Posts by Stoneshop

Re: Design Parameters

the wreck still held munitions containing approximately 1,400 tonnes (1,500 short tons) of TNT high explosive

Which is about half the estimated explosive power released by the Pepcon disaster.

Meteor Crater

is just 23852.8* Olympic Swimming Pools, with a capacity of 597803.3 Average Humans**.

If we allow putting a cone with a 30 deg slope on top, we then get an additional 50253.7 pools (frozen), or 1257784.4 AHs, resulting in a total of 1855587.7 AHs, which is 0.0265% of the world's population; not even half of Los Angeles will fit in.

* assuming the crater to be cylindrical for ease of calculation, so discounting the sides being tapered.

** rough estimate, with 400-pound lardarses offsetting kids

Re: Culture change required

1) Implement a proper software development life cycle;

3) Adopt a coding standard that prevents security defects from being introduced during coding (rather than trying to weed them out at the end).

Very sensible, very ambitious and totally unlikely to be implemented by the average Chinese tat vendor, who would rather add some more utterly pointless features, beefing up the feature list, than spend even two-and-a-bit microyuan on security.

In short: good luck with that.

Nah

We actually need a 'B' ark. And about those telephone sanitisers, I hear Samsung has cracked that problem.

BtAF reference 247

put tone marks on the pinyin when your writing Chinese names..

And you should put apostrophes in your sentences when you're writing contractions..

Re: Step #1 Missing

Step #1 - vendor produces and issues patch on their website.

Step 1a - If no vendor support, patch with C4 or ClF3

Re: Double Fail

Outside Western Europe and North America fisticuffs, and to a lesser extent exchange of small-arms fire is part of the political debate too.

Re: Slowly does it

As a child I spent about two years of maths lessons at school just learning how to use, add, subtract multiply and [sob] divide Imperial units

I once had a discussion with someone over the use of Imperial versus metric units in building (given that he was a Leftpondian he probably meant Colonial units, with their shrunken gallon and other abominations). He persisted in the notion that Imperial was easier to use, as it was divisible by 2. Demonstrating that one centimeter divided by 2 yielded 5mm which then could be added or subtracted or multiplied with whatever value yielding a new value which would again be equally divisible by 2 just didn't penetrate his two-plank thickness.

Later it occurred to me that he might have meant Imperial timber sizes specifically, but given that a 2x4 is not at all 2 inches high and 4 inches wide, going from the nominal sizes instead of measuring will trip you up anyway, sooner or later.

Revive British Leyland and give them the construction contract.

That would result in serious improvement.

Managers and telephones

There's some overnight conversion run, and a DBA and me (as sysadmin) are on call. A problem occurs, and at some point the DBA calls me for assistance. I tell him the things he needs to do (he has remote access, I don't), and after about an hour and a half of prodding the problem (whatever it was, can't recall) is sufficiently resolved that things start proceeding in an orderly manner again.

Monday morning I come in, to be roasted by a philosopher reschooled as IT twonk, and obviously ending up as a manager, for being unreachable while on call. Errr, what? I Being on the phone with the DBA for over an hour doesn't count as "unreachable" in my book. Apparently he was trying to reach me too, but there were no missed calls, no voice mails, no "someone's calling while you're on the phone" alerts, nothing. At all. He insists on having called the right number, and as I was clearly to blame for having an unright number, it meant end of contract. Well, good riddance anyway.

a bluetooth controlled smartphone you can control from your smartphone?

Yo Dawg, I herd you like bluetooth controlled smartphones so I put a bluetooth controlled smartphone in your bluetooth controlled smartphone so you can control your bluetooth smartphone while you control your bluetooth smartphone from your bluetooth smartphone.

exterminating the competition?

Well, it's going to take an awful lot of effort to eradicate paper and pencils globally.

Re: minimum weight

fall with different accelerations in an atmosphere, due to drag.

Not very surprising, but I don't expect pilots to wear large billowing dresses very often.

The one with the 'Priscilla, Queen of the desert' DVD in the pocket, ta.

Re: Wonder where they got the bulbs from

I wonder how they managed to do this given that Italy is in Europe and in Europe, we are only allowed the 100 Watt 53 Watt 28 Watt, 11 Watt energy saving bulbs these days

a) you don't want to use bulbs, but rather fluorescents, as the title already indicates, b) there's no limit to the number of lamps fitted in an armature, and c) there are exemptions for bulbs for specific purposes, like heating (not that you want those anyway; see a) )

and nobody can work out how much light that actually is compared to the Watts of last year.

Funny how all the bulbs I bought the last couple of years had both the output in lumens listed, as well as the equivalent incandescent bulb wattage.

Re: eh?

Google can locate you extremely accurately

Oh no they can't.

Simply because I don't have an Android. And no iPhone or Winphone either. This has some downsides, but insofar as those are actual downsides for me they're mitigated by carrying a N900 (being used as a WiFi-connected browser only).

Re: Could be a nice earner for some (female) Olympians

If you want tough as nails, there's Vyvyan Basterd (Adrian Edmondson), though he might need to work on the 'suave and bored' attitude a bit.

Re: CE = Chinese Export

In the dodgy rip off, the circles would overlap because the letters C and E have been jammed up against one another.

So, keming, not kerning.

Re: Bah!

and it was more about testing the sensor and controller than testing the airbag itself.

As the actual airbag is some kind of electrically triggered explosive which you can test separately without any car parts around it, it's the sensors and controller software that matter.

Trouble is, hardware usually costs money, and software comes cheap these days (that's what manglement seem to think anyway).

A hardware solution costs umpteen microrupees extra per unit, so that adds to the cost for each car produced. Software costs umpteen-and-a-bit rupees up front, so you'll break even at a million-and-a-bit cars; beyond that it's Pure Profit!