Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: "spaces won with 51 per cent of the vote"

Luddism in my case. I learned to type on a typewriter. A massive old Imperial thing, where you had to bash your little finger down by about an inch to get the A key to work.

The thing is, I learned by rote. juja[space]juja[space] for a whole line. Then move on to the next combination of home key and soemthing with the other hand then spacebar. Tab to get to the right place to put in my address on the top right of a letter, and always hitting spacebar twice after a full stop at the end of a sentence. And I still do it now.

I can format a letter properly, and have created templates for documents that get used a lot. But if I'm bashing something out quickly on the keyboard, I can have hit tab repeatedly and typed in an address - faster than taking my hands off the keyboard and reaching for the mouse to press the right buttons to align the text.

I'm sure this is because I wasn't taught how to use word processors, otherwise I'd know all the shortcut keys and that would probably be as quick as doing it the old fashioned way.

Re: Going backwards?

I don't think you can say that US rocketry is going backwards. NASA has created its COTS program specifically to attract private companies into the market and this has succeeded very well. Boeing have built them a capsule for ISS duty - I don't know if they've got plans to use this for any other jobs. SpaceX have used the money/guaranteed contracts to help fund first the Falcon 9 (with cargo Dragon) and then the Crew Dragon programs. Obviously they've also got other sources of income from Falcon - which is doing very well in private space launches too.

But SpaceX have been very innovative - and are currently top of the technology tree - given they can do reusability which nobody else in the world can. OK it's private, but not sure it would have happened without NASA contracts.

There's also Cygnus, but I got the impression they were rather less sustainable, as they were using a stock of old Soviet engines - with only the rights to manufacture their own, which they hadn't taken up. I've lost track of where they're up to.

Then you've got the ULA who used to do all the horribly over-priced stuff and had little incentive to improve. They're contracted to use Blue Origin's new shiny engines - and once those are perfected you'll also have Blue Origin kicking around with re-usable technology.

Obviously SLS isn't an exciting technical development, as it's using re-usable shuttle engines, then throwing them away. But NASA has never been the monolithic enterprise that built all its own stuff anyway.

The nice thing this gives you is the option to just buy in what you need. And only develop new technologies if the capabilities you want don't already exist. And even then, you can pay someone else some of the development costs in order to get access to something they want to develop anyway, but may not have the funds for. I'd say US space tech is in rude health. Just a few of the old dinosaurs like ULA look like they're in trouble if they don't up their game. Hopefully meaning better and/or cheaper stuff for NASA to use.

According to yet another anonymous government source (I think from a Guardian article) - it's not believed to be a state actor what done it. Obviously all preliminary, and there's notthing to stop state actors from hiring botnets like anybody else.

Re: 2032 - another reason for staying alive.

So it's nice to know the dates in 2033 when it'll be cloudy all across Southern England then...

Re: Poor filing practice?

MrReal,

Ah, so you've now changed your story again from saying that Saturn V could get to orbit, just not to the Moon. Now it couldn't even get to orbit! Not getting to the Moon would have been a lot easier to hide than the extremely obvious not getting to orbit. Particularly as there were press with the recovery fleet who saw the capsule land several days later with astronauts in it. Though maybe they were stuntmen and the "real" ones were hiding on the carrier. I mean there's never any gossip on Navy ships with crews of over a thousand, so that kind of thing would never get out...

Anyway solid rocket boosters have many problems of their own. They may be simpler, but they can't be throttled down - which means they're a lot less flexible, and if you want to change your velocity you're going to need to have more of them that you don't start until later - or other types of engines as well. Hence the shuttle main engines were throttled up as they got into the less dense air of the upper atmosphere, for example.

Admittedly nowadays we've got throttleable solid rockets - such as Virgin use. Though I'm not sure if they're as powerful. But solids can't be the best for everything, otherwise more modern rocket designs would use them, and yet quite a lot don't. They make good missiles though.

Re: I like it loud...

I agree. In fact loudness is my most important buying criteria. Sound quality a distant second. I do mostly listen to podcasts though. But when I do choose to listen to music, it tends to be in quieter environments.

I know there are health concerns, but some of these things are putting out ludicrously low volumes.

Re: I actually like Prime

I don't think most people see Amazon as evil. But I think we're all grumpy old (wo/)men and think it's been stealily getting worse as a service. A bit like Google, it's becoming less of a smooth, clean user experience.

I don't use them enough to make Prime worthwhile and don't watch enough TV. But if I did, then it would be a good value service. Plus you get to "borrow" a book a month if you've got a Kindle and access to Amazon Music.

But their tactics for selling it are now getting increasingly sketchy.

Re: How much?

Kiwi,

I doubt that Microsoft are just going to shut down Office 365. It's one of their most profitable businesses and what they see as the future of their company.

I have offline copies of our emails. And I control our domains. So if it suddenly disappears I'll have to scramble to set up some other email service and deal with it the best I can. The alternative though is that we pay an external IT shop to manage an Exchange server for us, and they're much more likely to go bust than Microsoft, it'll cost maybe twice as much as we pay now (it was a bit less than that when we used to do it this way) and the service will be a bit less reliable.

Or alterantively we could treble the size of our company at which point it might be worth employing a full-time IT person. At the moment that's me, but I'm not competent to manage an Exchange server, and have no intention of learning. I support our PCs and deal with IT in the breaks between actual paying work.

For a large company, there are much better alternatives. For a company our size cloud is far more reliable and cost effective than what we can do ourselves.

Re: Doping - an irregular verb

I'd already seen that story when I typed my reply. But there's a material difference, even if it turns out Team Sky had managed to hide a doping culture. Or even British Cycling. Nobody's failed any tests, and they've been quite well tested as they've been winning a lot.

The stats from cycling in general though suggest that doping is vastly reduced. Or at least road cycling - I've not read about track cycling. But in the tours leaders now regularly have off days. But also performance declines on days when they do multiple Cat 1 or harder climbs - and unlike in the Armstrong era where the performance would be similar on each, now the athletes are getting slower on the later ones. EPO turns out to be really good, if it doesn't kill you. Which would make systematic Sky doping much more likely to stand out - rather than what actually looks to have happened - which is a team that have concentrated (and spent very heavily) on winning the Tour de France. And been modestly successful elsewhere, compared to teams like QuickStep, Jumbo-Visma and Sunweb.

Doping is a global sporting problem. Some sports care more than others. I'm still waiting for big scandals in rugby for example. But Russia's state-backed systematic doping, backed by their intelligence services is a very rare beast. I've not read up on what doping is like in China since the scandals of 15-20 years ago, because they're not strong in the sports I'm interested in - but even at their height they weren't using state propoganda to try to rubbish everyone else or so desperate as to employ their intelligence services in pursuit of a bit of sporting glory.

Also, no catapults. But they've got that ski-jump for launching, so you only need a few rockets.

Do the Navy still keep those JATO things around?

Re: Ah yes ...

As I recall the english subtitles in Das Boot (if you watch in the original German) are different to the dubbed english spoken by the actors. It being a co-production between Columbia Pictures, German TV and I think the BBC - mostly they used the original actors to dub themselves - so it's still top quality acting. I seem to remember the subtitles are less polite than the spoken english version. Although it's difficult to get the naughtiness levels of swearing right between languages.

They've since digitally remastered it, and went back to the few original actors who'd been badly dubbed by other people, and got them to do it themselves - making the re-masters much better. I know I should watch foreign films with subtitles (while smoking unfiltered french cigarettes), but I find them hard to read without sitting too close to the telly. In cinemas I have to use a monoccular/mini-binoccular and that's just bloody painful.

Re: Does the UK require citizenship for .uk domains?

Err no - you've fallen into the trap setthe US and by Cummings et al.

The issue is, as others have noted the UK is being hoisted by its own pertard.

Remember the UK wants its cake and to eat it.

Roland6,

And yet you argue someone else has fallen for sloganeering...

No Brexiteer cared about .eu domains - and I'd imagine none do now either. But they do make their arguments rather easier to make - as this is exactly the kind of pointless political behaviour they accuse the EU of (even when it isn't guilty).

All this having your cake and eat it rubbish is so much rhetorical bullshit too. What the parties have been attempting to do is to negotiate an agreement with costs and obligations acceptable to both sides. And arguing about what the nature of that agreement should be. The question is then what the price is for those choices. It wouldn't be "the UK having our cake and eating it" if we stayed in the Single Market and Customs Union but left the more "political bits of the EU - so long as we accepted free movement and paid in our dues. If people didn't want that, then it was a different compromise with different costs.

Re: No, we aren't going to name names. Glass houses and all that.

The Independent have consistently used some of the most unreadable and horrible looking fonts I've ever seen on a professional site. I've never understood why.

Re: Mensuration

Bit like Wagon Wheels getting smaller then. It's just our hands getting bigger...

They're still horrible though.

Re: British Virgin Islands, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom

DCFusor,

Central Banks don't have a monopoly ability to create money out of thin air. Money supply doesn't work like that. Ordinary banks making loans increase the money supply. And it reduces again when those loans are paid off.

Central Banks' job is to manage the money supply, in order to achieve a relatively stable inflation rate (mostly around 2%) - for which they have inadequate tools and inadequate information - so they have to do their best. Their main policy tool is changes in interest rates to try and infuence the money supply - which broadly they want to increase at about the same rate as the economy does.

One of the reasons that the gold standard failed is that it was depenent on the gold supply. So when lots was being dug out of the ground you got high inflation (which is one of the main things that knackered the Spanish empire). But equally when the economy grew faster than the gold supply, you got deflation. Which is even worse than inflation - as it tends to lead directly to long periods of economic depression.

Also Central Banks' ability to create money at the flick of the switch saved the global economy from collapse within the last decade. You should be grateful for it. It's also a central tenet of Central Banking. Central Banks need to be able to provide unlimited liquidity to solvent banks in order to prevent bank runs - because once they start happening you get massive banking crises - which cause economic depressions. So the world's major Central Banks all printed trillions of dollars worth of cash in 2008/9 and all lent it to their banks at above market rate interest. In fact the banks were forced to take it. And all provided collaterol for it. All that money was paid back within 2 years at profit - and the money was destroyed again, at the press of a button. The result being that we didn't have a global banking collapse, no net money creation and a small profit paid to governments and drop in the banks' profits.

QE is rather different - but was a vital component of avoiding a global depression - and has not led to massive inflation as predicted by the doomsayers. It was based on work done on the 1930s depression - some of it by Ben Bernanke - who fortuitously turned out to be governor of the Fed at the time - as an academic expert on the 1930s that turned out to be rather handy.