* Posts by Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

560 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2009

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Suckers for punishment, we added a crawler transporter to our Saturn V

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: slow starting

A friend of who really should have grown out of this stuff by his age tells me the latest generation of motors have speed control in them. And servo function. E.g the motors as included in the bargain (!) set 42100. All controllable via the Devils radio bluetooth. You can even use a game controller such as a PS4 dualshock talking to a fondleslab or phone relaying on to the motors. That requires a free 3rd party app that is simple enough even an adult can use it.

A friend, honest.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Nicely Done @HildyJ

<pedant> Vehicle Assembly Building </pedant>

Upvoted because it's a terrible suggestion in all the right ways, I love it.

The empty building with working doors would be quite a feat. All the gantries & lifting equipment inside would be something else again.

Server won't boot? Forgot to make that backup? Have no fear, just blame Microsoft

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Out of the Frying pan, into the Fire?

I was about to post a counter but then remembered the version I used for years ran (flawlessly) on NT server 4.0. Jeez, how'd I get so old?

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Why terrifying?

Having a phone & app in the charging process is the cause of a good proportion of charging failures at the moment. Dozens of apps from dozens of operators on hundreds of phone variants, it's pointless.

Just have a chip & pin slot in the electron dispenser like a modern petrol pump or just let the charger identify the car and bill the registered keeper direct.

Sure have the phone & app for information delivery but get it the flock out of the critical path.

Earth observation chief Dr Josef Aschbacher takes reins at European Space Agency

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: So th Johnson has brought Blighty it's own (unnecessary) satellite constellation.

Maybe someone sees benefit in having access to orbits and frequencies that provide continuous global coverage. Maybe someone sees benefit in having sway over where the Gen2 sats are designed & built. Maybe someone has identified a way to provide a position & timing service from LEO by putting a small additional payload on the Gen2 satellites. Maybe there's people out there who know a metric fuckton more about this shit than internet armchair commentators. Maybe it is just willy waving by BoJo. My mind is open to all possibilities.

One thing that not a maybe, it's a cast iron certainty, is that haters gonna hate.

(the UK taxpayer owns 42.2%, the same as Bharti Global)

Boeing 737 Max will return to flight after software updates, says EU's aviation regulator

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

The other Boing and FAA fail

"EASA's review of the 737 MAX began with the MCAS but went far beyond. We took a decision early on to review the entire flight control system and gradually broadened our assessment to include all aspects of design which could influence how the flight controls operated. This led, for example, to a deeper study of the wiring installation, which resulted in a change that is now also mandated in the Proposed Airworthiness Directive."

I didn't know until reading this that is was EASA not the FAA the picked up the incorrectly routed wiring issue. If that's just an example I wonder what else EASA found that the FAA had missed.

Watchdog signals Boeing 737 Max jets can return to US skies following software upgrade, pilot training

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: So it's inherently safe without MCAS?

"Seems to me the additional training to be signed off on MCAS is exactly what they tried to avoid about recertification."

It's a documented fact. MCAS was designed to make the max behave like the earlier iterations at all corners of the flight envelope. This was so that pilots did not need to be re-trained & certified avoiding great cost for the airlines. Pilot flies 737 on Friday, pilot flies (cheaper to fuel) 737-max on Monday.

In fact the max does behave just like the earlier models in the vast majority of the flight envelope, I don't know if, testing aside, a max ever went into that corner. Trouble was a) a simple fault made MCAS think the aircraft was in that corner and b) MCAS had the power to take the aircraft entirely outside the flight envelope.

Super-antique-fragile-and-it's-XP-alidocious, even though the sight of it is something quite atrocious

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Dreadful?

XP wasn't isn't dreadful. I still use it in a VM to run old software. Gutted of all the cruft and fully updated to the EOL patch state it runs in at a tiny 5.9Gb. Takes no time at all to pop a copy & run it up. No network connections of course, files on & off by VirtualBox shared folder. Often the copy is simply binned afterwards but I have a couple that get repeatedly used so set to immutable disks. Hellishly fast to boot.

How big would a fully patched up copy of 7 be for those rare tasks? 40 or 50Gb maybe? Haven't a clue how big a minimal 10 install would be as that drove me to get off the Redmond wagon.

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Me, I'd get swifter comms by sending smoke signals from the roof.

You can't go burning stuff Dabbsy, think of the carbon footprint. What you need is IPoAC (RFC 1149) or RFC 6214 if you prefer.

Oh, the humanity! Microsoft congratulates itself for Teams inflicted on 115m daily users

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

collaboration platform

You've misspelled 'memory hog'

Huawei Matebook X Pro 2020: Nothing too crazy but at least it's more fixable and cheaper than comparable Apple wares

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Like comparing an apple with a watermelon

I've up voted your post because in the main I concur. However, I do always question how well the industry understands business use given that 99% of laptops have a screen aspect ratio designed for watching DVDs. Thankfully Huawei, Microsoft and Apple understand that shape is sub-optimal for many tasks.

EU orders Airbus A350 operators to install anti-coffee spillage covers in airliner cockpits

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Weird. American air carriers have required liquid-resistant designs

FAA: Please spell 'tested'

Boeing: t e s t e d

FAA: Excellent, here's an air worthiness certificate.

Nokia 5310: Retro feature phone shamelessly panders to nostalgia, but is charming enough to be forgiven

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Facebook App

If facebook[sic] does indeed slurp via a baked in app, how does it obtain informed consent to hold data if the user, or someone in the contact list, doesn't have an account?

They can still upload the contact list and use the data to enhance the profile of those that do have faecbook accounts.

Say the phone belongs to person A who does not have an account. Stored on it are contacts B, C & D, C also does not have an account.

Faecbook can add to the data on persons B & D that they are known to the person who owns number <one way hash of phone number of A>. Ditto, one step removed, for C. Because it is a one way hash they are not storing data about A or C, they can claim to meet data storage law.

Should A or C later set up accounts a trawl of the borg computers for matching hash will get the profile off to a good, fat, start. So yes faecbook can store data about A & C without ever having their consent by doing it by association. We can't avoid it but that's no reason to help.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit
FAIL

Re: Facebook App

No it isn't. If your house has a bath you don't use it does nothing. If a phone has a 3.5mm jack you don't use it does nothing. Nobody is going to trust a baked in faecbook app to be doing nothing. Even if you don't have a faecbook account is could still be reporting the contents of your contact list and anything else on the phone. Just because you don't use faecbook doesn't mean they can't try to monetise data about you.

From 'Queen of the Skies' to Queen of the Scrapheap: British Airways chops 747 fleet as folk stay at home

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Once...

I got an entire row upstairs in BA economy returning from Bombay (that dates it!). I was very glad of the space as I'd missed the previous days flight due to a late internal connection. The plane wasn't even airborne but the gate had closed. Due to my company expenses being tighter than a ducks arse I spent 24 hours in the terminal straight after 15 hours internal travel from outside Calcutta.

I have no idea what or even if a film was shown.

Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Linux flavours

"Are all the cool kids still using Mint"

Highly unlikely, I'm using it and I'm deeply uncool.

Google isn't even trying to not be creepy: 'Continuous Match Mode' in Assistant will listen to everything until it's disabled

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

"Google Assistant exists in many guises such as on smartphones and watches, TVs, PCs, and also on dedicated hardware, such as the voice-only Google Home and Google Home Mini, or with "smart display" screens on the Google Nest Hub or devices from Lenovo and Harman."

This is the lie (or rather one of many lies) Google would like perpetuated. Google Assistant is not in these devices, only a bit of software that switches the mic on and off is in these. Google Assistant is in a dark data center somewhere, one you cannot access, influence nor control. Racks of blinkenlights acknowledge the receipt of another packet of your private existence for processing, monetisation and long, long term storage.

Choose your own adventure: HP's new Omen 15 gaming laptop offers choice between AMD and Intel processors

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Whatever will they think of next?

With any luck, screens in aspect ratios other than 16poxy9.

eBay users spot the online auction house port-scanning their PCs. Um... is that OK?

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: This is not okay

"will be rebooting in a moment to make it stick."

ipconfig /flushdns

"Takes effect from the moment you save the file back"

Only for new lookups. If it's already in the DNS cache you need to flush it or wait for the cache to expire.

Startup Mycroft AI declares it will fight 'patent troll' tooth and nail after its Linux voice-assistant attracts lawsuit

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

It reads to me as if the personal backend might be abandoned as the official Mycroft Backend has now been made open source, see the blog post at the link above.

Not clear at all.

Tens of millions of biz Dell PCs smacked by privilege-escalation bug in bundled troubleshooting tool

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Biz PC's!

Do I win anything for the full set?

- Working for a global corporation ~55,000 employees - check.

- Laptop supplied pre-imaged by Dell - check.

- Laptop yesterday self-updated SupportAssist for Home PCs without asking - double WTF?

- Call to IBM to get it removed - painful.

Sigh :-(

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

HP printers are no better. They print for a while then stop - claiming the toner has run out.

Not all HPs do that, e.g. CP5225DN:

Once it can no longer accurately measure the toner level then on the supplies status you no longer get xx% and a pages estimate, it just says 'empty'. However, there's no forecast of doom if you don't replace it, quite the reverse. It says in black and white on the printed status page that you can go on using the cartridge until the print quality degrades to an unacceptable level. I ordered a new black black toner as soon as it reached 'empty' and it sat around getting in the way in my office for almost a year before gaps appeared in the printouts.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

In the UK you go online, fill out a short form and print a return label good for up to 4 toner cartridges.

Can't bear to part with that well-worn copy of Windows 7? Microsoft might let you keep it updated an extra year

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Deja Vu

Sort of but it is not the same. Windows 7 had things in people familiar with XP didn't like but is was still fundamentally the same in that the user was still in control. With Windows 10 the user is a passenger.

Using WhatsApp for your business comms? It's either that or reinstall Lotus Notes

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: RE: Alister

That is, by a considerable distance, the politest description of Lotus Notes I have ever encountered.

CES flicks the off switch on massager award… and causes a buzz

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

A three-point turn.

Nah, you'll get round in one in a real mini.

Huawei's 7nm 64-core Arm server brain, fresh Intel desktop Core chips, IBM tapping Samsung for Power10, and more

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: autonomous cars

.. With move to LED lights dazzle seems to be getting worse

I don't find LEDs as bad as Xenon. Sure they are worse for dazzle than filament but the beam cut line of an LED doesn't seem quite as sharp as Xenon. LED are just as bright as Xenon but the slightly softer transition as the cut line crosses the eye makes it not quite so bad. I am really glad Xenon is getting superseded without ever becoming mainstream. FOAFs who own Xenon really rate them however.

At least that's the way it seems to me , YMMV.

Bloodhound SSC reaches the end of the road for want of £25m

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Barriers

Thrust SSC came very close to killing Mr Green. It was little more than two of the biggest engines Noble could scrounge strapped to something with wheels, there were good reasons as soon as the bangs were heard they packed up and came home rather than push for a bit more.

The amount of design effort in Bloodhound is in another league. It should be capable of breaking the sound barrier in a controlled fashion rather than with fingers firmly crossed. It's worth doing just to prove the aerodynamics of that feat are solved. If anyone is thinking of posting "but but but aircraft break the sound barrier all the time" I strongly suggest you go do some reading instead.

I agree though that once above the sound barrier numbers are pretty arbitrary. Damn shame.

Three become six as new 'nauts arrive for a visit to the ISS

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Pretty brave

If I were going up on a firecracker the first after an incident is the one I would choose. The level of checking on a return to flight mission is way above the run of the mill.

Tesla autopilot saves driver after he fell asleep at wheel on the freeway

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Arrested for being drunk @Rich 11

One of my mates got fined for speeding on his bicycle. The cops were so impressed that he'd managed 36mph on a winding country lane that they didn't notice he'd inadvertently admitted he was cycling home from the pub

No he didn't. He might have been fined for cycling carelessly or without consideration for others or somesuch but he was not done for speeding. More likely he was simply stopped and given a talking to and inappropriate speed may well have been a factor in that.

https://www.slatergordon.co.uk/media-centre/blog/2015/06/can-cyclists-break-the-speed-limit-or-does-the-law-only-apply-to-motorists/

Huawei MateBook Pro X: PC makers look out, the phone guys are here

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: the wifi hardware in older vs newer laptops.

The wifi driver is not in the kernel that ships in the 18.04 LTS images (inc Mint 19) but it is in the live update line. This means that you need to install and then perform updates using a wired connection (USB dongle). Once the kernel is fully updated the wifi works.

There is also an issue with the 4 speaker system, only 2 work straight off but one user claims a fix. The camera works fine, the fingerprint reader doesn't.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Woohoo! And bum.

The former as this is another nail in the coffin of the 16:9 fixation in the tech industry. The latter because the RAM is soldered on the main board. Battery appears to be replaceable though.

If it were whiskey lake (which has some hardware spectre & meltdown mitigations) I think I'd be opening my wallet for this despite the RAM. I just might anyway. Time to read up on getting Mint on it.

Peers to HMRC: Digital tax reforms 3 days after Brexit? Hold your horses, how 'bout 3 years...

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: FreeAgent

<googles, follows link>

Run your business from anywhere

So that'll be cloud then meaning all my confidential data is held on a server god knows where with god knows who having access to it and I have zero backup on systems I control. Shall I look to see if FreeAgent will compensate me for the fines I'll incur when it goes TITSUP on the last weekend before the submission deadline?

And all for the bargain sum of £261 per year. That works out as £65.25 per VAT return to fill out 7 boxes for me.

Errrrr, no thanks.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

How in hell is filling out 7 boxes once a quarter so complicated it needs automating?

Big Falcon Namechange for Musk's rocket: BFR becomes Starship

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Starship

RUD is what happens subsequent to an otherwise successful takeoff.

A RUD can happen at any time, it refers to the whole vehicle whereas as you say hard start refers to a motor. spacecom was surely a RUD of vehicle, payload and significant proportions of the launch complex.

Busy week for ISS as Russia resumes flights and vies for parking spaces with NASA

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

A pedant would be wrong.

The launch of the geostationary satellite is the 18th of the year for SpaceX, equalling its 2017 record. Of course, a pedant might point out that the figure is higher, since the Falcon Heavy used three of the things in one go.

Falcon heavy was one launch, the 2017 has not (yet) been beaten. If the same pedant wished to count landings + splashdowns + RUDs then yes the 2017 record has been beaten.

Microsoft sysadmin hired for fake NetWare skills keeps job despite twitchy trigger finger

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

B###dy agencies!

I had one gratuitously embellish my CV once. I responded to a motorsport job which sounded like it might fit me but was very short on details. I sent over my CV and was told I was a good fit. A couple of weeks later I sat in a small office at Williams F1 while I and the interviewers tried to work out what the hell I was doing there. I had most of what they wanted but not the one key must-have skill - DSPs. Never been near one then and still haven't.

Clunk, bang, rattle: Is that a ghost inside your machine?

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: A real ghost story - Not mine

I wish you'd put at the top that it came from mumsnet, I'd have known it was utter bollocks straight off and saved myself a few minutes.

Swedes grumbling about Apple Store in their park are lucky – in Toronto, Google eats all your data

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Keep your food miles low

In the google town, those big vats top right, is that where the soylent green is made?

Insects with farts that smell like coriander assist in covering up Paris's aroma d'urine

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Stink?

I call them nutgeg and mace, until now I had no idea they were the same plant so I thank you for the education. It does rather reinforce my opinion that using different one word names for different parts of the same plant is the more confusing. If our larder contained a jar of nutmeg aril next to the nutmeg not only would I have known they were from the same plant but I'd likely have learned what an aril is before today.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Stink?

Yes, calling it coriander leaf or coriander seed really is tremendously confusing. Referring to two parts of the same plant by completely different words works so much better and saves the enormous effort of using two words.

Well slap my ass and call me Judy, Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 is just as hard to fix as the old one

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

You asked

<Slap>

Judy!

NASA chief in Moscow: 'We will fly again on a Russian Soyuz rocket'

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Hyperbolae?

giving him such confidence in a launch system that a few short days ago nearly resulted in tragedy.

There are so fantastically many things that can go wrong I'm really not sure this launch got any closer to tragedy than a launch that achieves orbital insertion. A failure mode was anticipated, instruments detected it and mitigations in place performed faultlessly. I would imagine that pretty high on NASAs list of goals is something akin to 'Don't kill anyone', this launch achieved that goal.

Had there been a catastrophic failure that they survived, stage 1 blowing as stage 2 departed for example, that would be a near tragedy. It appears this was simply something wasn't right in the lightup sequence of stage 2 so it didn't go ahead. That's just a malfunction not a near tragedy. Anomalies abort launches all the time, they aren't described as near tragedies. It just so happens that this stage 2 anomaly was detected after launch.

Happy with your Surface Pro 3's battery? Well, here's a setting that will cut the charge by half

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Alarm avoidance - of a kind

That's the way I read it too. Really struggling to see how this is in any way good.

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave me tea... pigs-in-blankets-flavoured tea

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Sprouts

I came here to say the same thing. Cooked "al dente", tossed in butter with some bacon lardons and just a hint of nutmeg.

It is truly a crime that I can only upvote this once.

Revealed: British Airways was in talks with IBM on outsourcing security just before hack

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Aren't Vendors Supposed To NOT Store The CVV?

Correct, they should not be stored and there is no indication BA did. This is why most sources suspect this was a live leak, copying the data to a rogue receiver during purchase.

No need to code your webpage yourself, says Microsoft – draw it and our AI will do the rest

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Credit to Microsoft for a truly novel idea

Quality assurance in web design.

Defense Distributed starts selling gun CAD files amid court drama

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: I'll never understand Americans and their fetish for guns

Nor do I but I do understand this is not about the guns. Owning guns is legal, making guns is legal, sharing knowledge is legal, sharing knowledge about making guns is legal. So why is sharing knowledge about making guns when in a format downloadable to a machine illegal? It's about what knowledge the government is going to decide it is illegal to share next.

(I'm not arguing for or against anything)

Cobbler feels the shoe-leather: An IP address is still not a human

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: IPv4

Flywheel, you've just given me an idea. Hack IoT toilets to create a botnet that downloads Adam Sandler movies over and over consuming all available bandwidth, bytes stored to /dev/null. This would a) save any poor sod from accidently downloading 90 minutes of Sandler arse gravy and b) what better receptacle for the job?

Chap asks Facebook for data on his web activity, Facebook says no, now watchdog's on the case

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

They might well have a complete history of what AnonymousUser142857 has done the web, but I'm not sure how they could connect that with Joe Bloggs from Ipswich.

Dear Faecbook, please provide a copy of and then delete all data held by yourselves regarding the owner of phone IMEI aa-bbbbbb-cccccc-ee. Regards, Joe from Ipswitch.

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