Posts by Stevie

Re: particle counting

"Two hundred million, eight thousand and five, two hundred million, eight thousand and six, two hundred million, eight thousand and seven ..."

"Two hundred million, eight thou ... um ... aw! One, two, three"

Thank you Eccles and Bluebottle for the script.

Re: 5...4...3...2...1...>

Jeff ... never talks about Walter and Deke.

Let's just say they were a big disappointment when it came to that fateful "Time to decide, boys: Join The Hood's Gang or go it alone with this crazy rescue thing I've been talking about with Brains over beers" conversation.

Re: Tesla forums?

Thank you for this most useful information.

May I interest you in some herbal supplements while we are here and I am reconfiguring P3nizP1llChimp?

Re: Only until the radio inspectors catch up with you.

Aha(hahahaha)! But all the technoyupps around my secret high-energy physics garage laboratory have ditched landlines for spiffy cellphones, and no-one can get any bars while the magic is happening, so calls to the Bow Street Runners are not a problem.

The trick is to get noticed for fixing problems

Years ago I was recommended to a high-ranking manager as a replacement for a staff member working on a (needlessly) complex system.

I swept in and began suggesting immediate fixes and planning to eliminate various systemic problems, including a number of landmines buried in the recompilation process I thought that a more jaundiced eye than mine might view as a job security perimeter.

Some days later I found that I had been replaced by the original staff member, though no-one told me about it and I found out when our different administration practices collided at full speed and their respective boilers burst spectacularly.

I never understood why I wasn't popular as my work habits had always stood me in good stead in my previous position, the one from which I had received such a glowing write-up. And yes, I considered the "give him a glowing reference or we'll have to keep him" scenario, but had evidence to suggest this was not the case and the recommendation was genuine.

Some years later I had moved to a different department and gained some distance and perspective. I suddenly realized that the manager in charge of Project Limpsalong had made his career from leaping into forest fires and noisily directing crack teams of firefighters to Put Things Right.

In suggesting that we could remove the ignition sources I was threatening his visibility and his promotion prospects.

Unfortunately, even had I realized this in time I would have been doomed. I can't have the power to fix a broken process and just sit on my hands, belting it with a Brummy Screwdriver every time it stalls. It's a pride in work thing.

Oh well.

Re: There are several better alternatives.

Doesn't seem like that's the case from the linked articles and discussions. It seems like there are alternatives, but that they each have their own set of issues and problems, especially when talking about the utopian goal of a user-friendly Linux-based desktop O/S.

What it seems like to me is that those who "bent over and took what Red Hat was giving them" must have had solid reasons for doing so. People who take pride in their work don't usually take an unpopular step unless there's a net benefit.

Re: er!

That's not what Lee and Perrins print on their labels.

They say Worcestershire, as the picture on their Wikipedia page will show.

Re: Bah!

We may not be talking about the same story.

Sand Pit Woes 4 CrazyOldCatMan

So, you never heard of building a sandpit with a lid?

Tsk!

Recommended purchase: the Step 2 Crabbie Sandbox.

Had one for best part of a decade. Weighed lid with a housebrick. Cat-free the entire time. Eventually it succombed to a decade outside in New York weather. UV did for the plastic.

Crabbie Sandbox is the best use of kid play $$ I ever made. Just add sand and crabby kid.

I'll keep my upright arcade version of Space Invaders.

With it's sideways screen.

The reason no-one could get the same "look" to their space-invader knock-offs (or is that "knocks-off?) is that to get the resolution right they turned the screen 90 degrees in the cabinet. You were actually playing the game sideways.

Of for such neato headslap solutions in this day and age. Now there would be huge investment and cost overruns trying to put more lines in a TV.

Can I just say to all the Atari haters that Pong Tanks is the greatest post-pub head-to-head mano-y-mano needlematch-grudgefest game ever invented since the Big Bang, and always will be.

Re: In the USofA, three wire cable colors are

green - ground (earth), white - neutral, black (usually the """hot""" wire) and red

Maybe in *your* part of the USA.

In mine they are white, red, black and unclad (ooer missus).

For them out of the know one uses such wire to cable an electric cooker. The electric supply to the house is on two "phases" - sides of a center tapped pole-pig in reality, call 'em "up" and "down". Your breaker box has twin lines of breakers (or places to put them) and they alternate up-down-up-down as you descend each line (in NY). A 220v breaker straddles two slots. Your unclad/green wire goes to the box frame as your ground. Your white goes to the center tap as your "neutral" (NY code does not use the term) and the red and black are connected to the up and down live. So now you have red-black giving you 220v to power the burners, and black-white giving you the 110v for the oven light.

Unless you have bought your house from a miserable bodger who used three (aka four) wire cable for two (aka three) wire cable jobs, which means every wiring job is a voyage of discovery and pants wetting as you try and figure out whether the red wire is actually doing a) anything and 2) what it was color coded for.

Many years ago I was going to surprise my wife by installing a laundry room while she was visiting friends for a few days. I read the code carefully (being from the UK I was confident but properly nervous about differences in taming-the-volts approach). "Every grounding electrode must have its own space in the ground connector bar" it said. I opened the breaker box, unfastened the breaker panel and swung it out, and a rat's nest of wire tumbled out at me. Clearly the last electrician to muck about in there had been lax about code best practices. But there was worse horror to come.

Once the dangly wires were all dragged out of theater, I could see the ground bar, with every position crammed with three or four wires under the securing screws. Luckily I had a spare bar and room on the mount to install it, but I still ended up having to leave some wires sharing - albeit only two wires per position.

Feeling good about having made things better I looked closely at the wire tangle, and then saw that there was a red wire just dangling free. So I spent an afternoon confirming that Mr Sparksen-Flashen had just used the wrong cable type for the job at hand and the red wire hadn't simply snapped off its breaker with age/poor installation procedures.

Then I moved a breaker and I don't want to talk about the chaos that caused any more.

Re: The most amazing engineering

Sorry, Lost all faith ... but those situations do not pertain. Every last one is a straw man you constructed to make some point lost in the blither.

Smallish airfields were not host to Concorde. It flew internationally, so it required an "international" airport at which to drop anchor. Pesky thing, national immigration requirements. And if you think Concorde was loud, you should have heard that Phantom - standard issue at the US airbases in Norfolk when I were a lad. Or a Shackleton taking off for coast watch duties.

Your point about choices being made in the "now" conveniently ignores the facts that 20 years down the road you are living in it and it is "now", and that the Steel Mill requires a re-zoning that will take over a year to complete and in this time of instant communication would never be able to be done quietly.

And if you can't figure out the issues with living in an area re-zoned from commercial to industrial use, you have to take what's coming. usually a whacking great property tax break for having a steel mill next door, though the mill would probably want to buy you out so your hovel could be turned into a storage shed for coil steel.

Re: History shows that no one will pay for a Web browser

Too true, Mage. I remember what the downvoters don't; that Netscape Navigator, the most developed browser in the world, cost $40 to buy until Microsoft gave everyone IE 3 for free.

I also remember the for all the froofaraw about MS contravening standards (that often were not in place fast enough to keep pace with what developers were demanding), NN had it's own set of non-standard features (like Layers), but was given a pass by the vocal majority.

Free Browsers came directly out of that pissing match. Anyone who doesn't believe all the companies making them would charge for browsers if they could is living in a dream world of faries and magic and Eskimos.

Re: ONLY! THE! CRIMINALS! WILL! HAVE! THEM!

No, Bob, the police will have them too.

Please take your meds.

Re: Never mind that animal

Scrapping is the only sane option for anyone who has seen Below.

Who would want to descend to periscope depth in a machine haunted by a possibly headless vengeful ghostly revenant?

Re: Errrr....

If you've ever tried to make a cup of tea on a high mountain while traveling at exactly mach 1 you'll know what I mean.

FTFY

Re: According to the BBC, at least, he's autistic.

You don't need to point that out. The Asberger's defense is never far behind an indictment of this sort.

I'm bewildered that the phone message doesn't send screaming alarms off in everyone's heads. Assume he got away with this. How far were we from seeing his name linked to a "swatting" with what may very well be lethal consequences for the poor bugger out in the Real World dealing with this 'silly internet teenager"s behaviour?

The Reiser is Innocent crowd* are still alive and well it would seem, ready to explain and forgive scary behaviour in their heroes of the moment.

* For those too young to remember, Reiser (he one who invented the Linux filesystem that bears his name) was found hosing out his brand new car. He had removed the rear seats, carpets and so on and was "washing" it. Police, looking for his missing (presumed dead) wife thought this extremely suspicious, but people in these comment pages loudly proclaimed the ordinariness of dismantling a new car and turning a garden hose on it's insides "to clean it".

Re: mouse golf!

My mother in law has the same mouse technique, with the addition of a furious stabbing action when a button click is needed, one so aggressive that it causes the mouse pointer to move off target for the second of the double clicks.

I took one look and bought her a trackball. Job done and she loves it.

Now we have to come up with a way she can use her digital point-and-shoot camera without switching the field of view to everyone's kneecaps.