Posts by John Brown (no body)

"There was a judge who made a very good comment about speed cameras causing people to spend too much time watching their speedo instead of the road and this would be worse as it would kick in every time you wanted to alter the heating/wipers/radio/lights...great idea that"

Didn't Tesla and other already go down the route of touch screens with no physical sensing of where you touching or feedback to say you activated to virtual control? My car doesn't have anything like that, all physical knobs and buttons and I can adjust pretty much anything without having to look, at worst a quick fraction of a second glance.

Re: wine predictions

"the next best is about €5.00 which is expensive here."

It's not common to find a red at that low a price in the UK at all. And with the new duty rules, red will go up as it's a generally a higher alcohol content than white. Post-Brexit rules mean alcohol duty is being partially simplified and will be more based on alcohol content rather than type of drink. Those into sparkling white wines will probably benefit the most.

" I don't stop other people if they want to drink and get drunk."

You appear to be working on the assumption that being "drunk" is a situation that occurs after any amount of alcohol is consumed.

Re: "Is it plugged in?"

And, of course, they always said yes because they'd never admit to having not done the simple and basic checks that even a non-tech ought to be able to carry out. So the correct first step is, "Maybe the connector has come loose, can you try unplugging it and plugging it back in, (at both ends if relevant)

Re: It can take a remarkably long time to notice that the alert mailer has stopped working.

"I can quite imagine that being true, I've heard something similar about pilots and aircraft engineers who might notice something is wrong even when asleep in the rest area (long haul) because they're so used to how the aircraft sounds/feels that when something changes it hits the unconscious brain and starts screaming"

My brother was in the Royal Navy as a "lifer". He said he could tell what his ship was doing just by the sounds of the engines/feel of the vibrations through the deck and bulkheads and it was obvious if there was anything unusual in the sound or feel.

Re: There's two more rules, actually...

"1. ASSUME the firearm is loaded until you have personally verified that it is not."

Clearly not followed on the Rust film set.

Re: I had a somewhat similar problem

"Cue much honking and beeping of horns behind me."

Possibly even more livid drivers if you'd just "queue jumped" to front and THEN held them up :-)

Re: Thank you …

I felt no guilt in increasing the upvote count since it was already on an unremarkable 47 by the time I got here.

Re: Wilford Industries

Hmm....

Re: A train, any train, not just the Shinkansen

"The big difference is the speed."

I'd have thought that would be the ideal reason to automate. The train already goes so fast that the line has to be secure. No people, vehicles or animals allowed to cross the tracks. Likewise, no dangerous curves, or junctions other than in known places. Also, the entire length of track is a known factor so maximum safe speed can be maintained for any specific part of it. If anything, it should be faster and safer than with a human driver. And, IIRC, the driver is already monitored to make sure they are paying attention at all times and informed by computer about what is coming up and what to do.

Re: USD 30M still missing?

Yeah, IIRC this is at least the second case recently where many millions of cryptocurrency are reportedly stolen, the cops catch the miscreant, but only seem to recover 10-20%

Re: Haven't movie theaters been doing it for years?

"I think shining a laser in customers eyes could result in some complaints, and even lawsuits."

...and few thank you notes from people who used to have cataracts :-)

Re: Better late than never

"your interest has to go beyond the contract you have with them."

Not least because sometimes they are small suppliers, completely beholden to the giant manufacturer, who might well go bust if demand drops for any reason.

Re: Never mind fossils

Oh wow, I never knew that. It sounds rather more complex than just allowing for a longer day though.

Re: Never mind fossils

Yeah, it is. The day is longer and has more than 24 hours in it, but the hour is still the same to a local observer. Nitpicking though, to an observer on Earth, it may be slightly different due to the difference in relative speed of Mars and Earth due to...err...relativity.

Re: Typo?

"but we see nothing that even indicates plants or even their fossils on the surface so far."

Although to be fair, we humans haven't closely examined very much at all of the Martian surface so far. Most of what we know has been observed from orbit. I'd love it if we found some evidence, but the odds are pretty low until there's some sort of long term human presence there.

Re: Nice

I would imagine it's also the cost of containing the gases at very high pressure as opposed to the a solid, transporting it to the satellite and "fuelling" it on the launch site. The raw material cost is probably largely irrelevant. Likewise, they are targetting very small sats and the article says the current gas based ion engines don't scale down small enough.

Re: Maybe mix the iodine

"I sometimes wonder how I survived my childhood!"

Do that today and you'd probably end up in jail as a terrorist!

Re: Public view

"And if they do try to type it in to a browser probably automatically type .com and end up with a Google search if it isn't that,anyway."

I'm seeing more and more advertising that ends with "Just search blah blah blah". I often wonder if that works or if searchers may end up at competitor sites, depending on their own location and search history.

But worse, I see adverts that just say "find us on Facebook". No, thanks, I'll try somewhere else.

Re: Nice article

"Appreciated, and also fascinating. If the $5m fee is 7% of GDP then if they get a 50% profit share that could add 10% to their GDP in a single contract. Let's hope they find an amicable way to make this a properly competitive tender process."

That's more or less what I was thinking. Why even put it out to tender at all? They know what they get now, they know the profit levels Verisign are making off it. Just advertise it for $10 or $15m licence fee and the buy knows they will be getting at least $5m to $10m in profits, guaranteed. No fuss, no muss. The downside, of course, is no kickbacks, no lucrative non-executive board positions etc.

corporate culture changes way slower than memes!

Re: A good step

"Those one in a box offers always seem to lack in quality, either of the tools, the parts or even both."

My experience is that the tools appear to have a life expectancy of the one repair they were bought for, if that. Cheap and nasty stuff.

"Although in practice I have never seen a non-locking SATA plug work its way loose. Ever. Ignoring cables that are too short here."

I was a field engineer for a number of years and yes, reseating SATA connectors was "a thing" to fix some issues of data read/write errors or HDD not detected. I can't say I saw any that had fell off, but quite a few where just pushing it back in properly was the "fix". Then the lockable connectors came along and those faults mostly went away. Some cheap ones tended to corrode, probably some chemical reaction between the contacts on the drive, the nasty cheap alloys used in the cheap connectors and humidity or contaminants getting in.

And yes, I constantly mis-remember that M.2 and NVMe are not the same thing. Thanks for clarifying that. I did, of course, mean M.2 :-)

Re: Normally

Unless the screw position assumes a full length card and you want to fit a half length card and it didn't come with an adaptor plate.

"Yet the SATA connector is standard, compatible, well known and secure."

Well, it's secure now. It didn't used to be. The first iteration of SATA plugs didn't have locking clips. They tended to work loose and even fall off over time if the plastic wasn't quite moulded right to grip. It's a mature technology. NVMe is still a stroppy teenager, as alluded to above, with weird and odd "standards" and incompatibilities.

"I have recently upgraded my home PC. My new motherboard has an NVMe slot if you care to check the image, it is behind the RAM and underneath the PSU connector)."

I've not bought a motherboard in years. Do current ones have multiple NVMe slots? Or do you just have to replace the SSD when you want a bigger one rather than adding to it? My current motherboards have 4 to 6 SATA connectors and all have at least 2 drives fitted.

Re: Hardware vs Software

"Hardware engineers like to get things working reliably before applying their devices to users."

IBM DeathStars drives.

Iomega Zip Click of death.

XBox, red ring of death.

...and lets not even go near the automotive industry!!

"Why overwrite it en masse, why not just overwrite on use?"

Because buffer and stack overflows. They won't magically go away. Programmers will be programmers and we just KNOW that sometime very soon, a program will make an assumption about some previously unused memory content, or read back a buffer longer than it should be, pulling in whatever random data was left there 6 months ago.

Re: Hang on...

In the early days of 8-bit computers, some games used up the whole RAM as part of (or incidently) copy protection since there was no where for the copy programme to reside. It wasn't unusual back then for video RAM to be 7-bit, no lowercase letters. but then upgrades came out making the 1K video RAM up to 8 bit and a new char. gen for lower case. then copy programmes came out which loaded into video RAM so you could watch it work while it loaded then saved a "full RAM" game :-)

(Pre Speccy/Beeb/C64 days)

Re: Joysticks

"I played the Acorn version, it was the only machine that could handle shaded polygons at the time. People venorate the commador amiga but it really was weak in comparison."

That there's fightin' talk!!

There were a lot of nice things about the Beeb, I had many to play with where I worked, and lots of nice add-ons the average user could only dream about, but claiming it was better than the Amiga is just...wrong. 8-bit as opposed to 16-bit for starters. The amazing Amiga graphics had incredible strengths in most areas, but could be weaker in others. It's such a shame that the port of Elite was so poor though. Fairly low res., pitiful sound effects to name but two. That port could have been soooo much better.

Re: Joysticks

"I bought the official analogue joysticks just to play this game."

The best where the ones without auto-centring or where that could be be mechanically disabled, It made docking without a docking computer much easier.

On the other hand, I was spoiled rotten at work playing Elite. Being an educational establishment, we had bought in some CAD package or other. Clearly not very memorable after all these years. But it was a super duper CAD package that cost a lot of money. Apart from the disks and manuals, also in the box was a 6502 coprocessor and a device called The BitStik!! The BitStik was basically a none centring analogue joystick the size of a large trackball with a knob sticking out of the top. Said knob was also a rotatable pot for Z-Axis control in the CAD package. It was also fully supported by Elite and would control the throttle making manual docking piss easy, set speed, set roll and go! :-)

Ah, Here is the Bitstik, from Acorn themselves no less. Seems that was the CAD package name too. Interestingly it wasn't new. It was a rework of a product aimed at Apple ][ users 2 years earlier. But still, 2 grands worth of kit to play a 20 quid game LOL