gerdesj

I do enjoy riding on double decker trains - as you say the view is amazing. We do have lots of double decker buses and a ride through the country at the front of the top deck is a delight.

I remember taking the bus from Plymouth to Millbrook (mid 1990s), which included a trip over the River Tamar on the ferry. I can't remember if it was one bus or two to get there and back.

One year I recall a harsh winter and icy roads. On one trip, I was sitting in one of the top front seats. It was early evening and I was heading home to Plymouth, idly watching the stiff, whitish countryside through the haze on the windows. The bus lost grip on a gentle incline and started to spin gently but, well, I nearly needed to change my trousers. We did a good two complete spins until a wheel hit a bank and we came to a halt facing mostly backwards. "Drives", made a polite announcement and reversed down to the bottom and then did a very gentle 10 point turn and cracked on.

Fair enough - we are missing out on some lovely views.

Another way to do it is exemplified here: https://www.gov.uk

A well thumbed discussion on how to discover information though menus and otherwise is here: https://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html

You will notice that GOV.UK has effectively decided to use all three models - GOPHER/WAIS/W3. I find that it is surprisingly quick to find stuff on GOV.UK.

"About you

We haven't saved anything yet. As you shop on Amazon or chat with Alexa, we'll save helpful information to personalise your experience.

Once we have saved some details, you can manage them here."

I've had that account since ... well, I can see orders back to 2011.

It's the width of a Roman Chariot - what's wrong with that 8) It was the first and that's the way it goes.

Not sure why you need a double decker train and I think you could if you really packed people in. You can just make them twice as long. Railways don't have the same constraints as nearly anything else.

I remember the carriages of the later half of C20 and each person had a huge amount of space. In one design you had a corridor running the length of the carriage with a series of bays with seating for up to four or five on each side, loads of leg room and a luggage rack above. Separate door to the platform for each bay. Obviously you had to puff furiously on your pipe or fags to fill the space with healthy smoke.

I ended up with two bridges in the final which is quite strange for the owner of an IT firm, but I did study Civ Eng, 27 years ago.

Your qualms are noted. I'm not sure what de-Google really means in the real world.

I have a Google user account from the days when you were invited to grab a whole GB of email storage. Its just an email address, just a service. They have a fully tooled up data set on me in return, to flog. I use it for testing. They make more money out of the relationship but I also find it useful in many ways so I keep it on.

If I wish to de-Google (whatever that means) I will stop using it.

I don't think you really understood your parent's comment.

"See Britain and trains."

There are quite a few confounding factors at play in Britain with regards trains. The UK is quite small and infrastructure like railways takes up space and competes with roads and so on. There is the need for bridges and tunnels to accommodate crossings with other methods of transport or itself or to traverse topography.

A first stab at really high speed rail here called APT Advanced Passenger Train involved engines and carriages that tilted. It seems that the journalists on the demo run were so pissed (drunk) that it was given horrific reviews and the idea was shelved. That might have been our really fast railway links.

We did get HST 125 (High Speed Train) which in the early '80s did look pretty fancy compared to the older blunt nosed locomotives that they replaced.

Is that what you meant?

What's weird about Warp?

Does it have to be a XP box or is just keeping a serial dialup connection working the key?

"Windows NT 4.0 machine running as late as 2007"

lol. I know a ... factory, that had a BBC model B (with a rather complicated wiring loom) still doing a job around that time.

The IT supplier at the same factory went to a museum in Cambs. around late '90s, early '00s to ask if they could buy an exhibit because something had failed locally. The museum gave them the part.

That was just aerospace and nothing fancy like your nuke plant!

Until recently several customers have an industrial machine that boots DOS. I think the oldest effort we deal with is Win XP now. I do have a C>64 at home ...

In a world that requires security audits etc here's some notes that might help:

Scenarios: You have a device that only talks NetBIOS or even NetBEUI for file sharing. You need to get files to and from it and your CAD workstations run Windows 11 and anything less than SMB 3, with signing and sealing and all that jazz is laughable.

... Devices requiring ftp, telnet, serial over carrier pidgeon

Solution options:

Networking: The first job is to segregate your industrial gear from your general network and you might want to create two or more industrial gear and internet of things type networks with differing access policies. Start with one for now, you can improve it later.

You use 801.1Q VLANS logically or physically (why the hell did I want to write literally?) separate via separate switches.

Please do not skimp on this step. Buy a network bod to sort it out or put your IT bod on a course or hopefully they will have labbed this up at home already!

Comms: Samba is bloody wonderful and speaks everything that MS has ever done and deprecated. Even Samba does need to be asked to start speaking some of those dialects again but it will.

Put a Linux (other Unices are available) box on the same VLAN as your machines. You will need to set quite a few options relating to the minimum version for its server version. When talking to the machines, Samba is the server and when talking to your file server, Samba is the client.

Create a data share on a Windows box on the corp LAN. For example it might be on a file server for multiple access or just a single CAD PC.

Get the Samba box to mount that share to itself at say /srv/data_share_mc1

Now get the Samba box to create a share from /srv/data_share_mc1 which it calls DAT_MC1 (8.3 chars for NetBIOS)

With luck, you should be able to map DAT_MC1 on your machine.

I had to traverse two symlinks to find it but the vim binary is 4.4MB in size here. It does link 13 libs including the mighty standard C library at 2.1MB.

I suppose I could crank out the compiler and create a stripped static binary for it. Nope, bugger that, I'll drink more wine instead.

My Commodore 64 is glaring at me 8)

Careful which Cambridge you are on about. I take you are referring to Cambridge MA, US and not Cambridge, Cambridgeshire off of England, UK.

I'll note that COVID-19 "broke out" in Wuhan a city which has a virology laboratory nearby - the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who perform research on viruses.

I'm sure that is completely incidental to the pandemic of 2020-21. Clearly, some rather nasty live food markets are to blame.

It wasn't your numpties wot did it then, it was another lot that time!

I'm old enough to remember newspaper articles with kerning like that.

I smoked for roughly 30 years and was not in very good shape when I gave up eight years ago - that improved rather a lot.

The problem is that nicotine is not the only addictive substance involved. If it was then you could chew gum, wear patches or whatever and off you go. There is an extremely complicated set of chemicals involved in fag smoke. There is also the habit effect and other complications.

In the end I think that boring old will power is the only way and any trick or tool or whatever that you can deploy to bolster that is how you give up.

My initial plan was to vape but I soon found that unsatisfying and it looked to me like trying to substitute one habit with another.

Once I started stopping, I didn't want to stop! It was extremely hard but I always reminded myself that I had got so far and that that time would be wasted if I had to start again. I followed doubled up time periods - one day, two days, 1/2 a week, a week, a fortnight, a month, two months ("cripes, this might work") and so on.

A mental tool I developed was a couple of mantras: "I don't want to smell" and "I don't want to die". Whenever I felt the cravings I repeated those to myself and I have no idea why but it did work for a while at a time. Gradually the need tailed off (say around two years)

I remember having quite vivid dreams where I would "crack" and start smoking again. I had to do quite a lot of mental verification to prove to myself that it was just a dream. At one point I even smelt my clothes to prove to myself it was all a dream.

We are all different and there is no right or wrong way to quit. One thing we can all agree on is it is hard, very hard but not impossible. Pick a strategy that might work for you and be prepared to change it but please do have a go. It really is worth it.

I'm 55 (UK) and recall the '70s. Loads of people were hardened chain smokers, including my Dad back then and on through to the early noughties. Chain smoking was not an exception at all but it was a dying habit and did trail away. I can remember filling cups with fags for parties to intersperse with the nibbles - you could reach for a handful of crisps or light up or both at the same time. They looked lovely next to the pineapple and cheese hedgehog (you'll have to look that one up!)

He'd go through something like 80 Embassy back then, a day. He gave up in 1984ish and is still trundling along. His Dad died at age 60 of lung cancer.

I gave up about eight years ago after 30 odd years at roughly 20 a day. I definitely did some damage and will eventually have to find out how much. I don't have a near permanent cough and at least five major bouts of 'flu per year anymore. I did have a short bout of Covid in 2021 and I suspect it might have been really nasty if I was still a smoker then.

Blimey: That's a lot of fiddling with letters!

English generally does not use formal sound change notation because the sound is already within the word when it is spoken, written or whatever.

My mother (born and died: Devon, England, UK, 1942-1997) could make herself sound almost incomprehensible to me, one of her own sons by speaking in the Devonian of her childhood.

Language is constantly moving and changing. You will almost certainly have your parents whining that you speak in ... tongues. When I say you ... I mean you!

"letters" for printing are just small metal blocks with the letter in reverse on them - a blacksmith and the up and coming new artisans could have put some together, with some effort.

The thing about the printing press is not the technology involved, which is pretty simple, it is the ideas involved. Once you have seen the process, it becomes obvious.

The press itself would have been imported, probably a bit more than once and then copied mercilessly.

I think that thorn's days were numbered already and y was simply used in print to save a couple of pennies.

Perhaps someone more invested in this would be able to look at the incidence of thorn in English handwritten text and printed text.

Another recent oddity is the letter r. My parents (so think born: early 1940s) were still writing r as a backwards and downwards curved squiggle, within a word. As a leading letter it would look like r or R.

For good measure, let's take a unique oddity: naïve - note the double dot over the i. It's a French word and let's face it, that thing is almost certainly a British affectation.

I own a copy of "Usage and abusage" and I probably ought to throw it into a fire 8)

Ye is really Þe (Þ = thorn) and it seems that printers, back in the day, used y instead, probably to save money. So it was probably considered old school when printing became popular and wasn't worth getting excited about.

Agricola means farmer in Latin, is that an incidental? You mention Lutherian, so perhaps an affectation.

English isn't the only language that uses the Roman alphabet (which I'm pretty sure is named after the first two Hebrew letters and not old Greek).

English is not Hungarian, where each sound has a glyph with a diacritic to adjust to taste (sorry: sound). Well, it sort of does and I recall a Hungarian telling me that. However, I recall noting street names in Budapest and asking about one or two and it turns out that spelling with adjustments (glyh plus diacritcs) breaks down a bit. I'm not enough of an expert but I suspect Hungarian is quite as mad as any other language, at the periphery.

Its also rather moot as to when "English" actually arose. I think we can allow roots, in all sorts of, not places ... but times! As this article mentions, we have lost the letters wynn and thorne from English.

When you see the words "Ye olde shoppe" (often in the Gothic black letter typeface) note that the Y is actually the letter thorne and ye is pronounced the or thee. It is unlikely that anyone will actually notice!

One of our customers decided to go for off site backups with us - they had been a customer for 15 odd years for other services. Backups are not our core business, its one of the services and I got around to setting them up sooner rather than later.

Two weeks later they had a fire in one of their huge printing machines which caused quite a lot of direct damage due to heat and rendered a lot of equipment broken due to smoke/fumes. It was also, as it turns out, a week before the first COVID 19 lockdown in the UK.

Their backups landed on a XFS file system with reflinks enabled. I cloned their repo and fired up NFS with their VMs running on our gear. It took me another hour to spin up another OpenVPN server (CA etc) for them to use and sort out a few other details (coffee doesn't brew itself).

They ran via VPN out of our data centre for most of the pandemic.

That was an utter triumph but I also have some rather less triumphant stories about backups and lack thereof. Let's skip over those 8)

I stared at my keyboard for bloody ages and came up with || instead of m.

nob end!

Try running a business on that basis - where do the restores come from? 8)

We charge our customers for backup storage by volume and that includes an annual demonstration of recovery. We fire up some or all of their systems on our gear in isolation and show that they are reasonably functional.

Your teacher's comment is riffing on the well trod lines of: "heights don't kill people, it's depths that kill people", which is all about perspective. This is is not related to "guns don't kill people ..." which is about agency.

Not too sure here. I use quite a few commas, too.

I suspect it was done old school: Written by Stephen and passed to a LLM to fill in all those links and other garnish and then passed back for final polish by Stephen. That's how I do my write ups (but generally without the LLM bit for shorter efforts).

This is a long write up, and I'm sure it will have been assisted, but in the right way, and not a sloppy way.

I've dropped several commas before conjunctions, soz!

Spinal Tap's "put it up to 11". My laptop (Kubuntu) has volume controls that allow me to override 100% and take it to 150%.

I can wind it up to 15! \||/ (is there an official ASCII art four finger devil's horns)

The Union flag is a bit of a pain! Notice how there are thick and thin white stripes. When I was a lad, it was a given that in an emergency you would fly your flag upside down.

50 odd years later, I note that hardly any Brit owns or has ever owned a Union flag. Not only that but how many people would know if it is upside down!

The right way up is thick white stripe on the top edge, nearest to the pole.

This scheme is OK but not OK. You note the Brazil flag and that's a great example along with the likes of the UK and the US too.

The Brazilian flag is nominally "quite" simple: Green with a yellow/gold parallelogram/rhombus with a blue circle ... then there is the white band and stars. Absolute nightmare to classify.

I thought the UK flag was a bit of a challenge and I remember an art class 50 odd years ago, trying to paint the bloody thing. Little did I know at the time about how Aussies and Kiwi worriers and co would fare! Won't someone think of Hawaiians: their state flag is not something you depict for a quick laugh!

I suppose the US flag is arguably the hardest to depict: Those stars would take ages to draw/paint/dribble. I imagine kids get a box of stars to stick on their depictions in art classes in the US.

A jack is a flag flown from a jackstaff, wot is found at the back of a ship or boat.

The UK flag is called the Union Flag (it's a flag and it is a union of various flags and possibly nations too!) but let's face it, given how many people think its called the Union Jack, it doesn't really matter.

If your flag pole at home is somewhat canted then I think you can call it a jackstaff, with a similar justification to the Royal Navy managing to designate their shore bases as ships. For example just up the road is HMS Heron (His Majesty's Ship: Heron).

The Union Flag/Jack is only the flag of the UK by convention and not law. It's a bit wooley, just like our Constitution but it still all works.

My point is that whilst I do enjoy this encoding scheme and it is jolly clever, reality is way more complicated. The UK's flag is pretty complicated but not alone. I'm pretty sure several flags have tassels, which I suppose strays into the coat of arms territory.

How hard do you want to squint!

I suppose the obvious question is: Are you actively profiting from Adsense?

If yes, then ... you are profiting from ... that shite. You must be OK with that and it does sound like you are actively complicit with it, despite your protestations.

If you really think that Adsense is awful and might damage your brand then dump it and don't whine on HN!

OK, that's probably a bit unfair because you are dealing with a monopoly with no recourse to arbitration. That's your real problem.

I lived through roughly the latter half of the cold war and both of my parents were soldiers. I lived in West Germany etc.

No we have not escaped the nuclear thing. If anything, the current Russian tzar is rather more unhinged than any of his predecessors.

I doubt many here know what perestroika and glasnost mean or why those Russian words were so important back in the day.

I don't fear AI (where on earth would an "autonomous" AI manage to find the power requirements). Darleks can't really fly and LLMs will stop when you pull the plug!

I do fear numpties with a red button and a tenuous grip on reality.