* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Google's Grumpy code makes Python Go

Tom 7

Re: Calling BS @J H Woods

But as soon as you have the code working the PHB will put it live. Its very important than nothing works until everything does.

How the NYE leap second clocked Cloudflare – and how a single character fixed it

Tom 7

Re: 2038 is already a problem, today. Are you freaking kidding me

Fear not for two reasons:

1) the new Pis are already 64bit and in 10 years time I'd imagine the Moore's last guess will mean that we will have 8 core 64b bit machines running on brownian motion power supplies and people will not be using the old 32 bit jobbies other than for fun.

2) Gel capacitors in all the power supplies are pretty much going to ensure any still running aren't.

Tom 7

Re: To my fellow programmers

Try and understand what you are coding for - this exact leap second addition has happened 27 times before.

Perhaps even look at all the open-source code that is available in other languages too.

My fortnight eating Blighty's own human fart-powder

Tom 7

Re: Food intolerance?

@Philbuk - that's not the coeliac but one of the problems that often arise as a result of the damage coeliac does.

Tom 7

Re: Food intolerance?

Also could be a milk/lactose intolerance - I have something to cows milk (goat and sheep milk are fine???) and its amazing how much shit has cows milk or milk protein in. For coeliac it takes a time for the food to get to where it causes problems. Feeling sick straight after the meal points to something else and may indicate that its not eating this shit that is good for him but the not eating of something else. Its worth trying to find out what though it can be difficult as some things you can be intolerant to you can eat once in a while with no reaction and yet two or three days on the trot will - well give you the trots.

Drones will be able to carry 120GB footage of you in the shower if Seagate has its way

Tom 7

Re: Where are the Drone Jammers then?

If you try videoing me from your drone I'm gonna get naked and you are going to be vomiting all over your shiny and writing it off!

Amazon files patent for 'Death Star' flying warehouse

Tom 7

Re: Nothing new here...

Yup - the US had a couple of aircraft launching/retrieving airships at least (Macon?) I think the requirement for a laundry might have been a weight problem.

Meet the Internet of big, lethal Things

Tom 7

Develop the market, then tie up the market.

When tractors started out their great benefits were down to open API approach to things - the 3 point attachment was the same on all tractors and on all the equipment that would attach to it. Same for the PTO adaptor so basically you could buy a plough or a seeder from anyone and this helped keep the prices of things down.

I dont know if JD are trying to lock in which things you can stick on their tractors but at the local dealer I walk past with the dog I noticed some remarkable looking connectors on a large turnover plough that looked like it was specifically designed to be a bastard to get hold of so I'm wondering if you want to use a big turnover plough on a JD tractor it is 'best' to get a JD one with its custom sensors* that will connect into its proprietary tractor socket.

*I'm guessing they are for detecting the individual pull on each blade or something - the dog didnt want to stop long enough for me to work it out.

Did EU ruling invalidate the UK's bonkers Snoopers' Charter?

Tom 7

The data is just too valuable

for anyone to be trusted with it.

Organised crime spends a lot of effort getting people into the police force and I can see them now making sure there is someone in every ISP copying this data on a regular basis.

Tesla set to up prices by 5% in new year because of 'currency fluctuations'

Tom 7

Re: AutoPilot - that's nothing No ubering

The thing is with a vehicle like this then sharing is a serious option. If I'm asleep or in the office for 8* hours I dont see why my car shouldn't be out earning its keep. Just need to design one without the door column so the interior can be swapped out easily for cleaning/battery charging.

*with luck by then the anal retentive manager who likes you to be in the office so he can reduce your productivity with constant interruptions and changes of course will have been replaced by a raspberrypi with a flat battery.

2016 just got a tiny bit longer. Gee, thanks, time lords

Tom 7

There have been 27 of them since 1971

"they have to be manually programmed into computers and getting them wrong can cause loss of synchronisation"

Shit even I would have worked out the wrinkles in any automation code to do that - even if I had to do it at whichever midnight on new years eve was appropriate. Surely in 2017/2016/2017 no-one runs anything serious that relies on a manual time change?

Shirley?

Christmas Eve ERP migration derailed by silly spreadsheet sort

Tom 7

Re: Extract, Translate & Load on Xmas Eve.

Oh I dont know - I've always found Xmas the one time of the year where my home life collapses into something near hell* and yet the office is free of PHBs and much work can be done.

*The pubs are full of amateur drinkers, you cant get a decent meal out, the telly has nothing worth watching, you realise why people would rather sit in a kayak in a frozen sea and harpoon seals than be at home with the relatives. Christmas is why people want to go live on Mars ffs.

Tom 7

Re: If you want to screw something up, use excel

Its taken MS years but they finally have a product that is completely immune to all normal programming management techniques designed to make software just a bit more reliable then a Samsung battery,

Raspberry Pi Foundation releases operating system for PCs, Macs

Tom 7

Familiarity is one of the greatest needs of the desktop user.

For most of us change is a pain - which is why MS forces updates on you. I reckon there will be a lot of kids (almost the whole of year 6 at my daughters school) who will be finishing the year familiar with Pixel, and more importantly familiar with developing code in Pixel and administrating (hacking) the Pis they are being taught on - and several have them at home.

I have a feeling a lot of them are going to be quite happy with Pixel on Pis and PCs and will only be booting into Win for games if they haven't got a dedicated games machine.

Support chap's Sonic Screwdriver fixes PC as user fumes in disbelief

Tom 7

Re:The English Electric Deuce mainframe

I have seen pictures of the Colossus workers in Bras and Panties during summer decrypting.

Tom 7

RE: But if you store them in the tube

Surely they're to be stored in that strange little cage in the pc case that seems to suck them in from the desk above and holds on to them harder than the black hole at the centre of the galaxy and no amount of shaking or poking will get them out?

No Soylent for Santa after key ingredient supply is choked off

Tom 7

Re:"You're dumped!"

You're all dumping. FTFY.

Learn your way round the Internet of Things in a day? Course you can...

Tom 7

Re: Step 1 - Do not use IoT

Step 3. Don't spend money on courses in London when they cost more than hiring in the experience if you dont live in the diesel polluted brain drain.

Step 4. Spend money saved in pub.

'Upset' Linus Torvalds gets sweary and gets results

Tom 7

Re: Linus needs to start looking for his replacement.

Maybe he could spend a few hours extending GIT so that you cant actually submit code to it that hasn't been through some automated testing and quality control first. As an anal retentive I try and use every possible automation of anything important.

Swearing is good though.

Tom 7

Re: I wonder about the devs

@boltar. Do not be silly. The easiest way for the Trotskyites to destroy the country is to get people to vote for governments that put people like Gove in charge of education.

Around 1.4 million people have sub-10Mbps speeds - Ofcom

Tom 7

Re: 10Mb is pathetic

Sod cat videos - some of use would like to try and work from home and provide simple services.

'So sorry' Evernote rips up privacy changes

Tom 7

Re: Tomboy

There is a re-write of it in C++ which has a far smaller footprint.

Zim seems more powerful but why people dont just use and HTML wysiwyg editor and your half way to proper documentation anyway!

Cloud-happy Oracle dodges rumors it is axing its traditional hardware ... as sales of traditional hardware fall

Tom 7

Re: There are 2 types of high tech employees :

There are two types of accountants:

Those that cost the company money in the short term by making employees redundant and hiring them again as contractors.

And those that cost the company money in the long term by making employees redundant and hiring them again as contractors.

NASA – get this – just launched 8 satellites from a rocket dropped from a plane at 40,000ft

Tom 7

How do you get that through baggage handling?

Even my phone causes problems!

Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

Tom 7

J2C on github

is about to getting to a hammering!

Or should I use the eclipse plugin?

Meat pies in SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Tom 7

Re: FAIL

No - a proper pie has hot water crust pastry and is either pork or scotch. Other nearly but not quite as fantastic pies may use shortcrust - or indeed a whole variety of pastries. I've even made a steak and kidney using flaky pastry allround which was pretty damn good (my own special home made overhopped IPA [Intentionally for Pies Ale] helped) but you cannot beat a proper pork pie.

Kids, look at the Deep Learnings! (We’re just going to slurp your data)

Tom 7

Re: Cloud

I've been experimenting with these things to see if they are really useful and most of them come out around 3/10. I personally prefer Zim (4/10) cos its basically piss-easy and nearly does what is needed and you can get web-pages at the end of it and even its shitty little web server means its actually pretty useful as an educational tool.

It seems good enough to actually help design, build and document what I hope will be its replacement which is a full-blown HTML5 wysiwyg front end on a nice database backend which will allow deep learnings of your own choice. If I ever finish the 1200 page book on deep learning that is!

If you bought a dildo in Denver, the government must legally be told

Tom 7

Re: Remarkable

You cant even some things through amazon. I bought some 100L pans for brewing here in the UK and found the exact same pans for 1/3rd the price on Amazon.fr. Tried to get some of those - they wont take a UK credit card - unless you VM from somewhere in France. Never got to the bottom of that - all the correspondence was in french and I never learned the bugger.

A single typo may have tipped US election Trump's way

Tom 7

Re: Simple attach was effective

"A lot of services appear to have no idea how easy they make it to spoof their emails" and most of them seem to be completely unaware that the PDF they get you to print, sign and send back can be spoofed too.

Trump's 140 characters on F-35 wipes $2bn off Lockheed Martin

Tom 7

Re: 400 billion? Try 1.5 trillion

They say that every dollar spent on NASA generates 18 in the economy. I'm guessing a similar multiplier for defence spending in the US. Money doesnt just disappear* it flows around the system and is used many many times. The US are fully aware of this and I'd bet the stock market in the US will take a noticeable hit if Trump is not talked out of 'saving' taxpayers money.

*the UK seems to be able to make money disappear into bank black holes or offshore though.

Meet Hyper.is – the terminal written in HTML, JS and CSS

Tom 7

Re: Toy

I like toys! This will be quite handy as one of the steps towards the 'desktop' in the browser and freeing you of OS dependency.

Tom 7

particle effect spray

Ascii Porn?

Sysadmin told to spend 20+ hours changing user names, for no reason

Tom 7

Re: Not difficult.

Had to do something similar a few years ago and scripted it - good job too as I had to unscript it two weeks later and its was a lot easier with the original script.

Its useful to make sure you seriously fuck up the people above the person causing the stupidity though.

HMS Illustrious sets sail for scrapyard after last-ditch bid fails

Tom 7

Should have driven it hard ashore near ColdHarbour point.

Be worth about £1Billion as 'affordable' housing.

Bloke sold cash register code to restaurants that deliberately hid sales from taxmen

Tom 7

Re: the various tax boards WILL check up...

Bob, I'd love to see a small area of some country where they try and emulate Ayn Rands childrens books as a way of actually living. The joy of seeing your food deliveries arriving and rotting at the bottom of the truck due to having to shell out for private provision of everything taxes currently cover that in private hands would be prohibitively gouging.

Cassini tickles Saturn's rings ahead of final death plunge

Tom 7

All the best science

ends in the fiery destruction of something.

Apple Watch sales go over a cliff: Down 2.8 meellion per quarter in a year

Tom 7

Re: battery life

When they first came out I could calculate Planck's constant from information received from idiots wearing these things. After a week or so it went blissfully quiet. It seems even the most gadget happy idiot finds them useless.

Take that, creationists: Boffins witness birth of new species in the lab

Tom 7

Its not just the creationists

CNN reported at the weekend about a fire where a concrete statue of jesus survived. This was taken as a miracle: concrete not burning!! Oh and 11 people died. Fucking miracle.

It’s Brexploitation! Microsoft punishes UK for Brexit with cloud price-gouging

Tom 7

Re: Well there's also the US election result

Osbourne said there was £0.5trillion available to calm the markets before he was pushed. Alas a FOI wont tell us how much of that has or is being spent but I'm not expecting things to get better when that's all spent.

Cargo capsule goes AWOL, explodes on its way to Space Station

Tom 7

Not sure I want to go on the ISS

the ignominy of being killed by an intergalactic tin of baked beans!

Imagine every mistake you can make with a new software rollout...

Tom 7

Re: SO VERY TRUE!

"But NEVER NEVER NEVER do they let the actual workers see prototypes or ask them if something will actually DO THE JOB"

If you get the people who actually know what to do with the data involved you may will finish the job. Unless that is you get some MBAs to ask them what's what. If I apply to do an MBA will they actually remove any logic circuits from my brain?

What you need to know from re:Invent – FPGAs-as-a-service and more

Tom 7

RE:Right now, a lot of bitcoin miners are trying

it they're trying to calculate they're too late. Doncha just love the law of diminishing returns!

Really weird quantum phenomenon spied lurking near neutron star

Tom 7

Cant help thinking that a magnetic field that strong

is going to align almost any matter in it in a way that would polarise light anyway.

Chernobyl cover-up: Giant shield rolled over nuclear reactor remains

Tom 7

With a half-life of 30 years, wouldn't Cs137

be around 1024 time less irradiative after 300 years. But 1000 of something that will kill you in a week means is will take 20 years to kill you. And you are assuming that it decays into something harmless - most things tend to keep decaying for many iterations. Caesium decays to radioactive barium 137 - which has gone in a few seconds but Pu238 goes to u234 which is around for 234,000 years and then to Thorium 234 for a month then off to Proactinuim.....

Tom 7

Re: RE: Chernobyl wildlife

The thing about the wildlife is it mostly just dies. It doesnt wander into a clinic complaining of unusual symptoms.

What is good for the wildlife is there aren't many humans wandering around giving it lead poisoning so even if it is irradiated it gets a good chance of reproducing before dropping dead next to the tree that no-one hears fall.

Tom 7

Anyone got a copy of the Guardian article with the radiation map?

They printed a radiation map of Chernobyl's shitting over Europe. I was amazed to see it caused a plume from Sellafield at the time.

Wish I'd kept my copy.

systemd free Linux distro Devuan releases second beta

Tom 7

Re: Ubuntu adopted it

So? I've been a faithful Ubuntu user for a few years but I now cant get a middle mouse button to work on my machines. Its marked as a kernel bug that even swallows any attempt to emulate the third button. Only another 37 kernel release to wait for the fix. I dont play games but I'd imagine steam might like a MMB and its a long way off on the standard releases.

Investigatory Powers Act signed into UK law by Queen

Tom 7

Re: What's that high pitched humming noise?

na the ludites in the next grave got to him

Vegans furious as Bank of England admits ‘trace’ of animal fat in £5 notes

Tom 7

Re: why...

Its not that there is no synthetic option - its would just be too costly. I think most vegans would be surprised to discover that almost all synthetic products have some animal products in them Biodiesel contains animal products - not just the fat from burgers but when leather is made the fat scraped of the skins is boiled down and goes in along with your chip fat.

To make animal free synthetics you'd probably have to build a whole new production line and supply chain for everything.

Tom 7

Re: Perhaps the Superior ones

"If you're calling someone else's attitude to animal rights stupid then you're acting superior." No we're not asking you to live by our rules but you seem to expect everyone else to live by yours.

You just need to be aware that if you co-exist with meat eaters you are going to be contaminated.