Re: EMACS
However, I think it can emulate Vi.
Posts by adam 40
1167 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Oct 2009
CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it
The Raspberry Pi 5 is now available ... if you pre-ordered
Europe's digital identity system needs patching after can_we_trust_this function call ignored
NASA and Boeing try to chase the contrail clouds away
Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid
Russia hustles to fill impending void left by the ISS
Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it
Workload written by student made millions, ran on unsupported hardware, with zero maintenance
Friday 13th October 2023 15:36 GMT 
1993
Around then I was contracting for BT City Business Products, writing code to copy data from a single Reuters feed to multiple terminals across a trading floor.
As it was in C and used sockets I wouldn't be surprised if it was still in use today, in some form.
I always wondered if it was strictly legal, copyright-wise.....
The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech
Wednesday 4th October 2023 16:48 GMT
Re: Untested? If only
That's very interesting, so I wonder what the engineering problems are? Is it a problem with the reservoir they are injecting into, the pumping, "pressure management" (whatever that is?)
What I'm getting at is, can it ever be made to work (if you had a better reservoir/better engineering/etc?) Can it be made to work "better" (they had some limited success)? Or, is it fundamentally a flawed concept?
We need more details, the newspaper article is a good starting point.
Wednesday 4th October 2023 16:35 GMT
Yes I think someone forgot a few powers of 10?
In any case I'd like to see a Carbon Capture plant actually up and running, to prove or disprove the engineering.
Could we not run (say) a gas turbine into a CO2 purifier, and then pump the resultant captured CO2 into a depleted gas field under the North Sea?
It would be interesting to measure all the extra inefficiencies this imposes, in real life, not just a design, and also monitor the CO2 deposit for leaks etc.
If it proves to be feasible, it would be an extra string to our bow.
Wednesday 4th October 2023 16:22 GMT
Re: Carbon sinks
I totally agree with Dr Syntax.
If you also gasify the wood byproducts it's win-win. So, for example, convert Drax into a massive charcoal oven, and use the gas byproducts to drive turbines.
Then you get both electricity generation, and also create fixed carbon in the form of charcoal.
The next challenge is to bury it somewhere, I favour compressing it into pellets that are denser than water, and dumping it in the ocean, above a deep trench. It literally sinks - a carbon sink (geddit???!??) It'll remain there inert for ever.
But, you could also put it into landfill as activated charcoal, which has another win of trapping pollutants that might otherwise leach out. Or, bury it in opencast mines, which then get landscaped.
Another idea I had was to farm kelp at sea, and create charcoal from that, and then dump it.
CERN experiment proves gravity pulls antimatter the way Einstein predicted
Wednesday 4th October 2023 16:08 GMT 
Spectrum of Antihydrogen
One line so far, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0435-1
"The transition frequency at a field of 1.033 tesla was determined to be 2,466,051.7 ± 0.12 gigahertz (1σ uncertainty) and agrees with the prediction for hydrogen to a precision of 5 × 10−8."
What if we are looking at distant galaxies with normal spectra, but they are entirely antimatter? How could we tell the difference? If the matter and antimatter separated out in the early universe, then maybe there is the same of each, just isolated into galaxy or galaxy cluster clumps.
Russia to ban all VPNs – again – says senator
BT confirms it's switching off 3G in UK from Jan next year
Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her
Long-term support for Linux kernels is about to get a lot shorter
Tuesday 26th September 2023 14:46 GMT
Stable not in the stable
I'd like to see the old binaries hang around for longer, and not get deleted.
I'm very much an "if it ain't broke don't fix it type", so when I install a linux, I get a bunch of packages to go with it, and turn off updates, unless there is instability straight away.
However, sometime later I might want to install a program I forgot earlier. It would be better if the packages were still around so I could pick up these binaries. After all, they don't need "maintaining".
This also applied to embedded linux projects, where we fix on a certain version and don't update in the field.
If the kernel is dead in 2 years that's barely enough time for all the apps to have been built to go with it (if there are install dependencies, which there usually are.)
UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program
Scared of flying? Good news! Software glitches keep aircraft on the ground
Thursday 7th September 2023 16:05 GMT
Re: No problem.
Absolutely. The bean counters decided it should be implemented to this quality.
So, the liability rests with them, it's a simple equation.
I'm thinking a class action against NATS would be appropriate here, because the airlines are shrugging off liability (and, who can blame them?)
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is returning with its first-ever asteroid sample
I'll see your data loss and raise you a security policy violation
FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds
UK air traffic woes caused by 'invalid flight plan data'
Windows screensaver left broadcast techie all at sea
Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet
High severity vuln in WinRAR could allow code to run when files are opened
Bank of Ireland outage sees customers queue for 'free' cash – or maybe any cash
Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor
Airbus to help with International Space Station replacement
Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan
Wednesday 2nd August 2023 16:52 GMT
Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid
Those of you with smart metering - why can't we have a tariff that follows the wholesale price?
For those who want a green tariff - they also get cut off - or have a minimal allowance overnight when the wind isn't' blowing?
(Or - the price goes right up?)
The disconnect (sic) is that we don't have consumer pricing related to the peaks and troughs. If we did so, we could have:
- Smart plugs that turn on an appliance when the energy price is low, e.g. a washing machine.
- Car charging that only charges when the energy price is low (for infrequent car users).
All this technology is do-able now, we have the electronics and simple computers to implement it.
If we adjusted consumer demand in this way it would relieve a lot of the problems caused by a flat rate maintained for months on end.
Google toys with internet air-gap for some staff PCs
Thursday 20th July 2023 15:19 GMT
Internet for reference purposes.
This is giving me an idea.
Us dev peeps need to look stuff up on the internet, so how about a "dual-head" machine (in one box of course) where the "surfing" internet connection is serviced by a "locked down" CPU with security, virus-checking etc, and the dev CPU(s) are air-gapped/highly firewalled, but both display on the same display(s).
You mouse over between windows and can type into either.
The only way of copying data from one domain to the other, locally, could be the clipboard/cut-n-paste.
Dev machines generally need to be networked for code-control, teamwork, tools licences etc, but that could/should be on a separate physical firewalled network.
Methane-spotting satellite that gives true readings of industry emissions hits skies in 2024
Thursday 20th July 2023 15:03 GMT
Re: I wonder what...
True, the _majority_ of the CO2 in the atmosphere is natural, what we're concerned about is the "topping up" of that by anthropogenic burning of ("natural") fossil fuels.
In any case, much more carbon is locked up around the world in carbonate sedimentary rocks. Maybe we could encourage more of that to happen, in the oceans, to permanently lock the stuff up. Combine feldspar with CO2 in industrial quantities and dump the limestone formed.
Always on the Horizon, UK must wait for megabucks EU science deal
Thursday 20th July 2023 14:39 GMT
Re: becoming a global science superpower
Hasn't it always been like that?
Kelvin formulated the second Law of Thermodynamics IN 1851, during the pursuit of more efficient steam engines, which was driven by market forces. Theoretical physics (of its day), from market finance.
It's only in the WWII years and soon after that science research was funded by government (military technology being the main driver).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
