Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
Or a forest fire. Or someone goes to town with Agent Orange.
“So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revaluate the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and ... er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances.”
Why remote? It's easy enough to insert a gateway into the link that simply holds any packet for the required time (dependent on the distance between Earth and Mars at that moment, so 4 to 24 minutes approximately) before passing it on.
For a lab test involving a five-node cluster with one member that would be about 40km away from the nearest two after its real-world deployment they were simply installed in a single rack including all the comms gear, and a 40km spool of fiber on top of the cabinet. Saved a lot of walking when simulating error conditions.
My windows pc borks every time I install software.
Ah, my work laptop suffers from that, too. Also when Microsoft flings out a new bunch of patches, the patches for those patches, or just for no readily apparent reason. It can also signal a desire for borking by just having some function, like copy/paste, cease to perform.
Saying FSD wasn't engaged is probably safe, as that's currently expensive vaporware. Claiming autopilot wasn't engaged could get interesting depending on what's in the logs.
Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD.
Would be quite a thing if the car actually went and bought FSD even if its owner had failed to do so.
The police and fire brigade probably just cut the car apart, found the corpses not in the drivers seat when they transferred them to the ambulance and then called a scrapyard to take the wreck away.
On the contrary. Because not finding a person behind the wheel, unless there was an entirely plausible explanation for that such as being completely ejected from the vehicle, and that person who might have been the driver appearing to have been seated more or less conventionally (i.e. lower legs in the footwell, torso how it might be positioned after crashing as a passenger), not slumped over from the driver's position, everyone involved in the recovery would be seriously documenting what they found before anything was touched and moved. Especially since digital photography and video is ubiquitous and cheap. They're clearly looking at two obviously extremely dead and charred corpses, and there's not going to be any hurry in getting them out of the wreck and carting them off to wherever. It's a crash that's going to raise a few questions, and the first responders involved know quite well that a lot of the answers to those questions lie in their documenting what they've found.
that would require some sort of remote control:
load the appliance up before you go out (to work, to the pub etc) , then start it doing whatever before you leave for home, so it should be finished when you get home (something you can do with intelligent use of timers anyway),
is when your pub-leaving time is rather variable.
and it's quite useful to be able to start it 15 minutes or so before you intend to leave home on a freezing cold day to de-ice
You usually know what time you're going to leave home for work, so setting a timer is a feasible option. Which I did for several weeks, 35 years ago to get a 12 year old diesel started in -20C as otherwise the engine was rather stroppy. And even in the tropics I didn't bother with air conditioning (which wasn't there in most of the cars anyway[0]); just knowing where to park it and draping a towel over the seat took care of that.
[0] someone I knew had bought an Audi with air conditioning, which was still a bit of a luxury back then. Back in Europe he found that that option was an XOR with heating.
But, but, but, surely the modern idiot idiom is to overload controls with multiple functions; the eventual aim is that there is just one button to push (and we do that before it leaves the factory) which so annoys the customer that he throws the device away. Requiring him to buy a new one, of course.
"The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive – you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope."
The problem I see with systems such as Tesla's Autopilot is that for a minority of owners they will assume it can do things it was never designed to cope with. The problem isn't so much a technical issue as one of human understanding. If it seems to be able to drive under certain circumstances, some owners will assume it can cope with more.
There's also human curiosity, or 'curiosity' when knowingly trying something that might sit beyond the system's capabilities.
when you hit the wrong button,
Button? You mean a physical thing you have to press to make the boiling water come out, right near where your hand is? For Elfin Safe Tie raisins it should be controlled from an app on that tablet, with a detector to sense a receiving vessel is in place and calculating the amount of water it should dispense.
Right when the next cuppa is filled an OS or app update hits while the valve is open, inundating the tablet which, now being buggered, fails to close the valve again, thus flooding the desk, one's groin and major parts of the room before the power gets shorted stopping the water boiling.
The few times I had to visit the loo to rearrange some network and power cabling were at a CCC camp and two others in NL. In none of those cases bodily waste processes were involved; they were using mobile toilet units to house the network switches spread over the fields. Lockable and weatherproof although they often had to be covered using those emergency foil blankets, to keep the inside temperatures acceptable. At buildup people wanting a wired connection would stick a cable through the vents, and every hour or so someone from the buildup crew would go around and plug in all those cables. Teardown was more or less the reverse, people rolled up their cable, put it next to the 'datenklo', and after the next round would find them disconnected to retrieve them (or not; I've got multiple lengths of 30m and more that were left behind, trailing from a datenklo to where a tent had been).
At that price I would want to have it height-adjustable, motorised of course, with enough range that you can at least use it as a standing desk. The ones at the office[0] can even go a fair bit higher, allowing you to merely squat, not crouch under them if you have to rearrange some cabling.
"If you can afford the £7,995 asking price for the desk, we sincerely doubt you'd still be slumming it with a flatmate. "
Nowadays, 8k barely gets an estate agent to answer your phone calls, and a newspaper article I read a few days ago was more or less about how if you were in your thirties and hadn't managed to buy a house yet, you might never. Prices have been rising way faster than income levels, even for well-paying jobs.
it's not finding anything out,
Oh really? Perhaps finding out that one can actually fly a helicopter in as thin an atmosphere as Mars has, autonomously and if all goes well, repeatedly, with that "photo of a rock from 5m up" just as icing on the cake?
The rock you have for a brain is clearly not worth photographing, from any distance.
For planes (and rockets): it takes fuel to carry fuel, so from that criterium alone any amount over the absolute minimum is wasteful. Though with planes the airline planners also factor in the cost of fuel at the next airport, as it may turn out cheaper to take some extra outbound, and not have to fill up as much at the other end for the return.
Car fuel efficiency is very strongly influenced by drag (speed, squared) as well as rolling resistance. Not carrying a spare tyre is at least as much a matter of the space it takes than of its weight.
Ryanair fill it with the bear minimum it can get away with
I've never flown Ryanair, but all the others I've flown with appear to have had a minimum of zero at the time as there were no bears on board on any of them. At least as far as I could determine, that is, and not counting toy bears or a particular subgroup of gay men.
I think some people should start asking themselves the question - "why do I ask that question"
To probe whether they are aware of the problem that question is highlighting, and more specifically, whether they would be answering that question now or several closely related ones in front of a board of inquiry.
Plane accidents tend to invite those questions.
The outside auditors had arrived to sign off on the annual accounts, and were demanding to physically see various items listed on the assets register.
If that was the late 1990's you should have asked for the asset numbers of the rocks they had been living under for the 10 years at least since software licenses for that kind of stuff came into being. VMS started requiring software licenses for the OS and layered products from version 5 on, and while you could show the output of $ LICENSE LIST, you also got nice paper certificates with the registration codes to put in a binder and hand over to the auditors.
Hmm, you might be the DEC FS tech that told me that story a long time ago.
Possible, though not at the Kaufbeuren plant then as I've never been there. Did have a few courses in the Munich training centre, on disk and tape kit. Also Highfield a couple of times, and Galway for the VAX9000. Video-based training and most of the sysadmin stuff and software troubleshooting was done locally in Nieuwegein.
Possible, though the content of that notesfile tended to be first hand experiences, or "$name from our branch office here in $location_code".
As FS tech I had to visit military sites too, though not very often and not, like one US colleague who just stopped as he had to re-tie a shoelace, suddenly looking at the business end of two firearms. In my case I had to disassemble[0] any RA81 HDAs that had failed, taking the platters out to leave onsite, so that the shell could be shoved back into the logistics channel satisfying that part of the process. At some point there was a sizeable stack of platters in the corner of the computer room, and curiously I asked how they were going to dispose of those. The sysadmin then went over to his desk and handed me a presse-papier, which was a blob of metal with one side cut flat. "Those platters, plus thermite. We'll let you know when the next session is."
[0] bit of a bugger, as the HDAs came from Kaufbeuren with the shell halves bolted together using metric fasteners, outside torx bolts to boot, where my toolkit was meant for the US-sized stuff holding VAXes together.
The 2400 baud sort of gives it away that that was in the days before zmodem allowed a transmission resume.
AFAICR, some time between late 1983 and early 1985, based on where each of us was living (he wasn't a direct friend of mine, but we had a common connection). So indeed before ZModem, and Wackypedia tells me 2400baud was Brand Spanking New in 1984 so that fits too.
A bit like ceefax
That's quite stretching it.
The main difference is that Minitel is interactive: you can enter data into forms if they're present on a page, where ceefax is strictly one-way. Plus, while ceefax pages can contain links to other pages those can't load on demand; they only become available to you as that page appears in the data stream.
Maybe you were thinking of Viewdata?
At DEC there was an internal Notes file named WAR_STORIES, which had several such tales. One in particular that I remember was about a piece of quite secret experimental lab kit at some army base that Had To Be Accounted For Or Else.
OF COURSE it could not be found during one of the regular inventory checks. And not during the very deep and thorough inventory check that immediately followed. So a lot of papers had to be filled out, going up and down the administrative chains as required, and after collecting all the right signatures in the end it was declared destroyed, allowing it to be struck from the inventory.
Shortly after the device reappeared, under a tarp in a nearby storeroom that wasn't part of the secure lab environment.
It was decided by the lab chief that no, they were not going to declare the unit unlost. Not with the even bigger amount of paper movement the entire situation would invite. So the small group of people who had come to know the device was unlost then decided on making the reality to be in line with the device's administrative status, through the combination of night, a pit in a secluded corner of the base, a rather large amount of thermite and an angle grinder (twice, both before and after the thermite)
It may well have been a very long and very expensive international phone call to download it though. Depends on what, if any, connectivity was available back then.
A fellow student was so keen on getting a particular utility that was listed in either Byte or PC Mag but not available on any local BBS, that he dialed up international straight to the source.
At 2400 baud, because that was the speed of his modem.
And requiring four tries to get it downloaded in one piece and uncorrupted.
Reading up on David Boies, he's some very high-falutin' lawyer who's been on the right side in US vs. Microsoft, and some rather wrong sides in quite a few others, although even swine like Harvey Weinstein have the right to representation in court. And to most lawyers, morally right or wrong is secondary to working on a case that brings in money, especially ones that do so by the truckload. Winning or losing is also lower on the list, although losing too many and your reputation will suffer, which tends to put a damper on bringing in new high-profile cases.
His behaviour in the previous installments of SCO vs OpponentOfChoice can probably be summed up as
- repeatedly shooting his feet
- machinegunning his knees with gay abandon after his pedal department ceased to offer any sort of target
- deploying a groin-pointed Gatling but running out of funds to buy ammo before having a chance to pull the trigger.
That way you would have to cross the date line, and ports.com transit time calculations would flip upside down. Or something.
Apparently a lot of date-time code is built using homegrown libraries and dubious algorithms. Because this kind of bugs still occur way too often.
If you limit when they can use it because of weather you lose $$$
If ships need to hold for a day, maybe two, until the wind has shifted or sufficiently subsided, they'll pass through the canal anyway and the fees will go into the Egyptian coffers, only a few days later. It's when those conditions persist for quite a bit longer that some may choose to go round the Cape, although that would replace the canal fees with having to buy a few extra gallons of bunker oil, plus one more week of transit time. The Canal Authorities may also allow passage if the ship is assisted by a Rent-a-Tug or two; it's their canal, they can set the rules, and since last week all shippers are well aware why those rules would be there. I expect bills with Very Large Numbers will soon be exchanged between the SCA, Evergreen, Shoei Kisen Kaisha and the shippers delayed by this mess, or rather their insurers and legal representatives.
If they were big enough for containers, and extended to Shenzen ...
Well, they already did that, kind of. They've lopped off the top half of the pipe as well as most of the bottom half, leaving two parallel metal strips, and attaching them to some reinforced concrete bars to keep them from wobbling and moving around. So now you can't really put the containers in them, but they've solved that by providing wheeled platforms neatly running on top of these strips.
Saves quite a bit of material.
Asking for a cup of tea was pretty devastating for Arthur Dent.....
He told it about barley, ripening in undulating fields. He told it about hops, the varieties for each type of brew and how they were grown and picked. He told it about yeast, and spring water. He told it about malting, and mashing, and the large copper kettles in which the mash is boiled. He told it about how the wort is cooled so that yeast can be added, allowing it to ferment in large tanks. And he told it about scraping the residue off the bottom of those tanks, and packaging it in brown jars with a yellow lid.
"Ah" replied the Nutri-Matic. "And what about all the fluid that was fermenting in those tanks?"
It had figured the total volume involved, and the residue could clearly only account for a small part of it.
"It's usually bottled and sold as beer, but if you want to make Marmite, beer could be considered a by-product".
"Sounds terribly inefficient", the Nutri-Matic uttered after a brief pause.
"It's worth it." replied Arthur.
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