Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: Sewerage leak

That's even more common now, especially since the pandemic and so many orgs switching rapidly to laptops and still have some level of WFH. When I get called to a faulty laptop and it's suspiciously clean, my spidey senses immediately trigger and I wonder just what form of liquid, slime, ooze or gunk might be in there.

The silly thing is, if the user fessed up in the first place, it would be cheaper and with less come-back on them. By attempting to clean it and reporting "I don't know, it just stopped working", they inevitably get caught out in a lie and there's a charge for a service visit that ends up being chargeable as "non-warranty".

Re: California water...

Or pass on the purification to the data centre by only allowing them to take in waste water. If they need it cleaned first, then that's on them. Much better than taking fresh water and dirtying it. And if they really are such large water "customers", maybe they should be partnering with the local water company anyway and using their expertise to clean the water they dirtied instead of the usual attitude of doing the minimum they can get away with (or less for as long as they can before being caught)

Re: I'm beginning to wonder...

It reminds me of something from Mad Max or other films of that ilk. Badly fitting, welded on panels, which Tesla have a reputation for along with that whole post-apocalypse look it has. The preppers are probably drooling over it thinking they can charge it up from a couple of recycled solar panels :-)

...and considering Jay Lenos obsession with cars, I can just imagine what was going on inside his head when the claim of making a cybertruck waterborne was put to him. I've seen him talking about cars and he seems to know a thing or two about them. I've not seen the show, but I wonder how he managed to keep a straight face :-)

Re: scraping the bottom

Although not as serious a risk, reversing any car or truck down a slipway to launch your boat or watercraft is going to cause problems in the medium to long term anyway. That salt water gets inside places you can't hose down, assuming the drivers knows enough to even care and pretty much every launch I've seen happen that way, the car or truck invariably ends up at least part way into the water and the driver rarely if ever bothers to hose down with fresh water.

Re: Don't know whether to laugh or cry

That doesn't really explain why US congresscritters are so bothered about it though. US corps making profits abroad tend to keep that money out of the US so it doesn't get taxed when being repatriated other than those rare times when they get a tax-saving "amnesty".

It makes one wonder what and who is motivating them to this action and how thick the brown envelopes are ;-)

Re: Good thing too

"The AMD Geode was 32 bit only and was sold until 2019."

Wow! I didn't know that was still around so recently! My last and most abiding memory of it was when it was used as a basis for a tiny WinXP PC and only just barely managed to run with enough oomph to be useful as a basic office desktop. Then MS released the first service pack for XP along with a load of extra bloat that killed the Geode microPC dead :-)

Re: No imagination any more

"They've been replaced with identikit programming graduates taught to code by numbers."

That's true. But, as systems grow and evolve, they become ever more complex to the extent that no one person can fully understand the underlying hardware and software so you need teams of people working on new projects and developments, and almost by definition, that means corporate involvement and all that comes with it. Arduinos, Arm, Raspberry Pi and similar are where the "bedroom developers" of old are playing these days, but they are competing with the corporate world and their big marketing budgets. It's a "mature" industry now, not a bunch of hobbyists coming up with brand new ideas in a the vacuum of the nascent computer industry of the 70's and 80's. Someone upthread mentioned cars and shoes. Same thing. It's all "been done" with very little room left for true innovation, just minor tweaks and improvements.

Re: Still fighting the last war

"Although I suppose you could have a limited high G mode where the pilot presses a button to let the computer take over the dogfight, render him unconscious and so carry on flying the plane until he wakes up?"

Didn't the Germans do that back in WWII with the Stuka dive bomber? ISTR reading that when it pulled up, the pilot would black out for a short while so the act of pulling up was designed to be automated once the bomb was released. Not quite what is envisioned for the Tempest, but an early beginning of automating where the pilot might not be able to cope with the G forces exerted in some manoeuvrers.

Re: Still fighting the last war

"Besides, it follows on from the naming protocol which gave us Lightning, Tornado, Typhoon and Lightning again."

...and Typhoon again, the first also intended as a Hurricane replacement during WWII, and the only reason I remember this is because I built the Airfix kit of it about 45 or so years ago :-)

Re: Hydrogen is absolute SHIT for energy storage or transfer

While I agree in principle, I don't remember houses exploding with any sort of high frequency or regularity back when most of the UK used "town gas", largely consisting of hydrogen, which surely must have had the same propensity to leak back then as it does now. Physics hasn't changed.

"Back on the Musk vs FCC thing... On the one hand I'm very wary of govs wanting to control infrastructure things like broadband and on the other, if you want broadband (Starlink), just buy it off the Starlink website."

The bit I find amusing is the way that some companies get all upset because a potential customer choose not to buy their product, for whatever reason. It seems to be an especially USA thing, although I have no doubt it happens elsewhere too. eg that "cloud" thing the US military was tendering for. They seem to forget that the "customer is king" and if they choose not to buy your product, then that;s it, suck it up. Believing your product is "best" or "most suited" is your own salesman fantasy. The customer will choose what they think is best, for whatever their criteria happen to be.

Re: McDonnell Douglas DC-X

Yeah, the voice over was more like marketing-speak than anything actually useful, implying that it would eventually reach orbit with more development, which was never going to happen. It was certainly an interesting idea for the time, and it could have done with a lot more development, especially treating that as only a first stage, but much bigger but we'll never know how things might have turned out if NASA had pushed for it as an Shuttle alternative. I suspect it would never have worked because, like the Shuttle, they were trying to do too much with one vehicle, eg the "flying" part. SpaceX came along later, took what NASA gave them, probably including stuff from that program, and pared it down to the bare essentials to make a returnable booster using the latest materials and technology and didn't try to make it fully manoeuvrable and capable of "flight" (They saved that for Starship :-))

Re: Hop

On the other hand, just knowing it CAN be done, even with just the info from seeing it happen, repeatedly, and all the online discussion of how it works freely available, a decent engineer (or team) with the right backing, can replicate it. They don't need to steal, although it possibly might help speed the process along. At this stage of their design process, they are barely any further than SpaceX grasshopper, but I'd expect them to progress faster than SpaceX did since there are fewer unknowns ahead. Their aim of 2030 sounds reasonable so long as they don't get tripped up by materials science, or shoddy workmanship in and effort to get it right first time to please someone higher up the food chain like the Soviets did with Concordski. The Chinese don't seem to worry as much about technology races and being first, they play the long game, even if they don't always get it right.

Re: They do it over there but they don’t do it here …. (Ooh fashion)

"That the ASA works at all is more of a complement to the business environment in the UK than an expression of its power."

And like other "voluntary" regulators, it's worth remembering that they came in existence because the Government said "regulate yourself to our satisfaction, or we WILL do it for you",

I still remember when the Press Complaints Commission was set up and what lead to that, and then the very serious government threats in the early 20-teens as it was seen to be failing and the more robust Independent Press Standards Organisation being formed to stave off actual Government regulation, which scared the shit out of the press and it's owners. It's still not perfect, but probably still better all around than Government getting involved in that sort of regulation.

Re: Quote from Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

"the whole series in publishing order"

I generally find that works best most long series of books. It's simple, it's how the author wrote them, and saves the arguments with purists and "super fans" who insist on the whatever order they personally have decided is best. And it's nice to be "surprised" when you come across a story that is a sequel or prequel of one you've already read :-) Prequels especially, because they often expand on and sometimes assume you've read, the chronologically later stories.

Re: All the more reason

In English, it's more usually pronounced as a Z, which is what I see it as. Thankfully (for once!), the US gave us Brits the word "zit" for a puss filled lump, usually on the face, which fits just as neatly as using the Chinese SH sound for it.

Re: All the more reason

"or just wind down operations if it's determined that there is no feasible way for the company to operate and comply with applicable regulations."

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, there's also the other side of the coin to consider. What happens if there's a bat-shit crazy President in charge, especially with one or both houses in his/her pocket?

Re: Peripherals

"lack of an adequate shredding policy...Everyone was certain it was a stitch-up"

Oh well played, nicely done :-)