Re: Basic skill of slide rule
The other advantage of slide-rules was that it was 'necessary' to approx. the order of magnitude answer - which was good brain training.
2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010
"I remember arriving in Calais by ferry in the early-1980s. It was lunchtime. French border control/customs were no where to be seen."
I passed through a border about the same time - I think it was Lux.-France. There was a border post but all that was visible was the bottom of a large pair of boots hanging out of the box ( officer attached )
"France has been scanning passports on leaving the country for a non-Schengen country for as long as I can remember"
That's certainly not true at Calais. The recent terror incidents have often resulted in French troops searching car boots (duplicated by security staff BTW) but no scanning passports as far as I can recall. (I'm usually too annoyed by the size of the queue at UK control.)
"issue of "Frontaliers" (people who work in Switzerland but live in France where it's cheaper)"
Indeed when leaving Switzerland via the crossing near Vallorbe at ~0600 I'm always amazed by the number of cars streaming towards Switzerland from what is a relatively sparsely populated area of France. The Swiss have a shortage of all sorts of workers and low unemployment so I can't see this being easily changed.
"Switzerland and France are both in Schengen, the UK is not."
I know all about Schengen - I've been enjoying its advantages for years. My point is Switzerland seems to cope with a free movement in highly desirable country without having to record every in/out. It's basically done another way if you want to remain/work. Until France tightened up security at Dover recently* and UK exit checks were introduced it was normal to drive UK-France-Switzerland-Italy and return and show passports once (at UK border in Calais). Before Schengen most European borders involved cursory checks if any.
*Schengen is very strict border controls at the outer border - Oh yes, even now at the French 'border' at Dover the passports are usually just glanced at if at all
I travel by road into Switzerland via France 3/4 times a year - nobody checks, we have a holiday and return again without checks ( other than UK) . If Switzerland can manage without being completely overrun how come we have a problem. ( We stay in our own apartment BTW so no checks there either )
"At the quantum level, there is uncertainty as to position, or even the outcome. It seems these cards are modelling that behavior."
Point is they're not supposed to be doing that. Even if the algorithms generate deterministic chaotic outputs that wouldn't explain 2 cards being OK
Well I've got a mixed estate of 8 Pis
1) is a motion sensitive camera overlooking the back of the house, a temp. sensor reporting to pi2 and an in-house web-server
2) is a file server, iplayer server, runs a daemon that controls 4 remote wireless mains sockets and records temp. measurements from around the house.
3) Has daemon controlling external house-lights via a Power MOSFET, has a temp. sensor reporting to pi2.
4) Motion sensitive camera and PIR sensor.
5) Motion sensitive camera, has a temp. sensor reporting to pi2
6) Controls via Pi2 a heater in otherwise unheated utility room, has a temp. sensor reporting to pi2.
7) has 2 temp. sensors reporting to pi2.
8) testbed - at mo' has a Schmitt trigger light sensor tracking dawn-dusk
Very simple jobs which could be combined into a smaller number but would mean swathes of wiring around the house.
Combining the capabilities can be usefull. Just tracked over the last few weeks an area of loft that had an intruder that sounded
too loud to be a mouse. So PIR detector switched on light and motion cameras spotted a mouse and a few days later noted its demise.
"The only realistic option will be a new fleet of subsidised CCGTs, and they will then undermine the case for SMR unless SMR also get subsidies."
Agree entirely. Just a glance at the current load on the grid is quite scary. (OK it's very cold but luckily it's windy). The coal/nuclear contribution is ~40%
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
"It's bad enough auto-mounting by default"
Well it's just box clear/tick in System Settings to enable/disable automount. There are finer grained options as well if you do want to automount something.
What I can't remember because I always have it turned off is what the default setting for a fresh install is.
"Quite the opposite. It's a tool that is more than good enough for both "proper" software engineering and quick and dirty analysis*. "
Agreed. I worked (~2003) for a while, on secondment, with our Computational Chemists and was suprised at the extensive use they made of Python. Mind we had an extensive set of in-house and commercial libraries, tools etc.
"Well, it's not like I have something to hide. And besides, who would be interested in pictures of my pet/my holiday?""
Well I've not got anything to hide ( except financial stuff naturally) but I do always use ssh to access my systems at home from outside - this is to ensure security so my systems don't become a playground for spammers etc. My system is as secure as I can make it.
"I would think that the "security agencies" would know that any encryption with a backdoor is useless"
It's the same in other areas. I lost count of the number of times I put together very detailed proposals for/against certain approaches to tackling a disease area, going to great lengths to research what was know, list the unknowns, explain the complexities, list the pros & cons and suggest a way forward only for a PHB+2 to dismiss ( or sometimes sanction ) the whole thing after a few moments consideration.
"Bugger me! I was blaming my phone as it always appeared "
Well for several months after an update my wife's Android phone clobbered the Netgear router (not the access point.) After much experimentation and searching it was banned. Other Android devices like a Nexus 7 did the same. Even walking up to the house was sufficient as other people had found. It suddenly stopped ( presumably after an update ).
"e. From what I remember the amount of gas trapped in ice is a factor of formation speed, temperature, pressure and doubtless a few other factors not least gravity."
Depends on when the ice formed. The atmospheric pressure on the Martian surface is very low now.(~0.06% Earth and mostly carbon dioxide)
My comment was meant to illustrate that even at the time of the 6809 processor instruction sets were getting rather complex. You could write complex data structure traversing code in just a few bytes in assembler ( The important FORTH word NEXT was just 4 bytes long ). I don't think any compiler would have used most of the instruction set. 6000 was the approx. number of unique op-codes taking into account the very extensive set of addressing modes.
"RISC was originally to get as much on a single chip as possible (by making functionality simple) and thus making things fast, but this is no longer a constraint."
I thought RISC was an approach supported by measurements of actual operations in real program execution which supported the idea that compilers usually used a limited set of 'simpler' instructions., and therefore the masses of increasingly complex ops being added took-up too much silicon for their limited usage . ( Even the hard-wired 6809 had ~ 6000 op-codes from memory). I also remember a BYTE article describing one of the earliest RISC cpus being designed by students.
"So I'm not sure that Tumbleweed supports this, yet."
Well I get :
dmesg | grep isolation
[ 0.000000] Kernel/User page tables isolation: enabled
and CONFIG_PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION=y in /boot/config-4.14.11-1-default.
Booting fine but I am in a VM for the moment
"There's absolutely no point in having a referendum if you're going to ignore the result, so it was morally binding, if not legally so."
There is if a gov. is looking for an indication of strong/weak/marginal support for a proposal. In any case almost all ref. require a significant margin esp. for such a major change
"Nimbusoft seem to be all sold out, but I'm looking at Entroware."
Worth looking at PCSpecialists too. OS free so you'd need to install yourself - I've got a 4 year old i7 which installed OpenSUSE without a prob. ( I'm typing on it now). They don't support Linux officially but if you select 'No OS' they'll ask if you want Linux and point you to their Linux forum.
"My MK14 from ~1980 still works. Never quite got round to fitting it with thrusters or it most certainly wouldnt."
Now that is an obsolete assembly language machine code. Well I hope it is obsolete. I used to write for it with a typewriter !
And, yes, I've also still got one
"The sooner we get rid of the knobheads the better."
Whilst we can probably agree on that it's clear that with the statistic quoted about 1 fatality in 1e8 miles it's going to take (as mentioned) a lot of testing before a) people, b) insurance companies are persuaded and then people will be put-off by the likely extra cost and (presumably) the maintenance ( sensors/computers etc. will need checking, upgrading and certifying ) regularly.
"The software change appears to ruin fuel economy if you see before/after tales from drivers that have had it done,"
Well I had my Touran 'fixed' in April. Traveling to Switzerland ( a 3 times a year 1700 mile trip) returns 54-55mpg exactly the same as the previous 12 trips.
"That would make it a fine language to compile into".
Indeed it would but the benefit to me was I needed no other support other than an ability to lay-out & etch PCBs and a self-written serial terminal program. This was a long time ago (certainly pre-1985) when hardware was expensive and I was a relatively poor chemist. Still have the hardware somewhere ( in an enormous case).