Where can I buy a large analogue meter?...

[rbowman]

On 04/17/2022 03:48 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:

On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 22:39:41 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 01:56 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 20:50:36 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 10:54 AM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 17:39:40 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com
wrote:

On 04/17/2022 07:03 AM, Commander Kinsey wrote:

I have Zen2 (an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT) and that\'s also TSMC, but 7nm.

The equivalent CPU on Zen3 (Ryzen 9 5900X) is also 7nm.

Yes, very fast.

I\'ve got a 5500U in my laptop. It\'s a 7nm Zen2 unlike the 5600U Zen3
but
I have no complaints for a $700 laptop.

That\'s 0.4 of the speed of my desktop. Laptops suck.

Until the company upgraded my desktop I was using the laptop for some
projects. It beat the hell out of an elderly Core i5 with a hard drive.

I\'m not a real fan of laptops but they have their place. I\'m using a
company supplied laptop for remote work. Admittedly the HDMI is plugged
into my desktop monitor though a switch and I use a bluetooth mouse and
keyboard but it\'s good enough to VPN in to a real machine.

It\'s also difficult to travel with a desktop...

I wonder what would happen if you tried to set up a desktop, keyboard,
mouse, monitor on a table on a train?

First you would have to find a train...

You don\'t have trains? They\'re annoying things with shitty brakes that
would cause a car to be taken off the road. They expect everything else
to get out of their way. And they never go where you want to when you
want to. About time we got rid of those useless things which actually
use more fuel per person than a car.

Oh, we have trains but they\'re hauling coal to BC to ship to China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OmTnWxpcEQ

No passengers, no tables. We have two passenger terminals but they\'ve
been recycled to other uses.

https://aws.boone-crockett.org/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/hq-bcheadquarters2015.jpg

That was the Milwaukee Road terminal but they went under in the \'70s.
You can\'t see it but in the foreground the rails have been ripped up and
turned into a bike/pedestrian trail. The other terminal is next to an
active rail line but the coal trains don\'t stop.

The closest passenger terminal is 133 miles north. You might want to
think twice about setting up a computer on the Empire Builder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Montana_train_derailment

Except for the east coast routes favored by government drones like Biden
US passenger rail is pretty dismal. Freight isn\'t much better:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/shippers-complain-about-union-pacifics-plans-to-meter-traffic/

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/fertilizer-maker-faults-union-pacifics-plan-to-reduce-congestion

The second one is the money shot. A major fertilizer manufacturer can\'t
ship its product to the Midwest where the farmers are getting ready to
plant. If the farmers skimp on fertilizer the yields will be down. Just
what we need with Ukraine off the table at least for this season.

 

[Joe Gwinn]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 23:36:26 +0100, \"Commander Kinsey\"
<CK1@nospam.com> wrote:

On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 23:15:57 +0100, Joe Gwinn <joegwinn@comcast.net> wrote:

On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 14:39:32 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <whit3rd@gmail.com
wrote:

On Sunday, April 17, 2022 at 10:12:09 AM UTC-7, Joe Gwinn wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 13:55:55 +0100, \"Commander Kinsey\"
C...@nospam.com> wrote:

Anyway, within the x86 architecture they keep adding instructions etc. Can\'t it be improved out of the mess?
Not without giving up un backward compatibility and making a clean
break. Which has been against Intel theology for a long time.

Apple went through the same thing, and eventually hired a bunch of
market research firms to run focus groups sessions...
The question to be answered was if there had to
be a Motorola processor on the motherboard, or would a really good
emulator suffice. The vast majority of those in the focus (myself
included) said that no Motorola hardware was needed, so long as the
emulation was in fact that good, because we all had essential software
that could not be replaced for one reason or another. I assume that
most of the focus groups came to the same answer, because that\'s
exactly what happened.

Joe Gwinn

It was a stretch, though; there was a \'toolbox\' runtime library, and the
rewrite of that was probably the first need, because it would normally
be cached, and a two-stage emulator-plus-toolbox requirement used
a LOT of cache. Apple had some PowerPC processors made with extra-large
cache in the early days of the 68k-to-Power changeover, and eventually
the OS\'es became incompatible as emulations were dropped, first 68k
and then Power code in the Intel years.

Yes, but never mind the details, Apple did get it to work very well,
and maintained it for about ten years, then ceased to support it. By
then, most of those critical apps wee no longer critical, or had been
killed off by something else.

Nobody does anything critical with a Mac anyway. They\'re just for arty folk.

Well I\'ve never been accused of being arty, but OK.

But for really critical stuff, nobody uses Windows for sure. It\'s
Linux all the way, often controlling bespoke FPGA hardware.

Why no Windows? Well, the US Navy tried, in the SmartShip IT-21
program, for which the USS Yorktown was the testbed.

..<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)>

Long story short, someone in the engine room entered a bad value of an
input form for pump performance recording, and crashed the Windows
computer system and all associated shipwide networks. The ship was
dead in the water, without propulsion, steering, or weapons. What
could go wrong?

Fortunately they were far from land, and not in a battle, so they
didn\'t get sunk or blunder into anything. They had to reboot the
entire ship. This all took about three hours.

That was the end of SmartShip - only the name survived, used only for
administrative activities, isolated from all tactical networks.

UNIX was the follow-on answer, but the various big platform vendors
became too expensive and too inflexible, and over time everything
migrated to Linux, mostly Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which IBM
subsequently acquired. Wonder if IBM has learned anything since DoD
abandoned AIX.

Joe Gwinn

 

[Anthony William Sloman]

On Monday, April 18, 2022 at 10:20:33 AM UTC+10, whit3rd wrote:

On Sunday, April 17, 2022 at 3:36:35 PM UTC-7, Commander Kinsey wrote:

Nobody does anything critical with a Mac anyway. They\'re just for arty folk.

Not an uncommon view, but inaccurate. Excel, for example, started life
as macintosh-only code; the Windows version was an afterthought, ported
over.

Isn\'t Excel just a Windows steal of Viscalc? Lotus 1-2-3 came next, so Excel is more a Chinese copy of that that exploited the Widows graphical user interface - and of course the MacIntosh had the first commercial graphical user interface, copied from the Xerox PARC Alto machines (of which there were a couple of thousand, although it was never marketed).

Visicalc was the killer application for the original Apple 2 computer. Dan Flystra made a lot of money out of it - I had an acquaintance at MIT at the time, who had run into Flystra who was also active in starting up Byte (which was how I got to be foundation subscriber to the magazine).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 7:35:55 AM UTC-4, charles wrote:

In article <op.1kl2t...@ryzen.lan>, Commander Kinsey <C...@nospam.com
wrote:
Where can I buy a large analogue meter? Big enough to show to a room of
people, about a foot long pointer.
get a smaller one and a video camera.

And a large TV display.

--

Rick C.

- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 4:26:01 PM UTC-4, Jock wrote:

On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 05:45:30 +1000, Ed Pawlowski <e...@snet.xxx> wrote:

On 4/14/2022 2:44 PM, Jock wrote:


Would you buy a 6.2 litre electric car?
I\'m not actually stupid enough to buy any electric car.

Wait 5 years. They will be much better in many ways.New battery
material, greater range,
Still no use for me.
charging times not much different that pumping a tank of gas.
Don\'t believe that will be seen in 5 years with a viable battery life.

And the battery won\'t last anything like as long as a modern IC engine.
My previous IC car lasted 45 years fine and only needed to be
replaced because I was too stupid to fix the known windscreen leak
with the car never garaged or car ported.

Ok, in 2040, where will you buy gasoline, at the airport? The remaining ICE on the road won\'t justify keeping open a distribution network for autos. While gas will drop to probably $2 a gal in the next couple of years as BEVs start to make a dent in the number of gas cars on the roads, that will only last so long before prices start going back up as it becomes more costly to maintain the distribution network for the smaller amount of gas being produced. As the demand drops, eventually it will be very expensive, like $10 a gallon, to get any gas at all, and it will all be unleaded regular. So don\'t plan on running your high performance, high compression muscle car..

The idea of running an ICE for another 45 years is pretty much a fantasy at this point.

--

Rick C.

-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 3:45:37 PM UTC-4, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 4/14/2022 2:44 PM, Jock wrote:


Would you buy a 6.2 litre electric car?

I\'m not actually stupid enough to buy any electric car.
Wait 5 years. They will be much better in many ways. New battery
material, greater range, charging times not much different that pumping
a tank of gas.

I can\'t charge my car as fast as the car charges, now. I can\'t get 200 kW service at my home.

--

Rick C.

+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 5:28:27 PM UTC-4, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 4/14/2022 4:25 PM, Jock wrote:
On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 05:45:30 +1000, Ed Pawlowski <e...@snet.xxx> wrote:

On 4/14/2022 2:44 PM, Jock wrote:


Would you buy a 6.2 litre electric car?
I\'m not actually stupid enough to buy any electric car.

Wait 5 years. They will be much better in many ways.New battery
material, greater range,

Still no use for me.

charging times not much different that pumping a tank of gas.

Don\'t believe that will be seen in 5 years with a viable battery life.

You may be right. Could be three years.

Do you have a BEV? The only people I\'ve seen complain about charging times, are people who don\'t own them.

Personally, I don\'t see a need for faster charging. My car is a bit shy on range from what I\'d like to have, but then it is nearly four years old and they do much better today.

--

Rick C.

-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 6:19:29 PM UTC-4, Jock wrote:

On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 07:28:20 +1000, Ed Pawlowski <e...@snet.xxx> wrote:

On 4/14/2022 4:25 PM, Jock wrote:
On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 05:45:30 +1000, Ed Pawlowski <e...@snet.xxx> wrote:

On 4/14/2022 2:44 PM, Jock wrote:


Would you buy a 6.2 litre electric car?
I\'m not actually stupid enough to buy any electric car.

Wait 5 years. They will be much better in many ways.New battery
material, greater range,
Still no use for me.

charging times not much different that pumping a tank of gas.

Don\'t believe that will be seen in 5 years with a viable battery life.

You may be right. Could be three years.
Don\'t buy that either. And even if it was true, much more of a nuisance
having to do it most days instead of once a week or so.

Do what most days? Plug it in when you get home. Set the timer to charge at night when electricity is cheapest and you never have to visit a smelly gas station again.

--

Rick C.

+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 7:46:41 PM UTC-4, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 4/14/2022 6:19 PM, Jock wrote:
On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 07:28:20 +1000, Ed Pawlowski <e...@snet.xxx> wrote:

On 4/14/2022 4:25 PM, Jock wrote:
On Fri, 15 Apr 2022 05:45:30 +1000, Ed Pawlowski <e...@snet.xxx> wrote:

On 4/14/2022 2:44 PM, Jock wrote:


Would you buy a 6.2 litre electric car?
I\'m not actually stupid enough to buy any electric car.

Wait 5 years. They will be much better in many ways.New battery
material, greater range,
Still no use for me.

charging times not much different that pumping a tank of gas.

Don\'t believe that will be seen in 5 years with a viable battery life.

You may be right. Could be three years.

Don\'t buy that either. And even if it was true, much more of a nuisance
having to do it most days instead of once a week or so.
New models have a range comparable to a gas car, 350 to 400 miles.
Yeah, takes 30 seconds to plug in twice a week. Still faster than
stopping at a gas station.

Rather than dwell on the negatives, educate yourself and you will find
many have been overcome or will be soon.

Many simply don\'t want to learn about BEVs. They want to believe what they want to believe. That\'s ok. Anyone will be able to keep their current car as long as they want. They just won\'t be able to drive it because no one will continue selling gasoline when only 1% of the country want it.

If I had need for two cars, one would be an EV today. Even now, it is
good for 90% of my needs.

I haven\'t found a use case my BEV doesn\'t fit. It does a lot of things my old car didn\'t. Oh, wait, there\'s one thing I can\'t do in my BEV. I can\'t rev the engine in neutral or make a bunch of noise. Oh, I can\'t blow smoke out of the exhaust and I can\'t murder anyone by piping the exhaust into their bedroom window. Yeah, and I can\'t use the fuel to start a fire. Geez, there are so many gasoline fires in cars. Those things are DANGEROUS!

--

Rick C.

++ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Friday, April 15, 2022 at 8:17:18 AM UTC-4, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 4/15/2022 5:11 AM, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
On 14/04/2022 20:45, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 4/14/2022 2:44 PM, Jock wrote:


Would you buy a 6.2 litre electric car?

I\'m not actually stupid enough to buy any electric car.

Wait 5 years. They will be much better in many ways. New battery
material, greater range, charging times not much different that
pumping a tank of gas.
wait 5 years ... if they haven\'t got much better - same battery
material, same range, charging times not much different than now - then
quietly forget the whole idea...

Obviously you have never seen the evolution of cars, airplanes,
electronics and the advances that can be made in five years.

Cars today no longer have to be hand cranked to start and the top models
even have heaters in them. Amazing the progress they made.

Yes, my car in Puerto Rico has seat heaters! Niiiiice.

--

Rick C.

--- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Friday, April 15, 2022 at 9:00:21 AM UTC-4, amdx wrote:

On 4/14/2022 8:22 PM, Phil Allison wrote:
amdx wrote:
================
Whitless IDIOT whit3rd wrote:
Not so simple if you want accuracy. For one thing, the pointer ought to be counterweighted, not
just lightweight. For another, the glass pane that protects the pointer must be grounded,
or electrostatic charge will disrupt the reading. A d\'Arsonval movement is hard to scale up
and keep rugged; taut-band and such are improvements, but... servo is what\'s easily available for
a DIY project.
Ah, had not thought about the counter weight,

** Moving coil meters all have them - excepting maybe some edge reading types.

Essential to keep the scale linear.

https://thefactfactor.com/facts/pure_science/physics/ammeter-and-voltmeter/5931/



..... Phil

Ya, I\'ve had enough meters apart that after it was said, I remembered
the counterweight on the opposite end of the pointer.

It helps with clock hands as well. I have a cheap wall clock that would die when the battery didn\'t have enough power to move the second hand uphill. I added a counterweight and it runs a couple of months more now before I need to replace the battery.

That used to be a standard feature on clock hands when they were wind up. A lot of electric clocks don\'t bother. Also they often don\'t have second hands. The leverage on the minute and hour hands is a lot greater.

--

Rick C.

--+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
--+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[Ricky]

On Friday, April 15, 2022 at 1:13:55 PM UTC-4, Tim+ wrote:

Cindy Hamilton <hami...@devnull.com> wrote:
On 2022-04-15, The Natural Philosopher <t...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Obviously you have never seen the evolution of cars, airplanes,
electronics and the advances that can be made in five years.

Obviously you haven\'t .

Nothing much has changed in any of those fields - they are pretty mature
tech.

Coincidentally, I had a conversation this morning with an engineer who
works for Ford. He works in image processing; one of the projects
he worked on a few years ago enables the backup camera to initiate
braking if it sees an obstacle. He actually benefited from this
feature on a cloudy, gray day when he was backing up toward a gray car.

My husband gave him an idea for additional features for automatic
headlights. He said he\'d split his bonus with us if he gets one.

There really is a lot more going on than you realize, TNP.

I think TNP has reached his “new tech” limit.

The automatic headlights on my car are quite amazing. I haven’t worked out
how the work but they’re a *lot* more sophisticated that a simple forward
pointing photocell. I suspect some fairly serious image processing is going
on.

I assume you mean the high beam control? I don\'t use it. It\'s pretty good dipping to low beam, but it seems like a lot of things prevent going back to high beam. I just work that myself.

--

Rick C.

-+- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
-+- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209

 

[rbowman]

On 04/17/2022 06:51 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:

On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 01:49:12 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 02:55 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 21:18:43 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 10:56 AM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
You sound like a real programmer. As it happens I\'m having a lot of
problems with Python. Some idiot managed to make the program require
AVX, when 50% of the users had CPUs predating that.

I\'ve run into that a couple of times. In one case out of about 30
programming and QA machines I found two that could run the program. I
just happened to develop it on one of the two and was fat, dumb, and
happy until I tried to distribute it.

Python 3.x I assume? ESRI has been using 2.7 for some GIS scripting but
are moving to 3.x. I can hardly wait to rewrite my scripts.

Not sure, they run on a Debian virtual machine using Oracle Virtualbox.
This is the last log output I can find if it means anything to you:

Not a clue. Have I mentioned I hate VMs? Sometimes they\'re good for a
laugh. Some sites with high availability systems respond to Linux like a
vampire to garlic. What they don\'t know is under all those Server 20xx
VMs, Redhat and kvm is holding the whole mess together.

I use them to be able to run Linux shit on my grown up Windows systems.

Do you have 10 or 11? I am running wsl with Ubuntu on one machine and
Kali on another. wsl has come a long way and there now is a X server
included that integrates nicely. I\'ve got a dedicate Linux box too but
for some things wsl works well.

I did have problems on the laptop where the system would crash when the
display went to sleep. I don\'t think HyperV played well with the Acer
drivers. One or the other may have been fixed by now but I didn\'t
reinstall wsl after removing it.

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Apr 2022 14:01:49 -0600) it happened rbowman
<bowman@montana.com> wrote in <jc3a1bFbndrU1@mid.individual.net>:

On 04/17/2022 10:41 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
Only time PC is on is for adjusting satellite dish and HAM radio QO100 stuff
that software has already been recompiled on the raspi, needs a new USB DVB-S2 tuner compatible with the Linux kernel.

Have you looked at DragonOS? I\'m running an old SuSE distro and have
thought about trying it. I\'ve been messing around with RTL-SDR on
Windows and it sounds like one stop shopping for Linux.

No, never used DragonOS.
I have several RTL_SDR sticks now in the raspis, some are 1 ppm
One reads my outside weather station
One reads airplane data using dump1090 and logs and displays it:
http://panteltje.com/pub/xgpspc_5_planes.gif

One reads ship AIS data and logs and displays it:
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/xgpspc/index.html

Also very old version.. Latest one has many more features.

One 1 ppm I have laying about as spectrum analyser used with my own software:
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/xpsa/index.html

xpsa is running on my laptop, on the PC and I ported it to Rasberry too.
Latest version has more features, I have not released it yet.


I have done some QO100 reception stuff like receiving SSB and the wideband transponder with a rtl-sdr stick
and some hardware I designed using this software on the laptop:
http://www.pabr.org/radio/qo100sdr/qo100sdr.en.html
rx:
http://panteltje.com/pub/leandvb_contact.gif
http://panteltje.com/pub/leandvb_wbbeacon_rx_2.gif

These are the 1ppm sticks I use:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/272411458376

There is more...

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Apr 2022 14:08:22 -0600) it happened rbowman
<bowman@montana.com> wrote in <jc3adkFbplkU1@mid.individual.net>:

On 04/17/2022 10:51 AM, Jan Panteltje wrote:
What\'s a modern programmer? One that uses that snake language \'python\' or so?
I like to code in asm for Microchip PIC micros, there is a lot you can do with 256 bytes RAM and 16 kB ROM.
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/pic/scope_pic/
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/pic/index.html

While I prefer the AVR series I definitely agree. My day job is C/C++/C#
and increasingly JavaScript with a new Angular product but when I get
home I like to keep in simple like when I could wire-wrap up a working
Z80 board.

Have dot doen wirewrap in ages...
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/raspberry_pi_dvb-s_transmitter/

soldering....

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Apr 2022 20:24:58 +0100) it happened \"Commander
Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in <op.1ksavwqomvhs6z@ryzen.lan>:

On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 20:11:05 +0100, Jan Panteltje <pNaonStpealmtje@yahoo.com> wrote:

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Apr 2022 18:42:23 +0100) it happened \"Commander
Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in <op.1kr54xtqmvhs6z@ryzen.lan>:

Some people backup to optical just in case.

http://panteltje.com/pub/CD_box_binnenkant_IXIMG_0549.JPG
Optical media last very very long in the dark, I also used some M_Discs
that box hold a thousand CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, Blu-ray discs and is full.
Now I backup daily to 3 TB USB drives... two, in case I drop one.

Just how much data have you got?! That is a lot of disks.

I dunno, many are CD-R from many many years ago, with all sort of things, even movies.
For more recent data this is sda2 from a Raspberry Pi4 with 4 GB RAM:
/dev/sda2 3844510712 3239539624 409610424 89% /mnt/sda2

so 89 % of a 4 TB Toshiba USB harddisk
That includes images of SDcard, some distros, what not.
Logs.. I have radiation logs that go back years for example.
Backups of the website... smartphone, legal stuff, financial stuff, all code I wrote,
security videos, all emails of the last 20 years or so, pictures I took and videos I made,
many Usenet postings I saved back over the last 20 years, easy with the newsreader I wrote
it has a search function, etc etc.., datasheets...
But even Linux \'locate\' will find things in seconds.

Security videos can be huge, I have two 4K cameras running continuously, but I have a core of a Ryzen 9 3900XT allocated to each
which only records when it sees something suspicious. I\'ve even used it to locate my neighbour\'s cat, which she found
confusing. But it auto deletes after a month unless I save it.

Yes, huge, but encoded, soem run at lower frame-rate,
yes I keep several weeks.
Been playing with the Pimoroni IR camera module on Raspberry, low resolution but detects body heat.
That has now passed the \'several weeks 24/7 on\' test.
http://panteltje.com/panteltje/newsflex/download.html#xflir

 

[Jan Panteltje]

On a sunny day (Sun, 17 Apr 2022 20:55:50 +0100) it happened \"Commander
Kinsey\" <CK1@nospam.com> wrote in <op.1kscbchnmvhs6z@ryzen.lan>:

Agreed apart from \"disallow working in the same industry for N years after leaving\". Most people probably work in the same
industry for most of their life. So such a job means if you ever choose to leave, you can\'t get another job. I would therefore
never take a job with that in the contract.

Indeed

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 01:38:34 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/16/2022 05:20 PM, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2022-04-16, Commander Kinsey <CK1@nospam.com> wrote:
On Sat, 16 Apr 2022 13:31:06 +0100, RJH <patchmoney@gmx.com> wrote:

On 16 Apr 2022 at 11:52:08 BST, \"The Natural Philosopher\"
tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 16/04/2022 11:35, RJH wrote:
On 16 Apr 2022 at 11:06:34 BST, \"The Natural Philosopher\"
tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 15/04/2022 21:28, Cindy Hamilton wrote:
On 2022-04-15, The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

BEVs are very mature technology. There is only a bit left to improve.
Like aircraft and cars in general.

Yeah, they keep saying that about computers, too. And they\'re
constantly proved wrong.

They are completely right about computers. They cant be clocked any
faster, they cant be made to work with much less power - all they can do
is add more cores.


The new(ish) Apple processors use a fraction (between and half and a third) of
the power used by an Intel equivalent.

That by itself, says nothing
A Z80 uses way less power than a pentium
A motorcycle uses way less power than a ferrari.

It says everything. Less power for the same load - google Apple M1

I prefer things designed for adults.

I very much doubt Apple can beat Intel anyway.

It\'s not Apple vs Intel it\'s TSMC vs Intel.

True, but possibly not the way you meant it. AMD is partnered with TSMC
and the Zen 3+ design on TSMC 6nm capabilities is currently kicking
Intel ass.

There is a problem with AMD. Their implementation of VT-D (virtualization to use two OSes on one CPU) sux. It slows the system right down and it\'s hard to interact with it.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 01:50:47 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 03:45 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 22:24:59 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 01:00 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 19:55:20 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 09:46 AM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 16:08:45 +0100, Scott Lurndal
scott@slp53.sl.home
wrote:

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> writes:
On 04/16/2022 05:20 PM, Jasen Betts wrote:


Apple\'s processor is an ARM so it\'s going to be more efficient than
intels X86

When comparing RISC to CISC you have to be careful to specify what
area
you\'re comparing for efficiency. Power consumption has been where
RISC
has shone. It took a while for compilers to catch up to create
optimized
code. Code size is necessarily greater, hence more RAM.

Come now, risc processors have been used for three decades now,
the compiler guys are really really good at generating quality code
for all of them.

No modern programmer is good at anything, especially tight coding.
Give
them a computer from the 80s and they\'d have trouble writing a
calculator program to fit into 64KB.

One product I worked on was a handheld pH / ion concentration meter
that
used an 8049.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48

I did the pH meter and another programmer did the ion concentration.
Reading the electrode value from the A/D and driving the user interface
was the same for both products but the math was sufficiently different
that 2K wasn\'t enough to do both.

There was also a benchtop meter/auto-titrator that used a Z-80. 64K was
a real luxury.

In reply to Scott Lurndal, yeah the compiler guys have gotten really
good after 3 decades...

I have a mouse driver that\'s 130MB. WTF? That\'s over 3 times the size
of the hard disk on a PC I had in 1991. What does the mouse driver do?
Watch for left and right and a few button presses? In 1991 I think it
was 30KB. 4000 times less efficient programming, we\'ve really come far.

I looked at Java back in the late \'90s. It wasn\'t too bad but as it grew
performance went into the toilet. The answer was \'you need a newer,
faster machine.\'

Over twenty years of hardware improvements and Java apps still suck.

I bought an Osborne 1 in \'81. It was a CP/M machine and came with 2
single side, single density 5 1/4\" floppy drives for a massive 90 KB
each. I later sent it back for the DD upgrade. Some how 90KB was enough
to hold Wordstar, SuperCalc, or the BDS C compiler executables which
happily ran in 64KB of RAM.

Somehow Turbo Pascal managed to compile so fast that at first I thought
it was broken compared to BDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

Excellent movie but relevant how?

The film shows how people gradually became stupider. The same is happening with programmers because they don\'t have to fit their programs into tight RAM allocations any more.

 

[Commander Kinsey]

On Mon, 18 Apr 2022 01:54:12 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 03:46 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
On Sun, 17 Apr 2022 22:29:11 +0100, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:

On 04/17/2022 01:24 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:
Security videos can be huge, I have two 4K cameras running continuously,
but I have a core of a Ryzen 9 3900XT allocated to each which only
records when it sees something suspicious. I\'ve even used it to locate
my neighbour\'s cat, which she found confusing. But it auto deletes
after a month unless I save it.

So they\'re finding out about body cams. No auto delete after a month
either. It can be years before the case comes to trial and they have to
produce the camera video.

You can turn them off.

That feature may go away; they\'ll have to get more creative. Currently
some bodycam systems vendors turn the camera on when the officer gets
within a specified distance from the incident. That, of course, also
implies the body camera is a radio collar for the cop.

I thought they could be turned off out of respect for something, eg. they\'re talking about a deceased relative.

Of course your arm could always get in the way.