Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Re: It asks for your location?

SW1A 0AA?

Re: Not the only Burroughs ATM story

Even the newer ones weren't perfect. Back in the late 80s a colleague was preparing for Christmas shopping, and asked an ATM for £200. It hummed & clicked, and reported that it only had £150 left, and would he take that. He selected "yes", took the cash, and fortunately kept the receipt showing the issue of £150. A few weeks later he got his bank statement, which showed a debit of the originally-requested £200.

It took a lot of arguing with the bank ("that isn't possible, Sir"), but they did eventually agree to refund him the missing £50. We assume that somewhere a bank software engineer had to hastily create a software fix...

Re: Electric planes?

I would NEVER consider driving my petrol car down to 5% of a tank of fuel, but with a battery electric car, it's quite safe to do and not uncommon.

Buit that wasn't the question. You don't get less energy from your petrol when the tank is 10% full than when it's 90% full, but does a battery have the same characteristics?

Re: "Get used to the modern"

the equivalent of a car with imperial sized lug nuts when every other fastener was metric.

To attach the wheels with their 255/45R17 tyres?

Re: whenever governments grab MORE control...

You know what helps the lower and middle-class? Unions.

Only when they, too, are kept under reasonable control. The biggest boost to the middle class in the past 50 years was during the Thatcher era, when the government firmly stamped on union abuses of power and gave power back to ordinary people.

Uncontrolled unions are just as bad as uncontrolled companies.

The remaining members of the EU are the ones that brought in the charter of human rights that the UK refused to sign up to

If by "charter of human rights" you mean the European Convention on Human Rights it was drawn up by the Council of Europe long before the EU existed. The Council of Europe itself was proposed by the UK (Winston Churchill) after WW2 and although there is some overlap with EU membership it is a distinct organization, and the UK is still a member.

The remaining members of the EU are the ones that brought in the European Court of Justice that among other things allows any EU citizen the right to challenge any EU government on anything.

The ECJ (or more correctly the CJEU) is the supreme court that rules on EU law, just as the UK Supreme Court does for UK law. Ordinary citizens cannot appeal to the CJEU, only courts of member nations can do so. Its job is to rule on whether national law is compatible with EU law, and is not specific to human rights.

You seem to be confusing it with the European Court of Human Rights, to which any European citizen can turn for a judgement on matters of Human Rights within Europe. The UK is still a member of that, too, because it isn't an EU body. It has 47 members, the EU has 27.

A court that the UK has a poor history with and has been trying to get out from under for years.

Which one? The UK is no longer subject to the CJEU, it is still subject to the ECHR. There have certainly been controversial judgements handed down by the ECHR which the UK has disagreed with, often because it seems to put the individual rights of criminals ahead of those of their victims.

If you're going to speak in favour of the EU you should at least learn what it is actually responsible for, and not blindly give it credit for anything with "Europe" in its name, even when it has nothing to do with the EU.

Re: Luxury

I still think that DEC PDP11 kit was the best teaching platform ever.

I really should fire mine up again, after I check the PSU caps. I could do with more storage, but Q-Bus SCSI cards are like hen's teeth, and similarly priced. The existing RD52 still works, but 30MB is a bit tight these days...

Re: Crooks will use this to play on people's worries

True, but the mortality rate of those testing positive in the UK is around 15%

That's not the point I was making. I'm saying that the number of deaths is sufficiently low that most people in the UK will not know anyone in their immediate entourage who is affected, so it will seem (to many people) not to be serious. It's a perception issue.

Sure it is - you just make the penalty for breaking it similar to Italy - £3000 fine for breaking lock down, 1 year in jail if you lie to the police when questioned about it, and 3 years in jail if you then test positive for COVID.

Only works if people go along with it. If a million or so people decided to ignore lockdown there's no way the civil authorities in any country could cope, the system would be overwhelmed. At the moment the authorities are banking on the deterrent value of a hefty fine, but how many months of lockdown will people tolerate before civil disturbance explodes? We've seen that happen many times across the decades, for various reasons.

I want this all to end so I can travel again, go for a drive, eat out, watch a movie or hit the theater, maybe go see a lecture some place or a concert. Mostly I want it to end so I can visit my parents.

Me too, of course. My Mum is in her 80s and lives in another country, it will be months before I can see her again.

Normality isn't coming back until at the latter half of next year if we can;t find some effective treatments for COVID in lieu of a vaccine. People may as well start mentally adjusting for the fact. We're not sacrificing Gen Xer's parents lives because Gen Y are bored at home. Sorry.

Easy to say, but I really don't think society as a whole will tolerate it. No matter how hard you screw down the lid on a boiling pot, it will eventually explode without a safety valve. I'm not saying that I want or advise that, of course not, but we have to face the reality that you can't keep 70m people bottled up in their homes for a year "just in case". We need a realistic medium-term plan to get out of this, even if we can't cure or palliate the effects of the virus, the alternative is likely to be worse.

Re: Retrievers?

Assume a spherical retriever, then it won't matter.

Re: The Wetherspoons Troughing Method

Don't forget to announce you are taking a 25% pay cut and remember to leave out that you just took 20% options in shares.

Taking a payment in stock options instead a salary isn't an entirely unreasonable approach, options like that only pay out if you stay and the share price goes up. If the company doesn't survive the crisis, or if you bail out, then you get nothing, but if it weathers the storm & returns to profitability those options will be valuable.That's why they are used as bonuses, as a way to persuade senior employees not to leave, and to commit to making things work.

NASA claim the 'copter rotors will spin at 3000RPM, by my calculations that gives them up to 1.5m diameter rotor disk before the tips go supersonic.

No so much COBOL as the tools

I would think that the problem isn't so much the language as the environment. Anyone who's familiar with modern procedural langauges shouldn't have much of a problem picking up COBOL. More of an issue will be finding people who are trained on Windows or Unix/Linux and getting them used to working in 1970s/1980s terminal-based environments with line editors, batch processing, obscure toolsets and all on systems with limited storage. Can you imagine a millenial Python/Linux programmer having to get to grips with IBM JCL and overlays configured by link-editors, all in maybe 1MB RAM and possibly with intermediate storage on serial tape? On a 3270 terminal?

Re: Why do so many businesses seem to need video?

I find that in video meetings eye contact is one thing that's missing. People tend to look at the image of their correspondent, not at the webcam, so never quite seem to make eye contact.

This. With webex it was easy, when you started a meeting as host you had to give a password, it could be different for each meeting. Zoom makes it a real PITA to do. You can set a default password for your personal room, but once that becomes common knowledge it serves little purpose. They need to add a way to easily choose a password each time you host a call.

Remember all the non-PC and sexist jokes about Angela Rippon's legs when she started reading the news, until that Morecombe and Wise Christmas show?

Re: So

I predict a shortage of candidates to stay in Moonbase Beta.

Re: New French study confirms results

If, say, 5 people die in the trial, and you have no control group, you have no idea if the death rate wthout the treatment would have been 0 or 10, so for all you know the treatment might make things worse. You have to have a control group, it has nothing to do with " the good of medical science".

Re: Never mind

spout some bollocks in Latin

What, like "Corona Virus" ?

Re: Corvid-19

It's nothing to crow about.

Re: Well _this_ is news

Something filled a log file & ran out of space? SD card died (I've had two die so far)?

Re: O tempora, o mores!

When I was learning French years ago, I remember one of the most satisfying moments was when I "got" a pun in an Asterix book. Even the jokes based on national stereotypes were well done, like the Britons drinking their hot water with a splash of milk (tea hadn't been 'discovered' in Europe in Roman times).

I really must get round to completing my collection.

Re: How about supermarkets...

Round here chickens seem to come with a matched pair of left & right wings. A balanced meal?