* Posts by Stoneshop

5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009

Firing a water rocket to 1km? Piece of cake

Stoneshop
Go

FTFY

And another thing, shouldn't one use a proper unit like Newton for this kind of thing?

s/Newton/Norris/.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: 550 kg thrust

Rust is pretty close to half as heavy again as bare steel, until it falls off that is.

Per unit volume, that is. But if you let a piece of steel turn to rust, it'll still contain the same number of Fe atoms, plus the now added O, so the total weight will have increased.

Its weight will indeed be lower when it falls off, but only during the fall.

Stoneshop

Re: 550 kg thrust

More than enough to lift a Fiat 500 (the original): 499kg, 118.80952 jubs. It would also easily, although briefly, significantly increase its acceleration*.

* They're remarkably spiffy when fitted with a Moto Guzzi engine, but still sluggish compared to a Goggo with a 9 cylinder radial.

Stoneshop
Devil

Re: Zippy

How long to cross Wales?

Just tell it it's English.

'Dodgy Type-C USB cable fried my laptop!'

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Who ever designed..

It doesn't help that PSUs don't come branded "Seagate" or "WD", which would make reuniting the right PSU to the right gadget easier, but instead all seem to be labelled "Asian Power Supplies"

Probably way too sensible: get out the labelmaker and put a label on the PSU indicating what device it belongs to, the moment you unpack the stuff. Maybe less urgent if both the device and the PSU have clearly-readable power markings and/or unique power plugs, but still useful IMO.

Uber rebrands to the sound of whalesong confusion

Stoneshop
Mushroom

"technology that moves cities and their citizens."

Caterpillar? Liebherr? Komatsu?

Or maybe Dynamit Nobel?

Smart toys spring dumb vulns. Again. This time: Cuddly bears, watches

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Re: Scary State Secrets

(aside, how do I parse that: "(Scary State) Secrets" or "Scary (State Secrets)"?)

Yes.

Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash

Stoneshop

Re: Really?

Also, in that second picture, the 'cabin' appears to have parachuted to a rest in the Windows XP default backdrop...

Nah, it's Teletubby-land

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: Really?

The reason you don't hear about water landings far from a coast line these days is that modern commercial airliners generally fly within gliding range of land.

If you count all flights worldwide, including ones that don't fly over open water at all or just small distances, your 'generally' may start to turn out 'not totally bollocks'. But even, e.g. Stavanger-Aberdeen is already beyond that: 500km, with the gliding distance from FL300 being maybe 150km, in perfect conditions.

Stoneshop

Re: Looks as though it requires a high-wing aircraft configuration.

none that cross large distances of water, for the very reason that in the event of a ditching the doors are under water

One word: Ekranoplan

Stoneshop

Re: Really?

As far as I'm aware the only survivors from water landings have been in coastal waters.

Pan Am flight PA6

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Really?

Landing a cabin of 400+ people from x0,000 feet by unsteered parachute sounds at least as terrifying as having it connected to a set of wings and a control system and a bunch of people controlling who want to stay alive every bit as much as the cabin, and are in a position to help do so.

Plus the rather annoying fact that a plane at cruising altitude will have a forward speed of several hundred miles an hour, maybe a bit less if the engines are on fire. Given the utter lack of aerodynamic control surfaces once the cabin has detached from the bits that made it into an aeroplane, and with that blunt end forward, I doubt it will keep the 'this side up' attitude that passengers might prefer.

And then it'll need to scrub speed to prevent the parachutes and/or their attachment points from failing. How much altitude has it lost at that point, how much vertical speed has it gained, and can you still deploy the parachutes and the retro-rockets before the cabin and its contents goes crunch against the countryside?

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Thunderbird 2?

Imagine not having to file in to a small metal tube, and instead be seated in a land-based boarding area (a bit like Heathrow) - still shaped like a tube, but without the massive inconvenience of the wait.

Then, to save time, instead of having to wait until the flying bits are attached, the tube can have its own wheels so it can roll to its destination all by itself. You can choose to use "rubber" wheels and stuff called "tarmac", which is abundantly available, allowing you to be quite flexible in choosing a destination, or the wheels can be made of steel requiring them to roll on "tracks", also made of steel. The latter option offers less flexibility but higher speed. The tubes can even be within bigger, underground tubes, again on rubber or steel wheels, so that no-one above ground notices you're moving

Stoneshop

Re: Looks as though it requires a high-wing aircraft configuration.

although IIRC EasyJet can now turn one around in about 25 minutes, including their version of cleaning

They should be ordering planes that have a cargo door; front or rear doesn't really matter. Put that end against what's essentially a large suction hose, connect some high pressure air to inlets the other end, and presto! Plane emptied and cleaned in the blink of an eye. Loading the new batch of cattle being done using some kind of plunger.

I've actually wondered whether it would be feasible to have a plane where you can basically slide the entire passenger deck out of the actual plane into a gate area so you can have passengers leaving and boarding over the entire length of the plane instead of through a limited number of doors, then having to get past other people who have seats closer to the door you came in through.

Chip company FTDI accused of bricking counterfeits again

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: Goodbye FTDI

Because widget manufacturers will not even know whether they are buying counterfeit chips or not.

Then you're the widget vendor's customer. You're still not FTDI's customer in any way.

They buy components like you buy petrol, through a chain of middlemen. Do you know which country the petrol in your car came from?

If the petrol station is selling me a petrol-like fluid that doesn't quite work like Real Petrol under all circumstances, it's their problem (provided I can trace it back to them). What country the crude originated from is irrelevant.

Stoneshop

Re: Goodbye FTDI

"Should" and "do" are very different beasties.

If it's a serious application, it should be tested to be resilient against serial garbage. If it turns out it's not, you complain to the manufacturer as well as the tester.

If it's a life-critical application, you get the FDA or its local equivalent to do so.

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: Goodbye FTDI

since they are deliberately screwing their customers, the purchasers of the chips

In what way are buyers of counterfeit chips FTDI's customers?

Stoneshop

Re: Goodbye FTDI

Imagine the liability if a counterfeit got into a medical device and FTDI's driver f*ckups killed somebody.

Devices that take input from serial should be able to deal with garbage coming in, even more so when it's life-critical.

Reg readers battle to claim 'my silicon's older than yours' crown

Stoneshop

Re: I've got

An HP85 from 1980 which still works fine. I'm told the printers and tape drive can give problems

They do. The tape drive wheel rubber gets sticky; happens to TU58 tape drives as well.

Stoneshop

Re: Long lasting DEC kit

I remember my surprise at opening the door of a -11/780 vintage cabinet and it feeling very solid, the newer -11/785 doors I was used to felt like wobbly cardboard

Don't you mean the 11/750? I've never noticed any difference between the 780 and 785 in that respect, and I doubt all the 785's I've encountered started out as 780's.

750 doors, and similarly 82xx/83xx doors are rather bendy indeed.

Stoneshop

Re: Very Old DEC Alpha

I worked for an insurance company who had an old big Blue DEC Alpha box, it was so old it didn't even have a compaq badge on it.

That's just plain 'old'. Now, a VAX with white on blue lettering would qualify as 'rather old', and a PDP with white on black would be one for the moniker 'very old'.

We've hauled MicroVAXes out of a cellar and adjacent crawlspace where they had been stored for the past ten years or so, after at least ten years of running production. Plugging in and switching on, most ended up either booting VMS or some flavour of Unix, or at least got as far as the bootprompt.

Stoneshop

Re: osborne 1

Running a small-scale museum, we have stuff that's older than a fair part of our visitors, and some of it* is even older than our participants. Unfortunately, one of the Osborne I machines had one of its floppy drives emitting magic smoke, and they need both. Until then it appeared OK, but we were lacking system and program floppies. The other is rather wonky in general.

The BBC B needed a new filter cap in its PSU, but it didn't mind it blowing. The mains fuse did, but other than that, no damage.

* Friden electromechanical typewriters driven by paper-tape. One of them should even be capable of doing mailmerge once we can find the correct cables to connect the auxiliary reader. But on its own it works fine.

Facebook tells Belgian government its use of English invalidates privacy case

Stoneshop

Ze klampen zich vast aan een strohalm

On se raccroche aux branches.

Brit airline pilots warn of drone menace

Stoneshop

Re: How bad?

But you also have murphys law, you can design as much as you like but you don't actually want it to happen because every time several bits of things randomly hit an engine you can only model to a certain degree the parts paths they would take, every times different maybe one day its hits that thing and does damage no one expected.

Indeed. And as United 232 showed, Murohy on his own can nearly down a plane*; you don't want some idiot with a drone helping him.

* They were both lucky and crafty, giving Murphy the finger, and it only ended like it did because 20 feet above the runway their luck ran out.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: How bad?

Wonder if this is a good what-if to ask Randall Munroe.

He does the serious answers to absurd hypothetical questions. This particular problem is far from hypothetical; now maybe if 'What If' would be extended to absurd answers to serious questions would this one be elegible, by for instance suggesting airliners could be fitted with an airbag-like cover with a proximity trigger. There'll be a whole slew of calculations involved like how thick the bag would have to be to keep the average drone from doing damage to the plane itself, and ways to mitigate side-effects like sudden loss of visual on final and the changes in aerodynamic behaviour, so that would make this something right up his alley.

Major Hollywood studio eyes Paint Drying sequel

Stoneshop

Dry Hard 8 will be scrubbed.

Land Rover Defender dies: Production finally halted by EU rules

Stoneshop

Re: It's a good joke, but.....

My mileage differs. I worked on seismic crews in Africa in the 80's, and we drove Toyota Land Cruisers (the old upright type with running boards) without problems. Then one client insisted we use Land Rovers, so they were shipped in but the corrugated desert roads shook them so much that the aluminium panels cracked and fell away.

African countries can be divided into Landy countries and Landcruiser/Hilux countries. They have different track widths, and trying to run one in a country meant for the other is bound to cause problems.

The monitor didn't work but the problem was between the user's ears

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: "Do not try this yourself."

use the power switch on the back of the PC to turn it off and hit the voltage switcher instead.

Impossible, unless it was an outrageously stupid voltage switch design. In most cases you need a screwdriver or similar object to move the slider, which doesn't protrude out of the case. Other designs require you to take out the fuse holder or some other kind of insert (which usually means unplugging the mains lead) and flipping it over.

Stoneshop

Re: The thing is...

Had a similar problem, but in this case the system went down hard around 17:30, a couple of days per week. Obvious suspect: cleaners. Considered improbable, because the system was in a recess, the power strip and the wall socket were behind the system requiring some serious gymnastics to reach them, and there was a power socket in plain view on the wall to one side of the recess. Initial diagnostics pointed to airflow problems, and over the next few weeks all of the associated components and wiring were replaced, with finally the entire system being carted off to Repair and a temporary replacement being installed. Which ran fine for the entire time it was in use; the original system also ran flawlessly under test. Moving the system back to the customer, same problem again.

So a colleague went to see what was going on, sat there waiting for the cleaners to come in and do their thing. One plugged in the vacuum, in the appropriate socket. The other went to take the waste bag from the document shredder, tied it closed and put it right in front of the air intake for the system. Which duly experienced an airflow problem and switched off.

The temporary replacement system, although being essentially the same, had a different enclosure and didn't mind plastic bags being put right in front.

This gun says you ain’t leaving until my PC is fixed

Stoneshop

Re: Pr1me field engineers

a washing machine disk drive that was spinning with its lid open.

Let me guess, he had just disabled the interlock to diagnose a problem? Otherwise it shouldn't do that.

A colleague of mine walked in to a computer room to see an, ahem, solidly-built workman standing on the lid of an RP06 (Memorex) disk drive. Those have a sliding lid to load and unload the pack. A glass lid.

As he wasn't too keen on scraping shredded bits of leg from between the remains of the platters and heads, and the tub, he grabbed the guy by the belt and yanked him backwards.

Stoneshop

Re: Similar

Most of the customers I dealt with as DEC FS were on service contracts, so in that respect it wouldn't have hurt even if the problem took days to resolve. But yeah, "Not letting me get to my car to fetch the spare part I need to fix this problem will just add $monetary_quantity/hour to your bill" should add a certain persuasion to terminating the standoff.

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Similar

Never had a case like this, but having an agitated C*O on your back the whole time isn't going to help finish repairs either.

"So, are you going to keep me from actually working on the problem by continually demanding to know why it isn't done yet, or can you let me concentrate on finding and fixing it?".

There's no guidance for Scottish police use of UK facial recog database

Stoneshop
Big Brother

s/precaution against/requirement for/

Brit censors endure 10-hour Paint Drying movie epic

Stoneshop

Re: I'm waiting for the prequel...

The first part of the trilogy being The Riddle of the Sanding

Stoneshop
Go

Re: Brilliant

AFRICAN-American wall, so the Academy Awards nominations won't be a whitewash...

The Rolling Stones saw this coming decades ago already and wrote a song to support it.

Stoneshop

Screenplay

Based on the novel by Benoite Grout.

Sensors, not CPUs, are the tech that swings the smartphone market

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Pedant

Sensors are meant to convert changes in some physical quantity (force or pressure, conductivity, radiation, etc.) into a signal that can be processed further. However, it's a bit of a stretch to think of a transistor as a sensor that is used to detect the quantity of electrons at its base/gate, and turning it into a greater quantity of electrons.

Ban internet anonymity – says US Homeland Security official

Stoneshop
FAIL

He's just astroturfing

for Farcebook

Pubs good for the soul: Official

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: foaming agents for beer

It turns out that Dow was adding some agent to their brew to make the head last longer.

Well, the word I usually find next to 'Dow' is 'Chemical', so this isn't much of a surprise.

In this Facebook and Google-owned world, it's time to rethink privacy

Stoneshop
Coat

Re: Facebook

Try as I might, I just cannot find myself on the Internet.

There are a lot of your postings here on ElReg...

Sena's multi-action camera monster, or Cardo's PackTalk club rider juggernaut?

Stoneshop

Paranoid IAMer?

Not much. Certainly not IAM*, and at a level of road awareness that wouldn't even start to approach 'paranoid', but sufficient to have not suffered prangs more serious than a couple of bruises over twenty years and 300Mm, and then most of them due to, ahem, sudden lack of traction. And none caused by abrupt deceleration involving another vehicle.

*whazzat? International Association of Movers?

Stoneshop

Re: When I ride, I ride.

Never ridden anywhere where the cager count is less than one per hour? Pity. Though in those places you tend to need to keep an eye on reindeer and moose, but on wide open tundra they rarely sneak up on you to surprise you.

Stoneshop

Re: If you stream music

Modern Life support systems can often keep an injured person alive until they reach hospital

Which means they're being monitored

Anyway, if you're distracted by music, don't put it on. I have rarely felt the need to listen to music while riding, but occasionally (need to) ride with a fairly constant stream of info coming in over a two-way radio, some of which may be meant for me or something that I may need to act on because I'm close, so I can't just switch it off or zone it out. However, this hasn't ever caused distraction to the point of getting myself into a hairy situation.

Stoneshop
FAIL

Re: If you stream music

Biers are referred to as 'organ donors' in many hospitals.

Ever talked to an actual ER medic? Hint: they don't care much for spare parts of which the parts carrier expired outside medical montoring.

Sainsbury's Bank web pages stuck on crappy 20th century crypto

Stoneshop
Pirate

“Someone there should be beaten to a pulp with a keyboard.”

Given the mechanical properties of nearly all of today's keyboards, that will take about a 20' (43.542857 linguini) container full of them. Better change over to an industrial model, or straight to the real thing, the Model M.

Asda slammed for letting vulns fester on its cyber shelves

Stoneshop
Holmes

Re: horrible sign up process

a 4 digit pin number

And not just any PIN number; it's your personal PIN number!

Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Stoneshop

Re: LAN connectivity useful, internet not so much

Having had a kitchen which was a long trek from the living room,

Checking whether the breadmaker was done, in the kitchen 40m away*, was performed using a truly ancient HP digicam driven by a bit of shellscripting wrapped around a very minimalistic set of camera drivers**. This setup managed one photo per 45 seconds: one for taking the picture, 43 for transferring it to the host (serial at 9600 baud) and one again for deleting the image on the camera. Putting the most recent 200 pics on a local webpage allowed us to view the progress from the living room

* this was in a former office building.

** definitely not written by HP, otherwise they'd be a quarter of a gigabyte for half the functionality.

Stoneshop

Re: cracks

That's why I wrote " More random than any security device can aspire to be."

Though it might be somewhat impractical if you want to use this for an RNG that needs to be in some kind of portable device.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Location

If no one is near, or currently approaching home, heating stays off. If it detects you heading towards home, it works out your ETA, and from past data, knows how long it takes to get the house up to temp, and so switches the heating on at the optimal point.

Likewise, if you leave the house and forget to turn the heating off, it can do it for you.

Which means you have a phone that runs an app that blabs your location.

I don't have one of those; both the first, and ipso facto, the second condition are not fulfilled. It can send an SMS, and a RasPi will then determine if it needs to act on it (no-one at home, house at $low_temp) or not, by signalling the thermostat to select a higher, preset temperature.

Data centers dig in as monster storm strikes America's East Coast

Stoneshop
Coat

Re: A nice cup of tea

A stove powered by bottled gas

Be aware that butane stays liquid when below zero Celcius, so you either need to have a butane/propane mix (or pure propane), or you switch to an MSR/Primus/Jewel/Trangia.

Regarding making tea, or coffee, you cannot be too prepared.

(the fleece-lined one, ta)