Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: hmm what will reg readers' opinion be on something modern

If you're drinking something hoppy, it's probably an IPA, or possibly a session ale, but not a stout. Hops are added to pale beers to preserve them. Stouts and porters tend to be robust enough both in terms of flavour, and cask-life, without having to add poncey flowers into them.

Re: Beer Definition

Stout made with chocolate malt, and chocolate stout, are not the same thing (although they can be both). Chocolate stouts are delicious, and most definitely have chocolate in them, as is coffee porter, which can get you drunk and wake you up at the same time!

Re: Not beer

My understanding with fruit lambic beers (at least the supermarket ones) is that fruit syrup is added to the beer after fermentation has completed. In some countries, it is common practice to add the fruit syrup to beer when serving.

Re: Not beer

I guess you've never tried any chocolate stout then. There's this thing called "fermentation" you might have heard of, where microorganisms (usually yeast) turn that sugar into alcohol. Chocolate stouts are usually strong, dark, and bitter, with a chocolatey aftertaste.

They won't be sweet unless someone has done something to stop the fermentation (like a fortified wine), or they've put far a load of sugar in to start with and the yeast has poisoned itself, this would lead to "off-flavours" from the dying yeast, apparently known affectionately as "yeast-poop" amongst brewers.

Re: Beer Definition

At the time, the keg and the yeast were one and the same. For certain brewing processes, this is still the case (lambic springs to mind).

From Wikipedia: (my emphasis)

Lambic is generally brewed from a grist containing approximately 60–70% barley malt and 30–40% unmalted wheat. The wort is cooled overnight in a shallow, flat metal pan (generally copper or stainless steel) called a coolship where it is left exposed to the open air so more than 120 different types of microorganisms may inoculate the wort. This cooling process requires night-time temperatures between -8C (18F) and 8C (46F). While this cooling method of open air exposure is a critical feature of the style, the key yeasts and bacteria that perform the fermentation reside within the breweries' timber fermenting vessels.

Re: Transistor physics

Indeed, modern chips are not flat, but as the article points out, modern lithography techniques mean that subsequent layers have to not interfere with the ones already laid. This puts a limit on how "high" a chip can be built, and you're still ending up with structures that look flat to the human eye, which are maybe a few hundred atoms tall. That's 2.5 dimensional at best, far from true 3D structures.

Re: Transistor physics

Back when I was at uni in the tail end of the previous millennium, they had a lab doing just that. - Thin film diamond vapour deposition.

See those stylish chemists from the '90s

Re: About time too

But we cannot do that with Windows (yet), as *IT* dictates how many cores can be used (for each task) and it just switches between them when *IT* determines which program has priority - and we have to sit and wait while Windows locks the screen and figures out what is going on. :-(

Open task manager. Switch to the Details tab, find the process you are interested in, right-click, set affinity.

You can explicitly set which cores are used, at the process level, so the exact opposite of what you said. In fact, if I remember rightly, and I'm going from memory here, it's one of the configuration settings in SQL Server to be able to set the processor affinity, so you can tell it explicitly NOT to use certain cores, if you want them free for something else.

Of course, if you wanted to set the affinity of all OS processes to one core, the affinity of an email client to another, and so on, apart from taking you a while to work through all those processes (the OS itself is going to have quite a few), all you're going to achieve is the underutilisation of some cores. You'd be better off setting the process priority down for things that you don't want hogging your resources (you can do that in the same place, too).

Complaining that a multiprocessing OS is splitting processor time to various tasks according to its own rules is basically blaming it for what it is designed to do. If you haven't set those rules to your liking, then it's not the fault of the OS for not being psychic. I don't know of any other OS that would handle processor sharing any differently, and we are a long way past the point where you would assign a single task to a single core and set it running. A multi-purpose OS with a UI is not an embedded device.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of valid criticisms of Microsoft, and of Windows, but making up bullshit doesn't help.

Re: Transistor physics

Once you get to the smallest scale you can make a transistor at (which, in order to be reliable, is probably not going to be smaller than ten atoms or so), you will have reached a hard limit of how many you can etch onto a silicon wafer, end of.

After that, the only improvements will be from either using something that's not a transistor, such as qubits, which will mean an entirely different programming paradigm, or moving into three dimensions, to produce something that is no longer a chip, because it isn't flat; let's call it a "block".

Once you do that, conventional lithography is dead, and we'll need some sort of other nano-fabrication technology to build those. That means those really, really expensive fab plants that Intel and their ilk have will be redundant, so don't expect that to happen any time soon, at least not driven by those players.

If you move into three dimensions, you also have to contend with cooling issues. At the moment, drawing heat from the top of a flat surface is a relatively simple job - a bit of thermal paste and a heatsink, and you're away. Thankfully, silicon is a reasonably good conductor of heat, but I reckon there's still a problem there in getting heat from the middle of a "block" to the edges, especially if those "blocks" are comprised of lots of layers of different materials with different thermal properties. Electrically insulating layers also have the tendency to be thermally insulating.

Re: Wasn't this in one of the Brosnan Bond films?

I think there will be three factors at play here; beam divergence, atmospheric attenuation, and collector efficiency.

If the beam divergence is kept low, and the collectors are wide enough to "catch" the whole beam, it’s not a problem. At the other end of the scale, if the transmission is omnidirectional, then the power drops off with the square of the distance.

Atmospheric attenuation depends on the wavelength used, the thickness of the atmosphere it will have to travel through (which will depend on the angle; directly above would be the lowest attenuation, and on the horizon the highest), and the weather - water vapour absorbs microwaves, to varying degrees, again depending on the wavelength, which is how a microwave oven works.

Collector efficiency is basically a measure of how much energy is captured by the receiver, which is effectively acting like an aerial. A quick google of the subject suggests that we can expect this to be better than 90%

So, judicious choice of wavelength, to avoid any major atmospheric absorption, and a well focused beam means it woudl hopefully be up to 90% transmission efficiency, which will be well above the actual efficiency of the solar panels themselves.

Re: Hot Stuff

I thought the Simpsons had already shown us that they all are.

Re: Having access to the system logs ...

I would have thought that any sensible person reading the thread would have seen that the previous two posts referred to Tom Lehrer. Even if the reader had never heard of him (and if not, why not?), I think that a basic level of reading comprehension would suggest that that was a quote.

Edit - just to add; not that it's my thing, but there's a world of difference between whatever consensual (and legal) activity gets you off, and abuse. Conflating the two is just stigmatising the sexual preferences of others, which is a course of behaviour that everyone should steer clear of, under the adage of "mind your own business".

Re: Crime of the century

Not to overstate the obvious, but I believe the actual issue here is of a Health Secretary making rules that affect everyone in the country (rightly or wrongly, I'm not getting involved in that debate, for there be idiots), and not following them himself.

That, and using personal email for government business, thus sidestepping necessary accountability, giving out work to the guy who runs his local pub without proper procurement procedures (again, an issue with accountability), then pretending to not know the landlord in question, despite being on Zoom calls with a picture of the same pub on the wall behind him, which subsequently mysteriously disappeared, and all sorts of other instances of Tory donors mysteriously getting "fast-tracked" for lucrative government contracts with the health Department, with no oversight, or proper procurement procedures, despite being very demonstrably not the best choice in many cases.

And if you think "Door Matt" (as John Crace likes to call him) is the only one up to these sorts of shenanigans in the corridors of power, I've got a selection of very nice bridges you might like to take a look at. Act fast, as they're selling out.

Are we getting close yet?

Re: $10 million

That system works, because banks make loans that they think people will be able to afford to repay, or at least pay the interest on.

Large loans are typically "secured", for example, if you have a mortgage, it is secured on your house. If you default, the bank gets the house, as well as any repayments you've already made.

Now, arguably, a bank might secure a loan on a yacht with the yacht itself, but they'll probably look at the rate of depreciation on that yacht, which, unlike property, is unlikely to go up in value, and do the maths, and work out that if you defaulted after your first payment, and they repossessed it, they'd probably only get 40% of the value back. If they were in the business of giving loans for yachts, and there were enough customers out there, they might amortise that risk by charging a high rate of interest to cover the defaults, on the assumption of a certain rate of defaults, but they'd probably decide that the risks were too variable, and go into a safer business. So yes, if you walked into a bank and asked for an unsecured loan on an expensive veblen good like a yacht, or a "luxury" watch, they would either laugh at you or try to fleece you for an interest rate that rivals a pay-day loan company.

Re: Bitcoin mixers and tumblers

And when that "mixer and tumbler" is operating in one of the other 194 countries in the world, how do you propose that your law enforcement agency does that?

Re: Ha ha

The lack of regulation does make cryptocurrencies very much a "Wild West" situation, and you do have to assume every other player is a bad actor, unless proven otherwise.

However, whenever I see a comment like this, I feel compelled to ask how that is different to, for instance, the US Dollar, the favoured currency of black-market arms and drugs dealers worldwide?

Re: BCCI

I think legally you have to tell them, or you are technically committing fraud.

I think the standard form, for when a financial institution makes a mistake in your favour, is to write them a letter, either sent by recorded post, or asking for a confirmation of receipt, telling them that they have made a mistake. No need to tell them it's in your favour, and if they don't respond, the money is legally yours.

IANAL so don't take this as bona fide legal advice!

That's not why Barings got shut down. It collapsed because they essentially allowed a single trader to make a bunch of long-shot bets with more money than they had to back them with. No "intrusions", as such, and it wasn't "shut down" by any authorities, it folded due to insolvency.

This particular story sounds like a run-of-the-mill "get rich quick" scam. They sued the word "crypto" in there, but there's nothing to indicate that this was the nature of the scam, except that when the perps ran off with the cash, it was in the form of Bitcoin, rather than a suitcase full of high-denomination notes, or bearer bonds, or frozen orange juice futures, or whatever.

Bitcoin itself might turn out to be a massive investment bubble, but this fraud isn't related to that.

To compare to another famous bubble, this is like a couple of guys telling everyone that they could get rich, if they only give them money to buy a load of tulips, buying a load of tulips with that money, and then rather than waiting to see if the price goes up, just running off with them, selling them, and keeping all the money. Hell, there might not even be any tulips involved, or only just enough to string the "investors" along by waving a bag of bulbs in their faces to encourage them to part with more money, and get their friends in on the act.

Re: $10 million

Yes, but if you go to the bank and say, "I'd like a loan to buy a super-yacht," or even, "I'd like a loan to pay my rent / pay employees / buy food," they first thing they'll ask is how you intend to pay it back, before laughing you out of the room. Yes, our economy is based in large part on the circulation of debt, but a lot of people will see that as a problem, not a great selling point. Just take a look at every major financial crash in recent history for a lesson in why.

Re: $10 million

Money is not for creating more problems. If you have more money than you can spend, you're fine. Stop trying to find excuses to spend more money.

From the perspective of societal good, this is the exact problem with capitalism.

If you have vast sums of money, and hold onto it, it means that money is taken out of the economy and the supply is reduced. There's slightly less to go around for everyone else, and less taxation to fund public services. This harms everyone.

If, however, you spaff it all on yachts, that money goes back into the economy. The agent takes his cut, pays taxes on it, and spends it to pay for food and bills. The yacht builders pay their employees, pay income taxes and national insurance contributions, buy other goods and services, and so on. The money continues to circulate in the economy. The government gets their cut, so there is money for rubbish collections, road maintenance, pandemic vaccination programmes, armed forces, and so on.

Once you get people hoarding personal wealth on a scale similar to a country's GDP, you have a problem.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with saving for a rainy day, saving up to buy a house, etc. but you have to ask how many zeroes on the end of those savings are necessary to insulate yourself against the unforeseen and how many are just down to pure avarice at everyone else's expense.

Re: Yay money laundering!

I'm not sure how people are trading in cryptocurrencies for cash, to be honest, at least in the UK.

Find vendor who accepts payment via BitPay. Transfer cryptocurrency to BitPay. Pay vendor. Receive goods. BitPay also convert various crypto into vouchers for Amazon, major supermarkets, etc. I've not tried that route, but can confirm that it works with vendors who accept BitPay (e.g. Pimoroni)

When China's economy is based in large part on producing goods to be sold elsewhere, that seems very unlikely.

...and "untraceable" probably applies less to Bitcoin than it does to the USD. The blockchain is in essence a ledger containing every single transaction. The only thing that may be untraceable is *who* is making those transactions, and even then, de-anonymisation of wallets is not impossible, especially when Bitcoin is transferred to exchanges that require user verification and authentication.