* Posts by TRT

9611 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2009

'Peregrine falcon'-style drone swarms could help defend UK against Gatwick copycat attacks

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It would be much more spectacular...

If they were 'Millennium Falcon'-style drones.

Delayed, over-budget smart meters will be helpful – when Blighty enters 'Star Trek phase'

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Re: Hell freezing over...

We will just cut the power to your heating units...

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Exactly. Every bloody episode of Star Trek I watch, there's SOMETHING goes wrong with the power. It's always "Divert all power from life support to maintain the shields", "There's an unexplained power drain in the EPS conduit on deck 11", "We're recalibrating the dilithium chamber and there's only minimal power for the next 22 hours", "The alien entity is draining our power through the shields, Captain!", "Re-routing the energy flow matrix to stabilise the warp field could damage the plasma injectors"

If the guy who turns up to fit it is wearing a red shirt, I'm outta there!

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You sound particularly well informed! Hmmm....

You'e yping i wong: macOS Catalina stops Twitter desktop app from accepting B, L, M, R, and T in passwords

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Gah!

That stops me from ordering my favourite Bacon, Lettuce, Tomato and Mayo on Rye sandwiches.

BOFH: Judge us not by the size of our database, but the size of our augmented reality

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Re: "Wind shear in the cloud"

Given the state of the State of California at the moment...

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Re: Wind shear

I was going to move our data centre into the cloud, one with a direct clean, green hydro power source but...

have you SEEN the planning restrictions for the top of Mount Snowdon? The cost of bribes alone makes it prohibitive.

Everything must go as school IT supplier Gaia Technologies' £5.7m debt burden revealed

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Re: History repeats

I suspect you mean the company that made my confocal microscope that runs off a 386 and DOS6.2...

Solid piece of kit. Made in England.

Good news – America's nuke arsenal to swap eight-inch floppy disks for solid-state drives

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Re: Still working is good, but ...

All well and good trashing them spares inventory but you'll regret it when V'Ger and his buddies come back with broken down link boards.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

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Re: When I discovered that the orange Central Line...

Doesn't look it, does it? Well to some people it does.

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Re: Think Like a Council

And remove all the forward repeaters to save on maintenance costs. Like they have done everywhere. Bastards.

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Yeah. You can't get those confused. I mean... just THINK of Paul Hogan in the Fosters advert...

*swigs*

"Ah! It tastes like an angel cryin' on yer tongue. Fosters. The yellow nectar."

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Re: It depends

When I discovered that the orange Central Line on the tube maps is exactly the same colour as a traditional red London bus, you could have coloured me stunned!

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And THIS is why...

the world will never see the self-driving car on the public roads.

How many on this comment thread are coders? And how many posts has it taken to thoroughly muddy the waters of what the actual codified rules of the road actually state? And was there any kind of conclusion reached?

And that's JUST for the traffic lights.

We're going deeper Underground: Vulture clicks claws over London's hidden tracks

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Re: 6 mph in Victorian London

I'm sold on making a proper visit there!

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Re: 6 mph in Victorian London

Morfa Road. I wondered what it was running next to... an old Copper Works. Must be what all the railway stuff was about. I'd have loved to stop for a browse around there.

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Re: 6 mph in Victorian London

I was in Swansea earlier this year. Don't think I hit Kingsway. I did find an incredible set of roads which appeared to be built around disused railway viaducts and being roundaboutted like crazy to marry up with some horrendous quantity of new housing.

That video in the news piece is utterly shit, isn't it? I expected a series of historical photographs and maybe the odd scene from a film made on that road, not 2 minutes of video taken on the same day from a variety of different angles which jump cuts to the side of a cinema for some reason.

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Re: 6 mph in Victorian London

I've been unable to find any articles pertaining to the current trend of constricting the road network deliberately.

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Re: 6 mph in Victorian London

The Pigou–Knight–Downs paradox.

Fancy yourself as a bit of a Ramblin' Man or Woman? Maybe brush up on your cartography

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Re: A fundamental flaw

Which is why the OS map app needs the ability to drop a destination pin, waypoint pins and produce orienteering details from your current location including straight line gradient and obstacle warnings between waypoints.

There are plenty of apps for big screen computers that let you set up routes before hand and display them on os maps but the os app still needs to handle those better.

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One can also...

Zoom in so close that the scale bar reads 0 yards to the centimetre.

Shoddy. Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy, Ted.

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Re: Any Idiot...

Relying on the phone? Stupid. Expecting a convenient aid to work right? Reasonable.

You could take a GPS device with you, like a Garmin. Good or bad advice?

Don't rely on just a map alone. That's your backup if you like. If you're teaching map craft then the phone's your backup.

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Re: Updates

OS maps. What a legend!

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Re: Updates

Yep. They would have headed south a long time ago.

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Re: Undocumented feature

Unfortunately if you, like me, swap between Aerial view and downloaded explorer map*, then by going back to the offline maps through that menu screen resets the scaling and centring of the map.

The premise behind this new app is that the device will have an always on connection, which is utterly idiotic given the likely use case. If you have always on, there are dozens of far better, far cheaper apps and maps to use. If you buy a paper map, they give you a download map code included now. It's very handy. But as you zoom in and out, they don't cache all the other scales of map within that downloaded map's coverage area, so you get a 5" view of a very detailed map indeed, and if you are in the mountains with no signal, you can't zoom out, pan, then zoom in. The zoomed out view is ultra lo-res and useless for placing an orienteering flag on base camp which is about 50" of screen size away. The system doesn't even give you a bearing from where you are to a dropped orienteering pin so you can put the phone away in the pouring rain and use a simple compass to get closer to where you're going.

It's utterly useless in the current form. Might as well use Google Maps. Or even Apple Maps. at least that take you to new and surprising places.

I've asked them if they'll make the old version available whilst they sort out this new one.

*very useful for checking if the farm a mile away you can see nestling in the trees with a blue tarp over the barn and the pink walls is the same as the now you think it is on the map.

BOFH: The company survived the disaster recovery test. Just. The Director's car, however...

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Re: There's a solid point there too

Had exactly the same thought with the front of Euston station. And I wouldn't get close in to the building as although shards might go over the top, full panels of safety glass suddenly changing shape and falling free of their frames can come down like guillotines.

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Re: "Learnings"

Learnings are small, furry rodents that have a habit of jumping off cliffs.

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I particularly liked...

the bit at the end, which turned a bad situation into the kind of golden opportunity that manglement are bound to recognise and snatch with lightning reflexes. That, indeed, is the true genius of the BOFH.

What's the scoop with Mars InSight's mired mole? It's digging again, thanks to trowel trickery

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Re: I'm not surprised

Corrective tap action.

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Re: Bah!

It was delivered to the correct side of the planet... but no-one though to equip the robot arm with a case knife or a pair of scissors. All that way to be defeated by the packaging.

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Making America grate again?

Conspiracy loons claim victory in Brighton and Hove as council rejects plans to build 5G masts

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Re: What is a safe level of microwave radiation?

Added bonus that it will keep your chips warm too.

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https://www.expressandstar.com/news/2011/12/19/cannabis-farms-causing-house-fires

Given the fire danger from dodgy electrics in these places compared to the risk of a helicopter dropping out of the sky on your house... really. This kind of "Henny Penny" thinking will have people glueing themselves to the roofs of tube trains next.

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Agreed. But have you seen the height of Whitehawk Hill TV mast? Quite dominating on the skyline. But, and I've not been there for a while, didn't they get some sort of UFO pod ride on the seafront? I seem to recall it was a cousin of the London Eye and broke instantly.

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Re: Brighton - Ugh!

Not been there in quite a few years. Last time was about 10 years ago when I wasted a whole afternoon looking for The Black Chapati, only to discover that it had gone some years before.

Is it really that bad now?

Tearoff of Nottingham: University to lose chunk of IT dept to outsourcing

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Re: Been through this myself.

Anyone with "capable talent" can earn 150-300% more outside of HE. The only thing keeping most HE IT staff in post is loyalty, interest in the work and job security.

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Re: Been through this myself.

Indeed. It's not to be assumed that crank-driven XP boxen are infected plague carriers that need to be bartered off by a propane-driven firewall, but more that they are immunodeficient geriatrics that should be in a sterile bubble, but still able to see out!

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Re: Been through this myself.

Nottingham has a reasonable amount of research going on. Just wait until they try to tackle THAT hot potato.

"Yeah, I need 500Gbps sustained with no packet loss, 4PB of object storage, a 200TB NVMe cache, 3,000 processing cores and a 15,000 GPU cores with ECC DRAM of course... no, that's just for my research group. How much is that, please?"

Her Majesty opens UK Parliament with fantastic tales of gigabit-capable broadband for everyone

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Re: gigabit-capable

Full fibber broadband.

Lies, damn lies, and KPIs: Let's not fix the formula until we have someone else to blame

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Re: KPIs

Customer satisfaction is hard to rate. I never believe ours. You see people tend to use satisfaction questionnaires as a means to express displeasure, but not necessarily when things went as could be expected. So you have to apply a correction factor for that tendency, calculated from response rate.

Openreach's cunning plan to 'turbocharge' the post-Brexit economy: Getting everyone on full-fibre broadband by 2025

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Ah, Brexit again.

To soften the blow, Boris has let the spin doctoring marketeers loose on it. Hence forth it shall be known as The Great British Break Off.

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Re: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

I always wanted to open a chain of Russ Meyer themed "world-cuisine" restaurants.

Pasta, Fussycat. Dill! Dill!

Supper Vixens.

Mondo Tapas!

Beyond the Valley of the Dahls.

Pandora Pekings.

The Immoral Mr Tea Shop.

No ghosts but the Holy one as vicar exorcises spooky tour from UK's most haunted village

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Re: My imaginary friend is better than your imaginary friend

They also accept crypto currency.

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Re: G K Chesterton

The Catholic Christening liturgy caught me off guard. The bit where the priest implores the souls of the ancestors of the child to guard and protect the infant. Sounds like summoning the dead or necromancy of some sort to me.

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Re: Sweet Kicks

Does that mean DM wearers have been walking on air?

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Re: Ghost tours

They're Cybermen. OK?

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Apparently he got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if people started being nice to each other for a change.

I can't believe you've done this: Cisco.com asks visitors to explain to IT why they have broken the website

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Re: Like rain on your wedding day

I wonder what precipitated?

Hey, I wrote this neat little program for you guys called the IMAC User Notification Tool

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Not an acronym...

But a very large sign outside the door of a building on a campus announced this was the home of the

Department of

Hard Asset

Management

A caged delivery arrived one day and was left near the door. A box of long fixings for something or other stuck out of the side of the cage and obscured the last two characters of the second line.