Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: nice story

For "clicker" substitute "clinker",

Yes. My brain was saying clinker but my fingers typed clicker. I have no idea why :-)

Re: nice story

But hey, you voted for them.

"them", being any party that's been in power since then, of course, which means the vast majority of voters voted "them" in. Those who never vote or have only voted for parties who never made it to power can hold there heads up high, point and laugh. Except the Greens, of course, who don't want any form of nuclear power! :-)

Re: Something about Americans.....

The Krypton Factor?

Re: nice story

"There is absolutely no excuse for the amount of fossil fuels we've shoved up power-station chimneys during the whole of my adult life."

True. And until very recently, no safe limits set on the emissions. Coal fired power stations were pumping out enough radioactive particulates to have closed down a nuclear power station. And giving away/selling the "clicker" to be used as hard-core/pathways, a highly toxic mix.

Re: Presumbly the UK has similar plans

FWIW, Japan was at war with someone in the 20th century pretty much all the way up to and including WW2.

Re: Presumbly the UK has similar plans

"The Coronavirus Act 2020 was ready to go suspiciously quickly - I suspect there are boilerplates."

Yes, pandemic planning was already done. What appears to have gone badly wrong was the provisions and supplies supposed to be in warehouses, ready to go. Much was either expired and unusable or had been wound down and reduced over the years under the guise of cost savings.

Re: How much are the Tories in Government

Maybe the current Deputy PM will be made President for Global Affairs at MetaAlphabet Platforms.

"Nobody must be skimming Usenet addresses these days."

The number of Usenet users, apart from binary downloaders, has plummeted, and of those users still using it for actual discussion, no one uses a real email address any more.

Re: Snail mail can be just as bad

CofE work with documentation 2000+ years old. It takes a while to get it up to date :-)

Re: Ridiculous

"However their EU Mandated WEEE recycling van is round in 15 minutes flat to cart the old "dead" machine and accompanying consumables back to the warehouse."

I've seen the opposite. Went in to commission a new printer and not only was the old printer still there, left by the previous printer company, the one that had replaced was ALSO still there, from the SAME previous printer company. Both the old ones were twice the size, half the speed and twice the running cost of the one we had just put in. They should have billed the original supplier for storage as they were leased items.

Re: Too Often...

One place I worked at, someone mis-ordered bog rolls. They wanted 100 rolls and got a 100 boxes of 100 each. They were probably still using them during the great bog roll shortage of Mar/Apr 2020!

Re: Boffin?

S/he joined joined 2010. Should know better by now :-)

"watching as the information is being gathered."

That's been possible for quite a few years now, long before Starlink and similar was planned for. IIRC, the first sat phones for civilian use were made available around the end of the 1990's. Military use certainly predates that, probably by a significant margin. ISTR reports of military operations being planned around when satellites could be overhead.

"blow up or disable at most a few hundred very-much-civilian and very-well-mapped ground stations."

Well, true, but at that point it really doesn't matter. WW3 has already started once that level of attack is in progress.

DA's are basically elected politicians as I understand it. Not being in the USA, I could be wrong.

Re: Half full or empty

Shirly tea is an infusion, not a brew. (Lancastrians excepted, of course)

Re: It will be running Ubuntu?

"(actually how about real iron core storage? Or stone tablets)"

Funnily enough, that's what I came here to ask when they said "immutable data". I'm not sure spinny disks will survive the launch or landing and SSDs don't really have the lifespan I think they envisage. Although now I'm asking the question, paper tape might well last quite a long time in the cool, airless lava tubes, deep enough to be shielded from radiation. But, as someone mentioned earlier, there's some evidence of meteor impact that might be disadvantageous to long term "immutable" storage of any kind.

Re: Wait!

"38 to 52 minutes @33rmp"

rmp? Revolutions per mega (or milli?) pixel?

Yes, drivers for leading and bleeding edge hardware is forever the bane of FOSS OSs. The OEMs will rarely, if ever provide drivers or information for those wanting to write drivers. Things are improving, slowly, especially in Linux-land, but if you want the latest kit, Windows is the only option.

Re: "standard pc?"

Must admit, I generally use csh at the command line and only use bash when I need looped command or running scripts. I never noticed that bash had word move left/right with ctrl-arrow keys. But then the first thing I do with a new install is set the key repeat rate to some I find comfortable, which is 3-4 times faster than the default. Likewise, I shorten the delay before key repeat starts. Been doing that since I first discovered FreeBSD 4.3.

Oh, and I've never had an issue with dual or even triple booting. Just always install Windows first because it WILL trash your other OSs :-) Not tried with anything newer than Win7 mind, things might have changed with Windows since then, but the fact FreeBSD uses only one partition and allocates it's slices inside actually makes it much easier and safer to multiboot.

Re: Fund DreamChaser, please

On the other hand, SpaceX's Starship is going to be a tail-lander with quite a large load capacity even for the landing. I don't know what sort of G forces are involved in that sort of landing though.

Re: Yablochka redux?

"Given that Russia's access to latest software from big vendors seems quite as restricted as its access to hardware, they may need to revert to older versions which are not as easily subjected to sanctions. Or licencing checks, for that matter."

In the early days of the home computer revolutions, what was available behind the Iron Curtain was knock-off Spectrums and C64 at best, often with low RAM specs. Some very efficient and innovative coding came out of eastern Europe, especially when The Wall came down and access to the latest Western kit became possible.

I can easily imagine a similar situation developing in Russia now, possibly a major shift to Linux if not just outright hacks of Windows so there's no registration or phoning home. It's not like anyone can successfully sue them now.

Re: Yablochka redux?

"I used a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop PC for a day when my regular desktop was broken. It was adequate for everything except full screen video, and I suspect the latter was due to the GPU limitations."

Depends what you mean by full screen video. My RasPi4 running Kodi plays 1080p full screen with very low CPU usage. That's X265 video in the main. It depends what codec the video needs and if there is any hardware acceleration in the GPU to support it and software to make use of it.