Posts by Tom 7

Re: Key collisions - forced decisions

If the keyboard does everything then a good set of well chosen short cut commands is far far faster than a combination of keyboard and mouse. So long as ALL commands are at your fingertips then with a little practice you get exactly what you ask for whereas a mouse, even a pixel off, will wreak havoc with your menus or command choices, as will returning to the keyboard from the mouse.

But unless you have had the fortune to start before the mouse became ubiquitous its unlikely you will believe this and spend the time (and we're talking weeks not days) of sitting down with an editor and beating it into submission.

If you get a chance though, ditch the mouse and in around about a month using the same editor for pretty much everything you'll start to notice a noticeable increase in fluidity and production.

Re: Wind farms

This wasnt a common weather phenomenon for them. I'd keep an eye out for a few more of these. Especially when La Nina is about.

Re: this will make our computers and phones thousands of times faster in the future

Once about 300,000 patents have expired. Its not worth making graphene commercially until then.

Re: telecom secor naming...

Should really be email-modernism or uber-modernism I guess.

Or possibly meals-on-wheels-modernism for old gits like me.

Re: Raise a beer

My concern is the things a couple of dozen light years away with the the sq light year array picking up a message from earth that seems to translate as "Go stick your head in a pig".

Re: Someone with access to an MRI machine has misunderstood machine learning again...

Bonne Langford? AUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH!

Re: Adaptive Optics

Not a good week for a survey - it was -12 windchill here and too much eye-watering when it has been clear!

Or possibly trained. No, almost certainly trained.

Re: The dream of stable trans-uranics

There are a few astronomers who think they may have found some in a star somewhere where there are some unknown absorption/transmission lines but I do wonder what use the stuff might have and what the definition of 'stable' is. After all H, He and LI are quite stable but Castle Bravo proves we can modify the definition of stable. I wonder how stable a box of transuranics might actually be if hit by a random cosmic ray at just the right spot.

Re: We've Done This Before....

I could make 2.4Gb work over 10km using the technology we had then. We did submarine fibre and I could see a use for that but for domestic use? We were looking at fibre TV but even in those days we could not have even worried the bandwidth. The hardware did price out at something around the annual phone line maintenance costs. At the time I though we could have sold millions of basic connections and retrofitted protocols later. Boy did I underestimate the potential!

Re: A question from an undereducated old idiot......

But the thing about 'oh shit' ball is it can be picked up by any of a thousand lints and replaced by something that is less likely to go wrong. ISTR using preprocessor macros to make things safe.

Belts braces and a belly button stud for this sort of thing.

Re: Open source resistors?

Been open source FETs for bloody decades already!

Re: Bit sad really

Sort of pleased they haven't - because we might need to put some in there ourselves!

Re: IP4ME

And a Bloody Mary doesnt have blood or Mary in it but its got Worcestershire Sauce.

Chin Chin!

Re: It's for

They seem to have given up forcing coolness on others than fuck. It seems Android has better faster changing social meeja. Whatsapp lasted about 9 months with the kids and Signal is about to be dropped by the sound of it.

Re: WTF

Nothing like having all your passwords and stuff either bypassed or having to re-enter them.

Re: And get a better education...

Education is in for a real sea change I went in the late 70s and we had classes of 60+ and I soon found you were just scribbling down what the lecturer was speaking and with the numbers in the class you couldn't really interrupt. I found a workaholic mate who lent me their lecture notes and I found I could copy those up in just over half the time but because he wasn't a responsible figure I checked his notes as I went along - the lecturer was believed unless someone spotted their mistakes at the time. Something that only came to light in revision. My dad was a uni prof and took us abroad when doing summer work and that often involved being allowed to go to lectures given in summer schools by people who obviously loved their jobs and subjects. Production line uni was shit in comparison and I dread to think what my eldest is going to come up against next year.

As you note some lecturers are excellent, some rubbish. We now have the whole world connected and can aggregate all these lecture into a collection of accessible and classifiable classes where people can pick and choose the ones that suit them best. Well once we realise education should never be a profit centre

Re: WTD

I dont know what the job was but I'd imagine if you could fill in the time sheet in 15 minutes then it wasn't worth itemising. I remember filling in a wedge of time for researching how to fill in a time sheet. After all they wouldnt want the customer to sue for me falsifying time sheets.

Re: (((3xbody)++)++)++

But since then its been pretty stable. For about 3.8 billion years.

Re: New Features

I think the problem with phone cameras is every phone has them. We have a few hundred gig of pictures taken on phones here that will probably only ever be seen by my AI experiments.

Re: Foot pedal

My mum had a sowing machine with a foot pedal. She could control the sowing machine speed with it in what you would call sub-pixel accuracy. It was simply a button with about 3/4 inch of play. She could get it to go from off to a gentle hum (no movement) through to flat out with seemingly infinite precision. I could get it to stop or so fast it sewed right through my thumb, nail bone and all, before giving up. I used to use it to modify clothes (at 6'5 nowt fitted) but never got past digital.

30 years later I sat down with it and found I too could control it with precision and was baffled until I started to teach my daughter to drive.

Since then I've used midi-pedals for helping control games and might try a ball mouse or two for some 3d stuff!

Re: Worth making a note of.

I wouldnt bet on RISC-V not being able to reduce its power consumption to match PDQ. After all its in all its developers interest and I doubt if much of the technology is IPed (anymore) or rocket science.

Re: 'we believe this is not widespread'

"Oh, right, stupid me. It would have cost more." but it never does does it? This lot really would let the ship sink than spend the money on a haperth of tar, especially when they can spend the money in a mates pub.

Re: No WiFi?

Presumably with the WiFi off though? Cant see a Wake On WIfi being anywhere near as frugal as Wake On Lan

Not if your telemetry is OK. Imagine a video on the shuttle looking down - might still be flying the buggers.

Re: It's called lock-in

So you are saying BT is a monopoly because BT is a monopoly and will forever be so?

Re: Life Lesson

And then you jump ship and suddenly no-one can remember how to make it work. And then you get a phone call and negotiate a large wedge.

Re: Helicopter danger

Well, they could use drones.

Re: Huge failure - No actually it wasnt

Its not a sad day for your team. How were you to know the steel accommodation sphere was so close beneath the surface.

Re: As long as the UK doesn't copy it

I dont think its racist - merely the land of the free deciding free trade isn't all its cracked up to be and trying to find excuses to hamper imports. They've done it before and they'll do it again.

Re: Fluorescents...

At 6'5" doorways have always caused me trouble but nothing like when leaving one room where you could generate a good 1" spark and the lingering smell of burning hair. or on more than one occasion an involuntary jerk showering hot tea in the air. My forehead still prickles when lightning is about!

Not as bad as the time I slipped on the golf course and got a wet backside and then sliced it nearly out of bounds and, being delighted to find I had an easy chip on to the green failed to notice the wire behind me was held up on insulators addressed the ball and got 8KV through my coccyx and couldn't control my legs for the next 3 holes.

Re: I'm finding this hard to believe...

And if it lasts 15 years it still wont be financially beneficial to me. I have no need for any more oomph than they've got. They does backup, file sharing, some web serving, network monitoring and occasionally run some video capture and motion detect and get_iplayer. The only time they sweat is when there's a power cut (we get quite a few). A Pi-Zero would be more than I need but the ssds seem to be a bit annoyed with power cuts!

Re: I'm expecting Raspberry Pi Trust to take an interest in RISC-V...

it goes against one of their core philosophies which is one OS to rule them all.Its why they didnt have a 64bit Raspbian (and still dont). The 64 bit Raspbian probably nearly doubles the amount of code to manage, a Risc-V would add another 50% or more.

I think I will be getting a few of these devices myself but they are in a different head space than the Raspberry foundation currently aims at, more Uni than school level.