Posts by Flocke Kroes

Re: Supermarket websites

Clearly the people responsible studied web design - so they could implement every possible bad idea.

I have a bar code code reader that pretends to be a keyboard, types in the bar code and presses enter. I tried it on the search box with a tin of beans and the result was newspapers.

Click on check-out then spend ten minutes clicking through "you forgot...", "perhaps you would like...", "on special offer...", "Still five more pages to go before you can check out...". I am sure they paid many thousands for a tardigrade speed analytics system that carefully records that I never click on anything on those pages then recommends the supermarket buys some extra page generators to keep me entertained in the pre-checkout queue.

I admit to trying out the customer feed back survey: "Are the changes a big improvement or a great improvement?" I would like to say I was disappointed but my expectations were that low.

Re: The Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands

UK post codes do not begin with an X so those are safe to use in your test database - except XM4 5HQ.

Re: Asking the product

Both parties do this routinely - when they are the opposition party.

Re: Proof of stupidity

Nigerian 419'ers had some success monetising stupidity but now that politicians have learned how to harness it the supply has became constrained no matter how much more they make.

On the other hand ...

I have not seen any news directly about Trump since January (well done internet!). In part that is because I read mostly "biased librul media" who will not give him any more covfefe. Even taking that account I was expecting to see something. I put some effort into preventing my search results being selected to match my preconceptions. Even there searching for recent news about him shows mostly his legal problems with no direct quotes. I had to scroll down a long way to find anything positive and that was only on the little crazy conspiracy sites dedicated to him and rt.

Trump's effectiveness at destroying the United States was limited by his ignorance and narcissism. When the Republicans find a candidate without such limitations they do not want Trump splitting the vote. Perhaps they are keeping him out of any media they control so they can get a more competent corrupt candidate nominated. If they succeed perhaps Trump's come back will get librul support - Trump was very effective at nobbling other Republican presidential candidates and he was personally responsible for a large number of votes for Biden.

Trump was the first US president to lose the popular vote twice in a row. If he stands again he should be able to get a commanding lead and hold the record for many years to come.

Re: The Obvious

Browsers have to be run full screen so there is room for a wide column of white space down each side.

Re: Conner Chinook

Chinooks had two heads per surface. A MACH.2 20TB drive is more like 2x ordinary 10TB drives that share an enclosure, motor, controller and power/data connections.

Re: Pushback against decades of propaganda might be futile

I am sure there is plenty of ignorance about Marxism and this is an excellent time to do something about that.

Let's start with Marx's slogan: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Clearly all skilled hard working people should work themselves to death for a pittance so that the cluelessly incompetent and just plain idle can party every night.

Marx also places no value in capitol investment. You are welcome to demonstrate your commitment to this philosophy by lending me your pension fund at 0% interest and I will pay you back when I am dead.

Re: Excluding people

If you do not like what I say you can exclude me from your property so I can only say the things I want from my own soap box. Zuckerberg can exclude anything he does not like from his own website. If you do not like that please cancel the hypocrisy and let me preach the paradox of tolerance from your bedroom window.

Re: Zeroes

Depends. Some operators are responsible. You need a radio license to transmit from each country that can receive your signals. For the US, that would be the FCC and they have requirements about planning deorbit and collision avoidance. Other countries vary. If you want the cheepest launches your choices are the US and New Zealand. For the US you need FAA approval and they require a de-orbit plan for within two years of the end of the mission (I expected to see something different for GEO but missed it with only a quick duckduckgo search). Other countries may or may not have requirements but if there is restricted US tech on your satellite you may not be permitted to export for launch from certain countries.

There is a big legacy problem and piecemeal moves in the right direction. A proper international agreement would be good but the situation is a long way from the wild west.

Re: After you have found it ...

Of course there is a reason to go on looking. So that you cease to waste time by only ever finding things in the last place you look.

Re: Artemis 3 does not require gateway

SpaceX launching to Mars in 2022 is nearly impossible but cargo to launched to Mars in 2024 is possible and it might even land in one piece a year later. I think NASA can get cargo to the Moon well before 2024 even with a large amount of help from congress.

NASA getting crew to the Moon before SpaceX getting cargo to Mars is more difficult race to predict. Martians before Lunatics would require a determined effort from congress. Congress are perfectly capable of delaying Artemis several years but at some point voters are going to see a fully operational Starship and wonder why NASA is not using it.

I am not sure whether the Artemis 2024 plan came from Boeing or from Pence but the 2024 date was required to sell it to Trump. The anticipated huge welfare payments to Boeing bought the required support from congress. 2024 has turned out to be both too early and too late. Old space still do not have a complete credible plan all the way to the Moon and SpaceX made enough progress to get the HLS award. Now that Artemis 2024(+1?) is not funnelling money entirely in the anticipated direction we will have to wait to see how congress responds.

I will stick to cargo on Mars before people on the Moon because of my level of confidence in congress but it is not a safe bet. Congress could surprise me and 2024 Elon Time could easily be equal to 2026 CE.

You are confusing OOXML with XML. OOXML has a weasel worded patent license and pointless binary blobs. If you want an XML document, select ODF.

Give the Russians 17 years to catch up...

Buran got to orbit once in 1988 before being cancelled. Black Arrow put one satellite into orbit in 1971 before being cancelled. Given time I am sure Buran will be just as forgotten as Black Arrow is now.

Re: Body heat power

To get energy from heat you need a temperature difference. The inside of a comfortable human is 310K and the outside is about 295K. The maximum possible conversion efficiency is (1-T(cold)/T(hot)) or about 5% for a device with good thermal connections to the inside and outside of a human. The average thermal power available from an entire adult is between 50W and 100W so the upper limit of available power is between 2.5W and 5W. To get all of that someone would have to wear a space suit covered in heat sinks.

Something a bit more likely so sell is a watch strap that covers only 1/1000 of the available surface area (about 2m²). That gets you at most a couple of milliWatts. Enough for a digital watch (not a smart watch). Anything inside the body would need a good thermal connection to the outside for a supply of cold. For something tiny you would be better off metabolising blood sugar and oxygen to CO₂ and water like the rest of the body. Anything bigger, go for rechargeable batteries and wireless charging.

Some approximate numbers

Blue do not publish many numbers but Redditers estimated 24000kg of propellant with a mixture ratio of 5.5:1. This works out as 3692kg of hydrogen. Getting that much hydrogen from steam reformation of methane produces about 20,000kg of CO2. There are other energy costs from liquifying the propellants, training and operating a launch and recovery. There would be a much bigger cost for building the rocket and capsule but both of those get divided by an unknown number because they are reused.

An average American produces green house gasses equivalent to approximately 20,000kg of CO2 per year. New Shepard seats 6 (5 Tourists + 1 crew) so a ride to space is a bit more that 0.2 average American person years of CO2.

Some get government support

One of our previous home secretaries wanted mandatory implementation of RFC3514.

Re: Making Python faster

In Python, every variable is an object which is mostly harmless for big complicated objects but really hurts for simple things like integers. Imagine a function has come up with the result 12345. C can put that in a register and return to the caller (and will do something stupid if the value being returned is too big to fit in the register). Python allocates some memory, stores a reference count of 1 at the start of that memory followed by a pointer to class int, then some number that represents the amount of memory needed to store the value of the int (python handles really big integers without making the programmer think hard) followed by the value 12345 and finally returns a pointer to the allocated memory. This process is so painful that python is already optimised by having instance for small integers already prepared at known locations so small integers can be returned by incrementing the reference count of the right one and returning a pointer to it.

From here things go further down hill. C is a typed language so the caller knows that an integer was returned. It can copy this integer wherever it is required, use it in arithmetic or simply forget about it. In python the caller only knows that some subclass of Object was returned. Something "simple" like a+b gets expanded to type(a).__add__(b). Luckily __add__ is optimised and does not require a dictionary look up. int.__add__ has to check the type of b and if int.__add__ does not understand it the Python interpreter tries type(b).__radd__(a) instead. Simple copying is not that bad: add one to the reference count and store a pointer where required but forgetting about an object is not trivial. The interpreter subtracts one from the reference count and if the result is zero calls type(a).__del__ then deallocates the memory assigned to the object.

Everything being a subclass of Object (almost always) makes creating new software in Python easier than C - at the cost of making the CPU do a huge amount work.

Re: Man's best friend?

But cats will keep your data away from police dogs.

Re: All marketing people are scum.

The B Ark is more than ready. The one successful landing so far exceeds the requirements for a B Ark.

Re: Subsidies?

The alternative to subsidies is to set the minimum wage to under $100/month, an enormous supply of free water an no limits on pollution.

Re: Upload?

With 1Gb/s of adverts to watch you will not have time to upload.

Re: ambiguous scenes

I assumed the the server does not know the right answers for half of all CAPCHAS and is just collecting training data for AIs.

Re: Here we go again.

And again and again since at least Plato and probably long before him too.

Re: originally planned to fly

Test flights (of SpaceShipOne) were planned and carried out earlier (2003) but the earliest date I can find that involves passengers going to over 80km altitude in a SpaceShipTwo is when Branson hoped (no hint of a promise) he would fly before the end of 2009.

Cannot affect elections

When it comes to MPs security all parties are united on the absolute need to spy on voters in every way possible.

Re: Axiom space?

They have been around since 2016 and include several ex-NASA employees. They are in a good position to embrace and extend ISS then separate from it when they have enough hardware to be independent. They have been in more specialised space news for a while. The success of Crew Dragon gave them a product that they can sell to the public and this has got them a more prominent position on tech/science news sites.

Their name has come up on The Register repeatedly before but you would have needed to pay attention. They were not in the title and other names would draw your attention away from Axiom unless you already knew about them for some other reason.

Re: Quantum Computing

Give it another twenty years and QC tech will be as mature as fusion power.

Re: Finding a mobile

I send signed and encrypted messages from my mobile to my desktop that tell it where I am. To contact my mobile, send a signed and encrypted request to my desktop. If the signature is authorised it tells you where my mobile is.

Re: Is the market voting with its feet?

I would say the enough of market is voting out of ignorance to cause a few disasters. There are plenty of programmers around here so the common perception of driver assistance software is to assume it requires constant supervision. At Teslarati they twist reality into a corkscrew and thoroughly believe that all real Tesla owners know that driver assistance software requires supervision.

Driver assistance is good (up to a point) below 30mph because the stopping distance is (mostly) short enough to deal with surprises. It is also good over 50mph because the roads have better visibility and fewer complications. People can get a false impression from the situations where driver assistance is (mostly) reliable and assume it is safe to not pay attention even in areas where driver assistance struggles.

For example the locals know about the junction where this collision occurred. The road can be clear as far as a truck driver can see but that is not far enough to complete crossing the road before an unseen car travelling at the speed limit can arrive at the junction. Locals slow down and do not assume that sky visible between a trailer and the road is a new bridge not on the map that their car will fit underneath.

Part of the reason such stories make the news is because many people have far greater expectations of something called 'autopilot' than something called 'level 2 driver assistance'. It would help if Elon understood that he also needs adult supervision - for using Twitter.

They are a pig for the CPU to calculate with. Better to use integers and remember to add decimal point in the right place when you print the result just as you would with BCD.

Re: Regolith eating raptors

The Blue complaint had something about raptors tearing up the regolith, putting bits of it in orbit and those bits coming back and hitting Starships or astronauts. That was a valid complaint about the earliest concepts. The current plan is that the raptors shut down before the Starship gets too close to the moon and the final descent it handled hot gas thrusters firing diagonally from above the tanks. The return trip starts with thrusters and switches to raptors when high enough. The top of the tanks is high up on current Starships and expected to be even higher on HLS so there will be enough propellant to go from LEO to the Moon and back to NRHO with a full load of propellant.

The little legs on current Starships are a temporary solution. HLS Starships will have big legs and wide feet. There are cargo missions planned with other landers that will reach the Moon before Starship. One of these could survey a proposed landing site.

The long drop from the crew habitats to the surface is a valid concern. Starship has lots of mass margin so there is room for multiple redundant solutions. The good news is that NASA cannot use Starship's full return cargo capacity. They can only bring back what will fit between the astronauts in an Orion capsule.

Congress requires NASA astronauts to go to the moon in an Orion capsule launched on an SLS rocket and return to Earth in that capsule. This places other limits on the missions: Only one mission per year as that is the maximum rate SLS can be manufactured. SLS can only get Orion to NRHO. Before NASA had a ride to the moon there was a plan to put a space station (LOP-G) there so that Orion+SLS would have somewhere to go. The 2024 deadline means that LOP-G will not be there in time.

NRHO is not that far from low lunar orbit. The propellant for the return portion of that trip is not that bad either. Bringing that propellant from the surface of the Moon to LLO requires lots more propellant. Bringing lots of propellent from LLO to the moon requires a huge amount of propellant. Dynetics almost solved this with a clever design with extra propellant tanks that get dropped shortly before landing. Blue solved this by breaking the LOP-G to the moon and back ride into three parts that get delivered to NHRO separately and assembled by crew at LOP-G (and disassembled on the moon!). SpaceX solved it with a really big Starship. Just imagine crew getting out of their cramped Orion into a small LOP-G and living there until it is time to leave for the moon in a huge luxury Starship bigger than the ISS.

Once Starship has done its return trip to the Moon there is then the question of what to do with it. Going to an Earth-centred elliptical orbit is quite cheap. Aerobraking to LEO in one go melts HLS starship. Getting there with multiple small aerobrakes means that the electronics get fried in one of the many trips through the radiation belts. Burning propellant to get to LEO requires a large amount of propellant. It is hard to match orbits in an elliptical orbit so a tanker cannot sensibly meet a returning starship there, but a tanker could go to NRHO, deliver enough propellant for a round trip to the Moon and get back to Earth with its heat shield and flaps. HLS Starship has an endurance of only 100 days so it cannot wait for another Orion. NASA will hire another starship. If only there were some other human rated ride to NRHO.

Servicing HLS Starships for multiple trips is tricky. Time to build Moon Base Alpha.

The balance of a crew/cargo/tanker Starship returning to Earth is a problem. Without doing something clever most of the mass is at the base. The lower flaps would have to be huge and stick right out. The upper flaps would have to be small and mostly folded up leaving little margin to control descent. The solution is to put the small tanks for landing propellant high up in the vehicle. The small oxygen tank goes right at the top.

Re: 7 flights of stairs

I think the 7 flights of stairs refer to climbing the access tower to get into the capsule. Probably 21m / 70 feet / 152 linguine.

Re: Really ?

Hey, Government. I'm making a mint selling snake oil and after-life luxury homes. I'll financially support your re-election if you keep the population too illiterate to read about me buying another private jet full of hookers and blow.