Posts by Neil Barnes

Re: "If it's old, it's obsolete; and if it's obsolete, it needs to die."

"I'm feeling better!"

/me returns to debugging a 6502 single-board...

Re: Looks like Windows 11

I do wonder about the possibility (probability?) that I (and others) like the early windows generic interface - menus, taskbar, heirarchical start menu - only because that's what we learned first.

I'm a Linux user, but prefer Mint/Cinnamon over any of the others I've tried (many, over the years, but by no means all) largely because it still maintains that simple and (to me) obvious user interface. I use Windows 10 at work, and can live with it, but I wouldn't choose it as a UI - it works for others, but not for me. Personal choice - but likely driven by early experience as well as forty year's muscle memory.

(And it can be the tiniest things, most easily changed, that cause the most irritation: I hated the XP default background screen because it reminded me of Tellytubbies. A silly thing, but nonetheless...)

An interesting thought... software classified as munitions. But hasn't that been done? I don't think it ended particularly well.

Re: The model would help users generate and edit their writing in emails and documents.

I don't see it so much now, but my niece, married with a child, still refers to the capital city of the Chaldees when she means 'your'.

Re: Telescope with no viewfinder

If the sun ain't shining, my scope (cheap and cheerful, but it autolocates and then points and tracks itself) stays in the cellar.

Er, you know what I mean.

Re: So this vaccine is ..

I suspect the answer might simply be that too many bees are required to pollinate (say) an orchard than might be supportable by other local flowers for the rest of the year. A truckload of hives being carted around the country following the blooms is probably cheaper than growing a bee-food crop locally.

I've not seen this sort of service in the UK, but a quick search found Barry's Bees who charges just twenty-five quid per hive per season, which seems remarkable cheap for half an acre's enthusiasm: https://barrysbees.co.uk/pollination-contracts/

https://beefarmers.co.uk/working-with-other-sectors/contract-pollination also appear to offer the service... I learn something new every day!

Why does anyone anywhere take a dietary supplement without medical supervision? How many hundreds of thousands of years have we just been eating stuff?

I can only assume that the same people who purchase these pointless products wash them down with a swig from their two hundred dollar coffee mugs.

Re: Water and IT

Built a studio complex in Paris some years ago, and discovered the hard way that a cast iron sewage pipe made a vertical to horizontal right angle in our ceiling space.

When the foot of sewage was being cleared out we discovered the undeclared asbestos that had also to be removed.

Messy...

Re: Way finder

I think the technical term is 'cornering the market'. They did the same for F1: In Germany there is now no way (absent techno-cheating) to watch a race except on Sky; you can't even watch it from the F1 company themselves..

Re: But then there's the completely fictitious jobs which public figures like to mention......

Hmmm... forty-odd years ago I applied for a job with a major UK company which asked among other things: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? How about your parents? And how about their parents?

This was not a military company... twenty years later I actually found myself in the position in which it might have been important.

There's a difference between sending best wishes for what is largely a civic festival, and an implicit assumption that you believe in the same invisible sky faeries that they do. The latter is offensive to many; either because they believe in a different set of invisible sky faeries, or because they thing you do.

Re: A map of where to look would have been handy

Well it was a lovely night here last night, nice view of Mars very close to the moon, but I didn't know to look for this damn comet...

Re: Superspreader? Give me a break.

Do the Canadians have seatbelt laws?

How do billionaires get rich? With other people's money...

For every self-made billionaire, there's a billion people shy a buck.

Re: As an aside...

Oh yes, couldn't agree more. The move to using cheap processors to replace dedicated hardware is an obvious one that's been going on for decades: you can get an ARM chip for a cent and a half in bulk.

And I've just designed an EEPROM programmer so I can program a 6502 SBC using, er, an STM Nucleo dev board, cost about a tenner[0]. It's fast enough on its own to replace the ROM and RAM in the 6502 system, and in some versions fast enough to replace the processor as well... but where's the fun in that?

[0] About the same price as I paid for my first memory expansion chips, 4 bit by 256...

Re: With every Amazon order:

On previous escapades with bloody Prime, I discovered that if you do inadvertently fail the challenge of doom, you can cancel it - not immediately, I think their computers don't talk to the same database so there is actually no option to cancel, so you both had and did not have Prime membership - but in a couple of hours or so.

Which means you didn't have to remember to cancel in a month... and at the same time, you still had a month's free membership.

Possibly they've closed this loophole since they last caught me,

Re: only apply to devices sold after July 1, 2023

But also gives them time to make arrangements to make it be able to service their existing parts, even if not immediately. As I read the article, anything already in production/sale remains unrepairable by the existing repair shops/users.

So you still can't repair things you already own. And if you want to be able to, you need to buy a new one. Trebles all round!