Posts by Daedalus

Re: My French is pretty poor...

It gets better. I think it's in Italian where "embarrassed" is used as a euphemism for "pregnant". Possibly French and/or Spanish too.

Re: Clogged Computers

Not as bad as PCs in crematorium that get full of dust. As you know what that dust is

Ah yes, Keith Richards' favorite nose candy.

Technically the ordinary household "dust" that can accumulate inside an innocent PC is even more "cadaver" than the remnants of a cremation, which are those common non-combustibles which make up our bodies, calcium, sodium, iron etc. Household dust, however, is largely those skin cells we shed on a daily basis, and usually a mixture of several individuals at that.

You have to allow for the overcrowding in the UK, especially in the south. Most places in the US you can do something with little chance of finding a crowd, except near the big cities. Anything you want to do in southern England, you have to figure on a couple of thousand people wanting to do the same thing at the same time.

Re: Why have the switch ?

It's common in the USA to wire a wall switch to a nearby socket to turn lights on and off, given that few modern houses have ceiling lights except in the kitchen. There's even a colo(u)r code convention on the wire. Black (live) goes from the socket to the switch and Red (secondary live) is supposed to come back, but if you only have cable with Black and White (neutral) you're supposed to put black tape or marker on the returning white wire. I like to break the bridge on a dual socket so that one of the pair can be switched and the other always on.

That said, you can buy a socket/switch combo that fits in the same place as the ubiquitous dual socket. What you do after that is limited only by your imagination.

Re: @ The cur ... For the love of the wee man

Unfortunately Googling 'beaver stuffed into my pipe' got the last council fired.

That's a 9.5 on the Dabbsy scale. A line worthy of the man himself.

AKA "It's easier to make excuses than to get permission"

The real triumph was getting the DBAFH to hold off long enough for authority over future outcomes to slip away from him.

Re: Plagiarism

As long as we're replaying Red Dwarf scenes, let us not forget the scene in Backwards that has the line "I'm addressing the one prat in the entire country who's bothered to get hold of this recording, turn it round and actually work out the rubbish that I'm saying. What a poor, sad life he's got!"

Re: Niche skill

My sentiments exactly. Microsoft docs are accurately unhelpful, while Linux man pages tend to be comprehensively incomprehensible. My particular beef with M$ is the way their doc pages tend to give you trivial or pedantic amounts of info ("A FUBAR is a function to BAR a FU"), advertise that "you can do this! and this!" and then direct you to another page for "more info" which turns out to be "more of the same". In come cases a "suck it and see" approach is quicker than reading up on the topic.

Re: Perhaps Elon Musk...

Interestingly Rudyard Kipling, in a burst of Edwardian futurism, wrote some pseudo-news articles about "bat-boats" that were winning races by taking to the air, only starting and finishing in the water to show that they could indeed, plough through the waves in the approved manner. I think they were part of his story "With the Night Mail".

Re: Really a robotic chef?

We need a Moley that can operate a Mouli.

Re: Modern problems

So far the very non-dimmable 1OOWeqv bulb I installed is not giving problems. The same could not be said of the generic doorbell button I tried to use to trigger the door from outside. It turned out that the new open/close circuit, still a two-wire affair like the older version but with added features, requires a clean break in the circuit to function properly, and the trickle current through the bulb lighting up the button was giving it fits. Removing the bulb fixed the issue.

Re: Once more with feeling...

Volocopter is one of the few outfits that actually understand the issues. The key is total rotor area: more area means less power for the same amount of lift. Also they put the rotors high, which is safer and also avoids ground effect complications.

"duplicate DC in the US "

Oh come on. Duplicate DC's, by natural law, have to be located in the same building as the original, so that the suits can admire them both properly through the glass partitions between the DC's and the barbecue.

Re: IT is a burden and a cost

They don't care if it means destroying the company in five years, they will have left with a comfortable pay check long before that.

Even sooner if they can engineer a buyout by a bigger, more stupid company, a la the infamous Autonomy sale.

I mention this because the company I work for, having been spun out of another company after a buyout and now owned by.....well, anyway, they've started going on a buyout binge instead of trying to address the real problems at the coalface.

The reason that they should be fined is that their systems allow the bulk export of data.

Exactly. Remember all those "we lost a CD with 100,000 names, NI numbers and addresses on it" incidents? So many systems just store everything in plain text for anybody to download, instead of requiring a single lookup key to find a single item. It would be a lot easier to secure people's data if the sensitive parts were stored as hashes so that they could only be used as lookup keys. But even in the credit card world, people use workarounds so they can view actual numbers, rather then inputting them into the query to see if a given card is valid. Many data hosting services have to spend significant time purging out anything that looks like a plaintext CC number.

My thoughts exactly. By rights this guy should be in serious trouble with his employer just for taking a work laptop out of the country without proper reason. On the other hand, if he does use a personal laptop to log into GitHub, which is perfectly doable, then he's stupid for risking his own property like that.

All the power sockets were 2A round pin items.

Very common at the time, I think, and certainly at York. The idea, I'm sure, was to stop students from using space heaters with all the attendant risks. Since 90% of said student body were technically clueless in one way or another, it was effective. The 10% who had gone for science had no trouble wiring up suitable plugs, not to mention bodging the timers on the room's actual heating device - an oil radiator with a blower - to stay on all the time and react only to the thermostat. I'm sure I left quite a trail of bodging behind me.

Re: Hmm

It transpired that what was really being smuggled was the bricks

Reminds me of the story of a merchant in old India whose sacks of rice were forever being probed for contraband as he crossed the border.

He was smuggling the rice.

Re: NaN

That should be NaN Railway Cuttings, East Cheam.