Posts by Dave Bell

Re: Why so vague?

I have, for sundry reasons, been looking at how the British economy has been run for the last hundred years or so.

The much-vaunted City is a bunch of incompetents, most of the time. There have been plenty of talented individuals, running businesses that worked, from Mr Selfridge to Lord Sugar. As City interests have replaced the original management, the businesses have faltered. And often the City-types have started shifting the wealth into tax havens.

And now Tata, from India, has bought Jaguar Land Rover, and with the same workers and managers and factories, the business is booming.

Since there do seem to be close ties between the British and American money-shuffling industries, and they seem to be the crooks and liars who got us into a mess, it would not surprise me that, if this referendum ever happened, there are those in the EU who would be glad to be rid of the British economy.

Two distinct problems

I have two problems.

First, my rural location, although in the village and close to an Exchange, means that the top speed possible for me is far less than anything advertised.

Second, my ISP's network seems to have lagged the growth in the use of streaming media. Even if my local line were capable of supplying the advertised speed, I doubt they could deliver it.

Would paying for an 8Mb/s connection mean that the minimum I experience would increase? I don't know. My experience of ISP advertising suggests they are so crooked they could hide behind a spiral staircase.

And then there is IPv6 looming. At last. But where do I go to get it, and a modest speed increase? You guys talking about as much as 70Mb/s either have some unusual reasons, or are doing some flagrant willy-waving. I'd like a bit higher peak speed, but I'd really like my speed at peak times to be a bit closer to the peak. And that's an ISP network issue, which is something they don't want to talk about. All the shouting is about peak speed, and it's largely irrelevant.

Re: Source of educational material?

You can do your own looking, sunshine.

I've seen enough examples of relatively ordinary, one man, one woman, sexual activity, that is presented in an intensely misogynistic manner, that I really do worry. And if you cannot spot that, you;re the one with a problem.

I do wonder why there was not a control group. There's an implicit one from the design of the test they used, but is that enough.

(The family statistician tells me that without a control group of some kind, you cannot really distinguish their claim from your hypothesis, but he'd have to read the original paper to decide how stupid they might have been.)

Re: I would imagine...

He'd better behave himself. If they catch him being "unprofessional", by their standards, I bet the job vanishes. It's a pretty good deal from their PoV, they have a talented candidate, and they can check him out before he gets near anything critical to them.

Re: Hehehe, Crafty, Creative

Two things strike me as odd. First, the code he was producing was apparently good. Second, he was "working" for multiple companies.

It sounds as if his management skills would be worth paying for, just not as extravagantly.

Or maybe Verizon has a lousy idea of what good code is.

Go and read a few free Kindle ebooks. Add a few of the dirt-cheap ones. Believe me, the existing book publishing industry has skills that are worth paying for.

Getting to a new stable system is not going to be easy but the people I know in the book business are not stupid. Some publishers--big companies too--are already backing away from DRM. They don't want to repeat the mistakes of the music industry. How many "pirates" will ever read all their downloads? How many sales does piracy really lose? And if you can get the message across, how many readers will want to not pay the authors.

Baen have been putting out free books, tasters for an author's work, for years. Now they're doing it through Amazon, and their name, as well as the author's, is going to be worth something. They're not even using DRM.

Re: Great

The only all-British satellite launch used a booster that was fuelled by kerosene and hydrogen peroxide, the hydrogen peroxide decomposing over a catalyst to produce a very hot mix of oxygen and steam.

As propellant mixes go, it isn't so good, but a steam rocket is rather British.

Re: No-one wants smart watches?

One of the things which the development of capitalism did was make risk taking affordable. Those kickstarters are taking a risk they think they can afford, with the chance of getting a good return.

Who can afford to lose ten million? That's averaging less than $150 per pledge, which is currently around £100, and that's a bet a lot of people can afford to lose.

Kickstarter is doing what the stockmarkets originally did, and is maybe a bit too much like the days of the South Sea Bubble, but I've heard a good many claims that Wall Street and The City aren't willing to take risks, Kickstarter is at the other end of the scale, and the venture capitalists somewhere in the middle.

It could turn into an element of a varied investment portfolio. Some money going into reliable investments some going into high-risk funds, some into Kickstarter. It might be more fun taking your own decisions too. Just don't risk what you can't afford to lose.

Re: Educate the User

That's apart from IE?

It doesn't help anyone that some corporate applications depend on notoriously old and insecure versions of IE.

Thing is, a single defence method is never going to be reliable. Avoiding the dodgy sites doesn't avoid infected sites. An AV scanner will never detect everything. There are ways to subvert firewalls. No OS is free of exploitable bugs, even if it is designed to be secure. But using several of these techniques makes it much harder for the virus/malware writer.

So the average Resgistard may not be as safe as he thinks. And the UI of Windows 7 does rather tend to encourage people to click on "OK", because you get the same dire warning for so many different things. I have not used a modern Mac, but I would be unsurprised if it had the same problem. My AV software does go for a spectacularly different pop-up warning box. Multiple layers of defence, again.

Remember, moats don't stop alligators.

Re: I wish to place a bet...

I do so hear you on that.

Maplin used to be good on components, and I suppose that Radiospares is still running. but the only people I could ever rely on for having the parts I needed was the Caterpillar dealer network. Which isn't much use for electronics, but even before computers and modern "logistics", if a part wasn't in Europe it was on its way out the factory gate on its way to the airport before you could get home from Levertons.

As for the time Massey Ferguson got a supply of bearings from Russia... They just didn't last.

Kudos to the Chinese for exploiting the incompetence of Anglo-American business management, in all areas, but things such as vee-belting and ball-bearings are standardised. There's something wrong when the manufacturer supplies the cheap crap in very expensive branded boxes, and you can get the good stuff for less from a local bearing factor.

Wearing my writer's hat...

I sometimes post stuff to a mailing list devoted to a particular shared-world setting: it's a lot of fun writing it, and reading others' stories. The mailing list is run by Yahoo, and of course there are directed adverts, and often they're quite relevant to the story. Pity they're set around eighty years ago, in the days of doped linen fabric, flying wires, and other ancient aviation technology, though it seems there are still companies which supply new Whitworth spanners.

Though I am not sure that Amazon is the site I would search for them. Amazon handles a lot of transaction processing and warehousing/delivery for other traders, but every search term seems to get a response from them. Which can soon begin to seem a little optimistic on their part. Especially when some of the brandnames they pick up on from the fiction are, as far as I know, fictional.

Comments, on any website, can turn into frothing lunacy. They don't really say very much about the site's reporting of subjects.

Re: "Environmental Impact "

There was some controversy over whether he should have done it, but if it was done right, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness. I hope that it has been done right, with water samples and monitoring and all that. I'd want to have a full year of data from before the dumping, and at least a full year after, to be able to make a comparison, and I really doubt any of the results from that operation can have gone into the reseach reported here.

Thing is, 90 tonnes into a huge ocean is still a tiny test. But it's a step in size. The results will change as the tests get bigger. I'm not terribly worried about this, and if this sort of action can make a difference, both the economics and the environmental affects need to be worked on. This study depends on knowing what happens, and that depends on well-run trials.

Re: Good fonts

Strictly, TNR is a clone of the original Times Roman, made by Microsoft for Windows. But you are right, it is a classic font design.

It doesn't need much skill to produce a readable document with TNR, mostly just the size on the paper and the margins. I suspect there is an element of over-rigid specification in schools: print your essay in this precise style, and the teacher can see the amount of work you have done at a glance.

I had a good many pre-Unicode fonts, and I rather liked Garamond and Palatino. I know Palatino is used in some printed books I have. But I don't see those CDs full of fonts in PC World any more.

Re: Computer Models!

Be careful about subsidies. Some of the subsidies for fossil fuel are quite well-hidden. If the pollution causes health problems, who pays that bill? In the British system, everyone ends up paying a little more, even the power generator. In the US system, the power generator hardly pays any of that bill. Either way, you can call it a hidden subsidy, because the power generator doesn't pay anything like the full costs of the pollution.

Yes, I know the customer pays, in the end, but the way it works today, it never gets onto the books, and so the costs of fossil fuel are reduced when making plans.

Re: "abject" ?

I remember seeing metal-loaded spray paint intended to provide screening for plastic cases. Such solutions may still be available.

Re: Google is evil.

Google's scanning of the stuff I put on Google Drive must be driving their ad selections crazy. I once mentioned a girl getting a set of King Dick Whitworth spanners for her birthday, and the results were more than somewhat curious.