It's not a bicycle, no sitting involved; the rider's legs act as the suspension so small wheels are OK
He was talking about comfort. It is about the little wheels going down a crack, or coming up against a vertical misalignment larger than about a third of the wheel diameter, and stopping dead. Rider goes arse over tit.
I did, and don't see your point. There are far worse cracks in the sidewalk surfaces around where I live in the UK (we call them pavements), partly thanks to the habit of drivers parking vehicles on them, for which they were never designed.
For elderly people who have limited walking range this ensures you get home, while still being transportable.
No elderly person will ever get on one of those things. How many did you ever see on Segways? Oh, wait : there was George Bush, but look how that ended.
Don't worry, after a few yards on the pavements (=US sidewalks) in the UK there will be a crack or misalignment that those tiny wheels will stick in and tip you off.
That's a nice smooth test area in the video, I must say.
Care? No, they j......... consider themselves "informed" because they now know someone to vote for. I would by no means rule out that this has a serious impact on voter behaviour.
That's funny, because the more I know about any particular politician, and hear them speak, the less I like them. I would be more likely to vote for the one at the bottom of the Google hits. In fact I don't usually vote for any of the bastards.
You can easily test this yourself. Take a topic that your listener has no information about. Feed him one sided information.... Watch him agree with you
Not me, I would tend to react against the speaker. I am reacting against your opinion here for example. I do not see that happen very often among people I know either. Most people I know have the opposite fault - being contrary for the sake of it. But I'm prepared to believe I'm not typical.
I found nothing about bees in TFA that was linked; perhaps the article has been edited because it does sound a bit incredible.
The claim that sharks are less dangerous than bees, lightning, or whatever, is a fine example of misleading with statistics. Bees and lightning can strike anyone who walks outside (that is everyone but the most extreme basement dwellers), but sharks are only going to attack people who swim, and while they are swimming.
For a start, I never go into the sea; neither does my wife, son, neighbours, 99.9% of the citizens of the Central African Republic, and I guess most people anywhere. Even of those who do enter the sea, the vast majority must spend a very small percentage of their time in it.
I would submit therefore that the risk of shark attack while in the sea is very significantly higher than that of a bee attack or lighting strike when walking around on land.
However, no entirely insane legislation has come from the EU
I don't know where to begin with listing insane legislation from the EU. Perhaps banning fencing creosote. Maybe that's OK in dry sunny countries, but not where i live in the hills of Wales where it is much damper than in your "majority of countries" in the EU.
Why should it have made a difference? I had always assumed that this kind of surveillance went on. I was suprised that people were suprised by Snowden's revelations.
Microsoft - Dave Cutler's team - were working on the OS that was going to replace OS/2 (......Windows NT 3.1 and successors after the (surprising) Windows 3.0 success.
....Windows NT and OS/2 have no common ancestor. They are completely different OSes from bottom to top.
My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it. It is true that Dave Cutler and his team members were recruited by MS from DEC, and came with with the the source code of a DEC OS called Mica (an evolution from VMS but later cancelled), and this (and Cutler's experience in DEC) was used in creating NT. DEC later got an out of court settlement from MS over this stolen code. Reference. Nevertheless, some elements of OS/2 were also used, like the printing sub-system I believe.
Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.
Rubbish.
I should know. In particular it crashed every time you printed something from WordPerfect for Windows, which we needed to do a lot (for memos - had no email then). Fortunately the print job did get through first. Maybe it was WordPerfect's fault, I don't know, don't care now. Windows 3.0 frequently crashed when WordPerfect was not running too.
It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.
It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
I am talking about where I worked. We did not get Windows 3.0 the moment it came out. We did get 3.1 the moment it came out though, having found 3.0 so awful we hoped 3.1 was better, and it was. They should have called 3.0 the beta.
One of [OS/2's] biggest failings was claiming that it was "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows"... which i... helps to remove the motivation to build much of anything specifically targeting for OS/2, rather than Windows... and being an 'also runs' OS doesn't get you much traction for adoption.
Even worse, they marketed the version of OS/2 (2.1 AFAIR) which had Windows 3.1 on board already in a virtual machine as "OS/2 for Windows"!
As if OS/2 was some kind of app. It was like the tail wagging the dog, with OS/2 being a grown-up OS and Win3.1 being a dog's breakfast.
IBM forcing Microsoft to make it run on the 286 was a complete waste of time.
It was, but you need to understand the culture back then. The processor arms race had not begun and people thought that 286s and 386s would be around for ever - 386s for power users and 286s for the rest of us. SLR cameras are an analogy - Nikon have both entry level and professional grade SLRs, always have, and no-one expects today's professional camera to become next year's entry level camera. The two lines develop separately.
That was when I was buying my first PC, and I was going to get a 286 as "it was all I needed", despite 386s being around. Then suddenly the arms race took off and I got a 486. I remember the dismay and even indignation of other guys who had just bought a 286 or 386 and were suddenly left behind.
Windows 3.0 was not unstable. Sure, any application could crash the OS, which is a technical deficiency, but I don't remember any kind of unstability in general.
My work Win3.0 machine crashed so often that it is a fine point as to whether the blame lay with Win3.0 or the app. True, there was often the message "UAE" [Unrecoverable Application Error] but I suspect that Windows would have said that anyway. If it was the apps, then Windows should not have allowed the app to bring the whole machine down.
Win3.1 was considerably better with the same apps, so it could be done.
Windows 95 was still sitting on DOS to a large extent.... if you typed the MS-DOS "mode" command with an option like 40-column you unmasked the hidden DOS prompt
The fact that you could get a DOS prompt does not mean it ran on DOS. I am running Mepis Linux right now, and can call up a DOS prompt in a virtual machine. I can also dual boot into DOS, which is effectively what Win9x could do if you needed it, especially for games then.
The big change for me was with Win95. All earlier versions of Windows were bolted on top of MS-DOS
Windows NT came out in 1993, predated Win95, and had nothing to do with DOS apart from the capability to run DOS in a virtual machine. Its own command line interface was not DOS, even though many of the commands had the same syntax
although many people had it started by AUTOEXEC.BAT so they never needed to notice that DOS was still there. Starting with Win95, however, the default was for the computer to boot directly into Windows..... And of course, the ability to have it autorun CDs when they were inserted was another great convenience.
Having an auto-starting app, even a GUI shell, is hardly a quantum leap in computer history, nor is auto-running CDs.
When OS/2 was launched it was a joint Microsoft/IBM product, and it was touted (by both) as being the replacement for Windows.
Exactly. I worked for a big corporate at the time and we all had PCDos on IBM ATs running stuff like IBM DisplayWrite and, most importantly, a mainframe terminal emulator because the (IBM) mainframe was where our serious stuff was. When Win 3.0 came out we were all handed boxed copies (I recently sold mine) - although Windows was MS, it seemed (to our management at least) the way to go, and was assumed to have IBM endorsement (a corporate essential) because it would run on IBM PCs. Management were unaware of the MS-IBM bust-up.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour. It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1. It was not networked of course, but we would share printers in groups of four of us using a switchbox.
At about same time, one guy in our branch, our IT "co-ordinator" (who knew nothing about IT) was given OS/2 as a pilot. We all understood that would be the way to go fo all of us, but the whole thing stagnated (I guess because of the IBM/MS split). OS/2's price (its own, and that of the memory needed to run it) remained too high. I bought OS/2 for home but there were bugs (could have be sorted by IBM if they had their heart in it) and lack of apps. It seemed there was an anti-OS/2 camp within IBM itself.
But people, like our middle-aged management, who had never previously used computers (I had started on a PDP 11) or seen a GUI before, thought Windows and MS were absolutely wonderful. Us younger guys all had home computers by then, and knew better. Ironically, the generation after us also thought Windows and MS were wonderful because they never saw anything but Windows. It led to all the myths that we must now endure about Gates being a genius, inventing the PC, making computing affordable, and such like crap.
But Windows 3 (if we include its 3.1 bug-fix) was a milestone in that it popularised the graphical interface.
Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies.... we found was 1.- etc etc
You should have ignored them. Anyone has the right to distribute shareware. You do know how shareware works don't you? If so, I don't understand why you even contacted them and I expect they didn't either. Here is the first Google definition I've found:- "Shareware is software that is distributed free on a trial basis with the understanding that the user may need or want to pay for it later."
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding here. Shareware can be upgraded to fully paid versions by, well, paying. I guess that these companies were assuming, by your contacting them at all, that you wanted to pay for the upgrade to the full version. So it is hardly suprising if they were taken aback by such a request, and that they no longer had the full version of this ancient DOS stuff by their right elbow.
I'd love to see the private sector version of this.... I really haven't noticed private sector behavior being any better.
The result would be about the same. People are people. There is far more variation in culture between different organisations (including between different government offices) than there is any public/private divide in this. I've seen it all, including working in the UK Admiralty at one time where the security was fanatical.
As for TFA (I've followed the links) I find the 2/3 figure hard to believe and the article is light on facts and the form of the questions. Perhaps the 2/3 would not report in a case where they knew it was their own fault. I'm guessing, as I see no reason not to report any other breach that came to light. The resulting flap it would make an interesting diversion to the usual dull routine.
One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid. If that connection fails, the plant has to scram to avoid damage to the generators (overspeed).
BS
Power stations (even non-nuclear) always have back-up generators that kick in on loss of grid to allow control of the plant to be maintained and for cooling pumps to take the heat out of the system in a controlled way. Generators will not overspeed if cut off the grid - their speeds are controlled by sophisticated control systems, and if they even fail then an old-fashioned back-up mechanical governor will cause the main steam supply valve to slam shut.
The plant would not be "scrammed" on loss of grid. Scramming means hitting a big red panic button. The plant would be kept spinning at first, obviously with the reactor power reduced to near zero, with residual heat being dumped through purposed heat exchangers and possibly releasing steam to atmosphere (unless it is a BWR - Indian Point is not), while the cause of the loss-of-grid was investigated - like getting the grid company on the phone. Many losses-of-grid are quite brief, but if it looked like it was going to be a while then the plant would be shut down in a controlled way, not by a scram button.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a bicycle, no sitting involved; the rider's legs act as the suspension so small wheels are OK
He was talking about comfort. It is about the little wheels going down a crack, or coming up against a vertical misalignment larger than about a third of the wheel diameter, and stopping dead. Rider goes arse over tit.
Obvious that you didn't WTFV.
I did, and don't see your point. There are far worse cracks in the sidewalk surfaces around where I live in the UK (we call them pavements), partly thanks to the habit of drivers parking vehicles on them, for which they were never designed.
For elderly people who have limited walking range this ensures you get home, while still being transportable.
No elderly person will ever get on one of those things. How many did you ever see on Segways? Oh, wait : there was George Bush, but look how that ended.
12km really isn't very far
Don't worry, after a few yards on the pavements (=US sidewalks) in the UK there will be a crack or misalignment that those tiny wheels will stick in and tip you off.
That's a nice smooth test area in the video, I must say.
all you would need to do is start a company consisting entirely of women
It has been tried. It usually ends in catfights and tears.
Page rank ranks a site based on how many sites links to it. If A candidate is popular, there will likely be a lot written about him/her.
There is a lot written about the politician who's name began with H and who died in 1945 (avoiding Godwin). So he is popular?
Care? No, they j......... consider themselves "informed" because they now know someone to vote for. I would by no means rule out that this has a serious impact on voter behaviour.
That's funny, because the more I know about any particular politician, and hear them speak, the less I like them. I would be more likely to vote for the one at the bottom of the Google hits. In fact I don't usually vote for any of the bastards.
You can easily test this yourself. Take a topic that your listener has no information about. Feed him one sided information .... Watch him agree with you
Not me, I would tend to react against the speaker. I am reacting against your opinion here for example. I do not see that happen very often among people I know either. Most people I know have the opposite fault - being contrary for the sake of it. But I'm prepared to believe I'm not typical.
I found nothing about bees in TFA that was linked; perhaps the article has been edited because it does sound a bit incredible.
The claim that sharks are less dangerous than bees, lightning, or whatever, is a fine example of misleading with statistics. Bees and lightning can strike anyone who walks outside (that is everyone but the most extreme basement dwellers), but sharks are only going to attack people who swim, and while they are swimming.
For a start, I never go into the sea; neither does my wife, son, neighbours, 99.9% of the citizens of the Central African Republic, and I guess most people anywhere. Even of those who do enter the sea, the vast majority must spend a very small percentage of their time in it.
I would submit therefore that the risk of shark attack while in the sea is very significantly higher than that of a bee attack or lighting strike when walking around on land.
The man was George Bernard Shaw, playwright and society wit. The way he said it however was much more quickfire than you make it sound.
Someone should gently remind the prime minister that the Victorian era is over.
You obviously don't know much about the Victorians.
However, no entirely insane legislation has come from the EU
I don't know where to begin with listing insane legislation from the EU. Perhaps banning fencing creosote. Maybe that's OK in dry sunny countries, but not where i live in the hills of Wales where it is much damper than in your "majority of countries" in the EU.
It's sad that people are more concerned with what companies are doing with their information than the government.
Why?
Why should it have made a difference? I had always assumed that this kind of surveillance went on. I was suprised that people were suprised by Snowden's revelations.
Microsoft - Dave Cutler's team - were working on the OS that was going to replace OS/2 (......Windows NT 3.1 and successors after the (surprising) Windows 3.0 success.
....Windows NT and OS/2 have no common ancestor. They are completely different OSes from bottom to top.
My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it. It is true that Dave Cutler and his team members were recruited by MS from DEC, and came with with the the source code of a DEC OS called Mica (an evolution from VMS but later cancelled), and this (and Cutler's experience in DEC) was used in creating NT. DEC later got an out of court settlement from MS over this stolen code. Reference. Nevertheless, some elements of OS/2 were also used, like the printing sub-system I believe.
Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.
Rubbish.
I should know. In particular it crashed every time you printed something from WordPerfect for Windows, which we needed to do a lot (for memos - had no email then). Fortunately the print job did get through first. Maybe it was WordPerfect's fault, I don't know, don't care now. Windows 3.0 frequently crashed when WordPerfect was not running too.
It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.
It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.
I am talking about where I worked. We did not get Windows 3.0 the moment it came out. We did get 3.1 the moment it came out though, having found 3.0 so awful we hoped 3.1 was better, and it was. They should have called 3.0 the beta.
One of [OS/2's] biggest failings was claiming that it was "a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows"... which i... helps to remove the motivation to build much of anything specifically targeting for OS/2, rather than Windows... and being an 'also runs' OS doesn't get you much traction for adoption.
Even worse, they marketed the version of OS/2 (2.1 AFAIR) which had Windows 3.1 on board already in a virtual machine as "OS/2 for Windows"!
As if OS/2 was some kind of app. It was like the tail wagging the dog, with OS/2 being a grown-up OS and Win3.1 being a dog's breakfast.
IBM forcing Microsoft to make it run on the 286 was a complete waste of time.
It was, but you need to understand the culture back then. The processor arms race had not begun and people thought that 286s and 386s would be around for ever - 386s for power users and 286s for the rest of us. SLR cameras are an analogy - Nikon have both entry level and professional grade SLRs, always have, and no-one expects today's professional camera to become next year's entry level camera. The two lines develop separately.
That was when I was buying my first PC, and I was going to get a 286 as "it was all I needed", despite 386s being around. Then suddenly the arms race took off and I got a 486. I remember the dismay and even indignation of other guys who had just bought a 286 or 386 and were suddenly left behind.
Windows 3.0 was not unstable. Sure, any application could crash the OS, which is a technical deficiency, but I don't remember any kind of unstability in general.
My work Win3.0 machine crashed so often that it is a fine point as to whether the blame lay with Win3.0 or the app. True, there was often the message "UAE" [Unrecoverable Application Error] but I suspect that Windows would have said that anyway. If it was the apps, then Windows should not have allowed the app to bring the whole machine down.
Win3.1 was considerably better with the same apps, so it could be done.
Windows 95 was still sitting on DOS to a large extent .... if you typed the MS-DOS "mode" command with an option like 40-column you unmasked the hidden DOS prompt
The fact that you could get a DOS prompt does not mean it ran on DOS. I am running Mepis Linux right now, and can call up a DOS prompt in a virtual machine. I can also dual boot into DOS, which is effectively what Win9x could do if you needed it, especially for games then.
The big change for me was with Win95. All earlier versions of Windows were bolted on top of MS-DOS
Windows NT came out in 1993, predated Win95, and had nothing to do with DOS apart from the capability to run DOS in a virtual machine. Its own command line interface was not DOS, even though many of the commands had the same syntax
although many people had it started by AUTOEXEC.BAT so they never needed to notice that DOS was still there. Starting with Win95, however, the default was for the computer to boot directly into Windows ..... And of course, the ability to have it autorun CDs when they were inserted was another great convenience.
Having an auto-starting app, even a GUI shell, is hardly a quantum leap in computer history, nor is auto-running CDs.
When OS/2 was launched it was a joint Microsoft/IBM product, and it was touted (by both) as being the replacement for Windows.
Exactly. I worked for a big corporate at the time and we all had PCDos on IBM ATs running stuff like IBM DisplayWrite and, most importantly, a mainframe terminal emulator because the (IBM) mainframe was where our serious stuff was. When Win 3.0 came out we were all handed boxed copies (I recently sold mine) - although Windows was MS, it seemed (to our management at least) the way to go, and was assumed to have IBM endorsement (a corporate essential) because it would run on IBM PCs. Management were unaware of the MS-IBM bust-up.
Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour. It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1. It was not networked of course, but we would share printers in groups of four of us using a switchbox.
At about same time, one guy in our branch, our IT "co-ordinator" (who knew nothing about IT) was given OS/2 as a pilot. We all understood that would be the way to go fo all of us, but the whole thing stagnated (I guess because of the IBM/MS split). OS/2's price (its own, and that of the memory needed to run it) remained too high. I bought OS/2 for home but there were bugs (could have be sorted by IBM if they had their heart in it) and lack of apps. It seemed there was an anti-OS/2 camp within IBM itself.
But people, like our middle-aged management, who had never previously used computers (I had started on a PDP 11) or seen a GUI before, thought Windows and MS were absolutely wonderful. Us younger guys all had home computers by then, and knew better. Ironically, the generation after us also thought Windows and MS were wonderful because they never saw anything but Windows. It led to all the myths that we must now endure about Gates being a genius, inventing the PC, making computing affordable, and such like crap.
But Windows 3 (if we include its 3.1 bug-fix) was a milestone in that it popularised the graphical interface.
Afraid not, a friend of my and myself actually tried contacting some of the old shareware companies .... we found was 1.- etc etc
You should have ignored them. Anyone has the right to distribute shareware. You do know how shareware works don't you? If so, I don't understand why you even contacted them and I expect they didn't either. Here is the first Google definition I've found :- "Shareware is software that is distributed free on a trial basis with the understanding that the user may need or want to pay for it later."
Perhaps there was a misunderstanding here. Shareware can be upgraded to fully paid versions by, well, paying. I guess that these companies were assuming, by your contacting them at all, that you wanted to pay for the upgrade to the full version. So it is hardly suprising if they were taken aback by such a request, and that they no longer had the full version of this ancient DOS stuff by their right elbow.
I'd love to see the private sector version of this. ... I really haven't noticed private sector behavior being any better.
The result would be about the same. People are people. There is far more variation in culture between different organisations (including between different government offices) than there is any public/private divide in this. I've seen it all, including working in the UK Admiralty at one time where the security was fanatical.
As for TFA (I've followed the links) I find the 2/3 figure hard to believe and the article is light on facts and the form of the questions. Perhaps the 2/3 would not report in a case where they knew it was their own fault. I'm guessing, as I see no reason not to report any other breach that came to light. The resulting flap it would make an interesting diversion to the usual dull routine.
What do you expect with titles like "... for dummies"?
One unfortunate problem with nuke plants is that IIRC you have to have a continuous connection to the grid. If that connection fails, the plant has to scram to avoid damage to the generators (overspeed).
BS
Power stations (even non-nuclear) always have back-up generators that kick in on loss of grid to allow control of the plant to be maintained and for cooling pumps to take the heat out of the system in a controlled way. Generators will not overspeed if cut off the grid - their speeds are controlled by sophisticated control systems, and if they even fail then an old-fashioned back-up mechanical governor will cause the main steam supply valve to slam shut.
The plant would not be "scrammed" on loss of grid. Scramming means hitting a big red panic button. The plant would be kept spinning at first, obviously with the reactor power reduced to near zero, with residual heat being dumped through purposed heat exchangers and possibly releasing steam to atmosphere (unless it is a BWR - Indian Point is not), while the cause of the loss-of-grid was investigated - like getting the grid company on the phone. Many losses-of-grid are quite brief, but if it looked like it was going to be a while then the plant would be shut down in a controlled way, not by a scram button.