Clive Feather

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  If not ... there'll be a New Management cameo in which fearless journalists from the Daily Express get their hands on a GRAVEDUST machine and try to use it to interview the ghost of Diana, Princess of Wales (because they...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Napoleonic planning: if I recall correctly, Napoleon ordered trees to be planted along the sides of roads to provide shade for marching soldiers. "But it will take 20 years" "Then you'd better get started immediately." Railway signalling: I hope OGH...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Didn't most of the Alfar get sent off to fight ISIS? Or am I confusing a proposal with fact? Argh: not the Strategic Reserve....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Looking forward to the amusement when an Australian agent in Canada tries to follow up a request from the CIA and gets it horribly wrong due to a cultural misunderstanding ("you say trojan, we say, where's the horse?"). "Thong" is...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Related to that, I miss Angleton (I, too, went to Public School). George in Season of Skulls seems a nicer person than he ended up; could he be rehabilitated somehow? Or is it too late? Beyond that, I'll have to...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I'm pretty sure that, in Paris, "pneu" trains can run on conventional lines and vice versa, though it's possible they might need to be towed or have different shoegear fitted. Line 1 connects to 2 at Etoile. 4 and 6...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Pigeon: you're comparing a Paris system bogie with Lille system track. They don't work the same way. That Lille one looks more like a guide rail (perhaps with a vertical pole sliding through the gaps) than traditional trackwork....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Only a few of the Paris Metro lines use rubber tyres; the majority still use standard steel wheels on rails. Of the 16 current lines, only 1, 4, 6, 11, and 14 use rubber tyres. The "pneu" lines have ordinary...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Elderly Cynic: 1226: No, that's not it. I was involved in both the original project that introduced the concept and C99. Were you part of WG14 when I was? I can't figure out who you are, if so. (You can...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  1170 Non-ASCII characters in program text are evil, and I'm used to them also being illegal; I deplore the alteration in the C standard that now allows them. A very naïve point of view. Why can't my colleagues use words...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  1133: I spent a decade in the 70s and 80s looking at displays. Trying to find better/cheaper. 24/25x80 ruled 99% of the world back then. At least in countries with Latin lettering. In the 1980s anything based on the BBC...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  1090: I can't think of anywhere in C (except quoted strings and character constants, of course) where spaces and tabs are treated differently. Having said that, my experience is in C90 and C99; they may have done something stupid after...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  I'd say a mixture of training and practical experience (to test out the training) is optimal. If you only ever train you don't find the things that the trainers didn't teach you or have changed since the training was...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  But, since you ask for an alternative explanation of the cosmic background radiation, here is one that I have posted before. No, I don't believe it, but it's a good way to make physicists splutter :-) The red shift...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  842: yes, I was a senior manager at Demon Internet when we negotiated the first unlimited call length tariff with BT (okay, only from 00:00 to 06:00, but ...). A short while later they told us at a meeting that...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  As a friend of mine - a geology professor - once said: "never buy a house on Dry Creek Road"....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  775: It was years before modems were a thing most people knew existed that you could buy. Hell, you couldn't even legally plug one into the phone line before 1984. Sorry, Charlie, but in 1982 Torch Computers were selling a...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  721 #733 I didn't get the chance to check last night. I didn't remember the newspad from the film, but the one that's shown in the IBM link is consistent with my memory of the book - you typed in...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  658: from memory, though I may dig it out tonight, 2001 (the book, not the film) had something called a "newspad" which sounds very like a tablet - there was a home page full of headlines and you tapped on...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  The planet of all women was Lyrane. More precisely, the males were about one in a hundred and were kept out of the way - all they could do was fight and breed....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Happy anniversaries, Feorag and Charlie. 120: I recall my boss once complaining, during a trip to our Amsterdam office, "how come these things weigh 80 tonnes and run on rails, but they still manage to sneak up on you without...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  136: a load of nonsense. How are you going to segregate smokers in a class 153 (clue: only one carriage) or a 700 (clue: no doorways between the carriages)? Opening windows were removed because, among other things, they affect the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  134: from pTerry's biography: "is that the cost of the tickets or the cost of the plane"? As well as private carriages, you could hire a "special" train - loco and one carriage - to take you wherever you wanted....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  You would think that the rail roads would take some ideas and equipment from the airline industry. Why does everyone assume they don't? Every time the airline people try to show they can do better, it doesn't end well. I...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  A first-class rail ticket cost about the same as a cheap stagecoach one I haven't checked but that wouldn't surprise me. In London, we now think of buses as the cheaper option compared with the UndergrounD, but the early tube...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Some trains in the UK were still dumping the toilets on to the track as late as the start of the Covid lockdown. At that time the prediction to finish fitting retention tanks or withdrawing the trains was the end...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  If you look at maps of older US towns, especially between the Rockies and Appalachians, you'll see most are about 20 miles apart. So farmers could get to them and back in a single day. Isn't that why those states...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  Reminds me of a story I read, possibly apochryphal, of a gentleman who was found unconscious in the south of England towards the end of last century. ... And, crossing the threads, this is why people from Hartlepool are known...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  I'll admit I had to look this up, but third class carriages with roofs and windows, not open sides, only became a requirement under the Railway Regulation Act 1844. This is the Act that created "Parliamentary Trains". The requirement was...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  The 3 or 10 mile rules applied to ordinary people who were working in a location (mostly on the land), and is what people could do without giving up their jobs. In English law, the operator of a statutory market...