Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Good to know

Dammit - beats.

Re: Modern

"maintenance manual on a mainframe"

RS6000 might have been IBM but it wasn't a mainframe. It was a small RISC-powered Unix box.

Re: Good to know

Yes, but consistent beets quality in ISO9000& its friends.

Re: The new world we're in.

"the intermittent fault actually appeared while he was trying to figure out the problem"

A faulty fault!

Re: I go bang!

"wonder how they managed to get the cicuit certified"

You may be making a false assumption here...

Re: The system is designed around failure and blame

I expect the kids appropriated the bricks PDQ. The last time I removed a bath panel I found a spirit level imprisoned behind it. Sometime plumbers do leave something useful behind.

Re: Tobacco smoke

"The peat is Bord na Móna certified so should keep the greenies happy."

Not too sure about that. The thought now is that far too much carbon captured in peat has been released and bog growth should be encouraged to start capturing more. I have to admit, however, that we've burned a good few of those BnM briquettes in our time.

Re: Custardy

She certainly wasn't to be trifled with.

Well, somebody had to.

Re: Tobacco smoke

"there is one at the end of the road that stinks."

Our neighbour across the road has one. Maybe it depends on the wood but I find it quite pleasant.

Re: Been there...

"Always enjoyed the fact that the US "#" (pounds, or octothorpe if you're a purist)) key translated to the UK "Sterling" key on some keyboard or other.

Would make more sense if it replaced the "$" key, but something else was there."

It's still the $ key. As the # is still needed it means the UK keyboard needs an extra key.

On the subject of # and £ keys has anyone sorted out how to get the £ working properly on Devuan on the RPi? It results in displaying a # and (apparently) a CR on bash. Ksh displays £ and then on the next line a complaint about ?B?#: not found and in vi it inserts \xc2\xa3.

Both its parents,f Raspbian and Devuan on Intel have no problems with this. And, yes, I've tried various combinations of locale and keyboard map without finding one that works. Fortunately it only affects CLI usage (including ssh sessions).

Re: It was something we used to do in the 80s

One of my first jobs was preparing dissections - mostly rats for schools (they went into perspex boxes filled with formalin; the filling holes sealed with the littl plastic plugs from the ends of ballpoint pens). The formaldehyde tanned my hands. I'm sure that resulted in the dermatitis I suffered down the years.

Re: It was something we used to do in the 60s & 70s

My approach to dating pollen samples was to brew up a large sample with NaOH to dissolve the humic acid matrix and sieve it, just like the first stages of a normal preparation for microscopy. The resulting brown liquid was then run through a continuous flow centrifuge at 10,000 RPM to get the fine particulate content back. That was checked with a microscope to ensure it was mostly pollen. It didn't need any other treatment except to char it (uncharred samples would gum up the dating system with tar). What I suspect was happening was that someone else was doing much the opposite - precipitating the humic acid with HCl and dating that. He was supposed to be doing a PhD on pretreatment methods; it did tell us something about the relative ages of various components but not in time for what I needed.

Re: It was something we used to do in the 60s & 70s

"The fumes at melted away a lot of the contacts on the motherboard!"

We had a pretreatment for carbon-dating samples that involved a final wash with dilute HCl (I can't think why!) followed by drying in a large drying cabinet. The cabinet got progressively less effective. We eventually found the fan blades had been eaten away. The cabinet was just sitting in the open lab, no fume cupboard.

We had another, small drying cabinet in a different lab. This was used to dry off benzene which was the final wash for pollen samples for microscopy so the amounts were small. One day SWMBO decides to make some meringues using ANalar sucrose (because it was available) and used the little cabinet as an oven.

The things you could get away with before elfin safety.

Re: And it works!

What was it called again? I keep forgetting. Oh yes, Permanent Record by Ed Snowden.

Re: Arrogant

"It is apparently the case its designer mostly had had in mind."

Presumably to try to make it as close to Windows as possible.

Re: Simple....

"Patents shouldn't be transferable...."

Let's do a thought experiment.

You invent something.

You patent it.

You find you really don't have the money to build and sell it.

Do you

(a) Hock your house, children & right arm (assuming that allows you enough credit) to borrow money from the bank to set up a factory and marketing organisation, not of which you have experience of or

(b) Go to a VC who requires the above and 95% of the profits to set up the factory & marketing organisation or

(c) Sell the patent to someone who already has the business in place to develop it and cash out not?

Suddenly we see there's a good reason to be able to transfer patents.

Re: But

"A few things in win 10 will start complaining, as it downloads crap into the users folder and tries to run them."

Very likely the next update will ensure it doesn't complain about crap downloaded from MS.

"at Mach 5, they travel 86 meters in 1/20th of a second"

Quite. There's something not making sense here. Is the engine 86 metres long? Is there a convoluted path? Is the air slowed to much less than Mach 5? Or does this mean there's some way to go before it can be cooled quickly enough to work in an engine of practical size?

Re: Test bed

"developers had setup linux PCs or MSSQL servers for testing purposes, and within days the network would be crawling and the hard disks would be full of nasty stuff"

How come the IT department made it possible for these servers to be reached from the outside in the first place?

Re: TL; DR

Do we get to deport southerners from Yorkshire?