Posts by Dave Pickles

Re: distance and signal strength

Bluetooth radar? At the mandated 2m distance the round-trip delay would be about 7ns.

Better would be to use sonar. Send an ultrasonic 'chirp' through the phone speaker and pick up the reply via the microphone. The round-trip time of ~12ms is rather more manageable, though having the microphone live all the time would not be easy to sell...

Re: Well now....

But how do you install Linux if new servers come with compulsory Secure Boot?

Re: How?

Leaving the pilot on the ground gives a few advantages:

- The drone can pull higher 'G' without squishing or disorienting the pilot

- The drone can be more aerodynamic without the need for a human-sized space up front and a window to look out of

- The drone can be expendable. If the opposition carries four air-air missiles just send up five drones.

Re: To be fair

Failed to go all the way.

Re: With 500MW

There is a photograph in the Kinlochleven museum showing what happened when they had a pipe burst in the power station. Not the kind of Dielectric Cooling most data centre owners would be keen on.

So we can say "There's a hole in my bucket..."

Re: Even when fibre arrives it may not be suitable for techies

"(*) Covid-19 permitting. They've done one street away but I haven't seen them for a couple of days."

That's because they're parked across my drive. Luckily Covid-19 also means I don't need to drive anywhere at present.

More likely someone wrote "3rd January 2019" on the top of the BACS transfer form.

Re: The kind of boss I like to work with

A PHB of mine from long ago (now sadly deceased) had a saying "a mistake is evidence that someone has attempted to achieve something".

Re: Not good enough.

Those PO staff and others who testified in Court that money was missing have presumably committed perjury.

You forgot measuring fuel in pounds. Unless you're flying the Gimli Glider.

Re: But how fast does it clock?

From the article their demonstration ran (?) with a 10KHz clock, but experiments on individual gates maxed out at 1.19MHz.

Re: What is overflowing?

149 hours is near-enough 2^29 milliseconds.

Re: Not the LSE

The French have shut down a couple of their nuclear power stations which were getting a bit toasty in their water intake departments, so we're burning gas to make up their shortfall.

Re: B****r!

Thanks for the reminder, unfortunately my bro-i-l has thrown away the packaging. Sometimes Amazon can be too efficient!

Re: When was the last time your over-zealous attempt to fix a problem back-fired heavily?

And the first non-compliance with Apple terms and conditions.

Re: did anyone ever use these buttons the way they were intended to?

Many years ago I was taking a short-cut through the data centre and spotted smoke coming from one of the (washing-machine sized) disk drives. Naturally I pushed the Big Red Button. My boss was not entirely happy; he pointed out that the drive wasn't loaded at the time so just powering it down would have been sufficient. Perhaps.

Re: Age check = ID

Shame the age-checking scheme in "Leisure Suit Larry" (asking questions an under-age person wouldn't be expected to know the answer to) doesn't work now we have search engines.

Re: Another shot of Code

Wikipedia reckons that it was written in PL/M (a minimalist version of PL/1). From memory of poring over the disassembly of CP/M 2.2 I suspect that only the CCP was written in high-level language.

"What was the storage capacity of the typical PC when XP was released?"

I bought a laptop in 2000 with a 20 Gig HD, so 40GB for a desktop machine sounds about right.

Re: Long ago.

My turn to say I didn't know they existed...

After a hiccup at my ISP took down my VPN to home ("just reboot the router, sir") while I was 1000 miles away, I built something similar using an Arduino and a GSM modem. An SMS containing the correct password power-cycles the router.

He brought just about everything else. At one time it was reckoned that the best tutorial guide to writing a device driver for NT was the VAX/VMS Device Driver manual.

https://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story

https://everything2.com/title/The+similarities+between+VMS+and+Windows+NT

Re: Article is a bit light on facts.

VAX FORTRAN may have been standard, but the VAX floating-point representation was decidedly strange. There were four different formats and all of them had the exponent in the middle of the word with the mantissa wrapped around it. I believe the aim was some level of compatibility with earlier generations of DEC hardware.

https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nssdc/formats/VAXFloatingPoint.htm for the gory details.

Re: Supertramp

Bloody Well Right...

Re: Serious question.

Satellites don't all traipse round in neat circular equatorial orbits. Most are inclined to the equator and many have elliptical orbits, some very elliptical indeed. Imagine a three-dimensional motorway with traffic continally swapping lanes; sooner or later someone's going to get side-swiped.

Re: The funny thing is that...

And Windows NT was around 30Mb...

Re: Solution at the end user, er..., end

I use this on a Raspberry Pi:

http://ncid.sourceforge.net/

It has blacklists and whitelists, which can include regular expressions. For blacklisted calls it can play a recording or emulate a fax machine. Best of all, in the UK it will seize the call before the first ring, so you are never interrupted by the spammers. It's a simple matter to parse the log file to create a web report.

(No connection other than as a user).