Re: Week roundups
Can anyone explain why their mosquito nets are so expensive? I can get about 100m2 of fine netting for my garden for the price of on of their nets.
Posts by Tom 7
8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
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SpaceX breaks run of scrubs with Starlink launch: Darth Musk finds your lack of faith in on-time launches... disturbing
A decades-old lesson on not inserting Excel where it doesn't belong
FFS FSF, you're 35 already? Hands up if you just sprouted a gray hair or felt a craving for a Werthers Original on reading that. Happy birthday, folks
Tuesday 6th October 2020 19:24 GMT
Re: Werthers?
Bonfire night used to involve making a whole variety of sugary treats. Properly made treacle toffee would remove filling from your teeth and make temporary door hinges. I remember watching something about the Cubans making some form of metal filler/glue from sugar and it brought to mind having to drink lava temperature hot chocolate in an attempt to melt your jaws apart. I was pleased to discover mulled cider with added vodka worked pretty well as I got older. Last time I went to the cinema I estimated I made over a thousand pounds worth of cinder toffee most bonfire nights!
Tuesday 6th October 2020 19:17 GMT
Re: Werthers?
I know I'm getting old and my remaining teeth are dodgy but mint imperials are like pebbles these days - I'm sure I could happily crunch them thirty years ago. For comparison I can quite happily crunch the hazel nuts that have escaped the squirrel bastards with their long tails and twitch noses.
Wind and quite a bit of fog shroud Boris Johnson's energy vision for the UK
Tuesday 6th October 2020 17:58 GMT
Re: The big problem however...
Most people cant retrofit heat pumps. With 40G of wind and probably 12G or more of PV by then a sunny windy day will exceed the UKs electricity requirements with those two alone.. You can get some pretty thin storage heaters and you may even be paid to fill them up with lovely heat. It may be come apparent now why the companies are rushing to put in shit smart meters. Imagine having smart meters that were actually smart and they could let you know when to charge your electric car or hot water (sometimes it will be cheaper to use gas, other times leccy) or even to crunch some bitcoins.
Bang in another 20G of renewables and on at the right time you could make steel at incredibly low cost.
Pack your bags! Astroboffins spot 24 'superhabitable' exoplanets better than Earth at supporting complex life
Big IQ play from IT outsourcer: Can't create batch files if you can't save files. Of any kind
Tuesday 6th October 2020 08:56 GMT
Re: Couldn't happen now?
If the information in there is anywhere near mission critical it should be removed from the spreadsheets and stored safely in a db. The spreadsheets can then read that info from the db safely and with security. the calculations need to be in the DB too if possible - stored procedures are not hard and can provide a level of abstraction that means you just change the SP when there is a minor DB change and you dont have to re-write 4000 random spreadsheets around the place.
Spreadsheets have their place (in /dev/null?) but some find them useful but they are damn near immune to good software practices that have evolved over the last 60 years and if people are going to fuck with them its worth making sure you can keep proper control over any useful IT in them given they are so easy to fuckup.
Tuesday 6th October 2020 08:46 GMT
Re: More than once ...
Security is quite easy. All you have to do is sort out ownership and responsibility. You simply cant fuck with anything that you dont own or are responsible for and should not be allowed the ability to do so. get management to agree to this, set up the appropriate security groups to provide the necessary and sufficient security levels and within hours you will discover management would rather do away with security altogether than not be able to breach their own rules and spy and interfere outside their pervue.
Tuesday 6th October 2020 08:41 GMT
Re: Idiocy
Not sure of that. I worked for a small council and we had 7 or 8 software people and 3 pfys and and MBA manager who knew fuck all about bits and bytes. There were 3 old hacks who had managed to resist all attempts to change their contracts to make them legally obliged to train an outsourcing company to do their job. We kept the boss at arms length and serviced the 'customers' very well. I was amazed to discover that other councils of similar size generally had ~100 outsourced people crawling over desks and filling in forms.
We used to get things done before they had even got the first planning meeting for a project and there was generally no budget because we could make it work on the stuff we had.
The reason why other public projects may not work is because people like Did0 get involved. People who are not interested and have no investment in the project in the first place. People who seem to be hell bent on making public projects fail and fail loudly.
Former antivirus baron John McAfee collared, faces extradition to America on tax evasion, securities allegations
Suffering silicon: Benchmarks for Apple's A14 chip are in, but post-Intel Macs, when they arrive, will tell the real story
Monday 5th October 2020 19:11 GMT
Re: Ha!
cat /proc/cpuinfo gives you all the details of all the cores your system is running on. From there you know the number of each cpu and can launch jobs on a specific core or cores.
Its quite fun to do this on the multi-core RaspberryPis, Getting the distribution of certain programs over the right cores can give some phenomenal performance enhancements.
Unis turn to webcam-watching AI to invigilate students taking exams. Of course, it struggles with people of color
What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases
Hasta la vista, Ola: TfL bans ridesharing startup, claiming unlicensed drivers picked up passengers
ISS? More like HISS, am I right? Space station air leakage narrowed down to Russia's Zvezda module
Microsoft lends Windows on Arm a hand with emulation layer to finally run 64-bit x86 apps at last
Xen Project officially ports its hypervisor to Raspberry Pi 4
Airbus drone broke up in-flight because it couldn’t handle Australian weather
Tuesday 29th September 2020 11:49 GMT
Are they not aware of winds and wind shear?
These things are probably fine at 70,000 meters where the wind is generally pretty clean. Getting them up there involves lots of potential problems. I'd imagine once you can get one to fly on pv for several weeks then you can make loads and clutter up the skies losing a few on the way up and down because the wind will just tear something that fragile apart. Any experienced pilot will have a story of some kind involving clear air turbulence.
Help! My printer won't print no matter how much I shout at it!
It's powered by a mega-corp AI, it has a Liquid Mode, but it's not a T-1000. It's Adobe's PDF auto-reflow for mobile
It's the year of Linux on the... ThinkPad as Lenovo extends out-of-the-box Ubuntu support to nearly 30 machines
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 debut derailed by website glitches, bots, lack of supply
He was a skater boy. We said, 'see you later, boy' – and the VAX machine mysteriously began to work as intended
Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity
The power of Bill compels you: A server room possessed by a Microsoft-hating, Linux-loving Demon
Friday 11th September 2020 16:39 GMT
MS RAID!
We has a RAID 1 configured NT server that started failing. Both disks were identical according to all tests. You could make a copy of either of them and put that disk in and the system would be fine but the two perfectly functional disks in failed. Boot to linux with failing disks in and the raid was fine. Put it down as a WAWA - whistle and walk away. After spending a weekend just completely intrigued as to why it was failing - we think NT just got bored with these two disks in this machine - they worked in other identical boxen and non-identical boxen.
Bork, Beer and Breweries: Three of our favourite things
Adobe Illustrator's open source rival Inkscape delivers v1.0.1 - with experimental Scribus PDF export
Thursday 10th September 2020 08:41 GMT
Re: I need some pointers
They were working on limited interfaces for particular functions. How far they got I dont know.
In the 80s I used $300,000 a seat chip design workstations. Took months to get fluent with them using them 8 hrs or more a day. Once you were fluent you were off though. I have been using blender a bit and am not fluent yet but that's not really because blender is the problem - its 3d stuff and animation is hard. I tend to automate stuff with python a lot rather than piss about with a mouse and the menu system - largely because complicated things need complicated menus and some times its just a bit too complicated for even a 4k screen, and its a lot easier to make a wall with windows from bricks and window and mortar in code than to crash around menus.
The 'trouble' with open source software is is gives you the total perspective vortex of all the possibilities.The greater the power the more baffling the interface - a bit like reality. I've just done a quick search and found BforArtists which looks like a good front end for Blender for certain users. I hope many more appear but the underlying engines still need to be all powerful.
Its a bit like being able to program properly and using excel - excel will get you started and then fuck you over again and again and require far more support than just learning to do a bit of DB programming. I've a couple of friends who use gimp for their photography stuff and they claim they wouldnt touch photoshop now THEY have learned.
India flies Mach 6 scramjet for 20 whole seconds
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
