Posts by Stoneshop 5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
The biggest consumption in fridge/freezers is the motors. Strategies like keeping the freezer full - even with added blocks of newspaper - will cut down that consumption.
My freezer, when opened, presents me with a column of closed drawer fronts, so there's very little cold air wafting out. And it beeps at me when I have the door open for longer than (a minute I think).
Now, why haven't I seen this in my local pub? Or any pub for that matter?
And the obvious integration with the pub's Ordering and Loyalty apps, and your bank's mobile payment app (in a way that doesn't preclude you from hydrating your mates when the banking behind that app inevitably goes on the blink).
but recently I've become more and more convinced that it's not that: no-one understands these platforms because they are passing beyond the ability of humans to understand
How about a Java deployment running in a middleware layer in a virtual machine on some hardware platform somewhere, communicating with other Java deployments running in another middleware layer in other virtual machines on another hardware platform elsewhere, via networks and a message bus implemented in $deity-knows what language and sized several wee bits too small on yet more virtual machines on one more hardware platform somewhere else again. Hardware, message bus, middleware, virtualisation, network and applications are all managed by different groups, so good luck in getting any of them to accept responsibility for lacking performance let alone total failure.
So who do you think it was who managed to drop his 10mm spanner neatly across the bare ends of the live and return busbars then?
10mm spanner -> M6 bolt. M10 bolt -> 17mm spanner.
I was told about an incident in the exchange I was assigned to for keeping their VAXes happy: a painter had set a tin of paint down on those bus bars. Across both.
The result was said to have been similar to Mr. Bean's way of painting his living room.
...only to find a 10 inch long thin flatblade screwdriver, with a 6 inch uninsulated bit, jauntily lying across the motherboard.
A PC is where you can lose a screwdriver in. A mini is where you can lose a toolkit in, and a mainframe is where you can lose the service engineer in.
But also, how did it get to the point of having the printer stripped to components
There was a time when computer equipment was subjected to Preventive Maintenance, usually as part of a service contract. Replacing the drive belt and tensioner in RA8x drives, adjusting vacuum and pressure levels and replacing filters in various tape drives, down to replacing or cleaning out the airflow filters in VAXen and Alphaservers.
Preventive Maintenance on printers would have been in those contracts too, and printers being subject to the unholy alliance of dust, moving mechanical parts and the buildup of gooey ink, they would dearly need it. Which means that at least once a year, but probably more often, a service engineer would show up, dragging a trolley with the PM kit for that printer model, and to a first approximation take the entire printer apart indeed. With any part not deemed up to spec and potentially causing a service call some weeks or months on, let alone broken, replaced. If the customer was lucky the printer would be back in working order at the end of the day, but it might instead be waiting for parts that weren't in the kit, in the engineer's "would be useful to have at hand" stash of parts back in his car, nor in any of his printer-frobbing colleagues' either.
So yes, a printer closely resembling one of those exploded views in the associated service manual, with an ink-smeared person wielding screwdrivers and spanners next to it may well have been a planned activity.
The Model M is not the only worthwhile IBM keyboard. They all share the same characteristics though: clicky, heavy and robust. Bash some luser's head in and just run it through the dishwasher before using again robust.
They also had some very average plasticy spongy ones that came with the PS/2s and such.
it is impossible, since I sent you an email from your email account.
Hahaha.
Received-SPF: None (no SPF record) identity=mailfrom; client-ip=185.236.209.63; helo=[185.236.209.126]; envelope-from=compromisedaccount; receiver=compromisedaccount
Received: from [185.236.209.126] (unknown [185.236.209.63]) by mailprovider (Postfix) with ESMTP id 93152252CE
Message-ID: <BE6780530B59B4D801E6356D3FD2BE67@CTJANL63ROU>
iplocation.net tells me 185.236.209.63 is in Russia, and who his ISP is.
But spammers expect people not to be able to real mail headers.
with demands varying from $480 to $4000 depending on the email, and I may have missed some, as I was just checking the obvious ones that I supposedly sent to myself.
Have you had your accountant inquire about these yet? "Umm, that $4000 transfer to yourself with the description 'Blackmail'? What is that about, if I may ask?"
VHS? Betamax? Betacam? V2000? V1500? Ampex? Some other open-reel format? Then, PAL, NTSC or SECAM?
It's going to cost more in tape and postage than those BTC(USD600).
I'm also curious how a laptop that doesn't even have a cam can view me defragging my hard drive, but I'm willing to be enlightened. Never mind that SSDs don't need defragging anyway.
It's a shame a lot of regular sites view any email address containing the '+' as invalid.
$name.$service@$domain should be accepted, and I haven't found any site that doesn't. Currently I simply have a catch-all on my domain, and some local processing using procmail. Works a treat.
... and to boot, it was not even one of the throwaway $(servicename)_$(qualifier)@$(mydomain) ones I expected.
In my case, $servicename == monsterboard. Nothing else.
Hmm, do they still exist? Apparently, yes. So I try logging in: nope. Password reminder? "No account associated with that mail address" or something like that.
And harvesting my contacts from there (insofar as they can actually do so, given a non-existent account) would yield a dozen or so spammy recruiters I haven't had any contact with for the past fifteen years, so I doubt they still work where they did back then.
That's because every house in Australia is home to multiple species of deadly spiders
Austrians tend to have little fear of finding deadly spiders in their Lederhosen. And kangaroos, wombats and dropbears are a little thin on the ground too.
... since miscreants most likely don't know, that my dog's looks and her behaviour differ heavily.
Read a story recently about people in some average (i.e. not particularly safe, nor unsafe) neighbourhood, who found their dog had managed to open the front and back doors so that it would be able to lie in the open front door with a good refreshing draft wafting through. Initial reaction: "Oops. Err. Burglars?". Second reaction: "Noone's going to check if that 75 kilos of DOG will allow them in. Or back out."
Based around the the AY-3-8700 I suspect.
Elektuur (the magazine that later went international as Elektor) once published a schematic for Pong built with 74xx TTL. Someone gave me a built but not working circuit, about the size of an A4 sheet, asking if I could fix it. From what I remember the ball and paddles were built around 74121 one-shots, two for their horizontal and vertical size, and another two for the h and v position. Plus of course a pile of standard logic for detecting whether the ball timing pulse matched either of the paddle timing pulses, and then changing the direction and v speed of the ball. No net, no borders, no on-screen score, but ISTR a follow-up article that outlined a score counter using nixies (quite likely cheaper than 7-seg LED at that time).
It took over 3 amps at 5 volt.
Repeat after me, Embassies aren't foreign soil, they're just buildings that have been accorded diplomatic status.
Although if you've committed a crime in country X, any soil outside country X including its embassies and such, is foreign. Not sure about international waters; a different set of rules apply there, but I doubt anybody's going to lift a finger if Assange is nabbed from a dinghy floating halfway between the UK and South America.
Hm, I take that back. A lot of fingers will be lifted, to then descend on keyboards. But nothing more than that.
And possibly an option to not pay it at all with every new PC we buy when we want to not install it at all!
The system I bought for my old man a couple of weeks ago was entirely devoid of any OS, Windows or otherwise. Just a bog standard Shuttle XPC something. This surprised me a bit, but in all it was quite welcome.
but such a large mirror might start acting like a solar sail.
Never mind that, you actually have to continually adjust the mirror's orientation to keep the solar reflection aimed at Chengdu anyway. If it's geostationary it will have a fixed position w.r.t. its target but the angle towards the sun will change with the time of night, and if he's putting the mirror in one of the appropriate Lagrange points the target will move relative to the mirror. Plus it will be more distant, hence appear smaller, and he'd need a way bigger mirror (so more materials and thus rocket launches) if he's to get anywhere near enough light on his city's streets.
A bunch of solar panels and a stonking big battery looks way more feasible.
A city having no electricity bill for its street lighting sounds like return to me.
Trying to get some numbers to go with that notion didn't yield much, but a BBC News article on the City of Westminster running their street lighting at 75% on average mentioned it would save UKP 420.000 on their leccy bill. Westminster is very very roughly 1% of Chengdu in area, but it's probably lit more brightly than Chengdu on average; let's say four times as bright, for ease of calculation. So taking that amount saved and multiplying by the difference in area we get about UKP 42 million, without correcting for energy price differences between UK and China. This would not quite pay for a single Space-X launch, but it's in the ballpark. I expect you'd need at least a few of them to get the materials plus an assembly robot up and into geostationary orbit.
If this guy has designed a really lightweight mirror it miiiight work.
Unless these attacks were very well targeted (which doesn't seem likely),
There's a lot of kit, not just by SuperMicro, that's built/customised for particular customers. Such a customisation will not normally end up elsewhere. And given that those boards will be manufactured in dedicated production runs, it's relatively easy to target only those.
Also yes if you find something like this the "right" thing to do is hand it in *IMMEDIATELY* to someone who knows what classified data is
And how would you know there could be confidential data on a stick, and not cat vids, without you plugging it in? People generally don't put labels "STRICTLY COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL" on such things, although there are ones that are sufficiently stupid to do so.
Power output in Kettles ?
So that's 100.000 kettles at 2kW each, all of them running for 6500 hours. At roughly 100 seconds to heat a liter from 15C to boiling in such a kettle each of them would make 234.000 liters of tea, or a bit over half a million mugs over those 6500 hours.
a highly complex and detectable method
Depends on who you want it undetectable (or at least nearly undetectable) for. On the manufacturing side you actually need just a few people who know the details: the ones modifying the schematic and the PCB layout, and creating the manufacturing manifests for the board etching/sandwiching/populating machines. It's the ones that handle the boards after they've shipped (building them into systems, reflashing, further inspection, etc.) that these mods need to be hidden from.
Also, for everybody else in the manufacturing chain these are just like any of the other customised boards destined for a particular customer.
Have you had shipments of tuna, salmon and catnip arrive at your door even though you're completely sure your cat has not touched any of your computers? As those implanted chips are small and low power they need to be really close to the access point to be able to connect, that's why you will find your cat right next to it.
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