Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: In this case, it's not the technology.

You missed one more. Pulling the dusty files out of the dark corner of the brain where they were confined after I got my Chemistry MSc and went to the dark side of IT: Many light metal alloys are not steel, they change with time and some of them quite a lot. Some of it is change in crystalline structure, some of it is oxidation, some of it is dark magic which noone understands :)

Most Al, Ti, Mg, etc alloys (as used in space tech from half a century ago) would have undergone a considerable change of mechanical properties over 50 years (not necessarily bad by the way, Al alloys generally become less fragile and more plastic with age). What would have been well within the tolerances 60 years ago, may not necessarily be usable today. If the pump has any elements made out of Titanium or Al alloys that would have been the prime suspect in my book.

IMHO - this is the biggest FAIL in the Orbital idea. It is not a rocket technology fail, not a control tech fail, not a refurb fail. It is a material sciences fail.

Re: Corporate fines == useless

Not necessarily, especially for banks.

Banks manage anything - including IT change control as "risk" now. The reason why jobs are moved to lower cost and lower qualification geographies is that the cost of risk in doing so does not outweight the cost savings.

This fine will be a precedent for change in the risk (and its associated costs) calculations. Will this be enough to stop some of the genuine stupidities involved in IT decision making - dunno. It will however have some effect.

Re: Wrong Target?

To me, this seems analogous to instructing map-makers to leave out the shadier streets in a town.

It is not any different from instructing map makers to avoid putting that Minuteman or SS-18 launch site on the map. That is something they have been doing since the days when the first map was drawn (just in those days it used to be coastal batteries instead).

As far as going after the search sites, if the Minuteman site on the other side of the hill is not on the map the only people to know it is there are likely to be the neighbours and the "enemy". Everyone else will not have a clue that there are 16 nuclear warheads waiting to blow up someone on the other side of the globe.

Cutting down the audience to people who know it already is usually 99.99% good enough in terms of mitigating the effect of information which is the subject of "right to be forgotten". This is in fact the aim of the right to be forgotten directive - it is not to be forgotten by people who already know, it is "not to be learned" by people who do not.

Re: Who knew pay by bonk was insecure? It's bonkers, I tell you

but how are they going to hang on to it? Unidentified?

The only way they can do this is if they set up a merchant (described in the article actually). There are quite a few checks and traceability requirements to set-up a merchant nowdays. So "setting it up" is IMHO out of the question.

Things become considerably more interesting if you "own" a merchant. Instead of lifting the cards, you add your remote pay-by-bonk terminals operated by the pawns around the world to the merchant transaction system. Then you lift the money out of the merchant accounts. This is a tall order - you need to "own" that merchant's infrastructure top top bottom - interface for POS, transactions, accounts and banking backend. Not infeasible, but probably too much effort for the payback you are going to get for a normal "pay by bonk pickpocketing" in bars and malls. Now setting up a 1.5m parabolic antenna aimed at the morning queue at one of the London subway stations or drive by skimming of bus queues... That may be worth it...

Re: This is the winner?

I can just see 10,000 people at a sporting event suddenly launching these things.

So do I. Just colour them correctly and launch at a Balkan or Latin American national match. The war with the neighbours is pretty much guaranteed after that.

Re: Linus don't need no gun

There is also the "deploy wife" option... She has been a national karate champion "only" 6 times...

Re: Excellent if it happens...

Popcorn please.

Most UK operator SIMs have a programmed blacklist which contains some or all competitors so that the mobile never tries to camp onto their networks. In theory, if the phone has a running SIM toolkit app, it should be possible to reprogram that remotely (this was done when Orange became EE). In practice, this may end up with a sequence of clusterf***s, so popcorn please...

Re: There is only one hope for our undertaking....

Korolev was not alone there either. Tupolev was there too. If Hiitler waited for a year before attacking USSR, Stalin would have managed to complete the extermination of scientific, engineering and military command capacity providing the Vermacht with a walk in the park.

Re: Sad

Indeed. I remember one rare event when the human cost of the Russian space programme became clear. When the Buran flew in 1988, there were official awards given to the project crew. While Soviet News were usually quite good in "damage mitigation" on that occasion they forgot to remove the black ribbon off half of the photographs of the test pilots (more than half of the awards were given post-mortem).

Re: Here's hoping...

They are not exactly photoshopped :) They are however subject to very heavy processing and composition out of tens if not 100s of images. In this case you are looking at a more raw input for two reasons:

1. It was a relatively short lived event. The usual "technique" of sitting with the cameras trained on the same object and streaming pictures to be combined into a final image ad-naseum was not applicable.

2. It was moving. None of the instruments used to snap the pic were designed to be a telescope (with servo stabilization and tracking), so they had to use significantly shorter exposure.

Re: How much did they blow on Fire phone?

Phone is not capital infrastructure.

Some of that 1.3 Bn on capital went into stocking up the German datacenter with kit as it had to be seeded to be a full region in AWS from day one. However that does not explain all of it. My guess is that they acquired one more location for a datacenter this year somewhere outside USA.

Re: The SD card design is deliberate

Surely the issue is the lack of correctly functioning drivers for the hardware, not the hardware itself?

Hardware design is "interesting". Instead of a normal unified power management controller the LID is on a separate IRQ which is not something which is handled by the normal IO. However, lid open/lid close is still presented on the input subsystem so the power manager detects a lid close from there, suspends the beast only to be immediately awaken by the lid IRQ which is in the list of IRQs allowed to wake it up.

So a "driver" is not enough. The drivers function correctly and the events are correct. The problem is the underlying design which supplies more than one event source in a manner which nobody else understands and is inherently susceptible to race conditions. As this is an arm soc which has the "design feature" of a dedicated lid IRQ (it is not even a GPIO pin), getting that folded into the normal input driver is actually non-trivial.

Could you imagine the government pulling this in the UK?Could you imagine the government pulling this in the UK?

Wanting to pull it - yes.

Pulling it - not a chance. The IT system delivered by Cap Gemini to customs and excise to do this will go belly up taking the country internet with it. Same as with any UK govt IT project.

Re: The Neanderthal must have been really drunk...

The C-M/EMH may have had to beat them off with a stick, but any kids would have been an evolutionary dead end.The C-M/EMH may have had to beat them off with a stick, but any kids would have been an evolutionary dead end.

Excuse me for being thick, as I am posting this before my 3rd quadruple espresso this morning.

If it was an evolutionary dead-end then why the f*** (yes I meant to use the f*** word) does the white Caucasian and most of Asian population have 2.6 % Neandertal DNA? Did this happen as a result of the fairy dust form of genetic transfer?

Out of all theories the "Neandertal as first Garry Glitter" theory is frankly one of the most preposterous pieces of rubbish I have ever heard. If anything, it is the opposite, us modern humans being attracted to atavistic treats. We can stare into a fire for half an hour with our mind blank and I am just going to restrain myself from commenting on the effect that chest hair + muscles + 6 pack have on the prettier part of humanity.

What ISS does to dump heat is not usable for a reactor

Quote: If I'm not mistaken, they already use radiators on the ISS.

Yes they do (ammonia as a working fluid if memory serves me right), but for nothing anywhere near the amount of heat which is dissipated by a nuclear reactor. They also (ab)use the fact that the station is reasonably reflective and heat insulated by orienting it so that the radiator is in the shade thrown by the station.

The surface area of a purely radiation cooling radiator which operates in the "boiling water coolant" temperature ranges typical for modern nuclear reactors will be enormous. You cannot hide that easily in the "spaceship shade". It will be too bloody big.

The only solution is to increase the operating temperature so your heat transfer rate per m^2 is higher and thus decrease the radiator size. Getting that done and combining it successfully with a nuclear power generation cycle is a non-trivial engineering problem.

Re: It was all they could have done*

They already tried Solution 3. If memory served me right, FishKill was one of the sources for AMD and video card manufacturers. That proved insufficient.

Are you sure?

Although I have G1

HTC G1 can definitely run at least 2.2 courtesy of Cyanogen. Probably later too (just not an official mainstream cyanogen port any more). Same as my Xperia Arc - it is officially not able to run anything past 4.0 and that was pretty awful, its max stable (and buggy) Cyanogen was 9. It is running at present a reasonably up-to date 4.4.4 courtesy of the Legacy Xperia cyanogen spinoff project which is ahead of what most new phones coming of the factory lines are running. It is also reasonably bug free. Average uptime is weeks of heavy use (mostly as "newspaper" and GPS).

As an added bonus I no longer have the Tw*tter and F***book taking all of the rather scarse application partition space. So something that should have been replaced by now is still perfectly usable and will probably remain "in-service" for a couple of extra years.

It will also be replaced by another Sony for this exact reason - you can get a bootloader unlock from the manufacturer straight away and all top of the line models have excellent Cyanogen/AOSP support.

Re: I am surprised

If I understand this correctly this is for infotainment and various cockpit gadgets, not for key functions.

Re: Intel threat?

Aside from their 'regular' chips, the place Intel should be doing is between tables and their existing market

That is not a particularly big market. It is a crack between the tables, filling it with some silicon will not take long.

Re: Well.. that might a big part of the problem

Quote: Or did I sleep through Business 101 when they were discussing customers, etc.?

No you did not. The paying customer is the marketer. You are the subject being monetized.

Re: What do they care if you run linux?

I would not be so sure.

While there is no substantial difference in terms of clipping the ticket on Linux vs Windows on Azure for the base OS, with Linux they do not get to clip the ticket on infrastructure apps.

Oh well, that is a different BU so the usual depiction of the MSFT org chart comes to mind http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/microsoft-org-chart.jpg

DWB - Seconded

2.5 l Isuzu Rodeo Denver.

Binary driving (my wife) - sub-30 mpg

DWB (me) - 37-42 mpg which for a 2 metric ton truck is very reasonable.

Re: No propulsion?

Ever sailed a boat?

With a correct sail design or correct payload attachment design you can make it do whatever you like. In fact, in space all you need is a moveable payload attachment design where you move the payload relative to the sail in order to adjust the centre of gravity. Designs like these do not require any thrusters except for emergencies. All they need is an energy source and a couple of rails to move the payload along. The design of solar carrier is de-coupled from the payload so you can carry nearly anything (the solar sail assembly becomes a solar "tugboat").

Re: If the tone is wrong the content is lost

Slightly more complicated I am afraid.

There is a fundamental problem in a volunteer project. If someone's contribution is crap and is not improving how to tell them to go away. Even more interesting - if you have told them to go away and they have not, how to get rid of them. 'cause there are some people that consider their ideas to be so good that they will simply never ever let go.

If this is a workplace, you fire them or if you cannot fire them assign them a menial task at the desk next to the door. If this is a volunteer project you sometimes have to use "inappropriate" methods to achieve the equivalent of getting someone fired. C'est la vie.

Re: special place in Hell reserved for this guy - NOT!

An elderly cat will be much more upset by being moved than by being provided with new carers in the house it "owns".

Ahem - dogs have owners, cats have staff.

Further to this - Burmese and Siamese (that looked like a Burmese on the video) tend to declare ownership over people. They will adopt one particular person as an owner (or to be more exact, declare that they own that person) and tell everyone else to sod off, even if those are the people are feeding them and changing their litter tray.

If you are that lucky person, the cat will stand in-between anything and you (inclusive of lethal poisonous local wildlife). I have seen it and been on the receiving end of it myself. Our old cat which my mom has been feeding and living with for 10 years declared my son an "owner". From there on, you could no longer even consider tucking in his blanket or getting anywhere near him if the cat was in attendance. At 1-2m you got a warning hiss, approach under 1m was dealt with by a set of 20 razor blades attached to a surprisingly agile (for her age) old Siamese.

Re: Sad state...

Quote: Totally unoriginal, "intelligent" art for idiots

Care answering which placard are you holding? "Migrants not Welcome", "Go Back to Africa" or "Keep off Our Worms".

Looking at it, it was original, it was intelligent social commentary and it did hit the local xenophobes very hard. Hard enough for them to remove it in less than half a day.

I wish they could

In order to do that we will have to stop buying oil and gas from them first.

So for the time being we have to pretend to listen. At least those of us who live in places that do not frak.

Re: Percentage...

Indeed

When we compare the response now to the investment which the developed countries put into eradicating smallpox the response is laughable.

Frankly, we are lucky that the infection ratio is so low (the "exponent" factor is order of magnitude less than flu, any of the MMR family or varicella) and that it is transmitted only via direct contact, not airborne.

Looking at how we are reacting to it, I really would not like to think what would happen if smallpox returns (with or without some idiot's assistance) or if we get a Spanish Lady mark 2.

Re: Surplus

Quote: Well, that's not their fault. They've designed it to a price and made no promises beyond that design spec

They went a bit beyond that by making a deliberate and concerted effort to disable any possible means of accessing anything locally through any legacy protocol. NFS - boom. NFS4 - boom. SMBFS - boom. All taken behind the cattle truck in the siding and given a bullet in the back of the head. To add insult to injury the kernel in git is 3.4 which is known to have issues with some of these and without any of the later fixes for them.

So, while the drive being abismally small is "design to spec", the rest is not. It is "cripple to marketing goal".

Re: Apple invented nothing

A "fake prop from a sci fi show" is admissible prior art. It is sufficient to prove the lack of originality in a patent application. So the law says. End of story.

Re: "restrictions should be slapped on the numbers of births in the park."

Why the bears?

Ask her to perform the same operation on a doormouse. The doormouse _MUST_ remain _ALIVE_.

Then ask her to do it repeatedly 200+ times.

Then ask her if that was a good idea.