Posts by defiler

They look, feel and taste like shoe insoles. Their sausages are substantially better, but that's because I suspect many brands of sausage have just about as much meat in them...

Re: Evolve or die.

Mate of mine mocked me for Borderlands taking so long to load zones. 7200RPM spinner vs his SSD.

So I bought 2x 500GB SSDs and RAID0'd them. Nothing important on them, after all.

How fast is fast enough? No such thing, it seems...

over-enthusiastic tightening

Old British motorbikes used to use the TAF standard - Tight As Fuck. Then those bloody Japanese turned up with their reliable, fast bikes, all built to specific tolerances, and forced us all to actually think before applying a spanner.

I once cracked the oil cooler on my old Yamaha XJ - it was leaking very slightly, but just needed a new copper washer. I just needed to get home after rock-climbing. Blindly applying force without a torque-wrench once your arms are very warmed up, on a soft-metal component of substantial replacement cost is a damn fool idea. One clear "ping" later, and I had to ride home with waterproof overtrousers on.

No, this little nostalgia trip has absolutely nothing to do with the story. I'm just avoiding dealing with work.

Re: Very good of you

Looks like a cheque too. Remember in the heady days of the 1990s when fractals were revered much like blockchain today, there was fractal image compression, and the spooks were investigating what you'd find if you expanded the image beyond the original which was fractally encoded (hoping to be able to create extra surroundings around the picture)? Nah? Just me? Could recreate a whole cheque then. It might even be worth me making the trek to a real branch of my bank...

Re: Lack of decent content.

It ran on an Amiga. It was 25 years ago.

As someone who had a shot of one of the old Virtuality headsets (and even the venerable Virtual Boy), I can testify that they've come on leaps and bounds since then.

They're not perfect, not by a long shot. They're much, much better than they were then, though. For simulators they're great. My Vive struggles a bit on some things, though. Could use something with more poke than an R9-380. And therein lies the problem. To get something convincingly detailed and smooth takes a fair bit of poke, and that takes a fair bit of money. That's what'll keep VR in a niche corner, in my opinion.

Re: Meat?

Sir, I believe you have curry for 10p. Where, perchance, may I sign up to this deal?

Re: Meanwhile, 8TB is still above €250

This type of tech will raise the minimum cost of production

Initially, yes, but if it becomes moderately widespread the read/write heads with integrated laser diode will end up becoming a single component. And stop for a moment to think how cheap laser pickups for CD/DVD players are.

Besides, the companies that really need 20TB drives will be buying them instead of 14TB ones. I'm hopeful, at least.

Also, right now you can get 8TB drives for £200. It might just now be the manufacturer you want!

Ah retail - how I don't miss that at all...

Re: Automation does have its place

Group Policy works great for user setups on Windows. You just add a user in the correct OU, and it picks up the policy. Sets up home drives, profiles, application configs and stuff like that.

If you're spinning up lots at once, Powershell does the trick, but if they come in dribs and drabs then ADUC and GPO saves a lot of guesswork.

Re: Blaming BREXIT?

straightforward and easy

I believe in BREXIT!!

And Santa

And the Tooth Fairy

And the other fairies

And the Loch Ness Monster

Yay!!

Done that on a live server before. Immediately followed by the words "aww shit."

Luckily it was a web server, was back up within a minute, and there were no complaints. It gave me a stern reminder to watch what the hell I'm doing, though!

Re: Heres hoping

They're not keen on flammable stuff inside space capsules. Might just have to go with the brownies...

Re: Hey software, get the fuck out of the way!

What happens if they both press it?

I'd like to hope that the Captain has priority then. After all, it's the Captain's aircraft. Which seat the Captain sits in can vary between airlines, but once the plane is set up for an airline it shouldn't need changed until it changes hands.

That's how I would do it, anyway... All opinion. I'm the guy sitting in the back.

Re: who really cares about speed?

Plan for the worst case, not the average case.

That's not how it works in most of the civilised world. Building a road bridge? What's the higher between traffic load and maximum wind load. Add a safety margin to that one factor, and you have the design load for the bridge.

However, Sky Q tends to tear up the civilised part of wifi and wipe its arse with it, so you may have a point there.

Re: "I wouldn't recommend Mikrotik kit to Joe Average"

@DJV - To be fair to Mikrotik, that vulnerability was patched months ago. I updated my router no problem, and I can't really feel that we can lay blame at Mikrotik's feet if their customers don't click the Update button.

To others, yes it's a complex router and you have to put the effort in to secure it. It's only a couple of rules, but it would be nice if there were security levels on the ports so that traffic would automatically flow "down" or "across", but not "up". So long as there's no fundamental flaw, like they'll show my browsing history to my mum or something...

A list of stations with fewer passengers

Am I the only one who looked through that with The KLF's It's Grim Up North running in my head?

Re: SI

You think England is bad, you should come to Norway.

Was going to say Scotland, but you win!

Kitchen knives

Also, sweeping chopped food from the chopping board into the pan using the sharpened edge of the blade instead of the back...

People thought they were getting a 486-alike when the reality was was more similar to that 386SX.

I thought the 486DLC/SLC were significantly faster than the 80386DX/SX - they had a cache that the 386 was missing. But since the 80486SX was about 4x the speed (from memory) of the 80386DX, the DLC/SLC fell way short. Anyway, I think we can agree that the 386 upgrades were a bit pish.

A mate of mine had a 486DLC/25 and it was a bit cack! :)

Re: Whisper it…

"c) they have a range of >400 miles in extreme weather conditions with the air conditioning or heating on."

D) they can tow a caravan a decent distance.

Bob, John - these are (once again) fringe cases.

For every driver that does these things, I could show you 50 that never does and never has. Maybe an electric car could never be practical for you, because maybe you're on one end or the other of the bell curve. But for the vast majority of people, there's an electric car being manufactured today that would be practical for them at the right price. With one caveat - can they charge it at home?

I was in Sidcup earlier in the year (commuter town on the edge of London, for those who don't know), and the cars were parked all along the pavement (sidewalk). Most houses didn't appear to have a driveway. That's an issue if you need to charge an electric car. If they can charge it at work / at the station / at the shops then that problem is greatly diminished, but it's still the biggest negative that I've seen for the vastly overwhelming majority of people in this country.

Re: It's already there

Where do you think most of the UK central government email system lives?

Office 365 every time I have to go scouring SMTP sessions...

Re: So why was it granted in the first place?

Battistelli was replaced in July

The system works!

Heh. I used to run SETI@Home on the office desktops. Not the servers, though. It was nip and tuck between me and the guy who had installed it all over Richer Sounds.

At least we were trying to do something productive. Crypto coins? Pfft.

Re: One Benefit

I'll fetch my (boxed) Warp installation CDs :D

Re: three or four launches enough to assemble the ISS

Flat-pack it - sorted. I bet Ikea will have a Røcketstüff pack sorted out in time. Best strap the Allen key to your wrist or something though.

Re: Not just assembly.

no machine-level instructions to add a constant to a location

Strangely enough, ARM assembly can be a bit weird when working with constants. Because it's a 32-bit instruction (including operands), the first few bits are the instruction, then a flag on whether to set status registers, then 4 bits for a register (at least), and then you end up with something like an 8-bit value and a rotation factor.

So you can specify 255. You can shift that by (say) 8 bits and have 65280. But you can't have 65281 because the "active" bits are more than 8 wide. At that point you have to load it from a memory location, or load 65280 and add 1, or any number of kludges.

It's been a little while, so I'm a bit hazy on all this nowadays, but that confused the hell out of me until I dug into the reasons behind it.