Posts by JassMan 926 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2008
@john Robson
Probably not because most grid failures happen during daytime when there is more stress on the grid and more switching as infill generators kick in and out. ie You are more likely to have a grid failure at the time you are running on battery anyway.
Also why don't they have a wind turbine or 2 of their own? As AC says it can't do any harm to have a bit of solar on the roof, although Manchester is getting a bit far north for effective payback on the cost of solar.
Or thinking more outside the box why not just carry a mirror on the one in the sun. A mirror could power the the drilling robot for several years before the levels of dust made it ineffective, while converting sunlight to wireless power and beaming it round, means a massive decrease in efficiency and reliability. Sometimes old technology is still the best.
I think the may just be a tiny price difference as well, so cost savings may allow extra experiments to be carried out.
In fact if it is always in the sun, surely the weight of the mirror and solar panels on the mining robot would be less that the planned batteries, meaning it could carry more powerful motors. I guess it is too late for Prime-1 but when they send the next one, I hope they send me a beer with some of the money they save.
Even if it is just one of these--->
Not only that, but she will back to demanding that all https is banned and that private individuals can't use encryption. That will work really well at stopping cyber attacks. I'm sure she really wants all passwords transmitted in the clear as well, you know to help the security forces keep our country safe.
The good news is that, according to Sky (and going by our own experience), even if the clock is wrong, recordings should continue working regardless.
That is only good news if if only want to record nothing but Sky. If their advertised program time is an hour different from another channel's program that you want to record - hard cheddar.
@Androgynous Cupboard
OTOH by restricting sales of Intel processors, the US probably did China a massive favour. If you were starting a proc design now, knowing what can be achieved, you wouldn't start with x86. It was only the popularity of the PC™ that killed off many better designs such as the 68000 series. Thank god that ARM and MIPS stuck with the RISC strategy and found a business model that Intel couldn't kill off.
I am glad they publicised this survey so well. I expect no-one will respond because no one will know about it. They will take the lack of response as the general public not being worried about losing any remaining control they have over their privacy. The great health Data grab all over again.
@Mike 137 Thanks for the heads up.
Especially if you are using Firefox. They now have a farcebook container extension which "* prevents Facebook from tracking you around the web. The Facebook Container extension for Firefox helps you take control and isolate your web activity from Facebook." It creates a tab which hides everything you do in that tab from all the others you have open and vice versa. Just open about:addons search for facebook and make sure you use the genuine Mozilla extension.
* description by Mozilla
IANAJP (I am not a java programmer) but logic dictates that if you have a server dedicated to a single task, then you want to do as @RichardBarrell says but first load the server with all the admin tools you are likely to need (possibly including a simple mail server to message the admin in case of problems.) Check how much memory remains (without swap) and size -Xmx as appropriate, leaving an extra gig or so for some other tool you forgot. Turning off swap as indicated further above without doing this will result in the dreaded OOMkiller killiing off the very tools you'll need to find out what went wrong, and possibly lead to an even more dramatic panic.
Much as we all hate Larry's Corp, there is a useful article at oracle.com/technical-resources/articles/it-infrastructure/dev-oom-killer.html . Some may not be relevant because of systemd, but it is a good place to start.
Yep, they probably used a version of those in the BBC weather office, modified to print out satellite pictures directly from a big dish on the roof. I think they were capable of printing A1 at a pinch but of course in the good old days it would have used renish or nordisch newssheet or whatever is about 2 foot wide (sorry about 600mm).
Intel did not return request for comment on Intel GPU compatibility with ARM processors in PCs and servers.
If they start selling these for bog standard PCs, they will have to drop the price to a more reasonable level. People will start asking why they are paying more than 10 times the price of a Raspberry Pi just for a CPU especially when ARM licences are so cheap.
The world would be a better place if they did. Once the legacy x86 code is defunct, it should mean quicker builds for developers.
Yep. A perfect response to to the govs failed plans to snaffle everyone health data.
If they can't even send a private email, how can we trust them with our data. Even if they have a thousand rules about what can, and cannot be, done with private data, it only takes one idiot in an organisation and all plans are out the window. In this can there are lots of idiots and many are in government.
Reminds me of the time, a rather evangelical secretary kept sending everyone she had on her mailing list, stories about the good news of getting to know Jesus. One day she received a mail from GOD who reminded her that everyone was entitled to their own beliefs and suggested the office would be more productive if people only received work related mails on the office system. The shock of it all kept her off work for a week and a public reprimand (all be it with a followup private beer from the boss) of the spoofer so she could see the there were no gods involved the sending of emails.
They can't use pwned 'cos it is already in common use but by replacing the 1st character (as in pwned) to a non-alpha they follow in the footsteps of Yahoo! Bing! etc but remain sufficiently different by having the mark at the beginning instead of the end.
Besides, FarceCrook is too obvious.
@MrREynolds2U Is this fast? I thought it was just the new standard having just replaced my creaking dualcore 1.8GHz Intel homebrew, which despite being 14 years old only took 25 secs (still quicker than original posters 3minutes). I do remember that Windows did seem to take a boringly long time to start and was one of the reasons I eventually gave up on it around 8 years ago.
That time is to get to LightDM login. It is an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with a bog standard LinuxMint 20.4 XFCE install apart from the NVidia driver. (my eyesight is no longer up to reading 2560x1440 on a 14inch screen which comes up with the nouveau driver)
Does that make it a Ferrari? I just bought what I thought looked liked a reasonably laptop on which I could do a bit of FreeCAD designing as well as running some photograph manipulation without having to wait for diskswapping which I have turned off.
I don't know exactly how X orders all its sub processes but I believe X is running long before the login manager.
It is running an Athlon Ryzen 9 with 16GB and no swap file or partition. I did change the standard 256GB Samsung SSD to a more useful 2TB but I don't the speed changed by more than about 5%.
journalctl -b shows that that in fact lightdm is ready for user login after only 5 secs but I think there is some stuff that happens between grub accepting the choice of Mint and when the real kernel starts to get loaded.
Indeed, there are also concerns that if the rules are introduced too quickly it could mean that perfectly good tech with plenty of shelf life gets dumped prematurely.
If your charger breaks, and it is the only one you had with an old style connector, there are thousands advertised on eBay every day. If your device breaks, who can resist buying a new one. Especially since you will already have a USB-A charger or 3 in a drawer and a USB-A to USB-C cable.
The only thing that stifles innovation is Apple with their attempts to maintain a walled garden and forcing their customers to update all their gear because the new stuff doesn't have at least 1 previous style of port.
There is an interesting take on this story in the Grauniad. It seems some the actual cost of the flight probably came from Netflix funding the documentary about the flight and all the prep.
Much is made of the $200 but basically it is an irrelevant figure since it has nothing to do with the flight at all other than this is the sponsorship funds given to the charity. As other stories have suggested, the actual cost was probably in the 10s of millions. However much it actually cost, it was probably good value at 3days and 45ish orbits when you compare it to almost $0.5M for a Virgin Galactic 30minute flight to the edge of space and straight back down or Blue Origin's 10minutes just out of measurable atmosphere.
Thanks for the info about the kernel. I have been using Mint since 2012 (and Ubuntu since 2006) and had in fact used the method explained in your link. It is just that as I am now getting old and doddery, I had completely forgotten about using the kernel tab of Update-Manager.
Thanks also to all the contributor's other helpful (but failed on my new laptop) hints as to how to get it working.
Just bought my new laptop with a Ryzen 9. Discovered that the UEFI wouldn't let me repartition the hard drive while it was in the computer. This means Windows now has no chance of ever running on the lappy because I stuffed in a new M2 2TB drive and live USBed Mint onto it. I am now a happy bunny with a spare external half gig drive.
Shame Mint20.2 still doesn't support 5.11 kernel but I am hoping it will arrive with the xmas update. The only things that don't work are the keyboard backlights, some screen modes and the stupid leds on teh lid which I can well do without.
According to the prior information notice: "Big data and analytics is an emerging and evolving capability, with its prominence heightened by COVID. It is fast becoming recognised as business critical and a core business function, with many government departments now including chief data officers.*
If they also got a few in house Project Managers who knew what they were doing (instead of spaffing millions on consultants) they could get some some of their IT systems for millions instead of billions.
Oh wait, that would mean their mates would no longer fund the ConParty coffers - so I guess that idea is a non-starter.
*my emphasis
I once had a particulary nasty iron with a hook and no other means of putting it down. One day while working, the phone rang so I absentmindedly hung it on the open chassis containing the pcb. On finishing the call, I leaned forwards to inspect the last leg of the chip I had soldered in - and promptly stabbed myself in the middle of the forehead on the hot tip of the iron. It only took 5 years for the scar to eventually fade away. Needlrss to say it was a wake up call and I bought a new iron at the earliest opportinity.
Ouch!!!
"After a meeting involving senior executives of Google and Apple, notes of the meeting were exchanged between the two companies," Epic's filing says. "The notes reflect: 'Our vision is that we work as if we are one company.'"
If this turns out to be true, it sounds like they are operating a cartel. This could lead to some very large fines from the EU and probably many countries where the politicians haven't been bought.
Other parts of the story show that Apple & Google are abusing their near monopoly positions, again maling the need for some serious fines and hopefully prison for top execs.
Clearly the person who came up with that idea hasn't needed to actually get a GP appointment face-to-face thought it was a brilliant way to hide information in plain sight
FTFY
Also a brilliant bit of arse covering as obvs not their fault if no-one is actually allowed into GP waiting rooms to read it.
I made the comment because even if it is atmospheric water, it would still be contaminated. In the spirit of scientific endeavour, one of the the things they surely want to know is how much water exists at various depths and would there be be any chance of distilling water from local sand/dust/shale etc.
wrt mud clogging up the works, surely this is a natural hazard they have already thought about. Although, since they have already met the wrong kind of rock, maybe not.
Thinking about the problems though - it seems they could have done with a small hoover to take dust samples from the drill site. Plenty of earthbound drills have attached hoover tubes (to keep the dust from your carpet/softfurnishings) so it wouldn't have been that hard to adapt the technology for the lower atmos pressure. It is obvious from the photo that a sizeable sample could have been obtained from the edge of the hole. If there is enough atmos to fly, there is certainly enough to hoover up a dust sample.
If they had wetted it first, it may have lubricated the drill sufficiently to prevent it it destroying the structure. If it is sand they are drilling, they would just need to wait for nightfall and the water would have frozen to a solid plug. OK, it would be a "contaminated"sample but anything is better than nothing at all.
be doing their utmost to preserve DNA. Sending it into the harshest environment outside of a reactor containment vessel is surely the height of irresponsibility. Especially when you add the environmental impact of rocket travel. Any DNA worth preserving, should be stored in one of the several ice-cave species banks which already exist around the world.
Don't get me started on the even more stupid idea of sending ash to the surface of a celestial body which is already effectively 100% covered in flyash.
Laws against fraud should automatically quadruple the sentencing where it can be shown that a reasonable person can see unjustified environmental harm has or will occur as part of the original scam. Now is the time to get serious on willful polution.
Tech support scams have been going on for about as long as people have needed technical support, but a report published by Microsoft last month suggested the volume may be declining.
That shows how much you should trust a report from microsoft.
Calls to my phone claiming to be from Microsoft Support have risen from every couple of nonths to every second day.
I ask "when does your telemetry tell you I last rebooted Windows?". When they give any answer less than 6.5 years, I tell them they are lying scum and should stop trying to scam people and get a proper job instead, they usually hang up. One was very persistent though and insisted I should sit in front if my computer and click the start button. He just wouldn't believe that there is no start button on my screen. He couldn't even conceive of anybody having Whisker menu at the top of the screen instead of the bottom and had me describing everything i could see along the bottom of my screen which of course is nothing but background.
It's hoped the machine-learning system can assist human controllers in preventing accidents and improving traffic flow. By optimizing journeys, the software may even reduce fuel consumption, too.
Is laudable as long as they don't then use the more efficient flow to increase traffic. Just like fluids, if you have lamimar flow you can pass more, but introduce a bit of turbulence and it all backs up to create a flood.
Ie. They need to make sure they are not creating conditions for a bigger disaster when a trivial incident occurs.
"There shouldn't be anyone too senior for this to apply to them, you know. We need to hold each other to account when we're talking through these issues, and simply being incredibly senior, successful, bringing in prizes, money, etc. etc. shouldn't exempt you from scrutiny to behave decently."
If senior staff can't bully their juniors, how can they expect to get away with putting their name on major research papers. Next thing you know, people who have fresh ideas will start getting recognition and where will the establishment be then. This could end civilisation as we know it.
They will make a massive profit out of this. Large corporations often have a 10hour (or some other nomiminal timespan) and for the rest of the day (and weekends) the balance is placed on spot markets where interest rates are much higher than Joe Bloggs can earn even depositing for a fixed term. If they manage to take a couple of months to repay their victims, the directors will be giving themselves some massive windfall bonuses this year.
This is yet another case of lawmakers doing too little too late. All of these bills should have been written decades ago.
The sadest part is that they may never get through the political process at all.
Government of the people by the rich for the rich and all its correlations.
I used to think XP was mostly bloat because I could not imagine what an ultra-mega-overbloated monster the current Win10 would become. Once it exceeded 32Gb without any apps I just gave up and wiped the Win10 partition never to be seen again.
The only justification for inventing Win11 would be if they made a usefull OS which would run in an 8GB partion with full office suite so that the rest of your disk could be used for user data.
Having emigrated to the land of kangaroos before I was old enough to even know the name of a swan, I grew up believing all swans were black. On returning to my birthplace once I was old enough to earn my airfare, I discovered they also come in white. For a while, I just thought it was peculiar to see so many albino birds together, until I realised that all European swans are white. Of the two varieties, I would say the white are the slighly more unpredictable so what is this black swan event thing?
... but it is unlikely.
Rather worryingly, anyone spending that much moolah on a site is not doing it as a philanthropic exercise. This usually ends up with the new ownets trying to recover their costs plus an even larger RoI. Luckily stackoverflow is all about freedom so presumably everyone is just going to move somewhere else. Shame though if that wealth of information is lost behind a paywall or some other means of monetisation.
No patch is ever decided by the server to be sent to a remote unit. The remote unit may not be connected to a network or even switched on. Patching is always performed be the remote unit checking to see if the server has a newer version available and if so it requests a pull of the patch.
Apart from it being inconvenient for a server to randomly update your software when it is vital that you get that last report done before the deadline, it would be illegal under various computer misuse acts around the world.
Much as I hate lawyers, I really hope the big 3 have racked up enough legal costs to make this troll bankrupt.
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