* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Rust marks five years since its 1.0 release: The long and winding road actually works

Tom 7

Obligitory XKCD

https://xkcd.com/2309/

Beer rating app reveals homes and identities of spies and military bods, warns Bellingcat

Tom 7

Re: We've reached peak fuckwit

Barcelona also has a cathedral of beer or something. I've been there but I cant seem to recall the name for some reason. But beer is different there than here in the UK. Craft beer places seem to have mediocre tapas - possibly because its easier to sommelier for a more limited and expected taste range.

Mind you I had a 'sour' in the Nags Head in Reading not long ago and I doubt there's is a food in the world that would complement that.

Tom 7

Re: We've reached peak fuckwit

Sounds like the sort of app that pub landlords can use to totally denigrate fellow landlords establishments and sados who've been chucked out to do the same. Have you never read an Amazon review. I would give it the same respect a government speech - zilch. Sod proxy drinking - I didnt spend 50 hours tearing up my car with my fingernails while my daughter( who has no interest in drinking learnt to drive) not to actually visit places if they let me out, My favourite establishment serves beer that tastes like piss occasionally but when its good (and it can be very very good) I'm not likely to let others know about it.

Tom 7

Re: The wicked and the fools ...

And everyone else realises we're already there.

Tom 7

Re: Anyone in a sensitive job: do not use social media

I'd be suspicious of why you didnt use it and immediately set loose some autonomous drones to track you and find out everything about you!

Tom 7

Re: Even worse...

As a gentleman isolator I've returned to my old hobby of homebrewing. Seem to be getting it right and the supply normally lasts a few days whereas sending the misses out for battery acid and hand sanitizer normally comes up with just battery acid and my cooking covers that area of taste.

Tom 7

Loose lips seem to go " Waffle Spaff Waffle"

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Tom 7

Re: Machine Learning

One thing about this is it wont be long before the game writers realise CUDA is generally available or Linux and there's a bit of a market there for little effort.

Tom 7

As far as I can tell the only problem with Linux desktop is it doesnt run Windows games and a couple of office thingies. The kids I've been working with can do pretty much anything on a RaspberryPi standard desktop without batting an eyelid. Its the older people who lack computer skills seems to be the problem!

Tom 7

Re: Nothing to do with Linux, all to do with Windows.

I was using Cygwin XWindows to run Linux stuff in the office on company PCs 25 years ago. The 'desktop' was shit but I could install and run software to test certain things faster than I could get permission to buy or use a license for some MS product from the PHB at the time. It was the only way I could debug some things on SQLServer 4,5 without grinding the whole system to a halt which is what happened using the MS way to do it. Never worked out why. Even building MS stuff was faster without the overhead of Visual Studio which at the time was designed to make things easier for the programmer but by no means the underlying OS.

Tom 7

You probably do.You may not have a choice over what your customers or employers wants but there's no reason for you not to enjoy the luxury of Linux other than masochism.

Fancy watching 'Bake Off' together with mates and alone at the same time? The BBC's built a tool to do that

Tom 7

Re: And yet they still can't manage subtitles....

Even get_iplayer handles them!

Tom 7

Re: He made one mistake

They dont do that currently. Well they just ask if you have a licence and that seems to be it.

Latest NHS IT revolution is failing to learn lessons from the last £10bn car crash

Tom 7

Re: Same as it ever was

If a large scale IT project had someone capable of learning lessons that person would be bought up by one of the contracting companies and generally kept out of the way.

The government hasn't gone to all the trouble of arranging things so the NHS cant do things efficiently for people to come along and prove them wrong..

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

Tom 7

Re: I'm not a smoker, but

I think the cigarette was used to light the fuse not be part of it. What happens is the cigarette generally only lights the end of the fuse so it works as a fuse whereas a flame can light the fuse anywhere along its length resulting in seriously ouchy fingers.

Tom 7

Re: This lead to additional requirements

Much in the same way there was no evidence Hiroshima was bombed as no remains of a bomb were found?

Tom 7

Re: At least the O-ring wasn't frozen this time...

And the joy of putting the motor once repaired into a dustbin of water in order to check it the tell tale works to indicate all is well.

Tom 7

Re: Of course it was going to hit the boat!

My father used to experiment with fireworks. He decided that those ones with the 4' long stick that looked a bit like a fairy tale castle turret would be good for a 2 stage rocket - the stars coming out would surely light the other one to carry on up for a second shower.

Of course the extra weight slowed the first launch and it only made it a hundred feet or so up and showered everyone my dad with stars. While we were all leaping around as the ground sparkled and cracked beneath our feet and our coats glowed and smoked the second stage, severely wounded by the first dropped to about 6 feet above my dads head before igniting the rocked and payload simultaneously showering everyone but my dad and landing about two feet in from of him like some demented fountain, When it went out and we'd once again patted ourselves out and discovered no one was actually hurt we all burst out laughing till it really did hurt.

I love the smell of fireworks but to this day I can remember the foul foul smell my scorched woollen duffel coat carried for weeks,

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Tom 7

Re: 1% are the 1%

Gaiman wasn't born when that joke was first aired.

You can't have it both ways: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

Tom 7

I've been doing that for years. I worked there for a couple and even as a smoker the air there scared me. The things I used to cough up or remove from my nostrils! Last time I went was to the GBBF after living in the country for a while and the beer all tasted of diesel!

Tom 7

Re: So the technology is imperfect?

At uni I broke my glasses (I'm very short sighted) and couldn't be bothered to get new ones. I could recognise most of my friends from a distance by the way their blur moved. I'd forgotten all about this until you mentioned it when a vision of a certain seriously attractive lady appearing over a hill popped into my brain! She had a particularly recognisable gait having legs all the way to her armpits. And arse length blond hair too but I could recognise her walking towards me from 1/2 mile away while I couldn't see a lamppost twenty feet away.

Tom 7

Re: Chinese technology ...

Really? I didnt meet anyone other than white anglo saxon until I was 11 an have no difficulty in recognising my bame friends. I dont think I know anyone else who has problems apart from people who are out and out racists.

Tom 7

There is another corona virus that you can catch again a year later. It is possible that herd immunity is just a pipe dream until we get a vaccine.

Tom 7

Re: Anti-coronavirus masks may thwart our creepy face-recog cameras, London cops admit

And with Johnsoon failing so badtly even the Fail is having a pop at him it looks as if Gove will shortly be our next unelected PM!

Beer gut-ted: As many as '70 million pints' spoiled during coronavirus pandemic must be destroyed in Britain

Tom 7

K'in eejets.

Just distil the lot into hand cleaner or tax free gin as I like to call it.

If you're going to spend $3tn, what's another billion? Congress urged to inject taxpayer dollars into open anti-Huawei 5G radio tech

Tom 7

Re: Open RAN

Not if you dont want to.There may be patents on this stuff but most have serious prior art and I dare say Huawei have enough $s to make many patent trolls life (?) hell.

Tom 7

Re: Only themselves to blame

Some do.

Source code for seminal adventure game Zork circa-1977 exhumed from MIT tapes, plonked on GitHub

Tom 7

I think an GUI screen emulator might be more use to most people. Could probably do one with curses!

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

Tom 7

Re: Calling Isaac Newton...

If they had one Malta would have very good press quite quickly though!

Tom 7

1m/s**2

So in a day that would be a pathetic 54 miles a second or close on 200,000mph. Not to be sneezed at without a mask.

Behold: The ghastly, preening, lesser-spotted Incredible Bullsh*tting Customer

Tom 7

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

sorry - I dont know where the weeks have flown!

Tom 7

Re: There should be an IT Driving Test

Judging from my drive around yesterday to charge the car after 6 rusting I think driving tests should be re-done every year too!

Australian contact-tracing app sent no data to contact-tracers for at least ten days after hurried launch

Tom 7

Spare phone

I wont load it on my phone but I will dig out a spare phone , clean it thoroughly and then run it on that.

That way it may save lives (mine FFS) and with luck bankrupt the buggers hoping to make money off my info,

It has been 20 years since cybercrims woke up to social engineering with an intriguing little email titled 'ILOVEYOU'

Tom 7

Re: Plus ça change

We were. But not for long. I used to enjoy reading the code in the virii - I learned more useful programming stuff from virii than MS courses. I think each new one elicited an outburst of 'Well I never!' followed by finding some legitimate use for half the code!

Gmail and Outlook sitting in a tree, not t-a-l-k-i-n-g to me or thee

Tom 7

Re: re: Google Mail

I use gmail to communicate with friends and other humans. I use secure mail services for anything that needs to be secure.

RetroPie 4.6 brings forth an answer to 'What do I do with this Pi 4 I bought last year?'

Tom 7

Re: Pi 4 mouldering?

I've been running Yoshimi on mine - turned it into a rather interesting synthesiser.

Tom 7

Re: Jupiter Ace?

The Dragon 32 could have Forth as the OS. A friend of mine had one.

The ultimate 4-wheel-drive: How ESA's keeping XMM-Newton alive after 20 years and beyond

Tom 7

Re: Great story, well written

read, read shirley?

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Tom 7

Re: My Beloved Electron

As a child I liked knowing how things worked and we are now so far from the ground in IT its hard to show kids how a modern computer works. I have spent some time with a few kids and an 8080 simulator to take them few a few simple steps and when I've had access to the internet and kids the Visual6502 is a way of showing them the silicon running the code along with the code. I wonder if a Knuth revisited on a real machine might make a good educational toy.

Tom 7

TBF at the time most 8 bit machines were largely the work of one person, The Z80 was pretty much a one man design. Interestingly these things are at a headful level - a top engineer could in a couple of years design the logic, the ccts and the layout of something of that size. Once you get much more complicated than that you need to start working in teams.

Tom 7

Re: Thanks for this.

RISC-OS is very impressive - even on the original Pi. Shame about the ecosystem.

Resistance is futile: Some Cisco security appliances are ticking time bombs of fail thanks to faulty resistors

Tom 7

Re: The manufacturing process issue

A process failure during manufacturing of one batch of resistors should be found when the random samples of the batch are tested.

Where were you in drought season? Interstellar comet 2I/Borisov dumped 230 million litres of water as it whizzed through Solar System

Tom 7

noralorrawater in a drought.

It would barely wet the grass in Rutland!

Dumpster diving to revive a crashing NetWare server? It was acceptable in the '90s

Tom 7

I've got a tower in the house which has a slightly recessed power button in the top. So leaning over the side of the desk to pop in a USB often results in the hair shifting and the requirement to lean on the box and then a powerdown followed by much swearing as the logged in user then doesnt have the ability to dismount the USB which was mounted by the system and I cant be arsed to spend two minutes setting things up properly.

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Tom 7

Re: Never saw a car crash into a computer

Show me how you kiss with the tongs!

Tom 7

Re: Never saw a car crash into a computer

Sounds racist and sexist to me!

Tom 7

Re: First-foot

In my old village there was a moderately steep hill with a humpback bridge at the bottom and a slight kink to the left after the bridge. The wall in front of the house on the right looked like it was part of some endless stop motion animation where as soon as it was rebuilt someone would knock it down again. Points were given for how high up you managed to hit it.

Tom 7

Re: Cars of the day... with good old steel bumpers and side panels

A PhD student of my dads had a 1930s cabriolet that was made from plate steel, One day she was pulling out of a side road on the edge of our village which had a massive wall that cut of the view of the road after 100yds or so.Despite the 30mph speed limit she was hit on the drivers door by a motorcyclist doing about 60, The panel didnt bend far enough to hit her and the motorcyclist was in a bad way, his bike was destroyed, and I mean destroyed. It took a panel beater a couple of days to restore the running board and door panel a lick of paint and it was as good as new. Most modern cars would have been written off!

Forget tabs – the new war is commas versus spaces: Web heads urged by browser devs to embrace modern CSS

Tom 7

It will be compulsory to buy monitors that can

display Octarine to do web development soon.

Tom 7

Re: Can it do orange?

I remember having fights with the design dept when I was in charge of accessibility over colour choices. It usually took a ten minute walk around various PCs in the building to show them that on most of the monitors no-one could see the difference they were asking for and if that didnt work a twenty minute calibration of their monitor to make it show the colours its was meant to show made their new visually stunning development go away.

I guess we have moved on from the font wars where people expected a particular font to have some meaning that 6.5G people knew fuck all about and are moving to colour wars where only three people in an office in Chelsea who bought their badly calibrated monitors from the same batch at the same time can see some visual difference only when they've all had 6 cups of badger shit coffee in the early afternoon ennui from their vegan beef stew lunch while listening to Enya through Dr Dres.