davidhbolton

10 ms·

31.
by davidhbolton 4y ago
My parent's house, bought in 1970 for £4,000 sold for £32,000 in 1986. That was the high inflation of the 1970s to blame. But a house I bought in 2000 for £185,000 sold for £550,000 in 2015. That wasn't inflation to blame but supp
32.
by davidhbolton 4y ago
A CS degree when I got mine (41 years ago) was half and half though it wasn't called software engineering. Back then the "engineering stuff" was practical: things like programming, calculating latencies of disk drives and stu
33.
by davidhbolton 4y ago
Confession. Learnt Pascal at Uni. Programmed in Compas Pascal 1984 (precursor to Turbo Pascal) then Turbo Pascal 3.0 from 1986-1993. Then from 1997 to the present day worked with Delphi (2,3,4,5,7, XE7 and XE 10.1). I wrote a 40,000 line Po
34.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
It's a very neat visualisation. This is only 100,000 stars out of 200-400 billion in our galaxy. And the next level up- a flythrough 400,000 galaxies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw Now that really makes m
35.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Other reasons to keep cash. 1. Self discipline. Plastic (debit or credit) lets you spend more than you should. Cash doesn't. 2. Privacy. Do you really want every transaction to be observed by the Government? "We think you are spen
36.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I worked at British Aerospace and my title was software engineer. Compared to previous programming jobs, this was roughly 70% paper work and 30% developing software. It was quite formal how they developed software using the waterfall method
37.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I had been a Turbo Pascal Programmer and in the summer of 1990 joined British Aerospace as a programmer for their avionics test software. The first week I just sat with an Ada book and compiler and taught myself and week two started using i
38.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Here in the UK roughly 16% (not far off 10 million people) live outside towns and cities where public transport is next to non-existent. Roads are frequently without pavements so no walking and being single lane, incredibly dangerous for cy
39.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I have to disagree with your hypothesis. Hand written assembly will I doubt never match the speed of compiler optimized code for anything non-trivial, unless you are an expert and have spent many years developing in assembly. There are just
40.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
People are surprised that dealing with the EU is cumbersome and overly bureaucratic? Who knew...
41.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Watching this simulated fly through of 400,000 actual galaxies blows my mind. Space is frickin huge... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08LBltePDZw&t=31s
42.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
No, the UK is not suffering from a shortage of fuel, just the delivery mechanism for one chain. BP.
43.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I'm part of a team that looks after a 1.3 million loc application in Delphi using the XE7 version. The 32-bit version builds in just 11 seconds on an 18 month old laptop. I've just spent the last two years adding Virtual Channels
44.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I always think it ironic that the C order of variable declaration prevailed for so many years (C++, C#, Java) yet in recent times several newer languages have discovered that the Pascal declaration order is handy for compiler type inference
45.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Turbo Pascal was a very fast compiler, written in assembler. I'm a Delphi developer, and have spent about 24 of the past 36 years programming in Pascal. The Delphi XE7 compiler (now about 8 years old) can on a one year old Lenovo lapto
46.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
In countries like the UK where you can be jailed or fined for not giving a password, this provides a way to do that and escape jail. Truecrypt did it and after the developers stopped supporting that, VeraCrypt came along. You obviously don&
47.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Well there was the well publicised case of Luther Rahman, the Tower Hamlets Mayor. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-32428648 But I'm more inclined to suspect postal fraud. There was talk of student
48.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
The trend is not clear and undeniable. Climate science is at best contentious and certainly highly politicised. All of the IPCC predictions of temperature rises have not happened. Sea level rises? The Maldives have been building several air
49.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Cold is still the big killer. 20x that of heat. According to this scientific study. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150520193831.h... "Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot wea
50.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
The EU is very much under the influence of big companies lobbyists. It always was and always will be. The EU parliament is a joke- voting is done in a way that makes it possible for people to vote for the wrong thing - see https:/&#x2
51.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
In the UK about 9 million (roughly 1 in 15) people live in the countryside. My nearest supermarket is 7 miles away. There is no public transport to speak of. The nearest railway station is 6 miles away.
52.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I do wonder if there could be some nifty filtering tech that would allow the two voices to be isolated and the higher-pitch one (Taylor Swift) and music be removed.
53.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
I was part of a team that maintained end of day commodity trading software for a bank. Out of nowhere they got an $800 million inbalance one night. It was very odd and of such a magnitude that it was seen at board level (not good). We spent
54.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
Here in the UK, approx 10 million (about 16% of the population) people live outside of towns and cities. My nearest supermarket is seven miles away. Public transport is almost non-existent. Cars are a necessity not a luxury. In cities (and
55.
by davidhbolton 5y ago
It would be interesting to see if the emails included personal information that only the firm should have known such as the recipient's name. In that case I'd argue that the test was flawed.
56.
by davidhbolton 6y ago
I'm a 62 year old software developer. My normal sleep is between 4 and 5 hours with occasional 6 hour sleep according to my Fitbit. Anything less than 4 and I feel tired but I'm putting in a full days work with four or more hours
57.
by davidhbolton 6y ago
Turbo Pascal, Borland Pascal and Delphi all suffered from the curse of units. Units were great, way superior to C/C++ compilation allowing fast compiles and efficient stripping of unused code. But they were version incompatible. If you
58.
by davidhbolton 6y ago
Well I run a self-hosted WordPress. it's very robust, fast with static pages, excellent SEO, and very good security through plugins. These days there's a lot more than just trotting out static pages although mine does that through
59.
by davidhbolton 6y ago
If you want to see an economist repeatedly criticise Richard Murphy on a regular ongoing basis, I recommend https://www.timworstall.com/category/ragging-on-ritchie/
60.
by davidhbolton 6y ago
It's actually not that difficult. Yes you do not want to make any mistakes ($1000 fines) but there are companies who will sort this out. There are plenty of people, myself included who live outside the US and get paid from US earnings

More ›