cjsuk

You can make your own sounds if you want :)

Or winners who got out before the losers.

No because that would require some form of energy transfer. To observe the state of the system you have to take energy from it. I suspect your very presence would likely be a big contributor to this not working to start with too.

Disclaimer: I am not a physicist; merely an engineer.

No BitTorrent clients in the App Store either. So I have to watch everything on openload instead.

I go to sleep at 00:00 and wake up at 07:30 so that makes me rather happy :)

That's why you need multiple layers of protection:

seller -> paypal -> card company -> real money

Paypal offers one extra thing over the top, which is the ability to easily get your money back if the seller screws up.

I use this a lot with sellers in the UK. If you ask them directly for a refund because they forget something or sent you crap (dominos are good at this), it is like getting blood out of a stone. Even being polite, some people will just jam the phone down and tell you to fuck off.

If you pay with paypal, they usually don't even respond and the money just gets returned after 2 weeks by default with paypal. If they do respond they usually just refund a portion anyway.

So what you're getting on top is arbitration.

If you use your credit card, you're pretty screwed here in the UK unless the amount is over £100.

Those are likely pretty trivial boards which you place parts yourself. I do that at home with crap equipment. It's not quite as easy if you have to have someone to place parts for you, which is required without significant investment if you are placing BGA / 0201 / 0402 packages reliably etc.

I’d like to see that but I think the turnaround and unpredictability of third parties adds a lot of risk to a product development cycle. If you look at lead times for PCBs and population for example it can be a 30 day turnaround minimum for every cock up you make on a prototype. During that time your engineers may be dead in the water. To get around that you can pay a 20x premium to have your boards shipped fast. Two iterations will pay for a pick and place machine and a basic PCB fab environment and fill the boards yourself. You should already have the rework tools in house. Same with plastics where a 3d printer will get you close enough to get the production tooling done.

The big issue is really setting up manufacturing and supply chain on a large scale when you do get it working.

Ignoring the obvious welfare complaint, which I incidentally agree with, it paints a pretty good picture of all the health and social problems leading up to this situation for a lot of people. It also shows how the health of the previous generation can cause havoc on the current generation, a problem which I'm dealing with now.

If we improve physical and mental health over the next couple of generations I think there will be a massive shift away from this failure mode. The problem is that those services are being cut as is the education that supports them. So we're screwed.

Also a 4 year cycle on government before someone comes and erases progress or long term goals instantly and just burns a mountain of cash doesn't work either.

Indeed. When A is shit and B is shit then the result of your A/B testing is going to be the least shit of the two. At the end of the day it's going to be shit either way.

I'm a firm believer that you should never ask your user to make a decision or look over their shoulder. Not once ever. You should listen to their complaints and ideas when they come to you, then build your strategy on that. Be reactive, not prescriptive. That empowers the user, shows respect and results in a satisfactory product that benefits the user which after all is the end game.

Telemetry invades the user's privacy. Feedback does not empower the user because the user expects a reaction from it which is unlikely. A/B testing results in churn for the user which does not show respect, merely that they are a test subject.

Microsoft as a fine example could learn a lot from listening to their users rather than steamroll ahead based on collected telemetry and feedback data.

A fine example: People didn't want UWP/metro and still don't today. I have yet to meet one person who uses that side of windows 10. They wanted shit that worked, was faster and kept out of their way and didn't wreck the workflow that they had invested years in learning or had someone experienced close at hand to help them with it. 90% of the userbase just installs chrome and does everything in there as well so that stuff just gets in the way.

Not what I wanted to wake up to this morning. I suspect we’re in for a rough ride for a long time thanks to this mess.

Data modes and CW are there for us unsociable individuals :)

It's the same in the UK with RSGB. Very easy.

Yep you don’t need a lot of watts either. You can get a long way on 5W.

We’re on a solar cycle minima at the moment which slightly ruins ionospheric propagation on HF which is the least “line of sight” set of bands. However it’s on the up again so in a year or so expect 1000km regularly.

I regularly hear East European stations here in London, UK with a random length bit of wire strung off a home made 40m receiver and into a tree though. Noise here is terrible so I have had to use very heavy narrow bandwidth audio and IF filtering.

If you want long distance, be prepared to use very narrow bandwidth i.e. learn CW though (its not that hard although I have trouble copying some of the faster stations).

Have a look at amateur radio and satellite operations as a whole. You can, with some persistence and brains have a chat with someone a vast distance away via satellite repeater with nothing but a cheap handheld radio.

I’ve only managed to receive so far due to a cruddy antenna but that was with a $30 Baofeng radio from Amazon.

Note: you need a license but it’s pretty easy to get, at least in the UK and you learn a lot while getting it. It also tends to cost you a lot of money in the end because it’s really interesting :)

I did this as well for a bit. You get to the point when carrots, tomatoes and potatoes taste incredibly sweet and broccoli, if not murdered, tastes marvellous. I ended up growing a load of things.

Then there was a relapse :(

Yes indeed. These were perfectly good ones but the furniture salvage people locally didn’t want them and no one came on gumtree or freecycle :(

Where I live in the UK we just put the clothes in a bag next to the recycling containers and they get taken away.

They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc

In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)

Duke Nukem Forever for example

MSFT got into the office.

Starbucks street cred.

It annoys me that mine lights up like a Christmas tree.

I managed to break my 2013 15” retina MacBook Pro a couple of days ago. It slid off my lap and down my legs and gently hit the floor from about 6 inches up. This managed to critically deform the lid and pop the screen. This in itself is a big WTF.

However, I spent the entire hour following this event being annoyed not because of what I had done to it but because I wasn’t actually annoyed. I was annoyed at myself for not being annoyed.

The I realised why: I know there was no path forwards because the current line is crap. I’ve been putting off thinking about it and dealing with the “what happens next” question.

What happened next was dragging an old i5 Thinkpad T440 out of the cupboard and firing windows 10 up on it.

Got to be honest. The keyboard is better, the thing is a ton more productive, it’s faster (!) to get anywhere and I had forgotten how much stuff I have in muscle memory which doesn’t require hypermobile fingers doing twisted fucked up devils chords on different meta keys to run the entire machine off the keyboard. Plus if you drop it, it still works. The trackpad is crap though (meh, use a mouse) and the screen is crap (meh).

Turns out the only good bits on the MBP were the screen and the trackpad. The screen is extremely fragile though.

The whole machine cost less than a recycled screen for a 2013 MBP and gets in the way less.

Glad to hear it. I’m scouting for one on eBay now :)

The early ARM machines didn’t really make it out of the U.K. I had some early Acorn/ARM stuff in 1988. It was by far the most advanced bit of kit at the time. Literally smoked everything and did so for a number of years afterwards.

Example: 1987 graphics demo: https://youtu.be/653Ger80ros

They even did a line of unix workstations!

Nice video on the matter here from 1987: https://youtu.be/hrj-EEnsacQ

Now that’s what I come here for. I had a Master with 65C102 coprocessor (internal one) and I still claim to this day that it was the finest machine I have ever used. Rather cool what you can achieve with the tube even to this day.

Yes but do you stick them to the front of your car?

This sounds expensive and unreliable and will just result in very expensive headlight assemblies that have to be replaced entirely. Also inability to get the parts to fix them a decade down the line.

This is already a problem with some vehicles with relatively simple lamp assemblies.

Couldn't agree more.

Now people will have to start delivering value instead of clicks and content will be worth what it's worth rather than the advertising leverage.

This should remove a lot of pointless mind consuming junk as economically not viable.