Posts by ChrisC

Before or after the decimal point?

Re: Yes, it is

ISTR his articles here had a sometimes "interesting" take on the subject matter, and if the above summary is in any way truly representative of what the article actually says then this could well be another example of this.

As general comments:

Of all the navies around the world which operate carriers capable of handling fixed wing aircraft, the ONLY navy which cuirrently operates catapult-equipped carriers is the US, so declaring cats to be the obvious choice is only necessarily true for a specific set of criteria, otherwise everyone would be using them without a second thought as to what the alternative options might be...

Whilst the STOVL design features of the F35B make it less efficient than either the A or C variants when deployed to bases where STOVL isn't required (i.e. normal airfields with nice long runways), there's nothing about the B which prevents it being based at such locations, so there's no "could be used from ground bases" argument to be made here.

Whilst looking at the Telegraph front page, I noticed another familiar name from days of Register yore - Andrew Orlowski...

Re: More subscriptions

"Brave New World."

Or even Brave Modern World, if you want to keep the BMW theme going...

Re: constant problem

Would be nice if all "smart" TVs included a simple way for users to disable the additional features, so that those of us using the TV as a monitor wouldn't have to suffer the extended startup times and more convoluted UIs, and those of us who do make use of the built-in smart apps initially can then continue using the TV for the lifetime of the panel without being constantly reminded just how quickly the manufacturer gave up on providing updates for the apps, if they ever bothered to provide them in the first place...

"Incidentally, another reason people like to try to get drives from different lots is the idea that a firmware update might kill a drive"

Doesn't even have to be a firmware update that kills a drive, given that one reason to release firmware updates is to fix bugs (sometimes critical) in the firmware you already have on your drive...

On the wider point, I guess one reason people like the idea of populating their arrays with drives from different batches/manufacturers is that, whilst the points you make about general failures are entirely valid, what you don't seem to have touched on here are those completely out of band failures that happen every once in a while, and cause a particular model of drive to suffer significant reliability problems completely out of keeping with anything else at the time. Granted, these don't seem to occur as often as they used to, but maybe for those of us who still bear the scars of having lived through such times (I was the "lucky" owner of both an IBM Deathstar and a Seagate 7200.11 with firmware SD1A...) there's some inherent reluctance to trust in statistical modelling etc. when our gut instinct is screaming at us to never ever trust all our data to the same manufacturer/model/batch/whatever, just in case we end up being part of the next big drive reliability scandal...

That being said, I appreciate your insider perspective here - the more good quality information we have about likely causes of array failures, the easier it becomes to push our (irrational) fears to one side when deciding how to set up an array in future. Coincidentally, I'm in the process of speccing a new RAID setup for home, and was umming and aahing over whether to populate it with a set of "identical" drives, or go to the extra trouble of mixing and matching manufacturers, suppliers etc, and I think your comments here have just made my life a bit easier.

Re: Frustrating...

I'd prefer a Cobra Mk3, but yeah, the sentiment is the same... It pains me to know that, no matter when I'd been born or how long I might live, there will *always* be things from my history that I wish I'd been around to see, and things from my future that I wish I could be around to see.

Nope. For me, the last time I reached stage 3 with Windows was with 7.

Thanks to having now been required to use it for the last 4 or so years (I prefer not to have to recall the exact date at which the downgrade from 7 to 10 was inflicted on me) at work, I'm now somewhat begrudgingly at stage 2 with 10, but can't see myself ever reaching stage 3 (*)

Meanwhile 11 still has me firmly pegged at stage 1 based on the past few months of experience with it on my new personal laptop, and unless they do a u-turn on their crazy UI designs and give us old fogeys a nice classic UI theme again, then it's unlikely I'll ever get beyond stage 2 with that either.

(*) although if IT decide to foist 11 on us at some point, then I'll most certainly reach a pseudo-stage 3 for 10, insofar as, compared to 11, I bloody well will declare it to be the best thing since sliced bread etc. This shouldn't however be taken as a sign that, compared to any of the genuinely decent versions of Windows, I now think it's any good and have therefore reached a true stage 3 acceptance - merely that it's the lesser of two evils and I'd be lamenting its loss from my work PC every time I boot up into the 11 desktop instead...

Re: Google's minimum viable response

"but even then, with some reasonable footwork (all it takes is a pernicious private eye and/or their flunkies), it can be deduced that the 'suspect' was not in any of the establishments covered by such a location-blank."

I think you missed out an "other" there - the only way to be in with a shout of showing that the "suspect" was visiting a clinic etc within the blanked-out area would be to show that they weren't in any other establishment within the area, and even then there's always the "I just felt like parking up and reading a book/having a nap/doing something else that wouldn't generate a digital footprint for an hour or two before continuing my journey" defence.

Re: I/O

"I'm willing to bet that MOST uses won't need anything like the various I/O it supports."

True, I was more coming at it from the angle of comparing what the Pico boards offer I/O-wise compared with other similar entry-level devboards like the Nucleo.

Re: the ability to take software and break it into dozens if not 100+ 1mb files

Nowt wrong with OS/2, especially when compared against the rancid abomination that passed for Windows 3.1's attempts at multitasking... Anyone who needed to be able to efficiently run multiple Win3.1 applications in parallel would really have been doing themselves a giant favour by running them under OS/2 - the first time I fired up my newly-purchased copy of Warp and saw how Amiga-like it made my PC, after having been cursing it for the previous few months every time it ground to a halt until whatever task I'd started came to an end, was the day I realised for the first time just how powerful PC hardware actually was, and how godawful Windows 3.1 really was...

Re: Check you can complete before you start

"This is along the lines of..."

No, because in your example the obvious instructions on the front of the machine merely instruct the user to follow all instructions, without guiding them to find the additional instructions hidden on the rear of the machine. Unless they use their initiative and go over every inch of the machine with a fine tooth comb to see if there might possibly be any other instructions listed somewhere else, then they won't find the all important one.

In the aforementioned test, the first instruction they're given tells them EXACTLY what they need to do to pass the test - following that one simple instruction is sufficient to direct them to the additional instruction at the end of the paper. There's no ambiguity, there's no need for them to have a sufficiently evolved sense of curiosity that they go looking for something they hadn't been told was there, they just need to follow a clearly worded instruction to the letter, no diversions, no freestyling, no making stuff up as they go.

Re: Am I the only one

Nor will there be any point in having an auto-driven vehicle in the first place, given the only routes it'd be able follow safely are ones consisting of nice straight and flat roads joined by very easy turns, all taken at a nice sedate pace so as not to cause any wheelspin/slip, and where at the slightest hint of rain/frost/snow the vehicle simply refuses to start up for fear of never being able to reach its destination in one piece...

Re: MS dropping peripherals support - AGAIN

"So, which set of competing concerns should take priority? What is the proper balance to strike between all of these interests?"

How about prioritising the needs and desires of the users, especially given how much effort MS have put into trying to encourage/coerce/hoodwink people into switching first to 10 and now to 11, rather than being happy to just leave them alone to use whichever older version they were happy with?

Make the default mode of operation safer and more secure by all means, but don't take away the ability of users to use older drivers if they choose to do so. Stick the option to enable this in the back of a locked filing cabinet in a disused toilet etc. etc. if that's what it takes to prevent the unwary from stumbling across it and unknowingly opening up their system to all manner of attacks, just make sure the option is at least available *somewhere* for those who are very much aware of what it means to enable it.

Re: Good and yet a little disappointing at the time...

AAA was supposed to be the successor to ECS, but manglement incompetence-induced delays meant AGA ended up being hacked together instead to provide at least *some* level of upgrade for the A4000 and A1200.

You might be thinking more about the Hombre chipset that was proposed as a replacement for AAA given that, by the time that was expected to finally emerge from the labs into production, it wouldn't have been anything like the upgrade it would have been had it launched as planned a few years earlier. Hombre was the point at which the chipset would have given up any pretence of trying to remain backward compatible, allowing it to focus on the sorts of graphics techniques required for the Amiga to remain competitive.

Pretty much the entire Amiga story is a bittersweet saga of greatness tinged with countless cries of "if only", "what if", and "dear god, why" throughout, and of a small and utterly dedicated team of engineers working miracles in spite of management attempts to hinder them almost every step of the way.

The Archimedes story is rather bittersweet too - a truly world class system designed from the ground up here in the UK, which managed to almost entirely fail to capture the attention of the masses, ending up as a niche education machine and ultimately living on only (*) as the ARM processor, and in the fond memories of anyone lucky enough to have used one at the time.

(*) as someone who earns a comfortable living designing systems with ARM processors at their heart, I'm well aware that the ARM-spinoff side of the Archimedes story is a genuine success of the UK tech industry and so, generally speaking, definitely not worthy of being idly dismissed as an "only" footnote. I'm just trying to - badly perhaps - make the point that despite the success ARM has become, it's still rather sad that the Archimedes wasn't able to latch onto any of that success and survive as a complete system to continue demonstrating to the world just what you could do with a well designed processor driving a well designed OS...

Re: Clean desk policy

They may well have done in this case too, but if said drawers are anywhere other than right next to/under your desk, so that adhering to the clean desk policy doesn't require you to trek over to the far side of the office, or, heaven forbid, a completely seperate storage area so remote from your desk that to get there you'd have to seek approval from your manager under business travel procedures, then it wouldn't be hard to imagine how this short cut might come about...

Re: Legal issues

That is what I said. It's also what I expounded, explained, mentioned, indicated, noted... Whilst the rich and varied nature of English might make it a pain for people to learn, it's also part of what makes it such a nice language to use. Wouldn't life be dull if English was such a tightly controlled language that there was only ever one correct way to say something?

Re: 48V vs 50V

I think the "jump out" part of the previous comment is the bit to focus on here - it's voltage which controls how close you need to get to a conductor before current will start to flow through your body...

Re: Win 10 is good enough

It's anything but shallow IMO. The UI is the very essence of how you, the user, interface with the machine, so being provided with a UI which appeals to your specific preferences damn well ought to be THE most fundamental requirement for any UI design specification...

The way I see it, modern UI design feels like it's been driven by people who look at the UI as being a static graphical element which has been made to look as beautiful as possible in PR screengrabs, but which doesn't actually need to be useable in any way, shape or form. Legacy UI design OTOH was driven primarily by the desire to create something that worked as a dynamic interactive link between meatsack and silicon, and to hell with what it might look like when viewed as a static screengrab in an advert or whatever.

Hence why modern UIs seem to focus so much on trying to make the UI look like something that wouldn't look out of place when printed on high quality paper for a coffee-table book about something stylish. All that whitespace and subtle, simple iconography and typefaces looks drop dead gorgeous when viewed as a design concept - there are times when W10 and 11 genuinely take my breath away at how nice the UI can look when you just sit back and gaze upon it from afar.

As something a human needs to be able to interact with OTOH, it's all a complete pile of shite. Give me skeuomorphic icons, 3D bevelled edges and all the other stuff that modern designers heap scorn on as being oh so out od date and past its best, but which, for those of us who spent several decades using early WIMP UIs, served us just fine across god knows how many different versions of OSs running on different systems, across widely differing screen sizes/resolutions/colour depths...

Re: What is the market for these devices?

"If the service is only for users possessing an Xbox Games Pass then it is reasonable to assume the user already has an Xbox"

Not so reasonable - the game pass also gives you direct access (i.e. install/run the game locally) to the game library via a Windows PC, as well as cloud-based access (which I'm guessing is what these TVs/monitors are also using) via Android and iOS, so there's no need to have access to an actual XBox to make use of the pass.

I visited Wylfa perhaps 10 years before you, and the tours then were similar to how you've described them, other than I don't recall being given anything else (other than the dosimeter badge) to wear. As you say, there's nothing quite like being able to see it for real, with just a viewing window between you and an actual real life, and very much operational, reactor hall.

Re: The curse of overchoice

"But all cars have.. 4 wheels"

Except for the ones that have 3...

"...the same handbrake..."

So far in my 30 years behind the wheel, I've driven a "grand" total of 12 different cars from 5 different manufacturers, and have experienced three quite different methods for applying/releasing the parking brake - calling it a handbrake would, for the 2 Mercedes in that collection, be rather misleading given that applying the brake on those required use of a foot pedal near to, but under no circumstances to be mistaken for, the actual brake pedal...

"...gear system and pedals in the same place (except no clutch on an automatic)..."

Centre console, column shift, flappy paddles, or however it's done on an EV where there aren't any gears in the traditional sense... For a manual, is reverse to the left or right of the box, and do you have to pull up a locking collar, push down on the top of the gearknob, or just wiggle the stick until you get it past a detent? For an auto, is it a traditional looking shifter you push/pull fore and aft, or a dial you spin left/right, and does the shifter/dial give you access to the full range of box modes or does it only give you the basic PRND stuff with manual selection of specific gears/modes handled via controls elsewhere?

Pedals - same position yes, but EVs are starting to bring a whole new world of pedal behaviour into the mix which has the potential to confuse the crap out of someone used to how pedals work on ICE (or older EV) vehicles.

"...the same essential dashboard info, window, light and wiper controls generally in the same place."

Generally in the vicinity of the steering column or surrounding dash area yes, but still sufficiently non-standard to give rise to some problems if you're trying to drive an unfamiliar car and something happens suddenly that causes you to act on instinct and muscle memory, reaching for a control you KNOW is there on your daily drive, only to find that either it's not there at all on the car you're sat in right now, or that the control that is there isn't the one you were after.

So the analogy with OS/distro choice doesn't feel too far off the mark here - yes, there's a certain level of similarity between different cars/OSs in terms of their fundamental design/behaviour, but there's also plenty that isn't the same even within the basics, and what might suit one person perfectly well might be seen by someone else as a "WTF were the designers thinking there?" moment.

Certainly not the best overall, but given the particular combination of hardware I had at the time, it was easily the best of the 9x sub-genre for me thanks to its ability not to randomly fall over in a quivering heap due to my attempting to use one of those newfangled USB-connected thingys that were starting to become popular back then in place of the serial/parallel/bespoke-connected stuff we'd been having to use up to that point.

I like how your "not kidding" note is related to the idea that someone might like goat milk for brekkie, rather than the idea that someone might want a goat farm on their private jet.

I mean, the latter, yeah sure, what do you expect from an oligarch, but actually wanting to drink goat milk (vs imbibing it via one of its more palatable forms - e.g. cheese, mmmmmm), now you're just being silly...

Re: 10 base 2 network

So someone who might be finishing off a genuinely important bit of work is just expected to drop everything, pull themselves out of the zone and end up having to spend even longer completing the work later, and head off for lunch just because the boss says "jump" and their underlings say "yes sir, how high sir?"

There's being a team player, and then there's being a minion to the PHB who thinks they have the right to control your life. Unless there's more to this anecdote than has been written, the problem was the boss expecting everyone to go eat at the same time, not that the rest of the team were expecting it from those random team members who weren't always able to join them without being coerced. That's not a particularly pleasant sort of team environment in which to spend your working life...

A quick Google images search for "ZX Spectrum box" confirms your recollection, and a similar search for the boxes of other popular 80's computers reveals much the same for those machines as well.

Re: W11? Personally I wouldn't bother upgrading and I use W11 daily!

I'm not aware of anyone needing to pay to switch from 10 to 11 at the moment. And if/when the free "upgrade" path is switched off by MS, given how little benefit there is from switching from 10 to 11, I'd be amazed if more than a handful of users bothered to pay to get their current W10 system running 11 instead. Switching off the free "upgrade" from 7 to 10 made somewhat more sense, as whilst the visible changes on 10 weren't to many peoples liking, there were some undeniably useful improvements under the skin which some 7 users would have felt willing to pay for if, for whatever reason, they'd missed out on snaring it as a freebie.

IMO, it's quite likely that (rounding errors aside when counting the totals) the only people who'll ever pay for 11 are people like me who get it by default when buying a new PC, but if you're buying a PC with Windows installed then it makes no difference which version it is, MS are still getting their licence fee out of you either way.

Re: No rampack

There might have been wobble on some Spectrums, but it wasn't a feature common to all. I had an original 48K with an Interface 2 hanging off the back, and an AMX Mouse interface hanging off the back of that - despite the dire warnings in the IF2 manual that the pass-through was only to be used for the ZX Printer (what a rebel I was in my younger years :-) - and the only wobble as such was a *slight* bit of play between the IF2 and AMX interface, but nothing like as bad mechanically or electrically as the legendary wobble of a ZX81 ram pack.