Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
I frequently have salad consisting of just my home grown variety of iceberg lettuce (I forget the brand name but it has flavour!!!) and if there are toms from the poly tunnel they get added as a bonus. People fail to realise that a salad is merely a device for eating salad dressing and the greenery is there for the crunch and to provide a greater surface area for the sea salt to stick to.
I wonder about the sense in re-using old supercomputers - bang per watt tends to be a lot less than on the newer ones and I'd imagine old code makes fine configuration testing for the new ones which are near impossible to run at 100% for a while.
Having said that I'd be more than happy to take something that peaks at 3.8kw so I can run it for the 5 or 6 hours my PV is maxing out at these summer days. And if the cooling water is warm enough I might be able to brew up some ale while I'm about it!
No, The open source community has found a way to bankrupt M$ in the same way the craft beer movement is bankrupting the brewing giants and similar pseudo monopolies that have long run out of original ideas - make a successful company, sell it to monopoly, rinse and repeat.
While Monsanto spends billions bribing governments in schools the open source movement is unleashing billions of solar powered raspberrypi robots that can clear fields of weeds and pests for less than the price of an MP's lunch.
The fact the sheep is sheared or unsheared is very pertinent. Mine are awaiting the clippers at the moment and I would estimate their cross sectional area to be 4 or 5 times that of when they are sheared. Given the mass will barely chance during shearing their acceleration due to light pressure from the sun in vacuo will be a mere 25% when sheared.
I think even you would notice the difference between a sheared and unsheared kebab after a few aeons if it smacked you in the face on a Saturday night.
Actually I just trimmed the feet on my sheep and then sprayed their feet with the violet antiseptic and got it all over my hands and when I went for a pint someone thought it was the dye put in a money bag from a robbery a few towns away. Fortunately I smelled heavily of sheep so the rozzers didnt bother me for long. I could never work out if the shoulder injury was from the arrest or the bloody sheep.
Federico Faggin designed the Z80 in 1974. It was, I'd bet, the last non-risc CPU that one person could get their head round. Since then people have designed bits of CPUs but how the hole thing works, along with the non too simple problem of the operating system running on it, is beyond one persons ability to fully understand. If you look at the way these things are being hacked you have to give some kudos to the people doing the hacking - just before you seriously deform their nasal passages.
I would imagine, now these mechanisms have been uncovered they will be added to a long list of things to check for in future designs.
Having said that I can easily see a bright engineer in Intel having spotted this already but the bean counters decided performance figures were more important than a hopefully sufficiently obscure security flaw.
nooo nooo nooo. Did my thesis on a PDP11 (after spending a term or so walking into the Uni Mainframe to see the 'Hardware Fault' light illuminating the unused card punches.
Wow was that a revelation. I went from two lines of code a week to writing atom bomb simulations* (nothing to do with my thesis which was on fibre optic performance).
To be able to write code and not wait a 1/2 day or so for it to be run by the batch system was a fucking revelation. And now I can do it all again on a Pi. Must resist Must resist.
*source code deleted after converting from eV to tonnes TNT!
I designed (in VB it was so long ago) a web site to sell a few hundred thousand products to a few tens of thousands of regular customers. I wrote it in VB so others who worked there could understand what was going on and help. The marketing department were a serious pain in the arse - different styling every month or so. So I wrote them an interface so they could change the styling as a when they pleased, that shut them up - it seems they only want to change shit when someone else has to do it. That was a light bulb moment, Since then I have endeavoured to ensure that anyone who has any input basically takes full responsibility for it where possible.
Try it some time - manglement really fucking hate not having someone else to blame. It leaves them naked and vulnerable but its worth staying late a couple of weeks to get them out of your hair if you can suss out how to get them to do their own work.
We have a Samsung(?) washing machine that went wrong while in guarantee. The engineers practically moved in. Three new motherboards and lots of other bits. The motherboards ran all sorts of tests and diagnostics but never ever solved the problem. It does four or five washes fine and then stops mid cycle with an error number that appears in none of their manuals!
If you switch it off and on at the mains it will do four or five washes before stopping mid cycle again - but never when the engineer is there.
Wot fun toasters are! My mate was a diy/repairer enthusiast and when the toaster spring weakened to the point the toaster handle had to be flicked up to get at the toast decided to "beef it up". After ten minutes of testing with various helical things from his large jar of helical things a pair of springs were loaded into the toaster and, with some pressure, the pair of half cooked but completely dried out doorsteps were lowered into the now beast. After a minute or two curls of smoke rose out of the machine rapidly followed by two blackened objects one of which went vertically up to the ceiling and shattered while the other performed a graceful arc onto the top of the wardrobe,
As hinted earlier my friend was a fiddler. He had decided that the wardrobe should have ventilation so clothes dont get damp and had replaced the top with a lattice of little planks and the toast dropped straight through a gap and within the time it took to stop laughing at the collection of smoking crumbs all over the room had torched his clothes into a mild inferno which took a whole CO2 gas bottle 'borrowed' a couple of nights earlier from the pub.
Boy does that stuff make you hyperventilate!
On my first adult visit to Belgium I was standing at the pub urinal disposing of the unwanted bits of about 12 pints of trappist ale and was surprised at the constant flow of not only the processed ale but the number of women behind me on the way to the sit-down. They seem quite happy with mixed sex toilets there.
I've implemented 'unbreakable' evidence chains before. The bosses really liked them for a while and then realised they didnt really want them after all because 'mmmble mmmmble. They were a lot simpler than blockchain too.
Blockchain is quite easy to implement and at least it is mathematically provable, but as others point out it is a solution looking for a problem. I personally think it works quite well on an SME level it just has two problems - 1) it seems to grow exponentially in resource requirements and inversely in speed, and 2) you wouldnt believe the shenanigans that go on in most companies these days.
The reason why the CIO's dont want blockchain is because the last thing a business wants (the business not the shareholders or law) is an unbreakable chain of evidence.
Last thing you want to do is crash the whole company because someone wants proof you did what you said you did - see Cambridge Anal.
@JeffyPooh
My grandma used to switch off sockets to prevent the electricity leaking out and her daughter (my mum) used to unplug the telly when there was lightning about to prevent the telly blowing up.
Which really used to piss me off as we had a 405 line telly that would only receive BBC1 for about 10 years after everyone else had colour and 3 channels. It never fucking broke down which was the only way it was going to be replaced - until the grandparents died and we got their colour one.
I think the old one is probably still working in the land fill somewhere.
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