How about 'explosive'?
Same initial letters, expresses the rate of growth quite well IMO, and could very well be applicable to the foreseeable aftermath of a billowing cloud of smoke and debris all around.
5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
And pumping out more CO2 than simple burning as the Oxygen that would have gone to easily filtered out Sulphurous and Nitrogenous oxides is instead added to the Carbon.
Nope. In every CH4 molecule (methane) there's only one carbon atom, which can only bind two oxygen atoms. There's no way that excess O2 (which is present in the air used for combustion anyway) can suddenly cause more CO2 to be produced because that would require more C, thus more CH4. And with the fuel cell tech keeping SOx and NOx out of the reaction you don't have to scrub them from the exhaust, ergo, better in that respect.
had some hilarious moments of people just riding straight into bushes or just getting on one side of the bike and falling off the other...
During a festive evening celebrating something-or-other, one of the local security guards came in and alerted us that someone outside had been trying to get on his bike for roughly the past half hour, and would we want to help him?
There are several categories:
- The Tardis Award for ostensibly storing at least double the overall volume of a shed inside that same shed.
- The Librarian's Ribbon for knowing by heart all the items stored, and their exact location. An additional medal can be gained for knowing what the function of at least 50% of said items is (this to allow a certain number of widgets "I have no frigging idea what it's for exactly, but it looked worth saving" like we all have).
- Lifetime membership of the Society for Putting Things on top of Other Things, for, well, having put impressive numbers of Things on top of Other Things.
There was the student on the lab bench opposite mine, who wasn't aware of what the ridge and the '+' markings on an electrolytic cap were meant to convey. With the working voltage for the circuit being 150VDC, for reasons I can't remember any more (no, it didn't involve vacuum tubes). So, a couple of seconds after powering on, there was an almighty bang, a rather pungent, acrid smell and a very pale student.
How about you explain me how short circuit inside 5V powered chip caused "power surge".
Simple.
Switching PSUs take their reference feedback from their most relevant output voltage, in most cases the +5V rail. Load that rail heavily and you'll see the other output voltages go up. Do something silly with the +5V rail, like that chip blowing, and you could well have the PSU go nuts. And given the crap which even today is sold as computer power supplies, never mind 30 years back, I wouldn't bet on some random PSU shutting down in a decent manner without any malodorous and/or acoustic side effects in case of a sudden overload.
And saying "that's not supposed to happen" will just show that you know shit about designing and building electronics, especially where shaving the last microrenminbi off the BoM is concerned
Them: "We've got these GPS trackers to fit in the support vehicles for $event, but they only come with mains chargers. Now, the vans have mains converters; can you fit those on your motorcycles too?"
Me: "You're kidding? Something that big just to power a tracker the size of a ciggie packet?"
Them: "Well, the battery doesn't last even half the event, so ..."
Me: "Don't they have 12V adapters?"
Them: "Maybe, but they weren't supplied"
Me: :The charger outputs, mmm, 5 Volts, and this socket may be non-standard but it looks just like the socket on my digicam, for which I <rummage> have an USB cable. <inserts> <inserts in powerbank> Aaaaand it works. So, ten of these cables from fastandcheapcables.com, ten USB charger adapters for car ciggie lighters, and we're set."
Wrong, its been a few weeks now and not once have I had any remorse... I don't miss any of it....
Just weeks, and you're in between moves? So not really having projects underway? Projects that you wouldn't manage to get working without that one particular part or cable that's in one of those boxes that you've now chucked out?
I bet your new home doesn't have a shed either.
Ditto Torx screwdriver bits that are needed when removing hard disk platters for physical destruction.
Nah. In my life as a FS tech I had to disassemble RA81 HDAs (70-18491-01) onsite in cases where the platters had to be left at the customer (sensitive data) while the shell and positioner still had to go back to Logistics anyway as part of the replacement parts process. For the (5? 6? mm) bolts holding the shell together you needed Torx sockets, then for the platters a Torx bit, with neither being present in the standard toolkit. So it was the best-fitting hex-nut socket for the shell bolts and an Allen key for the platters, and as the tools provided were of decent quality they managed without stripping or being damaged themselves
and I guess no "are you sure" and "are you REALLY sure" to confirm
Such a two-step confirmation needs to be one positive ("Are you sure?") and one negative ("Cancel alert?"), and should require full verbal responses ("Yes", "No"). Would take maybe 10 seconds extra while almost eliminating accidental activation.
Even better: two hard-wired buttons with those flip-top covers, a good distance apart, and you need to hold them for at least five seconds while a LOUD buzzer sounds.
“Unfortunately, the desktops only had HDMI and the screens were VGA..."
So was it incompentence on the Chinese Embassy parts for sending desktops and screens which couldnt go together (and which obviously was never checked) or was it a deliberate attempt to force a little bit more business their way (or to a friends business) for repairs/upgrades/etc...
"Have them click on AliExpress and they can be knee-deep in HDMI-VGA adapters"
A teenager from an advanced civilisation on bonfire night?
Aye, something close. The more adventurous go buzzing other planets, wearing silly antennae and making 'beep beep' noises, others just stay in their cellar with their computers, and there's now one botnetting a cloud of dark matter around a powerful star and making it go 'blip' to annoy the neighbour alien teenager who's just returned home with a gorgeous bombshell who was sufficiently impressed with his antennae and the beeping, and who are now trying to sleep in after some utterly extended interspecies sex.
In other words, juvenile jealousy.
Nothing is simple any more.
Sums it up nicely. Sums everything up nicely.
And outside of the domains where things aren't simple because of the subject matter, people are hard at work (and often failing, luckily, but still) to make simple things not simple any more. E.g. Juicero, the Otto lock and many other such ventures.
Given that it concerns black holes, how are they going to pinpoint the location of the event since, by definition, they didn't see that a collision was going to take place ?
Do you mean to imply that you can't see a black hole collision coming because you can't see those black holes themselves?
The presence of black holes can be inferred by effects on their local environment, stuff swirling inwards around them, as well as gravitational lensing. So they can be located, their trajectories determined and a possible collision predicted.
Why do you think the number of tracks matters ?
Because the actual head is about 1000 times as wide as a single track, meaning there's NO FSCKING WAY you can get separate heads over each track.
Plus there's the cost.
With your first comment I thought you were trolling, but it appears you really think it's feasible. It is not.
DEC's RA8x series drives used two heads per side on a single arm, effectively halving the seek stroke while still being able to access the entire platter.
I've also encountered a drive with two independent positioner assemblies, but details appear to be in some offline part of my memory.
When you have one set of heads, it doesn't matter *precisely* where the heads go when they're looking for track 13,
That would be a sticking point if the positioner controller was using an external reference, like servo tracks or even a feedback system coupled to the positioner itself, but that has long passed. Nowadays the positioning data comes from the active head itself, in a way that you might want to describe as 'maximum correct signal' (not unlike manually tuning a radio). Although the drive logic has to have some rough idea of where track 13 is, and how much to seek inwards or outwards to get there, the final positioning over the track is done using the signal from the head itself.
I remember that, years ago, this was the reason given for the much lower densities on removable media than were available with hard drives
That's part of it. Another reason is that the environment in a drive using removable packs can't be as clean as in a HDA, so head flight height can't be as low. And track width is related to head flight height again: lower height means narrower tracks means greater data density.
Does the Linux implementation of OpenZFS not have snapshots?
$ uname -a
Linux machine 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.43-2+deb8u5 (2017-09-19) x86_64 GNU/Linux
root@machine:~
$ zfs
missing command
usage: zfs command args ...
where 'command' is one of the following:
create [-p] [-o property=value] ... <filesystem>
create [-ps] [-b blocksize] [-o property=value] ... -V <size> <volume>
destroy [-fnpRrv] <filesystem|volume>
destroy [-dnpRrv] <filesystem|volume>@<snap>[%<snap>][,...]
destroy <filesystem|volume>#<bookmark>
snapshot|snap [-r] [-o property=value] ... <filesystem|volume>@<snap> ...
rollback [-rRf] <snapshot>
clone [-p] [-o property=value] ... <snapshot> <filesystem|volume>
promote <clone-filesystem>
[ ... ]
and no matter how well you try to control and log that they can always just get a copy cut before giving it back.
There are locks however, and they start at about one-tenth of the price of this Otto lock, that you can't get duplicated at your average locksmith. You want a spare? You present the dealer with a token you received with the original purchase (NOT the actual key), plus some ID. If you want to have an illegal copy made you would need to pilfer a blank and get (access to) cutting tools. Which means that, if one of your house guests is capable of that, you need to be slightly more discerning in your choice of guests.
You can make locks more difficult to pick, but you can't avoid having that hole available for poking.
I know a world-class security engineer whose hobby is lock-picking. In which he's also world-class. There are fully mechanical locks he grades as 'couple of minutes with an angle grinder is less bothersome'.
ULAs weren't available in the early 1980s hence the IBM's use of lots of TTL to get it to work at all.
So the ZX81 and BBC B were built with technology that didn't exist? Interesting.
Now if IBM decided to just use standard components, that's another matter. But ULAs and other MSI-level custom chips were definitely available at the time the PC was designed.