timrowledge

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• Commented on Announcement time!
  " A lot of the "boomers can't handle tech" issue" Say what? A very substantial fraction of the technology in use today was invented by boomers. And another substantial fraction was invented by people very near retirement age (like, for...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  I wasn’t suggesting anything more than the idea that you might find some useful info about dealing with assorted widgets that want their own apps, from an old geezer that has been doing something about it. Your choice. And #438...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Given your original list, I was a little surprised to not see Mike Oldfield included. And in quite different tastes, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time listening to Abbey Park and Steam Powered Giraffe, and Professor Elemental,...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Good grief. Just go to , for example, https://tech.scargill.net/ and read a little about one old geezer deals with this. Tasmotise everything!...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  Ha - I was just about to post that Grauniad article too. Mind you, if they actually build a mile and a half or so of it, it will be an interesting experiment in construction. And coincidentally I just read...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  If I have a planet sized object zipping around in order to change the orientation of another planet, then you’d better believe I care about the eventual orbit of the zippier-planet. I really don’t want it looping around to reappear...
• Commented on Announcement time!
  This is a horrible shortlist to have to choose from because it includes 4 people I kinda know, two of which I’d consider near-friends....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Twenty-ish years ago when I was doing a little work with Amory Lovins (www.rmi.org) he pointed out that a better name would be “global weirding”. Seems to me he was on point. And as for giant blades, it’s obvious that...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Wait - we’re going to allow mere reality to interfere with a good pun? Shame, Sir - shame I say....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  As I mentioned in another forum a week or two ago; they had “blade runner” right there, waiting eagerly for a chance. What a lack of imagination . :-(...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  “Government-run healthcare with half the cost and better outcomes than in the U.S., with every citizen who pays their taxes being covered” I’m fairly sure that the “who pays their taxes” is not part of the deal in general. More...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Well, single-sex school life is sub-optim. Mine (the aforementioned Poole Grammar) was single-sex but the girls Grammar was just a couple of miles away. And in a modest sized town we didn’t only mix with people from the same sc....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Hi, almost ex-neighbour! Yup, Poole, 73 to 78, good(ish) ol’Poole Grammar. Next you’ll be telling me you did ballet at Mm. Murilova, though I don’t remember a Maddy. Ah, I wasn’t a dancer, stage manager & scenery....
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  “ basically everyone would have "dated" (the visitor's term) well before they even got to university,” Well I can’t think of anyone in my then social group (the not very popular but actually fairly smart nerds in coastal Dorset) that...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Three of the most common and important things we keep on computer systems are names, addresses and date/times. And what are some of the most difficult to handle things? Yes... I have a colleague originally from Morocco who explained that...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Since the headmaster of the primary school I attended (in Kent, circa mid-60s) was the author of one of the standard textbooks for teaching cursive (we knew it as ‘italic’) writing, yes, we learned it. Interestingly he was also left-handed,...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  Zoë on Sluggy (https://sluggy.com/#2024-03-05) gets it right - ChatPCP....
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  The Mac pro is a quite nice desktop, not a big server. Couple of years ago ARM actual servers like Graviton 3 etc were including 120 cores and supporting 4Tb ram. They’ll all hop and skip across each other until...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  Yup, ARM64/v8-9 is utterly different to armv7 and predecessor processors. And certainly Apple had a lot of input because they have very nearly as long association with ARM as I do. Newton was the impetus for the ‘interesting’ ARM610 ,...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  Ok, so you don’t like ARM, I don’t like intel; there’s really nothing more to say....
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  “intent upon rolling back civilization to the bad ol' days of feudalism.” Oh, they’re not aiming at feudalism - there’s far too much of that reciprocal duty thing involved. Simple total enslavement is the fantasy. It’s time for Soylent Gold...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  ARM have never made chips. It was a deliberate and arguably brilliant decision right back in the mid 80s when it all started. Pretty much everybody makes ARM chips in some form - a long time ago it was an...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  “One such source of inefficiency is the x86 instruction set, which is a fucking mess, and only gets worse with every addition to it.” Well, yes, which is why I consider the x86 to be a waste of perfectly good...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  The standard solution here for rural use is a pressure tank (ours is about 20gall?) that the well can fill at its leisure. Our well pump sends us water at about 70psi (up 35 ft, along 250ft, under the road,...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  My favourite on that subject is Harry Turtledove’s “Ruled Britannia “ where play stops reign....
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  Let us not forget the prop.13 warning that “Hey ya’ll, watch this!” Is known to the State of California to be dangerous to your health And per Charlie at #359, remember it must also include sharks with Frikken brand lasers...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  “and if we did, we sure as shit wouldn't wire up our own electrically powered petrol pump. The risk of something going BANG very energetically is a slight deterrent” Err, Charlie, you have met humans, right? Admittedly in my very...
• Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
  “Think of it as patriotism: my country is the best country no matter what.” - that would be more what I’d bind to Chauvinism in the original form. The whole “my country is the best simply because it is my...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  “Not one of you has even suggested the idea of kids pulling the charger out of your car” Pretty sure that’s because they lock, to prevent exactly that. As for people cutting the cable.. I dunno, maybe gin up some...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
  I live in BC, where BC Hydro - so called because virtually all our power is hydroelectricity, duh - charges an average (given my domestic, non-time specific) of about 11c/kWh. That works out around 7p I think right now. I...