Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Re: The RYA Yachtmaster (Ocean) still includes sextant use

>The beauty of the sextant navigation, along with Line, and compass chart and a 2B pencil is that they will get you anywhere

It does help to know the time in Greenwich - but you can get that from the GPS

Re: USNA Annapolis

Seems unnecessary, even if GPS was down the US Navy has alternatives GLONASS and BAIDU

Re: "It's probably 20 times as much planning to execution."

Torpedo on the starb'd bow captain.

Quick send out the "form a sub-committee to study the problem" email

To hands to the Powerpoint

Re: " thereby presenting the best argument for ongoing remote work, for every job, forever"

You would think that the telescope's on-site staff are suitably quarantined

Re: Nobody told the rats

That could be a security problem.

With this new system the rodents would know exactly where to dig.

What precautions are being put into place to prevent toothy herbivores accessing this data ?

Re: Costs

Although that adds costs.

If I'm going to be responsible for damage where I dig then I don't just want a 1-800-CALL-BEFORE-YOU-DIG I'm going to need the precise locations in writing, signed by a director, witnesed and filed with my lawyers before I set foot on site. From every water, gas, power, telco, etc that MIGHT have services in that area.

If a water main bursts in a High St on a friday evening then it's going to take till well into Monday before anyone can start work.

Re: Not a hope

>Good luck to whoever gets the job, because they're seriously going to need it.

I don't think the contract is to find all the stuff

I don't think it's even to record all the stuff

It will probably end up being a web page with links to various utility companies 'contact us' page

Re: About bloody time!

Wait till you find out how many data centers have multiple independent fibre links - all in the same conduit

Re: Having worked with BT /Openreach....

>documention hadn't been updated for decades.

So long as the cablea are non-migratory

Re: Weight of passengers

>Prince Harry was also a helicopter pilot - he flew the Apache

He was the one who was demonstrating the value of peace and democracy by having an hereditary monarch shooting them from a helicopter gunship

Re: Weight of passengers

You are still allowed to not load luggage - although on wide bodies there is generally enough air-cargo that can be bumped first. It's expensive to leave passenger's luggage behind.

It's assumed safe because the individual terrorist doesn't know that their bag is one of the ones to fly on a different plane.

Re: Weight of passengers

The Italian Job maneuver ?

Re: Weight of passengers

That means it takes extreme skill/practice/aptitude - it doesn't mean they can count past 10 without taking their shoes and socks off.

Re: Weight of passengers

Army helicopter pilots can do adding up ?

Especially in stones and lbs = that's officer stuff

Re: Weight of passengers

The checkin desk had a scale that you stood on with your hand baggage - so you could always claim it was a very heavy laptop

Re: absolutely everything is kept.

Also the headline data rate is (I suspect) the raw antenna feed.

The first step is to do digital correlation between beams - this contains all the "information" from the raw signal and subsequent filtering and combinations further reduces raw "data" while still retaining all the signal.

Re: 10 years of deign work ?

Depends on the problem.

For space missions you want to lock the on-board software as early as possible because the HW depends on it and you are usually constrained to lots of of space-qualified systems.

What you innovate on is the processing software on the ground.

With SKA and CERN (or at least ATLAS) you are drinking from a firehose and at the start of the design you can't reasonably build a system that can keep up. With ATLAS (friends worked on it) the original plan was that you wouldn't be able to process everything and you would just sample the data - hopefully if events were random you would get X% of them by grabbing X% of the data. I assume with updates they can now process everything.

Definitely with SKA there was a lot of extrapolation of what would be possible when the HW was ready - especially at the front end digital correlators that have to swallow the raw signal.

Ironically what is difficult on these ground based missions is keeping them running for 20-30years.

I know the Keck telescopes built in the 90s have a full time team building things like motor controllers and PC interfaces to replace stuff made either for ISA bus era PCs or some long forgotten industrial control rack machines.

Re: Space??? who needs space?

The point is that you aren't trying to store that data - you are trying to process it.

Radio astronomy is basically capture lots of random noise, do clever stuff, get picture.

You do have to store lots of intermediate data because it can take months to build up an entire picture when you are relying on the Earth moving to shift your telescope.

The amount that will actually be stored permanently is relatively small.

Re: 10 years of deign work ?

Mostly no - when it was started nobody had any idea how to do the electronics.

Building it hoping extrapolating that GPU/FPGA/storage would catch up was a reasonable plan.

Unlike a certain optical survey telescope that worried about the data size and spent most of the design time inventing their own tape drive technology, because nothing available could store the XXXX bytes of data expected.

Where XXXX is a number that sounded insane at the time but is now probably on your phone

Re: Lol

>no gods involved the sending of emails.

Although sendmail config is believed to be the work of Cthullu

Re: Lol

So that's why it's called BCC

>Miguel de Icaza is a tool

On a software site I think that statement may be a little ambiguous

My senior developer just went up massively in my opinion.

We are having a state visit from $important politician. He was asked to give a talk on the very technical problem he works on

"Why, is $politico an expert on X?"

Well no, but ...

"So can you explain why I should waste my time ?"

Well no, but ...

"Right so I'm not bothering then"

Re: I see your icon, but will ask anyway

>How much CO2 is wasted just to make and ship/distribute all that paper?

Probably less than you would think

Paper is an insanely competitive microscopic-margin business. So costs are cut to the whatsit, hence very little energy is wasted - mills run on burning the unused off cuts etc.

It's heavy so is being delivered by the container load on ships

Re: Not much of a surprise

>Just how racist is the Scottish Assmbly, might I enquire?

Honest question from an ex-pat with no skin in the game - I was confused why our Aberdeen office had a strict rule against sportswear until it was explained to me.

Presumably the independants aren't big fans of the Conservative and Unionist party. On the other hand the wee-frees aren't full of Christian love and understanding for the left-footers.

So when the SNP gets to rule over an independent Scotland - who goes to the Gulags/takes advantage of Eu freedom of movement ?

> Doppler Radar

A robust stance from the Wind Shear supporters there

Re: Free school meals

Even cheaper if you add in the cost of administering free school meals, the armies of social workers etc to do assessments on who needs them etc

Presumably anybody who doesn't need free school meals is already opted out because little Trixie-Blossom can only eat vegan gluten-free organic moonbeams

Re: The only relevant question....

Gone down from the height of 70s cuisine that was the Spam Fritter ?

Re: 5th largest economy in the world

Fingerprint scanners are a reasonable idea

They store a hash of a single print, ie. they aren't useful for implementing a final solution to the problem of the gingers among us.

They can't be lost (except that kid that got a 'D' in woodwork)

The payment can't be donated to Gripper Stebson (showing my age!)

But that comes out of a totally different budget - it's even on a different spreadsheet