Posts by Neil Barnes 6253 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
Huegerich claims that EthereumMax token holders like himself, who had bought in between May 14 and June 27, 2021 and failed to sell quickly enough, suffered a loss.
One wonders just what he thought how his sellers should have been recompensed, on the same grounds?
Irrespective of pump'n'dump, the argument that one made a loss because one sold at the wrong time seems specious at best.
Must dash, I've got this bridge to sell before the price crashes!
If only to discover whether they have done away with the ridiculously thin scroll bars that popped up in 20.2
I concur with the author's observation "...the most usable, versatile, and feature-complete all-round Linux desktop experience..." and that's why I've been using it for years. It's just that not all changes are always for the better.
One feels sorry for the engineers who spent their time developing the plug-in parts, and the plugs they plug into... I can't decide whether MS (and other designers) have carefully soldered them in to reduce potential flakiness in the event of them coming loose, or cynically soldered them in because 'they'll never need more than 640k'... and they can always upgrade to next year's model.
In almost every computing device I have owned in the last forty years, the device has eventually needed more ram and more storage. Until recently, this has been an easy, if sometimes fiddly, task to perform with no tools beyond a suitable screwdriver.
Almost every task I require a computer for these days - and I appreciate others' mileage may differ - is memory bound, not processor bound and the amount of data I generate for storage increases with time. I don't care for storage any further away than the server in my basement; it is a truism of computing that the nearer the memory, the faster the memory. For me, the best place for storage (not backup) is in the machine.
I am unlikely to be tempted by a machine which can't be upgraded. I've been down that road and for me it doesn't work.
That was a problem I had with a UK linux keyboard living in Germany: I needed the umlauts but didn't want a DE layout. The compose method is 'altgr-shift-2 letter' for äöü and 'altgr-s' for ß which is what I use now but the extra (and to me unnecessary) keystroke annoys me...
Some kind soul on the Mint forum indicated a way to re-map the keyboard so that altgr-vowel worked, which was really nice, but it only ever worked on one machine, for some reason I never discovered.
At least duolingo doesn't keep hassling me äböüt mïssïng ümläüts any more, but the compose key does slow down touch typing.
I will grant that zoned/timed heating is a reasonable idea but in general it could be a set-once-and-forget; no need for IoT connectivity.
As for dimmers: I don't want a dimmer. Lighting fitment designers all seem to have the idea that a light in a room is an accent, a design element, a talking piece - anything but a device to allow me to see. They're all too bloody dim to start with :)
I'm still looking for a generic IoT product that isn't solving a problem that is already solved in older and arguably better ways - y'know, like a light switch or a thermostat. Listening to a household and exporting audio to who-knows-where for analysis does not strike me as a desirable mechanism.
Mr Barnes takes the https://xkcd.com/1807/ view of connected devices.
<brace for downvotes>
Apropos not invented here: the BBC used a couple of lines, blanked before they got to the transmitters so the public didn't see them, to carry internal messages from Presentation in London to the regions.
For reasons of (I assume) ASCII, the decoding chipset used in the BBC internal displays didn't include the UK £ symbol - which at the time was 0x23. So the BBC, with typical attention to detail, carefully decoded the data, and when it saw that 0x23 being used to address the video rom, arranged that for the first three or four lines it showed (IIRC) the top half of an 'f' and then the bottom half of an 'E'...
In far too long at the BBC (thirty-odd years) I don't recall ever seeing the £ sign being used on a Presentation message...
SOP in BBC engineering was to discharge the CRT. Then do it again, a couple of times... the first time never emptied it completely. The CRT anode on a broadcast monitor often ran in excess of 25kv.
Before the days of transistors everywhere, the flyback efficiency diodes were glass valves; part of the mandatory safety instructions was to surround that with a lead-glass tube to keep stray x-rays in check...
to have the whole set... nah, he still needs to find some broken Android toilets. Still plenty of them around in the motorway service stations on the A2 in Germany, not fixed for months and all still showing the same errors as they were.
Which must lead the advertisers to thing they're, er, peeing their money away...
Not an IT thing, but I was called to fix a mysterious series of faults on a sound desk in a studio; odd things like the tape machines would start and stop randomly.
Eventually traced it to corroded tracks on the sound desk motherboard, and that was because some kind soul had spilt mineral water into it some months previously. It had dried up, but left its salts behind, and whenever the weather got a bit humid, it corroded a little further...
<puts broadcast engineer hat on>
The issue is less with the number of colours which can be differentiated, but what happens when those colours are gradually changing and are adjacent; increasing bit depth allows smaller quantisation gaps and also, courtesy of noise in the image, a better naturally dithered result - so you don't so easily see steps in the picture.
But that said, there are always going to be pathological images which show some unpleasant artefact or other, even in their original uncompressed state.
The broadcast research, back in the day when digital transmission within a broadcast centre was being developed, showed that eight bit colour depth with a few levels reserved at either end of the scale was sufficient for the majority of viewers. Much video equipment used ten bits internally, and CCIR 601 digital video used ten bits, simply to provide some room; a little extra precision that could be either kept or thrown away at the end.
But consider a pathological image: a flat field of a single colour, with luminance changing very slightly across the width of the image... if the difference between the sides is small enough to only be a couple of bits worth of data, you *will* see vertical stripes as the bits flip, unless your bits are so small that they are finer than the eye can resolve. You simply do not see that with an analogue system, even if the change is at the level of the signal noise. The noise acts to dither the signal and smear the change across the picture.
If that sounds an unreal image, it's not: think of a blue sky shading to the horizon...
You'd likely see quantising noise where a ten-or-more bit per colour channel is reduced to eight-bit RGB(A), but as it looks like it only accepts eight bit input depths then you'd need to preprocess higher bit depth images before compression, which would give you the option to choose the distortion of your choice: bit slicing, dither, smearing, whatever.
On the other hand, it doesn't look too complex to increase the pixel depth to 16 bits instead of 8, with a cost of an extra bit in the header to indicate depth, and a compressed image potentially twice the size... as always, the more depth in the image, the less chance of two identical adjacent bits. Perhaps you'd need a bigger indexed map?
(just thinking out loud here).
I've been contemplating image compression off and on for years, without doing anything really practical about it, and agree entirely with his comments about existing methods. I'm fed up of seeing jpeg compression artefacts on images; I shall have to play with this and see what happens.
I'm all in favour of simple file formats even at the cost of lower compression ratios... have one of these on me -->
Not so much otherwise... I'm trying to find out the copyright status of a book originally written in 1916 and republished (fifth edition) in 1925 in the UK.
The publisher has disappeared into another printing company about which I can discover nothing, though Companies House indicates that it no longer exists.
I can't locate a lineal descendant of the author - online genealogy is a joke - though I still have a query or two awaiting responses. Google Books admits of its existence but provides no view and no copyright information...
The problem is the whole life of the author (fair enough) plus seventy years... say what? Who does that benefit beyond Disney (other multinational copyright conglomerators are available)?
My best guess is that the copyright still exists with the estate of the author, but I can't locate said estate. I can't even prove the year the author died (I suspect 1953 or soon after, but I can't show it). If I can find the estate, I can ask. If I can find a date of death, I can wait. But, well, I can see why Gutenberg have their rules... it's a nightmare.
At least it's obvious if you're streaming current films or music; there's little excuse there. But vintage stuff?
(if you're interested in WW1 recipes: https://github.com/nailed-barnacle/A_Yorkshire_Cookery_Book )
"The Girl From Ipanema"
My word that damn song follows me around... probably my fault for marrying a girl from Copacabana :)
Lifts, lobbies, hold music, the thing's everywhere. The most egregious offence was probably the time I was having breakfast in the second most expensive hotel in Kiev. A gent walked into the restaurant dressed in white tie and tails, pulls a string to remove a curtain revealing a white grand piano, sits down on the stool (flipping his tails in the approved manner), cracked his knuckles, and started playing the girl from bloody Ipanema.
Bloody hell - surely Brookes sorted out the managers/workers equivalence thirty years ago in The Mythical Man Month?
Though you wouldn't think so - everywhere I worked in over forty years did the same trick: promote engineers eventually into management - where they had no chance to do what they were good at and were usually very bad as managers, as well as hating the management process to the extent of resigning.
I have a vague - so probably incorrect - memory that the space shuttle had five flight control computers, one made by a different company 'just in case'. At one of the early launches, possibly the first, there was a hold because the odd one out didn't agree... turned out it was right and the others were wrong.
p.s. flew into Brazil on that Air France plane; it crashed on the way back :o
That sounds like an excellent addition to the software... but I hope there will be a long period of observation to check that what is now automatically calculated instead of tedious manual calculation does actually predict the results observed. One wonders about second and third order effects, possibly currently unknown...
"Is that chunk of rock going to hit us?"
"Computer says no."
"Ah, she'll be fine!"
I'm no longer in the professional environment so it shouldn't affect me... but end of lease laptops are an excellent way for me to get a two or three year old machine costing a grand or more for a couple of hundred quid.
As the man said - it it's good enough, it's good enough.
And when I *was* in the professional environment, it was rare that a case had to be made for other than more memory; we certainly didn't see machines dropping to bits with broken keyboards and screens and sockets after a couple of years.
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