Posts by Richard Tobin

Helpful suggestions

My electricity meter is in a dark inaccessible corner, so to read it I take a photo of it with my phone. Recently, every time I do this the phone suggests that I might prefer a photo of it that I took several months ago instead.

"more than four times the legally permitted height"

"more than four times the legally permitted height" and "heights of up to 2,000m (6,500ft) ... the maximum legally permitted altitude is 400ft."

I suppose 6,500 *is* more than four times 400, but it's probably not what you meant...

Hurray!

This is most impressive.

API

API does not stand for "application protocol interface".

Scientology test

It's particularly easy to see what's going on in the Scientology "personality test". Every tenth question is in the same category, so you can easily score 100% once you've worked out what the categories are. More amusingly, you can chose your scores so that the graph of them that they show you is a picture of a house or something like that.

Odd unit conversion

All but one of the numbers appear to have been converted from metric tonnes to pounds, but with the conversion factor (2204.6+) rounded down to the nearest integer:

2,204 pounds of gold = 1 x 2204

6,612 pounds of silver = 3 x 2204

44,080 pounds of lead = 20 x 2204

23,101,000 pounds of steel = ???

189,544 pounds of cobalt = 86 x 2204

13,422,360 pounds of plastics = 6090 x 2204

Not a mistake

That "mistake" is there to disguise the fact that it's *not* about Snowden.

Uninitialized variables

When Sun introduced shared libraries in, I think, SunOS 4.0, dozens of standard unix utilities and probably thousands of user programs failed, all with essentially the same bug.

In C, local variables are not initialized by default, but at program startup the stack would be full of zeros, so that local variables in main() at least would be zero, and many programs inadvertently relied on this. But when shared libraries came along, the dynamic linker ran before main() was called, and the stack no longer contained zeros.

Of course, more modern compilers will generally warn about uninitialized variables.

You can help!

Google for "whiplash", "loans", and "attorney", and click on the ads!

Ransom demand

Can they really have only received one ransom demand?

Lock 'em up

It's the only language they understand.

Meaning?

What does "visible to passive SIGINT" mean?

Eek!

I've got one of those huge humans stuck to my feet!

Conflict of interest

Can you think of an industry with a more obvious conflict of interest? They need a constant supply of new malware, and if they know about it before their competitors, even better. And what's the best way to achieve that?

Praying's not good enough

They should sacrifice a goat.

You'll NEVER FORGET about Dr Dre NOW

Who?

It's obvious

Its purpose is to distract attention from the other secret satellite they sent up at the same time.

Helium 6

"The helium-filled He6 disk drive tops out at 6TB". Helium-6 has a half-life of 807 milliseconds. Helium-8's is 119 milliseconds. I guess that's why the warranties are so short.

Nowhere near satnav

GPS satellites are not in geostationary orbit. They're at about 13,000 miles, so nowhere near this asteroid.

Non sequitur

"Despite studies showing computer use makes no difference to educational outcomes, the top-down coding gravy train rolls on". What? These are completely separate things. Whether using computers is useful for learning in general has nothing to do with whether learning to code is a good thing. You might as well say that despite refrigerator use having no effect on educational outcomes, we still teach thermodynamics.

I think people can ask Google to remove search links from its index regardless of whether the information is "old, irrelevant and not in the public interest". You don't need a law to be able to ask for something. So what exactly does this "existing data protection law" do?

Not its real name

What the OED actually says is "In technical contexts also called octothorp". That doesn't make it its real name.

Its real name, as all Intercal programmers know, is "mesh".

As for its being the same as the musical sharp sign, the OED calls this "erroneous".

Dyson???

If my Dyson vacuum cleaner had lasted as long as my Huawei VDSL modem, I might take that seriously.

Z Class?

I've never heard of a Z class flare before, and I can't find any mention of such a thing on the NASA web site. Beyond X9 they just go to X10, instead of (say) Y1.

Someone recently added "Z class" to the table on the Wikipedia Solar Flare page without any explanation. If, as that table says, it means > 10^-3 W/m^2, then we've already had several: the X17 flare on Sep 7 2005 would be Z1.7, for example.

Where does the figure of "a least 40 times as large as March's display" in the article come from? The March 29 flare was X1, so 40 times that is not a particularly interesting number. Or did you just misunderstand this statement on the Wikipedia page: "the extreme event in 1859 is theorised to have been well over X40 so a Z class designation is possible"?

Dyson

"The patent system offers us some protection but not enough: with an army of lawyers, hidden prior art is occasionally found and ways to design around existing patents identified."

In other words, he wants a monopoly on things that he wasn't the first to invent, and on ways of doing things that he didn't think of.

(I have a Dyson cordless vacuum cleaner. It broke just after the warranty expired, and was pretty useless anyway. Why anyone would want to copy them is a mystery.)

If Watergate happened now...

... they'd have to call it Watergategate.

The keypad might have lasted longer if the software had been better - when typing in code you had to press MEM-TERM-MEM between every byte, so guess which key was likely to fail (quite apart from it being unnecessarily tedious and error-prone).

All in all it was a typical Sinclair product: unavailable, unreliable, unpleasant to use. They always aimed to build the cheapest possible usable product, but somewhere along the line the "usable" part of the specification was lost.

Oh dear...

Every time Lewis Page writes an article about how safe Fukushima is, a few days later Tepco admit they've lied again and the figures they gave before were completely wrong. So watch the news over the next few days.