Posts by Jeffrey Nonken 1208 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
.gz and the app won't work? Sigh
I grew up in Downingtown, Pa. Several Burroughs plants there and nearby. My father worked there, as did my best friend's father, the fathers of everybody in the high school computer club... except Alan, whose brother did.
Ah, those were the days. Dad's in a nursing home these days, my best friend is the spitting image of his father back then, and I've pretty much lost track of the rest. Me? I develop firmware for a flight simulator company.
'Surely the "ultimate" landing confirmation sensor and far better than assuming you might be on the ground when possibly still 65' up in the air and nosing down to "make sure".'
No, I gather that the the nose down operation was to provide additional friction to improve braking*, not to "make sure" the drone had landed. It was applied after the drone was assumed to have landed.
*... Or more likely it's using the elevator for air resistance, to apply the equivalent of additional flaps. The article isn't clear on that and I don't actually know much on the subject.
"should ask customers to call phone numbers they need to look up on credit cards or websites,"
Instead of providing (possibly false, which it would be if it were a scam) information directly in the email, tell the customer to use contact they would have elsewhere. For example, there are contact numbers on the back of your credit card. They could also log into a known website to get that information.
How's that?
"Funnily enough, US regulator can't just do whatever it wants”
... But Comcast and AT&T are allowed to wrote their monopolies into state law, preventing municipalities from providing alternatives even when the former ignore contracts requiring them to provide service.
Funnily enough, the court didn't bother to mention that part.
Disclaimer: I'm actually a colonist, so my opinions may not count.
I grew up on Lipton tea. Pour boiling water over the bag, steep, add milk and sugar just prior to serving.
Since then I have reduced my sugar intake (multiple times), learned to take tea without; to me it tastes wrong with only milk, so now I take it black.
Meantime I also discovered better teas. I now buy my tea online from Harney and Sons. Their English Breakfast blend is my go-to, but I mix it up a bit sometimes. Bridgette's Blend is one of my favorites. But I digress.
Now that I've re-trained my palate, Lipton tastes abominable to me.
I still make tea the same way, except it's usually loose now, but boiling water brings out the flavors. I only make a cup at a time because it's just me. I use a Chef's Choice electric kettle to boil the water. (I keep one at home and one at work.) Microwaved water is an abomination. I use bottled or filtered water; tap water here in Sacramento is an abomination all on its own.
I use one of these for my loose tea: https://www.harney.com/finum-permanent-tea-filter-large.html
Does the coffee pot brew the coffee or merely warm it? If the latter, it seems like it would be too cool for proper tea. But I don't know much about brewing tea in a pot, so maybe it's not that bad. Brewing tea like coffee sounds completely wrong.
Adding milk while it's steeping would cool the water prematurely, that sounds wrong too. But I'm still of the "pour boiling water over dried leaves and steep" camp.
How long to steep is a matter of taste. You Brits seem to like your leaves ground, which goes bitter after a few minutes. I prefer whole leaves, but I'm careless about the timing. Consequently I've gotten accustomed to a touch of bitterness.
My own opinion, for what it's worth, is that making it in a coffee pot with milk already added is an abomination. I would also be annoyed that somebody would decide for me that my tea should have milk, and not give me a choice, quite aside from the issue of proper steeping.
"So Amazon realised it had better run trials in the UK – a country where gun ownership is tightly restricted and its citizens are happy and willing to have every fucking second of their private lives filmed because they already live in a corrupt police state with the Big Brother-like cosh of closed-circuit TV on every street corner."
Whoa! Alistair, be careful. You got serious there for a second. Have a lie-down and it will pass.
"Unfortunately, after the first dozen cats, the rescue centre refused to let me have any more."
OK, that made me snort my tea. Or would have, had I been drinking tea just then and not eating frozen lasagna. (Reheated. Hah, headed that off!) Fortunately I managed to avoid snorting that, it sounds even less fun than the tea. Close call, though.
"Now, of course, with the addition of courier traffic, there is no room left for humans travelling on foot..."
What are you on about? You don't need the sidewalk. Instead of popping down to the local market, you order from the Internet and hang about your house waiting for delivery. Duh. SO much more convenient. You get more exercise anyway, pacing while gesticulating angrily. Though blood pressure could be a problem.
60? Good god, I thought I was, um, maturing... sounds like you were finishing school around my birthday. Prolly about my dad's age.
I have a slipstick, but it's a cheap plastic one, and I never really learned how to use it. Electronic sliderules were juuuuust getting popular when I started college. Remember the old TIs with lensed LED displays and horrible battery life?
Dad used to have a nice wooden one, but I have no idea where it got to. A shame, I'd love to have it. Maybe my sister got it. It's a name brand I'm sure you'll recognize, hell, could be the same one you have, but damned if I can remember it.
"Users of rooted handsets and custom ROMs will likely be out of luck attempting to install Android Pay."
Which doesn't suck at all, except for a) all the tons of crap apps mobile operators force on you in the stock ROMs; b) the number of perfectly good phones that are orphaned once said operators lose interest in upgrading them. A year or two into deployment, I expect, or whenever they start pushing the latest new Shiny.
Cyanogenmod makes my phone more configurable and leaner at the same time, as well as being able to run the latest builds of Marshmallow instead of an old version of Lollipop. It's actually more secure than stock ROM, which will never be updated. Google Pay can suck my left nut.
Son, move over. It's time for your nap.
The earliest commercial Personal Computers ran on 8-bit micros (typically the Z-80 or 6502) and had either 8" or 5 1/4" floppies as a high-priced option; otherwise, your mass storage was audio tape. The 8" floppies had more storage until they invented High Density encoding.
Of course, there were Personal Computers before that, but those were pretty much just for dedicated hobbyists. I myself owned a KIM-1 and still own an IMSAI 8080.
"Now imagine the person to be an airline pilot."
Not a valid comparison for several reasons.
- I can't say what it's like in the Blighty, but here in the Colonies all that's required to get an automobile or motorcycle license is passing a written test, an eye test, and a brief driving test. Basically you only have to show passing familiarity with some laws and mechanical operation of the vehicle. Whereas to be an airline pilot takes years and lots and lots and lots and lots of training, plus certification, frequent training refreshers and re-certification. Even a private pilot's license takes a metric buttload of training and cert.
- As somebody pointed out in an earlier post, flying a commercial airline requires two pilots, and at least one must be alert and in the cockpit at all times.
- Flying is not driving. Flying is not LIKE driving. Generally once you're in the air... well, I wouldn't say you have fewer things to worry about, but it's a different set of things. Typical road hazards don't exist; most man-made hazards will be close to the ground, and airborne hazards are few and far between. (Though likelier to be deadly.) Weather is a larger concern, pilot error, mechanical breakdowns.
- Keeping the above in mind, the autopilot is very clever at keeping you on a constant heading and altitude, and in combination with a properly programmed GPS can pretty much fly you from one end of the trip to the other with minimal intervention. No trees, deer or wooden posts are likely to be encountered except possibly at the endpoints of the trip, though bird strikes are more likely (but not that common).
- Oh yeah, and no flying home from the local pub. Again, I can't speak for other countries, but pilots have to be alcohol-free for a minimum of 8 hours (varies -- some airlines may increase that). But as long as my blood alcohol is within legal limits, I can jump into my car and drive -- in fact, I can anyway, just not legally. But they have to catch me to enforce it. Airline pilots? Shown the door.
Thing is, the autopilot doesn't have to worry about turns in the road -- it's not following a road. It doesn't have to worry about pedestrians, dogs, cars cutting you off, discovered checks, traffic jams, traffic signals, posted speed limits, the car ahead of you applying emergency braking... or any of thousands of road hazards or conditions. Icing is a concern, but not slippery roads.
Navigation consists of following straight lines from one point to another, (mostly) unrelated to geographical conditions on the ground. Driving a car is ALL ABOUT ground conditions.
I wish people would stop drawing this parallel, because the two are nothing alike.
For comments on lines of code, I prefer to use the double slash.
For block comments I generally have a slash followed by a line of asterisks, followed by one or more lines of text (no asterisks), followed by a line of asterisks ending in a slash. Separates the block visually, nice symmetry, easy to edit.
I'm sure Linus would find other reasons to hate me, if not that.
We should all remember Nathan Hale's famous line, "I only regret that I have but one asterisk for my nation."
... Yes, and no.
Yes, assembly is tied directly to the architecture, so varies accordingly. Learning one is NOT learning all.
No, because there is a paradigm, a way of thinking, that is different from higher level languages. Once you learn how to program in machine language, moving to a new machine is mainly just learning the architecture, syntax and op codes. I know, that sounds like all of it, but it's not really... There's that difference in thinking from other languages.
I was lucky enough to have access to a very simple machine when I was young, an IBM 1620, where I was able to teach myself its machine code. In spite of the fact that it was a register-less system, applying the understanding to new CPUs has never been a problem for me. Generally takes me about a week to get comfortable, a month to get proficient.
Then again, I'm one of those weirdos who LIKES programming in assembly. So maybe my experience doesn't count.
Anyway, I agree it's not a language per se, but I feel that knowing a machine language gets you closer than only knowing only high-level languages. (Or 'C'. Which is basically an abstraction layer over machine language. IMHO. Still protects you from the underlying architecture.)
Sorry you don't like it; you are in the majority. Your contempt is noted.
Not everybody has to be quick in the natural world. Snakes, for instance, can copulate for days. As for penises, they have two, and they switch off. (As in "take turns".) With corresponding anatomy in the female.
And yes, they are themselves predators, but they are not at the top of the food chain.
It has its issues, for certain. But a) I would not want to live in a world without choices and b) be fair, this particular mistake is on a third party port.
Also c) other options are hardly without blemish. Apple has some nice phones, but when is the last time iOS had a problem? Say, bricking iPads? On an upgrade meant to fix a security hole?
And they leave devices behind, too. There's an iPhone 4 in this house that only runs iOS 7, and a clutch of perfectly good 3GS phones that only run iOS 6. My Galaxy S4 only runs 5.0.1 stock, but at least I have the option of installing a third party port that brings it up to date.
I don't entirely disagree. I just think that "pile of poo" might be a bit unfair. Also incomplete. Possibly disingenuous.
I'm guessing the remark about Cyanogenmod is an aside, just for comparison of usage statistics. I'm wondering if the paragraph was inserted as an afterthought, it is rather confusing. I think Mr. Pauli should move it and add a few more words of context. Or at least add the context, though the following paragraph might want a few more words to properly shift the context back.
Honestly, I can't tell you its actual origin, but it is doubtless based on the idea of a con man selling property that doesn't belong to him to unwitting victims. The result is a common theme, where one might say "If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you" or "I have some land [in Florida] to sell you". Whether we imported the saying from England, somewhere else, or it's home grown, I couldn't say. Could be as old as confidence tricks.
By offering to sell you multiple bridges Senator Wyden is suggesting the lie is particularly egregious.
Encryption: we will mandate that every lock on every domicile accept a skeleton key that only law enforcement can access. Every police station, state and federal agency in the country will have a copy, unlimited blanks and a copy machine. You are safe from abuse because You Can Trust Us, and criminals aren't smart enough to reverse engineer the skeleton key. Criminals cannot prevent us access because they have to obey the law and only buy locks that accept our keys.
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