Posts by James Cullingham

Hard for Google to claim ignorance

On the stretch of road where the bridge was, the StreetView images are dated October 2012.

Approaching from one end of the road the images are dated May 2019. From the last of these you can see the collapsed bridge, and you can also see that there is a fairly flimsy barricade. Presumably the camera car could see that the road was impassable, as it went no further. That would have been a good time to update the map.

Approaching from the other end the images are dated May 2023, and now concrete blocks are visible, mostly blocking access to the former bridge from both sides. Again, the camera car would clearly have been very aware that the road was impassable.

So I think Google could and should have updated their records. But their failure should never have resulted in anything more than inconvenience.

As of 2019, at least, though, the signage and blocking of the road was pitiful.

But, as far back as 2019, and still in 2023, so clearly also at the time of the accident, there were (small) trees growing up in the space where the bridge had been. A competent driver, proceeding sensibly down an unfamiliar single-track road, should have been going slowly enough that seeing a tree in front of them should have been enough to cause them to stop safely.

I would pin a substantial amount of the blame on the blame on the driver and the rest on whoever is responsible for maintaining the road.

Braking FUD

Following the link to the page on that Driving Test website, we can see that it correctly gives the thinking & stopping distances from the Highway Code. At 30mph, this gives 30' (9m) thinking distance and 45' (14m) braking distance. Total is therefore 75' (23m).

It also states: "Broadly speaking, stopping distances double when you’ve got wet conditions. On ice it’s worse: they’re ten times greater. So if, driving on a normal sunny day at 30mph, it takes you 23 metres to stop (that includes the time it takes you to see the hazard, process it, and react), then in icy conditions it could take you as much as 230 metres to stop."

Seriously? My thinking time is also going to be multiplied by 10?

No, my thinking distance will remain at 1 double-decker bus, not 10

Disturbances in the wash (Eddies in the space-time continuum)

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/950420-i-have-detected-he-said-disturbances-in-the-wash

Every byte counted

My 'favourite' feature related to the storage of numeric constants that formed part of a line of BASIC. As background, you have to bear in mind that the machine was very storage constrained, but also very performance-constrained, especially when it came to FP arithmetic.

Say, for example, you had a line

10 LET A=1

10, as the line number, was stored in 2 bytes

LET was a keyword, so was stored as a single byte token

A and = obviously took 1 byte each

But then came the numeric constant 1. Due to the performance hit of parsing that into an 5 byte FP representation (1 byte exponent, 4 byte mantissa), this was done as the line was entered, so what actually ended up in memory was the code for the character 1, followed by the marker byte 0x7E, followed by 5 more bytes of data.

Horror! One character took 7 bytes!

It was actually more efficient to write instead

10 LET A=PI/PI

because PI was, again, a single byte tokenised keyword, so now you had 3 bytes instead of 7 - a substantial saving and one that would add up over the length of a full program.

Similarly 3 was INT(PI), and arbitrary constants were, IIRC e.g. INT("12345") (still saving 3 bytes).

You got the performance back by writing every-increasing amounts in machine code (process: write it out, then hand-assemble, then create a hex entry utility, then type in the entire codebase in hex)

And you saved bytes in your machine code by referring to your disassembly of the entire ROM (published as a book - https://k1.spdns.de/Vintage/Sinclair/80/Sinclair%20ZX81/ROMs/zx81%20version%202%20%27improved%27%20rom%20disassembly%20%28Logan,%20O%27Hara%29.html) to see if you could abything from a full routine down to a few bytes here and there.

Happy days!

At least we have been spared...

the wringing out of every last drop of blood, or rather money, from whatever jottings he may have left, at whatever cost to his memory.

Christopher Tolkien, I'm looking at you...

FTFY

That'll be "Extreme Pedantry", not "Extreme Pedants"

The birth of the Eloi

I think we've found the singularity for the Eloi/Morlock split

So, it's apparently

Planet 9 from Outer Space

Have I understood correctly?

So, if you can prove that you have actually been robbed as a result of their possible negligence, then by way of compensation they won't charge you for switching to a potentially more responsible provider.

Wow, that's really generous.

"Canon fodder"?

Interesting image, but perhaps not as threatening as what you actually meant to say...

Waldo

Made me think of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldo_%28short_story%29

Very amusing

And I liked the completely gratuitous Blackadder reference too

Made me think of this

http://opalcp12.wikispaces.com/file/view/I+Always+Do+What+Teddy+Says.pdf

Yes Prime Minister on surveys/opinion polls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

Display of selected gear

Potentially useful if you have a semi-automatic/sequential gearbox, as although the rev counter/your ears might well let you know if your gear is appropriate you wouldn't necessarily know which actual gear it is unless you count diligently

Rowan Atkinson/Zak the Alien

He uses the word podule to refer to his translating device in this skit from the his live show in the late 80s. Of course, the word lends itself to his delivery.

http://www.firstpost.com/topic/person/rowan-atkinson-zak-the-alien-rowan-atkinson-video-r0LoLdjGy9o-3117-1.html

If you haven't seen it, it is highly recommended

Unhelpful

How can anybody believe that this is useful. It can't possibly be in the interest of consumers having to remember different gestures to achieve the same result on different manufacturers' kit.

Say I have a certain brand of TV, and I've carefully learnt all the gestures required to control it. Maybe manufacturers will now see that I am locked in as I am less likely to want to relearn these skills if I switch to a different brand of TV. But the truth is that I (and vast numbers of people with less interest in learning arcane hand movements) will just not bother using these features, and will probably be more inclined to choose a brand that doesn't waste our time with them. All in all an own goal.

Imagine cars, if in the early days someone had patented 'using little sticks on the control column to operate the indicators' or 'moving the gear lever in an H pattern to move through a sequence of gears'. Nobody would have a clue what they were doing. Standardisation helps everybody, and rushing to patent obvious things just blocks the development of usable standards.

Three for the BBC: Citadel (featuring speech synthesis, for the intro anyway), Repton and Revs

Split charge

Why not split the charging, like with phone calls? Your monthly charge would then have two components.

First, the 'line rental' equivalent, i.e. your payment for the ISP making a connection available. It would be not unreasonable for this to be based on speed. When I signed up with BT I was told what speed to expect (6Mb vs advertised 8Mb) and this has proved a good estimate. Other posted above have clearly had similar experiences. So, this part could be based on a reasonable (and periodically reviewable in case of significant changes in infrastructure, contention levels etc) assessment of expected speed.

Second would be a usage-based fee, presumably charged in arrears, representing a fair share of the backhaul capcaity etc.

The balance between the two would be an additional area of differentation between ISPs. No doubt in practice most would offer a bundle including a certain amount of data, as now, but for fair pricing there would ideally be much less bundling.

After all, who should pay more: the rural-dweller with a 1Mb connection that keeps it busy 24/7 (monthly throughput 300GB+ unless my maths are out) or the urbanite with a 200Mb connection whose only use is checking email and a bit of shopping. I don't know the answer to that, as they're paying for different things: one is primarily paying for the exchange to premises connection and the other primarily for backhaul.

To the pain!

So, version 4 is the ears?

Touché!

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jury-rig

Hmmm

Surely a 'caprine killer' would be a killer who was in some way goat-like (and possibly was, in fact, a goat)? It seems that you have missed the opportunity to use the word 'capricide'.

And all she originally said was

that this halibut was good enough for Jehovah

Set the limits right for more respect

As has been pointed out, speed limits would be respected more if they showed more evidence of having been set carefully and with the aim of increasing road safety rather than, for example, satisfying some political objective or of saving effort for the person setting them.

Here is a fine example of illogic: http://maps.google.co.uk/?ll=52.997323,-1.524943

The main road - the B5023 - has a 50mph limit, as do all the main roads within a radius of several miles. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with this, incidentally: it is a lovely road but does have a number of field entrances and agricultural traffic, so perhaps it makes sense (at least for some stretches). The limit was reduced a few years ago (5ish).

But look at the short stretch of road that resembles a layby. It's about 150m long and serves three houses and a pub. No traffic will use that road unless to access one of those four destinations. Yet the limit there is 60mph (you can confirm that with Streetview)! Admittedly I'm not sure how fast a car would need to be to reach that speed in the space, but you may still ask why. Presumably it made the paperwork easier (only one road for which the limit was being changed), although it did mean that more signs had to be installed.

While we're at it, look at side the road opposite. Again, this carefully tells drivers that they may now drive at 60mph. But Streetview will also confirm that (a) this is a much smaller road than the main road, with a poorer surface; and (b) a few feet after the national speed limit sign are two warning signs indicating that the road narrows and is bumpy, because there are bridges over the river and railway.

Some limits should be higher. Some should be lower. But either way they should be properly thought out and relevant, so that 'my judgement was that I could safely drive above the limit' ceases to become a valid statement. Then, and only then, we can talk about proper enforcement (e.g. using GPS).

Final point: much though I hate them, I respect average speed cameras much more than spot ones. You still get numpties braking for them, but at least they mean that if, for instance, it becomes necessary to exceed the speed limit temporarily (e.g. because it is the quickest, and therefore safest, way of overtaking a slow-moving vehicle) then it can be done without necessarily falling foul of the machine.

Yes, retro

I thought the name sounded familiar...

http://www.cimweb.co.uk/e-f-m-a.htm

Artillery or cavalry?

So, which of these is it that raises matters above the vulgar brawl level? I thought it was artillery (blame Civilisation 4!) and Google supports this (214k hits for 'artillery "what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl"' vs 22k for 'cavalry "what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl"'. Does anyone happen to know the real story?