Posts by Neil Barnes

Re: Hydrogen, eh?

'cos heat is work

and work's a curse

and all the heat in the universe

gonna cooooool down...

(that's entropy, man!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-brvKO-Z0

Re: Also no audio on Ubuntu Snap Zoom-client

Tested or not, I won't install Zoom client software on any machine. It can run in a separate browser window, thank you, and be closed when the call is finished.

modernised and no longer include menu bars, just hamburger menus

Exactly the thought I had.

I appreciate that there are different schools of thought regarding menus and hamburgers and ribbons and all the other way of interacting with a system, but damnit I like menus. One per window, please, none of this global menu stuff thank you.

Re: Another court case?

Yes, I came here to enquire whether the parrot or the camera owner had the copyright...

Thank $DEITY for that - I momentarily thought that I'd inadvertently been using FB!

Re: I was once responsible ....

It's easy. Some of us knew where the bodies were buried.

Re: AD Revenue

I'm still getting my head around the utterly bizarre costs to make a video...

$465 million to make the show, on top of the $250 million for the rights

No wonder they've had to put the price of Prime up. No doubt I will be subject to every increasing attempts to get me to sign up...

Re: Nobody told me I wasn't allowed to do it.

In my most recent incarnation, developing software for an automated cat feeder, I spent a long long time thinking up ways things might confuse the feeder. And yet, every now and then, something surprised us, like a cat simply beating up the feeder, or hiding toys in it, or in one case, an owner who rather than pushing the 'open' button simply picked up his kitten and let the feeder detect it to open the lid...

Re: 1976....Intel 8080....

I'm afraid Tiny Basic is - even for the time - somewhat limited: it was produced in response to Bill Gates' famous 'stop stealing my software' letter.

It has, for storage: one array of characters (I think) and twenty-six signed sixteen bit numeric variables. That's it... I'm still trying to work out how to find a prime number efficiently. I suspect that the multiple precision stuff may be a bit beyond it.

I also wrote[0] a software emulation that runs directly in a terminal, and that's a *lot* faster than the original and a hello world of a lot faster than the emulator. I'll perhaps get around to running CP/M on that, and then eventually on the hardware version of the 8080 simulator.

[0] I know, I know, but having an emulator that I knew worked helped no end in making the emulator work.

No need to ban them.

Just observe that as a motor vehicle, they should be used *only* on the road, properly taxed, insured, and MOT'd. And with all the usual penalties for misbehaving drivers, only possibly more so.

Oh, and to all those idiots that just dump the damn things in the middle of the pavement when they get bored with them... I' assuming salvage rights apply?

Re: Serial to VGA? All you need is an adapter!

Hell, I've used RS-232 for over forty years, including all the wires that no-one uses, in big and little connectors... but I've never actually found out what the letters mean.

Re: A market ready for disruption ...

...and it's scary that you might loose access to older data and software.

It's incomprehensible that you might loose access to older data and software. An update OS in the same family of OSes *might* have reasonable excuse to prevent some older software running unmodified; at the very least it should offer some sort of translation layer. But to prevent access to older data? No.

Re: A clothes drier that adapts itself to prevailing conditions

Not that many monsoons in Yorkshire, to be fair, nor in Germany where I live now.

But at the flat in Copacabana we used a hanging rack...

I do appreciate your point. But still, for most of the world, it's an unnecessary luxury (and just a luxury for the rest).

Re: SMRs are expected to produce 300MWe per unit.

What do you want to bet that the very communities that grab the cash coming from the factories refuse point blank to have any of these new power stations in their back yards?

Oh, just the odd fraction of a wavelength of light, here and there...

Re: Fond memories

My dad had a Morris Oxford also. As a small child I recall being fascinated by the ox and ford logo on the steering wheel... and the delicate green stripes along the waistline, where my dad's inexpert yellow painting of the top half of the car dripped into the inexpert blue painting of the lower half...

Re: "Earth’s magnetic field will disappear in 6.2 billion years or so"

the change in the sun's density will have moved our orbit outwards

I'm missing something here: irrespective of the sun's density it's centre of mass remains the same, right? So why would the orbit change?

(I am not an astronomer and don't know the answer to these things)