Posts by Loyal Commenter

Re: But...

For me, TPTB have decreed that we should have a daily "check-in" 15-minute call with our colleagues (with obligatory video on of course). That's 15 minutes more than I'd typically choose to spend talking to most of them, and I'm convinced that this is nothing to do with our welfare, but more to do with the need for certain managers to feel like their job is relevant. That, and forcing you to get dressed every day.

Whilst I can see how some people may need the human contact this brings, we're a team of software developers. There's a certain personality type amongst devs, and it's typically not socially outgoing. Don't get me wrong - I'm not an antisocial person, it's just I can function perfectly well without making mindless small-talk with people I'm forced into a work-space with, and a daily "check-in" is a 15 minute interruption to your flow when you're trying to devise the best way to solve a programming problem.

Re: Productivity - Enhance vs. maintain

YMMV, personally, I find the things in the office that are unplanned and unexpected are not gains in knowledge and creativity, but disruptions from things such as loud cow-orkers making phone calls, marketoids peacocking around the office, unnecessary meetings (at least when you're on a VOIP call, you can be doing something else productive if the boss can't see you), and getting stuck in the kitchen with the office bore when you're trying to grab a quick mug of tea/coffee.

For me, knowledge is gained from being able to focus on learning a skill, and I find learning from written materials which I can cross-reference more natural than listening to someone ramble around a topic. Again, YMMV. As for creativity; that comes from within - inspiration may come from others, but I have to say from experience, people found in offices tend to be a pretty uninspiring lot.

Re: World beating

What's that squeaking sound? Does someone's tin-foil hat need oiling?

I came here to make pretty much the same comment, but it seems I've been beaten to the jump by some distance...

I wonder if Cleverly was even aware of the irony in a bunch of spies asking another bunch of spies to stop spying, or whether the concept is too grand for his rather limited mind. When I've seen him do TV interviews, he has hardly outshone himself, instead being one of those to stick to the Party line, ignore the question being asked, and read a prepared statement as an answer instead.

Re: Warmer.

Given that the things that evolve the fastest are the things with the shortest reproductive period, which tends to mean the smallest, expect those new life forms to be mostly new diseases and tiny parasitic insects. Huzzah!

Re: Warmer.

Don't you think that sea life might well be upset if the planet's axis tipped over by 90 degrees? What's more, the large moon churns it all up twice a day, which might be a good idea to get life going.

Given that such things aren't thought to happen quickly in bodies that are not tidally locked (we're thinking along the 10ka sort of time scale IIRC), anything swimming around freely is going to care not one jot.

Tides are important where there is coast, and mostly so for intertidal organisms. Something like Architeuthis that is swimming around a mile under the water's surface isn't going to notice the top of the water column going up and down by a metre or two.

As for the Anthropic Principle; I've never found it to be particularly helpful. The weak principle effectively says, "we exist here because the conditions here are suitable for the sort of life that would evolve here," which seems more than a tad tautological to me. The strong principle effectively says, "the conditions here are so suited to life that they must have been made that way just for us," which is not only a leap of faith (and I choose that word carefully), but also tending towards magical thinking.

In general terms, I think it is more helpful to say that if the conditions exist that are suitable for a "thing", and a mechanism also exists for that "thing" to come to be, then sooner or later that "thing" will evolve to fit that niche.

Life exists on Earth because there are suitable energetic and chemical gradients to allow the complexity to evolve and sustain itself. Similar conditions no doubt exist across the universe. The one thing we don't know enough about is how easy it is for life to get started (we only have one case study, and the genesis of terrestrial life is shrouded by time, and the pesky habit of the Earth's to recycle its crust so that fossils from that time are no longer around). Life may take many different forms, although it would be constrained by what is chemically, or energetically possible. Being on a celestial body that is relatively stable in terms of temperature, pressure and energy input is obviously going to be a big part of its sustainability. Our planet is in a stable orbit around a suitable star (there are lots that aren't such as variables, or ones prone to ejecting large flares), has a moon to help stabilise its orbit and tides, and Jupiter as a shield to soak up stray space rocks. This isn't always 100% effective of course (look up "Late Heavy Bombardment"). This creates an "island of stability" where life has flourished and evolved. Just because that "island" provides a suitable environment on Earth, however, does not presuppose it is the only "island" that can exist, and we have to be careful in drawing such conclusions. It can help us if we are looking for other similar conditions elsewhere, of course, by giving us a "leg up", but we shouldn't let us overlook other places that otherwise would be "interesting".

If I were able to upvote you more than once for the Heinlein reference, you'd be getting 6⁶⁶ votes...

Re: Warmer.

Rotational stability is probably important for land-based life, but oceanic life probably doesn't care too much, so it probably comes down to how much water there is on the planet in question.

We get the benefit of Jupiter protecting us from occasional visitors from the Oort cloud, but do we know that other solar systems have Oort Clouds?

These are things that help make Earth suitable for complex life, but it's a bit hubristic to assume they are requirements.

Re: Alternative?

If you're doing any sort of data analysis, a SQL database is the appropriate tool. If you don't have a head that can understand databases, you don't have a head for understanding data, and you are doomed from the start.

Putting your data into a database allows you to properly organise it and analyse it consistently (Excel really doesn't and has a number of pitfalls to catch the unwary). It is the right tool to be able to store the data in a structure that represents its real-world structure (rather than a flat spreadsheet).

You might balk at the idea of using something like MS SQL Server, but if one is starting from scratch, there is probably a lot less to learn than learning to use Excel to get the job done.

You also have the benefit of it being transactional, and logged, so you can often undo your mistakes (if you know how), unlike with Excel, where a mistake can mean your data is gone, with no idea why or how.

Re: Alternative?

Learn SQL.

Seriously, if the concepts of "tables", "rows/records" and "columns/fields" is too onerous for your wife, then she should just give up before she starts.

There is plenty of material on the internet on how to write SELECT, INSERT, DELETE and UPDATE statements. Basic SQL is very easy to pick up. There are also plenty of free SQL compliant databases. Yes, they might be a little tricker to install and configure than Excel (for instance the free versions of MS SQL Server, and indeed the paid for versions, aren't the friendliest to install), but half an hour spent with google should get you past any problems.

Then she can do it properly, and if she actually needs something to be in Excel, it can be extracted from a proper database easily enough.

Once you know how to use SQL (and have got past the inevitable mistake of forgetting the WHERE clause), you'll find there are far fewer pitfalls than there are with Excel.

Re: Ye Olde English Proverb

A bad workman tries to insert a screw with a lump hammer.

In this analogy, Excel is the hammer, and the screw is your data.

... there are very few situations it's the really correct tool to use, but in an awful lot of others it's good enough to get the job done when you don't have the perfect tool.

The problem is that whilst being "good enough", it fails in often untraceable and unpredictable ways. So what you think might be "good enough"suddenly stops working or produces errors you don't even know about.

Like losing the results of thousands of positive coronavirus tests.

Unless you are an "expert user" of Excel, you may well not even know about the limitations it has that would produce these problems, so you, quite reasonably, might think it is a suitable tool for the job when it is not. This is the real evil of Excel.

That and lack of testability, reliability, traceability, and security in a half-arsed incomplete programming model. It allows people to think they are being clever getting "calculations" done without even realising that they are effectively doing a programming job, but without the benefit of knowing how to program, and the caveats that would bring, such as the need to define behaviour, boundary conditions, inputs, outputs, etc. and verify and test the behaviour to ensure it is correct. Actually, that - that is why Excel is Evil.

Oh, and people's thinking that it can be used as a simple ETL tool, with the assumption that if you export something to Excel and re-import it again into $software, opening the file before re-importing it won't suddenly decide to convert half your values into random numbers, or dates, or remove leading zeroes, drop precision from numbers, choke on dates before 1900 (whilst thinking that there was a 29th February in that year) and all other sorts of shenanigans. THAT is why Excel is EVIL.

I mean, even for its original purpose, of simple accounting spreadsheets, it has the complete lack of structure and control that you would get in any actual accounting software. It might be okay for reporting, with various caveats, but invariably, whenever I have come across it in the 25+ years I have been working with computers, there has been a better or more appropriate tool for the job. In summary, Excel is EVIL

Re: Relax...

Yes, cos the intern at the NHS in charge of getting data emailed from 17 incompatible NHS trusts into one report is "empowered" (sorry) to call up Crapita and demand a custom applications

No, they are absolutely not, but the chain of manglement above them is absolutely responsible. Possibly just their immediate manager telling them to "get the job done I don't care how," or maybe right the way to the top of the organisation, depending on how ham-strung the intermediaries are by political edicts.

Someone is to blame, however, and it isn't the poor intern.

Re: T minus 7s?

I guess a lot of the pre-flight checks are done just before firing, to assure that they are as current as possible.

Re: "However, this largely feels moot as the keyboard itself uses two USB ports."

I think this is probably due to both the power, and bandwidth requirements. I'm not about to go peering round the back of my PC right now, but IIRC, it has 5 or 6 USB3 ports, and a couple of USB2 ones on the back panel. Add to that, one header each for USB2 and USB3 on the mobo itself (which give 2 ports each on the front panel), and that's not the most generous. And it's one bought this year (albeit at the beginning of the year, so probably a 2018/19 model).

Due to the number of things I generally have plugged in, I went and bought a PCIe USB3 card, which provides an additional 2 ports round the back, and an additional header. I think it cost about a tenner on eBay (shipped from China of course).

Due to requirements of things I have plugged in internally, I also bought a 4-way internal USB2 hub, turning that single header (equivalent to 2 ports) into 4 (equivalent to 8). That cost about a fiver.

The reason the USB3 needs to use a PCIe slot, and the USB2 doesn't is that USB3 provides about 12 times the bandwidth and twice the power of USB2.

There also seems to be this idea that you can just dasiy-chain USB hubs together, with no power, and the bandwidth and power provision will be magically spread to every port. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics".

Re: How reliable are the lights

Contact Corsair about a replacement. As far as I remember, they do lifetime guarantees on most of their products.

I had a DIMM go bad a few years back, causing intermittent crashes. This was several years after I had bought it, and the PC it was in had fairly heavy use. Corsair only asked that I run Memtest86 to prove the problem (which I had already done to identify the faulty module), and that I send the whole set back to them for replacement. Of course that meant that I was stuck without any memory in my PC while it was being replaced, so I had to buy some new (faster) modules to replace them, but the replacements when they arrived went straight onto eBay and covered most of the upgrade cost...

Re: USB passthrough

A memory-card reader sounds like a good idea until you look at how long the various formats tend to last. Admittedly, micro-SD seems to be a settled standard for now, but the lifetime of a well-made keyboard will be in the decades (and with Cherry switches this is a reasonable expectation).

I have, scattered around my desk, and in various drawers, micro-SD cards, adapters for micro-SD to mini-SD and full-sized SD, Proprietary Sony memory cards, compact flash [sic] things half the size of a floppy disk, as well as an assortment of pen drives, from thumbnail, to thumb sized, and USB enclosures for 2.5" and 3.5" hard disks. It is only in the last decade that I threw out the stack of Zip disks I used when I was a student, the drive itself having long ago ceased to function. The only thing that is constant in the external storage game is change. If you bought a keyboard that had a slot for a compact flash card, for instance, you would regard it as nothing more than a retirement home for dust.

Re: "However, this largely feels moot as the keyboard itself uses two USB ports."

No idea why they didn't just build in a USB hub into the keyboard.

Presumably, power requirements. USB 3 can provide quite an amount of power compared to USB 2, and this essentially means that hubs should be powered, especially if the upstream port is underpowered (as some laptop ports can be). It seems a perfectly sensible design decision to use a port for the keyboard itself, and a second for the hub, thus guaranteeing that the lights on the keyboard don't draw too much power to under-power the pass-through ports. The ugly alternative would be to plug the thing into a power brick, or risk complaints that the external port is underpowered when it is plugged into a USB 2 port on a 4-way hub.

Re: Ranting from home

I use a similar (but cheaper model) keyboard from Corsair, the K68. It, too, has the frankly unnecessary, but oddly satisfying fully programmable lighting effects, but uses the cherry MX Red switches, which don't drive others around you to despair with the loud clacking worthy of a daisy-wheel printer. I believe this model, and presumably the one under review, come as variations, with a choice of red/blue/brown switches to fit the preferences of the typist (and those around them).

You are basically paying for the high quality genuine cherry switches, rather than knock-offs (I'm typing this on a much cheaper "i-Rocks" model with perfectly good knock-off mechanical switches), plus a mark-up for the name, and for the lighting effects. I don't regret the frankly steep price point, because Corsair products do seem to be, on the whole, solidly and well made.

Re: Hefty price

To be fair, it has got to the point where the frame rates these things will pump out far exceed the capacity of most monitors. I don't know about you, but the two QHD monitors I'm using have a 60Hz refresh rate (they have HDMI inputs, so it's a hard limit). Sure, you can buy 120Hz monitors, but guess what? That's about 5x the refresh rate that the human eye can actually detect.

The (admittedly quite expensive) graphics card I bought earlier in the year for £320 or so was a replacement on a 4-5 year cycle. It will quite happily produce that resolution at 60Hz for any games I care to play, even with 2x supersampling turned on (which works out at the equivalent number of pixels as 2 4K monitors). I suspect that if I had a monitor capable of it, it would churn out 120 FPS. There's no way on Earth I need that capability, and it's largely an insurance against the future, if games get a lot more graphically demanding. So the obvious question is - if a not-quite-top-of-the-range graphics card from 2019 will produce effectively the same output as a top-of-the-range one from 2020, for any practical gaming needs, who are these things aimed at?

I always take such figures with a pinch of salt

If the words are coming from the mouth of a marketeer, it's a fair bet to assume that there isn't enough salt in the world to season them properly.

Re: @jake - How was this missed? Daft question.

I wasn't sure what type of lock a "disc detainer lock" was, so I googled it. The second sponsored ad at the top of the page was, for sale, a disc detainer lock, and picking tool for such, for "training purposes".

I think maybe the phrase you were looking for was "nigh-on easily pickable"?

Re: Microsoft GitHub

I think it's an excellent idea to completely disregard a company's appalling previous behaviour decades ago, over decades

There FTFY.

Not that I'm a particular MS fan-boy, but to be fair to them, their sharp business practises of the '90s and early '00s do seem to be in the past, and as other posters point out, the attention these days would be better placed looking at Google, FaceBook, Amazon, PayPal, eBay, et al