Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: "The system, nicknamed Vista"

It'd be safer to just go and get The Internet Box and destroy it :-)

Re: +1 for Carlin

"We, as fleshbags, are not allowed to, or at least ethically, should not copy/plagiarise other peoples' work and I don't see why it should be any different for AI systems and their manipulators"

Yes, it's step beyond "tribute bands".

Re: "well away from risk factors like other industrial installations that could go messily wrong"

I'd imagine the shock wave from that explosion might well have killed spinning disk even further afield too.

Re: Iceland

"There's a lot to be said for building data centers in deserts. Lots of unoccupied open land, efficient cooling with evaporation,"

Pretty much the prime definition of a desert is no or minimal water so you may need to get truck or pipe water in and than try to come up with a closed loop, or near closed loop evaporative cooling system that doesn't corrode away too quickly.

Re: Zero

"the only viable ones would be those that generate genuine value, or that someone is prepared to run on a non-profit basis.

I came here to ask what you would define as "genuine value", then the rest of the sentence sunk in and it appears you mean those that at least make enough money to pay for running the service. I'm pretty sure generating cash flow is not the only definition of "genuine value".

Re: 1954...

Even if the standard was agreed today and the first production units were being delivered tomorrow, it would take at least 10-15 years to get one installed in the UK. Planning permission and anti-nuclear protestors objecting at all stages and going to court to challenges every time they find an uncrossed "t" or undotted "i", appealing to the next court up when they fail, camping out in trees, digging tunnels and doing everything else in their power to slow down the transition to any form of green energy, which is, sadly and entirely unironically in their eyes, completely contradictory to their stated aims.

Re: Thrusters

"Any attempts are likely to be given to engineers with spare time on their hands to work out how future rovers might include self-righting equipment."

Maybe they could have a chat with some of the Robot Wars/BattleBots teams?

Re: A Classic Case ...

"Of course everyone knows the words printed against tick boxes have no meaning, they're just to decorate the page before you add the ticks"

Yeah, I remember the discussion with the manager of the local dealer that serviced my car when I queried how well I could trust the service checklist which claimed the technician had "cleaned/greased sunroof rails" and "topped off automatic transmission fluid", neither of which my car had. He'd just ticked every box on the sheet. I wasn't oo bothered since it was a company car and I wasn't paying. The second time, I was more vocal in my complaint. The 3rd time, our fleet manager escalated it to the manufacturer and it never happened again. It even looked like the ticks had been done at different times during the process as they no longer looked identical all the down the page and there were dirty fingerprints on it :-)

Re: Yes, but

"They had a lower capacity than a 1.44Mb 3.5" disk (IIRC, 180K per side), "

The Amstrad PCW came out in 1985, two years before the 1.44MB 3.5" floppy. It was, however, contemporaneous with the 720KB 3.5" floppy disks. By 1987, when the 1.44MB 3.5" disks arrived, Amstrad had updated to double density, 360KB per side or 720KB per disk. A few years later, they switched to 3.5" disks on the PCW, probably because they had now became cheaper than the now obsolete 3" drives. Bearing in mind it was built to a price, I wonder if an 8-bit Z80 CPU could manage with an HD 3.5" 1.44MB floppy or if they simply didn't see the point in changing again. After all, the target market wasn't power users :-)

Sometimes people just don't remember (or weren't there to know) just how fast computers were evolving back then and the various routes hardware makers went down only to find they chose the wrong route. There was no real reason those 3" drives could not have been double sided, they just got beat out by the Matsushita 3.5" format. It could have been one of the other competing formats that were also aiming to out compete and out perform the 5.25" floppies that had reigned supreme. At least we never standardised on the IBM 4" floppy!

Re: the Ribbon is a terrible UI

"For me it was a revelation in WIMP interfaces that all the things you could do were discoverable somewhere in the menus."

Today, I had to actually print out an email from Outlook. I don't often use Windows, let alone Outlook. I must have spent 10 minutes looking for a way to print that bloody email before I finally noticed an extra (pale gray) search box in the top of the menu ribbon. So I typed "print" into it and it immediately gave me the print options I was looking for. I still have no idea if there is a print option you can actually find and click on in the menu.

In retrospect, I should have tried hitting Ctrl-P, maybe that would have worked, but it was end of day, I was in a hurry and I was a bit overwhelmed by the 6 million menu options in the menu bar that I've never used or needed before ;-)

Re: Yes, but

"killer app"

Speaking of killer apps (and I'd also like to upvote the article!), Lotus 1-2-3 became the killer app on DOS after following in the footsteps of SuperCalc, which, speaking of CP/M, was born there and ported to MS-DOS a year before anyone had even heard of Lotus 1-2-3. Ditto with WordStar being the killer app before WordPerfect, although to be fair, WS did get an honourable mention in the article.

I never did get the hang of Lotus 1-2-3 having come from a CP/M background where SuperCalc was the king of spreadsheets and initially it was the only useful one available for MS-DOS and used all the same familiar commands.

Re: "Durable and rugged enough to go anywhere"

Not to mention the ramps to the upper desk parking some have!

Re: No Giugiaro

Yeah, it's what Delorean might have built if he'd gone for a "truck" instead of a sports car :-)

Re: They don’t have to

"only a minority of cars are fleet-owned."

Not sure of the percentage changes in recent years, but the UK car market is leaning strongly in the direction of leasing rather than owning these days. Yet more "subscriptions" for the renter classes, nothing owned. I wonder what will happen when these people owning nothing retire and find they can no longer afford all the subscriptions? Shades of the misunderstandings of Marx upthread! What those people are worrying about is already happening ;-)

Re: Responsibility

"I've bagged groceries a few times!??"

If you look at peoples shopping trolleys going around the supermarket, or the customers bagging up their goods at the tills in front of you, you may begin to think a little differently about how much people know about weight distribution and stacking heavy items on top of lighter, more fragile items!

"I know from experience of dealing with people who are 'on the spectrum' that they can tend to interpret instructions in a way which is technically correct but not what others would intuit."

Also known from experience, if instructions can be interpreted in multiple ways, then when things go badly, the person doing the job will be blamed, not the imprecise instructions. Look at you, Project Manglers!!

Re: Human Nature

"You don't need to be *taught* levers and moments, it's part of the physical functioning of the human body! It's like expecting people to be have to be taught how to foooking BREATHE!"

While a nice catchy soundbite, people don't learn about levers and moments from their own body on a rational and logical basis. It's almost exclusively trial and error. Tell an average person that the process of walking is falling forward so they're about to fall over and then putting a foot out to stop the fall, and repeating that action to create the motion of "walking" and they'll look at you as if you are stupid. Add in comments about tipping points, levers and moments and they'll be utterly convinced you are stupid.

"It would seem logical to install a heavy equipment as low as possible - I know I certainly wouldn't have thought of getting it to the top of a rack, even when I was only 20. But the human mind is a curious thing, and who can say what criteria the junior had in mind for the task ?"

I could see a situation where an inexperienced junior whose job it is to "service the racks" might see it as logical to put the stuff least likely to need changes in the most inaccessible places, leaving the more easily accessible spots for kit that might need pulling out or havering cables swapped around more frequently.

"the architect put the X-ray unit on the top floor of the tower,"

I'm surprised the architect was allowed to define where the various departments should go. That's usually the purview of management politics and infighting. Especially as to who gets the best views from the top floor!

Re: Either

I remember seeing on the PC in "glorious" CGA graphics. It also used filled polygons and just didn't have the same "feel" as the original wireframe BBC version which I gave many hours to :-)

Re: Biggest problem.

"Voters are still thick enough to give them what they ask for."

Yep.

From the article "He added that he hoped voters would decide "based on facts, not slogans, misdirection and massive campaign spending."

Yeah, he's living in a world where the sky is a different colour! Has he looked at US politics in the last few decades? How did he run his last campaign? On facts?