xioxox

Yes - Windows update is one of the most unreliable pieces of software I've had the misfortune to use. On one of my machines checking for updates hangs indefinitely. The whole update service is stuck and can't be stopped. I can do some hacks involving deleting the update catalogue in safe mode, but it just breaks again a few weeks later.

It's not great in DE for bank transfers. Either the account does not support sending SEPA instant or it's quite a large charge. Often savings accounts don't seem to be acceptable as destination accounts for SEPA instant.

There's also NICER (https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/nicer/) and MAXI.

I think he's wrong about reflectivity on passports too. My European passport picture page is extremely reflective - it's hard to read anything on it at the wrong angles, and the reflective holograms make my picture very hard to see. The photo is printed with very low contrast and uses an online user-supplied photo, too!

Doesn't Fortran 90 have the MERGE(IFTRUE,IFFALSE,CONDITIONAL) function as standard which is similar to the XIF used here? (as usual, Fortran chooses some weird names for its functions).

Perhaps the difference with the conditional discussed here is that in a function all the arguments are usually calculated before evaluation, so the conditional may avoid an error if one of the arguments can be invalid depending on the condition. It's a bit unclear from the proposed language addition, however.

I wonder if a frequency approach might be more accurate than relying on the left/right channel gain accuracy, providing the signal changes on timescales much longer than the wave period. Just generating pulses at some frequency might be the easiest method, which wouldn't rely on frequency measurement or FFTs.

There are also the X3 games from Egosoft (e.g. Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude), which are great fun for building a space trading empire, exploring, waging war or being a pirate. Warning: they can suck up a lot of time. They aren't the easiest to learn games and there's a lot of modding potential. They started with a lot of bugs, but are much more playable now.

X4 Foundations is the new release, but I haven't tried it personally yet.

Personally, I didn't feel it was particularly great. All the sound seemed to come from in front of me and sounded like the stereo effects occasionally used in music tracks. Perhaps it's due to the shape of my head and ears not matching their model, as suggested in some of the comments above.

You also have to always wonder what the environmental impact of these security fixes is, both in terms of extra carbon pumped into the atmosphere and the resources going into replacement CPUs. It's probably very bad. I wonder whether it's ethical to publish them? :)

Never or ever? I have to use it for a work project. It's ok when dealing with numbers or matrices, but very painful in many respects. It's missing quite a few features found in more recent languages. I don't recommend it personally unless you're working with other big fortran codes.

* Missing standard data structures, like hash maps. I just wish I had something like a Python dictionary built in.

* Strings are pretty awful. You can now have resizeable strings but using them is very painful (and buggy in gfortran). You'll have to constantly strip spaces off the ends of strings to even print them.

* Some of the compilers are very immature (gfortran), if using any fairly recent features (e.g. resizeable strings). I've hit several (still unfixed) compiler bugs and my code contains some terrible workarounds.

* Available libraries are hit and miss, particularly outside the numerical area.

* Linking to C/C++ is possible, but painful with the binding support.

* Documentation (including books) just isn't good compared to what's available for C/C++/Python, etc.

* No templates (would come in very handy for some routines which handle different numerical types).

* Ok for numerics, though can't use C/C++ intrinsics for AVX/SSE maths.

I suppose what I like better than C/C++ is the module system and built-in support for N dimensional arrays with proper slicing, etc. The allocatable array thing is quite nice - it's like smart pointers in C++.

I've heard part of the problem is that the Post Office were allowed to conduct their own prosecutions. If the public prosecutor (Crown Prosecution Service) would have been involved, they would have asked the Post Office for any material which would have benefited the defence (this would be passed as disclosure). Because the Post Office were "victim" and prosecutor they never did this and the defence didn't get this material.

In one case (Seema Misra) the judge asked the jury this in his/her summing up:

“There is no direct evidence of her taking any money... She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank notes or anything of that kind. There is no evidence of her accumulating cash anywhere else or spending large sums of money or paying off debts, no evidence about her bank accounts at all. Nothing incriminating was found when her home was searched...Do you accept the prosecution case that there is ample evidence before you to establish that Horizon is a tried and tested system in use at thousands of post offices for several years, fundamentally robust and reliable?”

The jury pronounced Seema Misra guilty.

There are many more details in this very comprehensive report by Private Eye: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-i...

Of course! Presumably you could use heated gases in the gas giants (like hot air balloons). I found this rather old JPL page which suggests it could be possible: https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/adv_tech/balloons/outer_jupisat.ht...

Cool! I wonder why balloons have not been used much on other planets? Is it the weight of the gas? The USSR had the the Vega 1 and 2 balloons on Venus, but presumably further missions could be pretty useful for studying planetary atmospheres, even for gas giants.

I have a Toshiba R500 - it's a machine ahead of its time - transreflective display, SSD, very light, long battery life, nice keyboard. Unfortunately the CPU and memory are limited, otherwise I would be using it today.

In many astronomy programs, we have to put up with the PFILES convention, where arguments are given like so

    mytool infile=foo.fits outfile=bar.fits

Some parameters need to be given (and will be prompted for if not given), and some get a default if they are omitted. The extra tricky part is that the parameters and their defaults are read from .par files in a path. There are the default ones for the tool, and a user-specific parameter file which can be modified using the "pset" program (or read with "pget"). A tool when run will also modify the par file to update various parameters with the ones given on the command line.

Unfortunately, there is no form of locking on these par files, so one has to mess around with the path settings (to make per-process paths), or use some form of locking, to ensure they don't get corrupted if multiple processes are run at once.

Yes, reading this thread as someone from the UK makes me realise the US is very different culturally from the UK. I'm sure the proportion of people for whom religion is important in their lives is much much smaller in the UK than the US. I think most British people only encounter religion at Christmas and weddings, unless they're of a religious minority group.

One very useful program on Linux is "tsocks" which allows you to use many command line programs transparently with a SOCKS proxy. It works using LD_PRELOAD to intercept libc network functions. It hasn't had much development work recently, however.

Also the sodium lights are also much easier to filter out if you do astronomy. So much lighting is bad nowadays - lighting the sky rather than the ground.

Dave Green's CubeHelix scheme is excellent for this: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/

There are lots of parameters which can be varied to choose which colour range to cover.

The US should take up the nice UK gender-neutral term of Postie.

Unfortunately Google is making it much harder to run ROMs now due to the new Safety-Net bootloader checks. You'll no longer to be able to use many bank apps (or even the McDonalds app!).

It looks like I was wrong about UDP being supported by ssh. Sorry about misleading everyone. I've verified with nc that it doesn't actually forward UDP. I'm amazed that streaming media over this seems to work fine on most sites, though.

[note I am wrong here - it doesn't support UDP - see below]

The ssh SOCKS proxy supports UDP. I use Firefox with a SOCKS proxy via ssh (e.g. ssh -D 2222 hostname) to get around geoblocking and accessing papers via an institutional account. The tsocks program can also let you use a SOCKS proxy for an arbitrary command in linux. I find it much more convenient than a VPN, as it can be easily applied to single programs.

One of the most interesting results here seems to be that the vaccine benefits from a long period between the doses, with the efficacy rising to 76% three months after the first dose, then to 82% after the 2nd dose. This seems to imply the approach of vaccinating as many people as possible with one dose of this vaccine and leaving a long gap to the 2nd one is the right one, as used in the UK.

The vaccine basically would not exist without the UK government helping putting together the organisation to make this, before AZ even got involved, plus the academic research funding. This vaccine is sold at cost and is allowed to be manufactured elsewhere such as in India. It seems perfectly reasonable that the UK can fund a facility to guarantee supply after all the investment and effort.

This is in Iain Banks's book Transition. Did anyone else come up with this before him?

There are laptops with truly terrible cameras, in particular Dell, even in their most expensive laptops. These aren't my pictures, but I've tried different lighting but the pictures have the wrong colour, are low resolution and are extremely noisy: https://www.dell.com/community/XPS/XPS-15-9500-camera-webcam...

I thought one needed Ctrl+L to refresh the screen when it gets corrupted by program output in "gdb -tui".

Me too... the lack of decent non-array containers is frustrating. The string handling is also painful (seemingly TRIM everywhere). I've also hit several compiler bugs trying to use fairly new features.