Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Big credit

Especially since lightpens and touch screens existed by then too.

Before I ever heard of a computer mouse, a book of home brew add-ons in about 1980/81 showed how to build a basic touch screen using infrared LEDS and sensors to form a course grid in front of the screen. I never actually built that one, but it worked in exactly the same way as a TRS-80 row/column keyboard address matrix so would have been dead simple to program for. In fact with LDOS and it's device driver architecture, you could easily just write a new keyboard driver and load that for a kiosk-like terminal and not even have to bang the hardware.

Re: The other alternative history...

Or the one where the British Government doesn't decide to keep Colossus secret, stifling the British computer revolution and ICL rules the roost, Tim Berners Lee invents the internet and all, and Lord Clive Sinclair is a billionaire off the back of his ZX Spectrum Gen 9 after moving to the ARM powered RISC chipset and the world is driving around in frighteningly dangerous electric single seater tricycle like buggies with optional 6 foot tall warning flags.

Re: Elite?

Probably for budgetary (Or manglerment bonuses) reasons. Like having capital for new shiny and nothing for repairs and maintenance.

Local Authorities are great like that. Like the 100m long "wall of fountains" arrangement on our sea front. Lasted about 2 years before they turned them into flower beds.

Re: What about the admins

And not forgetting the front-line helpdesk staff who, while also working from home, had to deal with double or triple the calls, also had to troubleshoot home users ISP connections, VPN connections, and sometimes their home PC connections (at least in the very early day when not enough kit was available)

Of course, thanks to you admins, for making it so the help-desk people had work to do and beefed up the remote working servers/VPNs etc at very short notice so the users had something to try to connect to :-)

Re: Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.

"Myself and my colleague do as much testing as we can on our work"

That's good. But as you have probably discovered already, testing your own work makes it incredibly easy to miss faults. You know what to expect and often, that's exactly what you get. Someone unrelated to the project will more likely find the faults because they don't have the expectations you have. It's just the way most people are wired. Just reading over some code you wrote can mean your brain seeing code you expect to see and missing the glaring typo that is actually there :-)

That's why I thought this...

"divides teams from "Elite" (multiple deploys per day, cycle time of less than one day) down to "Low" (deploys less than once a month, cycle time of one to six months)."

...sounded a bit strange. Teams doing multiple deploys per day are "elite" and teams doing deploys monthly are "low". So a team pushing out hourly changes to help files correcting typos can be "elite", while the team doing the hard coding work pushing out changes monthly are "low". Yeah, great for team moral!

Re: iAge

"iAdmit it. I have rounded corners and respond to touch and gestures.

FTFY

Re: Here in the EU...

Thanks for that, done!

Re: Here in the EU...

"Why is the UK struggling so much with this?"

In short, because "ID cards".

In long, anyone who want's proof can get it, but since it's not mandatory, it's left up to the individual to decide if they want it rather than offering at the point of injection.

Personally, I agree with what you describe, it should at least be offered at the time of injection and not left for people to find that eventually they may find they are refused entry somewhere and only then go get the proof/certificate/whatever. We're already seeing stories in the news of people who took part in trials being refused flights to some countries because the trial vaccines they got are not approved yet, or, in one case at least, people who had a batch of Astra Zenica made in India being refused a flight to Malta because it wasn't on the approved list in Malta (I think that one has been sorted now)

Re: gimme gimme gimme

"Hopefully the UK chose not to prop up Intel's shareholders."

More likely, big investments like fabs are not coming to the UK until the trade situation and tariffs are more known and stable factors. If a fab was built in the UK, who knows what additional costs may be incurred importing the expensive kit and raw materials, let alone potential tariffs on exports of the product. EU trade is still up in the air for foreseeable, and there's no US trade agreement yet. EU trade is a known factor, not to mention the already talked about existing fabs and whatnot inside the EU free trade zone.

Re: There's no such thing as a workstation

"Workstation" has become a marketing term that has lost any useful meaning.

Yes, this. To me, a "workstation" is something akin to server grade hardware but intended for a user, eg highspecced components (down to the board level), high quality PSU, a beefy case with high specced mountings for the drives etc., all mechanically engineered to high standards. Consider the difference between closing the door on a really cheap, clunk! car compared to the lovely soft sound a high end car door makes.

Unlike the trend for thinner, lighter laptops, "workstation" to me implies something you can drive a tank over and it still keeps on truckin' :-)

"a stupid £50 dongle with VGA every user always loses"

We took on a refurb contract for a customer. They sent us all the old laptops from leavers and we checked them over, re-imaged and cleaned ready for re-deployment. Over half had the ethernet dongles missing. The dongles are getting hard to source now.

Re: Get an adaptor

Adaptors can be a bit hit and miss. Some will work in some situations, some won't.

There's still a lot of older CNC kit out there that uses serial. RS232C also has a much longer range than USB without adaptors or repeater (and possibly timing issues). I recently saw an old CNC machine in a factory still using punched tape to load it's programmes/data. The punch machine was attached to a PC via RS232C too.

"when the orbital height gets a bit low."

What might cause that? Surely the lack of any noticeable atmosphere means it's theoretically possible to have a fast and low orbit such that you stay just high enough to avoid hitting any mountain tops? Might it be perturbations caused by TMA1? :-) Or does the the Earths gravity affect lunar orbits enough to matter?

Re: $187 million for a "small studio apartment"

The service charge is the real kicker!!

Thanks for that, I also came here to ask the same question. But my question goes further. Why? Why not a more or less circular orbit? Is this so the moon-bound ships can dock way out and "hitch a ride" down to low Moon orbit where the lander detaches for the final leg? Is it cheaper in fuel, even if further away much of the time in an emergency?

Re: I like it

"The updates themselves have not caused me any issues although you do tend to get more prompts requiring user input than Windows or Mac updates."

That's because by default, you are not the admin user. On Windows, you probably are an admin level user.

Re: Microsoft Maths

Or just go back to "the good old days" where you buy an OS, software, programmes, apps, whatever as you see fit and you "own" it for life. And like with physical products, you get support and a "warranty" for 5 years, ie bug fixes. After that, you are on your own unless you buy the newer, latest version.

"App" developers, both small and large, get constant income from sales, when the new version comes out, the old version stops being sold. It's still a constant income, if not as high as subscription services, because people will pay, I dunno, £10 for an "app", every few years or so rather than "only" £2 per month for as long as they want the app. Likewise, something like MS Office for say £250 rather than "only" £10 per month for life.

Re: 85km isn't bad

IIRC, unless they switch out the engine and fuel system it can't go much higher. The type of fuel used means it runs rough and bumpy if you try to burn it all so they have to shut it off before they run "dry".

It's a good start, but they need to go back to the drawing board if they want to go much higher. It *might* just be a case of scaling up, but then this current craft is "just" a scaled up version of the original Scaled Composite craft and the engineering to scale up up has taken them 17 years. Not to mention that going much higher likely will require batter heat shielding, adding more weight.

Re: Was waiting for this in 2004

"And yet, it feels like something that would have been more relevant a decade ago."

That first one wasn't suitable for more than what it did. Developing something for commercial use by the paying public, takes a looooong time. Testing and certification alone takes years. Just look at the Boeing 737 Max. the whole point of that was to get to market faster by grandfathering certification because starting with a new airframe would take at least a decade.

Re: At workers' expense

"If workers don't produce value, then why are they there? "

He's talking about how those workers produce value and how much value they produce. Look at the UK, especially through the 60's to the 80's with powerful unions refusing to accept change and investment and the huge slump in productivity against value, being undercut by the most of the rest of the world. Or the USSR. Nationalised industries with no internal competition become lacklustre and left behind. Unregulated capitalism is just as bad. You end up with monopolies resulting in the same downward spiral when there's no one to compete against.

Imagine if Heinz were so big, they were buying the entire worlds supply of beans for baked beans. They'd have no reason to improve the quality or supply. They'd have every reason to make them as cheaply as possible and even cause artificial scarcity to increase the prices.

Re: Is that it?

"But all that just to lob someone just barely into space hardly seems worth it."

That could have been said about Yuri Gagarins first flight, or that of Alan Shepherd. Or even more appropriately, the Wright Brothers first manned, controlled flight.

A lot depends on whether Unity leads to a dead end or if it, or at least the design concept, leads to something more useful.

Re: Bring back Concorde - much more impressive.

"The combined throwaway budgets of two nations against the entrepreneurial endeavour of an individual? Not really a valid comparison."

Yeah, but imagine an alternative history where Concorde wasn't banned from many places and/or solved the sonic boom "issue", where it might be now with continual development.

Re: "Taking humans deep into that environment"

Same here. It's a working space plane. And the ticket price is about £180,000. That's well within reach of many people. You only need to well off to afford that, not "super rich[*]".

Yes, still in the top few percent, but that's a LOT or people. Plenty business leaders earn that per year.

There are about 3.6 million millionaires in the UK alone (although a lot of them are asset rich, cash poor because the house is worth a lot.

Re: Space Cadets

"Taking humans deep into that environment in normal attire (OK, jumpsuits but nothing special about them, made by Under Armour."

True, and it is a great achievement. On the other hand, although much lower, Concorde was doing the same many years ago, serving Champagne to passengers while the US military were still putting pilots in spacesuits to fly that high,

Re: Miserable and small minded

"I'm personally not a fan of Branson's abrupt reshuffling of schedules in order for him "to be first", but I can at least understand it."

AIUI, Virgin have been ready for a while and where just waiting for the FAA licence and permits to come through. That happened a weeks or so back and the 11th was the earliest they could go now that the paperwork is all in place. Virgin only appear to have stolen a march on BO because BO have been hyping their first flight for quite some while, whereas Virgin have, unusually for them, been relatively quiet. If anyone caused a Rapid Unscheduled Reshuffle, it was the FAA :-)