Posts by itzman 1946 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2011
Was introduced by engineers so that peole could make split second decisions unhampered by any especial need to interpret the interface.
Then engineers stopped designing stuff, and the task was left to art students who could drive ';software productivity tools'
Leading to such wonders as the new Barclays Smart Investors site, which features an airbrushed pastelized couple being 'smart investors' but won't let me withdraw money.
Smart Investors are waiting until the site works well enough so that they can remove their portfolios.
Remember when good products didn't need a "mission"? They just did something useful at a price that was reasonable. I believe it was called "value".
Yeah but that means hard work by engineers and people with STEM qualifications.
What did you do with all the people with degrees in Art History?
Marketing.
Britain leads Europe in tech.
I remember I had broadband years before my sister in Germany got rid of her government issue modem.
PCs are dying. For perfectly good reasons, like everyone who needs one has got one now, and there is no software led drive to cause people to buy new ones.
In fact the reverse is true. As many people are so happy to point out, WinXP was almost as good as it needed to be for many many people.
Slabs & smartphones are where the consumer tat is at.
I think this is so true.
I remember the PC thing from the beginning. We bought them because there was something only they could do, and we bought faster and bigger ones as they became available because there was something only they could do,.
I haven't seen a new killer app on a PC since Netscape really. Maybe Minecraft .
PCs are now like cars. They do what they do, they are all much of a muchness, and when yours wears out you get a new one.
Frankly any 64 bit CPU with 4GB of RAM could run this desktop faster than I can keep up with it.
And frankly the apps of 5 years ago are probably good enough too.
I am increasingly dismayed by upgrades that result in slower performance, and creeping featurism that I do not want but cannot turn off.
It is a mature market.
Even the software is mature
I tried to get a Cisco going on UK ISDN
In desperation I phone Cisco in the States and was put through to...
...a pleasant sounding dude who asked a few questions before reciting the magic spell which I think was 'set switch type=3' or something.
That he assured me, would work.
Are you SURE I insisted.
Well yes, he said, since he had just returned from a 3 week tour of all the European countries to test his Cisco ISDN driver software personally...in the field...
if Windows didn't morph into a window manager, desktop apps and API running on Linux.
Microsoft has to decide where its future lies.
It's lost the home desktop to smart phones.
It's lost the smartphones to apple and android.
It's lost the servers to Linux.
What is left apart from legacy? The corporate workstation and its apps.
If those apps would run on a linux chassis, who cares about windows, per se?
I.e. a Microsoft supported version of WINE plus a Microsoft branded suite of desktop apps and window manager...
systemd with faint praise
I challenge your statement.
99.99% of people who buy pre-installed computers just want to be told how to make it send and receive emails print and browse. They couldn't care less if its windows OSX or a linux.
The fact that android exists shows that.
Dumb users are OS agnostic.
They might just bitch if they cant play DoomQuakeNukeEm on it tho
You appear to have no knowledge of anything
The reactor did shut down
As it was designed to.
The decay heat is what was needed to be dealt with. A working reactors is fizzing and popping with lots of short lived isotopes that cause it to get hot even when the main chain reaction is stopped.
That is what you need emergency cooling for.
Otherwise the core melts.
As it did,
Which is why you have secondary containment to shield it.
Which it did.
which is why outside of the containment vessel, the radioactivity was pretty low.
And would have been lower still if they had flooded the thing with seawater and let the hydrogen escape, instead of trying to trap everything ..
I can't remember the exact quote, but "For every woman tending a child, there is a soldier with a rifle tending a frontier" was the gist of it.
How civilised is a flush toilet? But someone has to build the sewers and maintain the sewage plants.
A large part of today's problem is that we have a generation who have absolutely not the first clue as to how the world works, who have de facto political power.
They have the ethics and morality and comprehension of 6 year olds at kindergarten, demanding 'safe spaces' from authority figures.
There are no safe spaces in Afghanistan. People are killing each other daily. They would like to kill people in Britain too, and sometimes they succeed.
Yet the siren call of socialism 'if everybody were nice to each other' remains a childish plaint. People are not nice to each other. Basic game theory shows that being a murderous barbarian is actually a successful strategy against 'nice people'.
We have an army, so that nice people can be nice to each other. By killing the ones who are not so nice.
in 9.7 second an object in 1g will fall 1/2 g t^2
say 10 seconds and 10 meters per second square for simplicity that's 500 meters/1500 feet to very round approximations.
But I seriously doubt that anyone would be using ammo that was transonic and only just
speed of sound 600mph. distance about 2 miles = 12 secs.
So far numbers stack up, but 50 cal sniper rounds have far higher muzzle velocities..around 850m/s. and are optimised for low drag so flight time to target at 3750 meters is 4.5 seconds.
And suddenly the T squared term is way way less. Only 100 meters drop.
And 100 meters at 3750 meters is a mere 1.52 degrees above line of sight.
Its hard to get precise info on the actual ammunition, but 50 cal sniper rounds are said to be able to remain supersonic up to 1500 meters...
So maybe that 9 second flight time is realistic.
Oner is reminded of the wartime instruction 'never fly straight for more than a secind for every thousand feet you are up' as the flight-time of AA shells was about that., You simply moved away from where they aimed at.
Perhaps that is the answer to long range snipers. a constant drunkards walk should see you randomly off ground zero.
The good bit will come when they get in Benedict Cumberpatch to help and he identifies you immediately.
"Obviously, Watson, we are looking for a person of intelligence who has read the Register and understands IT, and who had access to the documents."
"There is only one in the whole FBI."
Well I already had one Amazon delivery that I found three weeks later after a period of intense rain languishing in the middle of the side garden after amazon claimed to have delivered it to the front porch.
So it will merely formalize the random delivery of parcels into accessible recondite areas of unsuitable delivery.
As I boy I spent many hours searching for model planes that had unexpectedly actually flown well enough to be outside of a 50 yard radius from launch.
Perhaps this will be part of a 'citizens fitness' initiative.
systemd-free Devuan hits stable 1.0.0 status
Sigh. I can only sympathise. I remember when on SUNOS and other Berkeley derived systems we could have a printer going in ten minutes.
Then SysV Unix arrived.
And the horror that was lpadmin.
It took over a decade before CUPS essentially wrapped that cesspit in something remotely usable.
sadly the history of engineering is littered with bad ideas that became de facto standards simply because the effort to bugger them into shape was slightly less than the effort to write them from scratch again.
If we wanted to get to where we are now, would we today start with postscript, X windows. Sys5 printing, socket based network code, PHP, JavaScript or even MSDOS?
Legacy dear boy, legacy. And if it ain't totally broke, fix it.
As a friend who died a fortnight ago said in his last phone call to me 'it hardly seems to matter now, does it'
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