Posts by Gene Cash

These deals are never "water tight with massive fines" since Microsoft/Google/etc can always find the right palms to grease.

Re: Ubuntu video drivers

I've got an old GTX-1060. The HOWTO said to install the nvidia-detect package, run that, and it would tell you what card it thought you had and which package to install to support it.

It told me to install the plain-vanilla nvidia-driver meta-package, which works fine.

apt is what switched me off RedHat in the days of Debian Potato. I'd had it with "RPM dependency hell" and a friend showed me how it figured out all the dependencies and updates needed and then automatically downloaded them. Put me in a state of shock.

We'll see what graphics card I need when KSP 2 decides to support Linux again.

Re: Doubling of sat streaks

No. They had a collimator that was just fine... except for a misplaced spacer. They thought it was fine, so there was no reason to ask the CIA.

NASA had a good relationship with the CIA all the way back to the Lunar Orbiter program in 1966. The camera on that was straight from a spy satellite.

Also, the CIA has plenty of improved satellites, and they have no need for time from Hubble or anything else.

Re: cbcpbea?

klaatu barada nikto

Re: Someone else's brain

Management?

Or 3D printers.

You think 3D printers are such an oh-so-modern invention? They were invented in 1984 and so thoroughly patented that nobody could do anything until 2005 when the first RepRap machines were built. And it was 2008 before Makerbot was started. Until then, a crappy 3D printer was a couple million, then it became a couple hundred.

And the SLS patent only expired in 2015.

Re: Worrying.

Congratulations, you've just reinvented the mass driver propulsion system.

Most proposals have a iron bucket in an electromagnetic accelerator. Accelerate a bucketful of asteroid then decelerate the bucket and reuse them in a constant stream.

Re: I am curious

I mostly use it to moan about some sort of issue with a product or service. That usually gets a response, where going through customer service usually does nil.

That said, there used to be a ton of interesting people to listen to. For example, I got a lot of my Kerbal Space Program 2 info from there.

Also, some of the YouTube folks used to tweet "hey, I've got some free time and I'll be at such&such a bar/restaurant/mall/convention/event at so&so time if anyone wants to meet up/chat/have a beer" which was nice.

Re: fine words butter no parnips

It has always been acceptable for a closed source, software-for-money business model to ship the product and wait for the bug reports then decide which ones were going to be addressed

No, it's not been acceptable... it's just there's not much choice. Do you buy Oracle's shitty buggy product or SAP's shitty buggy product? There's been no way to hold their feet to the fire except to not buy it, in which case you're not a customer and they JDGAS.

Re: so what happened ?

"There simply aren't enough people over here interested in the field" at the prices companies are willing to pay.

Re: Destroy another nation state's satellite?

"The early overflights of the USA by Russian satellites were allowed by the President" because no one had the capability to do anything about it. We didn't even have the capability (for a short while) to put our own satellite in orbit.

That's why everyone in the US lost their shit over Sputnik, and why the space race started.

Re: It's not WHO is contributing, it's WHAT they're contributing

> Ever used CUPS?

Yes, and it shit the bed because one of it's fonts wasn't installed. Took 2 days to figure out, at which point I went back to lpr-ng.

Re: South don't work in the North

Sony Trinitron TVs

I was given a Sears rebadged Trinitron (i.e. it had a Sears logo stuck on the front over the Sony logo, and all the stickers and manuals said "Sony Trinitron") for a college gift (which tells how expensive it was) and that sucker lasted 24 years (1991-2015)

To quote a friend of mine "dat wuz some good shit"

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

Actually, yes there is. There's quite a few channels I follow with good content, and these people don't need to be penalized for making stuff.

It's not as if there's any interesting entertainment in this shithole little town. They don't even have good burgers, which is a pretty difficult thing to screw up.

Re: More...

Well, if $20-$40 is a "fist full of bills"...

Dammit, Jim, I'm an architect, not a computer scientist!

Why the hell are we listening to an architect on a computer science topic?

That would be about as pointless as asking my osteopath why my car is misfiring.

Or even more to the point, asking him why my Linux machine won't boot. Considering the IT skills of the medical professionals I've met, he won't have a clue.

(And that's not knocking doctors... my skill at doing an appendectomy is "sorry, bro.. yer a dead man" but I hope you see my point)

Re: Unpopular opinion…..

A dollar? That's at least 4x market value.

Probably because (in my experience) the voice control doesn't work?

By the way, Debian has switched to graphicsmagick in testing.

Re: Argh!

Yes, we actually do store propane in our homes, usually for gas grills. There's a reason the store has a big sign saying "DO NOT BRING PROPANE BOTTLES IN STORE"

We also store gasoline in houses, and a large number of them go up due to that every year.

That's not listed on anything but the local news (if that) because it's a "dog bites man" story.

This is news because of the kneejerk "oooooh lithium batteries" from people like you.

Re: replace the filesystem with a database

or BeOS

Re: CCS DC cables are awful

I hear in Yeeeurope they gotta carry their cables with them!

Boy, that was a shock (ha!) the first time I saw that on YouTube.

Guy rolls up to a charger, and I'm like "where the hell are the cables?"

Re: Bye-Bye Redundancy

The old saw: "That's why I love VoIP. You don't get people phoning up to complain that the network is down."

I've stumbled across a lot of "tutorials" which are simple copy/paste hackjobs of StackOverflow and official developer documentation, especially concerning Android development topics.

They seem to mainly be building word/article counts on Medium or whatever platform they're on.

Re: If the job is important, neverruse untested technology

No, the 4 thrusters are not redundant. They're pointing in different directions.

A big part of the job was testing the propulsion system. They got an unexpected answer, but they at least got an answer, and can try to figure out what happened based on the data and make a decision on what to do.

This is a technology demonstrator and it's done its job. That's why it's a cheap little cubesat and not a large real satellite. Version 2.0 will probably be tested on another cubesat.

I'm sure they're disappointed about the state of things, but they didn't spend a huge heap of money on it, and they still learned something.

They're still going to get to test the Lunar Flashlight bit anyway.

Re: Why?

they are blocked at the firewall.

Uh huh. That's lovely that you're so smart. And most people don't even know what a firewall is, much less have one, other than whatever default Windows uses.

And yes, I've seen these cameras connect to Chinese IPs on more than one of my friend's networks.

But they don't give a shit, just like they don't give a shit about how much their Ring cameras are broadcasting.

Re: They used a GUI !

No, there's a lot of times people don't expand acronyms, then you have to spend time playing "guess which is the expansion of this TLA for this particular usage" on Google, which is annoying.

I'd much prefer El Reg error on the side of too much, rather than too little.

Re: Quaoaeaiar.

That doesn't make it any less unpronounceable...