Posts by Noram

Re: Multi-CD hell

I remember those, I seem to remember that WC3 wasn't too bad in terms of swapping between discs unnecessarily, but I remember FF7 (which from memory was basically a single game emulator of the PS game) seemed to need to have the disc swapped practically every time you changed location.

I remember getting a second copy of Baldurs Gate when I bought a DVD drive, purely because I could get the DVD version cheap and it meant I didn't have to do the disc shuffle.

It was an odd time, there were games that you basically just used the disc to install and do the initial game start up from, then could pop in a music disc and use the games CD player, and at the other extreme games where you due to fmv etc you had to constantly swap them (and even the likes of Warcraft 3 where you used one disc to "spawn" 2 disc free clients for network play).

From memory non metered water bills are based on the rateable value of the property pre council tax.

So a large property that was high rates in the 80's is assumed to use a massive amount of water (as a high rate house could be 8 bedrooms in a bad area at the time, or on the other side of town in a better area 4 bedrooms and a nice garden).

Re: A Suggestion Or Two......................

Re the imprint machines.

Maybe ten to twelve years ago (at most) a new Boots opticians opened up in my town, about 18 months later a friend went in and got a new prescription and glasses, apparently the card system was down and they don't take cash, but the older assistant went rummaging through the storeroom and came out with a what was by all accounts a brand new imprint machine in it's wrapper and showed the young assistant who'd never seen one in use (I'm sure doctors, police and shop assistants get younger every year) how to process a payment with the paper system. My friend was most amused by the youngster's reaction to something that he had seen introduced and used for decades.

So by the sounds of it the system was still usable as a backup and being supplied to at least some stores as recently as something like 2010-2012.

Of course now that more and more cards don't have the embossed numbers etc on them this is no longer an option, even if the banks/card processors did still accept them.

I always try to keep some physical cash in my wallet, if just because at times i've been the only one in a taxi with cash when the driver's card reader wasn't working or whatever, and I've seen the chaos that happens in a large Tesco when the internet line they used for payment processing was down (pretty much every isle had abandoned trolleys, despite there being 3 cash machines just outside the doors that were still functioning and obviously on their own connection).

Re: I need classic outlook

I'm still trying to find an email client that lets me import from windows mail, and keep the 20 years of pop3 emails from that.

I like the ability to keep copies of my old emails, and access them even if offline or the ISP etc goes wrong.

I've been using Outlook for a few months and loath it for my usage compared to Live Mail etc, for one thing it doesn't default to letting me see the email from all my accounts at once, instead I have to remember to go through a dozen different tabs.

Re: Musk OpenAI and Microsoft

If the emails were relevant to the law suit, which the contents would appear to suggest they definitely are, then Musk was utterly stupid to try and sue with the claims he made, at least if he didn't want them public as discovery would have brought them up, and Open AI would have filed them as part of the defence with the result they would have been on part of the public record of the case.

In short it sounds like Musk forgot that those emails would have been part of a valid defence against his claims.

I've looked at a few of his cars, and a friend put it really well.

"They've got worse build quality than a ******* Kia Rio."

It amazes me how many people will spend 40k on a car with panel, paint and trim issues that make 2003 Kia Rio look good.

The aforementioned friend had one from new, it lasted him something like 10 years without any major issue, not bad for a car that apparently cost him under 7k (it was really basic, but it was put together properly which doesn't seem to be the case with Tesla's).

Re: As an ex-Sr. Director of a software company...I'm apalled!

Some of those postmasters were calling the helpline hundreds of times each, with calls going in on days when they could see a problem at the end of the day/week.

This wasn't some "rare" bug, it was happening hundreds/thousands of times for a lot of the victims, and there were hundreds of victims.

If the post office/fujitsu couldn't work out a problem with the transactions from a single terminal over a set date, and that it had been happening repeatedly then they really were worse than you can imagine, or they just didn't care.

Especially as there were times when the the subpostmasters were on the line to the "help desk", following instructions and it went wrong again whilst they were on the line, meaning there was not only a known issue, but the call centre had the exact time, date, terminal user (and terminal), and transaction as a pointer to the problem. If they couldn't start working out the issue from that information then they really didn't care.

If they'd just bothered following up one of those cases, and actually fixing the problem there wouldn't have been hundreds of people (and their families) with ruined lives over this.

The archive.org stuff would still be, but it may not have everything unfortunately as I believe they don't routinely "mirror" full sites, especially ones with a lot of data due to the cost and complexity.

I'd hope they update to as complete a mirror as possible, or another organisation can get permission to run a full mirror.

One of my friends currently has his younger brother living with him.

The younger brother vapes and has one of the really heavy duty "custom" things that is more like a low quality smoke machine than a vape.

He's adamant that it doesn't put out anything unpleasant, the coating on the walls, glass, mirrors and screens tends to disagree. IIRC the base material for the vapes is is similar to a very watery jelly (glycerine?) and once it cools and settles out of the "vapour" you're left with a thin, but increasing thickness of it on every surface that attracts dust.

I had to sort out one of his computers a while back (about 6 months after the brother had moved in), and it gave me flashbacks to when I used to fix computers for my dad and a couple of friends who smoked, it was a very similar tacky sensation with the thick blocks of dust.

Re: Yes but no but

Given the likes of VM are shutting off their POTS (I had to move over to a dongle on the modem last week*), and offer to supply an "emergency handset" if you're "vulnerable" I would very much have hoped that the system to have your mobile automatically work with any tower without any additoonal cost to you would have been in place already.

Related to this is the fact that the mobile companies are determined to get everyone onto expensive contracts, evne if they just want "PAYG"

A friend who has an old PAYG sim that he was very careful to keep in credit for his mobile he mainly uses for emergencies/taxis (he's disabled, on a limited budget and basically suck in the house) was furious that his phone provider apparently cancelled the sim without any warning to him, no message about "you need to make a call in the next week" or "you need to top up again in the next week to retain functionality" the first he knew was when he tried to buy something and didn't get the code SMS from his bank and someone not being able to contact him via his phone mentioning it in an email.

In his case he rang up and after a discussion and the call handler talking to a manager they reactivated the sim on the old number but without any credit.

I've since found the emergency phone I bought for my dad has done the same thing because he didn't use it for a couple of months, so the loss of physical landlines if there is a power cut means that unless you're on a contract phone there is a very good chance your occasional use mobile is going to be worthless when you need it most.

*The "Instructions" supplied made it seem like you needed to call them if you had a simple double adaptor for your phone.

Re: In the glorious past

The problem with canning the bean counters is that you really need access to some specialist food production equipment, or some 55 gallon drums and a printer that can do very large labels.

On the plus side, you can sell the tinned mystery meat for pig food to top up the bonus.

Re: Sounds vaguely familiar...

Yup A bit like anything with a pattern.

The size of panel probably didn't change, the ability to get them in the same style, or there was a change in the regulations that mean they can't make them in the same manner any more so new ones might be the same general style but look different.

You get the same thing with carpet tiles, and wall tiles, always buy plenty of spares as the chances are if you need to replace some a few years down the line they won't match even if you can find "the same" ones.

Re: Imagine the meetings

II was thinking that, my meters have a third little box wired to them with IIRC a WAN and HN or something light, one obviously for the suppliers network and the other for the "in home display" device.

Possibly because both the gas and leccy were with BG and from memory fitted at the same time (I can't remember if we had one guy, or two working as a team, I think they were doing several nearby on the same day).

Re: Pretty sure NASA's budget...

IIRC it's also the case that the cost of building upkeep is or was born entirely by projects that used them, with the result that if say the main assembly hall was only being used for the Shuttle program one year, and that year only two flights were planned, then the entirety of it's maintenance work (planned or otherwise) had to come out of the Shuttle program, so if it needed a new roof for it to remain usable it had to be paid out of the budget for those flights

And there were apparently years when the Shuttle program was covering the cost of pretty much all of NASA's bigger building at some facilities.

It's one of the main reasons that the Shuttle program was often so expensive per launch, it had to cover the cost of every bit of infrastructure it used even if only for a few weeks a year if it couldn't be shared out with other projects.

Basically IIRC NASA never got a proper baseline "facilities" budget as such from Congress, it was always taken out of whatever projects they were working on, so for the moon launch they got all the money to build everything needed, but since then the cost of maintaining them has been down to what they could pull out of the budget for other things usually based on what was going to use it. Hence if only Shuttle flights were using something like the Main Assembly Building they got all the costs associated with it.

There is a blog by one of the old NASA guys, who I think retired at some point after reaching the level of Flight Director (or higher), which does a really good job of explaining various bits about the space program, and in one of the entries where he's talking about why the Shuttle missions cost so much per flight he explains a bit about how NASA's funding works.

Re: Keyboard Sounds

I'm fairly sure they did this "we can tell what you're typing by the sound of the keyboard" at least 10-15 years ago, i guess it's another case of "AI" meaning "we're doing something that's been done before, but adding a new buzzword to it".

IIRC the old one listened to the sound and basically ran the unique sounds through a program that matched the pattern to words after you'd got an hour or so of material and then could do it in real time. I think you had to have a different "learned" set for each user and keyboard.

My memory may be playing up, but from what is surfacing I think the old adage about lightning never striking the same place twice is quite wrong, when lightning strikes it ionises the air and actually makes it easier (thus more likely) that you'll get another hit in roughly the same area.

I'm fairly sure there is/has been research into how to utilise that to direct more lighting to where you want it hitting thus building a better lightning rod by effectively creating that ionised pathway through the air before the first natural strike.

Re: You missed a question.

I would have suggested the use of a roll of cheap carped and a couple of bags of quicklime to be a suitable option for the offender, if not for the first offence, then for the second. Very few third offences.

He obviously knew the score when it came to USB

Re: air CON

From memory the human body doesn't detect lack of oxygen, it detects raised CO2 levels via a nerve bundle in the airway, hence why things like lack of pressurisation in an aircraft can be such a killer, you're suffering from a lack of usable oxygen but the body doesn't recognise that and because it's low air pressure (with not enough O2 in it) your bodies normal warning system doesn't kick in.

It's the same reason that you need specialist monitors if you're working in certain storage areas, or underground, your body simply doesn't register O2 levels and unless it's an increase of CO2 you might not get any warning from your bodies lack of oxygen (IIRC one of the reasons climbers are advised/meant to watch each other, and above a certain height moves more slowly to allow for that lower oxygen level).

As a couple of the other commentators have said, you put out more than about 4% co2 in your breath, in many modern buildings that are designed to be "energy efficient" one of the ways they do it is to make the building more air tight, so if you increase the number of people in it, or in rooms that don't have adequate ventilation you get a raised CO2 level that can be noticed.

You can buy the monitors these days quite cheaply*, and since Coivd people have been using them as a simple way to measure ventilation (if the co2 level is rising it tends to indicate poor airflow), and people are finding that in some buildings you're getting co2 levels hitting 3-4000 parts per million, so approaching 10 times the normal levels (o2 levels might not be dropping dangerously low, but you're going to notice that it's "stuffy" and when you go outside how much better it is).

I've seen several people note that just getting into an aircraft can see the CO2 level hit 2-3 times normal almost instantly, and if it's parked up waiting to move (with the ac etc off, as they are like to do to save money on fuel) it's hitting 3,500 parts per million or more before settling down again once they're in the air to maybe just 3-4 times normal atmospheric levels.

*I've seen some really cheap ones for about ~£30 that apparently work quite well, and one that seems to be highly regarded and very portable for about £200 (which I think can log to a smartphone app).and seems to be a favourite of various scientists for their own personal use (apparently it agrees with their lab gear, but has a much shorter life)..

Re: Water companies have leaky pipes because Ofwat requires them to

Just up the road from me is a fairly steep hill, and every few months it has a nice little stream running down it.

At one point the water company seemed to be doing repairs on the same section almost constantly, god knows how much it cost them to do it as every time it took several days, caused a lot of disruption for the people living on the street.

It seemed to get better when from memory they replaced the main feed pipe with a new plastic one, but i've noticed a couple of leaks in the last few months, my guess is they finally replaced the main pipe with a modern plastic one, but not the old metal spurs.

It probably doesn't help that there is a fair bit of heavy traffic using the road (despite it not really being suitable) as it's the only way to reach several streets, and when I peered into one of the holes a while back it seemed the pipework was a lot closer to the surface than I expected.

Mind you at least it's not gas, we used to be getting the gas board out every couple of weeks at the end of our street where there was a small bridge, they'd turn out take a sniff (or use a sniffer) and say "nah it's fine", until they'd managed to turn up when it wasn't windy and I believe the response was "oh **** get the digger Bill" and ask why no one had reported it sooner...

IIRC the leak was in a bit of pipe under the bridge, which meant if it was at all windy it was funnelled away, but if it wasn't you could mainly smell it some distance off for some reason (looking back we always smelt it on a patch of grass, so possibly spreading/contained under the road/pavement until it hit the more porous soil and was able to reach the air in greater concentrations).

Re: Wind and solar

They may well be doing that as well.

But, and this is important, both solar and wind still suffer from the fact you need either massive amounts of over provision over a very large geographical area to ensure you maintain power, or you need a lot of power storage, or both.

Having fitted panels and batteries to my gaff it's interesting to see how I can go from 5kw of production to under 500 watts in the space of five minutes and how much the battery is being used to smooth that out.

Whilst if you spread out the panels enough you could in theory smooth that out a lot, without huge amounts of battery storage the grid would likely become very unpredictable in terms of power being sent from one region to another. So spreading the solar/wind production out a lot may in theory solve the "generate a minimum" issue without batteries, but at the same time introduce a whole lot of other, new problems in regards to balancing of the load across the county.

Re: It can take a remarkably long time to notice that the alert mailer has stopped working.

I can quite imagine that being true, I've heard something similar about pilots and aircraft engineers who might notice something is wrong even when asleep in the rest area (long haul) because they're so used to how the aircraft sounds/feels that when something changes it hits the unconscious brain and starts screaming.

I used to sleep with a quiet computer in the room, and I would always wake up if there was a power cut because the nice reassuring white noise from the case fans would stop, it would invariably take me a few seconds to work out why.

I suspect there is some deep primal instinct that meant our ancestors would notice the lack of wildlife noise as a warning something (or someone) had caused the local animals to try not to be noticed, those that didn't wake up then possibly never did again.

Re: system was running at 6-10 per cent of operating reserve ratio.

Our one usually only takes a minute or two to reboot if we do it manually.

I suspect if it's taking 15 minutes there are probably a load of other modems doing it at the same time (which would be about right if it's rebooting due to a power glitch), thus causing a bit of a jam in the system as potentially hundreds/thousands try to do their checks and authentication.

There might also be a delay if the local street boxes are also attempting to restart as I don't think VM/ntl/BY were very good at maintaining the back up batteries.

Re: Someone's personal data is being misused

IIRC it being for your physical address is enough reasonable excuse, as is opening it to see who to send it back to.

The law is from memory primarily there to prevent interception in transit, so you steal post from a van an open it looking for cash etc you get done for a specific offence (even if you find nothing), but you opening something that came through your door is fine, especially if you can see it might be fraud being committed using your address or need to know who to return it to.

Re: There should be an app for that.

I think Android already does something similar automatically as people report spam calls, the issue is that the spammers just spoof numbers so they can change it every few hundred calls (or every call if they wanted).

I've had calls from Indian/Pakistani call centres that have shown as local numbers on my phone which completely defeats the likes of "Trucall" unless you're willing to only allow whitelisted numbers through (which then stops things like the GP/Hospital/local store calling legitimately).

What I want, and is unlikely to happen, is for ALL the UK telecoms providers to work together to sort out a "spam" company list and stop the use of spoofed numbers where the telecoms companies at the end point can't necessarily see who is calling.

That way you could get rid of most of the spam regardless of where it originates in the same way email blocks do, and make it so that there are repercussions for the companies that provide these spammers with their connectivity in much the same way that "bad hosts" gets blacklisted if they keep allowing spammers to use their services.

Re: 'Delegation'

Going back many, many years (before mobiles) we had to do that at the local library when my mother and sister got stuck in their lift.

The firemen arrived very quickly, although to be honest I don't think they needed to bother with the appliance given the entrance to the fire station was just across the road.

The total distance from the station garage to the lift was about 10 fire engines, but as you say they got to put the flashing lights on :p

No breaking things though, I was rather disappointed at the time that they just had a large key and a crowbar to unlock the lift door and force it open the first inch of so to allow them to get their hands in and pull it open the rest of the way.

Re: The Agony and No Ecstasy

I've pulled my back picking up the junk mail that went through the letter box...That didn't endear the local takeaways to me that day :p

It seems these days I pull it badly at least once a year, usually doing something "light".

Re the wheelchairs, the old classic (first gen) Corsa was always a surprise in that it fitted a wheelchair (big rear wheel type ) fine, and I suspect did well on Motability because of that, as if you took the parcel shelf out the bulbous boot window allowed the wheelchair to go in it standing up meaning it was easy to get in and out (open boot, lift wheelchair, step back, lower it then unfold seat).

It was also IIRC no upfront payment, and the diesel could pull a trailer from MK to Minehead/Taunton and back on a single tank. My father had one and would put a mobility scooter (one of those huge "noddy car" types that took wheels from a mini) in the trailer, the wheelchair in the boot and go down that way for a holiday and come back with some fuel left.

For modern affordable cars that take wheelchairs the likes of the Kia's tend to do fairly well, the issue seems to be many manufacturers don't like giving a decent boot on their cheaper models.

I had a 2003 Rio (extremely basic) from new that cost ~£7k and took my mum's wheelchair and ran until I gave it to my sister at about year 10, she stopped doing any servicing/checks other than yearly oil, and it lasted until year 15. It probably would have lasted longer but the labour cost to fix an issue was too much. You could even put a Shoprider Sovereign scooter in the boot, but you had to pack it in like tetris.

I may have spent more time than I like looking at cheap cars that take wheelchairs in the past (and working out the risks and costs of buying new vs second hand, vs mobility lease).

Re: No mention of Ark Surviva Evolvedl?

Your comments about Ark are so spot on.

My clan loved playing it when we started out on a nice "PVP enabled" server, which was relatively quiet due to things like log of who'd destroyed property.

Then they removed that log so the griefers could break into your base and kill all your dino's without any repercussions,

Then they did the cross server transfers which combined with the bugs meant a reasonably well organised group could drop into a server in the small hours of the morning and destroy hundreds of hours of work by each of dozens or hundreds of players and wipe everything before heading off to another server.

It was a fun few months but it killed the game for us.

We're looking at Valheim with an expectation to start playing it together in the near future, but waiting until it gets a bit further along, 3 of us have bought it so far to be ready for it..

Re: Fire

Abit motherboards from memory were especially affected, I had a KA7 which failed and when I looked pretty much all the large capacitors were bulging or leaking.

I also had some 10/100 NIC's that came with an SMC switch (bought from jungle.com if anyone remembers them), and one day my dad called to say there was a funny smell coming from his computer, so I went through and it had frozen up Upon opening the case a capacitor on the network card had caught fire and scorched a couple of the PCI slots, surprisingly the machine worked fine when I removed the card, put a new one in a different slot and turned it on again, it lasted another ~5 years in various hands.

Re: exposed to rain, doesn't mean they aren't readable

But is it mold/being nibbled by slugs, rats and insect proof, or even just the water causing pages to stick together.

I would tend to take "exposed to rain" to include the after effects of the exposure.

They probably assumed the grounding would be over fairly quickly and they could get them back into the air. They wouldn't have wanted to stop production straight away as it takes months for them to get the planes built. so it's better for the bottom line to try and keep making them with an eye to quickly retrofitting any required changes and being able to deliver a large number in a very short period of time once they can fly again.

I suspect the reason they're stopping production soon is probably to do with space concerns at the factory, as there are only so many aircraft you can park up indefinitely before they get in the way of moving the aircraft that are allowed to fly out of the production hangers, and incoming parts deliveries, I think they were already using staff car parks for them months ago.

Someone has probably worked out they'll run out of storage space next month, or that they've already run out of space outside the production hangers and the ones under construction now can't be moved until they've cleared space...

Personally I still cannot believe they were allowed to put aircraft into civilian use that appear to have ignored safety lessons learned over the space of 50+ years in everything from basic aircraft handling to basic instrumentation safety, not to mention pilot training, as everything that seems to have gone wrong with the 737 max seems to be variations of things that caused crashes resulting in industry standards/requirements being changed in the past.

Re: isopropyl alcohol?????

Having tried Detoll/Fairy Power spray etc, we found that Biostrip does basically as good a job (if not better), and it's safe to handle as long as you don't leave your hands in it for ages :)

From memory it's even good to use on resin, assuming you're not using failcast that's so soft/weak that physically handling it risks damage.

You dip the model in some, put it in a tub/bowl with some cling (to slow down how fast it dries), leave it for a few hours and then rinse and scrub with a toothbrush, preferably not your own.

As it's sold for stripping house paint it tends to go a very long way when used on models.

Re: Terrorism

Richard Morden covers it quite well in the Metrozone series where London is basically full of driverless cars.

Re: Not had a landline for 3-years

Jason, because they still have to pay BT for the landline at a guess if you've got your internet with Sky but not got the landline with anyone else (there is still line rental needed).

We've got what should be a great power system here (including what I think is the UK's biggest UPS in the town), but we still have power blips, and about 18 months ago a cut that lasted several hours.

This ignores the times builders have cut through the main power line to one side of the town or the other, or the time when a new housing estate was being built the builders cut through the underground line something like 3 times in a week (you'd have thought after the second time they'd be more careful).

Back on topic.

If BT do drop the requirement to supply POTS, the regulation had better change to include a requirement that they supply some form of battery backed up device to let you interface your phones with VOIP during a power cut (preferably with the ability to swap out the battery easily when it starts to age, or take standard batteries in case of a prolonged outage or failed internal battery)..

Our mobile reception varies a lot, and we're in the middle of a town.

Re: Divide and conquer

I'm not 100% sure, but it would appear to be Amazon who are playing silly buggers with the authors (and their own customers).

This isn't the first time Amazon have used these sort of tactics, from memroy a few years back they did something similar with a lot of publishers, but kept the second hand sales of books by the authors going (showing their real colours in the argument, as the second hand sales see zero money going back to the authors, but a nice cut to Amazon).

I'm not a massive fan of the publishers, but they do a pretty valuable job for the authors (most of whom do not want to have to do things like edit, typeset, arrange PR, enforce their IP etc, when their speciality is actually writing*), but Amazon seem to be playing hardball trying to force everyone else in the industry to do what Amazon want under Amazon's conditions. Something that will only be bad for the rest of the industry, the other book sellers, the authors, and ultimately (and most selfishly) us, the consumer.

Ebooks save some costs for the people doing them, but most of the costs of a professional ebook are the same as for a professional paper book (with the addition of VAT as a cost for the purchaser),

*I would prefer my favourite authors to get on with writing, not having to spend much of their time running a publishing house (assuming the authors in question want to write).