Posts by Tim99

Re: Proof this was long planned

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” - Attributed to Mike Tyson and others.

Thanks, I deliberately gave a factual post without any personal opinion. I can be quite busy with my own moral compass, yet alone others :-)

Re: Back to the Future!

By about 1984 NetWare 68/S-Net was around with a proprietary box linking CP/M and early IBM DOS PCs. We had a few up and running for WP with diskless or floppy workstations. A couple of years later the Ethernet base Netware 86 series were everywhere in our organization. By the time I left, in the early 90's, we had 10's of thousands of NetWare "seats" connected to many 386/486 networks. It was particularly useful for connecting disparate kit together (*NIX, PDP/VAX/DG etc.). If there was no approved drivers, our lowest common denominator was a PC running a terminal emulator, where we could copy-paste/scrape/save the screen and then transfer it. We did have some other networks like MS/IBM PC/LAN Manager, DECnet, 3COM etc., but they were all replaced by NetWare.

Re: Guest Experience

It's been a long time since I have been there but the Bakewell Tart Shop was worth a visit too. Not as fancy (the shop too), and somewhat different to the pudding - Go to one for a sit down snack, and then try the other for a take-away?

Re: Tech's Ass

Did you mean recently, the US? Here, older migrants are mostly from the UK, Italy, and Ireland, with some from the US - well who could blame them :-)

For the last year, the top five are: UK (recently overtaking India that was first); India; New Zealand; The Philippines; and "The Rest of Australia". About 70% of foreign migrants are assessed as "Skilled".

The data that I could find for South Africa, finished in 2021, includes everyone who was alive then: England; New Zealand; India; *South Africa*; Phillipines; Malaysia; China; Scotland; Ireland; and Italy.

Most Italians came after WW2, particularly working in agriculture and fishing. When I first arrived many lived in Fremantle, a walk down the main street looked a lot like an Italian fishing town, with old men in dark suites and hats sitting outside drinking coffee. Where I first lived was called "Pom City" because the majority of the population had come from the UK (particularly in the 50s and 60s), mostly to build the steel works, oil refinery, and minerals processing plants.

The vast majority of the more recent South African population are skilled migrants (particularly in the mining industry). I personally don't know any SA farmers, but I do know a couple of accountants...

About 1 in 3 of us were born overseas and about 1.4% from South Africa. The UK English "born overseas" population is ~16% (roughly 11 million?) of which about 1.9% were born in South Africa. 30 years ago, a local politician was quoted as saying that we had migrants from everywhere in the world, "Except Eskimos" - the next week, there was a letter from somebody saying that he had gone to Canada, married an Inuit, and they both now lived here.

Re: The almighty dollar

It has been suggested that if you are a horrible leader of a country that has oil, the US doesn't have a particular problem with you being horrible - like exporting weapons to "freedom fighters", or invading a smaller country to grab its resources. The only crime is asking for payment in Euros, or bartering for food, services, etc. (from countries other than the US?) rather than the Petrodollar. Some even suggest that the Petrodollar is the only thing holding up the US...

Re: "weapons of mass stupidity" ✓

No longer use an email server, but do play around with 16GB Pis for SQLite/web servers. Often with an SSD; but, perhaps surprisingly, for applications that are mostly reads a μSD may well be OK.

The days of reputable cards randomly killing themselves seem to be over. I suspect that a lot of reliability problems come from overheating and mishandling. The increasing use of microSD cards in surveillance cameras has driven a lot of R&D in this area.

A standard microSD card was typically rated at 100 cycles (a 128GB card rated to record 12.8TB). Now, 300+ cycles is normal (nearly 40TB). One of my Pi5's with a 256GB microSD shows a usage of <4GB a day, indicating a mean expected life of >50 years (possibly closer to 10?!). For critical information I use an "extended life" microSD which are rated at 10 times this . A very rough calculation for a 1080 recording rate of 8GB/hr indicates that a microSD 256GB card has a lifetime of ~76,000 hours or over 8 years. In the last 5 years I have had failures of 1 SSD (1GB), 4 different USB thumb drives, 1 old HDD (500MB), but no microSD cards. As a result, I tend to use them as small portable backups. I run my Pis from a small UPS which probably helps.

Typical speeds with the Pi 5 are: μSD CommandQue - Read 92 MB/s, Write 70 MB/s; USB3.0 SSD - Read 430 MB/s, Write 320 MB/s; M2 pcie Gen2 - Read 453 MB/s, Write 414 MB/s; M2 pcie Gen3 - Read 887 MB/s, Write 749 MB/s. Extended life cards (no CommandQue) μSD write speeds are slower at ~55 MB/s, but similar reads at ~88 MB/s. A viable system is to boot from a μSD, but use an external SSD for write-intensive operations.

Re: Delete

Generally, I avoid deleting. My current mail system has a folder called 'ArchivedSent' containing emails going back to March 2005. The performance is still good - searching for a person's first name found 272 messages, several going back to 2005, and took about 1 second. In all there are just over 41,500 messages in 31 local folders, occupying a total of 4.43 GB - No, I don't use MS Exchange or Outlook...

Re: Complete nonsense

The old trick was to use a soft pencil or crayon to put a shallow diagonal line on one side of the deck. If you dropped them, it was fairly easy to stack them back in order. When I started, we didn’t use punched cards. If you stuffed up (and I did, regularly) the card was binned - We used optical card readers that looked for oblongs that had been filled in with a soft pencil, errors could be rectified with an eraser and the cards used again. When I finally got something to work, I was allowed to transfer it to punched tape…

Re: Profits? We don't need no stinking net profits

Privatise the profits, socialise the cost?

Re: Its why

It may have other issues, but the Duck Player in DDG seems to cut adverts without slowing down.

Gunpowder was very probably made the mid to late 900s (Tang Dynasty, China). Whist the invention of nitroglycerine (Propane-1,2,3-triyl trinitrate) is attributed to Sobrero, its transportation, storage and use were extremely hazardous. It was sometimes mixed 1:10 with gunpowder in an effort to stabilise it and increase explosive brisance, but was still extremely hazardous. It was not until the mid-late 1860s that "safer" formulations, like Nobels' Kieselguhr adsorbent dynamite were used.

I saw the stools at my first "proper" job in the early 1970s. The site was a relative latecomer, only having started making explosives in 1665. It was "nationalised" in 1787 to gain access to a better supply of (superior?) product after the government purchased the Faversham mills in 1759; and decommissioned in the 1990s. It's now a scheduled monument, an SSSI, and part of European Route of Industrial Heritage: Royal Gunpowder Mills. Well worth a day trip, particularly with children.

These days, much of the products that used nitroglycerine have safer alternatives - e.g. replacement of nitroglycerine with generic organic plasticisers added to nitrocellulose in ammunition propellant (single-base vs. double-base propellant).

One-legged stools were also used by milkmaids, often strapped to them; and there are indications that they were also used in general work, particularly manufacturing (including gunpowder).

Re: Reality check?

Or going back further, A raspberry Pi Zero with 2W >1000 times more powerful than a VAX 750 from the 1980s that required its own >kW power supplies?

Re: LOL

"when the whole thing catches fire, falls over and sinks into a swamp". Then nuke it from orbit, just to be really sure?

Yes, the idea was that steel and coal were essential for armament production. If they were controlled and integrated it would be almost impossible for the European members to go to war with one another. Churchill was a supporter, but did not want the UK included.

Re: Amazon are absolute bastards - I would never work for them

I ran a technical business for some bankers. I wanted to automate a piece of equipment to double throughput of one of our most profitable products. The cost was above my signing limit, so I approached my boss, the MD. The conversation went along these lines:-

MD: Put on a second shift... Me: I can't find enough good staff to fully cover one shift. If someone takes holiday or is sick, we struggle and don't make as much money. The new equipment gives us flexibility to cover that.

MD: What's the buy-back... Me: About three months; working flat out, it should last >6 years. The initial cost is about the same as one employee. After six months, it is free money.

MD: OK, go ahead, I'll keep an eye on the P/L; but remember we can always lay off staff, but not capital equipment... Me: (Thinks silently) - I *will* remember that.

---

When I was the MD in a successful business we set up, that might be why we said: "No employees, everyone is a Director; you get paid based on what you bring in, and we look after our own paperwork/admin".

Re: Taking the piss ?

...Are melted into air, into thin air | And like the baseless fabric of this vision... Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve... Leave not a rack behind... such stuff | As dreams are made on... I am vexed. Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled. (The Tempest)

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow | Creeps in this petty pace from day to day | To the last syllable of recorded time... And then is heard no more. It is a tale | Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. (Macbeth)

One can always find something apposite in Shakespeare?

Re: Oracle's recent approach merits a response.

...A change, it had to come... And the world looks just the same... Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss?

Re: Here are some numbers for the Pi

Like it, have an upvote, but no decimal place?

The constant π is an irrational, infinite number - it contains all the numbers that were, are, or could be.

Including the extended series that you posted...