- komadori parentI worked for a company which adopted FogBugz. The multiplier it calculated to be applied to developer time estimates quickly diverge towards positive infinity. It's probably fair to share some of the blame for that between us and it. Nonetheless, we managed to hit our quarterly release deadline well in advance of the predicted five to six years :-P.
- The Bank of England used to offer personal bank accounts to their employees, but they phased it out after 2015. Not sure if these accounts were exactly the same as those used for central banking though.
https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/bank-england-cl...
- That is true of all languages, but I think that Cantonese has a particularly high change velocity in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation compared to, say, English.
I think this is because Cantonese speakers tend to read and write in Modern Standard Chinese (more like written Mandarin) and so are much less anchored by the permanence of text. Additionally, Chinese characters provide even less guidance on pronunciation than English spelling. In this landscape, Hong Kong's small media ecosystem is a fertile breeding ground for new language.
- I don't know, you make it sound like a pretty good analogy to me.
A coal power plant take a form stored energy which is relatively difficult to use because it has to be burnt with oxygen producing harmful waste products, and turns that energy into electricity which is easier to use in a variety of applications.
A mitochondria take a form of energy which is relatively difficult to use, sugars and fats, because they must be respired with oxygen producing harmful waste products, and turns that energy into ATP which is easier to use in a variety of applications.
- A DVI* signal is logically very similar to a VGA one, but with a different physical layer. The analogue colour signals are replaced with TMDS encoded digital ones, but the pixel clock and sync signal work more or less the same way.
I would guess that a simple VGA to DVI converter simply syncs to the VGA pixel clock, samples the analogue colours, and outputs the digitally encoded values with the same timings.
From a quick look, the oscillator in this machine's schematic runs at 16 MHz. I assume that the pixel clock is derived from this. The DVI specification has a minimum pixel clock of 25 MHz so you couldn't produce a valid DVI stream from this without buffering the pixels and retiming the output in summer way. Well, I suppose since the pixel clock isn't explicit on the VGA cable you could have an imaginary clock which is higher by doubling pixels horizontally.
Ultimately though, success probably varies depending on the converter and the display used. There are quite a lot of standard VESA modes and you can often get away with generating something close-ish to spec.
For more exotic video signals you can use devices like the RGBtoHDMI: https://github.com/hoglet67/RGBtoHDMI
It decodes the input signal into a framebuffer and uses the Raspberry Pi's video core to output the result.
* HDMI is, broadly speaking, a proprietary extension of DVI. You can feed DVI signals though an HDMI connector and it will display anyway.
- As far as old-school 3D effects go, I like this tutorial on ray casting: https://permadi.com/1996/05/ray-casting-tutorial-1/
It's great to see something similar on the effects used in driving games, which I always imagined to be akin to raycasting's vertical slices drawn horizontally.
- One time I was baking a cake from an online recipe, probably just after recipe sites discovered the importance of verbosity for SEO. I found myself struggling a bit because the recipe wasn't very clearly structured and was quite vague about several of the steps, but I managed to work something out and get it in the oven.
It was only then that I discovered what I had been reading was an anecdote about one time the author had baked this cake, and the actual method was given below!
- > CTRL+F for jet comes up empty.
The relevant word in the text is "aircraft":
"You will be eligible to use the Company aircraft for (i) business-related travel in accordance with the Company’s travel policy, (ii) travel between your city of residence and the Company’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington and (iii) your personal travel in accordance with the Company’s policies, up to a maximum amount of $250,000 per year, which amount will be based on the aggregate incremental cost to the Company."
A commuter jet and a quarter of a million dollars of personal travel!
- Moron, Idiot, and Imbecile were coined as precise medical terms by Dr Henry H Goddard in the 1900-10s. Retard(ed) was devised as a euphemism to replace them in the 1960s.
Once an unfashionable euphemism falls out of use, people gradually cease to recognise the offensive meaning which made it unfashionable.
- Yes, that's correct. It was later adopted by the Linux Foundation with some industry support: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/open-sou...
- Boilers in the UK are usually mounted on the inside of an exterior wall to provide for venting exhaust gases outside. They may provide hot water on-demand without a tank (combi boiler) or fill a hot water cylinder on a schedule (system boiler) depending on type. Heating is typically provided by the boiler pumping hot water through a circuit of wall-mounted radiators regulated by TRVs (Thermostatic Radiator Valves).
- I share your intuition, perhaps unfairly, that it's indeed not as hard in absolute terms. However, it certainly requires a different set of skills and organisational practices.
Just because an organisation is extremely good at one thing doesn't mean it can easily apply that to another field. I would guess that SpaceX probably does have the talent on hand to throw together a Facebook clone, but equally I think they would struggle to actually complete with Facebook as a business at scale.
- Singapore has something akin to a state-run dating agency since 1984: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Development_Network
- Prior to the changes made by Theresa May in 2012, it took 2 years for a spouse to be eligible for ILR and further year for citizenship. I believe in some cases it was possible for a spouse to immediately aquire ILR if the couple had lived together in marriage while abroad.
Now, it takes 5 years for ILR and the spouse of a British citizen is immediately eliable on acquiring ILR to apply for citizenship. A spouse would not normally be on the 10 year route to ILR, unless they depend on 3rd party sponsorship to meet the financial requirements.
It has become a lot more expensive with increased fees and the Immigration Health Surcharge. IMHO, the worst of it is having to apply 3 times over the 5 year period, all the stress and paperwork involved in proving compliance with the financial requirements, and that it discourages you from changing jobs.
- I was so surprised by your comment that I had to check that I hadn't been using the wrong word all this time! However, I don't think it's a veganisation, as you put it.
Usage of "ends meet" dates back to at least the 17th century with uncertain origin, but possibly to do with ropes or accounting. "ends meat" seems to be a more modern derivation, sometimes given as a folk etymology for the former.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/66831/origin-of-...
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/make_ends_meet
https://www.oed.com/search/advanced/Quotations?textTermText0...
- You can write Cantonese, although most Cantonese speakers' "formal" written language is more closely related to spoken Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) than to the way they normally speak.
I recommend "Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular" by Don Snow.