Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
My old physics teacher at school used to repair and move old church organs and we'd sometimes get offered labouring work. Much as I enjoy electronics there is a lot to be said for a 16 footer at full blast in bizarrely shaped stone building that even Mr Hammond never came close to.
When I was in chip design/manufacture 30 odd years ago I'm pretty sure staff wages were not really a consideration in processes that were nearly fully automated. The only reason why 'abroad' got the work was because someone would invest in the plant needed to make it. In the US the industry is worth £250 billion and employs 300,000 people. I doubt they're on near a million a year each.
Got a scratched 40" HD TV for 50p! The scratch is not visible when its on and it does 1024*768 beautifully. Only problem is its best viewed from about 6' which is great for the eyes but it does take up a lot of real estate and the missus wont let me put the 4hd TV up with it partly because that would need another dining table! I will take it out to the man shed to experiment with dual monitoring with a smaller closer monitor as I've go an itch to dig out some old php web programming stuff which has suddenly become relevant.
I have a horrible feeling we had exactly the same problem with a Novell loaded machine around the millennium.
I think it was the only outage on that machine for several years but finally pushed the users on it over to MS Exchange so they could enjoy monthly outages like the rest of us.
In the US its the deepest pockets that either win or drag it on for decades. And you can pretty much guarantee the government lawyers will manoeuvre to get parts of it held in secrecy. This is the country that executed Ethel Rosenberg even though they knew she was innocent ffs.
We've got a couple of holiday cottages and we send the details to customers and over the phone explicitly make sure they've have the documents on the mobile devices and a printed copy of the directions as postcodes in the country can be quite large.
Result - people finally getting in at 3am and phoning us to ask for the wifi password so they can download the documents!
I use a lot of OO methodology when developing databases. I do all object access through Stored Procedures so I can change the code that access it or the database structure independently - with security setups this also prevents Web access fucking with your DB - no SQL can be run by the web user. Postgres procedure overloading can be a bit of a pain in the arse when doing this so I frequently do early development on MariaDB but that's probably because I haven't RTFM for postgres thoroughly enough to find a workaround there. But dumping the MariaDB to sql and loading it Postgres is normally pretty quick.
I can see them being more than happy to work on GPU stuff for it in a big open way. Its in their interests after all and if they want to be malicious undercutting closed source software that might be used to undermine them and getting most of the world involved as well....
At an amateur rocket launching day I saw a chap launch small rockets on a piston - the rocket fired its exhaust into a closed tube through a hole in a disk that accelerated the rocket up the tube with seriously impressive acceleration - leaving the tube at an order of magnitude or so faster that it would have accelerated under its own thrust. OK these were little rockets but I wonder if the principle could apply to the VLS setting with a pre-wet providing steam for thrust too?.
I was at BTRL and at one point I could spend £5k and would have to explain it later. After privatisation the inundated the place with contract accountants and managers and after an interesting time where the cost of sending a tape to the US was over £20 and I couldn't get it sent to meet a deadline for chip manufacturing so a $300k project was several months late I started a bit of an investigation with the union and we worked out that BT was spending around £100 checking every £5 people spent. This was at the time they gave everyone a level above me a Mondeo whether they wanted or needed it. Many were left in the car park as they had far better machines at home and nowhere else to leave the Mondeo.
I was approached by someone who wanted to know why I'd called NY on several occasions. I hadn't but the call times matched my lunch in the canteen times when generally the 5 or 6 of us in that office would be enjoying subsidised food and possibly Adnams on a Friday. (or <£4 bottles of Chateau Neuf de Pap if we were dining visitors). Nothing else came of it though I did learn that a chap in one of the nearby offices had a wife who spent a lot of time working away in NY.
I started a Co-op account before they had to de-mutualise (I'd get dividends for taking cashback at the local co-op store!). They then closed down the local branch and I never managed to get the online banking working so I ended up travelling 60 miles to the nearest branch and spent an hour in their setting up on-line banking. I returned home to find the online banking I'd set up just wouldnt work and despite numerous phone calls it never worked. They'd ask security questions that I'd never given answers to! I'd several other bank accounts so I used those and then one day I just though sod it I'll see if I can close the account so rang up and gave them a few details and they transferred a very large wedge of money to an account with the same name in a different bank but without any security questions. I dont think I've come across anything quite so shit in a long time.
Not quite true. A friend of mine dropped his harrier in the med - the fishing boat nearby managed to grab the last bit of his parachute as his seat took him under! He can round in hospital under guard and was treated like a pariah until the plane was recovers and a broken link took the blame. He later died along with a trainee when he flew into the ground at the bottom of a loop. There were murmurs of software error being involved but I think he took the blame.
My granddad was engineer on the R33. My bro recently found hand written instructions for servicing its engines - at least one of which is in storage somewhere. He was convinced H2 could be used in airships safely in the 60s and that you could make airships that would carry passengers in comfort to the US in under a day cheaper than airlines could then.
I do wonder if now we could try the same now - the fuel savings are potentially enormous - especially as the can be covered in PV and run entirely CO2 free.
Also they knew what they were trying to program. I find actually understanding the problem makes the coding faster and better. As I got more experienced in coding I discovered that almost everything people try to do in business has already been emulated in code too and often better than businesses try to implement it. The pleasure in writing functioning code that does what a customer needs rather than what they asked for is often matched by the look of pleasure in the customers when you casually demonstrate something 'I thought you might like to take a look at this as I think it may help cover your requirements'. Alas some people would rather you did what they asked even if it wouldnt work,
I did see a design for silicon 'tubes' - the cathode was replaced with a sharp point to induce a very strong electric field to induce electron discharge and then just miniature other valve stuff. Not sure how long the cathodes lasted but it did look promising for vacuum ICs.
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