Posts by Alan Brown

Re: IPv8 anyone?

"IP is just not practical for interplanetary communications"

It's pushing it for geosyncyhronous orbit (always was) and probably impractical even as close as the moon

Just to give an idea how much latency affects things:

When New Zealand moved its 64kb/s national circuit (yes really, an entire country could run on that little bandwidth, especially when paying $100k/month++ for it) from satellite to submarine cable in ~1996, IP traffic throughout nearly TREBLED from one week to the next

Just because IP "keeps working" at higher latencies, doesn't mean it works "well" - it becomes intolerable for humans very quickly and dies entirely not long after that

Re: Linux "Desktop"

"VS2022 will still build XP apps"

In that case, "Good luck convincing your insurer to cover your security breaches"

Re: Linux "Desktop"

"but don't try doing heavy spreadsheets"

Which is correct advice with or WITHOUT MS office.

Spreadsheets are for quick calculations, not for running businesses on - and anyone who does the latter will eventually find the practice biting them hard on the arse

"heavy spreadsheets" are the accounting equivalent of using a screwdriver as a wood chisel (as mentioned elsewhere in these forums)

Re: Linux "Desktop"

and yet..... the environment most often used for recovering fragged MS office files is: "Libreoffice"

There's more to life than a UI - and the MS UI is far from optimal at the best of times

Contract computer coding methodology - especially when outsourced to Bangalore - "why write 5 lines when 12 pages will do?"

It's easier to obscure bugs and keeps you in long-term employment

Re: Oracle "those number things are hard"

We'll just turn those ones all the way up to 11

Re: Closest I've seen...

ahh, cleaners.....

I had a linux PC used as a router in a museum. It died 3 days short of 3 years uptime. Guess why?

Re: Closest I've seen...

I had a customer who demanded a callout because her mail wasn't working - not once but on 3 separate occasions - an hour's drive away...

...each time because her husband had minimised the clent

Infosys may be Indian and India may be backing Russia, but it's clear the Indian _PEOPLE_ don't feel that way

Indian oil importers grabbed a shitload of cheap Russian oil - only to find they can't offload it to anyone - nobody wants to buy it

This is what happens when money-focussed mercantilists meet consumers with ethics

Re: @wolfetone

"Apparently nobody died"

The stats on previous ships after ammunition stores exploded lead me to suspect rather differently.

It tends to be terminal for nearly everyone below decks even before the vessel sinks

Turkish coast guard responding to the SOS only pulled 58 russian sailors out of the water and at that point the ship was on its side

An awful lot of young men are dying to massage an old man's ego - young men that Russia cannot afford to lose when you look at its demographics profile. The population age curve is already upside down and it's the fastest falling population on the planet

After this mess is over (assuming we don't go full WW3), Russia is going to be a complete basket case for decades - and it needs to be emphasised that the circumstances which put Putin in charge were the direct result of Western right wingers NOT liking Russia's tenative move towards social democracy, therefore backing the coup back in 1993

Elizabeth 2 is WHY so many Commonwealth countries have retained a constiutional monarchy

Charles is probably why most of them will ditch it for a constitutional republic of some flavour

Re: Evasion

and there's a whole industry structured around maximum tax avoidance whilst ensuring it's not tax evasion

" requires holders to pay US taxes on all income earned globally (minus any paid locally)"

And the $64million question: Did they?

Re: Formatting pc's in the days of DOS and Windows 3.1

Those were the days.... AMD K5/K6 cpus ran 50% faster than Intel for integer ops, so if you wanted to run non-GUI stuff (linux servers), that was what you purchased

Cyrix were ok but rather....toasty (not as toasty as 80286s - who else got serious fingertip burns off one?)

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

If sufficiently irradiated they may become intelligent, angry and armed

Beware of the coming of the great cow guru

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI

"Starlink has designed their satellite coverage based on assumptions about which locations and to how many people they'll be able to sell their service"

Those assumptions didn't include much coverage in Europe because terrestrial coverage is good and there's decent local competition

The USA is an entirely different market which is only possible because of massive local manipulation and monpolisation - you can see how the telcos have been trying (and failing) to get Starlink shut out of their cozy income streams. What is likely to actually happen is that they'll suddenly find that all the "too hard" places to provide service to suddenly became possible after all - at a reasonable price - but customers won't care after 20+ years of being shafted

Africa is a massive market which hasn't even been touched yet (dozens of countries), as is most of Asia. If you look at starlink.sx you'll see that South America has grabbed it with both hands as most of the countries there are taking advantage of an opportunity to connect citizens in ways previously unattainable

If you take a closer look you'll notice that Starlink is now capable of providing service to large chunks of the atlantic and pacific oceans. With V2's laser linking it gets even easier

marineised dishes aren't a thing (yet) but they'll happen. As will aviation-specialised ones

The income stream is there, and not where you assume it's coming from.

Apart from the massive potential for Ships at Sea and Aircraft in Flight (both currently playing eye-watering fees to Inmarsat, etc) there's the wee issue that they can provide intercontinental linking of financial centres (particularly asia-EU/asia-USA) at lower latencies than any terrestrial cable) and the income from THAT could pay the entire constellation all by itself once it comes onstream

I've been asked to provide a report on the feasibility of using Starlink for providing linking to hundreds of remote villages in a very deprived country and at first glance I can't see any particular obstacle. Until I suggested it the proponents were looking at commitments of billions of dollars for worse bandwidth and being beholden to the possibility of authoritarian local governments cutting off connectivity

Terrestrial IS cheaper where the population density supports it but there are large chunks of the planet where you simply can't put infrastructure (water, mountains) or there aren't enough people to justify it.

I spent a good part of the 1980s-90s on the end of a geostationary satellite link and know how frustrating that is. LEO birds are a godsend. I get that the French are doing this for various "because we're french" reasons but they're probably going about it the wrong way

Re: I blame the attrocious SF we have today

It's neither unless there's a delta in there, otherwise the energy is just potential

Re: re: Beware of the Leopard

The US Feds are currently mulling walking away from the whole mess. The war on drugs was lost a long time ago and the only ones benefitting from its current form are the dealers

(It's a Forever war because you're attacking a symptom (usage), not the cause (WHY people are falling into addiction). A "war on sneezing" would be just as effective if you wanted to eliminate the common cold)

Re: We live in a world where con artists rule the day.

"The Earth had CO2 levels as high as 700-900 ppm and life on this planet flourished"

last time the planet went past ~850ppm, Very Bad Things Happened in a short period of time.

Look up the Permian Extinction event. Once it hit that kneepoint it was all over in less than a decade

World: not destroyed

Oxygen levels: substantially reduced and stayed that way for a long time

Extinction level: Extreme (93-95% by biomass or species count)

Flourishing life: Red Tides on Steroids (Ironically, producing much of the oil we're now burning), not much else on land or sea

Humans can't survive long-term in an atmospheric oxygen sea-level equivalent much less than 17% and it's a particularly nasty way to die (altitude sickness - you essentially drown in your own lungs)

Re: RF

I've had this discussion with a couple of UK loonies. They see a dish on the horizon and think 5G, etc etc.

Explaining inverse square laws, how the phone in their pocket is giving them millions of times higher doses and how that's nothing compared to laying on an electric blanket is amusing

Kinda like the recent shenanigans at Chernobyl. Soldiers shouldn't have been digging in the Red Forest but readings 50 times higher than normal aren't anything to write home about (they're normal in some parts of the world). Sure you don't want to live there for an extended period (years) but even a few months is fine and I speculated that soldiers had been either doing something extremely stupid or up to no good (or both), such as selfies at the Elephant's Foot or attempting to steal items they shouldn't be going anywhere near with someone else's 10-foot bargepole.

Sure enough, it came out that dolts were doing things like handling Cobalt-60 sources without protection and attempting to steal various radiologically red hot items

Back on the antenna front: One of the fun things back in my telco days was to put up antennas and wait for the objections to roll in - only then would we attempt to connect them to equipment, having "calibrated the local loony brigade".

In a few cases we put up painted wooden/plastic replicas at one location whilst having disguised ones elsewhere. In no instances whatsoever were there evere complaints about the non-visible ones, but the wooden ones upset a lot of chakras

Re: Why?

" For a cascade the best bet is a mummy-bear orbit like OneWeb."

Quality British clusterfucks

Re: Local tin foil shortage?

The villagers with horns are witches and must be weighed to see if they are lighter than a duck

People believed that in India - where there is no 5G

Re: Putin is accomplishing all of his goals

It's unlikely. The country is too big and too fragmented to govern

What we call "Russia" is something like 87 "autonomous republics" and it's more likely that many of those will announce full independence

It's lkely that by June 90% of the aviation fleet will be grounded (only 5% are 100% russian-built and getting spares/support for the rest is essentially impossible) with large chucks of the sector already idled. The significance of that is the lack of year-round passable roads across large chunks of the Russian hinterland

Re: Amazing

And it's the "forced to pick" part which matters here

Finns have historically preferred not to, they're making that choice NOW because they now have to. Neither NATO or Sweden is threatening to invade

Re: Tokamak, or not tokamak, that is the question...

That kind of setup relies on earth (and rocks) being a pretty good insulator, so you can deposit and withdraw heat as needed year-round

Geothermal benefits and suffers from the same issue. They always start out well but once you draw off heat they invariably suffer from very slow replenishment issues unless sitting on top of a mantle plume or magma chamber (and even then it's iffy)

There are plenty of things that work in the lab but fail to scale. Wasn't this first tried about 50 years ago?

You can, but heat harvesting is more efficient

That kind of fission design was produced in the 1960s (98-99% output waste reduction, and hot enough to produce supercritical steam, which virtually no current fission reactor design can do)

It also reduces input waste by 89% (that's how much is wasted when you enrich uranium to "reactor grade") and can act as a nuclear garbage disposal for existing nuclear waste including that wasted "depleted uranium" (which is important because depleted uranium is actually your base material for nuclear weapons production, not the enriched stuff)

Fission reactors as we know them are built around the waste products of weapons-making because the original power reactor was and IT was built that way "because that's what was available"

There are better designs. Alvin Weinberg proved that in the 1960s and promptly got drummed out of the US nuclear industry (ironicaly he built the original fission reactor as we know it and built the better one because he didn't like the way his prototype was being scaled up to dangerous sizes). Several countries are working on that and China's 2MW test unit went critical last September. We should be seeing announcements on progress towards their 100MW electrical test unit soon