Posts by Pen-y-gors 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2010
A generation of Register readers was educated on space through the popular stop-motion children's TV show
True for me - well mainly the Clangers but also watching the Apollo missions live on TV. Somewhere I still have the three large scrapbooks of newspaper clippings I gathered about Apollo 11.
I wonder if that influenced my decision to study Astronomy at Uni?
Several different approaches for non-invasive blood-sugar monitoring have been under development for some years. Various products have been plugged as being available real soon now. They involve clips in the ear, sensors on the thumb and the palm of the hand. None of them so far seem to be actually available.
I'll believe this when I see it. Personally I don't care who makes it or how it actually works, just please get it onto the market soon.
It would really dent Bayer Pharma's profits though...
In other news water is wet
I'm sure we've discussed this before. Is it true to say that water is wet? Or is it that other objects, after coming into contact with water, and retaining some on their surface, are the things that are actually wet? A towel can be wet, as can a labrador.
@Just enough
Now that the truly enormous clusterf***ck that Brexit is has become obvious to anyone paying attention
Sadly it seems that a large number of our fellow citizens aren't paying attention, and haven't been for years, otherwise the polls wouldn't show a large minority still in favour of national economic suicide. Personally I blame Facebook/TV/Video games/The Daily Mail <delete as appropriate>
@Lyndon Hills 1
I think what he meant is that for the import side, we can charge whatever tarriff we want, so if we have no tarrifs then we have no processing of imports to do. Exports are really the responsibility of the receiving country so again no need for the UK to do anything.
It's not as simple as that (although the Quitlings don't seem to be able to think beyond stage 1)
No controls on imports also means no checks on standards. Electrically unsafe goods being imported? Poisonous toys? Dodgy Yankee food? Okay, that may be acceptable (erm, actually, no). But those items could then be exported with a 'Made in Great England' sticker - and the EU won't be happy to receive those. What were they saying about common standards?
Testing implies several levels - unit testing, integration testing and business testing (at the very least) - some of the most effective projects I ever worked on had a couple of experienced business users seconded to the development team to provide advice and answer questions during development, to write and execute the business test plans, and to help write the documentation and provide user training. The users got the systems they wanted and needed.
@John Hawkins
I'd really, really like to believe that. I really, really would.
But this sort of thing needs to be based on evidence, and the evidence is that she's completely lost, has no idea what to do next, and whose idea of long term planning is what to have for tea today. She staggers from one day to the next, with only the thought of keeping her party 'united' (Hah!) for another 24 hours and stuff the UK, the EU and everyone else.
Rees-Mogg has explained that after Brexit there will be no need for customs checks
I've never quite understood that (or anything he says, to be honest)
Surely the whole point of Brexit was to 'take back control' of our borders? How do you do that without customs checks?
Is it that I am a bear of very little brain and don't really understand these complicated things, or is Rees-Mogg simply a mendacious idiot?
@jake
Sounds like the training didn't work too well. Hit him once in the neck. Other shot probably went through the window of the house opposite, and narrowly missed the occupants who were quietly watching telly.
She was two feet away from him, but couldn't see him to target because of a closed door. The safe option would be to shoot a single warning shot through the top of the door, at an upward angle. Would probably miss, but a) he'd know she was serious and b) no risk of injury to innocent passers by.
But he should look on the bright side (if there is a bright side to years in a US hell-hole) - if it had happened in the UK he wouldn't have been shot, but they'd probably have hit him with trrrrrsm charges (possesion of material likely to be of use to a trrrrst, i.e duct tape) and locked him up for life.
UK contribution to Galileo £1 billion or so - for which we get jobs and full access to a new GPS system.
UK contribution to to UK GPS system? Govt say £3-5 billion, so in reality that probably means £9-15 billion. Timescales? Lets check the timescales for other Govt IT projects and see how they're going. Universal credit?
The late delivery does help though. They can plant the saplings in the Magic Money Forest now and they'll be about ready to harvest when the rockets are due to launch.
@Phil O'Sophical
if we can put together a credible plan showing that it's possible to do so, with newer technology, in about the same timeframe as Galileo, it's a useful bargaining position.
That's an amazingly big IF! A credible plan from the UK government? They have demonstrated time and time again they are incapable of a credible plan for going to buy a Mars bar at the Spar on the corner.
And with new technology? That would be the wheel, I assume?
In the same time-frame as Galileo? Or possibly by 2134.
The NHS budget is already badly over-stretched. Now doctors will be asked to prescribe a daily pint or two.
Anyone remember the old Milk Marketing Board and "Drinka Pinta Milka Day"? (And that was before the days of semi-skimmed)
Time for a new campaign "Drinka Pinta FirklestonesOldSkullcrackera Day"
Having visited friends in St Margarets who lived right under the Heathrow flightpath it can't be much fun. What pisses me off is that everywhere is 'under the flight path' these days. Our nearest serious airport is close on 3 hours drive away, but still we get them. Okay, they're at 30,000 feet, but when relaxing in a peaceful Welsh garden, with the sound of the stream, the birdies, the sheep and not much else, it's a really pain to get jet noise! Bastards I say!
Oh no, no. Faith is so essential and powerful. The sun only rises every morning because I believe it will. My laptop only boots because I have faith that it will. Those BSODs are a sign of a lack of faith - I am a worthless sinner. The daily sacrifice of a virgin also helps (getting harder to find these days)
And for a wonderful example of the power of Faith, <insert Brexit reference here>
This is obviously a serious cock-up, but, to be fair, no padlock is invincible, and that applies for most (all?) security systems. They are just ways of reducing the temptation of an open door with something valuable behind it. The more effective the lock, the less likely some opportunist passing-by bit of shit will have a go at it. If a garden shed needs a noisy angle-grinder to open it will probably be effective. The same lock will not be so good in a remote location on a shed full of gold bullion.
If the contents are valuable enough, it can be opened!
@deive
Sorry, lack-of-coffee moment. I of course meant duckduckgo, not Bing. But still get better results in Google!
The VPN problem isn't that the VPN needs access to stuff, but it isn't available in the Amazon store, so I need (I assume, possibly wrongly - I don't do technical wizardry with phones, I stick to webservers) to get Google store installed to grab it.
Basically, this is a very good thing. BUT...I quite like gmail. And the calendar is quite handy. And it's good to use both on phone and desktop. I appreciate there are alternatives, I just can't be faffed to install them and switch. For search I sometimes use Bing, sometimes Google. But I usually get better results in Google!
And, evil though Google tends to be, lock-in there is as nothing compared to Amazon. I recently needed wanted a new tablet, and succumbed to getting an Amazon Fire HD 10 (decent spec and price). But Jesus wept, talk about lockin! I've managed to kill Alexa (probably) but it looks like a bit of a faff to even get Google Play installed to get some of my more core apps installed (the VPN I pay for, Firefox Focus). I'm still googling to work out if I can completely replace the OS with vanilla Android.
Let the down-votes commence!
Having suffered the occasional coffee-on-keyboard incident I found that a good cure was sometimes to just put it on the radiator until it dried out. That doesn't work if there was sugar in the coffee. I have heard tell that in this case (and for any generally gunked up keyboard) then a quick trip through the dishwasher can work wonders! I suspect best without detergent, and on a low temperature, but why not? Let it dry thoroughly before plugging back in. And given that basic keyboards cost about a tenner, what have you to lose?
@james_smith
You also need to see a doctor if you have balls and a socket, as I thought they were mutually exclusive on the same individual.
No, more that you need to see a doctor if you have balls (or not) and don't have several sockets - hips joints? shoulder joints? eye sockets?
@Pete
However, it should not be used as an excuse to not ensure we train the right people to fill these jobs ourselves. Why can't we recruit and retain the necessary medical staff?
Because it takes time and money.
Doctors and nurses don't grow on trees. They have to be carefully nurtured from tiny seeds for years until they are fully grown, and even then they will require care and support as they develop to full maturity.
Or to put it another way: experienced doctors take about 15 years to develop from when they leave school. Specialist nurses less, but still not exactly months. And if we want to train them we need training schools, which cost money to build and run. And those schools need staff - which we're short of and would probably have to import to get sufficient numbers.
Problem is finding a government willing to invest for the future. God knows where we'll get one - they don't grow on trees either.
very irregular blocks of stone held together by what appeared to be crunchy, granular mortar and a lot of hope,
Obviously very effective hope (and lime mortar) - it's lasted for centuries!
My house is similar. 200 years old, 18" thick stone walls, and not always even lime mortar. When I was doing some work I found that the interior side of the wall was held together with mud and horsehair. I just slapped some plasterboard over it and carried on! Floor is slate slabs on earth, and foundations? What are they? Good for another few centuries though, unlike the average modern build.
Tinfoil is your friend here.
It can be very effective. We recently opened our nice new community shop, state of the art environmentally sound design etc. And because Welsh slate costs a fortune, a black corrugated iron roof (looks much nicer than it sounds - and the 10kW solar PV panels just fade into the background).
But... we also have foil layers on the wall insulation. And a thin metal layer on the triple glazed windows.
Coudn't work out why we had absolutely no mobile reception inside, but 3 bars of 4G outside the front door.
We'd built our own Faraday cage! But it's lovely and peaceful in the cafe. None of this "I'm in the cafe. I SAID, I'M IN THE CAFE"
And of course the rights-holders have the right to sue the infringers for their costs, including anything they pay to the ISP. But it gets it back to a fight between a right-holder and a bad person, aided by their well-paid lawyers (technically also bad people, but you know what I mean)
Why do all these businesses store credit card details? Small businesses have a system where they let a payment provider take the details and just say yes/no. Or even if the details are gathered locally, why do they need to be stored on a customer record once the details have been transmitted to the bank and the payment authorised?
That would expose far fewer bits of critical data. Before now I've refused to develop an online shop for a customer who wanted to store CC details!
And lets face it, if they crack the bank, Worldpay or Paypal you're stuffed anyway. Getting your CC details will be the least of the problems.
the third worst registry - .loan – with 59 per cent bad domains and a 6.22 index.
I really hate sans-serif fonts - I read that as .Ioan not .loan. Couldn't work out why there was a TLD of .Ioan, but not .dafydd, .gareth, .mair, .lowri or .nia - and why anyone would fill it with badness. Most of the Ioans I know are really nice blokes.
Similar problem back in the 1970s with an insurance company. Memory is expensive, so all numeric values were stored in a packed format - that's common, two decimal digits per byte, with a zero and sign (C for positive) in the last byte. To save space we stored everything by chopping off the last byte, so we could store a ten-digit number in 5 bytes instead of 6 - and then had to do some odd pointer-based overlaying of fields (in PL/1) to actually manipulate the numbers). Kids today have no idea of what we went through...
Way, way ago, working with a very early on-line CICS motor insurance claims system, there was sudden panic when it looked as if the company had just had a massive increase in claims. Turned out someone had entered a total loss claim for a fairly expensive car (£6000.00) without the decimal point. It was early days - sense checking and validation wasn't as tight then as it (sometimes) is now!
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