In this day and age, any hardware causing a BSOD or freeze, I will assume faulty and remove.
I can't honestly remember the last time I saw one that wasn't caused by that.
The last BSOD I saw was 3 years ago while building a set of IBM BladeCenter blades. Their RAID card crashes if the default MS driver loads on 2012R2. 2012R2 wasn't officially supported at that point, so it was fair enough, but even then all I had to do was create an install disk with the IBM-supplied drivers (many YEARS ahead of the default MS ones) and it's worked flawlessly for years since on a number of BladeCenters without a problem under 2012R2 and heavy load.
As a programmer, I can justify that - literally the MS driver is so out of date it can't have been written when that hardware was made, and it's not as "compatible" as the 2012 driver, or the 2008 driver but advertises itself to be and the vanilla Windows Setup (which has nothing else compatible with that hardware) tries to load it but BSOD because the hardware isn't what it was expecting. It was instant (on loading the driver via Windows Setup), reproducible, and obvious.
Slipstream the Windows install and supplement the MS driver with anything written SINCE then and it picks the better driver and just works. That's fine by me. And an issue you'd only experience when doing major system upgrades or first-installs.
But a BSOD other than that? I can't even remember. Had a couple of client drive failures and still no BSOD (wouldn't boot, but you'd expect problems beforehand). I would have to say it's been probably 8-9 years since any BSOD that wasn't obviously explainable (hardware obviously failing, computer overheating, or problems like the above).
But a BSOD just because you updated a driver and reboot? No way. Why would you tolerate that on even a personal machine? That's data loss just waiting to happen.
BSOD my machine without an obvious reason why (and not just "it's a new driver" or "it's not the latest driver") and your hardware will be replaced.
I have a gaming laptop. I update the nVidia drivers precisely "when required" (i.e. a new game literally won't load without an update). That means I'm miles behind on versions. I kill all the taskbar apps and get rid of the dual-driver junk and whatever else, in any way I can. Still no BSOD. And when I update, the worst I expect is - very briefly - running on the internal Intel graphics until the new driver kicks in after a reboot.
BSOD died with Windows XP, and those were mainly because it was hard to isolate processes from each other etc. If you have ANY piece of kit that still gives you them in anything even approaching a reproducible or frequent way, ditch it and buy something else.
Same for kernel dumps (unless you've been fiddling with the kernel, they shouldn't happen) or whatever equivalent on Mac.
YOU are not 100% vegan. You have added 1 vegan to the world.
YOU are still a meat-eater.
Could you imagine the delicious irony, for example, of the head of the vegan society eating meat "but that's alright, because I pay some other guy not to"?
It's misleading. "Google" are not 100% renewable. They are paying someone else to be, while still pulling the same power as they always have.
As you note, the result is still the same. Google as still pulling just as much power as they ever have from non-renewable sources. They've just paid someone else to make renewable power elsewhere too.
"There's a giant coal plant outside our offices **smack bang in the middle of a large city already contributing to peak power usage where electricity costs a fortune** providing power....but we purchased electricity credits in some far off land **where it's dirt cheap because it can't be practically transported to anywhere so they can't sell it to anyone else** to offset this"
The bank that's been running since 1690, forms a major part of UK and multinational banking, is listed on London and New York stock exchanges, and "was the most powerful transnational corporation in terms of ownership and thus corporate control over global financial stability and market competition".
We're not talking about your online personal account. We're talking about business accounts that require multiple smartcard authorisation to sign off on millions of pounds a year of salaries.
And yes, they STILL require IE / Firefox ESR,.NET Framework, and Gemalto ActiveX controls.
If it's not HTML5, they are required to push out an iPad app because there will be something that doesn't work on Safari. Android / Chromebook apps will never appear or will have to wait for the HTML5 version, and it will never be properly navigable across all devices with bare HTML5 (people keep telling me this, I've yet to see a decent demonstration that doesn't just send you to two different places). Hell, these people still use Quicktime...
Banking:
Our business banking partner insisted on using IE until this year. When they then realised it was going to die and they had to upgrade for Windows 10? We now HAVE to use Firefox ESR editions with a specific.NET Framework, an ActiveX-like control and exceptions for scripting etc. on their domains (their software tries to auto-add them on install to IE too!). If anything, we've taken two steps back in terms of security there, and still have a browser that is NOT our default browser just for banking.
Video streaming:
They all started off saying they'll support HTML5, but some of the HTML5 versions are literally play and stop and that's it. A load of sites break when you try to just play a movie, and how do I stop it auto-playing? Oh, there's a plugin/extension/js for that.
We need to get off our arses and just say "Fuck off. Plain HTML5 and nothing else or we don't visit". I still run across pages that want Java and all kinds of junk.
Relying on a plugin of any kind, even Flash, (plugins have to be native code) is inherently not cross-platform and is a security risk. You have no idea if that plugin's breaking open your SSL sessions and handling other data from sites insecurely.
Trouble is, the places that MATTER (i.e. schools which are teaching the children how to use a computer, and banks which are holding your money to ransom if you're anybody) don't give a shit. We're still fighting banks on "but this is more secure" when they make us run closed code in a closed plugin tied into closed sites on a particular browser that's not your normal browser and is - by definition - outdated. It shouldn't be.
The quicker Chrome blocks all this shit, and Microsoft Edge and Safari follow, the quicker people will have to fix it to make things work as before.
Don't let the banks pull the "You must use IE shit" any more. Literally just switch them off and go "We warned you, now you'll need to follow best practice as we've said for decades".
You say "What kind of question is that?", "Where have you got that from?", "Where do you get your information?".
Making up bollocks means "I don't want to answer that particular question".
Calling out the interviewer says "What shit are you trying to pull here? Give me a real interview."
Watch some of the greats being interviewed, they don't do this modern politics bullshit where you just don't answer. They give straight answers, back them up, and you can only argue that you disagree with their particular (usually well-reasoned) argument.
It's a modern disease to think that speaking absolute unrelated bollocks is showing how clever you are.
And if you don't want to say Yes or No to a question, it indicates that you don't want people to know what you think.
"Have you stopped beating your wife?" "Well, that's a fucking impossible question to answer and you know it, but I'll answer the question you are trying to misconstrue which is "Do I beat my wife?" and the answer is emphatically no. Now I'm interested in what you think you're trying to pull. Want to ask me a real question that I can express my opinion in next, or should we get a professional interviewer in?"
Red Dwarf died with series 8, everything since has been utter shite, including a "Back to Earth" special where they GO INTO A TV SOAP OPERA that the main actor was starring in at the time.
It's to do with the generation that did nearly being dead.
If you were 20 when Benny was on TV, you'll be over 60 now.
Welcome to Britain, where our comedy is up to date, the US find it 20 years later where they think it's still funny for 20 years after that.
Seriously, guys, we had Red Dwarf in the 80's/90's and the first mention I've ever seen in the US (apart from the atrocious Americanised US pilot) was in Big Bang Theory only a handful of years ago. Red Dwarf has been dead and buried since I was in secondary school.
Same with your Monty Python fetish. It was funny AT THE TIME for being outlandish, outrageous, different. That was in the 70's, ffs. It's old hat and hasn't actually been freshly funny for my entire life, yet if a Brit talks to a US person about comedy, I guarantee you they will come up (I'm a Brit, I have proven this statistically by my various encounters...)
It's not that "it's not funny", it's that it was funny BEFORE WE WERE BORN, or so long ago that nobody remembers. Since then, so much else has come and gone that's so much funnier, that by comparison it's archaic.
But you guys never seem to see that stuff.
Re-runs are the death of comedy like that, which was based on shock, rudeness, at-the-time-bordering-on-the-inappropriate, and stars that were still alive. Benny Hill has been dead for 20-something years and hasn't been on TV for over 30-something years, and that was in his later years when he just wasn't funny any more.
Hell, he starred in the ORIGINAL Italian Job and that was made in 1969.
It's like all of us here in Britain crowing about how funny I Love Lucy "is".
Because "We pass the emissions test" is an entirely verifiable fact.
Whereas "The AI is like nothing ever seen before, the world is procedurally-generated, the graphics are amazing" are not. They are subjective. At best, they throw buzzwords at you that are easy to comply with while still trolling out a turd of a game (I can make you a procedurally generated game, if you like. Give me ten minutes). They are marketing.
Stop buying shit before you know how good (or bad) it is.
You are perpetuating shitty over-hyped products that flop once people actually get their hands on them.
If you didn't part with your money until it was released, reviewed, tested, a handful of brave souls had tried it out, etc. then companies would have to put out decent products first time rather than rely on pre-release hype to sell enough that they don't have to care that it's a turd they're selling.
It's not even a new thing, this sort of shit was happening long before Duke Nukem Forever and people STILL KEEP BUYING SHIT.
Buy a game after it's been out for a year, and you know whether or not you want it. It'll be cheaper, you'll buy half the amount of games you actually do, they'll be much better quality on average and - best of all - after the first year you won't give a shit about "missing out" because year-old games will still be "new" to you.
Can you please distinguish between religious and spiritual when your own explanation contains:
"who is watching the watcher"
It sounds immensely like you belief you hit an existence controlled or observed by an entity other than known ones. Sounds exactly like a religion to me!
Honestly, I'm not being facetious here... what's the difference? Absence of a belief-in-god does not make something non-religious. Absence of knowledge of any-god-or-not doesn't either.
What's the difference between spiritual and religious?
Do you know, I drove home last night and have no memory of doing so? Automatic pilot, driven by my brain, while I thought of "higher" things.
I changed gear, negotiated roundabouts, kept to speed limits, stopped for pedestrians and red lights and navigated home without giving it a single conscious thought.
I also know that every night I fall unconscious, hallucinate vividly and then have complete amnesia about the whole event if I'm not interrupted before my brain is finished with it. It's called dreaming.
If I was sitting in a room for six years trying to do something, my brain would hallucinate the same (that's not meant to be an insulting word, it's quite literally what imagination and dreaming are) and believe I was outside my body. Yet, nobody, ever, in any controlled experiment, even when saying they ARE in that "special place" has ever demonstrated knowledge of, say, what's on top of the dresser behind them that they couldn't see from inside their body, or similar. You can even awake completely relaxed, unstressed, energised, without even having an hour's rest if you've had the right dream.
In the same way as out-of-body near-death experiences and suchlike, attributing it to some other existence seems, to me, to be entirely insulting to the capacity of the human mind under normal circumstances.
We have composers who see colours, artists who can paint pictures that don't complete until the final brush stroke but they can see it in their head in vivid detail, and story-writers who live in their heads most of their lives even if they can't write it down to save their life.
When the brain is then deprived of sensory information, and forced to entertain itself, it's no wonder that such experiences happen. To push them to "something else" rather than "Woah, my brain is capable of stupendous feats" is, I feel, condescending.
It doesn't require a supernatural explanation, or even comment. We've probably all done more amazing things in our sleep, or driving home from work.
Hell, I dreamed a "movie" from start to finish in twenty minutes of being asleep one night and still, to this day, I like to fold back into that dream or even write it down (which has taken YEARS of my life to do so). My brain was on-form that night, and I awoke exhilarated and haven't forgotten that experienced in 20+ years.
I really find it annoying when people then - as you just did - write it off as supernatural and, having "mastered" it in what sounds like a repeatable way, then ignore it and never do it again for fear of... what? Discovering some truth? Angering some god?
What if that's the way to escape the Matrix? What if that's the way to gain insight from your own mind on things nobody else has ever managed? What if that is the way to Heaven/Hell or whatever?
As someone of a scientific mind (can't you tell?), it drives me mad that people get near the equivalent of the next level of human existence, then never repeat it, wrap it in crap like "astral projection" and meditation, and basically forget it ever happened.
If it made you not fear death, surely you could do it again and be less scared, and not fear dying in the process?
But, maybe that would then conflict if - actually - it turns out just to have been a particularly vivid dream?
Maths has no problem with infinities. Hell, we classify different types of infinities and apple actions to them in different ways. An infinity doesn't scare a mathematician.
The problem is then applying that to a real-world interpretation as "infinite" anything - space, time, energy, matter - is hard to conceive and generally impossible. However, infinities themselves can cancel out, present only in impossible situations anyway, and so on. Same with quantum physics - the maths tells you WHAT happens, and we've confirmed the maths by multiple observations of exactly all the weird things the maths predicts, but we're still not entirely sure we're describing EVERYTHING as there are a few oddballs.
Infinities don't mean something's inherently wrong. And infinities come up in Maths all the time, from basic arithmetic onwards.
The problem is not that there's an infinity. It's having an infinity as the answer without a real-world analogue to that mathematical answer.
Personalised medicine is damn expensive. In a world where we can't afford cheap generics for enough people, and still have insurance-backed healthcare (stupidity personified), personalised medicine is an extra cost that can be put on you and penalise you for your genetic makeup further than we ever could before.
Or you could just eat less.
Because we have NOWHERE NEAR an understanding enough to tell people what they should be doing to get their weight down in such instances, without also involving the words "eat less" and "exercise more" along with them.
We haven't even identified most gut bacteria, let alone work out which ones are "wrong", let alone where they came from, let alone what's needed to put them back, and certain NOT how to sustain that situation without changing what the user eats and getting them to... EAT LESS OF IT to see if it works.
Personalised medicine is fabulous. If you can afford it. There's a reason that we type blood, and check chromosomes and all kinds of other things for your personal response to something (good or bad). And every test costs, whether you pay for it directly or not. And pretty much, in modern healthcare, the emphasis is on reducing the number of tests, not increasing them. Because every failed test costs just as much as every success, which is why you hire clever doctors to know what tests are necessary to eliminate the most things the quickest.
But your dicky belly that's solved by eating less just isn't worth the cost, unless there's a serious underlying medical reason that's going to kill you, rather than a chosen ignorance of eating less to avoid things that will kill you.
It doesn't matter WHY it affects them differently, except as trivia.
Unless you intend to specifically analyse, combat and treat individual microbiomes in the stomach of every patient, you're not going to be able to do much else.
And, honestly, it STILL comes down to "YOU need to eat less". Short of individually tailored micromanagement of your gut, you're not going to ever really change what's in there.
And yet, eating less will force the gut bacteria that are less efficient to die off and more efficient ones to survive or be introduced. It's horrible, yes, but still the only way to lose weight is to EAT LESS.
The only possible use for such high-tech analysis? People who risk malnutrition through serious stomach disorders that mean it's otherwise impossible to lose weight without dying. And those people are INCREDIBLY rare.
People make excuses as much as they like, blame your parents, your upbringing, your fear of sticky food, your gut bacteria or whatever. If you want to lose weight you have to eat less and exercise more, and there's no way around that that a non-outlier person can achieve.
Companies like this have no idea how to educate your child. That's not what they are interested in. Participation in the hour of code stuff is pure brand building. Look, kids, you can play Minecraft on your school iPads thanks to Microsoft! Google it now!
As someone who's worked their entire professional career in school IT, a shocking number of companies have no idea what education actually is or how it works or what's needed. RPi was a great example. Throw the device at kids with absolutely no educational content ready, nothing to give to teachers to aid them along, and don't even bother to come to educational conferences, just let others sell it for you on the basis of a name.
I don't know a single school that has more than a couple of them, and they are rarely used for anything but the default image, "load up Scratch, wasn't that cool?, right back to work".
If you think you're going to teach teenagers coding by using Scratch and Minecraft (which, admittedly, has logic circuits etc.) then you're sadly failing a generation whose parents were using BBC BASIC on the ONE computer in their school when they were 8/9. Seriously, even something like TIS-100 or SpaceChem does more for problem solving, logic constraints and the coding mindset than Scratch and similar (which is basically drag-drop-flow-chart, which we used to call "Control", not programming).
My school have the Microsoft.NET Gadgeteer devices, same problem. The curriculum content covered is minimal, most of it is left in the hands of the teacher, so you get a single example project that they make themselves familiar with, every kid does it the same, builds it the same, loads up the same example code, and apart from the real outliers that tinker on their own, nobody learns anything.
As a coder, a mathematician, there is nothing scarier than how little of how the computer actually works is taught in schools. Because the teacher's don't know either. I've worked in dozens of schools over the years and met dozens of IT teachers and primary school teachers who are required to teach IT. I've met precisel three teachers I'd trust to write a program - one a mathematics teacher who programmed in COBOL in a previous one, one a former industrial control specialist who went into teaching, the other my brother who teaches physics but studied maths in uni and was taught FORTRAN.
With the exception of the industrial control guy, not ONE of the IT teachers I've met or worked with has a clue about programming or how to program or would even get an XKCD or Dilbert joke about coders or similar. I wouldn't trust any of them to build a machine, network a room, or anything else. And that's worrying because that means they are not "Computer Science", they are "Computing". An end-user, not a creator.
Sure, they can teach the kids to do silly things in Scratch and knock up an assessment sheet in Excel, but anything more than that and you wouldn't want them near it.
And those are the people TEACHING the specialist subject of IT that - in the UK - is required to be a part of teaching in all subjects.
My teachers, back in my day, had no IT equipment, experience, or knowledge. And they did a better job because they knew it was the future and knew it was vital and they learned it and made us.
Nowadays, everything is computing so as long as you're proficient with a bit of typing and know where the print button is in Word when the teacher loses you, you're a genius.
I help run after-school clubs targeting coding, in an exclusive private school. We've had hundreds of top-class pupils comes through our doors. I've met precisely one who stood a chance of being a half-decent coder. All the others think that pressing F12 in Chrome and changing the local cached HTML front page of BBC News to read "Fred Bloggs is a Wally" is "hacking".
People just don't code nowadays. And Microsoft et al have no intention to teach them, because it keeps them as MS's mercy. They will never understand how si
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In this day and age, any hardware causing a BSOD or freeze, I will assume faulty and remove.
I can't honestly remember the last time I saw one that wasn't caused by that.
The last BSOD I saw was 3 years ago while building a set of IBM BladeCenter blades. Their RAID card crashes if the default MS driver loads on 2012R2. 2012R2 wasn't officially supported at that point, so it was fair enough, but even then all I had to do was create an install disk with the IBM-supplied drivers (many YEARS ahead of the default MS ones) and it's worked flawlessly for years since on a number of BladeCenters without a problem under 2012R2 and heavy load.
As a programmer, I can justify that - literally the MS driver is so out of date it can't have been written when that hardware was made, and it's not as "compatible" as the 2012 driver, or the 2008 driver but advertises itself to be and the vanilla Windows Setup (which has nothing else compatible with that hardware) tries to load it but BSOD because the hardware isn't what it was expecting. It was instant (on loading the driver via Windows Setup), reproducible, and obvious.
Slipstream the Windows install and supplement the MS driver with anything written SINCE then and it picks the better driver and just works. That's fine by me. And an issue you'd only experience when doing major system upgrades or first-installs.
But a BSOD other than that? I can't even remember. Had a couple of client drive failures and still no BSOD (wouldn't boot, but you'd expect problems beforehand). I would have to say it's been probably 8-9 years since any BSOD that wasn't obviously explainable (hardware obviously failing, computer overheating, or problems like the above).
But a BSOD just because you updated a driver and reboot? No way. Why would you tolerate that on even a personal machine? That's data loss just waiting to happen.
BSOD my machine without an obvious reason why (and not just "it's a new driver" or "it's not the latest driver") and your hardware will be replaced.
I have a gaming laptop. I update the nVidia drivers precisely "when required" (i.e. a new game literally won't load without an update). That means I'm miles behind on versions. I kill all the taskbar apps and get rid of the dual-driver junk and whatever else, in any way I can. Still no BSOD. And when I update, the worst I expect is - very briefly - running on the internal Intel graphics until the new driver kicks in after a reboot.
BSOD died with Windows XP, and those were mainly because it was hard to isolate processes from each other etc. If you have ANY piece of kit that still gives you them in anything even approaching a reproducible or frequent way, ditch it and buy something else.
Same for kernel dumps (unless you've been fiddling with the kernel, they shouldn't happen) or whatever equivalent on Mac.
That system's in use all over the world.
The administrative burden of JUST ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE is far too high and would actually cost you more.
On Thursdays (I think), you can't drive a truck through Italy. Same thing.
As soon as you get into registered lists, issuing stickers or permits, etc. it gets so expensive that you don't want to do it.
You can do it fairly, cheaply, or easily enforceable. Pick any two.
I don't know.
Which?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...
And it's lying.
YOU are not 100% vegan. You have added 1 vegan to the world.
YOU are still a meat-eater.
Could you imagine the delicious irony, for example, of the head of the vegan society eating meat "but that's alright, because I pay some other guy not to"?
It's misleading. "Google" are not 100% renewable. They are paying someone else to be, while still pulling the same power as they always have.
As you note, the result is still the same. Google as still pulling just as much power as they ever have from non-renewable sources. They've just paid someone else to make renewable power elsewhere too.
Or the Bluetooth patent holders might be offering a discount if they do this.
We're so innovative, we even copy our own competitors when they make a decision that's been widely ridiculed!
FFS, Samsung, you used to think for yourself AND make better decisions.
So, am I about to reach 100% veganism if:
"I eat meat all day long, but I pay someone else to eat only vegetables too, so that's alright, isn't it?"
More like:
"There's a giant coal plant outside our offices **smack bang in the middle of a large city already contributing to peak power usage where electricity costs a fortune** providing power....but we purchased electricity credits in some far off land **where it's dirt cheap because it can't be practically transported to anywhere so they can't sell it to anyone else** to offset this"
Barclays Business Internet Banking.
The bank that's been running since 1690, forms a major part of UK and multinational banking, is listed on London and New York stock exchanges, and "was the most powerful transnational corporation in terms of ownership and thus corporate control over global financial stability and market competition".
We're not talking about your online personal account. We're talking about business accounts that require multiple smartcard authorisation to sign off on millions of pounds a year of salaries.
And yes, they STILL require IE / Firefox ESR, .NET Framework, and Gemalto ActiveX controls.
Education:
If it's not HTML5, they are required to push out an iPad app because there will be something that doesn't work on Safari. Android / Chromebook apps will never appear or will have to wait for the HTML5 version, and it will never be properly navigable across all devices with bare HTML5 (people keep telling me this, I've yet to see a decent demonstration that doesn't just send you to two different places). Hell, these people still use Quicktime...
Banking:
Our business banking partner insisted on using IE until this year. When they then realised it was going to die and they had to upgrade for Windows 10? We now HAVE to use Firefox ESR editions with a specific .NET Framework, an ActiveX-like control and exceptions for scripting etc. on their domains (their software tries to auto-add them on install to IE too!). If anything, we've taken two steps back in terms of security there, and still have a browser that is NOT our default browser just for banking.
Video streaming:
They all started off saying they'll support HTML5, but some of the HTML5 versions are literally play and stop and that's it. A load of sites break when you try to just play a movie, and how do I stop it auto-playing? Oh, there's a plugin/extension/js for that.
We need to get off our arses and just say "Fuck off. Plain HTML5 and nothing else or we don't visit". I still run across pages that want Java and all kinds of junk.
Relying on a plugin of any kind, even Flash, (plugins have to be native code) is inherently not cross-platform and is a security risk. You have no idea if that plugin's breaking open your SSL sessions and handling other data from sites insecurely.
Trouble is, the places that MATTER (i.e. schools which are teaching the children how to use a computer, and banks which are holding your money to ransom if you're anybody) don't give a shit. We're still fighting banks on "but this is more secure" when they make us run closed code in a closed plugin tied into closed sites on a particular browser that's not your normal browser and is - by definition - outdated. It shouldn't be.
The quicker Chrome blocks all this shit, and Microsoft Edge and Safari follow, the quicker people will have to fix it to make things work as before.
Don't let the banks pull the "You must use IE shit" any more. Literally just switch them off and go "We warned you, now you'll need to follow best practice as we've said for decades".
Only a liar makes up another question to answer.
You say "What kind of question is that?", "Where have you got that from?", "Where do you get your information?".
Making up bollocks means "I don't want to answer that particular question".
Calling out the interviewer says "What shit are you trying to pull here? Give me a real interview."
Watch some of the greats being interviewed, they don't do this modern politics bullshit where you just don't answer. They give straight answers, back them up, and you can only argue that you disagree with their particular (usually well-reasoned) argument.
It's a modern disease to think that speaking absolute unrelated bollocks is showing how clever you are.
And if you don't want to say Yes or No to a question, it indicates that you don't want people to know what you think.
"Have you stopped beating your wife?"
"Well, that's a fucking impossible question to answer and you know it, but I'll answer the question you are trying to misconstrue which is "Do I beat my wife?" and the answer is emphatically no. Now I'm interested in what you think you're trying to pull. Want to ask me a real question that I can express my opinion in next, or should we get a professional interviewer in?"
Red Dwarf died with series 8, everything since has been utter shite, including a "Back to Earth" special where they GO INTO A TV SOAP OPERA that the main actor was starring in at the time.
If you're that worried, change your accepted settings.
But you're talking crap, as my NTP pool server gets PUSHED OFF the pool if it drifts anywhere near that far, or goes offline for even a short time.
Currently my jitters for uk.pool.ntp.org are:
0.071
0.079
0.050
0.190
Those numbers are IN MILLISECONDS. 0.05 of a millisecond.
And 0.478 on a stratum 1, famous, advertised, academic, public NTP server not in the pool.
NTP Pool is there for a reason.
Nothing to do with not liking Benny Hill.
It's to do with the generation that did nearly being dead.
If you were 20 when Benny was on TV, you'll be over 60 now.
Welcome to Britain, where our comedy is up to date, the US find it 20 years later where they think it's still funny for 20 years after that.
Seriously, guys, we had Red Dwarf in the 80's/90's and the first mention I've ever seen in the US (apart from the atrocious Americanised US pilot) was in Big Bang Theory only a handful of years ago. Red Dwarf has been dead and buried since I was in secondary school.
Same with your Monty Python fetish. It was funny AT THE TIME for being outlandish, outrageous, different. That was in the 70's, ffs. It's old hat and hasn't actually been freshly funny for my entire life, yet if a Brit talks to a US person about comedy, I guarantee you they will come up (I'm a Brit, I have proven this statistically by my various encounters...)
It's not that "it's not funny", it's that it was funny BEFORE WE WERE BORN, or so long ago that nobody remembers. Since then, so much else has come and gone that's so much funnier, that by comparison it's archaic.
But you guys never seem to see that stuff.
Re-runs are the death of comedy like that, which was based on shock, rudeness, at-the-time-bordering-on-the-inappropriate, and stars that were still alive. Benny Hill has been dead for 20-something years and hasn't been on TV for over 30-something years, and that was in his later years when he just wasn't funny any more.
Hell, he starred in the ORIGINAL Italian Job and that was made in 1969.
It's like all of us here in Britain crowing about how funny I Love Lucy "is".
Because "We pass the emissions test" is an entirely verifiable fact.
Whereas "The AI is like nothing ever seen before, the world is procedurally-generated, the graphics are amazing" are not. They are subjective. At best, they throw buzzwords at you that are easy to comply with while still trolling out a turd of a game (I can make you a procedurally generated game, if you like. Give me ten minutes). They are marketing.
And you fell for it.
Stop buying shit before you know how good (or bad) it is.
You are perpetuating shitty over-hyped products that flop once people actually get their hands on them.
If you didn't part with your money until it was released, reviewed, tested, a handful of brave souls had tried it out, etc. then companies would have to put out decent products first time rather than rely on pre-release hype to sell enough that they don't have to care that it's a turd they're selling.
It's not even a new thing, this sort of shit was happening long before Duke Nukem Forever and people STILL KEEP BUYING SHIT.
Buy a game after it's been out for a year, and you know whether or not you want it. It'll be cheaper, you'll buy half the amount of games you actually do, they'll be much better quality on average and - best of all - after the first year you won't give a shit about "missing out" because year-old games will still be "new" to you.
It's related to pi.
Can you please distinguish between religious and spiritual when your own explanation contains:
"who is watching the watcher"
It sounds immensely like you belief you hit an existence controlled or observed by an entity other than known ones. Sounds exactly like a religion to me!
Honestly, I'm not being facetious here... what's the difference? Absence of a belief-in-god does not make something non-religious. Absence of knowledge of any-god-or-not doesn't either.
What's the difference between spiritual and religious?
Sigh.
I never get why we have to overblow this.
Do you know, I drove home last night and have no memory of doing so? Automatic pilot, driven by my brain, while I thought of "higher" things.
I changed gear, negotiated roundabouts, kept to speed limits, stopped for pedestrians and red lights and navigated home without giving it a single conscious thought.
I also know that every night I fall unconscious, hallucinate vividly and then have complete amnesia about the whole event if I'm not interrupted before my brain is finished with it. It's called dreaming.
If I was sitting in a room for six years trying to do something, my brain would hallucinate the same (that's not meant to be an insulting word, it's quite literally what imagination and dreaming are) and believe I was outside my body. Yet, nobody, ever, in any controlled experiment, even when saying they ARE in that "special place" has ever demonstrated knowledge of, say, what's on top of the dresser behind them that they couldn't see from inside their body, or similar. You can even awake completely relaxed, unstressed, energised, without even having an hour's rest if you've had the right dream.
In the same way as out-of-body near-death experiences and suchlike, attributing it to some other existence seems, to me, to be entirely insulting to the capacity of the human mind under normal circumstances.
We have composers who see colours, artists who can paint pictures that don't complete until the final brush stroke but they can see it in their head in vivid detail, and story-writers who live in their heads most of their lives even if they can't write it down to save their life.
When the brain is then deprived of sensory information, and forced to entertain itself, it's no wonder that such experiences happen. To push them to "something else" rather than "Woah, my brain is capable of stupendous feats" is, I feel, condescending.
It doesn't require a supernatural explanation, or even comment. We've probably all done more amazing things in our sleep, or driving home from work.
Hell, I dreamed a "movie" from start to finish in twenty minutes of being asleep one night and still, to this day, I like to fold back into that dream or even write it down (which has taken YEARS of my life to do so). My brain was on-form that night, and I awoke exhilarated and haven't forgotten that experienced in 20+ years.
I really find it annoying when people then - as you just did - write it off as supernatural and, having "mastered" it in what sounds like a repeatable way, then ignore it and never do it again for fear of... what? Discovering some truth? Angering some god?
What if that's the way to escape the Matrix? What if that's the way to gain insight from your own mind on things nobody else has ever managed? What if that is the way to Heaven/Hell or whatever?
As someone of a scientific mind (can't you tell?), it drives me mad that people get near the equivalent of the next level of human existence, then never repeat it, wrap it in crap like "astral projection" and meditation, and basically forget it ever happened.
If it made you not fear death, surely you could do it again and be less scared, and not fear dying in the process?
But, maybe that would then conflict if - actually - it turns out just to have been a particularly vivid dream?
Pi is constant.
Zero is constant.
Both appear in the natural world an awful lot.
This kind of physics is not physics, It's maths.
Maths has no problem with infinities. Hell, we classify different types of infinities and apple actions to them in different ways. An infinity doesn't scare a mathematician.
The problem is then applying that to a real-world interpretation as "infinite" anything - space, time, energy, matter - is hard to conceive and generally impossible. However, infinities themselves can cancel out, present only in impossible situations anyway, and so on. Same with quantum physics - the maths tells you WHAT happens, and we've confirmed the maths by multiple observations of exactly all the weird things the maths predicts, but we're still not entirely sure we're describing EVERYTHING as there are a few oddballs.
Infinities don't mean something's inherently wrong. And infinities come up in Maths all the time, from basic arithmetic onwards.
The problem is not that there's an infinity. It's having an infinity as the answer without a real-world analogue to that mathematical answer.
Personalised medicine is damn expensive. In a world where we can't afford cheap generics for enough people, and still have insurance-backed healthcare (stupidity personified), personalised medicine is an extra cost that can be put on you and penalise you for your genetic makeup further than we ever could before.
Or you could just eat less.
Because we have NOWHERE NEAR an understanding enough to tell people what they should be doing to get their weight down in such instances, without also involving the words "eat less" and "exercise more" along with them.
We haven't even identified most gut bacteria, let alone work out which ones are "wrong", let alone where they came from, let alone what's needed to put them back, and certain NOT how to sustain that situation without changing what the user eats and getting them to ... EAT LESS OF IT to see if it works.
Personalised medicine is fabulous. If you can afford it. There's a reason that we type blood, and check chromosomes and all kinds of other things for your personal response to something (good or bad). And every test costs, whether you pay for it directly or not. And pretty much, in modern healthcare, the emphasis is on reducing the number of tests, not increasing them. Because every failed test costs just as much as every success, which is why you hire clever doctors to know what tests are necessary to eliminate the most things the quickest.
But your dicky belly that's solved by eating less just isn't worth the cost, unless there's a serious underlying medical reason that's going to kill you, rather than a chosen ignorance of eating less to avoid things that will kill you.
It doesn't matter WHY it affects them differently, except as trivia.
Unless you intend to specifically analyse, combat and treat individual microbiomes in the stomach of every patient, you're not going to be able to do much else.
And, honestly, it STILL comes down to "YOU need to eat less". Short of individually tailored micromanagement of your gut, you're not going to ever really change what's in there.
And yet, eating less will force the gut bacteria that are less efficient to die off and more efficient ones to survive or be introduced. It's horrible, yes, but still the only way to lose weight is to EAT LESS.
The only possible use for such high-tech analysis? People who risk malnutrition through serious stomach disorders that mean it's otherwise impossible to lose weight without dying. And those people are INCREDIBLY rare.
People make excuses as much as they like, blame your parents, your upbringing, your fear of sticky food, your gut bacteria or whatever. If you want to lose weight you have to eat less and exercise more, and there's no way around that that a non-outlier person can achieve.
Companies like this have no idea how to educate your child. That's not what they are interested in. Participation in the hour of code stuff is pure brand building. Look, kids, you can play Minecraft on your school iPads thanks to Microsoft! Google it now!
As someone who's worked their entire professional career in school IT, a shocking number of companies have no idea what education actually is or how it works or what's needed. RPi was a great example. Throw the device at kids with absolutely no educational content ready, nothing to give to teachers to aid them along, and don't even bother to come to educational conferences, just let others sell it for you on the basis of a name.
I don't know a single school that has more than a couple of them, and they are rarely used for anything but the default image, "load up Scratch, wasn't that cool?, right back to work".
If you think you're going to teach teenagers coding by using Scratch and Minecraft (which, admittedly, has logic circuits etc.) then you're sadly failing a generation whose parents were using BBC BASIC on the ONE computer in their school when they were 8/9. Seriously, even something like TIS-100 or SpaceChem does more for problem solving, logic constraints and the coding mindset than Scratch and similar (which is basically drag-drop-flow-chart, which we used to call "Control", not programming).
My school have the Microsoft .NET Gadgeteer devices, same problem. The curriculum content covered is minimal, most of it is left in the hands of the teacher, so you get a single example project that they make themselves familiar with, every kid does it the same, builds it the same, loads up the same example code, and apart from the real outliers that tinker on their own, nobody learns anything.
As a coder, a mathematician, there is nothing scarier than how little of how the computer actually works is taught in schools. Because the teacher's don't know either. I've worked in dozens of schools over the years and met dozens of IT teachers and primary school teachers who are required to teach IT. I've met precisel three teachers I'd trust to write a program - one a mathematics teacher who programmed in COBOL in a previous one, one a former industrial control specialist who went into teaching, the other my brother who teaches physics but studied maths in uni and was taught FORTRAN.
With the exception of the industrial control guy, not ONE of the IT teachers I've met or worked with has a clue about programming or how to program or would even get an XKCD or Dilbert joke about coders or similar. I wouldn't trust any of them to build a machine, network a room, or anything else. And that's worrying because that means they are not "Computer Science", they are "Computing". An end-user, not a creator.
Sure, they can teach the kids to do silly things in Scratch and knock up an assessment sheet in Excel, but anything more than that and you wouldn't want them near it.
And those are the people TEACHING the specialist subject of IT that - in the UK - is required to be a part of teaching in all subjects.
My teachers, back in my day, had no IT equipment, experience, or knowledge. And they did a better job because they knew it was the future and knew it was vital and they learned it and made us.
Nowadays, everything is computing so as long as you're proficient with a bit of typing and know where the print button is in Word when the teacher loses you, you're a genius.
I help run after-school clubs targeting coding, in an exclusive private school. We've had hundreds of top-class pupils comes through our doors. I've met precisely one who stood a chance of being a half-decent coder. All the others think that pressing F12 in Chrome and changing the local cached HTML front page of BBC News to read "Fred Bloggs is a Wally" is "hacking".
People just don't code nowadays. And Microsoft et al have no intention to teach them, because it keeps them as MS's mercy. They will never understand how si