Re: Russian President Vladimir Putin has approved a project to build an Orbital Station
Both of which are Soviet designs ;)
6715 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
Current ISS is mostly Russian
I'd like to see what you're basing that on.
In terms of mass, the Russian segment (ROS) is roughly 90 tons, and the US segment (USOS) is over 300 tons. In terms of habitable space, ROS is 280m3 and the USOS is 750m3. In terms of sheer size (and visual impact) the US made truss and solar array dwarf the entire rest of the ISS. About the only thing I can see that Russia has led at is number of manned launches to the ISS (70 out of 116).
You might argue that currently the Russian segment is responsible for guidance, navigation, and control, but it's equally dependant on the US segment for power, attitude control, and comms. This separation of responsibilities is deliberate, so that both sides of the partnership have a role in the running of the entire station.
And as I've said elsewhere, none of this is actually Russian work. All of the modules, the launchers, and the human-carrying craft are just slightly upgraded Soviet designs.
When it comes to rocket engines, if you're going to call designs 'knock-off clones', then you might as well go all the way and call practically every rocket a clone of the German A4 (aka V-2). The Soviet Union learned as much from the V-2 program as the US did.
which will make it infeasible for them to build their own space station
I dunno, I wouldn't be surprised that if something actually gets launched, it will be a slightly modernised Soviet design*. That wouldn't need much in the way of Western tech.
Russia, as a modern country, has barely improved on the space program they inherited from the USSR. Every time they've tried to create new designs, they've failed. The only reason they're still considered a 'space power' today, is entirely down to the resilience of the original Soviet designs.
* eg, the recently launched Nauka module, is based on the Functional Cargo Block design, dating back to Salyut 2 in 1973. Tellingly, Nauka was due to launch in 2007, but was delayed until 2021.
There's another difference as well. Solar cells are designed to work with sunlight, which has a range of different wavelengths. Power beaming would (presumably) use a single, fixed, wavelength, which would enable the receiver to be much more efficient, and the wavelength can be picked to be less harmful (ie, no UV or higher energy).
Mind you, using Einstein to advertise fridges would have been perfect. He and Leo Szilard invented one.
Ok, you're only slightly bonkers ;)
Having an international agreement on removing defunct satellites is a good idea. Either sending them down into the atmosphere to (mostly) burn up, or punting them up higher into a 'graveyard orbit'.
Clustering old satellites is less of a good idea, as they will bump against each other, and bits of solar panel etc. will break off causing more space junk.
Sending them into the sun is really difficult. It seem like it would be easy, because the sun is very massive, and consequently has a large gravitation attraction. The thing is, the Earth, and everything on or around it is already orbiting the Sun (at over 100,000km/h). To 'drop' something into the sun, first you'd have to burn enough fuel to get it out of the Earth's orbit, but then it would still be going mostly the same speed as the Earth, so it would still orbit the sun, just in a slightly different orbit to the Earth. To get it down to the sun you'd then have to slow it right down from ~100,000km/h to zero*.
* Well, probably you wouldn't need to get the velocity all the way to zero, and you could use some gravity assists, but you'd still need to slow it down a lot.
Properly built racks have the heavy stuff on the bottom
Well that's the problem isn't it, you start out with grand plans, so when you get your new rack you put the UPSs at the bottom, and maybe disk trays next, and finish up with the lightest stuff on top, with space left for future expansion.
Then after a few years of "temporarily" adding new kit, and replacing old junk, squeezing in another UPS, and wedging a network switch in the side to "just get it working for now, we'll tidy it up later", and you've ended up with a rack that would wobble alarmingly, except that it's tied to the rack next to it with a completely undocumented web of cables, some of which don't seem to have a beginning or end, just one unbroken loop. Oh, and only half the equipment is actually screwed into the rack.
The most permanent part of any network is the equipment you jammed in temporarily to bodge fix something quickly.
A pal spilled a cup of (fortunately unsweetened) coffee over her laptop, and sensibly immediately pulled the power, and asked me to check it out before she tried to power it back on. Fortunately it just required a small bit of cleaning and fired right back up.
However, it did smell strongly of coffee, which I hate, but my friend was entirely happy with.
I think (but I'd love to hear from someone who knows more) that it's only 'Onedrive for Business' that uses Sharepoint as it's backend. The 'personal' version of Onedrive uses something else.
Now you've got me wondering which version basic M365 subscriptions include, I'm pretty sure it's the 'personal' version, but of course Microsoft don't make it easy to tell.
Anyway, I've got the day off today and this is getting dangerously close to 'work' ;)
Just been setting up Onedrive on Mint and it works pretty well tbh.
Microsoft once had a strategy they called "Embrace, extend, and extinguish", which became a catchphrase for many people.
(See also IBM's 'FUD' for an earlier example)
Right click the taskbar
Go to 'Taskbar settings'
Near the top there's a toggle button to deactivate it.
Just to save anyone else the five seconds of work it took me this morning to deactivate copilot after it showed up.
I wonder if Window's telemetry shows them how long between a feature being installed, and when it's deactivated, and maybe there's a dev at Microsoft somewhere looking at the sub-five minute timestamp for my computer. I imagine a single tear falling down their face.
Basically they get a bunch of trees (you might have to ask your parents what they were), and mash them all up with some chemicals, then press them out to make these thin white sheets called 'paper'. Then you use a robot to put paint on them so they look sort of like a screen. It's quite like e-ink, but you can only use each 'sheet' once, then you have to throw it away!
A 'news paper' is when the painting robot downloads the main stories from a news site and 'prints' them onto the 'paper'. A bit like a screen-grab, but less convenient.
It depends what you mean by 'compatible'. Compared to Windows/OSX less applications will run/install without problems on every variant of linux. On the other hand most of those problems can be fixed with just a bit of web searching (because someone else will have had your problem, and posted how to fix it), so in that respect you get more compatibility than Windows/OSX.
To put it a different way, if you have a Windows XP program, it might not run on Windows 11, and definitely won't run on OSX, but if you have a Linux program built for (eg) Red Hat, you can probably get it to work on your (Debian based) Linux Mint install, but you're going to have to do some fiddling.
TLDR: It depends
If Ubuntu's new encryption system is based on LUKS, then it would still be possible to unlock the disk in a different computer (or in a different OS) as long as you had the original recovery password somewhere.
Even if they don't use LUKS, then I assume Ubuntu will still have some sort of 'recovery key' that you generate at install time, as that's how every other full-disk encryption does it.
I got rid of all my CDs recently, even though they had massive sentimental value to me, purely because I didn't have space for them any more, and I never listened to them.
I do still listen to the music of course, because I ripped them all to MP3 years ago, and no one can stop me from doing that.
There is alternatives between 'horde physical media' and 'streaming everything'.
A user decided to set a BIOS password on their (company) laptop, which, of course, they had forgotten by the time they handed it in for a new one.
As it was still in warranty, the solution was to run the terminals of a 9V battery across the mainboard a couple of times until it wouldn't boot, then ring up the support line.
Thanks for sending out the replacement mainboard so quickly Dell ;)
I was thinking to myself "4Gb is overkill for an ATM anyway, all they need to do is display a GUI and contact the bank's database, it's not like they need to run a web browser".
Then I realised, I bet a lot of ATMs do have to run a web browser, to display adverts etc.
I'm sure that's fine, with no possible security implications whatsoever...
It's the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society's broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let's blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don't even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault.
Iain (M.) Banks
MS Access has always used Jet as it's database engine. (Well, in 2007 they changed the name to "Access Database Engine", but it's still basically Jet.).
Mind you, a spin off from the original Jet is used as the database behind Active Directory, Sharepoint, Word, Exchange and Windows Search among other things.
If you work in IT, on average, you're never more than two metres away from a Jet database.
Notepad++ is a fantastic text editor, but Wordpad fills (filled) a different niche of being a very simple word processor.
They're both designed for different, although superficially similar jobs.
Personally I can't think of any simple word processors like it, all the alternatives are full-fat.
Some devices are so old they only support old standards, and the manufacturer has given up supporting them. That leaves you with the choice of either finding a way to work around it (segmented network, keeping an old browser around to talk to it), or buying a newer device.
I'm thinking in particular of some APC power distribution units we have, which don't have firmware updates available, but upgrading them will involve unplugging the power to several devices, not all of which have reliably redundant power supplies. (I've been burned before by supposedly 'redundant' PSUs which fail when they have to support the load they're supposed to be rated for).
Fortunately we don't need access to their web interfaces more than once every few years, so they can be left without networking, and we have an old laptop we can plug in if they ever need a tweak.
Ah, art imitates life.
I was once doing some desktop support at a customer's office (fixing Outlook iirc), and I'd got as far as the desk of one of the PR people who wasn't there at that moment, giving me the opportunity to get my work done without distractions. However, as soon as I tried to use the mouse, I found a problem. Someone had sellotaped a two pence coin to the bottom of the mouse, meaning the optical sensor only worked intermittently. I pulled it off, and got on with my work. As I was finishing up, the user came wandering back to their desk, chatting away on a mobile phone the whole way. I outlined the work I'd done, and mentioned that 'someone' had stuck a coin to the bottom of the mouse. They replied that they had done it "so that the copper would protect me from the harmful electromagnetic radiation".
I looked at them, the mobile phone still up by their ear, the copper-coated steel coin, and just politely suggested that if they were worried about EM radiation, they should probably close their curtains* and walked off, heroically resiting the urge to either laugh in their face or start crying at the state of the world.
Honestly, that level of ignorance would probably come across as 'unrealistic' if Simon included it in a BOfH story.
* After all, the sun produces an enormous amount of harmful UV radiation. It's certainly the most dangerous electromagnetic radiation that most people encounter on a daily basis.
If someone is found to be unfit to stand trial, but the court thinks they may be a danger to other people, they can be 'sectioned', and locked up in a secure psychiatric hospital. In some ways that's worse than prison, because there's no set sentence, or possibility of parol, they're locked up until the doctors think they're no longer a danger.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Act_1983
the fundamental problem with Concorde is that it outperformed most, if not all, US military jets
It's not just the speed, it's the range too. Concorde could supercruise at mach two across the entire Atlantic. An F-22 can go faster, but not for as long.
I've heard that the average Concorde pilot clocked up more supersonic hours in one year, than every USAF pilot put together.
He's not been jailed for anything, he's awaiting trial and he's being charged with deliberately writing code, specifically to launder money, knowing full well that it would be used for illegal purposes. His lawyers say that he had no idea that it was going to be used for money laundering.
I don't know exactly how the Dutch legal system works, but I assume the prosecution will have to prove he intended to use the code for money laundering 'beyond reasonable doubt', and if they're taking it to court they presumably believe they have enough evidence to do so.
If all the network communication is flowing through the device, then it might be possible to hack it directly via malformed packets or something, and then use that as a way to attack the rest of the server.
I've had that exact problem with Epson receipt printers. The job prints fine, but for some reason that information never makes it back to CUPS, which keeps re-trying the job. As the printers are attached to cash drawers, this also results in the drawer going DING and shooting open, which can be a bit of a surprise.
(This is also fun for pranks, I knew a colleague had a cash drawer set up on a test bench, so I remotely sent a print, then messaged him to ask if I'd managed to surprise him. I certainly had, especially when the cash drawer had sprung open, and shoved the computer right off the desk :)
Yes you can get information about large earthquakes from anywhere, but only sensors in China are likely to pick up, eg, a weapons test there. Having access to local sensors gives much better resolution and sensitivity.
It's like the difference between spying on a building with a surveillance satellite vs someone with a camera in a building across the street.
"The PR department has complained it takes too long to publish to the website, so we need you to create a shared folder they can just drop the files into. Yes I know it's a bad idea but the head of PR is sleeping with the boss who is breathing down my neck so just get it done."