the Chinese anyway.

Re: 50 ohm coax

I remember installing vampire taps on the thick coax in our testbed. Not to be recommended. Then we had strings of RG58 or equivalent running round the office. It was the move from hubs to switches that really made the technology work well and scale. I'm still boggled that we're talking about 100 Gbit ethernet now.

Re: Privacy. We've heard of it.

It's always going to be a cost/benefit calculation. If you are a paranoid zillionaire then you could go to extreme lengths and still not feel 'safe'. For us mortals best to do enough to make it harder than for the next guy. For frivolous stuff WhatsApp may be good enough even though Zuck can make some use of the metadata but use Signal for more critical stuff.

The big change came when it became easy to surveille lots of data going past. Previously with post & telephone the sheer work involved in checking any significant volume self-limited the process, except in extreme (East German) cases. Now it's easy enough to get done even on multi-terabit submarine cables. So if it's important to you, wrap it in the digital equivalent of a Foreign Office courier case. It's hard to stop the metadata i.e courier X flew London to Kabul on Y flight at Z time, but you don't know what was in the case.

Another example: I was out walking the other day, heard louder aircraft noise than usual & looked up. Four engine jobby - 747 or A380? but neither seemed likely. So out came Flightradar. It's a RAF C-17 out of Brize Norton heading east. Not perhaps unexpected in current circumstances. Anyway, my interest piqued, I followed it periodically, all the way to Ukraine... That's metadata, easy to get but tells me nothing about what was in it or why.

Re: Welcome to MUMSnet

It's worth also pointing out that the Gods of the Internet, i.e. the Regional Internet Registries, have developed a better plan for public address allocation than that which just growed up higgledy-piggledy with IPv4. That makes router routing tables a whole lot smaller, even with a much bigger address space.