Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Really?
Until something breaks up the Micky & Mallory Knox of IT development that's likely to stay the situation.
On the plus side MS is looking slightly more willing to look at other architectures (but we saw how far that went with Windows RT) and intel is running out of road with Moores "law" as they push further into X-ray imaging.
But I'll go with Murdoch.
Most of the politicians on that list are trying to pander to an agenda his media outlets (let's not call them "newspapers" shall we? And outlet sounds like sewage outfall, which seems quite appropriate) have created and shaped over the last 50 years.
Like a slow growing tumor.
Fully paid up member of the SLS supporters club.
The joke is what really lowers prices to customers (including the USG) is competition.
So what do these people want to strangle first?
Oops. Should have remembered this is the Con-gress, note the Senate.
No doubt the letter from the Senate will arrive in due course.
True, but that gives you a lot more velocity to brake at either end. In the early 90's the Defense Analysis Agency did a report on this. 76 days is possible if you can get up to 20 Km/s.
At the speeds Musk is proposing (around 8 Km/s) 80 days will be possibly in an alignment that comes up in about 20 years. The average for the speed he's been talking about is about 115 days, more like 4 months.
No that's for when the company is actually trading fraudulently.
A subsidiary question would be did the get the database by a breach of trust or by breaking the other companies security.
One is obviously unethical. The other demonstrates (misapplied) skillz.
I await the full write up with interest.
Brexit.
"Taking back control" (of your stair cupboard)
And no "supper savings" are only the same as "customer savings" if the suppler decides to pass them back to the customer.
BTW Aren't most UK utility suppliers foreign owned, so most of those savings go back to more profit to their (foreign) parent.
And you can bet that won't change post Brexit.
And I think that's the author's point.
The tech in a tech company is (sadly) just the start.
A lot of s**t has to line up just right to make a successful tech company in the UK with its financial culture of "If it's not making a profit in 18 months (and ready for IP in 2 years) we're not interested."
I think a dewer is a glass of a particular single malt Whisky. :)
A Dewar is the usual scientists name for a vacuum insulated flask, named after their inventor.
What most people would call a Thermos (which was a company that made them).
I'd guess he means a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance lab that does NMR to study chemical compounds, rather than imaging.
There are extensive threads on this here including a thread devoted to the wild and wacky.
F9 telemetry is by FO Ethernet connections and there are 3 000 channels of it. I've no idea what sampling schedule they use on each channel. In principle some could just be switch opens/closures and a time stamp. It's a common rule of telemetry engineering to choose sample rates that are adequate for the task being sampled but with Gigabit Ethernet and an FO line they may be more generous. The issue is of course lining those samples up exactly with when they were taken.
Unauthorised activation of the Flight Termination System was ruled out some time ago.
High pressure gas bottles store a lot of energy (one of their uses is to provide the muscle to open and close fluid valves on rockets). Range Safety assess them in lbs of TNT equivalent, so pretty serious. However AFAIK no tank has ever failed and they are designed to leak (bleeding off the energy) before burst (which is short and very explosive). However F9 COPV's (gas tanks) are Aluminium lined carbon fibre overwrapped, where most are steel lined. This has suggests thermal expansion/contraction mismatch coupled with mfg issues.
That said a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It's more likely some of the couplings or pipework ruptured. Presumably shrapnel from this punched into the fuel tank and had enough thermal or kinetic energy to ignite the now mixing LOX/RP1
BTW SX expect to open their refurbed pad 39 in November so I expect they will begin launches from their ASAP after that from that pad. How long this pad will need to get back to being launch ready is anybodies guess. Given that SX are quite into "continuous improvement" I'd guess they'll also want to make a few tweaks in the rebuild as well.
It was a cost benefit analysis.
The cold equations said it'd cost them a shed load of money to do the changes and save about180 lives and 180 burns cases so the Board said f**k em.
IIRC one of those burns case was an 11YO boy. :(
Please note insurers regularly put a value on human life and some industries or products specify the model. IIRC a weighted average life time salary is often used, about $1-2m.
Well..
The US Government was AFAIK modeled on the 17th century system for running a town council.
It's never been seriously revised. IE a tacit concensus by a bunch of wealthy white men who might disagree on the details but all saw things basically the same way. Once one of them stops "playing the game" chaos can promptly ensue. And it has....
There is no age limit on Con-gresspeople or Senators,
Once they are the incumbent they are a b**ger to shift as long as they keep looking after the interests of their state/district. Accepting sacrifices due to changing national (or global) realities seems practically unheard of, hence the 2 (or is it 3) corporate bailouts of Ford and Chrysler.
Actual party line following seems to be virtually non existent. You get nominal Democrats to the right of Wacqui Jacqui Smith (Like the CA Democrat who loves the NSA) and quite relaxed Republicans.
IAN a Political Scientist. Indeed I'm not any kind of scientist.
Who's looking to be President.
And looking to shut down the USG while he's at it.
US Reg readers. If all the debunking has been online you need to move to the print media. Start writing letters and emails to your favorite newspaper or magazine and tell them why his claims are BS.
BTW Isn't someone who carries out disruptive acts against the USG a terrorist (at least I'm fairly sure the USG thinks that way) ?
From a time when most custom chips were laid out with a set a coloured pencils and graph paper.
I'd suggest access to good tools was what made ARM doable by a very small team.
What a same size team could do today would be much larger.
But if this new hardware has it's own instruction set you'll have to generate a code generator for you're favorite tool chain (and languages) to support it.
The fact you can do this (beyond knocking up some in house assembler) may be one of Unix's lasting contributions.
And that "somewhere" determines what your legal rights are and how difficult it will be to honor any legal obligations you have for data protection.
And if that's the USA they seem to be basically f**k all. THE PATRIOT Act is still in force.
Assuming you're a competent IT Manager/FD who wants to do this because you actually believe it's a good idea let me suggest a couple of things.
Benchmark the T&C's. let me suggest the bigger they are the more weasling they are going to do.
How does their backup and restore policy compare to your current process? You do have a tested backup and restore process, don't you?
Start backwards. Plan the ETL from your selected cloud in the event of a massive failure of either their hardware or their business.
Still waiting for my robot butler.
Now that we know the actual size of the human brain, and it's processing power, we know how dumb all those 1960's "Computers taking over" story plots were.Taking over the world at 1MHz and
with 2 1/4 MB of RAM (roughly the DEC 36 that ran PLANNER).
We also now know we can build a server farm with at least 1 human processing throughput. It's 1 human, but it thinks several thousand times faster than that human. And it can be replicated fairly easily with enough money.
The question then becomes is it "AI" or is it just a specialist program chomping on a big set of data or is it the class of problems it's solving (normally only viewed as solvable with "intelligence") that makes it "AI" ?
Still waiting for the robot butler.
Actually that was pretty much the reason for the Manhattan Project.
It was only post war it was discovered the Germans couldn't get a Graphite based reactor to work (too much Boron impurity IIRC) and had wildly miscalculated the critical mass of a device.
The Japanese barely had a nuclear program to speak of.
But I'm not quite sure what he's a Chairman of.
Is it a QUANGO running a govt backed accreditation scheme? Is a private company with close-to-copyright-infringing similar name?
I will suggest that the UK level of SME infosec is so p***poor that anything that raises the baseline across a significant number of them is a good idea.
Not he first time MS and Intel and storage media have done suspicious things.
In "Startup," which charted the rise and fall of Go Corps pen based OS Jerry Kaplan recalls how they wanted to use an Intel proprietary storage format (a forerunner of micro SD cards). When they contacted Intel they were put through to MS and offered an extortionate deal for such.
Of course that depends on how much you can rely on what people say on social media being true.
Normally I lie through my back hole just on principle.
This might (but only might) be the thing that teaches the non super user (IE the vast majority of users who use the "stuff" but have no real IT knowledge) that maybe they might like to ye know watch what they post a bit, perhaps?
Apparently a piece of sellotape being pulled from its backing in a vacuum chamber can release 15KeV X Rays.
I have no f**king clue how that works but DARPA funded a project and it's apparently the basis of the SoA in hand held Xray flourescence metal analysers.
So there are other ways to make Xrays (or if you're into chip lithography Xtreme UV) other than the classic than banging electrons into lumps of metal (AKA Coolidge Tube) and plasma's (which turn out to only be good for "soft" Xrays into the 100s of eV's.
Keep in mind that knowledge is power. And the ability to predict things this mechanism granted it's operator were considerable.
So how about early prototype of something which would have changed the world lost at sea, possibly with it's developers? With the knowledge of how it worked and how to make it lost at the same time.
That's what they bought.
" It seems they can't do that though. Instead of competing, they have to buy up and destroy the competition. "
The legacy of Bad Boy Billy.
It was never enough that he won. The other fellow had to lose. And by "lose" I mean be thoroughly stomped into the ground so there was nothing left.
Indeed.
Also how much of a steer can they get from the aircraft (presumed) radar warning receiver.
If they can be preset by a data link from this they are half way home and it's the air forces job to supply the list.
If not then they are pretty clever at building both a RWR and a radar jammer (presumably both are SDR's running on some fairly beefy processor or custom ASICs). the other challenge is giving them enough output power to swamp the signal from the real target (probably less than people think)
Of course the $64 question is of course how commons are radar homing missiles in the arsenals of the various assorted bad guys that the RAF is facing at present? I'm guessing any such that IS would be using will be abandoned kit from the armies of whatever country they are in.
Because all the previous efforts have worked out so well, haven't they?
IIRC this (along with GP's in the NHS) remains a big user of that new fangled fax machine.
Hint. It's not the IT, it's the processes you need to get better first, and that means getting people involved who actually use them.
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