Posts by defiler 1469 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2010
Well, that depends on whether your playback device is portable. I still have my old iPod Video kicking about, but I tend to use my phone. Shove it in my back pocket and drop the wire down the back of my top. Done. Cable's out the way, and I turn off notifications on my phone because I'm dead inside and hate everyone.
I don't have to communicate with the outside world and they don't have to put up with my moaning. Everyone's a winner! :)
My (dated) knowledge of AOA sensors is that they're more-or-less windvanes on their sides, so the air passes over them and pulls them straight back. If they're at an angle then the aircraft is not travelling directly forwards through the air, but is tail-sitting. Or nose-sitting, but between gravity and engines that won't last long before it's straight again.
So you have a mechanical component that rotates, and a sensor to detect the rotation. I expect they'll use Hall sensors so there's no contact and no bits to get mucky *inside*, but if the rotating component freezes, or gets caked in grease or muck so it can't move, it'll read wrongly.
If it seizes during landing (or on rotation at take-off), it'll be raised, and will register a high AOA. Nose-down to correct...?
If you had two operating at once, you could at least tell that you were getting inconsistent readings. If you had three, you'd have a pretty good guess which sensor to disregard.
My understanding was that manual trim would only disable this system for a couple of minutes. Then you'd be back to fighting it. A nice big loop of fight, disable, fly, fight, disable, fly. You'd better hope it doesn't trim down when you're trying to make your emergency landing.
Your stall alert makes sense 90% of the time, but in a real emergency there are too many alarms going off already. Adding information announcements on the end distract the pilots away from dealing with the other factors going on, and delays the other alarms from sounding. Better to have the pilots aware that this thing can go wrong in training.
Even better to have it run on more than one sensor at a time. If it really is one AOA sensor to each flight-control computer, that's just disgraceful.
We had a moderate-sized client. 5 UK offices, plus two or three overseas (which luckily didn't factor into this!). IPX across the board, with a bunch of 3Net routers linking the UK offices together. All worked pretty well until one day the phone bill came in. Thousands of pounds on ISDN calls. They called BT and requested an itemised bill, which turned up in a box...
Turns out that one of the network printers had had its network interface replaced, and the new card was broadcasting its availability across the WAN every 2 minutes. All the lines came up to deliver a handful of packets, and they'd time out and hang up again. Then they'd dial and hang up, dial and hang up, every two minutes for three months until the bill was issued.
Add them up and it's over 85000 calls, all at minimum charge. Ouch
That's a very good point, and my understanding is that SSD heat scales pretty linearly with capacity, while HDD scales with number of platters, so it's a less direct relationship. And, of course, there's the sipndown option.
(My server is in the attic at home, and I've had to spin up drives when I've felt they've got too cold. About 8 degrees Celcius is a trigger to perform a RAID check.)
You do realise there's a significant market for small businesses and individuals to store lots of crap, right? And they don't worry about how fast it is, so long as it's big. I'm included there, for example.
There's also a massive section of businesses who need large capacity data, but not on the Google/Microsoft scale of filling out whole datacentres, where the difference in purchase cost is overwhelmed by the running cost. There's a reason why BackBlaze are spinning platters.
If it ever came to price parity then yes SSD wins. And there's a sliding scale where more and more people and businesses will pay the premium for SSD as that premium shrinks, but at 2-3x it won't kill the spinning drive market.
This actually seems like a plausible use case for facial scanning, but the voice in the back of my mind is screaming:
1) Why was this not approved in public first of all and run by all the relevant people to keep it public.
2) This is the thin end of the wedge. It's easy to get legislation passed to put these systems into prisons, but our government will make the wording fuzzy enough that it'll fit for a nursery, a cash machine, a pub or a stadium...
A fella I went to school with got congratulated by his CO for putting a brand new tank on its roof during a test drive.
Not saying that this case is a glowing example, but sometimes the Army are very happy to have somebody break the kit - it lets them know how easily / badly it can be broken.
Sorry, Doug. I'm with Eldakka here.
You're absolutely right that Apple popularised the full-face screen. They made it much more usable than the predecessors, and I'll not take that away from them. Importantly, they went for a capacitive touchscreen, which I don't think anybody else had. My old HTC Touch HD had a resistive screen in 2008, for example. It took a little while for everyone to jump on that feature.
The thing only had a line editor that made MS-DOS edlin look like a state of the art WYSIWYG editor!
Okay, so it had Vi.
Want to delete the 25th charcter on the line? 24 x space, "d", Enter.
Insert something? Space out to where you want to insert, i, text, Enter.
Yeah, you said. It had Vi.
/me scuttles off to find a bunker...
To be fair, we're more trustworthy in Scotland than in Kensington & Chelsea. Even in Edinburgh and Glasgow!
Besides which, Edinburgh Council's parking fine payment is remarkably streamlined. Clearly they want that fat cash fast! It's easier to pay the fine than pay the parking. Except for the size of payment...
My boy wants to play Portal and Portal 2, for a start. And for that money I can get myself an i5-2400 and a moderate-but-not-amazing video card. It's plenty for that task.
It might struggle on Crysis, sure. Don't care. There are a bazillion other games I can play.
But oh no! I can't play in 4k at 120Hz??! So what?
Nah - we'll wing it on the day!
The number of times I've seen this. It seems like everyone thinks that everything should just work every time, without giving it a wee check beforehand.
Got a video file in your keynote presentation? It worked fine on computer A - we'll never need to test that the codecs are in computer B... For example.
Hmm - fella I worked with nearly 20 years ago told me of an SGI server (I vaguely remember being described as "red and about the size of a fridge") spending years in a Ferranti building without ever being unpacked because there was no paperwork for it. Then one day, about 3 years later, it was taken away again.
This is usually a complex process in itself, yielding nothing more than a piece of elaborate scrap that will still fail to do the job, prompting the amateur mechanic to say "oh sod it" and source the manufacturer tool...
"The cam cover gasket may be replaced without removing the engine from the frame" (or similar such words) meant that my Honda Blackbird pissed oil everywhere until I could bring some proper time to bear on it and drop the engine out. Getting that big gasket into place with about 4mm clearance was a sod of a job that in the end failed.
Still, I tend to get the Haynes manual when I can. As the article says they tend to be more practical than the manufacturer ones.
Well, you say "bought", but you only bought most of it. You're leasing the battery.
That's why the numbers don't add up for me on the Zoe - I don't do enough miles to justify the monthly cost of the battery.
I wonder if that means the 10-15-year-old Ford Motor Group cars will be affected. They used Volvo satnav, which was horrible to operate, and had some shrill woman do the voice. You were in so much trouble when you took the wrong exit off a roundabout. Might be fun if that's your thing... ->
That's pretty-much how I read it over the years too.
HP consolidated all of the PA-RISC / Alpha / whatever else into their in-house VLIW project, and then Intel climbed aboard. By that point everyone else (in the server/workstation market) was already running scared of HP's leviathan, and lobbing Intel into the mix only made it seem more inevitable.
MIPS, PowerPC, Sparc all fell by the wayside under the inertia of Itanium. It didn't have to be good. It just had to be there and backed by such big players. ARM got away by running under the radar. x86 got away by means of its own inertia, and AMD shoving their x64 instructions in when Intel said it was "impossible".
Shock and Awe, I suppose, killed off the others. But then ARM started to get faster and more powerful and started eating x64's lunch. No problem - x64 was also getting faster and more powerful and nibbling into Itanium's lunch. Itanium didn't have anyone left up the tree to start stealing lunches from. It started in a niche, lived in a niche and will die in a niche.
Two things, though. I understand the Itaniums are incredibly reliable. They're intended for Mainframes and as such are much more dependable than Xeons. I'd be interested to know what makes them better if anyone knows? And secondly, I feel the world is poorer with a homogenised CPU landscape, so the loss of Itanium is a bit of a blow to diversity.
In my old house we had a little Hepworth H20 push-fit plumbing. Somebody decided it'd be fine from plastic to chrome-plated pipe.
I was awoken to panic as water started leaking through the ceiling.
I was in the middle of selling the house as well, and had the Surveyor coming round that day - I still don't know how I managed to clear that up. Put compression fittings on from there and it was fine. Luckily it was the nice clean supply side, rather than waste. Ewww.
But businesses still use Office, and use it a lot.
I think the real clincher here is that there is virtually no difference between Office 2013 and 2016. Certainly nothing that makes an upgrade purchase compelling. And I don't imagine 2019 will be much different.
So you run with the old licenses so long as you're paying £200 a head for it.
<sigh>
Because you need to deal with that one application that needs Windows.
Because you need to deal with that one plug-in that needs Office.
Because you need to deal with that one user that can't figure it out.
Because you need to deal with that one CEO that thinks LibreOffice is slow.
And continue for 100 reasons.
Windows isn't perfect, BSD isn't perfect, Linux isn't perfect, MacOS isn't perfect. Hell, even I'm not perfect. But we all get the job done, and if somebody locks us down enough nobody gets hurt.
I agree 100%. It's a dev sandbox - it should have dev data. Properly redacted test data. People make mistakes, and sometimes the door is left open. But with actual, live data there would have been a few pairs of eyes checking it over. In this case one person was careless, but shouldn't have had that data.
Also, for those saying security should be automated, that just means that all systems will have exactly the same weaknesses...
Largely this. My HDD failure rates have always been pretty low. I had a Deathstar fail (but then, I had 3 of them, so I was pushing my luck). I've had a single Samsung drive fail. My home server currently runs WD Caviar Green 3TB, and I've lost 2 of them, I think. But that lives in the attic, so it gets cold-cold in winter and hot in summer. Not the best environment.
I think all the manufacturers are pretty interchangeable for the most part.
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