FTFY
So big and duck-shaped and lumpy, it needs a big lumpy name like … umm ... Churyumov … ! That’s it! That’s a good name – Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko!
5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
I looked up properties for sale in Paraburdoo. Average asking price for 14 homes was $358,000. Doesn't sound so undesirable to me.
The price of an item is a reflection of demand versus supply. Try figuring the demand for luxury mansions on Tristan Da Cunha.
In the case of Paraburdoo demand will be limited (by number of miners not owning houses already, roughly), but supply is also limited (noone's going to cart in house parts unless there's actual demand) so that will keep prices at the level you see.
The f**king delusional bu***hit heroic vision of the 1957 Defense Review under the Conservative Defense Minister Duncan Sandys
A name I recognise from R.V.Jones' "Most Secret War", in which he is portrayed not very positively.
we could put a whole plane together with enough government subsidy
80% of the budget will be spent on committee meetings determining what colour it should be, and the remaining 80% on committee meetings to determine the composition of the aforementioned committees.
Your little MicroVAX would be delivered on one pallet, the VMS documentation kit would turn up in another.
An educational institution which shall not be named had, back in the days, several tens of mVAX workstations, as well as a fair few big'uns. At some point they ordered OS upgrade kits for the lot. Licensing required you to order one upgrade per system.
The order number they used was for the kit with full VMS documentation.
At another client, we had a lightning strik and they lost a couple of hundred VT100s.
Large warehouse facility. Probably close to a hundred VT100's. Serial cabling running to a Gandalf port switch near the systems. Lightning strike, right on the roof.
That was the end of the Gandalf and of about half the VT100's, most of which had spiderwebs of circuit traces holding pieces of charred circuit board inside.
Though, on a second thought, Ultrasparc 2 - that is from the days before the the universal 100-240V power supplies when US vendors fitted a "Eu PS" which should have been called "Eu PoS" in their gear to sell over here.
The VAX9000, power-hungry beast that it was, had a rather, ahem, unique power system layout. The power supplies inside the system cabinets themselves ran off a 280VDC bus, supplied from the Power Front End, a double-wide 19" cabinet, containing a transformer, rectifiers, control thingamajigs and several banks of electrolytic caps. Those were to provide a few seconds (!) of buffering in case of power glitches, such as when switching from utility power to a local generator.
For Europe they just added another transformer, in a cabinet the size of a VAX 11/750, turning 220V three-phase into 110V (the documentation states the power front end came in 110V and 220V models, but I've only seen the 110V model with that auxiliary transformer added).
disk drives in one of the computer rooms would experience brief bursts of read errors during the day. Simultaneously. But not all of them, some appeared to be utterly unaffected. The read errors were diagnosed to be track misalignment errors, and when one of the field engineers noticed the building going *bump* being what triggered a slew of errors the problem was fairly quickly pinpointed to be trucks backing up into the loading docks below. The affected drives had linear head positioners aligned with the direction of the impact; those that had them at right angles didn't care.
either way.....I'm wondering what laptop to take next time I travel.
None.
If you go there on business, you get the receiving party to provide you with one. If it's a private visit just ask your friends/family over there to scrounge a not-too-shabby one off Craigslist/Cash Converters/charity shop/thrift store for the time you need it, after which they can sell it off (if they don't have a spare one around you can use).
(El Reg, please get a web designer who doesn't consider an editing window of about 1/20th of the actual screen surface a good reason to get his head examined or just quit the "industry" in shame)
How about grabbing the lower right corner of the editing window and pulling it down as far as you'd like?
although the final bits of Cassini's signal will not reach Earth until nearly an hour and a half later, due to the travel time for its radio signal.
Underlining the statement "the science isn't going to stop" at the end of the article is the mention of the speed of the data. Had it been bad news we would have known immediately.
Massive infrastructure project, yes, but really it would put car companies out of business because nobody's car would be any different to the one next to it.
Er, no. People still have different transport needs: different maximum number of occupants, different load capacity, different maximum range, and people also have different spending room towards their vehicle(s). Plus, your automated highway won't control you all the way from door to door. Maybe that that last mile can be autonomously navigated by the car, but that depends on the circumstances.
As long as cars have a standardised way of 'hooking in/out' of the 'train', it doesn't matter whether you're driving a 2CV, a Lamborghini or a Ford Transit.
It didn't even see the truck.
That seems to be correct, yes.
It apparently didn't even notice the crash!!
As evidenced by its lack of reaction and subsequent tree impact.
If you had read the NTSB report, which contains the car controller logs, it is quite clear that the car DID sense the actual crash. From 13:36:12.7 (US Pacific time, so 17:36:12.7 local time) through 13:36:25.8 the car's data logging reports "Vehicle alert consistent with collision damage", and a number of sensor fault/sensor missing messages, including "Brake controller CAN node is MIA". So even if a brake command was issued, there would have been no response.
Is there a real market for this type of devices? Note if this is executed really well, it goes against Chromebooks.
That would require Chromebooks to be capable of being folded over twice while not gaining any thickness.
Something the size of a Chromebook had better be a full-blown laptop running Linux or *BSD, not some front-end for an ad-slinging, data-slurping cloud. And this is still a fully autonomous system, but now scaled down to fit in a jacket pocket.
If somebody came out with something maybe just a little bit fatter with room for a swappable HD / SSD
You don't want a conventional HD or HD-sized SDD in there, even if that would offer you swappability: too big and heavy compared to the entire machine. But an M.2 might suit your needs, and running off a fast SD card is utterly feasible too.
One of the most irritating issues with Psion was that they locked up their approach to storage in patents, which is why in the days of the Organiser II nobody else could make memory packs using EPROMs.
The 5 and 5MX took standard CF cards, and while I can't recall if the native EPOC format was something other than FAT, it could read my camera's cards.
Reminds me of the Olivetti Quaderno from circa 1993, which was a fine form factor but embuggered with NECs take on the 8086 processor in an era when the 386 was well established.
Compared to Intel's 8086 the V30 (V30HL for the Quaderno) was definitely nippier, and while there was a version of the Quaderno with a 386, it couldn't run half as long on batteries. So it depends on whether you prefer processing power or runtime.
And if you really want runtime, get a 5(MX).
I rather miss the Toshiba Libretto
In 2009 my girlfriend went to New Zealand for a convention and a bit of travelling around by motorcycle, and took a 110 running W98SE, upgraded with an 8GB SSD, a wireless card and an USB2 card. This was close to perfect: sufficient for email, storing pictures, and resizing and uploading a few of them.
perhaps in 1996 the hardware wasn't mature enough for the form factor (486 processor, 1260x600 display, Windows 98, 8M Ram, 270M HD)
I think you're off a bit: from memory the screen was 800x480, and the 110 had a Pentium 233 and 64MB RAM; other models were less powerful.
Many of the exoplanets we've found are less than 100 light years away, none are billions of light years away.
But they can well be several billion years old, like our own solar system. Life, and from that communities and civilisation don't spring into being in a week.
One unit that is also missing from the Reg Standards Converter is time*. Sticking with a conventional unit until a Reg one comes along, energy could be expressed as hamsterfortnights, with this galaxy emitting 43.816138 trillion trillion hamsterfortnights per burst.
* lunchtime is way too variable, although that can actually be useful on occasion.
At home we have a smallish industrial unit with two of those blue/UV tubes (rural area with insects of various species being common occurrence, so it's worth its weight in gold), and recently the (electronic) ballast went to meet its maker*. Taking a peek inside the zapping business was a 1kV transformer rated at a couple of mA, with interlock switches so that getting the cremation tray out would not be fraught with tension.
Regular mozzies and fruit flies just go *brzt*, but several other flying irritants sometimes manage to frizzle for several seconds, some even ten or more, and stink up the place to boot.
* Italian, so utterly unsurprising.