Posts by Peter Gathercole

Re: I am more concerned... @Chemist

The reason for the strict instructions is not to generate a picture from which a person can identify you, it's so that the computer generated hash of the salient features of your face can be encoded into the biometric data stored on the passport (things like the ratio of the gap between the eyes and the length of the nose).

Glasses, the direction you're looking, tilting the head, obstructive hair, and even the change in shape of the muscles in the face if smiling and the background can all make a significant difference to the hash.

And again, it's not about people looking at the photo, it's about you being positively identified by machine. It's much more difficult to fool a machine (with the right data) than it is a person.

Re: Space Wombles @Crisp

... But that was to Button Moon, in the Blanket Sky!

I suppose that the theme was composed by an ex. Dr Who, and Trillian from HHGTTG TV show (and also the voice of Grandma in 2015 Thunderbirds). Maybe that gives it some authenticity!

Re: Space Wombles

Surely the Clangers would be the people(?) to call.

Their music boat with Tiny or Small piloting would be just the ticket.

The Space Chicken might be useful too for the smaller items.

Re: Genuine question

Remember that Pluto is in it's own orbit, and moving quite fast (4.67 Km/s), so late as in crossing Pluto's orbit after it has passed by. 20 seconds would have increased the closest distance, but probably not by much compared to the 7,750 miles distance.

But the answer is in the quoted article from NASA. "...[JHAPL] says without the adjustment, New Horizons would have arrived 20 seconds late and 114 miles (184 kilometers) off-target from the spot where it will measure the properties of Pluto’s atmosphere. Those measurements depend on radio signals being sent from Earth to New Horizons at precise times as the spacecraft flies through the shadows of Pluto and Pluto’s largest moon, Charon."

So yes, late.

Re: Is it legal? @arrbee

I'm not going to quibble. I appreciate all of your points, and I sympathise with the people who are caught in this trap.

I was just objecting to the use of the term "tax".

I would actually rather prefer to have a more realistic balance between living costs and wages such that things like housing benefit and other subsidised housing (yes, I'm including council houses and housing associations) were only needed by a much smaller number of really needy households, rather than those who just can't afford to live where they do, whatever the reason why.

For what it's worth, and for reasons beyond most of these people's control, they are forced to rely on the state and it's devolved institutions for support far more than is healthy for the nation's finances. I wonder if enforcing the living wage and reducing benefit paid, and then carefully change the tax and/or NI on companies by an appropriate amount to shift the money away from benefits and on to a more income and tax basis would be a reasonable first step? Possibly Tim Worstal cold crunch the numbers and comment?

I appreciate what you are saying about buy-to-let, but the right-to-buy, which is what caused the public housing to be sold off was intended to benefit the original purchaser. Some of them will have bought and then sold, making significant profit for the people taking advantage of the right, but when they sold, it would be at the market rate. The b-t-l landlords would have paid market rates, and the only benefit thy has was that the houses were available at all. But the house transferred to private when the original purchasers bought, not when they were sold on.

What has helped the b-t-l purchasers most is the mortgage guarantee and incentive packages that were introduced to try to support the first time buyer market, and thus the whole of the housing ladder. These were not sufficiently guarded to prevent b-t-l landlords from using the schemes. Other than that, it's the relentless rise of house prices that allows a landlord to borrow against their existing portfolio to fund purchases, and then rely on the price rises to provide them a capital gain so they can either borrow more, or sell in the future and make a profit far higher than commercial interest rates.

There's lots wrong with the economy, much more than the loss of public housing.

Re: Is it legal? @Mage

Gawd. I'm going senile. Read Queue as Cue!

Can we have a bit more than 10 minutes as an editing period, please?

Re: Is it legal? @Mage

UK "Bedroom Tax" is not a tax. The media and opposition parties deliberately misrepresent it to increase the emotive impact of the issue.

It is actually a rebate on the housing benefit (a welfare payment) given to someone who lives in a house with an unused bedroom. (Rebate is used a little strangely here, because you don't normally expect it to be used to benefit state institutions).

If you do not get housing benefit, you are not affected at all by this.

Queue downvotes, but I don't think that the state should pay welfare benefits to people so that they can live in houses larger than they need, although I do think there needs to be significant exceptions for people with intermittent requirement for an extra room, for example if they need to house significant amounts of medical equipment, an occasional live-in carer, or children and members of the armed forces returning home for holidays and leave.

If it were a true tax, everybody would have to pay it, even people not receiving benefit and/or people owning their own house outright.

On the story, I thing Chicago are ill-advised to introduce a tax that is going to be difficult to enforce.

Re: Plenty of things I can do with 1G ram + 8G flash

I have a first generation Acer Aspire One (1.6GHz Atom N270, 1GB RAM and 8GB flash) which sounds like it's similar spec, and I have Trusty Tahr on it, and I still use it for basic web browsing, and playing some media.

I use gnome-flashback, partly because I prefer the interface, and partly because Unity is painful with slow graphics and only 600 vertical pixels. The other drawback is the SSD is seriously slow, possibly because it does not support TRIM.

The biggest problem is keeping enough of the filesystem free during updates. The update tool leaves a trail of downloaded deb files after they've been installed, and never cleans up old kernels.

If I did not make serious effort to clean up after every update, it would have run out of space ages ago. I hope that the version installed on this stick has been tweaked to do some of this automatically.

fwiw, ubuntu-tweak and computer-janitor are seriously useful for keeping this cruft down.

Re: Windows for Warships

I'm sure that I read somewhere that in part of the contract to supply the DoD with weapon, control or maintenance systems, there was a clause requiring a 10 year withdrawal of support notification.

This means that the supplier has to warn the DoD of the date that the kit would not be maintainable 10 years before the support was withdrawn.

That makes the 3 year notice rather abrupt, don't you think.

Re: Yes, I would purchase one (maybe 2 or 3) if... @picturethis

I think you're very lucky. The T30 was a bit of a bogey machine, the worst of any of the Thinkpads that I've ever had. Don't get me wrong, I kept my T30 running for as long as I could, but...

The T30 was the first Thinkpad that was completely made in the Far East AFAIK, and they got the mechanical design a bit wrong. They are notorious for the RAM sockets to break solder joints. Finding a T30 with both memory slots still working without some paper wedged in to put pressure on the slots is a very, very rare thing. I think that the designers recognised this, because there was no T31 or later T3X systems, and the T40 was launched not that long afterwards. I think the motherboard was put under some strain, because several of them I've had have had different types of foam pads to act as strain relief, but they never really worked.

I know Thinkpads are repairable. I had 4 different motherboards in my T30, and eventually resorted to re-soldering the RAM sockets myself, but I don't have a re-soldering station, and using a normal dry soldering iron to melt the solder already there eventually burns the surface mount pads off the motherboard.

I kept it running until I could no longer find any mobos on eBay, and the ones I had could no longer be re-soldered. I eventually decided to replace it with a T43 (this machine) when I could find one with a Dothan processor (and the cost dropped to lower than a T30 mobo, even one not guaranteed to work. But the hard disk (swapped out of the T30 to keep the 'machine' the same even though it's different hardware, is flagging SMART errors, and large IDE 2.5" disks (100GB+) are also getting rare. Core 2 duo T60s (with SATA hard disks) are beginning to look cheap on eBay at the moment, so I may switch again, but this swap will require copying between disks, not just a disk swap.

T30's also has a definitely silly bit of design. If you tried to remove the disk with the lid shut, you were guaranteed to break the top left corner of the bezel. It is such a common problem, that if you see a T30, it's almost certainly broken there.

If there was a modern Thinkpad, in approximately the same form-factor as the T20-T60 ranges, available at a reasonable price, I may just skip to a new one rather than a used one. But, unfortunately, I think Lenovo will take the interest as a sign that people would pay a high price, and they will introduce them at ultra-book prices. If they do this, they've not really looked at what people want.

Re: Definitely as long as it's as good as it's predecessors

T20 running as a firewall. 700 MHz Pertium 3, 256MB ram and PC-CARD second Ethernet card.

Too slow even for a firewall really, but been on 24x7 for more years than I can remember.

I bought it second hand in about 2003.

Typed on a T43, my main workhorse, running Ubuntu LTS 14.04. Still fast enough for most day-to-day purposes.

Re: C @James Cane

Unless you're prepared to have massive inefficiencies in your code (like surrounding all data structures with hardware write protected regions), it's always going to be a matter of trust.

If you use a language that does strong boundary and type checking for all data objects in software, you're trusting that the compiler and/or run-time is correct, and does not contain any flaws You're also always going to find that your code runs slower with these checks.

I'm not going to suggest that there are not sound reasons to stop using C, but using a language with better protection does not guarantee total safety.

C is still excellent for what it was written for, generating code that closely fits with the underlying computer architecture. But it's not a perfect language, by any means.

When C was first developed, it was necessary to have a language that would map very closely to the system ISA (and it did map to the PDP11 instruction set very nicely), because even minor inefficiencies in code size may have pushed the kernel beyond the 56KB address space on a non-separate I&D PDP11 (I used to run a PDP11/34A, and had different kernels to drive all of the terminals without a tape drive, or to have only some of the terminals working with the tape driver compiled in). IIRC, Sun 3 680x0 systems had to have a kernel less than 1MB.

That time is fortunately past, but that does not mean that in these days of a word-processor needing 100's of megabytes of memory just to load, that aspiring to produce efficient code should not be something to strive for.

Re: Compared to this... @STB

The counter to this is that although you (and I, I will admit) may not have the skill to fix problems like this, we do have the ability to aid someone who does, with a formal or informal contribution of either money or equipment, and it does not even have to be the developer with the Open Source software model.

I suppose that you could give Microsoft and Adobe money and ask them to do the same, but I suspect that it would disappear into the general coffers, and not significantly affect the quality of the code.

Re: Next question... @Rob 5

That's called society. Without it, there would almost certainly not be the jobs that you do that pay your salary.

It's one of the things that differentiates homo sapiens from most other mammals. Society as a whole provides what is required for society's benefit (there are other examples, such as wolf packs which have non-breeding members of the pack that contribute to the pack through hunting and nursemaid roles).

You, as a net financial contributor are paying for the next generation. Parents, as net care contributors, are 'paying' for the next generation with care. Some of the next generation in the future will 'pay' (with their care) for older people, whether they've had children or not. Society as a whole benefits from all contributions, and many I've not detailed. It's been this way, in one form or another since man started living in groups, although now it's expanding to a scale where it no longer looks like society any more.

I will admit that in the modern selfish world, where people just say 'what about me' all the time, that this could break down, but hey, nothing is forever.

Re: Something missing @erkulas

I think the argument about shorter life expectancy for men, and them not reaching pensionable age is a severely outdated one.

It may have been true up until 50 or so years ago, but health and safety legislation and the changing demographic of work in developed economies have seriously undermined this line of thought.

It's true, there are still mostly manual jobs out there. Construction work is an obvious one, but anything that is mostly physical in nature. In these, anything that would seriously affect the health of the workers is now severely regulated in progressive economies, and professions like mining, steel work, and transport (I'm thinking of dock workers here) have almost completely disappeared either because they don't exist any more, or they have been altered beyond recognition due to mechanisation.

One of the other outcomes of this is that the historical actuarial rules for pensions have been broken, leading to most older pension schemes that assumed that people (esp. men) may either not reach pensionable age, or only have a fey years that need a pension before expiring now face paying 20+ years. This also affects the balance of the state pension (too many pensioners vs. the number of workers), as that is a non-funded pension scheme (workers today are paying national insurance to fund the state pensions of existing pensioners, not paying into a fund for their own retirement). This is one of the reasons why governments actually want population increase, through means including immigration, to provide a mid-term extension of the pensions system.

Re: Self-inflicted @AC

I was thinking about why I was getting downvotes, and it occurred to me that there may be people who don't know what tax credits are in the UK.

They are basically part of the welfare system which is supposed to return tax to workers in low paid jobs, depending on their circumstances. This is supposed to encourage people to keep working in these low paid jobs, rather than giving up and moving to what used to be called unemployment benefit, now jobseekers allowance and income protection support.

The idea was that it would reduce the amount of money paid in benefit, but instead what it does is trap people in low paid jobs that they can't afford to give up, but which offer them no chance of improving.

In many cases, what this does, if treated at face value, is that low paid workers pay negative tax, meaning that not only do they not pay tax, but they get money back.

Something like 5,000,000 families in the UK receive some tax credits, according to government figures, and all households with children which do not have a higher rate tax payer will also receive child benefit.

It is part of the complex tax system that we have in the UK, as envisioned by that <irony>financial wizard</irony> Gordon Brown. I would prefer to see a system where people did not need this level of support (because it's regressive and unfair), and because what it really shows is that either wages are too low, or cost of living is too high in the UK for a significant part of the population.

So, as I said, tax credits are not a windfall, they are part of the regular income in about 1 in 5 of all households in the UK (based on the previous figure, and the total number of households in the UK). This is why it's important. Families rely on it's timely arrival for all sorts of things including food and fuel. That is why this woman is upset.

Re: Self-inflicted @AC

Whilst I cannot fault your logic, experience tells me that there are a lot of people who rely on a single bank account, through which all of their salary/tax credits/child benefit is paid.

This type of person is also unwilling (so as to avoid the temptation of spending money they don't have) or unable to get a credit card. Also, many operators of pre-payment charging systems for electricity meters will not accept credit cards. Drawing money out of a credit card at an ATM results in punitive credit charges. And many people do not keep significant amounts of cash lying around.

I have been caught in a situation where I could not get money from a bank because of a cock-up. There was a day where there was a backbone telecom failure in my home area, which resulted in all of the ATMs in the area becoming non-functional, and no shops could do any electronic transactions. I fortunately had folding money in my wallet, but I know of many people who were unable to do anything that day unless they had cash.

So contingencies are good, but there may come a time when even that becomes useless. Then, the only safe regime is cash!

Re: not only but also

Those government departments are just penny-pinching. My guess is that they are mostly using AIX (rather than IBM i/iOS/OS400), and there is great compatibility with older systems, so probably there is a good chance that they could install modern IBM POWER systems, and expect the applications to either run unchanged or for newer versions of the applications to be available.

If the code would work in AIX 5.3, then they could also use an AIX 5.3 WPAR on a recent system to run the code. There's plenty of options out there, and modern kit is so much more powerful that they are unlikely to have performance issues. If they are using hardware that needs normal PCI (as opposed to PCIe) or MCA (it'd have to be really old kit for this!) then it would be a problem, but you would probably struggle to find an Intel box with PCI nowadays, and MicroChannel would be completely out of the question for a server with an Intel processor, unless you wanted a 486 system!

They probably just don't want to install any new kit, probably because they no longer have the skill in house to change anything, and their outsourcing partners have quoted the GDP of a small country to do it for them.

@Paul

Which is the 32 bit processor you're talking about? It certainly wasn't the PowerPC Xenon!

Re: Two words. @Michael

Your dream line-up can only be a dream.

Jack Bruce, Rick Wright, John Bonham (OK, officially replaced), Jon Lord, Cozy Powell, Peter Banks (OK, he left Yes a long time ago), Dio, Kelly Groucutt (and Mike Edwards, although they both left ELO), Eric Carr, all gone.

And these are just the ones I found from the bands you mention!

Re: 2 million lines of FORTRAN code

Blind benchmarks would work if you take identical code and run them on two separate machines.

Unfortunately, when comparing different languages, the way that the problem is coded is partly conditioned by style, fashion (you don't think fashion is present? Wait until you've been around a while, accepted standards for writing code changes over the years), and personal preference. This makes direct comparisons more difficult, because different people will code the same problem in the same language differently, and some differences can have quite an effect on performance.

Beautifully written code is not always the fastest!