Re: A gift?
It's 'much more swiftly'.
And, comrade, you should stop posting. a) you're drowning in downvotes, and b) your keyboard is melting because of your frantic desire to drown. Go and take a tranquilliser.
378 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2012
This is clearly why no-one could replicate the infamous Fleischmann and Pons experiment: somehow a very strong espresso got into the reactor and whoooosh! The researchers who tried to replicate it, and Fleischmann and Pons themselves, never knew the secret so the world lost a perfect power source.
Because some authorities misuse power like that as soon as they get the opportunity. Using anti-terrosism laws against people who put the bin out a day early. Or fining people who have to have a piss in a layby using a clause in a law that was repealed years ago. Or fining people for parking somewhere the double yellow lines have long worn away.
It would take seconds after ID cards came in before some jackbooted microbrained goon from the local council was shouting "Papers! Papers! Schnell, Britisher pigdog!" at people.
Well you can see the Horizon from the top!
I see the Post Office as a redoubtable institution unfortunately brought low by a bunch of scheming liars in its own management and contractors. It could come back into it's own, I think, if handed over to the postmasters leaving Fujitsu and the top brass with the bill and a view of a brick wall from their cells.
I sometimes used to work on a shipyard and they had a quarantine area for stainless parts so they'd never come into contact with mild steel. If they did the mild would contaminate the stainless with rust, and then once started it would spread and make the part useless.
"But then again, aren't we all lazy and make assumptions?"
You're so right. Only this morning I realised I'd bought 4500 of MCP6001R op-amps instead of the usual MCP6001 with no R assuming it was an industrial temperature range or something (they were a bit cheaper at the time).
Oh no, the R means the power pins are swapped, so if I use them on existing designs they short the supply. I'll have to redesign some boards to use them. Durrrr.
Not just aircraft stuff - pretty much any business that uses NC machinery has old computers which they just hope will continue to work because there's no choice, as others have pointed out here. Older drive computers tend to use proprietary interface hardware which can't run on a newer machine and whose drivers just won't install on new computers.
I bought a new PCB assembly machine last year (cost lots and lots of £'s but it was either that or close the company as my last one that used Win95 mechanically wore out) which has a linux PC to drive it - but the control software is actually under DRDOS in a virtual machine. Its just too expensive to ditch old technology whenever the OS changes. I know people running DOS PC's with Hercules graphics adaptors and a green screen for goodness sake.
My favourite in this field is the 1-bit audio chips you get in cards and toys that play annoying tunes. They have a programmed rom, but instead of holding a bit that's either on or off, each memory cell stores an analogue voltage. The chip samples each cell in turn, copies the voltage via buffer amp, and thus reconstructs the analogue sound waveform. Sounds bloody awful, but it does work.
And I've found many other "digital" chips to be surprisingly analogue, particularly when used outside of their expected parameters. Most recently a Microchip processor that /doesn't/ properly shut down when operated at below its rated supply voltage in a fault situation, and allows its outputs to go into a low-impedance state that it really shouldn't do (according to the datasheet, and you trust those at your peril anyway).
Lovely, I'd like one of those. It should be paired with an Excelsior teacup - not a broken one either.
https://www.yourprops.com/USS-Excelsior-Cup-and-Saucer-replica-movie-prop-Star-Trek-VI-The-Undiscovered-Country-1991-YP807983.html
FYI this comment thread is the best one on El Reg for ages.
"It's just as unlikely that all 700 were dishonest as it is that none of them were."
True. There's been a lot of talk this morning about the possibility that real fraudsters will get away with it.
But a successful prosecution would probably depend on Horizon evidence, which we know can't be trusted. So the PO has denied itself the ability to uncover any real fraud unless there's independent evidence. Tough titty then.
No no no and no again.
I write in assembler because C is too slow and hard to handle, no good at all for real-time stuff. I did an addressable led driver on one of the cheapest processors available which has about 4 instructions to do something, and C would take too long.
I'd blame CO2 as well, it can be really dangerous especially because it's heavier than air and doesn't waft away in still conditions.
Round here a farmer's son went up the ladder to the top of the slurry tank (a very large, open-top cylinder for cow ... errr ... produce) for some reason. The CO2 overcame him and he fell in. His dad went up to try to pull him out and fell in too. Both died.
I know this to be true, as I worked in the auto test department of an aircraft manufacturer for a while.
The place was full of ancient computers that had to be kept running until every last one of the aircraft they'd been used on were out of service, because if you used anything else you didn't know if the tests were valid or not. Think Winchester drives, azodye printers and computers made entirely out of 74 series chips. Every now and again something would go wrong and a guy would turn up to fix it. One HP guy saw this creaking fossil he was asked to fix and said, "wow, I've not seen one of those for years, can we have it for the museum?"
The answer was "No, we're still using it!"
Sometimes people would smell smoke and would run around trying to find out which one of the prehistoric machines had overheated, but it usually turned out to be smoke from a bonfire outside.
I got my mother one because recently, every single time I visit, the HP printer has run out of one colour, and she can't fit a new cartridge (too fiddly for her). Just after I've left, another one takes the opportunity to run out so the useless machine stays useless.
The ecotank one can be refilled when I'm there so it lasts till next time.
They're so smart all you need to do to outwit them is stick some wobbly eyes to the back of your hat. They only attack when you're walking away.
Oh, and if your gander does attack, grab him by the neck and swing him around a bit. He'll think twice ... for a day or two. Stupid bastard.
In the 1980's there were loads of Japanese cars in the UK even though the quality was less than perfect, and almost no American ones. The US auto companies basically refused to make right hand drive cars, so you couldn't buy them. They only started to sell here when they got desperate, and even then hardly anyone wanted gas guzzling chrome mountains.
In order to provide all that used cooking oil, we're all going to have to eat more chips (fries for left-pondians). But then the planes will be able to carry fewer people because we'll all be morbidly obese, so we'll have to eat more chips again to provide extra oil, then the planes will carry even fewer people, so then .....
I always thought that Agatha Christie made a big mistake not setting a murder mystery on an airship. It has everything required for the story: a collection of rich, well-dressed characters who can have a mixture of motives, a closed environment for days while travelling over the ocean, a bar and sumptuous food, possibly rebellious servants, and a method of getting rid of evidence by dropping it out of the window.
I made the mistake of pairing my phone with our Evoque, which immediately slurped the entire contact list and goodness knows what else. De-paired now, but the damage is done.
Oh and BTW, it has an emergency button which can phone 999 and another for a Land Rover helpline, so it can probably send the phone contents to Skynet for all I know.
A mate of mine used to fix people's electrical problems, paid for by monthly insurance. He was called to a house on its own in the middle of nowhere, occupied by an elderly couple who'd reported a nasty fizzing noise behind the cooker.
Sure enough, the cooker cable was faulty, but it was chased into the wall instead of being fed by an isolator. He asked where the isolator was to be met by a blank stare.
Where's the consumer unit then, he enquired: another blank stare. Supply fuse maybe? Meter? No.
Turns out the house had been directly connected to the pole transformer some distance away in the 1940's. No fuse, no meter, and they'd never had a bill. My mate had to walk away and let the electricity board deal with it.
That waste heat could go to forcing sheds. The Yorkshire Triangle's sheds used to be heated by coal when there was a lot of it about, then waste heat from the power stations (as I remember, could be wrong here). So why not install a forcing shed in the datacentre basement for year-round forced rhubarb?
Mmmm, rhubarb .....