Posts by Peter Simpson 1

Re: Grow up

Yup. "Can't we all just get along?" The two museums would seem to this techie to have much in common, one being the historical antecedant of the other. Combining the two museums would seem the natural thing to do. I'm not clear on the justification for keeping them separated.

Perhaps the advice (and perhaps leadership) of someone who has experience successfully running a historical technical museum is needed? The Computer History Museum in California and the NSA Museum in Maryland are great examples of what Bletchley could be.

I have visited Bletchley and it would be a terrible shame to have it turned into a Disneyland cartoon version of what I saw. History should be presented as it was, warts and all. Save the Disney experience for something less important. Clearly, Bletchley and computing are never going to be on Joe Sixpack's "must see" list, no matter how tackily they're presented, so do it right and make it a good value for your intended audience.

...but in their defence the GPS manufacturers were apparently a little lazy, and didn't keep within their band - hence the interference.

Not in the least true. The GPS manufacturers designed their receivers, knowing that on either side of the band being used, there were frequencies allocated for satellite downlink use. The signals in these bands would have been of a strength equal to, or more likely, lower than the desired GPS signal, and so the filters were designed for this case.

Now, along comes Lightsquared, with a proposal to use these frequencies, originally allocated to satellite downlink, for something else: terrestrial transmitters. These transmitters would emit signals many orders of magnitude stronger than the signals the GPS receivers were designed to filter out.

You can't blame the GPS manufacturers for designing according to the current band plan, with the expectation that the interference environment would remain the same. After all, that's why we have band plans in the first place: to prevent interference.

Re: Few CIOs or VP ITs can code

...two years later the company went bankrupt among failing projects, falling quality, angry customers and so on.

Sadly, nobody in command ever seems to learn from these failures.

They just blame it on the incompetent developers and go somewhere else to do the same thing over again. "F*ck up and move up" is how a former boss put it.

Re: I'm obviously missing something...

I thought a RAM-raid was when you arrived early at work, with a screwdriver, and nearly simultaneously downgraded the amount of RAM in a co-worker's machine, while upgrading the amount in yours.

Heh. I'm exempt.

Color blindness, often considered a disability by those who aren't married.

// and a handy escape mechanism by those who are...

Re: Scary Stuff

I currently work on ANPR and your figures are roughly correct, in daylight. Remarkably, we get closer to 90% accuracy at night using infra-red cams.

Here in Massachusetts (actually, it covers the entire east coast of the USA), we have something called EZ-Pass. It uses a combination of RF transponders and ANPR to bill for tolls. It works up to 70 mph, and there are several examples of this up and running. At night, you can just see the visible bit of the IR flash as it reads the plates. The slow-speed lanes have fixed illumination and the plates, of course, are reflective.

I suspect there is a manual reading of illegible plates going on, and I understand that the plates aren't used unless there's a problem with the transponder signal. Still, quite impressive.

Yes, there's a whole subset of drivers who refuse to use it, because they don't want the guvmint tracking them. They're the ones in the long lines, which, according to our overlords, will soon be gone, as the system is about to displace the toll-takers (overpaid relatives of politicians), with license plate readers used to bill those without tags (at a higher rate, presumably)

// and it sure beats having that ashtray full of change (or waiting while the chap in front of you digs through his)

Re: The real elephant in the room ...

Pupils as young as five will start learning to code in the new system and from the age of 11, children will be taught at least two programming languages.

We'll keep them after school, and outsource them as coders. It's like a 21st century workhouse!

Re: Expected lifetime

Just wanted to amplify this point: designed for a life of 90 days, still going after _10 years_.

That's not an "excellent" design, that's a f*cking AWESOME design!. The team that designed these two bad boys should be getting free beer for life from their management. Well done!

Re: Can we have?....

I think I have an illustration for the Bulgarian Airbags conversion section...

// Daily Fail link suppressed

Re: Oh that is all kinds of wrong!

Proving that once again, just because something is technically possible, actually *doing* it may not be advisable (or in good taste)

Re: I stopped reading when......

How can you have a Guinness cert, but no Guinness?

Props for the inspirational and patriotic art, though. A very nicely done work area.

// England expects...and all that

Re: Odd timing.

...I think it was an African Grey.

You can tell by the lovely plumage.

Re: Sub! Editing! Failure!

Have the people respponsible for the Yahoo! titles been sacked?

It's a requirement, right?

Driver MUST be from a country other than the one he's driving a cab in.

Driver MUST not speak or understand more than 10 words in the language of the country he's in.

Driver MUST not use turn signals.

Driver MUST have working horn, and is required to utilize it at every opportunity.

Cabbies -- the same the world over...

Re: The book about how

Almost certainly the only good thing to come out of the Third Reich - the VW Beetle

// need to deduct points for the ICBM though

Re: @ Dalek Dave

I sincerely hope you're too young to remember watching the Apollo missions on TV.

If you had seen them, you would have no doubt that men walked on the moon. For $DEITY's sake, man, ham radio operators listened in on the transmissions. And what's the motivation for all the people that supposedly worked on that soundstage to keep mum for all these years? You'd think someone would have sneaked a camera in and could make a fortune selling the photos of the soundstage to the tabloids.

We really did put men on the moon. More than once. And brought them home safely.

// With slide rules and IBM 360s.

// ...and Real Engineering

Re: I don't get it

Because this small group of huge companies does two things extremely well:

- identifies, bids on and wins government contracts

- contributes to politicians' election campaigns

You'll notice that neither of the above involves producing a usable product.