Posts by phy445

Psion's vu-calc anyone?

Pretty sure this was one of the programmes from the launch of the ZX-spectrum (1982?). I can vaguely remember trying it and thinking maybe that'll be useful when I'm a grown up and need to keep accounts...

Its complicated

My interpretation of LT's rant is that comments should be as short and clear as possible. Getting tied up in worrying about passive vs negative is a distraction.

A pretty deep level on the passive clause is given here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2922. The author of that literally wrote the book on English grammar. I suspect most readers will be surprised by just how much there is to it.

3hrs travel?

Three hours travel time in Cornwall in August - so Doug was based in Devon then?

Even name + DoB is not enough

My daughter had issues with the SLC because there was another person with the same name and date of birth.

Given the obscene interest rates they charge you'd have hoped some went on decent system design

I Was Made for Dancin...

At the risk of revealing how ancient I am, this story prompted me to find out whatever happened to Leif Garret? His picture on his wikipedia page indicates that the gods have not smiled upon him...

Trashy comment

Back in the early nineties Macs had a Trashcan rather than a Bin on the desktop - I believe the Bin came along with OS X.

I remember this because I worked out how to change the menu item to empty said space from "Empty Trashcan" to "Delete Thesis" on the lab Mac that several of us PhD students used to write up our magnum opera (Google says this is the correct plural, so it must be so). This made several people very nervous

In the spirit of the story...

Google Translate came up with: Leave all hope, you who enter

Whilst Bing mangled things into: Leave every hope, you who entertain

For British English Deepl managed to get: Abandon all hope, ye who enter in

For US English Deepl went with: Leave ogne hope, ye who enter in

C/P from PDFs can be interesting...

On a data analysis course I teach on, we had several students that copy/pasted example python code from the notes to find that it would not run. It looked OK and the original code had been checked so it was a bit of a mystery.

It turned out that typing over the problem lines with seemingly identical text made the problems go away. My conclusion was that the PDF rendering had (presumably unicode) characters that pyCharm (students' development environment of choice) did not display but the python system could see and took exception too.

Re the dig at the security bods

Those security people were just doing their job. Imagine hosting servers for multiple companies on a system and allowing anyone with admin access for one company's server unmonitored access to all the servers...

Nice work

Nice work, it brings back memories from my PhD days–different materials similar applications. At a quick glance it does look as though the system looked at could be useful for ultrafast optical switching and/or optical computing. It will interesting to see if/how this develops.

Minor niggle on the reporting: it is not apathy that has prevented the production of silicon lasers, LEDs etc. Rather it is the laws of physics – insert Star Trek quote here...–Silicon is an indirect band gap material and it will always be terrible (effectively useless) at emitting light.

The illusion of real time

A good example of how we delude ourselves that we work in real time. In reality the brain issues commands via the nervous system and although we think we move in instantaneous response to said commands the reality is that it takes time for these things to happen and once the commands are issued it is hard to stop them. We rarely come up against this view of "reality" being tested.

What I find really remarkable is that the illusion is so complete we can compensate for it near instantaneously and work out how to catch a ball, or play music together etc

Geeks discussion point

Is the point about PCs being successful because geeks got into them first and the world followed correct?

To my mind PCs form part of the office automation process: pre WWII there were electromechanical adder-upper beasts, then main frames came along, then smaller office computers, and finally we got to the PC which put a computer on a desk.

I can see that there is some case to be made based on the development of the microprocessor based home computers which were uber-geeky in the mid seventies, and may have helped drive expectations, but I contend it is the office automation process that is the important factor. Geeks or no geeks we would have had a variation on the PC.

Discuss...

Sinclair mouse would have worked

IIRC Sinclair had a plan for a "mouse" that was essentially a joystick without a stick. It had a pad that you tilted to move the pointer. I don't think it ever went into production for some reason...

Not what I'd write...

Given I'm from the generation that took great joy from getting the ZX Spectrums, Acorn Electrons, (even a Jupiter Ace), in WH Smiths* to write something rude on an infinite loop then "Hello world" is not what I would have written into that DNA.

*other clueless vendors of computers are available

No cats but...

In my unofficial IT "expert" role I was once asked to look at the computer of a friend of the Significant Other – said computer was running very slowly and randomly restarting. I expected it to be full of dodgy DLLs and the like and to have to have a discrete word about browsing habits with the hubby of said friend. Instead it turned out that the computer which was kept on the floor had sucked in so many carpet fibres that the components on the motherboard weren't even visible.

The games console model

Isn't what Apple are doing essentially the same as Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo do with their games consoles? A lot of people like this approach – a machine you can just turn on and it does pretty much what you expect and you will probably want to upgrade to a new model every 3-5 years. Come to think of it, that sounds like most consumer products from cookers through to large format TVs. Its almost as though Apple want to appeal to consumers...

Nice, but the problem still stands

This is nice work, it gives useable results in a few days rather than a few decades - which is super, but it doesn't really solve the protein folding problem. Its a black box that gives a pretty good stab at structure of the proteins.

What biophysics has been trying to work out it how do the proteins fold so quickly (and so reliably)? They form those structures that have been splashed all over the articles on this system way to fast – this is the protein folding problem. Solve this and you will be the next Watson and Crick (hopefully without all the racism, etc.).

Nearly got away with it

I once got sign off for a website with the grand title: Polymer Engineering Near Interfaces & Surfaces

The only thing that stymied me was that the IT team who set these things up used a site’s initials for the home folder name on their system...

Couldn't happen now?

I'd like to think that HMG had learned from issues like this over the years. This weekend's IT 'glitch' hints at this not been the case

Windows boot power draw?

So Windows takes more power to boot than Linux? Why is this?

Genuine question.

Not a script but...

A long, long time ago in an East London outpost of the University of London I took a Fortran 77 module (course). The computers used were BBC Micros with 32 bit coprocessor attached via the Tube (interface, not the mass transport system or TV show). It ran a multiuser system with some sort of per user access privileges. One day I noticed that someone who should have know better had left without logging out–or rebooting, which was the quicker option in those days of ROM based OS's. I couldn't resist "playing" with the higher access privileges...after a bit of tinkering I discovered "add student" did what you might expect and a couple of "test" users with mature, innuendo free, names such as Ivor Biggun were added. At the end of the session I decided to undo my actions and tried "delete student" unfortunately it turned out that this deleted the login credentials of students. Queue swift exit...

Not so much a "Who, me?" as a "Who, you?"

See title

At the higher education where I spent the early nineties nearly all of the Macs (SE/30s and the like) had neat craters a couple of centimetres in diameter burnt into their tops. It took me a while to realise that these were not some eccentric security marking - rather they were caused by angle-poise lamps sagging down so that the hot bulbs touched the cases of the computers...

Had one and hated it

I had one of those for a while – the main issue for me was that even light typing would cause a slight wobble of the monitor and it was just too distracting. I stuck with it for a couple of months but could not get used to it. In the the end I spent about £500 on a standing desk with a motor to do the lifting. This is much better – some colleagues have a manual raise version, but they struggle with the raising unless the weight is evenly distributed on the desk.

The advice on getting a standing mat is good. Until you are used to it, even standing on a carpeted floor is hard work.

Low quality coding

I had to write some quick and dirty, single use (after debugging), code that needed login credentials recently – I couldn't bring myself to hardwire in said credentials. You have to wonder what other corners were cut and whether poor quality code contributed to the downfall of the company...

10Base5

The first (and I think last) time I came across 10Base5 cable (the 0.5 inch coax) was in the mid-90's at a university that had committed to 10Base2 (the thin coax). In one physics lab a networked computer needed to be installed at the other side of the room from the 10B2 port and the total length of that 10B2 line was at the limit of the specification. The solution was a 10B2 to 10B5 converter then about 5m of the over-size coax to the AUI port on the computer.

Shortly after I arrived we rearranged the lab so the the computer was next to the 10B2 junction, but we had to carefully coil the thick coax as there was a multi-month lead time on cable changes. Not too much later 10BT came in and all was well with the world.

Desktop front-page should be three stories wide

The front page view appears to default to being four stories/boxes wide. I think this is slightly too wide to take in at one glance–especially if you prefer larger typeface sizes. Its a bit like the wide margins in LaTeX documents are disconcerting to someone used to Word documents, but once you get used to it, it is easier(quicker) to read as the eyes do not have to move back and forth as much.

Reliable Atari

It’s good to know the Atari brand has retained its air of incompetence that characterised it’s fall from grace in previous incarnations.