Posts by Tom 7

RE A kebab shop only making £9k a year,

If I owned it I doubt it would make that - especially if it was next door to my £5k a year pub.

Re: @AC

Those the ones trying to take BCKSPC-CTRL?

Re: Weird timing

http://www.hovercraft.org.uk/ might help you find someone who will let you have a go.

Re: Stupid flying machines

Peroxide and a catalyst - it either works or works too well, I'd bet he was pretty confident.

Re: Water from comets or asteroids?

@Big John - that all assumes the sun started to shine long before the earth was formed (along with its water). The maths is easier if we assume the accretion disc was a uniform disc but given its quite possible that it was not a uniform disk or gravitational collapse was locally accelerated due to shock waves from a nearby supernova it's all a bit 'best guess' and not, IMHO, best science.

The 'most popular theory' is a good solution to the problem - but there are many more.

Re: Almost there

Theres shit loads of them - Sciaenidae

Re: Last time I tried to work in a bathrobe...

Do what I do - dont drink coffee - its a drug so it wakes your up a bit and then takes you down. You're much better off without it, it takes a while but apart from saving £30 or £40 a day that some of my friends seem to spend when out and about you actually get a lot more done in the long run.

Re: Sony Vaio P

I found the 5 did indeed fit in my pocket - and fall out when I bent over so a shoulder holster that clips shut is a good idea if you like to go armed. I've been playing with an HP mini 2.10 with Xubuntu on it of late to the point where my hippy leather friend is going to make me a holster for it. I may try the new psion tho.

I should add I'm quite large so the HP makes sense for me.

Re: No thanks to any dynamic language

The thing about Python is it borrows most of its libraries for 'big things' are from C++ or Fortran so type checking is done before it gets round to doing the grunt work.

But if your types need checking then you can do that in python or most (any?) dynamic languages. Its all swings and roundabouts - the 1 second you save not having to declare a variable type in a dynamic language will be lost with hospitalisation due to the multiple injuries sustained from being hurled off the roundabout if you dont program safely.

Re: you need only watch the first 45 seconds

The French approach to music is quite unique in the world. I remember being trapped in a Paris disco in 1975 or something - trapped by a large group of young female US exchange students otherwise I would have killed someone to get out - and the music was just fucking* awful. What made it really bad was there would be a roaring guitar intro that would drop into a plinky plonky song with vogon poetry for lyrics. I didnt have enough money to drink myself deaf - I did try even at around £3 for a demi of shit french lager.

*no fucking fucking fucking awful.

Re: Well, i hope it happens ...

@jake - I think its La Palma in the Canaries that is 'set' to crack in two and send a tsunami to the east coast of the US - not NY or Washington as they will probably already be underwater by then.

Re: Sales is hard

Sales can be hard - it can also be incredibly easy - one famous salesman of the year was dossing in the office when someone phoned in wanting a few very expensive items.

I've worked in companies where the sales team has fought against on-line sales because they knew they were going to loose huge amounts of commission - largely 'earned' by simple getting in between the buyer and the seller. Higher level management getting a cut of their staffs sales really doesnt help either when 95% of business is repeat sales.I personally find it exasperating when I go on a website and have to request a quote for essentially an off the shelf item.

Not that I am ever going to get involved with Oracle - unless I get a job with a receiver.

Re: XUbuntu

I'm running Xubuntu 17.04 on an old HP Mini 2.10 so I can have something to do in the car while waiting for the daughters to finish surfing club/netball club etc when its not worth driving home and back again and I must say so far I'm impressed with it. Its only got a gig of ram but there's more than enough free to do some serious coding!

Re: Using the jets instead of a rudder

In a built up area - and I'm guessing the people who want to use this service will be pissed up execs on a friday afternoon - a tail fin would be a serious pain in the arse what with all the winds bouncing around off cacky architecture.

Re: question for you Brits

Its not just Brits - there number of sites everywhere where people think its sensible to use a mix of greyey blue contrasting not with bluey grey (or similar practically monotonic themes) which are deemed by 'designers' to look cool or stylish and yet breach every simple accessibility rule.

One of the joys of the internet is you can normally force your own css onto a page so you can see what the fuck is going on. You need an old colour monitor with access to all the colour contrils to make some UIs U.

Re: .Sarcasm, I take it?

Defend the Falklands? We're handing them to Argentina to get entry in to the WTO

Re: "drone was attacked by the hornets while being used [..] to locate the creatures' nest"

Not sure what they're like at night - my dad used to go out with a torch and cut out wasp nests from bushes and pop them into a plastic bag and then in the freezer and he said they dont come out just buzz warnings.

Bloody works of art those nests!

Re: But sadly...

@ not.known@this.address

I read that as Episode 9 factorial. God that was depressing.

Re: I want a smart water meter

my advice is to get a micro-hydro-power plant and connect it to your coldwater supply and out down the loo.

Re: Lightbulb moment? Blue = Intelligence!

"It's the colour associated with the Universities." well their sports teams anyway.

Re: not just Hoomans

I thought that of Picasso until one day someone juxtaposed a photo of his wife with one of his pictures of his wife.

Quite extraordinary!

Re: Credit for something I didn't do?

Not quite hardware but we had an accountant who demanded a report be on his desk every morning at 9am. One day I delivered it and hung around the corridor for 10 minutes or so and popped back in to ask a question about a package we were working on for him and noticed the report in the bin. 400 pages of 132 char wide fanfold in ten minutes? A chat with the cleaner and the same report was delivered daily until it looked a bit dog-eared and then we'd print another daily report, or glue the first couple of pages on to the old one.

Re: Why only one thermostat?

Steve Wright (the one from when the US had comedians) liked to put his humidifier and de-humidfier in the same room and let them fight it out.

I'm trying to get a reliable sliding door opener so the heat from the conservatory can be let into the house to warm it up - but not now - it was 140f in there when I got my fat arse out of bed.

Re: In two minds...

If the troll gets major backing then the defendant will get that too - after all they stand a very high chance of getting their money back* after the patent is invalidated.

* ok the trolls could go bust and not cough up but that would be worth a couple of quid.

Re: > If anyone wants to do an academic study of his work

When at school sciences chose me but I loved reading almost anything I could get my hands on and read the works the English A'level students had to study and I loved them while they largely hated them. At uni a friend of mine was doing a PhD in english and she'd never read any Sci-Fi and took a book of my collection of browning tattered paperbacks and read around 200 works without breathing - seems she'd never read for pleasure before!

Re: The banks can help

Presumably that was a credit card payment so the bank was helping itself really.

Re If windbg wasn't supposed

nothing wrong with beginners learning to become pros - just make sure they take 10 or 15 MS training courses.

Re: Not So Hard

5 billion years ago there weren't any clocks!

Re: Dangerous precedent

"There is a need to force execs to control not only finances, but also the systems they have employees build, and bear full responsibility in case of failing so."

I'd sort of agree but I've seen what happens in finance when the execs bear responsibility and no way am I going to try and write laba-fucking-rynthine code so that the 'auditors' are as confused as the admins are anyway.

And as the computers wont be ...