Posts by BristolBachelor

Re: Magnetoplasma propulsion

Because we don't have any way to power it. They've been talking about 250kW, which is a little over twice the power available on the ISS. If you were happy to have no power, and no thrust while you were in eclipse, you could just about use all the solar arrays of the ISS to do it, until you started moving towards Mars, when thevpower would drop off because of that pesky 4th power rule.

You'd probably have to look at an active nuclear reactor, but with the cooling issues above. Whereas nuclear thermal doesn't need much extra cooling - the cooling comes for free by heating the gas that you then expell for thrust, thus carrying the heat away.

Re: Great.

It's more likely a consequence of what ham radio/CBer discovered about the new fangled electric petrol pumps. While the mechanical ones just worked (TM), the electric ones forgot how to count if uou held down the press-to-talk key. Yay! free fuel! Eventually, the garages noticed abd put up signs, similarly the pump makers were forced to do a better job.

The claim of hazardous environment doesn't cut it when they then don't force you to ground your car during filling, the the things like light fittings on the forecourt are not safe for use in hazardous environments either.

Re: I can't actually remember the last time I purposely used the Android Browser

With the stock Android browser, you can get into an extra settings page and set any user-agent that you want, including NCA Mosaic. Sorry, from here can't remember how, but istr you enter a specific non-URL string and then select something weird in settings or somesuch.

I actually run Firefox because I also run it on one of my boxes too, so have access to open tabs, and bookmarks. However it doesn't do a good job with the "request desktop site" imho.

Re: Apple Pay? Not if they use the current iTunes approach..

I'm in this boat(but have 2x iTunes accounts). I also have the same fchsking problem with Google and their app store too - even for FREE apps. It makes me want to do illegal things to some commercial manager at Google.

Microsoft is even worse though. For Win7 /Office 2010, we have 8 different versions that are all enterprise - but for different countries. We coukdn't even just use the English plus language packs, because changing the language screws some things up, and even then parts of Excel don't work

However there is only ONE version of OSX - just install and set language (haven't bought anything from the app store - everything direct from Adobe, etc.)

Re: time to seperate switching amplification and processing

I do that with my Panasonic Plasma (Optical output for selected input channel). Also has the advantage, that it is not smart and does exactly nothing except display pictures and has a digital tuner. It also outputs the audio on one of the HDMI inputs, but my amp does not have HDMI, so I don't use it.

An advantage of it is that it also delays the optical output by the same amount as the time taken by the video processing to maintain lip-sync.

"...write off the rovers after 90 days..."

It doesn't work like that. You don't assume that your car will stop working after 2 years, but when you buy it, they only say that it will work for 2 years (after that you are on your own and have to pay if something happens).

What happens, is that the specs call for a reliability figure and a time (e.g. my last project had a reliability figure of 99.999999% for 15 years of life). Everything is then designed for that lifetime/reliability. So in the case of the rover, there would've been "somepercentage%" probability that it would last 90 days. If it died before that, someone would've been sent to the American equivalent of a Siberian weather station (Guantanamo?). The expectation would be that the mission would last longer than 90 days, but you need to draw a minimum line in the sand to start with.

Everything would've been set up and funded to operate the rover for at least 90 days, and after that, additional funding and manning would be provided if it still worked, and the resources were not needed elsewhere (e.g. time on NASA's deep space network.

The wiper blade idea has been mentioned in other posts, but the dust is not like Earth dust. It is extremely gritty and will scratch anything it's dragged over. Also, if it is charged, that won't necessarily help anyway, because it could just jump back over the cells when the wiper blade has passed over.

Re: Has it?

I'm not on it, but Mrs. Bachelor is, and she did some research that showed some new posts are automatically buried and not shown to everyone who subscribes. So to be able to find old posts when even new ones might not show up? - you may need to use the AccessAll API included for the NSA.

Re: @Angela Taylor

Rarely?

So if an email server tries to send an email, and there's no MX record the email still gets sent? News to me. And the list-server doesn't drop the email address from the list because the email address doesn't exist?

There is a possibility that a human will see a message that an email wasn't drlivered, and they might try a 2nd time (and it will probably fail again, and they'll probably give up). However any invoicing/ordering etc. system will just fail to deliver the email.

Afaiac the email will normally be lost.

Re: Why not ask SpaceX?

Well I believe that the normal approach will be to launch the sats in groups of 4 on Ariane 5 (which has an excellent record for very precise orbits). However, they wanted to launch fewer for the first launch to test out the design of the satellite to allow the following satellites to be modified if required. Hopefully, the booked Ariane launches will go without a hitch. Note that SpaceX has also failed to deliver 2 payloads to their correct orbits.

Also the European union /ESA probably would prefer to use Ariane because it helps to assure European access to space (Ariane was originally developed because the US said that Europeans could launch sats on their rockets, but would not be allowed to keep any money made by the satellites - imagine how the telecoms market would look in that case). This may be seen as similar to SpaceX receiving a large amount of cash so that the US can launch cargo/people to the ISS without using Russian launchers, or satellite manufacturers in the US being banned from using launches provided by the Chinese.

Re: Possessing "Information useful to a terrorist"

So is a bus timetable "Information useful to a terrorist". Basically it seems that the law was written by a bunch of nitwits, or was deliberately vague to allow it's easy use to arrest, hold and convict people. (notice that's "or", not "XOR")

That may help in one regard, but how long between you leaving your phone on a table in a Starbucks, walking around a bit, realising that you've lost it and then being able to access said Google service to lock your phone to prevent someone reading it's contents?

I always have mine locked, and that's mainly to prevent opportunistic reading of its content.

In US Gov and US TLA agencies' eyes, US law is international law "What is law?"

Fixed it for you.

Re: Very impressive re. semantics

Unfortunately I bought all the sequels a couple of years ago before I found out they weren't actually written by Arthur C. Clarke. When I read that he gave storylines for the books, I read them anyway to see where the story went, but the writting style was depressingly different.

Re: Captain Future's enemy had one of those.

The last time I thought about it, it seemed evident to me that the force towards the "front" would exactly equal the force towards the "back".

I guess that you come from flatland and can only thonk 1-dimensionly. If you think 3-dimensionly and use vectors, you realise that the conoical sides are supposed to generate a net difference in one direction compared to the other. I'm not saying it works, but hey, that would be a great thing, no?

Please don't get me wrong. I wholeheartedly agree that this is needed, and I like the look of what they are proposing. I just think it a bit disingenuous to compare the launch costs of this and a geo telecoms sat. (Just like if I say that my bicycle is cheap because it costs less than a Rolls Royce)

Re: @ AC

It's very well saying that the intercept rate is meant to be over 95% - I have specifications for projects that say all sorts of things. You just issue a request for deviation, or a specification waver, and the nasty "meant to be" just goes away.

There was an interesting article published a while ago, and then a similar one more recently by the "Bulletin of Atomic Scientists". It covers how the Iron Dome interceptor works, and suggests a possible kill rate. It's interesting reading, but suggests that 95% may be the miss rate.

http://thebulletin.org/evidence-shows-iron-dome-not-working7318

Re: BristolBachelor

"More on that story please!"

Well let's see. From where I was working at the time, it was sometime in the 90's. Some details are deliberately left out, like the country, airport, aircraft etc. As I understand it, I could use the investigation in general terms as an example when talking about investigations, failures or systems engineering, but certain details that aren't relevant to that use might make people blush. So here is an example of a system level failure and a small part about the investigation that is worth baring in mind when designing equipment that might be expected to undergo post mortem if something goes wrong.

Pilot flying a small regional jet came in to land and set the engines to idle (oops 1). During final approach, he decided he didn't like something, and decided to do a go-around, so he throttled the engines to 100%. The engines now being below nominal operating temp because of the time spent at idle, throttled up a bit, but not to 100% (if you go from 0% to 100% in a sudden jump, the turbine blades heat-up, expand quicker than the outer of the engine and things get really noisy really quickly).

Realising that he wasn't getting 100% thrust, the pilot decided that he was going to have to land anyway, so changed his mind in a hurry, and got the plane onto the runway. Sometime around now, with the engines up to nominal temp and with the throttle still at 100% (Oops 2), ramped up the trust to the max. Plane shot down the runway like a bat out of hell, overshot and went into a forest.

They scrambled a helicopter to locate the plane as it was a bit hard to follow the random path through the trees. The investigation could not interview the flight crew and reconstructed evens from the flight recorders, radar records, positions of controls, etc. We were asked to retrieve whatever we could from the built-in records in our unit. The unit does a built-in-test (BIT) every time at start-up, a fuller BIT when commanded, and some periodic on-going checking during normal use. Also any anomalies are recorded - all done to identify possible faults for maintenance.

The box was a bit of a mess as I said earlier. The E² (effectively flash that is erased byte at a time instead of page at a time) dies were taken to the manufacturer who had a nice test set-up that could probe directly on the bond-pads. Can't remember which manufacturer it was, but it's likely that they don't exist by that name anymore and have been bought and assimilated so many times it would be difficult to find out. Anyway, the data was read-out of the die, and for speed was copied into a new chip and plugged into an engineering unit to read-out the logs. Separately, a manual search was done through the raw data to confirm that nothing was missed by the log read-out.

I think your case is a little exyreme, but obviously, anyone who has posted a photo on Facebook of a woman in which more than her eyes are visible should be banned, because in one corner of 1 state in the world, it's ilegal. Utter fcsking nonsence!

Mrs bachelor is a newborn photographer, and she has to deal with this sort of shit every week! She even has edited photos of babies like Barbie, that have no arse cracks or nipples!

Re: That... looks... nice...

I have used a shock horror Microsoft Bluetooth mouse on a Galaxy Note, and it works very well. You get a pointer, pop-ups work, so you can read the idea behind a xkcd sketch. All in all, surprising good (a pity that apps don't support right-click context menus though)

Re: you have to heat it quite a lot before it starts to work

But aren'f Lithium Air cells primary cells (non rechargable?)

Re: Off topic but relevant to UK IT

Meanwhile I've just been told by Telefonica that I cannot even have a line, let alone ADSL or 30mb in the house I'm renovating, even though the line's already there. Thankfully I have some contacts in the Sat business, but Satellite internet is not ideal. My other option is to start a Ltd. company with CIF number and order dedicated fibre, but it's only for ltd companies; just paying 300€ month being self employed is not enough.

Re: Hmm, radiation increases as you

"Sometimes your budget only allows you to plan for 20% of the foreseeable issues."

That would've been a fine excuse in 1960. Since then, we've sent up sats with detectors on, and even dedicated sats. We know what the environment up there is like, and it's not even amongst the "secret" data. Radiation is more than foreseeable.

Their orbit seems to be extremely low (which makes things easier as the atmosphere will shield them a lot better), but for example in one of my recent projects we were seeing a radiation triggered glitch in a simple op-amp at least once a day. You then analyse the effects of those glitches and design the system to ignore or cope with them. Resetting a 16 day timer on a mission with a lifetime of less than a month does not sound sensible.