Posts by Flocke Kroes

Re: Just shows how special we all are...

About 11 billion planets in this galaxy meet the first four of your conditions. Add in red dwarfs and we are up to 40 billion. I do not even have a figure for moons of gas giants with a reasonable chance of having had surface water for billions of years.

Multiply that by at least 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe and life becomes something we should expect (although possibly too far apart to stand a reasonable chance of contact).

We have a limited supply of planets for counting large moons, but if you look at trans-Neptunian objects, large moons are quite popular.

No need

This problem was solved in 1993. The other solution is to stop nicking peoples' phones.

Re: I don't care!

Has anyone told Elon another Tesla is already out there?

Re: Vorland's right hand

Thank you.

Re: Dark Matter cancelled

Cancelling something is how they advertise the good stuff to non-mainstream audiences. I only found out about Wonderfalls (Pushing Daisies with fewer zombies and more weird) because I searched for things that got cancelled early.

Prime minister's progress report for next year

"Thanks to our crack down on porn we have successfully pushed thousands of perverts and paedophiles off the internet. If they need to empty their sack, they will all just have to go back to school where they belong."

Re: 'Most research is sponsored by proprietary software companies, and as such might be biased'

Back when Munich was about to switch to free software there was a report showing how much more expensive that would be compared to staying put. That report was secret, available under NDA for €40,000, leaked and blatant bullshit.

Most common causes of flash failure

1) Lend it to someone who leaves it at the print shop.

2) Lend it to someone who drops it somewhere.

3) Lend it to someone who forgets they borrowed it.

4) Lend it to someone who puts it in the washing machine.

5) Someone complains the freebie flash from a sales rep stopped working after a week.

6) Someone complains flash bought at a market stall stops working after a week.

7) Someone complains flash found in the car park did something strange to their computer.

8) Someone complains flash bought at the supermarket (or any place that does not specialise in computing kit) stopped working after a week.

9) You bought it from a distributor within a month of them going bankrupt or being bought for a pittance and it did not work for the previous customer either.

More levels per cell requires increased over specification, but still works out cheaper for the customer.

Re: Refunds and Compensation

Take a look at what happened with the memory translation hub. Intel will watch calmly while the smaller vendors get sucked into the wood chipper. Even if the big distributors get free replacement chips from Intel, the cost of distribution and installation will land on the distributors. Anyone - big or small - who soldered Intel CPUs to the PCB is in for a world of hurt.

Re: Adam 52

Today way have big data systems that monitor vast amount of facebook, twitter and keep a record of which web sites every UK citizen visits. A slightly different scale funding to a few policemen checking a facebook page or two each year.

Re: As an amateur

1) Because testing is impractical. In the commercial world, drivers get updated for a limited amount of time to require people to replace the hardware every 2-5 years. In the open source world, drivers can easily live a decade. Linux support for outdated hardware is outstanding, but utterly impractical to test in house because that would require a warehouse full of kit and someone to walk around to see if it is behaving as required during tests.

2) A good range of commonly sold machines more difficult than you expect. OEMs frequently change the bill of materials without changing the product name. Do you really want to buy a new machine of each type from each manufacturer every month and run lspci and lsusb to see if there has been a change? Rest assured the OEM will not tell you about changes and may not be able to get you a specific configuration on request. How do you expect to fund this massive regular hardware purchase from free software?

3&4) Gross professional incompetence springs to mind but management diverting resources from incomplete software to put out some other fire is very common.

Long ago, the boot sequence was area where the competent thought before they bought, and made sure they had access to an unbricking tools before doing anything interesting. These days, the competent are so vastly outnumbered by the clueless that UEFI exists without catastrophic loss of sales to the OEMS inflicting it on us.

Re: Printer Power

Any volunteers willing to test if the printer responds correctly by asserting online and check?

Re: Can't we get rid of May?

Normally I have no faith in the ability of politicians but the is one thing they get right consistently. I know it is hard to believe, but when one finally gets kicked out they consistently find a replacement who is even worse.

Re: Maybe they should take responsibility for something?

How does vendors engaging in Brexploitation lead to vendors reporting massive loss of profits?

The system depends on a regular pattern to the intervening materials. Stucco might defeat that.

If you publish how something works ...

Someone with lots to lose will promptly fix it for you for free and share the fix with confidence that someone else with lots to lose will promptly fix the next flaw and share that fix too. Intel's management engine has convinced me to shop elsewhere whenever possible - that and their 'low power' CPUs are expensive, defective and not particularly low power.

Re: Or...

The repatriation tax holiday in 2004 dropped the rate to 5.25% and the big computing companies brought back about 9% of their cash and cut over 20,000 jobs. I doubt that 14% will be very tempting. There might be some movement at 4%.

Re: Wow. Stripping the active layer off 64 chips and stacking them together..

Not quite. The article mixed 512GB and 512Gb together, so I checked Samsung's press release. There is a 512GB package which contains a flash controller chip and 8x 512Gb flash chips.

The 512Gb chips are 64 layer. That is done by building up 64 layers of cells on the same chip just like CPU's (used to?) have about 10 layers of metal to connect the transistors. The impressive bit is that they drill a holes through all those layers to make the vertical connections for each stack of cells.

Swamp draining in action

Big John, here is your chance to show us deluded liberals how foolish we are. We knew there were gross problems with the legal system but doubted that Trump could or would do anything about it. As this is what you are talking about, please tell us what Trump has done to help Justin Shafer? What has he done about the FBI agent who ordered the raid or Patterson Dental?

Re: I'll wait

Gold plated contacts are a requirement for low voltage signalling. Back when clock speeds were barely over 1MHz there were tin plated contacts that would corrode, jam and rip the sockets off you computer. Demanding gold paid for itself even though they could not plate anything like as thin as they do now. These days the difference between a £30 gold plated cable and a £3 cable the same thickness is the price.

Animal fuel additives

This is the first I have heard of possum power, but NASA did a small scale animal fuel test, presumably to prepare for this.

One of the pre-conditions for heavy was completing of repairs to SLC-40. CRS-13 will launch from SLC-40 on the 4^th. The most recent progress report on changes to LC-39A for Falcon Heavy pre-dates Zuma. Unless someone can find something more recent, heavy gets carted out and fuelled up this month, a static fire of all engines at once about the middle of next month and a demonstration launch at the end of the year.

Re: Electricity vs Petrol/Diesel prices

Diesel has a volumetric energy density of 9.96kWh/L, but most of that is used to heat the atmosphere. Only about 20% is used to move the vehicle. You can see why here.

To compare with an electric vehicle, we need to add about 0% diesel spilled when refuelling, and 20% for heating the battery and charger when charging. Standby for electric is about 0.05% (one day of self-discharge in the battery). Accessories get powered direct from the battery in electric, but for diesel we get losses in the engine and alternator included in the 2%, so allocating 1% for accessories in an electric vehicle is a fair guess. An electric motor is about 90% efficient, so about 70% of the electricity you pay for reaches the driver train compared to 19-25% for diesel.

A diesel drive chain converts between ⅕ and ⅓ of its 19-25% input into heat. Electric does not need a clutch or gearbox, so I will guess about a tenth. The problem is it is a tenth of 70%, so it looks bad compared to the 5-6% in the diagram for diesel. Likewise the figures for aerodynamic, rolling and braking have to be scaled up by 63/13 (or 63/20 for motorway). That is a good thing! The entire purpose of a vehicle is to hammer the road and kick the air around. That gives a whopping 29% for brakes (6.3% motorway), and regenerative braking puts about half of that back into the battery.

For a fair comparison, you should be dividing your electricity bill by about 3 for motorways and about 5 for towns - then budgeting for a new battery every 2 to 4 years (longer if you do not drive the vehicles complete range every day).

Re: I wonder

You missed tails (warning: clicking the link will put you on a list, but please help make it a big list).

Re: Terrifying

When I first came across amanfromMars I found it difficult to read. After a few posts I could spot the travesty generator's style in the first sentence and move on to the next comment. TheU+1F426Register now has a significant number of commentards producing output less sane than a travesty generator while still passing a Turing test. I can now read amanfromMars straight through without pausing. The most obvious reason for this is I have got used to the style from the plentiful supply of new commentards who exemplify Poe's law. The more scary possibility is that amanfromMars is improving. Perhaps the age of machine learning really has arrived and that the machines are learning from travesty generators.

Generic NDA translated into English

Our product is crap. We know it is fundamentally unfit for use in your project and by our other existing and potential customers. This information must not escape into the wild until after you are thoroughly committed to embedding our product in yours. At that time you and our other customers must each individually develop the same bodge to make your project minimally successful.

Re: On switch location

TV: By the plug socket. Microwave: combination of setting the timer and closing the door. Kettle: on the back. Toaster: on the side. Fridge & freezer: by sockets behind the appliances. Cooker & central heating: anonymous switches on the wall to one side.

The most obvious devices with separate power switches are: VCR+TV and DVD player+TV. VCRs date back to late 70's. PCs (DOS) did not reach PHBs until the early 80s, so there was some hope that people could understand a display device and the device that creates the picture can have separate power switches. At the time it was widely believed that adults were too stupid to program a VCR* and they had to ask a five year old child to do it for them. Perhaps it was hoped that five year olds would grow up and dinosaurs would become extinct leading to the happy situation where everyone would have enough brains to program a VCR with a separate power switch to the TV.

*Note to millennials: A VCR is a stone age alternative to BBC iPlayer and youtube. Programming involved reading a magazine to find the channel, start and end times of the required show. People had to get off the sofa, walk to the TV, switch it on, and press a button to select the VCR channel. Next the VCR power state had to be set to on, input select to antenna, output select to TV then the frequency knob had to be twiddled to get to the right channel. At this point, the TV becomes superfluous and can be turned off. Press the eject button and remove the cassette (stone age USB memory stick) and put it away. Refer to your notebook (a device made from multiple sheets of compressed pulped dead trees) and pick a page where the last entry is a for a TV show no-one wants to watch again. Cross out the last entry on the page and write in the name of the show you want to record. Look at the number on the top of the page and select the cassette with the same number written on a sticky label on the back. Insert the cassette into the holder and press the holder back into the VCR. Press the rewind button.

Now things get tricky. Look around for the home's most reliable time source. Probably a battery powered clock. Check the second hand is moving and the time vaguely corresponds to the position of the brightest visible star. Compare this to the time display on the VCR and if necessary set the time selector "Time ADJ" and press the hour and minute buttons so the VCR displays the approximate time. Next select "Timer Set" and press the hour and minute buttons to about five minutes before the advertised start of the required TV show (Stone age technology did not include network time servers so all clocks were off by a few minutes, also broadcasters occasionally started a show a little early to annoy VCR owners). Advanced VCRs had a stop time. If present it had to be set at least half an hour after the scheduled end of the TV show. Failure to do this caused an extended news report that delayed all subsequent programming for the day. Almost there: when the tape has finished rewinding, press "stop", set the power selector to "Timer" and press "Play" and "Record" at the same time (the buttons should lock into place.)

40 years ago, five year olds were able to do all this. The engineers who came up with separate on switches for computer did not anticipate that a decade later the brains of over half of those five year olds would rot down to the level required to elect Amber Rudd.

No need categorise submitted image at all

Facebook can collect are large number of hashes and it does not matter what the image is until an image with the same hash is posted. At that time a human or AI must decide if the posted image is revenge p0rn. If a submitted hash regularly catches pictures of the Eiffel Tower then the person who submitted it can get an increased "cries wolf" score.

Re: Lessons from Orlowski

Actually I kept getting pulled out of the narrative because I was repeatedly being offered reasons for mindless hate against Google. Try reading the article again but pretend Google drowned your puppy yesterday. You will keep coming across phrases to confirm the bias I am asking you to hold for this exercise. Next, take the barest possible facts out of the article, imagine your puppy playfully chasing his tail and put the facts back into sentences. The bare facts to not have to confirm the seething fury you had when your puppy was dead. It is a matter of presentation. I am not talking about whether the article is true or false (probably various states in between). What concerns me is the way the article is intended to make me feel. At felt like an attempt to get me to feel common cause with the author and sufficiently angry to suspend critical thinking.

Re: So if HBO were to take over....

Bored of the rings starts with a sex scene - an elf tries to bang the ring off Dildo or Frito (can't remember which). If they start with BOTR as the source material they will not need to change so much to make a TV series.

Re: Proving you are not a Russian spy

Yes, you are in a no win situation. This is the internet, so perhaps I am a team of IBM lawyers - I certainly cannot prove otherwise. We would need access to server logs and the ability into inject javascript spyware to stand a chance.

Although the possibility of you (and others) being Russian spies crosses my mind, I try to treat you (and others) like humans with different points of view. Doing otherwise quickly causes the thread to degenerate into name calling, and everyone else will think both of us are a pair of obnoxious twits.

If you are not familiar with the list of logical fallacies, I thoroughly recommend a read. You can test you ability to detect them with some old Andrew Orlowski articles (he has improved considerably this year).