Posts by phuzz 6732 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
I agree on the Mint comparisons. I've got a bunch of mostly low end machines that I've been running Mint MATE on, but now it's time to upgrade to Mint 21, I'm wondering if the Xfce version might squeeze out a bit more performance.
Any spare RAM will just be gobbled up by Chrome though, so it's probably moot.
Presumably the exact amount that NASA paid would be in a public document somewhere.
I couldn't find it, but the initial contract was for $311M which was supposed to include the work done to convert it. Mind you, that contract ended up ballooning to about $1B. Gotta love 'cost plus' contracts eh?
I don't think there's any clear information yet, but I believe the plan is for SpaceX to build a Lunar lander version of Starship, which will be launched unmanned, and will travel all the way out to the Lunar gateway station.
Then the astronauts will travel out to meet it in an Orion capsule launched by SLS. Then they'll climb into the Starship, land, do science, take off again and return to the Lunar gateway, then get back into Orion for the trip home.
The Lunar version of Starship will stay in orbit around the moon, and will probably never return to earth.
(Obviously all this could change between now and whenever they launch).
Er, it really does need possible abort capability if there's people on board.
The Apollo Lunar Module had a big Abort button, which would drop the descent stage, and burn the ascent engine to get back to orbit. It even had a entirely separate backup computer, just for aborts when the main computer was down.
If you don't have an abort mode, this is what happens >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It all depends who came up with the idea. I've worked plenty of places where an otherwise sensible IT decision (eg, 'don't use the server room as a fridge') would be overruled by someone higher up. After all, if they get paid more money that me, then they must know better right?
Of course, when said idiotic decision turned out to be a bad idea, it wasn't the execs that took the blame....
("why didn't you tell us it was a bad idea", 'I did, here's the email', "I didn't read that, you should have told me in person", 'I did!', "well, I don't remember that, so it's all your fault").
A better way to phrase it would have been "GPS systems must take into account the slight gravity-induced timing shifts in order to achieve accurate positioning".
I remember an anecdote (which I can't find anywhere), that one of the original US Military customers for GPS wasn't sure about this new-fangled Relativity thing, and asked for the option to disable the compensation. They found (as predicted) that the clocks on the GPS satellites run about 38ms faster per day than clocks on the Earth's surface, which gives you a compounding position error of about 10km (per day!). The "take Relativity into account" fix was left turned on.
(This is a combination of the relativistic time dilation due to the satellites moving fast, relative to the ground. This slows down the clocks by 7ms. And the dilation due to being in slightly lower gravity, which makes the clocks run 45ms faster, hence 38ms fast overall.
And all this is without the very slight changes in signal propagation caused by changes in the atmosphere, perturbations in the satellites' orbits etc. etc. GPS requires a wide spread of different parts of physics)
A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that the very first GPS satellite is a whole 0.6 seconds older than a ground spare by now!
Congratulations, you got about 90% of that anecdote is completely wrong.
When the UK decided that the best aircraft to use as an air defence fighter was the Tornado ground-attack aircraft, they went to Marconi for a air-to-air radar, (with Ferranti providing some parts.)
As with basically all defence projects, it was late, but in order for a plane to fly, it has to be balanced, and so in place of the unfinished radar, the first Tornado F2 jets flew with a concrete ballast where the radar should be. This garnered the nickname of "Blue Circle" radar, because there was a famous brand of cement called Blue Circle, also, various MoD projects used 'rainbow' codenames, which began with a colour (eg, Blue Cedar, or Blue Danube).
The opposite is true as well.
When Apple made it really easy to buy music via iTunes, sales went up, and piracy went down.
When Amazon made it really easy to buy ebooks, sales went up, and piracy went down.
When Netflix made it easy to stream TV and movies, you've guessed it, piracy went down. Except that now every company is trying to start their own streaming service, (meaning it's complicated to find the service that has the show you want to watch, and expensive to subscribe to), people are once more going back to piracy.
Most people will quite happily pay a 'fair' price for media, if it's easy and convenient. If it's not easy, convenient and cheap, they'll just go straight to piracy which is always quite easy, fairly convenient, and above all, free.
Instructions written for Ubuntu almost always work unchanged for Mint.
That's the important bit right there. Not only do instructions work, basically any software made for Ubuntu (ie, most linux software) will also work unchanged.
I'm managing a whole bunch of Mint desktops at work and it's pretty straight forward.
Rather than Occam, a better razor to use here is Hanlon's:
"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Maybe they were shit at their job, accidentally deleted the control app, and they were actually trying to log into the sensors to fix them before their boss noticed, but fucked it up even worse?
Chiark also hosts a good Minesweeper clone, which only presents you with guaranteed solvable maps.
In the UK this use case is covered by people using the NFC in their phone linked to a bank account/card. That way merchants can still use the same terminals they use for credit/debit cards, and the punter just has to carry their phone.
I'm assuming this would also work with contactless terminals in other countries too.
The trouble is, your user name will probably come out fine, (because both en-GB and en-US use qwerty). That means there's no way to notice that the computer is using a different map than the keyboard you're using, so you'll blithely type @ when you thought you pressed ".
Almost as much fun as trying to set up a computer in French, when you only have a UK keyboard.
Bouncing around between different OS's has taught me to only use alphanumerics in file names, and maybe a - or _ (if I'm feeling fancy).
It's the same with passwords, eg, I don't have a £ in a password, in case I end up having to try and logon to a machine with a US keyboard layout. (and yes, I have had that problem)
The idea of a space station rotating to produce artificial gravity dates to Von Braun (helped by illustrator Chelsey Bonestell) in the early 50s
Werner always did have good PR, however, Tsiolkovsky (of the 'Tsiolkovsky rocket equation') wrote about rotating habitats in 1903, and it wasn't even a new idea then.
But it's this moment when you find out that the remaining power supply can't actually cope with all the load, and fails hard.
Had this on a blade enclosure that had four supposedly-redundant PSUs. I pulled the power out of one PSU to move it to a different UPS, the enclosure tried to shunt all the load to one of the other PSUs, which promptly failed. It claimed to be 1200W, but only worked ok up until about 300W...
I wonder how much of the GUI/CLI split is down to how different people remember information?
Personally, if I've not used a command for a a few months, I've generally forgotten the syntax and have to look it up. Exact text just doesn't stick in my brain.
On the other hand, my spatial memory is good, so I can use a GUI I've not touched for years and still find the option I need. Even when the GUI has changed it doesn't slow me down much because I've got some memory of all the other GUIs I've come across and can make an educated guess of where best to look. Plus the first thing I do in any new software is find the settings and see what I can change.
The innovative part is that they're using electric pumps to pressurise the fuel going into the engine, which makes it drastically more simple and reliable.
Hence the name 'Electron' for the first stage. As the 1st stage engine is named "Rutherford", and the second stage engine is named "Curie", naming the rockets themselves after elementary particles is an obvious step.
I feel that
unzip; touch; grep; mount; fsck; more; yes; fsck; fsck; umount; clean; sleepis slightly more poetic than
Expand-Archive; New-Item; Mount-DiskImage; Select-String; Repair-Volume; Get-Content; -Force; Repair-Volume; Dismount-DiskImage; Clear-Host; Start-Sleepbut each to their own.
For me it would have to be Socket 754, as used by AMD's first ground-breaking Athlon 64 CPUs. Fine pin pitch, the perfectly proportioned hole in the middle, and a very satisfying mechanical clamping when you lower the lever, just brilliant.
Never been a fan of LGA sockets :(
I was fixing an Outlook problem on my boss's laptop. I noticed he had a huge Deleted Items folder, so I decided to be helpful and empty it.
(Bare in mind that as head of IT he was a very technical person, and the only reason I was fixing the problem was that he had to go to a meeting.)
It turned out that his email filing 'system' was to delete any not immediately-relevant email, but leave them in the bin just in case he needed them later. Fortunately he understood that this was a carzy system, so he forgave me for deleting what was effectively his 'inbox'.
(I hope you have a better system now Malc!)
For reference this is what it took a couple of years ago to generate the virtual sets for The Madalorian (although it's a bit light on the nitty gritty tech details so if anyone knows of a deeper dive I'd love to read it):
Bear in mind, the image isn't static, it's changed so that the parallax looks correct from the camera's PoV
It takes 11 interlinked computers to serve the images to the wall. Three processors are dedicated to real-time rendering and four servers provide three 4K images seamlessly side-by-side on the wall and one 4K image on the ceiling. That delivers an image size of 12,288 pixels wide by 2,160 high on the wall and 4,096 x 2,160 on the ceiling. With that kind of imagery, however, the full 270 degrees (plus movable back LED walls) and ceiling cannot be rendered high-resolution photo-real in real time. The compromise is to enter in the specific lens used on the camera into the system so that it renders a photo-real high-resolution image only for the camera's specific field of view at that given moment while the rest of the screen displays a lower-resolution image that is perfectly effective for interactive lighting and reflections on the talent, props and physical sets, but of a simpler polygon count for faster rendering times.
(src)
Part of the reason it was so necessary for The Mandalorian was that shiny armour he wears.
With a traditional green screen they'd have to CGI in all the correct reflections onto the reflected green. With screens all the way around, most of the reflections will be close enough to not need touching up.
We've got a (fairly worn out) Utlimaker 2 at work which has pretty loud servos. You can hear what shape the head is drawing from the different sounds because the x and y axis have slightly different tones. A curve will produce a rising and then falling tone (or vice versa), diagonals at different angles are different chords etc.
If someone with more electronics ability than me wired straight into the servos (or motor controllers?) they could certainly coax some tunes out of it.
Or now I think about it, it should be possible to design a 3D shape, which also played a tune as it printed. Although if you wanted it to actually be a printable shape then your tune would have to have a repeating structure with new sounds being introduced slowly.
Fun idea now I think about it.
He does mention in the write up that instead of every floppy drive in a bank playing a single tone, he changes how many are playing over the course of the note to approximate a guitar, or piano etc.
I guess that sort of makes it a synthesizer, but as you say, that's the whole point!
The drives are grouped in columns by the software and the whole column can only play one tone at a time, but with varying number of drives playing. By changing the number of active drives I can make the tone volume change over time and mimic piano keystrokes or plucking guitar string which volume decays exponentially. The envelope can also be used to get other nice sounding effects, like vibration (sinusoidal envelope), etc.
This weekend, on my home computer (running Windows 10), I was getting annoyed by security dialogues popping up when I was trying to copy stuff from my NAS.
The official MS solution? Go into Control Panel (itself already an anachronism), and access 'Internet settings', AKA, the original Internet Explorer settings program.
I'm pretty sure there's not even any installed version of Internet Explorer on that PC, but Microsoft integrated it so deeply that it's control panel is still there. Probably still in Win 11 too.
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