* Posts by werdsmith

7096 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Feb 2011

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

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Re: Meh

Those are some impressive books that you can watch live sports in.

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Re: In a word...

Why? Because there are loads of commercial/entertainment applications for large displays. I’ve seen on near me, when’ve get close up to it, it is actually four large displays arranged in a quad to display one image. Then the market for wealthy people who have home cinema rooms.

I don’t think LG had you watching reruns of Knots Landing your kitchen in mind when they designed it.

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

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Re: One of the things not tested

Everybody has not forgotten. See my comment about STS-114.

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Re: Its a prototype

Those folk that made the trip to Cocoa Beach are having a great time this week camping out or booking out the Titusville Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson. It’s kind of useful that it’s a summer beach resort area. But they will be less happy if they keep on scrubbing.

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Re: 200% trust in NASA

* since STS-114.

Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas

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Re: FRA airport is very nearly in compliance with this law....

And my architecture text tells me that when heating was first introduced in London theatres, they were able to maintain the temperature at 12C

That’s interesting, because when theatres get filled up with hundreds of humans they require some effective cooling to stop them getting uncomfortably warm.

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Re: Exceptions for such dual-purpose signs have been arranged.

Whereas we in the UK have to rely on some petrol price web sites few by drivers' observations.

If you have a Costco nearby they do all the monitoring for you, so they can pitch their price below the lowest.

Heroku to delete inactive accounts, shut down free tier

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Re: Alternatives?

I use pythonanywhere and I find them to be excellent.

California to phase out internal combustion vehicles by 2035

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Re: Not going to happen

Young drivers have far more and far worse accidents than old ones.

Worse accidents, usually yes the oldies tend to be involved in less serious accidents, but they only have less accidents because they are on the road less. Accidents per mile driven for old fogeys is not good reading.

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Re: California Governor Noisome's Pipe Dream for the Loons

Noisome's pipe dream is just something the rest of the world is already doing, and on a much faster schedule than California is proposing.

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

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As said by other commentards, it doesn't seem to be a valuable alternative to a second-hand laptop.

As other commentards have missed, it's not trying to be an alternative to a second hand laptop.

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I sound as if "being part of the Raspberry Pi community", like "being part of the crypto community", is just a way of saying "being gullible"

This is the problem with people, some cant accept that their personal preferences and requirements are not universal. When considering that some folk might enjoy a particular pastime, you might not be interested but it's important to remember that it's not all about you.

So you can be a person that enjoys a particular hobby, or you can be a sad basement dwelling undateable that consoles themselves by picking fault with the hobbies of others.

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Pi-Top laptop kit having been sold off for £40, designed for Pi 3B but can be adapted for Pi4 is a way to go withoit splashing out too much cash. Keyboard isn't great but at least the trackpad is in the right place.

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Re: Less than convinced.

It's for being part of the Raspberry Pi community with a tidy portable package, as explained in the article.

But thank you for apologising on the last line of your comment.

Python tops programming love list – but if you want a job, learn SQL

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Re: "SQL coders"

Stored procedures being called from within stored procedures is not at all unusual or necessarily bad. Though there are functions that might be more appropriate.

Stored procedures can take parameters and do some task so they can easily be specd and reproduced.

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Re: The SQL boy error

DELETE FROM orders WHERE

You can still select only the first three words in a SSMS query window.

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Re: Python--

I do quite a lot of Python stuff and I can confirm that all of it that I do is crap.

I have a colleague who is a first class developer and he does create some good stuff using Python and he does enjoy laughing at my efforts.

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Re: Really?

Yes, Application Frameworks just makes work for DBAs, as it makes the most stupid performance decisions imaginable.

Big Tech is building the metaverse of its own dreams. You don't want to go there

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Re: E=World

Atari ST was 1986 I think.

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I dumped Faecebook in 2014 and I do miss the local history group I was involved in. My mother lets me know if anything interesting happens there.

I abandoned all forms of social media. Social media I define as anything where any random user can create the topics. If social media was unbalkanised then I would consider dipping in again. But while it involves corporations trying to own the web I remain in protest.

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MySpace died because everybody left for Facebook, who would people be leaving Facebook for?

The afterlife.

NASA builds for keeps: Voyager mission still going after 45 years

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Computing was already becoming available to millions of people by a number of better solutions before the IBM PC became dominant in the office. It was a few more years before the PC took over home computing.

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Re: Do they build them like the used to?

A neighbour of mine has a pristine Mk3 Cortina still on the road. Congratulations Dagenham and Brentwood Ford.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

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Re: Of course, Britain went decimal shortly afterwards!

Yes, I remember using the old shilling and two shilling as 5p and 10p, some had some very old dates on.

The two shilling was a sizeable piece of metal.

Sixpences (tanners) remained usable as currency until 1980.

I am not old enough to have used the thruppeny bit (Joey) but it remains my favourite UK coin with its 12 sides and brassy colour. I have a little collection of them.

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Re: The d in £sd

Limited Slip Differential

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Re: And don't work too fast either!

My timesheets are automated. =INT(RAND()*5)

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Re: Bank Accounts

I've lived in this house since 1999 when we bought it from a retired couple.

I believe that he must have passed on because I still get mail for the wife, but not him.

Mortascreen blocks direct marketing mail for the deceased.

LibreOffice improves Microsoft compatibility with version 7.4

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Re: I went cold-turkey on MS Office in 2016

You could probably have done that in Notepad++.

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Re: Sharing documents

I write docs on Libre and more recently Pages.

I still have to fire up a Windows PC and load the doc up for a final formatting check before it gets sent off. It’s rare that a document doesn’t need at least some tidying up.

Mouse hiding in cable tray cheesed off its bemused user

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Re: "Out of Cheese" Error

You get plenty of warning when a cat is about to furball, sergeant must have been a particularly slow one.

Microsoft brings more Arm64 support and an updated expiry date to Dev Channel Windows

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Re: MS does not care about Windows on ARM

you can't legally run it [Windows 11 ARM] in a Mac VM

For something that is not legal, the functional insider preview certainly is well advertised, used as a selling point and deliberately enabled in an automated process within Parallels. So if there was no understanding in place Parallels would be in too risky a position to continue like that.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: MS does not care about Windows on ARM

Looking at how smooth and slick the process is for installing Windows on ARM Insider Preview in a Parallels VM on MacBook M1/M2 I can't believe that there isn't already some agreement in place for Apple Silicon in this fashion.

NASA has MOXIE, but rivals reckon they can do better for oxygen on Mars

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Hamster-wheel generator.

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Re: Yawn

By truly habitable you mean habitable by humans without significant life support systems. A bit like some of the warmer parts of the Earth where modern humans enjoy life by occupying a small enclosed space protected from the UV and using copious amounts of energy to have the heat removed. Like Phoenix and Dubai. They don't grow potatoes in their own sewage in Phoenix though, at least I don't think they do. It's only Idaho where they do that.

Then some of the higher latitudes that have a permanent human presence, but people can't really go out of their heated building without considerable amounts of protective clothing.

Arizona for the win!

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By converting different molecules directly from the Martian atmosphere

That's very impressive. It's been known for a long time that water ice on the icy bodies in the outer solar system separates out into its hydrogen and oxygen components when exposed to local radiation and that the atomic oxygen recombines into O2, the hydrogen goes off into space. So breaking up CO2 with plasma is reasonable.

Rocket Lab to search for signs of life in the clouds of Venus

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Re: I hope they are consulting with NASA

Any organisms evolved for earth conditions will need to evolve quickly to survive being irradiated, starved of oxygen and extremes of temperature on the journey there. When it arrives it will need to fend off clouds of sulphuric acid, 93 bar’s atmospheric pressure and 450 C heat.

Google tells Apple to 'fix text messaging' in bid to promote RCS protocol

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It’s all very silly that if I want to communicate with this group, they use signal, and these others use discord and somebody else uses telegram and the chavs all use WhatsApp and if I want to talk to these people I need to have a separate app and account for each. Totally ridiculous. It’s like having to have a Vodafone SIM to talk to vodafone network users, an EE SIM to talk to EE customers etc. Sort it out.

Parallels increases prices with Desktop version 18

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UTM does work on Apple silicon though.

Amazon to buy Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7b

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Re: They need to make a window cleaning robot

Artex removers are more commonly known as steamers.

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Re: Oh crap!

Keeping an animal has associated costs. Manual vacuum cleaners optimised for animal hair and pet dander are more expensive.

If you don’t have an animal then you don’t need to pay extra for shit detectors. Because any human offender will probably tell you it’s there.

Virgin Galactic delays commercial suborbital flights again

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I do enjoy the Aesops fox in these “rich idiots” and the “fool and their money” banality comments.

The idiots can pay for their suborbital flight, and still be a rich idiot afterwards. In fact they barely notice the outlay as over the wait for their flight, they have increased their wealth by many times the cost of the flight.

How very stupid they are.

China-linked fake news site shows disinformation on the rise

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Re: In the UK..

.... we call them "Newspapers"

I don’t think I can even recall the last time I saw somebody younger than retirement age reading a printed newspaper that wasn’t a free Metro or LES. I guess the websites still do a bit of business.

I stopped trusting any news outlet after I was involved in a major national news story and I didn’t even recognise the event from the way it was reported.

South Korea's lunar orbiter launches and phones home happily

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Re: Nuke

@Kane

Or in IT rags' comment threads.

If you like, but I can't really do any harm here. If I decide to flex my military muscles I will just get laughed at.

werdsmith Silver badge

Re: Nuke

I'd like less nukes. But more than that I'd like less emotionally immature adult infants in positions of power especially in super powers.

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Re: If elements like oxygen and hydrogen can be found in lunar ice

Presumably from 100km the detection of ice is going to be spectral.

So they ought to be able to get a fairly sure estimation of composition and grain size if the target is fairly pure water ice. If it's very dirty then other signatures might mask and make it more uncertain especially as there is already hydrogen in the moon's tenuous atmosphere.

If the moon gets a lot of radiation, maybe during a solar event then radiolytic processing of ice can release oxygen molecules.

US-funded breakthrough battery tech just simply handed over to China

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John Logie Baird demonstrated the first transmission of moving images. But his contraptions made of bicycle parts and spinning wooden disk was not ever going to become a TV. He quickly abandoned his method and copied the US one.

UK Parliament bins its TikTok account over China surveillance fears

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Re: social media service probably sends data about its users back to Beijing

I would have thought that it would be more useful to keep it on an isolated machine and just seed misinformation for it to spy on.

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

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Re: Why change?

I know a company using code written in 1988 for running much of their accounts system.

Presumably the much of their accounts system is flexible and allows its users to reconfigure it to adapt to changing regulatory and tax etc. A lot of companies don't have users with that product knowledge and rely on support backup from the software vendor.

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I have an account with a hosting/online dev provider which is free and I have a half written project in there. I'm very proud of the project and I fully believe it will be worth finishing, and I will finish it. But not right now, because another project is in the way.

That provider just requires that I log in and access my project once every three months to avoid their sweeper up process. I think that's fair enough, if people want to keep gitlab projects alive then use them.

'Nobody can control TSMC by force': Exec dismisses fears China could seize fabs

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Re: They scored an own goal with their protests

It’s an example of world leaders in such a position of super power government acting with emotional immaturity, infantile pouting.