Posts by Gene Cash 5750 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Mar 2007
"Tesla invented the AC motor and transformer. Edison invented the phonograph and the light bulb. Lucas invented the short and the intermittent open."
"If God had intended for gentlemen to go motoring about at night, He wouldn't have created Lucas."
I have a Breville Tea Maker here in the US. It heats the water to the specified temperature, then dunks the basket for a specified time. Quite nice. Much better than my shite attempts at making tea.
It's also good for just heating water for oatmeal, grits, hot chocolate or whatever, as it's a lot faster than a kettle on the stove.
Will that work here in Florida? We don't measure the amount of moisture in the air... we measure the amount of air in the moisture.
Things like "swamp coolers" don't work, for that reason. There's no evaporative cooling because there's no more carrying capacity when you're already at 95% humidity.
We use heat pumps here, which is basically reversible air conditioning. It cools you in the summer, and pulls heat out of the outside to heat you in the winter.
> countries like the US are built poorly with insufficient insulation
"Cracker style" housing in Florida has a big hallway aligned with the wind direction and large windows keep a constant breeze through the house. It's how people survived here before electric fans and A/C
Of course, modern people don't want such an ancient and efficient design! At least with insulation, you can just install some.
So the faffing about with an extra rover (now two helicopters) would have been unnecessary if Perseverance just had a damn rack for the filled samples.
There would then be no need to go back and fetch them. It could just trundle up to the sample return lander and hand them off.
Damn it, do I have to plan ALL the Mars missions?? Don't make me come out there!
Seriously, though... why??
"Window manager" describes a "desktop" for me... I'm trying to track and manage what I'm doing with all those windows. Where's all my EMACS windows? where's all my browser windows? Where's all my xterms? Where is my Thunderbird email window?
How quickly can I switch to the EMACS editing /etc/hosts? Where is my last Google results browser session?
Some of the HUGE things that pisses me off about Windows 10 at work is that A) it takes 6-7 seconds to alt-tab back to a window and 2) when you alt-tab in Edge, it switches between browser tabs, not applications! don't screw with the meaning of a very frequently used key! So Windows fails on both consistency and speed.
Edit: this is obviously why I hate tabbed applications... I want to be able to configure my damned window manager and be done with it... not be at the whim of every asshole with a tabbed window toolkit to decide how he wants it to behave and doesn't make it configurable.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-no-notification-by-russia-to-end-iss-participation/
The Russian gasbags have said this on social media several times before, and I think they realize it'll make them look like luddites if they actually do it. It'll be seen as an "admission" that their part of the station couldn't go the distance.
Every launch increases the risk that something will fail
Actually, that's not true. When a booster comes back, you get to inspect it and see what components are holding up, and what's not doing so well, and fix it. After over a dozen such launches, you get a really good idea what's going on.[1]
When you're launching the first time, you're hoping the assembly crew did a really good job and nothing blows up.
(and I don't want to fly on the booster that ran into a bridge in Texas this weekend)
[1] as long as you don't accept "normalization of deviance" like they did with the Shuttle tiles, not realizing how fragile they were, and not knowing how badly they aged because they never tested aged tiles until after the accident.
In the OS defence
Bull. Shit. They are a gov't agency doing their job, funded by your tax dollars/Pounds/Euros right?
They have NO such defense. They're doing the job you're paying them to do, then paying them AGAIN for their end product.
The US gov't is about as broken as it gets, but there are some shining bits. We might have had Trump, but at least we don't have to pay for our USGS maps!
I HEARTILY second this notion. Turn the net off for a day, and see how people get along.
I mean EVERYTHING. All the internet-of-twats devices, gas station pumps, light bulbs, thermostats, phones, ATMs, in the whole world lose connectivity for a 24 hour period.
NO exceptions. If your bank/restaurant/hospital can't run without internet, you need to fix it.
Probably more fatalities than Thanos snapping his fingers...
I still firmly believe that there are civil servants that are here to assist and protect us.
I hope to meet one someday.
Also the CHIPS act authorizes a new "Moon to Mars Program" and a new NASA office to run it.
It also directs NASA to launch SLS at 1 then 2 missions a year.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-authorization-included-in-chips-act/
Because you can't charge them and hope to successfully prosecute them unless you have convincing evidence of their crimes.
That's what the investigations dig up. You have to sit there and go "ok X is illegal, and here is the proof where they're doing X"
Plus you have to do this in an ironclad formal follow-all-the-rules dot-the-Is-and-cross-the-Ts fashion where Apple's lawyers can't pick it apart and destroy it, which is their job, and they're good at it.
They're removing 3.5mm jacks, there's no removable batteries or SD cards any more, the designs are worse, and the phones are more expensive.
For example, the Pixel 5a I was forced to buy since 4G was discontinued has no bezel, so simply holding it opens apps on the edges of the display. I have to put it in a case just to avoid that. That's a serious misdesign.
Why would I buy one?
I was in "RPM dependency hell" with Red Hat at the time, and when I found out you could just say "ok, grab everything you need to upgrade and install it" with mostly just "apt dist-upgrade" then I switched to Debian Testing (Sarge at the time) and I haven't looked back. I've only had Testing break my system once in all those years.
"By default, it also doesn't include either Snap or Flatpak" is a feature, as far as I'm concerned. Every app does not need another corresponding copy of the OS. I've also migrated to Devuan myself. I tried writing a systemd init script once. Just once. I also tried writing scripts to auto-download pictures from my camera, and that was the motivation to move to Devuan.
20 feet for a microphone or camera is NOT a real achievement. If it couldn't do that, it would be quite defective.
I assume 20 feet is the range of the motion sensor. That's only about halfway to the street, and far less than the annoying lights for security cameras that people use here.
Remember when JWST was the over-budget decade-delayed albatross around NASA's neck... and nobody wanted anything to do with it, and everyone wanted to cancel it?
Yeah. Amazing how times change.
Reminds me how people treat IT. Nobody wants to spend money on it until the company takes it in the balls from a ransomware attack or something else.
Pessimistic is just another way of spelling realist.
Hm, considering how predatory and anti-consumer Paypal and Tesla are, I don't think he'd improve Twitter... but I do love seeing someone jerk them around, and I do enjoy hearing a lot of them lost jobs. Now they can get more respectable employment beating up grandmothers for protection money.
They force me to refresh several times to get even an approximation of my latest tweets, thus inflating their pageview stats, so I can see Musk's point.
I've basically dropped them and haven't looked at Twitter in a week and a half. As far as I'm concerned, they're as pointless as Slashdot, Tumblr, or Myspace now.
Lenovo are (IMO) not overly trustworthy
Let's see, there's:
* the Lenovo Service Engine that phoned home and installed bloatware
* the pre-installed Superfish malware
* the Lenovo Customer Feedback Program that shopped your info to Omniture daily
* the Lenovo Solution Center with TWO privilege escalations that allowed remote code execution
And that's just a quick Google.
I wouldn't touch 'em with somebody else's 10-foot barge pole.
The beef with Microsoft here is their attitude of "we're going to take other people's work and not give them credit".
Not only that, they're going to make people pay for that work. They're making a profit off my unattributed code.
As per the article: "The result, called Copilot, is then sold to programmers as a code suggestion aid"
Where I can't view tweets in my "timeline" newer than a week old, yet if I post something about (say) Amazon or Google Maps, I get a bullshit vague bot response in less than 2 minutes signed by "Joe" or "Sally" or "Beth" completely unrelated to the tweet it's "replying" to.
I wish Musk could smash Twitter like Peter Thiel smashed Gawker.
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