Posts by Tom 7

I would not even consider getting paid through uni for X years as a compulsory employee. I've seen enough companies bought out by foreign companies and throwing out the rule book. I can easily see current management chucking you out, suing you for training and interest owed and then giving themselves a bonus, leaving you with many years experience in something of no interest to anyone else. I say this as someone who got a grant to go to uni, went to work for BT who invested millions in mine and associated posts and then the government privatised us and decided having the best fibre optic design group in the world was a problem for other companies and so shut us down.

The lock in times for these things to make sense for company and student are incompatible with human rights let alone good employment practice.

Re: Hand soldered...

Not so much a drawback as for most it was the only option!

Re: No way is the JWST worth 10 Billion.

The taxpayers dollars were more than recovered from the multiplier effect as the money spend ran through the US economy. Give the same money to Apple and it would be offshore faster than you could say the I in iPad and perform absolutely no benefit to the US economy.

Re: "We need to find more people that have a passion for teaching"

Not sure about IT but I know a few uni science teachers in the US and the unis pretty much treat them like shit. I cant imagine the IT teachers in the US whose workload has doubled have received the pay increases that would attract others to the job, But I bet someones enjoying that more than doubling of departmental income.

Re: The Skunk

Fortunately the nob on the computer can easily be tuned to a different channel.

I would hope the trusts woudnt be so stupid as to allow the company to sell on the data in any form without permission from the trusts. Though of course someone could always devalue the company and then be bought out on the cheap.

Re: Lifetime

Its when Heisenberg's uncertainty principle collapses and you know the position is crap and so is the veracity.

This looks like it ends the 'need' for nukes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61996520

Re: The sooner, the better

Things were slowly improving for the people that matter.

Re: Power

Just tried reading the spec but it seems quite dependent on what is used. I'd imagine its low enough to run from a smallish PV setup so if the next Fuzix version can manage the wireless I think I may finally get a wireless feed to my chicken shed to test the Pi4 keeping an AI eye on my chicken shed!

Re: Bouncy space junk?

There would be pretty much nothing left but melting dust to rebound! The moon's escape velocity is over 2km/s. The kinetic energy available at impact is more than enough to completely vaporise anything that smashes into the moon though some it lost into digging the crater but you can see the flashes from meteor impacts on the earth facing side of the moon from time to time. Earth's atmosphere slows things down so small meteors or larger grazing ones sometimes survive.

More fun asto stuff - 12 instrument modes sorted - 5 to go https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html

Re: Great, and with so much potential

I had a nexus 5 for 7 years till the battery went. A few quid on a new one and it was as good as new - then one of the brats broke their phone just before exam results were due and borrowed mine. And put it in the back pocket and sat on it! I may see if I can find it and get a screen replacement.

Re: Just a small elephant...

I'd imagine that's why they are looking. But from what I remember of the physics I cant see a reason why it wouldnt work. An FET involves electrons or hole moving under the gate so the distance they have to travel is the minimum you can get from the lithography. With bipolar they have to travel through the base which can be made a lot smaller by diffusing the things you add to the silicon. The last time I worked on this you could make a FET with three masks and IIRC 7 to achieve very thin bases (14 overall for 3 levels of metal interconnect) but we did get 9.6Ghz parts in 1989/90 from transistor that were about 30u square when sub micron FETs were starting to appear. We were doing ECL with 1ma tail currents whereas CMOS of a similar size were u amp.

There was a paper around then that outlined a 600 gate 16 bit CPU which I could have done in bipolar at 2.4Ghz and it would have been the fastest CPU in the world and consumed 60W. A meg of ram would have been about 20Kw in bipolar though - and a large tropical island in GaAs.

I worry that that will only be legal for a day!

Re: Start to publish politicians, judges and other "VIP" location data...

They tend to have exclusions to various things - cant have people in a democracy talking to politicians!

Re: Avian...

I think its a bit premature to say avians and mammals have separately evolved intelligences. I think we have two different end results but I bet the core of it is shared from possibly before we left the sea and certainly by the time reptiles and mammals split.

Looks like our split from the EU may not help us getting brighter either!

Re: Isn't this...

The order to leave an Irish pub?

Re: USB-C connectors suck

Not sure iPhone/iPad charging cables are any better. We've got a lot of them in the electric recycling bin - dont use them myself. It could be that the youngsters in the place leave things on the floor and tread them but there are 8 genuine Apple jobies and only two USB we've collected in the last 3 years or so. Interestingly you can tell a non-functional cable because the live ones twist and turn and have to be untangled but the dead ones are always the first ones you can pull out!

Re: Memo to developers:

Saw my first horsefly of the year today - lifetime maybe 3 seconds.

Re: Seriously

Without reasonable accurate weather forecasting most outdoor events would be local. Weather insurance for events is vital - apart from Glastonbury.

Re: Buh buh buh Female Executives Are The Best!

A new group to define - inCEOs

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

How about a backup battery dropped in the boot? Not a full charge version but something 'portable' that will get you another 50 to 100 miles or so? Only take a minute or so to swap out.

Re: Vehicles

My 70 year old tractor has fuel injectors.

Re: That vinyl sound

Records have a form of frequency adjustment call RIAA. Every preamp will have a reverse frequency adjustment so in theory the sound should be unaltered.

Some old record cutting equipment had similar sound adjusting properties and so the master tapes used to drive the cutters were adjusted the other way so the end result from a record player should sound as near as possible like the 'original'. Some companies used these to make early CDs and a few people claim to have noted the difference and this seems to be the origin of the current audiophile folk myths.

The best way of looking at this is CD is spot on - any audio features added by digitising are less noticeable to humans than the effects of a candle bending the air between your ear and the speaker. Don't try that with headphones!. Vinyl is a serious downgrade to the audio signal but some people like the way it does it and prefer it to the far better quality and reliability of CDs possibly because of the ritual involved which is very reminiscent of opening a present.

There were reports today that the Death Clown could earn £5m a year when he stops breaking the country. He had a job as a journalist before so something to consider if you are a really appalling journalist with a serious aversion to knowing anything about what your meant to be doing.

Re: Disappointing

We've had satellites floating above the earth for 70 years now and many of them have been able to see meteoroids of this size impacting our atmosphere. As a result we have a pretty good idea of the amount of shit and how big it is flying around out there. This one is a bit of a surprise I believe but its not evidence the mission will be shorter than expected.

Having said that and looking to Ukraine we might not be here to receive the data.

Re: Intelligent Life exists

There's no mention of Eno in their contracts!