Posts by Nick Ryan 3756 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2007
Gravity is not a particularly weak force, it's the density and scale that matters. What tends to let it down is that in most instances atoms by and large are mostly not there and therefore there's not a lot of mass in the space of your average atom to exert much gravity. If one was to find a way to stick lots of them next to each other somehow, I suspect gravity would be considered slightly more useful.
...and what is the medium of force transfer? How fast is the effect of gravity felt? It is possible to convert energy to matter and vice-versa gravity and therefore local gravity should be directly alterable. And thus the real headaches begin. While it's possible to visualise a 3D deformation of a 2D plane, doing the same for 3D space is much harder.
Shhhh... you give the flat earthers or even hollow eathers ideas... Ideas borne out of absolutely no logic and impossible to hold up to the most basic of trigonometric scrutiny, but nothing like that has stopped these kind intellectually challenged believers. These people would lose an intellectual argument with a fruit fly if they ever stopped frothing at the mouth long enough to listen.
My sincerest apologies to fruit flies and this unfair intellectual comparison.
Is there a "standard" Linguine stored in stable conditions somewhere in the vaults deep below Reg central ?This is El'Reg... of course it is. It's stored in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard'. Do not look at what is at the bottom of this cabinet.
Hitler's speeches weren't all original to him either. If something works, use it. But then this is what happened to the Nazi party in Germany. Previously a well respect socialist movement, however was taken over (as it was there) and the end results were plain to see. Likewise, the Eagle and Swastika were symbols that were taken over and (ab)used and now seen as bad. Hitler was a master of manipulation therefore of course he was going to use phrases and words that others used previously, it's called learning. Modern leaders using similar phrases and words isn't necessarily a bad thing, however it does depend on context.
On the other hand where politicians are proven criminals and repeated liars, that's really bad. From Trump's apologists who carefully ignore that almost every time he opens his mouth he lies about something and/or attempts to sow division, to those that see BoJo as "just a harmless, slightly eccentric buffoon" and also carefully ignore that he is also a repeated proven liar.
While many users print documents, for good reasons too, and often have to print documents, printing has been an unfashionable side of Microsoft for many years.
Microsoft could have had an OS level print preview. They chose not to.
Microsoft's printing API uses a wide range of units within the same bloody API. Printing code has to regularly rely on conversion functions just to call sequential API calls. The API forces the developer to make assumptions - I spent far too long trying to find the actual print margins of a page and it turns out this information was just not provided forcing the developer to convert various provided values all in Inches(argh) to twips to mm to pixels to whatever and to use this along with the assumption that the printer would print in the horizontal centre of the page space. Vertical space was an entirely different chore of course.
Try printing from Microsoft's incredibly slow to load "Photos app" in Windows 10? Crashes. Right click picture and select "Print" and if it's still there, the older "Photos/Images application" will quickly load and provide the option to print the image, with a few useful options too. There's a reason many people copy the damn picture into something like Microsoft Word and print from there.
I can very accurately predict that there will be a new "game" involving forcing computer driven cars to perform an emergency stop or at worst swerve violenty in order to avoid an accident.
It'll probably have a catchy name like AutoBaiting or something.
It will then be followed by badly drafted and rushed laws stipulating the punishments for such behaviour and in response the AutoBaiters will just modify how they do it.
I had worse... a rather badly coded (OK, very badly coded) and barely stable field management system crapped itself because I insisted on deploying the system using HTTPS only and did not even route incoming HTTP to the web server. Idiot developers couldn't cope with just using the damn URI parts as presented and hard coded bits in, which on an insecure system that allowed HTTP through would work. The suggested that we make our system insecure to allow their poorly coded application to work (not quite their request, but how I reframed it when I denied the request). They then fixed their code but, of course, being low skill coders had embedded crappy third party components into their web application and, guess, what? They couldn't cope with HTTPS either... Numpties.
Now there's some testing that could happen!
What it should respond with is "apple with the word pizza written on it" however as the question being asked is "what single object is in this scene" (single word responses please), the answer should be "apple" however "writing" would be a valid response as it's an identifiable object in the scene.
One positive thing about all this though, is that the text recognition is working well.
It's also down to the entirely daft problem that is trying to be solved because the question being asked is not "what is in this image", it is instead "what single object is in this image". Which fails very very quickly, for example give it a picture of an apple, will it respond "apple" or the composite description of the two objects involved?
Even a young child when asked what is in the example image in this story would likely say something like "an apple with a piece of paper/label stuck to it", adding that there is writing on the paper/label if they are older. This is a description of a multi-object scene and includes adequate description to relate the subject for most situations and also shows context. Expecting singular object returns is self-defeating and shows a blinkered approach that is never going to work for anything other than clean, sanitised images of single, non-composite objects.
This is a different scenario - this is "something that you have", which is a different combination. However if you consider the "something that you have" scenario, consider chip+PIN - this is a combination of "something that you have", as in the physical card, as well as "something that you know", as in the PIN. This is considerably more secure than you just presenting your card and taking money out - although this is how contactless pretty much operates with the threat that sometimes we have to enter our PIN anyway and it does have the safety stop that the card may be stopped if reported stolen or lost.
Security is as secure as the least secure element in the chain. It doesn't matter if you have military grade security at every other step if one of the steps in the chain is a piece of string. Maybe a better example... :) you could have a very secure lock to your front door but if a copy of the key to the door is stored in a cheap'n'nasty "carer" or "emergency" key storage device, typically a combination lock, the overall security is not measured by the quality of your lock, it's measured by the security of the key storage device attached to your wall and the security and secrecy of the combination that is required to open it... or, typically enough, a small shim of metal as that's usually all it takes to open such locks. Biometrics is this combination lock - except it's worse as the combination may never be changed.
The biometrics that are the most issue are the entirely crap ones like face recognition or fingerprint... as in everything that the likes of Microsoft are pushing as being in some way "secure" or a replacement for a password. They do have their place, of course, like anything in security, but they are very far from any kind of solution on their own - they can enhance security when taken with other factors, but when used to replace other factors they reduce security.
Lots of things... largely that replacing the secret component of authentication with a non-secret component is fundamentally stupid. Using facial recognition or fingerprints as an Identifier? That's fine, but as a replacement as a secret, such as a password? That never improves security.
I continually despair at the barely trained monkeys at Microsoft, and other organisations, who, having no doubt been brought up on Hollywood movies, hold the utterly inexplicable belief that facial recognition or fingerprints are in any way a substitute for the secret component of authentication. They are not. As noted above, they are an adequate replacement for an identifier, but nothing else.
I was smiling enough and then I got to this bit:
There's a bit of silence as people wait for him to start the meeting - or maybe they're just wondering why he's completely naked and smeared in Marmite.and then just open laughter happened. Thank you for a Friday. Damn, Saturday now...
Oh hell... I can't say whether it's still possible or not to get Marmite in tins, but I am suddently reminded of being a child playing and with empty marmite tins. Fairly sure a few things came in similar tins but currently I can only remember Lyles Golden Syrup and Marmite.
That's largely the problem - so called developers insisting on using JavaScript to replicate standard browser behaviour, and inevitably failing really badly and dropping something out that usually has lots of quite obvious edge case failures, arbitrary restrictions and typically behaves very differently on different browsers or even screen sizes.
To be "fair" to Microsoft, Windows came into being where the premise was that such computers were single, trusted user and never connected to anything else. This doesn't excuse the DLL library hell that Microsoft inflicted on the world and the splattering of application files throughout a system though.
The world changed and Windows became connected and became used by multiple users. Unfortunately retro-fitting security never works very well and Microsoft lead by example with their own applications ignoring their own guidelines about where to install and write files, about the user interface, about how to interact with the Windows API(s) and how to work with security.
Nope, NASA tend to use proper measurements these days... since about 1990 really. Well, not proper measurements, but a step in the right direction. NASA often have to translate the units to outdated forms in press releases as the US is one of only two countries left on the planet to use such outdated measures.
However... Mars Rovers are known for their Sarcasm: https://twitter.com/SarcasticRover
Having not seen it, but from the description, this pink square problem is definitely something internal to the device itself. HDMI output generation is pretty simple, and it's not going to create random pink squares that react to opening of folders or mouse waving. HDMI is a raster based scanline output and not block based therefore the pink squares are in whatever memory space the output buffer is stored in. How the pink squares got into this output buffer... that's the important question. If the output buffer is dedicated RAM (it's a SoC then it could be) then it could be a local hardware fault with this RAM, if it's shared RAM then it's likely to be whatever process that is compositing the output buffer that generates this.
Modern electric motors are typically 85-90% efficient and modern car engines are around 30-35% efficient. However this is not the entire story, for example how efficient is the electrical storage of the electric car, and what is the environmental impact of the creation of this battery and the recyling/disposal of it in a few years? How efficient is the charging of the electric car battery, and how efficient is the electric network in delivering electricity to the charger? How efficient is the generation of the electricity in order to do all this? Including impacts such as plant building, maintenance and fuelling. The infrastructure for petroleum derivative engines is all in place already and the delivery process for the fuel is very efficient. The extraction and generation of the fuel is less so, but it's called a petro-chemical industry for a reason, not just a petroleum-fuel industry, and a lot more than just fuel is produced out of crude oil and this side of the industry is just as critical.
My point is that there's lots to consider beyond solely electric motor vs internal combustion energy efficiency. The electical generation and grid infrastructure to deliver electricity to charge widespread electric cars usage just isn't in place yet. The energy storage technology for electric cars is still very primitive, there is no feasible rapid charge system in place (how many of us have three phase electicity to the home), what little infrastructure there is in place is often bespoke and brand specific. Arguably we really need standardised easily replaceable battery packs rather than cables and sockets on every driveway, and that would require multi-government pressure on the electric car industry to do this and this could only happen once the technology was there which makes this possible - currently energy density is so low that the batteries are often built into the entire chassis of the vehicle.
It is quite possible to create fuel from air. It does, however, require a lot of energy to do so and where does this come from?
And before the conspiracy nut-jobs and perpetual motion machine afficionados strike... no, it is not possible to use fuel created from air to power the creation of this fuel in anything other than a very rapidly reducing amount at which point the process would stop very quickly.
Yes, funding schemes are available and possible, however with a growing number of retirees requiring pensions invested in at their final salary level, it is not sustainable for any organisation other than one that is perpetually growing. While there is some financial similarity between employer contributions and employee pension investment schemes, they are not comparable. Employer contributed pensions scale with the organisation and the people, pension fund schemes do not.
None of this was helped, of course, by the government's decision to change the law and allow companies to raid, which often amounted to effectively stealing from, the pension scheme funds for whatever purpose they feel fit - such as executive bonuses followed by the collapse of the organisation.
Sounds like the plan... Microsoft have managed to produce an entire generation of "web developers" who are so clueless that they still consider that a web page is a modal system application and that standards, accessibility and having a flying hope in hell of supporting a product post "release" (as in something delivered, not necessarily working and usually not) are something that other people care about.
Every version of .NET has felt like a halfway house to anywhere worthwhile, but never getting there and feeling like it never will. So many damn versions of just the major .NET versions, let alone the point versions and the tens of thousands of support libraries in many duplicated versions that now infest any Windows system that has ever had anything that uses .NET installed on it.
What product are we talking about? One which:
Are we talking about Microsoft Teams or Notes/Domino?
The C64 version didn't care what side if the space station you were on, therefore if you engaged it on the wrong side it would carefully ram your ship into the rear of the space station. It also struggled from too narrow an angle and tended to spend ages scraping the front face of the station rather than actually dock. As for caring about exiting spacecraft... nope... just flew into them...
When I did use the thing I'd tend to align the ship up approximately myself, enable the docking computer and then hit maximum time speed for instant dock regardless of ships in the way and so on.
In witchspace (knocked out of hyperspace by the thargoids) the docking computer could be used to target thargoid ships, just lock on, enable it, and the docking computer would line you up to shoot the thargoid. Unfortunately if often did this by slowing the ship down to an absolute stop which made one a bit of a sitting duck target...
They have agreements with the other carriers that allow them to trace calls, even if it's, as in your example, of going through to another carrier. Unfortunately they are likely to hit a carrier that is not trusted and has no agreement with, but within the UK they should all operate together and for many purposes there is legislation to ensure that they do so.
The caller ID system is a trust based and the number presented is entirely arbitrary and is up to the caller. While this sounds like a very bad thing, the core reason for it is so large organisations may present either a consistent calling number or to use a pool of lines for a much greater set of numbers.
For example, an organisation may have 200 unique extensions, each addressable publicy however may only have 20 incoming and outgoing lines. The organisation's phone system performs the allocation of the pooled lines as necessary, which is a somewhat different process for incoming and outgoing calls. For outgoing calls, the system will select a free line and the outgoing call will be tagged with whatever Caller ID number the system chooses to use - this could either be a common return number or the unique extension number of the caller and this need will vary between organisations for very genuine reasons.
All that is fine, but what really sucks and is disgusting is the various networking telco's insistence that they do not know the originating end point which is an obvious lie as without knowing the real end point of a call, it is impossible to route the damn data. This may be obscured by routing to a different telco's distribution network but there are plenty of charging agreements between networks and the end points have to be identifiable, they just choose to deny this.
The issue is more that the Internet shouldn't have access to the display sign controller. A device can be very easily and cheaply located behind a locked down hardware firewall. Alternatively it could easily be on a private network with a secure backhaul to update servers or even to Microsoft's servers.
There's nothing there that indicates the network topology.
Such a TV station is making authorised copies and performing authorised modifications to the original as per their license and agreement to do so. Parts of this agreement involve the protection of non-encrypted versions of the original, any versions in between and that the output will be encrypted.
All pretty standard stuff and has been the case for years, in different forms and across different technologies (because these change very quickly).
It's no conicidence that the best (illegal) copies of movies and such have come from compromised internal systems, and equally no coincidence that the suppliers of digital movies, in particular, supplies digitally watermarked versions unique to each licensee. This way when something does get out, they can identify the source.
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