Posts by Wilseus 445 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2011
"I did wonder if ammonia could also have been the culprit as this killed a fair few people back when it was used in refigeration until replaced by CFC then HFC."
There was an accident involving ammonia at the brewery near to my house recently. A number of people were hospitalised and one tragically died. Refrigeration you say? I'd been wondering what they used it for.
To me, the term "trace" implies that the substance is not needed but just happens to be there for some reason. It's an impurity, if you will.
The sort of outrage I'm seeing over this seems completely illogical to me, it's a bit like kicking off because a knife was used to prepare vegetarian food that had previously been used to cut a meat product. So what? It doesn't make any difference as to whether an animal was killed or not. It doesn't make any difference to anything.
"Yeah and, in my experience, the manufacturer of that "decent pair of high end headphones" will be happy to sell you a replacement for that 50 cent cord for about $15 plus shipping.
At least for the next 2 years or so until they've run out of stock and their new models use a different and incompatible connector for the 50 cent cords.
They're all as bad as each other."
No, not really. My old £50 Sennheisers had a detachable lead which had a perfectly standard jack plug on both ends. A quick look on Amazon shows that I can buy a replacement for £2.69 with free UK delivery.
So, as is usual for a hifi-basher on here, you're talking rubbish.
I have a microwave oven with most of the features you are talking about. It must be getting on for 40 years old: my granddad bought it when I was a very small child. My grandmother gave it to me many years ago when she replaced it with a newer (inferior) model. It has two knobs, one to set the time and one to set the power level, and has an electromechanical countdown timer like the ones you used to see on tape recorders. It's only 650W though, as was the norm back then.
The thing weighs an absolute ton and needless to say it's still going strong today.
It's very similar but not identical to this:
http://img.class.posot.es/en_gb/2015/12/02/microwave-oven-20151202174321.jpg
"Children still can't give consent and paedophilia will never be acceptable enough to legalise."
How do you define what is a child though? What would be considered paedophilia in this country is perfectly legal in many jurisdictions, including many EU countries.
"If ARM hadn't been spun off as a seperate company Acorn could have used some of its profits to develop and showcase a proper rival to the PC. They might only have ended up with a single digit percentage of the market but thats all Apple ever attained and look at it now."
Yes I concur completely. The whole rise and fall of Acorn is a very sad story really, and one that to this day still tugs on my heartstrings a little, but for better or worse, we are where we are and we have to make the best of it.
"(only the Commodore series attempted a serious effort at making certain system calls portable across their range via their 0xFFxx kernel jump table, but the C128 used a Z80 to boot the system!)"
I think the same is true for all Acorn's pre-Archimedes BBC machines, including those with 16 and 32-bit second processors.
In fact it's the case on the Arc as well: in BASIC type A%=65: CALL &FFEE. It won't try to execute ARM code at 0xFFEE, it'll emulate the BBC's OSWRCH call and print the letter 'A' on the screen.
"Nuclear boy scout. He got most of the way to making a breeder reactor in his garden shed. Used thorium from lamp mantles as a starting material and the smoke alarms as a neutron source to breed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn"
Hmm, according to the Wikipedia article, Hahn very recently died (presumably from radiation poisoning) but I can find nothing on any news sites about it. On the other hand there does seem to be an obituary for someone of the correct name and age.
"Now, bear with me on this one Wilsus.
Up North we use 'Could've had', but if i lived at Downton Abbey, then a case could be put forward for 'Could of had'. Its a question of grammatical context! If i was a posh twat, i could definitely use ' Could of had' in a sentence.......just try it now in a posh accent, go on..........you see? Now try this sentence, 'He could of had a brand new Rolls Royce, but instead plumped for the Bentley instead'. You see, it works doesn't it?
Now lets try up North: (so with a northern accent in your head)
'He could of have had a plate of fish n chips, but instead he had a plate of black puddings'.
Now try: 'He could've had a plate of fish n chips, but instead he had a plate of black puddings'.
Hope thats cleared up things.....or is that, cleared things up?"
Sorry, I can't say I agree. Surely that's just poor pronunciation? Downton Abbey isn't real, so can hardly be used as evidence in this regard.
P.S. When you say something like, "if I was a posh twat" you should really use the subjunctive, "if I were a posh twat." :)
'I think you'll find the accepted modern usage (in the UK at least, not sure about elsewhere) is:
"could of had"'
Oh dear. That usage is certainly not accepted by me.
"Could've" is a contraction of "could have."
"Could of" simply is not valid grammar.
"I thought the biggest complaint about Sky was that they made it very difficult to actually talk/complain to them..."
So people keep telling me. However I've been with them for a number of years for TV, and until very recently phone and broadband. In all that time their customer service has been nothing short of excellent, not that I've had too much to complain to them about because I have had virtually no problems with any of their services.
I can't help thinking that because people don't like the Murdoch empire, they just make any old shit up to make them look bad.
...or has this whole thing become stupidly over-complicated?
Back in the 1980s, the RISC chips of the time got around the branching problem with features like branch delay slots (MIPS) and predicated instructions (ARM).
I can't help feeling that perhaps there is a much simpler solution to this than dedicating ever more transistors to hugely complicated algorithms that could instead be used for the operations that the programmer actually intended.
Perhaps some radically new, but elegant type of CPU design is needed.
Quite so, but why is it so red on the snaps, then?
Because, like many such astronomical pictures, it uses false or enhanced colour. This picture is more indicative of its actual appearance: Hubble Image of Proxima Centauri
"Proxima Centauri really only produces red light"
No. I keep hearing this and it is totally incorrect. The light from Proxima has a colour temperature of about 3000K which is rather whiter than a halogen light bulb. The last time I checked, plants in my living room, at night with the light on, still looked green and my white ceiling still looked white. Sure, the light is redder than sunlight, but it's certainly not red light.
On the other hand, a cool brown dwarf with a temperature of a few hundred degrees probably would have these properties, but Proxima is far from being one of those.
"The best, easiest and cheapest way I improved a good system was to hang some Moroccan rugs on the walls, they were aesthetically pleasing BTW."
Yes, improving the listening room pays dividends. There are also commercial products sold for these purposes. Most are extremely effective but are, IMO overpriced for what they are, and generally have a poor WAF.
*WAF = Wife Acceptance Factor.
"... is almost always bollocks. Most of us cannot hear the difference, not when listing in a front room..."
The difference between what and what, exactly? Are you saying all hifi systems sound the same? Or that most people can't tell the difference between a stereo and a live concert?
I agree with you regarding 4K TVs though.
"about device on my Galaxy S5 gives kernel version 3.10.61"
Some Linux-based systems use kernels with newer features backported to them, so the kernel version being reported won't necessarily tell you much. That's definitely the case with ChromeOS, I don't know if it applies to Android as well though.
"32bits can not ever use all of 4gigs of memory"
Of course it can; native data word size does not limit maximum memory size. Even a 32-bit address bus can support more than a 32-bit address space with latching.
A data word size able to hold the maximum address is advantageous but not essential.
Of course, that's why we had processors like the 6502 which had an 8-bit word size and a 16-bit address space.
"Friend of mine has a nearly 10yr old Panasonic surround system that uses a Wireless system to connect the rear speakers. No cabling between the unit and the speakers at all."
I've seen systems like that. I guess a system could also use a digital toslink cable in a similar way. That wouldn't really make it a speaker cable though, in both cases the speaker cable would be the wires connecting the wireless receiver/amplifier electronics to the actual drive units.
"Optical fibre "sound cables" are quite common. Not sure about 'speaker cables', though."
It's a physical impossibility. The job of speaker cable is to carry electrical current, quite a lot of it in some cases, in order to energise the speaker's drive unit(s).
It's hard to see how you could achieve that by shining a red LED down a fibre optic cable!
"Paper fivers will continue to be legal tender until May 2017, after which they'll no longer be accepted in shops and banks."
This makes no sense, the term legal tender has nothing to do with whether it is accepted in shops or banks. Shops in the UK are free to accept or not accept whatever payment they like, whether it's in gold bars, postage stamps or Euros.
Legal tender simply defines what a creditor must accept as payment for an outstanding debt.
"The 6800, 68000, and 6502 were logical orthogonal instruction sets like the IBM 360. The Intel instruction sets always seemed far more arbitrary - so I never learned to program the 8080 etc at assembler level."
The 6502 wasn't that orthogonal, certainly not when compared to the 68000 or the ARM for example (IIRC you had to use different registers, either X or Y, for different addressing modes etc)
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