Posts by Kiwi 4368 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Sep 2011
Mention BNC...Ruin my Monday..
Back to therapy!
I'll join ya.
Just the other day I came across an 8-bit ISA LAN card with a BNC connector as it's only connector (save for the ISA).
Think I'll need some IPA to forget the ISA, and a whole load of therapy to forget the associated 'network' that went with it :(
Say it will take longer than it actually will, makes you look better when you do it in less time.
I often did that but still went to time. Just wanted to be sure I had plenty of time up my sleeve for unexpecteds.
I did find that a customer will be exceedingly pissed off if you go over a year long job by merely a few seconds, but will be barely happy if you complete a multi-decade job in a few days.
But it is much nicer to say "we're done ahead of schedule" instead of "I'm sorry we're late, we're going to need more time".
If only I could've managed to get co-workers etc to promise long rather than try to please the customer and promise short - so many promises at 10am of "Oh yes, we can scan your 4TB drive and have it all done and back to you by lunch time" (NOT exaggerating! It happened at least once - 2 hours to recover a large HDD!). I always doubled then tripled expected timeframes with HDD issues.
He taught me to work on circuits as if they were live "because one day they will be".
Lovely fellow that.
I was taught the same way.
Has probably saved me a little bit of hassle. Especially in a place where the wiring was, well, lets just say "incapable of passing any level of safety inspection". Treating everything as live - even when the breakers and building mains were off - meant I only got to cuss about how messed up the site was and suggest we talk with the powerco about a larger level of disconnect than getting taken home in a nice wooden box.
Me mum helped with some of my training as well.. We had a dead TV and I'd been working on it (still only a kid at the time, but had been building and fixing circuits enough to be confident of solving this). I got up and left the room. Mum came in, saw me gone, wondered if I'd been successful, plugged in the TV, left the room. I came back.. "Oh yes, must check that". Touched something live. Picked myself up off the opposite wall, then went and had a little discussion with my mother about not plugging stuff back in without warning people. (given that 240v can kill easily enough, she was a tad upset she'd nearly killed her kid).
"...caused outages at Cloudflare, Facebook, Amazon, and others..."
Someone is owed one hell of a lot of beers! Now if you could've added Google and Bing, maybe that other bunch of Yahoos...
Very well done.
Oh - and those who clean up the messes as quickly and quietly as possible? Yeah we owe you big time as well (though next time this lot goes down maybe you can put the boot in a few times before you help them up? Perhaps 'accidentally' trip while trying to get them on their feet and drop a knee to the nutsack or something?)
It really isn't complicated (although I am fortunate enough to not know how difficult it can be first hand), know your routes out, the main route, the secondary route when the main route is blocked, and the "oh fuck" route when all else fails.
The big thing most people fail on is drilling them - same for all sorts of other emergency things. In a fire or other emergency, for those not well trained, panic sets in and that can lead to confusion. Also, if you watched the earlier linked NIST video you can see how quickly a room can fill with smoke - so sight is impaired, smell is impaired, and with some fires even hearing can be impaired. Knowing your way out, knowing what you'll be seeing, and practising it at a crawl - that saves your life. You don't have to think, you can run on automatic. This also means you tend to calm down a lot or panic a lot less - you're already well practised in the emergency steps you have to take, you know what's happening around you, you don't need to worry.
This is why I practise emergency stopping etc in my vehicles. The thankfully few times I've needed it means I can work the vehicle with "muscle memory" and focus my mind on what else I need to know around me (what other vehicles are doing, where the edge of the cliff is, who/what is flying through the air and needs to be avoided...). I do the same with other things as well, so I know where I can go and what I can do.
Halon is really, really effective at putting out fires.
Friend of mine had (has?) a keepsake from his days working with a place that made emergency equipment.
It was a squat bowl maybe 9" across and 4 or 5" high, 'emergency yellow' in colour. On the top it had an assembly much like those you see on sprinkler systems (the outlet). He told me it was filled with Halon, and great for stopping a fire in a small area.
I've only seen the one so I don't know if it was a real product or something he'd made himself - and if the latter then I don't know if it was actually functional or just a mock-up (ie no pressurised halon), but he certainly would've had the resources and materials available to make the real thing if he'd wanted.
Aside from the potentially toxic nature of Halon, something I'd love to have around. Always wondered if Halon was so bad - or did it actually mitigate harm by stopping fires so quickly that less nasty was released? (some fires give off some really toxic stuff - maybe the fire was worse than the halon?)
take a look at the following youtube clips : below 10 sec the fire is tame, but after that all bets are off.(nongraphic - NIST testing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxiOXZ55hbc
Thanks That shows a lot of what I was saying before, and also very much reminds me of the fire I talked of (though that did grow slower and thanks to being near the doorway less smoke for me). You see just after the minute mark how quickly the smoke descends. What you don't really see is how hot the smoke is, although you can see some hints of flames rushing across the ceiling almost like waves (mostly hidden by smoke). At 1:12 you can see what looks like the wooden panneling on the left side catching fire, although it may be something like curtains or whatever the black stuff is on the wall. Think you can survive standing in a room like that for even a few seconds?
(graphic, the real deal)
No thanks. I truly have had some nasty experiences with fire :( I'll take your word for it.
There are lots of testing and training videos on fire on youtube though, they can be scary but also very educational - and for those of us brought up on movies like "backdraft" and other stuff where people are standing upright in rooms filled with massive amounts of flame but strangely little or no smoke and running up stairwells that are "well involved" yet somehow able to see and breath.. Well, people need to know what it really gets like so they don't make the mistake of standing up in a fire - which can be instantly fatal - not that you'll die instantly, but you won't survive the experience as your lungs can be burnt out quite badly. No, not every time, but a very good chance of it.
When we had one at home our kids were under the dining table with my wife covering in a flash.
Please don't remind me! We haven't had one that I've felt in these parts for ages..
Some years back I was worried what was going on under the Cook Straight during the 'Seddon quakes' - but that all stopped, then we had Kaikoura, nothing since. Before that the Christchurch series. But the Kaikoura one was a big one and little else afterwards (ok a few days/weeks of regular shakes but it tailed off quickly).
I used to be worried about what damage was done during a long series of reasonable quakes. Now I worry even more about a long long long period of silence - instead of stress building up a bit then releasing then building up a bit and releasing again - now we have building and building and building... One of the worst moments of my life was to wake at stupid AM to the civil defence sirens going off in the Wellington region, and the people coming up the hill to sleep in their cars overnight in case the quake had triggered a tsunami (there was the uplift of coastline along Kaikoura, and Lyall Bay emptied out as well). Just hope whatever happens comes in a series of smaller shakes rather than one big one. Comes with having several fault lines within walking distance of where you live - especially when they're quiet :)
Unless you're a fireman, that isn't you, Mister I-Did-The-Annual-Fire-Safety-Training-Course. Blundering into a burning data centre with the wrong extinguisher is going to earn you a roasting and two lungs full of Halon/FM200.
Agreed. Most 'things' can be replaced (I know some heirlooms can't), and there is nothing on this earth worth living with the damage you can do to yourself with a single inhallation of the wrong stuff (either bad gas or very hot gas).
If there are lives at stake and no one else maybe go in. I do say maybe because inside a fire - well you can't imagine it unless you experience it. Try crawling around your house blindfolded, deafened, and half-choking on something terrible if you want to learn what it's like - but do it in a panic as well. In the movies where you can see clear across a room that's 'well involved'? That's bull, it ain't going to be like that. Try a crawlspace a few inches high, the rest filled with toxic smoke. Think you can run across that room? Think again - said smoke is hundreds of degrees C. You'll be dead before you can think "That was silly".
So, provided you operate the ("sealed") battery within the design limits, it won't gas because the hydrogen and oxygen are recombined catalytically inside - and this does not "use up" any gel.
I've had an AGM battery for my bikes for some years now (just the one battery - I can only ride one bike at a time :) )
Mostly it's been in service however it has had a couple of long periods of no use and not necessarily stored at a proper voltage (ie dropped well below 10v).
It still seems to function fine, twice starting the bike this last weekend - note it's winter and the first start of the bike was from empty carbs (and my bike needs to pump fuel to the carbs first - a low fuel tank below the height of the carbs, so a good minute+ of cranking before first firing). The battery does basically live on a maintenance charger though (hopefully a still-good one).
Do these batteries get any of the sulphate/dendrite problems associated with other batteries?
Im pretty sure fire is generally thought to double in intensity every minute. Therefore it can very rapidly get out of control.
Many years ago I lived on a hill street where the houses had enough space underneath to stand up. Many of the places, including my uphill neighbour's, had a full-sized doorway leading to an area set up with shelving much like a garden shed or small workshop. These neighbours had all sorts of stuff stored there from years of living in the same place.
3 generations lived there - the grandmother, the parents and the kids.
I got home from work one day to see their eldest boy (then about 8 or 9) running out from under the place, and some smoke coming out as well. I walked closer to the fence and saw a small amount of flame - not even the size of a decent wastebin fire (I mean deskside bin with a half a dozen balled bits of A4). I raced inside, yelled to my GF to call the fire brigade, and went outside for the garden hose.
She was outside a moment later, fire engines on the way (but not sure why). She saw what was going on, gave them more details, then rushed into the neighbour's house to alert them (kid was nowhere to be seen). The father came out while the mother got the rest of them outside. The father grabbed their hose and helped. Thankfully close to the fire station so we had extra help inside of 5 minutes - we were barely able to keep the fire under control let alone stop it.
It was clear that had I gotten home even a couple of minutes later, both our houses could've been lost. But more - the grandmother was bed-ridden and probably wouldn't have made it out in time if it hadn't been for my initial water slowing the spread of the fire (had I thrown a rock through their window and started yelling, bringing the father out earlier, we probably could've stopped it with both our hoses). If I'd gone inside their house - the fire was under the old girl's bedroom and with the way things were stacked, good chance we wouldn't have got her out. It would normally take me about 10 minutes to get home from work back then - any small change to the length of time of the trip shorter or longer (eg if I've been inside my house before the boy ran out from under his)
They lost a lot of family memorabilia, and the framing underneath needed some repair work, but the house still stands (and while it's still 3 generations, 2 of them have moved up a notch...) There is still signs of the charring to the top of the door frame.
I don't consider this anything even remotely heroic as I could've backed away at any time and don't think I was in any fashion in any risk.
I've been in two house fires (counting the above). Fire spreads amazingly fast when it wants to[1]. 30 seconds is a hell of a long time when you have a fire kicking off. Slow it down (and get your extinguisher as close to the source/seat of the fire as you can), but get someone on to the emergency services quickly. If you can, get a sprinkler or other suppression system installed but don't expect them to do much more than slow things down. If you can't slow it down, get everyone out as quickly as you can. In many cases you've only got 10 seconds from when it starts to stop it with any ease. 30 seconds and it's probably beyond a garden hose, 1 minute and anyone inside is toast.
As to the kid? I didn't see him for a few days, but middle of the next week he brought over a very nice meal he'd spent much of the day making, and was both very apologetic and very thankful. He'd been playing with candles and dropped one on some empty cardboard boxes... I understand it was another week before he was able to sit down...
[1] As others have said - why is my damned BBQ so hard to start? Why do I need 3 goes, even with the best kindling and fire starters, to get the house warming up? Fire is alive I tell you, and has a rather sadistic/vindictive mind of its own!
Perhaps you can tell me something...
Hmm. Regular activity. Would you say metronomic? No wonder our choir-and-orchestra conductor is thin as a rake, with all the exercise he gets.
Recently I was handed a DVD of a live performance of Jeff Wayne's 'War of the Worlds'. I have also, in many cases much to my shame and/or pain, witnessed many orchestral performances - some live, some from on stage, one from amongst the orchestra, most on TV.
For many years I was a musician and even achieved some note within NZ circles, performing live quite literally hundreds of times and even appearing on TV (sorry no not saying who I am, or where or when! :) ).
It was while watching the above-mentioned video that I again began to ponder one of the deeper mysteries of my life. Despite all my experience, there is still one musical mystery that remains to be solved for me.....
What use is a conductor?
I mean he (usually) stands there, madly flailing his hands about, while the musicians are paying attention to the sheets of music in front of them or to their instruments. The pace is set by percussion, the timing of the notes and what parts we play is all in the sheets, the conductor is of about as much note as any member of the audience, and as likely to be visible. And that's when they're not hidden behind other musicians or rather large instruments that dwarf even the most rotund opera star.
When it came time for my solo, video shows that the conductor was pointing at me or at least madly waving in my general direction. I can tell you without the least bit of uncertainty that he was so very far from my thoughts that he didn't even begin to exist. All that existed was my instrument, the timing of the beat in my head from the now silent percussionist, and the dread that I might miss a note if I wasn't careful, and the sheer thrill of 'desire of a lifetime - on stage in his home town'[1]. Much going on up there, and no room to spare for some distant freak flailing madly.
So pray, do tell.. What earthly use is there for a conductor? (musically speaking). I have so desperately wanted to know this! (I know what is said in 'official circles', I know what Wikipedia et al will say, but I am seeking the real truth here - not the toursity 'Oktoberfest' but the real party that is had when the tourists have all gone home.
[1] Rez 'Tears in the Rain' on Youtube, from whence that line comes.
While the word "grocer" has expanded its meaning, I would recommend sticking mostly to the butcher, fishmonger, dairy and greengrocer.
Amen to that!
Switching to a more natural diet (and borrowing some landspace from a friend so I can grow my own) has made huge improvements to my life.
Eschewing the generally more expensive 'super market' in favour of the butcher and green grocer has meant that usually I get my food at better prices, but ALWAYS I get food that is fresher and tastier than the garbage they serve at the bigger places. They may be able to buy up entire regions worth of crop as easily as I grab a drink of tap water, but they're never going to match the quality of the small places - those small places have to compete and the only things they can compete on are quality and service. That 'service' often translates into better prices for better products.
But even if I paid 50% more for my food (which I don't, I usually pay much less), I'd be saving over all and be better off. It's certainly brought about big gains in my fitness and overall wellbeing just getting off the junk and getting better food. And I get to help my neighbours out as well.
On the plus side, it integrates into Apple's typically excellent "privacy-by-default" health data management system
Now you look like a very savvy gentleman. Might I interest you in a business deal?
I happen to be the sole owner of the Wellington Harbour Bridge, and I am seeking investors for a unique business venture which will see you receiving a guaranteed 1,000%pa return. I'll even throw in a free upgrade to your current watch with even better privacy-by-default health management if you just sign on.
Please ignore the slavering marketers and insurers behind me, and sign here. I will need the deed to your house, ownership papers for your car, a night with your wife, but I'll still feel like you're ripping me off, you're such an amazing business person with such big assets!
"Telling me that last week something funny happened and not be able to tell me what that was or show me it again means I can often do absolutely nothing about it."I have to say this to my parents all the time. How they can not know even the most basic vocabulary is an ongoing puzzle.
Tell me about it!
I get that from so many other people. Just some vague "the computer isn't right" and an inability to articulate what is off.
But...
Sometimes when I am riding my bike (or even stuck in a cage) I can tell at times when something is 'wrong' even though it may take a bit to work it out. Might be a slightly different smell coming through letting me know something is a bit off, or a tiny bit of sluggishness telling me there's a problem with the carbs, the plugs, tyres are a little low or something. Sometimes I can't really say what it is, just that she somehow feels different. How? That takes some testing and maybe actually requires breaking out some real tools and looking at things.
I can do all my own work (though sometimes I am happy to pay others - eg mounting a tyre is a pain I'd rather not go through!), have rebuilt the carbs and done extensive engine work, know the ignition system intimately and know things like plug specs like the back of my hand, yet sometimes still cannot articulate what 'feels wrong' other than to say 'something is off'.
But I still find it infuriating when someone says their computer 'was acting funny last week' and cannot say how :)
Had a situation where even when I expanded the screen, the buttons below were STILL off the screen at the bottom. Of course, clicking on the screen and hitting enter does not do a default of save.
At least with Linux you can generally hold the ALT key and drag windows with the left mouse button. Have had to do that a few times when I've pushed stuff outside of the normal display size (or gone from my large TV to my tiny laptop screen, but the browser or other program still wants to be on the big screen size and the max/min controls are off the screen)
do they even make Tv's these days without microphones and cameras built in?
Still a few around, plenty of cheap 2nd hand units in many places and there's the cheaper new TV's that don't do smart. But be aware many don't do much in the way of ports either, though there is probably a multi-input box somewhere that links to the TV via HDMI and carries a variety of RCA, Scart etc ports.
Just got a Viera 2nd-hand recently. Actually quite impressed with it!
My dumb light bulbs have a great ambience function. Via a knob on the wall, I can increase and decrease brightness at will, allowing me to set the ambience however and whenever I want.
Nice.
I live in a rental home. Such a knob requires written permission from the landlord, which requires an application. Said application requires stuff from the electrician - who of course must come out to install it and later provide certification of the completed job (which, is the LL is anal enough, may require a separate electrical inspector to sign off on). Probably at least a couple of grand to do.
VS the 'smart bulb' which I can fit myself...
(FWIW, I use the normal manual light switches as they're all I need - and appropriate brightness of bulbs in rooms)
(NOT saying they're a good thing, just saying that there's a whole lot of different costs involved in changing what's in the socket vs changing what supplies the socket :) )
(Already, I can fix my car, a 2004, by turning it off and back on. I kid you not.)
I can do the same.. Sometimes the mechanical oil pump doesn't start properly and turning it off and on fixes that..
The most electronic thing in my car's ignition system would be the coil, or the condenser......
Did come a little unstuck when he dropped a tin of baked beans on a bare big toe some time later, but there was no actual damage (spent a couple of hours at A&E proving that) and he learned the value of slippers :-)
Thanks for the memory... Mine was a 75rpm wax record (the 10" variety). Quite a nice cut, still got a scar some 45years later - if you spent a bit looking for it...
Amazing what can be recalled with a small trigger :)
I went with a PIR sensor as installing it at ceiling level was far easier than running wires for pressure mats.
Same. Nothing more to installing them than putting them in the sockets.
In a few places I have nightlights that also incorporate a rechargeable torch. The light in the base comes on with low light levels, the torch section has a PIR that lights it up in low-light if you move near it. Also the torch sections light up in the case of a power cut.
Cheap, effective, and I always have a charged torch handy if I need it (at least until the battery gives out), at least till I can find a candle or decide I don't need to worry about the power cut till morning.
The idea of coupling some lights to the UPS is one I should investigate more though.
What on Earth the GE engineers thought they were doing when they created this insane reset process we will likely never find out
1) They live in the US, or just don't like the idea of people climbing on chairs/ladders etc (who really drags out a proper ladder and safety gear to fix a bulb when the nearest wheely chair will do?) - worried about litigation.
2) One or more of the process design department has a toddler who has discovered the light switch.
Be thankful. They know, full well, that 5,000 on/off cycles is not beyond the skills of a 2yo to figure out, but they hope if they make it annoying enough the parents will take better steps to keep from having to adjust these bulbs every time little Jane wants to play with switches.
From a couple of comments on last years story on "Criminal justice software code could send you to jail and there’s nothing you can do about it" :
Original comment at https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2018/08/13/criminal_justice_code/#c_3587059 :
It's only a matter of time before they start targeting (Education? Segregation?) people based on an algorithm that determines how likely they are of committing a crime even when they haven't, it'll probably use social media data as well.
And the response at https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/all/2018/08/13/criminal_justice_code/#c_3587417 :
You can bet Facebook / Google etc want in on this. 1st-round is matching / targeting ads. 2nd-round is hoovering up financial-transactions / patient-health info. 3rd-round is being involved in every transaction or event that has any kind of data aspect etc.
Someone was on to it!
Some scientists suggest air pollution has been reducing IQ. Others wonder about TV, the net, education. Perhaps the ETs broadcast a Stupid Ray through the entire planet in 1999 and it's been slowly taking effect ever since.
Game consoles and TV - but not directly.
When we was kids we used to be sent outside and play. Who knows what the parents got up to but they didn't hover over us or keep any tabs on us. From the age of 4 or 5 we were trusted to walk or bike miles to and from friends homes, with the instructions limited to "be home by dinner" or "home before it gets dark".
The more stupid among us found ways to end our boredom that would've made Darwin wet himself. Some of us survived our exploits but there was a good chance we wouldn't be having kids. And of course the ribbing from our friends (now "bullying" and "hate speech" etc) often discouraged stupidity and encouraged more sensible (if more conformed) thinking (OK, I admit I probably am a bad example of this - or would I be much much worse if it wasn't for the hassling I got as a lad?)
We got out more, we did more, we engaged with the world more, we had much more interesting lives, and[modern kids]SHUT UP YOU BORING OLD BASTARD, TRYING TO WATCH TV!
I do think it's a part of things. Kids today do less problem solving, less adventure, and (aside from diabetes and clogged arteries) are less likely to meet any real risk.
Life was great at weeding out the stupid, but life is locked outside these days.
Or is this only for the well-off suburbs full of even-earth houses with driveways, so your pizzabot can drive up to your door and honk?
No, what they'll do is provide an app on your smartphone that tracks youlets you track it.
I'm surprised they require a pin to unlock it though. This is Dominoes - who in their right mind would want to steal it? Hell, who even in a severely messed up mind would?
(Still better than pizzahutt - surprisednotsurprised that the local supermarket can produce far superior garlic bread to that lot!)
Would you throw away your great grandfather's handmade woodworking planes just because you purchased a power planer and/or jointer?
Not exactly the same thing as an OS that isn't likely to be doing as good a job now is it?
I guess you never patch your machines but just get a new one instead?
(And, like duh, of course I use both hand and power tools where needed or enjoyable. Sometimes I take the skill saw or the table saw to the firewood, sometimes the axe is more appropriate...)
There are those of us still 'out there' without the resources to scrap 10 year-old machines simply because they can't run a 64 bit OS.
I'm probably one of the poorest people on here. I paid $NZ15 for this Dell D630 laptop (and used a HDD gifted by someone else). 64 bit all the way.
Where it comes to factory and medical equipment - are they going to be running the latest Ubuntu? Or are you going to be getting other stuff to run.
OOI, do any of these who are against Ubuntu doing this actually helping to fund anyone's efforts to keep 32bit general-public OS's going?
I'm not a fan of Ubuntu, and have moved away from them and their derivatives as well as abandoning Debian as well - now using Devuan (as I seem to mention eveyr other post these days :( ) I don't support much of what they do, but I have to say it - it's their toy and if they want to pick it up and take it home, that's their choice. If you want a say, pay. Support them to keep a 32 bit version alive for the sake of the very very small few people who might actually want to use it.
(For the most part, 32 vs 64 is not an issue - however I do sometimes get image or video files > 2gb that I really want to be able to keep on my own cloud server, so that has to be 64 bit due to a Python (IIRC) limitation where it would not handle larger files on 32bit (no idea why)
Unless they're planning to maintain all their own i386 packages from now on, moving to Mint doesn't seem like very good long term advice.
There is LMDE - the D being Debian...
(Now if only they'd do a Mint Devuan - the Mint polish but the NOT SYSTEMD! of Devuan... :) )
A llama might not hold as much, but at least you don't have to worry about your porn collection going poof!
Ah! So THAT is how I learned to swing the other way! Should've used a Llama to hide my 'educational videos' in, then they wouldn't've been swapped for something 'from the other side'!
We've had fast charging (and discharging) batteries for decades. A practical use for them may not come for a whileThey are called capacitors and they are fundamental to things like RFID tags.
Yup. Built a mosquito repellor that ran at IIRC 22khz when I was a wee lad (something like 8yrs old). Just made a 'buzz' but the key circuit was a cap charging up against transistor, when it reached the transistor's trigger voltage it tripped draining the cap pretty much straight into the speaker.
I did mention it in my first draft of the post but wondered if caps are truly batteries - I mean some work in basically the same way (eg electrolytic ones) but is there a big enough difference that they're not technically the same? :)
Dunno how old caps are but I know some that are older than my father, and he was ancient when I was born :)
Instead all the effort is being put into "look at this cool thing". Waste of time while we're not addressing these inventions and new techniques into applicable uses.
The first cellphone patent was applied in 1908[*] - coupling a telephone with a radio transmitter. It took almost a century before we got the basics of what we have today. Some 50 years from the early "field telephone" to something a normal person could carry in a pocket.
Lots of 'look at this cool thing' was needed before we got even a decent flip phone.
Tracks in roads to power cars - doable but there's safety and environmental issues to overcome. You also have to decently insulate them from the ground, they have to be flush with the road so not to be a hazard to others (pedestrians tripping or traction/direction issues with wheels crossing them), the cars have to be able to move off them without issue (ie cannot be the sole source of power). They have to be "environmentally friendly" - if they take 100,000 tons of CO2 out of the air from the removal of petrol cars but their creation causes 100,000,000,000 tons of CO2 they're not exactly good, nor if they leave behind plastic or other materials that are harmful to the environment. What about when it rains, or someone causes a lot of water to run onto the road?
We've had fast charging (and discharging) batteries for decades. A practical use for them may not come for a while, but nice to have. Not sure what your "can product 3d widgets you can feel" is supposed to mean. Most of the widgets I encounter in daily life are easily felt and, being physical objects, certainly are 3d in nature.
Electricity was discovered thousands of years ago. The basic principles of the internal combustion engine - also going back centuries if not millennia. The mechanics of a carburettor were well known before Mr Ford was born (even if not for fuel/air mixing). If none of these things had been around and fairly well known (if poorly understood) 150 years ago, we'd not have the cars we have today. It took a novel combination of known and somewhat developed products to create the internal combustion engine, and from there the first cars.
It can take time for an invention to have a practical use, but does not make it a waste of time. Every 'failure' increases knowledge. Sometimes those 'failures' can be re-applied to other things later, but sometimes even just the knowledge of someone else's 'wasted time' means I can learn from their mistakes and waste much less of my time.
The things you listed aren't usable today because there are still bits of the technology missing. When everything is in place, then they'll be used.
[*] IIRC - Could be earlier or later but not by a lot.
When can I get a Gauss Pistol?To keep the sky pirates from hijacking my flying car....
Come around here on chilli night.
Trust me. You car will be safe. We won't even need to fit a pipe to you...
Oh, wait a minute. You said 'gaUSs pistol". Sorry, my bad. Still, if you ever want total protection from anyone ever entering your car you know where to come.. (Although that 'anyone' can include family members, the dog, even yourself......)
And as long as the video is unedited, we can make our own minds up
That's the thing though... I've seen "unedited" video of stuff happening in my area, been able to look out the window and see that no, the news report is wrong because if it was right the event they're saying is happening "right now" would be in sight of my kitchen window (this includes police siege of a 'gang house", large scrub fire on a certain hill and so on).
I remember in the 90's seeing unedited footage of a plane crash overseas. The report was that almost everyone on the plane died. In a panic I rang a friend's family because she was flying at that time, probably on that plane (same origin&destination). No worry, they'd heard from her. The plane had burned but everyone got off OK. The footage was unedited, but the narrative was different from reality. It's these events that led to my utter distrust of NZ news media.
I've seen footage of large crowds of rioters rampaging through the streets of foreign cities. I've later found from people I know in those cities that the footage in question doesn't come from their city, or that yes 20 people were getting a bit uppity and broke some windows but the crowds of thousands? Oh that was from when the soccer team lost the final last season.
With so many people having access to international news media today, it's harder for them to completely fake events as they have done in recent years, but it's easy for them to exaggerate things to a degree (one just needs to watch Faux news, or so I hear) - and it's easier still for them to do the opposite - to hide events by simply not reporting them. They have so many other stories to chose from they don't even have to make stuff up any more. Showing Chump's supporters and haters in a story for "balance" - well how about find mostly complete morons and rather inarticulate people from one side, and the most intelligent and articulate ones you can from the other side - there's your balance... Not our fault the other side are a bunch of morons and this is the best we could find...
The last set is better but each clip is only a few seconds and I expect the longer it is the flaws will become more obvious.
That may be true, but as the computers and coders learn, as hardware gets better...
Remember "Asteroids" from the spacies parlours in the 1970's and 80's? Remember how the games were all monochromatic line drawings, ships, targets and pyrotechnics all the same colour? Pacman with it's rather basic shapes and simple colours? And those huge cabinets filled with hardware to make the screens come alive?
Now we carry devices in our pockets with more computing power than was in those entire buildings, capable of rendering quite high quality graphics in real time. And while these days we're seeing some excessive code bloat (ie programmers as a whole tend to get the code functioning but never optimised), some tightening of algorithms could make up for the ground Moore's law might be loosing to physical limits (or to purchase limits - given what my CPU and GPU can do now, why do I need more power?)
I can imagine people faking crimes to get someone else convicted.....
As far as I know it already happens. I'm certain some time with Mr Ducky will provide you with at least a few documented cases (not even considering the likes of "Arthur Allan Thomas" where the cops themselves planted the crucial evidence (literally put shell casings from Thomas's .22 on the ground at the murder site to get him convicted).
You know how DNA "evidence" is used often to put someone at a crime scene?
How often is that 'evidence' something really hard to obtain, like "hair samples"?
Do you know how easy it is to collect samples of someone's hair without their even knowing?
What about semen samples? What about guys who use condoms, take them off, tie the end in a knot, and throw them in the trash? Dunno how well that stuff would actually survive those conditions, but I sure you can figure a few ways to get someone charged with something after a little dumpster-diving (I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if there's a deliberate or accidental pun there).
Blood? Well, maybe a little harder. But I do have a great friend who owes me a few favours, and he runs the local blood donation van....
Evidence is not as strong as most people imagine. I don't want those who are guilty of serious crimes, but knowing how easy it is to manipulate evidence and manipulate juries - I'd never be willing to convict someone even if they confessed to the crime - and yes we have quite a famous murder case where a person of lesser mental capacity was conned into confessing - the wikipedia article is bad enough reading and I'd suggest you don't look to far into this unless you want a greater understanding why I hate NZ cops (and no, this guy is not even closely linked to my family as far as I know) - and why I question all evidence, how and where it was gathered, and whether or not there are reasonable grounds to suspect the evidence - was it there by natural accidental causes (ie the hair fell off my head while I was committing the crime) or other means (you grabbed a few strands from the back of my chair when I went out to make us a coffee, and later placed them where you were committing a crime)
Now with video being able to be faked so easily, it soon theoretically will be easy for me to fake someone else committing an offence and I can even leave physical evidence behind to prove it was them. Here's the CCTV footage officer, please carefully check out the areas he walked, you may find something of further proof. Here's the tissue you see him dropping into the wastebasket as well.
</rant>
or doctor evidence to frame people for crimes they haven’t committed –
It's worse than that.
All security camera footage is now suspect. Most of it wasn't too great in the first place, but given that this will soon become trivial to fake.....
Now, any crim has the ability to cast doubt on any footage of them. "Ladies and gentlemen, there is the easy possibility to alter videos - just watch this brief documentary".
The linux boxes you mentioned probably run 10% of the games the Windows ones do, support fewer hardware configurations and are less of a target than Windows PCs purely due to market share.
So... All those complaints about how Windows no longer supports hardware that's not that old - they're all just holding it wrong or something?
Windows is so far gone even MS is abandoning it. Why else would they be going to such efforts to drive everyone elsewhere?
I'm a really cheap gaming addict. I remember with fondness the later days of my Win98 partition--virii simply would not run on it.
I think SOASE:R is the most modern game I play with any regularity (I have purchased a couple of others ('Jupiter Incident' and 'Nexus' I think), but never actually played them). I still have Carrier Command in a playable state and play that through fairly often. (You can fit Carrier Command, several save files, and the OS you play it on all on a bootable 360K floppy - if you can find a machine that handles that!)
I'm such an 'elite gamer' that there is no one left alive who even remembers the ancient games! :)
But I have no idea if that's typical, or how common it might be for Android apps to open listening TCP sockets.
I guess anything that listens for PUSH notifications - stuff like Skype or other VOIP/chat/message apps that can receive messages (sure they can poll the server for new stuff, but they'd have to do it quite often to get messages in a 'timely manner'[1] - meaning a lot of excess data) would effectively be running some level of "server" at least to the extent that it listens for traffic it did not initiate and responds to that traffic.
That would certainly be enough to allow this attack to come through.
[1] For me, generally if it takes 20 minutes to get and read your message so what? Even if it's important, it's likely I can't do anything about it for now. For most people, a delay of .000001ms for a "Hi honey. how's work today?" is an absolute disaster of Biblical proportions requiring lawsuits and C-level job losses.
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