Posts by imanidiot

Re: "...A software workaround for an iffy component looms. Sound familiar?"

It could have worked fine if they had used 3 sensors and implemented a "voting" system to reject spurious data. The fault wasn't necessarily "fixing it in software". The fault was in doing so badly, ignoring the added hardware requirements and not providing training. Oh, and lying to aviation authorities about the nature and effect of the new systems of course. That's kind of a big issue all by itself even if it hadn't gone wrong.

Airbus has very similar systems in all their aircraft, the difference being that they implemented them properly and pilots are trained in their existence, effects and failure modes.

Re: I admire water usage in Abu Dhabi, if not its source

"but they have little choice apart from using solar stills"

They do have a choice, that whole smegging city should simply NOT BE THERE!

The only way that place can stay in existence is by burning extremely large amounts of oil and oil dollars to spend silly money on keeping the aircon and taps running. And many of the high-rise buildings aren't even connected to the sewer so they have to transport it to the treatment plant by ruttin' truck!

IMHO if a place is too hot or dry to live in without enormous expenditure of energy for air cooling and water treatment, maybe people should simply not be living there.

Re: Hope

Problem is that HST wasn't really made to be easily serviceable at the best of times. It's certainly not designed in a way that would be conducive enough to a robotic mission (autonomous or remote control) to get it to make sense

Engine ECU's are nowadays a tiny (and mostly inconsequential) part of what a car does. Most of it's functionality is dictated by a central computer (often the "infotainment" system) that is not directly the ECU. And that includes stuff like controlling light modules (now controlled though a CANbus interface, instead of switching 12V on or off), heater controls (instead of a knob pulling a cable to open or close a valve it's now a 3 levels deep menu on a touchscreen controlling a stepper motor on a valve. Probably again through a CANbus interface to some intermediate module. Airbags? CANbus to intermediate module(s). Seatcontrols? Probably CANbus. Dials/gauges? Electronic screen that will mysteriously die 2 weeks after warranty ends and will be unobtainium in 10 years, controlled through CANbus of course. Serialised too so you can't put in a different one if it breaks. And no, mileage is usually stored on several OTHER modules, not on the instrument/dial cluster itself nowadays so it's not that either.

There's lots and lots and lots of stuff in modern cars that is basically proprietary electronics/programming that means it becomes harder and harder to make/buy aftermarket stuff to repair cars that are broken. You can currently keep a now 15 year old car on the road for a very long time with the spares available to purchase nowadays. Repairing a 10 year old car is very tricky as lots of stuff is no longer available. Cars that are now 5 years old will very likely be completely repairable 10 years from now because of some stupid electronics stuff that is completely unnecessary to the function of the car and completely unobtainable by that time preventing it from working. If you don't believe that, just keep a look out for how many slightly older model VAG cars you see about with the early generations of LED lighting and how often they're failing. But they're monolithic units and extremely expensive to replace so nobody does it. And all this is WORSE with electrical cars because they all use basically entirely and only proprietary equipment in their battery, BMS and driveline. Tesla's are very difficult to fix by design for instance and lots and lots of their functionality can be disabled remotely by Tesla at their whim. There is no way to opt out, no way to prevent that. Tesla owns your car, you're just allowed to use it. And the same will go for many others.

Re: Pointless

So stats say well over a quarter of people voted leave. Seventeen million, four hundred and ten thousand, seven hundred and forty two people is not exactly a "tiny" number of people. It's not even a small amount of people.

I don't care whether Brexit was a good or bad idea (UK's f*cked either way imho) but stop trying to paint Brexit as a problem caused by a small number of stupid people because that's NOT the reality of the matter and the sooner you face that reality the sooner you might be able to actually steer your politics into a constructive direction again. I am sick and tired of the constant and incessant winging of anti-brexiteers about "a few stupid people did X" AND the pro-brexiteers constant winging about "we voted out, we're out, why still X?" Brexit happened. It's the reality now. MOVE THE FRIG ON! The rest of the world doesn't really care about your rainy little island. Every single EU topic is 50% or more "Buhuhuhuh blubber blubbber brexit" from both sides of the isle.

Re: When a baby cage doesn't solve the true problem

At the very least you put all new hires in the playpen for a while until you can be certain they're responsible enough to be let loose in the (fenced in) back garden.

Britains got more than one problem. And medieval religious dogma (be it catholic, protestant, muslim or otherwise) is just one of them.

Re: Flowchart

I'd think A1 is an equally good reason to be worried.

I'll give you a hint, see my username.

Re: Overkill for many sites

No, no, in the case of the Netherlands he didn't ignore neutrality, he simply made up some stuff about the Netherlands having violated it's own neutrality by cooperating with British intelligence officers and German officers conspiring against his government, thus making his invasion of the Netherlands "totally legitimate" (see the Venlo incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venlo_incident. This incident also contributed to the forming of the SOE by Churchill, then later das Englandspiel and the general mistrust of Dutch resistance by SOE, culminating in the failure of operation Market-Garden)

Hah, you think they'll let you out? Oz is, as they say, f*cked.

Re: Standard Industry Malpractice?

This isn't really about self regulation. More regulations aren't the answer. It's about people continuing to buy these products even while loudly whining about the problems. If people had stopped buying HP and Canon inkjets when they first stuck the tip in, the other manufacturers would never continue inserting the shaft and ream it's customers for all they're worth. But people continue to complain and whine and bitch about it and then continue to throw money at these manufacturers.

Apart from the fact phone lines (especially modern ones with digital compression) are terrible for accurate voice identification because a lot of the info is stripped out to fit more bits down the line.

Unless you have a hardware TPM, no. Pre-Ryzen gen 2 AMD CPUs don't have fTPM

Re: War with China becoming more likely

Doing so would be an act of war against the US (Or at the very least taken that way). I doubt China would take that step. IF they invade Taiwan, they're going to want to have taken the island before the US can even react and get a carrier group into the area.

Re: What is that depth information used for?

If I understand correctly iPhones have the proper sensors to make an actual depth map and 3d image. Android just sort of approximates it for the purposes of blurring backgrounds and such so they can simulate DoF, but their "depth" map is more of a chroma-key matte of "this is foreground, this is background" than a proper 3d image. Not really useful for 3d images like this.

Re: Drunk driving is illegal and dangerous

If it had all the bells and whistles it was definitely well over the 80k bare-bones baseline model.

Re: Hamsters are very intelligent rodents

Asshats (especially of the narcissist variety) usually feel no reason to hid their asshattish ways from animals or to hide their true nature like they do to humans. And animals sense that.