Posts by Adrian 4 2289 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2009
I'm slightly puzzled by all these cries of despair. Were you hoping Rishi would win ?
Given the choice, there wasn't going to be a good outcome.
Both options were members of a failing cabinet, and both were members of a party which for a long time believed Boris was their best member.
And the same selection process that produced Boris has produced Truss. Why would it do better this time ?
My experience of using other people's python is that it's almost universally crap, with the few exceptions being where it's deeply embedded in a larger package. It may be easy to write, but it's difficult even for machines to read.
Python learned nothing from the 2.7 -> 3.0 debacle. In fact, the compatibility situation got worse, with multiple step releases within 3.x making scripts written for one version unusable on another and with incomplete dependencies that make it very difficult to find the problem.
Forth, and to some extent Perl used to be decried as write-only languages. Python is rapidly outdoing them.
What's the solution ? Not venv; like any containers, they're a bodge to overcome the compatibility problems that shouldn't exist in the first place (and don't, in a well-regulated language like C). But with inaccurate dependencies, they don't solve the problem either - and in any case, need to be automatic rather than an optional extra if they're to make it usefully portable.
Much of SM is a mystery to me (or makes me intensely cynical) but I can see how this started : in a live chatroom like IRC you get notifications that someone has gone, and it avoids you addressing a comment to them. This is fine.
However it appears Whatsapp doesn't distinguish between 'gone to bed' and 'walked out slamming the door behind them' , and as being online 24/7 has become the norm, one has mutated into the other.
Whatever. A change for the better.
Now my cynical side looks for a less socially acceptable reason for the change.
Then how about a button that, on the request of the developer, the user pushes to see the last few error messages ?
Or better still emails them (on command, to avoid privacy issues) but I accept that may not be possible, especially as many failures will have broken connectivity.
The problem with solar orbit sats is that although they have a vast amount of space (how much of earth's orbit does earth occupy ?) and no nightside, there isn't any CO2 or water in solar orbit.
I guess maybe we could spit out power pills at them as we pass. Maybe with an electrically powered rail gun. But that's another semi-available tech to rely on.
"One wonders what MI5/MI6/GCHQ really think of that arrangement if it so easily and quickly can lead to wholesale chaos with parties in conflict and opposition. Common sense and a greater wisdom would dictate that they totally ignore the prohibition and discover all that is necessary for a true picture of events be produced and directed for subsequent daily media presentation and virtual realisation."
I would imagine they would completely ignore it, just as they did the law for ordinary joes.
Then when they need to use something incriminating they disguise it's source. This has been the practice since the interception of Ultra in WWII.
I trained as an EE but moved into mostly embedded software. These days I'm taking more advantage of my background and mixing the two.
To me, there's still something more interesting about an LED or an actuator doing something, as compared to something happening on a screen. Do others feel the same ? If not, have you ever really compared them, or have you been frustrated by the slow diagnose-fix-retry cycle of hardware compared with software.
It may be that I'm wrong, and for many, the developing image on a screen is just as real as opening a hydraulic throttle and feeling the torque rise.
I'm not sure hat's really true.
For prototypes, yes. I can get a few pcbs from jlcpcb for $10. And $20 postage. And a 2 week wait.
I can get a few pcbs from my local pcb manufacturer for £100 for the photomask and something similar for an MOQ of pcbs. So if I can manage my time properly, I get them from china and save £1-200.
But when I look at the panel costs for production quantities, they tend toward the same value.
What the chinese suppliers have succeeded in doing is rattling through a design with a lot of automation and some in-house photo-processing, and have enough volume thta they can aggregate designs without any delay. I can use OSH Park : for small pcbs, they're also cheap. But they don't do as much business so it takes them longer to aggregate a worthwhile set of orders.
What they haven't succeeded in doing is getting higher volumes as cheap. I don't know what the tradeoffs are. I think the popular chinese suppliers have been careful not to race to the bottom, but that means their higher volumes even out the same as everybody else.
My wife ordered a new Ford via Motability. As well as many common options being unavailable, delivery date has moved from April to September and the colour has changed twice because of a shrinking choice. Apparently JIT assembly no longer involves actual resource planning, it's just what's in the parts bin on the day.
> Financial Times journalist Sebastian Payne has pointed out that government insiders say the Cabinet Office is "preparing for a scenario where there's not a full cabinet" which would include "slimming the government right down" and "people doing a few jobs."
That sounds astoundingly similar to 'one sandwich short of a picnic' and similar phrases.
> So does that mean the civil servants in those departments will just seat around waiting for new ministers or will they be retrenched? Can they even be redeployed temporarily to other positions?
They will be redeployed temporarily to sitting around somewhere else
> (* I really hope that things are being run by a secret cabel of evil supervillians, the truth that everyone in power is simply incompetently stupid and venal is distressing)
So would I, but Hanlon's razor makes it unlikely. People really are just stupid, especially in crowds, like politicians.
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