Posts by TRT

Re: The human mind is a frightening thing

In college one of our female friends was nicknamed ‘Mars Bar’.

Re: Networking problem!!

More of a notworking problem.

Re: "rethinking the Texas move"

He'll move into the business of tauntaun breeding...

Re: Doomsday Preppers

"Canning" in America often involves screw top jars.

Re: Power Grid

Disappointed it's not the Electric Power Council of Texas... which would be EPCOT... but that's an acronym already taken by another Mickey Mouse organisation.

Re: Can't Play Elite...

The docking computer glitch that used to just smash you into a million bits fir no apparent reason. No thanks.

Re: 30 Episodes?

A Clockwork Orange?

Re: Doctor Who’s fictional sidekick

Except... wasn't she a ganger? A ginger ganger at that?

Re: Hold up a sign.

If they have the 49 screen view, then you each hold up one letter. Requires some coordination though!

Hm... so the implications of not having HDCP all the way throughout the display chain? I mean, my old RGB data projector is fine and still works to throw photons at a screen in a controlled way, but the setup simply chokes at some content which requires HDCP... I'm being frustrated in the realisation of my license / contract with the distributor etc.

Re: Internet of Shit

They would blame the

System

Control &

Automation

Technology.

Re: Nespresso...

BUT... you must admit, the "brown Windsor soup" on the keep warm hotplate DID give birth to the webcam.

Re: This is one thing...

Well there is the benefit that where there's a real risk of cable damage, like on building sites for example, you can easily generate, using cheap(ish) components, a 110V isolated supply with a centre tapped floating earth from the 220V/230V supply.

Re: Dodgy house wiring

I worked on my aunt's house changing a light fitting in the kitchen. Discovered through "sixth sense" that the idiots who had wired the house did ring circuits by taking the lives out of one fuse, running it around the house, then bringing it back to the DB and into a SECOND fuse block. None of the fuse blocks were labelled. One of them DID turn off the light though... but that was because the wiring in the rose had worked loose and one of the lives going out to the ring wasn't contacting the screw block properly and feeding live down to the switch.

Impossible to identify and isolate the entire fitting by switching MCBs off one at a time. It was only when I felt the hairs on the back of my hand stand up as it got close to a wire that I figured I'd best use the tester screwdriver on the bare copper end instead of the screw top. Lit up like a Christmas tree. I was just seconds and millimetres from getting a nasty shock.

Re: This is one thing...

It's not "internal switching" as such, selecting 240/230/220 OR 110 like the little selector switch used to do, but "Switched mode", which is a method whereby internal capacitors are charged from the supply voltage by a controller circuit that measures the state of the DC supply and "switches" the supply side as required to "top up" the DC circuit. Thus the supply taps into the mains no matter what the supply voltage only so much as to keep the output regulated. They are happy to run off a wide range of supply voltages. These supplies make use of reference components for measuring voltage and current... reference components which can degrade rather rapidly under certain conditions, thankfully mostly failing safe rather than the other way around.

Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

You also realise that the UK's virologists have for decades been scouring the globe collecting, sequencing & studying viruses from ALL manner of species, especially those which have the potential to impact world food supplies. Plant, animal and (if you want to draw that distinction) human viruses included. We ALREADY had the sequence; what we lacked was confirmation that the disease causing pathogen for the outbreak in Wuhan was the SARS-COV-2 strain aka COVID-19.

I expect the next step is to run mutation Monte-Carlo's against what we've learned about how this species jump happens, and then try to spot where we can prepare new vaccine prototypes before they are needed. To be absolutely fair, we were already doing this before COVID, but of course funding on the scale we've seen this past year is usually dependent on an immediate problem rather than a theoretical one or a hypothetical prophylactic.

Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

There were UK virologists who already had the virus sequenced before it went zoonotic and jumped to humans. You think this virus just materialised de novo out of thin air? It has a history, a family tree.

Re: And the EU still can't understand why the UK left.

The UK has in place an incredible virology service with huge genomic sequencing capacity. Around 10% of all the positive tests have been completely sequenced and the transcriptome calculated. These records have been linked to basic patient data such as age, sex, ethnicity, travel history etc. Further, where the source of the sample was a resident of Scotland, their hospitalisation records have been linked to the genomic data, which includes treatments and outcomes. How else do you think all these news stories about effectiveness of "oxygen therapy" and "steroid treatment" come out? The transcriptomes are also fed into structural protein modelling simulations using the UK and EU's massive HPC capacity - this is how we can determine the effect of mutations occurring in a protein's antibody target region, and the probably effect on vaccine efficacy.

We're not a Petri dish. The WORLD is a Petri dish - the UK is the microscope and the scientist looking down it.

Re: Pricing

Actually, those small modular ones are pretty nice... I presume the "hidden" RJ45s are "through" ports enabling the hub to run FROM PoE delivered by tapping into existing cat 5/6 cabling that the fibre will be replacing. That's a pretty neat idea! And adding that to the Catalyst management... actually that's really tempting and quite inventive. Neat.

Re: "when Wi-Fi gets more reliable every year"

And there are those at university who are desperate to get FTTD because they're moving 50TB data sets around, but the university IT department have only just ratified the spec for 10GbE over cat 6a and still consider fibre is only for vertical infrastructure, same as it was 25 years ago when they ran 4 pair OM1 to every floor of the building labelling it as "future proof" and "suitable for beyond the expected life of the building".

Re: Hmm ...

Ha! I know that set up well. Fortunately we had a separate pre-press department, but the 8100 was still in the same room as a digital sheet-feed press. Noisy as f***. Could send the RIP output to a number of devices - the e-Print, a Fuji dye-sub proofer or a Fuji ImageWriter which spat out huge lengths of roll film. Also had a Chromalin proofing system which was great fun. Used to love running those off. Could spend a whole afternoon just quietly banging out proofs one after another - it was a skill. Ah... great days.

Of course, one could argue that there's more than 10 yearsworth of unpatched vulnerabilities in a even week old Windows 10 image...

Re: "We are aware of an issue with a small number of devices"

An extension of that mode of thinking which can be generalised as "We got it right more often than we got it wrong, so we are better than average."

A 10 year old Windows 10 image?