Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Manual is optional,

Yes, that! Likes and Subscribes don't translate in the quality or even future production of "more great content". Neither metric tells you anything about other videos they produce(d). Even the advertisers are more interested in accumulated views. They don't care if people "like" or "subscribe".

Re: Manual is optional,

"rather spend 15 minutes reading the material as opposed to 1+ hours watching a video."

The YouTube generation? Millions of long winded "instructional" YouTube videos that for most people can be distilled down a few minutes of reading text and looking at diagrams on a simple static webpage which can easily be referred to at a glance rather than spending some minutes trying to find the spot in the video that has the bit of info you need to refresh :-)

Re: Manual is optional,

"I'd always rather have the option of learning something from a few different perspectives and then maybe one of them will make it stick."

Impossible to test for. More likely is that using multiple learning methods is that subsequent ones are simply reinforcing what you already learned. Since you can't unlearn something, there's no way to tell which method works best.

Re: Free speech, duh

"Last I checked, North Korea's GDP was smaller than that of Somerset."

It seems to be about double that of Somerset.

Nth Korea $28.5 billion (nominal, 2016) $40 billion (PPP, 2015 est.)

Somerset In 2019, Somerset's economy was worth almost £12.1bn in Gross Value Added (GVA) terms...The Somerset economy has grown for the last seven consecutive years.

Clearly Somerset is catching up but has a ways to go yet :-)

Having said that, I'm not sure GDP is a useful measure when it comes to talking about a pariah state that has few trading partners and of whose internal markets we know so little.

Re: ... the constituents can remove their MP. if that MP happens to be the PM...well :-)

You can be a party leader without being an MP, but in general, you can't be a PM if you are not an MP, ie the leader of the Parliamentary party, the one in power. But, under certain circumstances, the Monarch can invite someone, anyone, to try to form a government if there are issues such as a hung Parliament and little prospect of a coalition.

Re: Face like thunder

She has two claims to fame.

First UK PM to serve under two monarchs

Shortest term UK PM EVAR!!

That last, along with so many other negative firsts will be what she's remembered for. If she's remembered at all. A modern day Lady Jane Grey? Who?... asks nearly everyone?

Re: seeing how things work (or don't) over there...

"The problem is, the little people don't get to remove the leaders early."

Under some circumstances, the constituents can remove their MP. if that MP happens to be the PM...well :-)

Re: Free speech, duh

Kim Jong-un is also the leader of a nuclear power. Not a G7 nation, but their economy might be in better shape than ours right now, Now THAT is depressing.

Re: energy storage ... pulling a train of concrete blocks ...

Just had a look. It comes across as an entirely theoretical school science experiment.

Clicking on the technical section, I expected see at least some details on operation, how it works, test rigs etc. Nothing.

The idea is interesting but it's light on the practical engineering and despite working on the concept since 2014, seem to be still trying to attract any funding. I suspect there may be some major challenges in building this to scale, otherwise we'd at least see some sort of scale model prototype they'd be showing off to attract the funding.

Re: enthusiastic salesperson who never intended to defraud anyone

Well, they never said the truck was moving under it's motive power. They merely said it was in motion and left the rest up to the audience to be hoodwinked. Typical lying "salesman".

Re: EY did not define ranges for the four generations included in the report.

"It would be too quaint and uncool to call them by the actual years. Giving them fancy and slightly obscure names turns them into very distinct tribes, and thus reinforces the "us vs.them" feeling of each generation."

It seems to be primarily a US thing IME. Nothing must be known by it's proper name, everything must have a "cool sounding" new name. Now don't get wrong, the Yanks are great at coming up with new words and especially acronyms for projects and such, But PLEASE stop doing it to things that already have names. it just confuses everyone. But those "nicknames" do seem to catch on very very quickly across the US. It's like some sort of forced hothouse evolution of language. A recent one I've come across is the pronunciation of cache, as in a cache of treasure. Suddenly it's being pronounced "cachet" on all the US TV programmes (that use the word, ie not all of them, obviously). Seems to have started a year or two back, but pretty much every treasure hunting documentary seems to have switched now. Possibly, they are trying to sound sophisticated and have learned that cache is a French word so are trying to be too clever and think it's pronounced caché :-)

Re: Who buys these things?

Absolutely. Who wouldn't want a laptop that "grows" into a tall portrait-style display then shrinks back to landscape shape for closing and carrying? You still get the width that you normally get with any laptop, but now can see much more of a document or web page without scrolling. As screens get wider, so web pages add more unscrollable shit to the top and bottom of sites meaning we view the page through a narrow letterbox, especially on average laptops.

The prototypes and early production foldables show some promise and are giving the designers and engineers some real world experience of the problems. They will probably overcome them eventually.

Bob Newhart had a few points to make about marketing early inventions and prototypes.

Re: Particularly idiotic

"you need to look at Liz Truss's Government."

Update alert <sound of sirens and GIF of flashing lights>

She resigned! It'll be someone elses government within a week.

Re: To be fair

There's nothing inherently wrong with embedding executable code in web pages or documents. Allowing them access out of the running application and into the OS and the general file system is the problem.

Re: Moon drifting?

Most SF set in the "near future" (say 40+ years as a random benchmark) gets most of it wrong. But if if it's a good story, not only does that not matter, but we will always remember the bits it did get right and laud the author as prophet :-)

Re: This must be incredibly difficult

I wonder what evidence future archaeologists would find of human civilisation 65 millions after another "dinosaur killer"? Especially if it had arrived and wiped us out before we started making artificial materials other than mining and smelting ores, say pre-Bakelite? Remember, it's not just weather, earthquake and volcanos that might hide the evidence. Entire continents will shift in that time.

Re: This must be incredibly difficult

"...even if travelling at the speed of light. (ref: "Just 13.8 billion years after the hot Big Bang, we can see 46.1 billion light-years away in all directions.")."

That's the sort of thing that makes it hard to get your head around!! If the "Universe" started with the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, even if it 's expanding at the speed of light, then it should only be, at most 27.6 Billion light years across. Of course, it's "space" that is expanding, not the contents of space moving at the speed. Which is even more brain hurting for me. This is why I'm in IT and not a world renowned cosmologist :-)

Re: The most useless metric ever: from 0 to 100 in xx seconds

"but it being 0.1 sec faster than another car is not going to make me buy it."

No, but other factors might. That acceleration factor is just one factor and it's aimed at the people who like that sort of thing. The boy racers and EV equivalent of petrol-heads :-)

Same applies to the top speed. You want something in reserve so you're not maxing it out at 7mph on the motorway.

Having said that, I'm not sure if the extra oomf matters so much with EVs as it does with ICE cars.

The big and unique thing about Arecibo seems to be the powerful radar facility. That might be a bit more difficult to run on a remote space based jobbie. I've no idea how much power Arecibo can put out, but if they are using to to look at the surface of Venus and Mercury, I'd imagine it's quite a lot. I suspect solar cells won't cut it for sustained operation.

I just watched #4 on Netflix a week or so back. The Silent Sea, a dubbed Korean SF drama.

That's not just a public sector disease. See also any new building put up in the last 100 years or so. Most are already gone and any new ones will likely not "live" past 30 or 40 years at best before being replaced. Things are not built to last because they know there won't be a maintenance budget. Maintenance, repairs and upgrades attract VAT on materiels. New builds don't so it's often more attractive financially to pull an "old" building down and quickly put up a new one on the cheap.

Part of the reason for a whole new line instead of an upgrade to an existing line is the network in the relevant areas is almost or already at capacity, which is a major part of the problems elsewhere on the network. A major network repair programme across the entire UK would also be a good thing but would not increase capacity by much, just make what is already there more reliable.

Re: Starting with a lie

While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think it was Hunt who gave it away "a few weeks ago" when he was a mere backbencher.

Re: This should make people happy

"she backed down"

Because the real policy makers are the "markets". Because the "markets" disagreed with her unconventional choices, government bonds and the £ devalued. This morning, even before Hunt made his announcements, both had recovered because the "market" expected more conventional policies to be applied. Note. Expected. The markets demonstrated that if thew government follows the market approved policies, then the £ and bond values will be safer.

Nice economy you got there mate. Be a shame if something happened to it.