Posts by GrahamRJ

Re: Wallace?

That's not cheese though. It's gloop which isn't entirely not cheese flavoured.

Re: Oh, Ubuntu. Where did it go wrong!

I've been using XUbuntu for years (since 14.04), because I couldn't rely on Ubuntu to play nicely with VMs. VMware, Xen and VirtualBox all had significant issues unless you didn't want a desktop, which of course makes it less useful for software development. It's been rock-solid all along the line, doesn't bake in too much crud that I don't need, and basically just works.

Re: But could it land on the Hudson?

Ironically, a fully automated system maybe wouldn't have had to, because it could have made the decision to divert to LaGuardia instantly, and flight simulators suggested it would have got there. By the time Sullenberger and Skiles had figured out WTF just happened, carried out all the manual steps to recover control, and then looked at what survivable options they had left, there wasn't another survivable option.

Re: Oh boy

Pizza will still kill you. Just more slowly via heart disease.

Re: One of the rare times he escaped his own reality bubble recently

"the silencing of covid sceptics"

The word is either "liars" or "reality deniers". Yes, it is possible to be rationally sceptical until evidence is presented. After that, you're either a liar or a reality denier, and that doesn't entitle you to a platform. Twitter bans happened after the point that there was any ambiguity about evidence.

"the special case for banning Trump"

On the contrary, Trump got a special case for keeping his account open for a *really* long time. Regular civilians got bans for a whole lot less.

You're absolutely correct that this is the Watergate of our times. You'll remember that the defining feature of Watergate was malfeasance by the President of the USA. That's exactly where we are now.

As far as "liberal media" goes, the top two definitions on Google are "willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas" and "relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise". If you're unhappy with "liberal" concepts, ould you like to tell us which parts of those definitions you find offensive? Are you're closed to new ideas, opposed to civil rights, in favour of autocracy instead of democracy, or in favour of communism replacing free enterprise?

Real scientists freely admitting they can't predict exactly where it's going to be at any given date - but with complete consensus amongst all real scientists that it's happening because of really hot stuff that's definitely there and is definitely hot.

Maybe the anti-environmentalists could learn from that, because there is equal scientific consensus on the existence of volcanos and the existence of climate change...

That explains why audiophool stuff is a load of old cock then.

Re: Much loved???

"Normal people"? I'm a child of the 80s and 90s, and I can state as fact that the only "normal people" who had their own fax machine at home were running a small business from home. No-one else ever did - they were expensive to buy, expensive to run, and there was no reason whatsoever to do it. So even back in the 80s and 90s, anyone who owned a fax machine just for fun was automatically not a "normal person". In 2022? They're either someone who wasn't normal in the 80s/90s and still isn't, or they're someone cosplaying 80s/90s which also isn't normal.

I'm not sure how you get from sending a fax to killing someone's granny either. If your granny's life depends on getting a fax through, you're starring in a Saw movie and someone's playing with you. You for damn sure aren't working in any medical profession.

Re: It's not time to railroad

85% of flights are short haul

If you count flights by airplane take-offs, then single/2-seaters flying touch-and-goes are definitely going to give you that figure, sure. But 85% of passengers, not so much. With a 200-mile range, that's not even enough to get from London to Manchester; and realistically you'd be lucky to make Birmingham and still have enough power to stay in the stack for a bit. Typically you'd consider "short haul" to get from London to anywhere in the UK or near airports in neighbouring European countries, and this emphatically can't deliver that.

Re: Living in fear of a 2nd wave.

Clearly you've not seen that image. With the Photoshopping involved, this is not an organ which any human owns.

Re: The Ex

Apparently their house had central beating.

Re: Establish a system to preserve certification test records

The big difference is that no-one has ever died, or even become ill, from a single vehicle's emissions. (Apart from suicide bids, of course, but it's not even been possible to do that since the 90s when cats became a thing.) This is very different from the food industry, where dodgy food absolutely *can* do nasty stuff to you.

Quality is fairly measurable by quantity of defects - but only if your company is rigorous about tracking and evaluating issues. Many are not, which is where your JavaScript sausage factories fall down.

For quality, most of them probably happened between the late 80s and the early 2000s. That's where development standards like MISRA, DO178B and the like were set up, based on evidence from tracking issues in various safety-related applications.

Some of the details will vary (C coding standards about using pointers aren't that relevant for JavaScript), but the overall process requirements are unlikely to be any different. You still need to specify your system-level problem, break down the system-level problem into implementable requirements, code up those implementable requirements, (optionally) test that you got the implementable behaviour you specified, and finally test that you got the system-level behaviour you wanted.

Evidence from back then was that bug frequency before testing was mostly language-independent - it correlates much more strongly with coder experience than anything else. So the other conclusions about quality are probably still valid too.

As for economics, that comes back to the constant debate of quality versus speed to market. You can't study that, because any benefit of being first to market is going to be radically different depending on the market.

Motion sickness AFAIK was mostly an artefact of the frame rate for mid-90s VR. (I was there, and I remember just how slow it was to respond to your head moving.) I played with my brother-in-law's Oculus recently, and that's basically seamless now.

More interestingly, he mentioned that there's a real business case for this. I've always said that I'll work in a paperless office just as soon as they give me a screen the size of my desk - until then, cross-referencing multiple datasheets is a non-starter. He says he's got a Minority Report kind of thing though where all the documents hang in the air in VR, and you can pull them towards you for a look or shuffle them around or whatever. Sure it's not as crisp as a good monitor, but I can see definite applications there - after all, an Oculus Quest is cheaper than 2 half-decent monitors, and my company are already giving the mechanical engineers 3-screen setups.

Re: Why aren't Twitter happy

They can probably take it or leave it. They're angry that (a) he's slinging mud about their company, and (b) he's not giving them the billion dollars pulling-out fee. And realistically he could probably have got away with (b) if it wasn't for (a). Money is business, but slagging them off makes it personal.

Re: BBC Domesday Project

If it was run competently, one person who can answer the question "have you done anything like this before?" in the affirmative, with evidence of positive results. And who then has the budget and authority to hire a small number of people to do what they know needs doing. And with a reasonably well-bounded definition of what "success" looks like.

Re: NASA boffins will spend months nudging CAPSTONE.

Almost certainly - but $5m buys a lot of boffin time. And with the rocket equation being what it is, price goes up exponentially as the fuel load gets bigger.

I'd love to run a failure like Facebook (net income $39.3billion) or Netflix (net income $5.1billion)! And whilst IBM may no longer be the world-dominating colossus it was in the 70s, it's still doing pretty well (net income $5.7billion). As for the others, Microsoft was run by white guys until 2014, and AMD was run by its white founder continuously from its foundation until 2002.

The skin colour or gender (Carly Fiorina, anyone?) of a CEO is not a good indicator of a positive, innovative attitude in the rest of the company, nor indeed (Clarence Thomas) on their moral values.

Re: Deja vu again

You're misunderstanding the "anti-CO2 crowd" then. No-one thinks that rising CO2 and rising temperature levels will kill all life on Earth.

What a return to Eocene conditions will (provably) do though is kill most existing species, because most species cannot tolerate such extreme temperatures. Humans have the technology to ensure we survive as a species, but (also provably) the living space for billions of people will become uninhabitable. Most of those people are black or brown.

The "anti-CO2 crowd" think that mass extinctions and widespread starvation or displacement of people, caused solely by human action, is a bad thing. YMMV.

Separately, many of the "anti-CO2 crowd" also think technologies that allow fat rich white people to keep using the same unsustainable level of resources, just *different* resources, are a bad thing. There's widespread recognition that electric vehicles aren't going to help a society that normalises 100-mile-a-day commutes.

Re: Seriously

If that rain is accompanied by 100mph winds, it'd be nice to know. Especially if you'd have a chance of travelling on a plane, ship or lorry, or going over an exposed bridge when it happens.

Re: The answer isn't getting rid of guns

> probably finding new ways to kill kids

There are plenty of ways to kill people. The point is that guns are specifically designed to kill people, quickly and efficiently, and every other method of killing multiple people quickly is significantly harder to acquire/build. And moreover, most of those methods are fairly tightly controlled.

You can kill people if you smash your car into a crowd, for example. Except that owning and driving a car requires multiple months of training, followed by formal qualifications issued by a government agency, followed by lifelong registration of both you and your vehicle with a government agency. Stealing a car normally needs you to get the key off the owner (theft of cars dropped an order of magnitude instantly when immobilisers appeared). If your doctor thinks you are a danger to the public behind the wheel, they (in most countries) have a legal duty to tell that government agency, who will take away your privilege of driving for the safety of the general public. And if you drive dangerously, both your privilege of driving and your vehicle can be taken away. And even then, killing people is harder than you'd think, because governments have insisted on car companies designing their vehicles to reduce the damage they'd cause when they hit a pedestrian.

If guns in the US had anything like this level of controls, they would not be the biggest killer of young people in the US.

You can make your ANFO bomb, too. Except that bulk orders of AN are checked these days, because we all know about what the IRA, Tim McVeigh and other terrorists did with it.

Knives? Limited success rate even against civilians - the guy on London Bridge was stopped by one guy wielding a fire extinguisher and another guy with a narwhal tusk, and he was down before the police shot him.

Re: nice story

Re the waste, the most persistent waste is plutonium isotopes. The reason the UK has so much of it is that fast breeder reactors can use it as fuel, so other countries shipping us their waste would essentially have been powering the UK for free. But more stocks of uranium were found, and various environmental groups went batsh*t about building more reactors, so the UK government decided it would be easier just to sit on the stuff. One of these days we might get something done with it.

Aside from plutonium, the rest have relatively low halflives. We're also not short of *really* deep mines where the stuff could be stashed, and vitrification is very effective at stopping it going wandering about.

Re: Just the two failures then..

You've heard about Boeing's 737-MAX debacle? I wouldn't stake too much on that hope, especially if I was part of the payload.

They've probably upped their charges since then too.

By the way, you know what you call a baby electronic component that doesn't want its nappy changing? A pullup resistor...

Re: It's not the AI that needs fixed

My gran had a wolfskin coat. (I never asked about red riding hoods.) Don't confuse a feeling of superiority with getting a different outcome.

Bah. Johnson, Pepys, Newton, Hooke and Dryden all drank coffee. If it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me. I prefer a drink that tastes of something.

Re: Great murder choice.

As a (relatively inexperienced) diver, the main theory elements for each qualification are the new and interesting ways you can kill yourself with the new combinations of gas, depth and time. So that people can get familiarised with what these actually feel like, diving clubs rent hyperbaric chambers from NHS hospitals to run so-called "dry dives" where they put you through those scenarios without actually being at risk of drowning. (And not coincidentally, also somewhere with a lot of doctors in very close proximity.)

Re: Congrats ...

Not just for astronaut training. Funk was also refused a pilot job by all airlines - and then refused access to the Shuttle programme because she hadn't had a job as a test pilot.

The redundancy in that case was provided by the Russians and Soyuz.

Re: PSA

You mean the gun nuts in Michigan, perhaps? They certainly like Trump.

Oh, you mean the people protesting against black people being killed with impunity by the police? It's an interesting idea to call anti-racism "fascist", but not exactly founded in reality.

Re: Kids Toys

My gran had a load of Bayko. I used to love playing with that. When she died, it all went to ours and sat in the loft. I raided some of the metal rods for my Warhammer 40,000 figures, because I needed something for the standard bearers' flags to hang on, and it was hard to find 1mm hardened steel rods.

My son now plays with it occasionally at my folks' place when he visits. Things go around...