Posts by HobartTas

Re: Rounded corners?

Interesting that you mentioned this because on a typical window there are three icons in the upper right hand corner and they are minimize, resize, and close the window. For a fully square and full screen window like on my Win7 machine then when using the first two I position the mouse over it and press click because I have no other choice. For the last one however, I never do this as I just over generously and quickly and lazily move the mouse in a 45 degree angle upwards and to the right to a point way somewhere past the notional height and right width of the screen by about 20% and since the mouse can't actually be any further than this, then it therefore has to sit on the upper right hand pixel so when I then click the mouse button it does close the window.

I cannot comprehend actually having to position the arrow right on the "X" and then clicking the mouse unless of course the window is not full screen and then obviously you do have to do this to close it.

Problems started for me with the introduction of Vista because the windows were very slightly rounded and doing that same trick I always used to do on a full screen Vista window meant that the upper right corner pixel wasn't part of the slightly rounded window and hence not part of the "X" either and therefore all that happened was that when I clicked as usual then I just successfully de-selected the window as if I was actually clicking on the background which I found a real nuisance.

This must have eventually gotten noticed by Microsoft one way or another because a service pack (probably the first one) notionally included the missing area as if the window was still square and included it as part of the window itself such that my old method of closing the window worked again.

Two things I don't understand and the first is does no one else on the planet close full screen windows like I do? And, secondly, how did Vista go into production without anyone whatsoever at Microsoft not noticing this either?

Re: Hear, hear, CFM, Rolls Royce, Airbus, Siemens, Boeing... You're wasting your time.

The density of LH2 is 70.85 g/L or alternatively 70.85 Kg/kL so that unfortunately would mean a complete redesign of all airplanes and we saw what happened when Boeing tried to avoid doing that with the 737 Max because it would take too long and also be very expensive meaning they would lose a significant number of sales to Airbus during that period of time they would have to do all of that.

Otherwise you could possibly consider LH2 as a fuel but pressurized cryogenic tanks would probably be too heavy, if you go the unpressurized or lightly pressurized route you would have to contend with constant boil off and with an airplane that probably wouldn't be too bad because as soon as you start filling up the tanks you'd have to fire up the plane's APU for power and then start up the engines which would also cope with any boil off as well as consuming LH2 itself.

It would also mean that you'd have to keep the engines or APU running when you land and start disgorging passengers and continue doing so until you could reverse the fueling process and drain the tanks leaving behind some residual H2 gas. Also are these tanks when left empty going to warm up to normal atmospheric temperatures and how will constant cycling down to cryogenic temperatures and back up to normal atmospheric temperatures going to affect their lifespan?

Then there's the issue with cryogenic fuel tanks inside a wing or the airplane body even if surrounded by insulation causing problems with atmospheric moisture condensing and freezing inside the airplane itself so how would you cope with that exactly? How much ice would a trans Atlantic flight accumulate? Would it be just hundreds of Kg or Tonnes? There wouldn't be much accumulation at an altitude of 34,000 feet as it's cold up there and not much moisture in the air but transiting from sea level up to there and especially descending would be interesting to say the least given you wouldn't know the exact weight of the plane when it lands.

H2 could be converted to a more conventional fuel and both Methanol and Ammonia have been mentioned but Ammonia has been pretty much ruled out for both domestic and military uses because of its toxicity and because you need people to actually handle it which probably won't turn out all that well if there's any accidents occurring. The trouble with Methanol is that you need to get Carbon from somewhere as part of that molecule and the most likely source would be CO2 and since Carbon gives off a lot of energy when oxidized into CO2 then the reverse happens when you try to reduce CO2 to get back to Carbon and typically efficiencies of conversion of H2 to Methanol of only 50% are usually quoted for this reason.

Whatever is decided will in all likelihood mean synthetic fuel prices quoted in integer multiples of current jet and kerosene prices rather than simple percentage increases which will make flying very expensive in the future using any SAF.

I suspect LH2 is more hassle than what it's worth.

Re: Still looking

The Moxie experiment on the latest Mars rover successfully made Oxygen by converting CO2 into CO but I'm not sure how easy it is with presumably unlimited electricity from solar or nuclear energy on the Moon to go any further. If you could have some sort of a reaction chamber where you could pump in CO or CO2 together with electricity and get Oxygen gas given off and the Carbon then deposits there in solid form which you then dispose of then that would be ideal and it would mean you could simply recycle all the CO2 back into O2 and you wouldn't need the vast quantities of O2 mentioned on a regular basis.

Alternatively, set up the moon base and skip the people and just use robots for probably a tenth of the cost of a manned station.

I agree with you that the power issue is a deal breaker but if that problem is solved then solar panels are probably the best way to make power even though they will generate less than on Earth but they are otherwise reasonably lightweight, don't forget any install will be a reasonably large array compared to what a rover or lander would have so I would expect that they would have to also include small robots that could continuously move along the panel array sweeping them of dust as they go along.

Re: Small decentralized, please

Smaller ones for home use do exist https://redflow.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/RDF1143-Redflow-ZBM3-A4-WEB.pdf

Why is this as the USA's nuclear ICBM's have been using inertial tracking with accelerometers since the 1950's and presumably they are still using them today.

Re: IT Airbus

Modula-2? As a Pascal programmer I looked forward to the commercial and readily available release of this language as an improvement to Pascal back in the 1980's.

Imagine my surprise when I first got it and the FTL Modula-2 compiler started rejecting variable names, procedure and function calls left, right and centre for no apparent reason and upon closer inspection I identified the problem because for example lets say you use the mathematical arctan function, or is it the Arctan or ArcTan function instead?

I don't understand for what unknown or even insane reason Niklaus Wirth decided to introduce case sensitivity where it wasn't there previously in Pascal.

This meant not only did you have to remember the name which is easy enough but also the capitalization of each letter in the name which is next to impossible just to get it to pass through the compiler, and the English language consists of only 26 letters and definitely not 52 of them.

Sadly, for this reason alone I pretty much dropped using it the day after I got it and haven't touched it since.

Re: Why does minecraft need a beefy computer?

The wikipedia article on ballistic missiles states that warheads re-enter the atmosphere at about "6-8 km per second" but as I understand it air resistance is proportional to the square of the speed being traveled so I presume when they detonate on the ground or several kilometers above the ground they would be going considerably slower at that stage.

As far as "extreme maneuvers" go you would only do that if you had a range of targets close together so that they couldn't work out what the eventual target is and you couldn't do too many of these maneuvers either because that's an extremely efficient way of bleeding off speed which is something an attacking weapon doesn't exactly want.

BSD? That implies two things (1) availability of ZFS and I assume you can use it on a boot drive as well by now and (2) OS installations are usually fairly small like several tens of GB's or in other words a small portion of the disk its installed on. The combination of both of those things means that if you can somehow specify "copies=2" when you do the OS install using ZFS you can have redundancy and automatic repair of all OS files so a corrupt file should no longer occur.

Re: Microsoft part 2

Regarding "Neither filesystem takes very kindly to being physically ejected without being unmounted first, I would have thought a fairly basic practical requirement for any portable filesystem."

Perhaps instead we should use some open or pre-29 version of ZFS even though it probably is even worse at "doesn't take very kindly to being physically ejected without being unmounted first" but due to its superior features like check summing and time stamping for each and every block it could easily repair itself quite quickly when it's mounted and brought back online.

Several years ago researchers got to 220TB for BaFe tape https://www.fujifilmusa.com/products/tape_data_storage/innovations/barium_ferrite/index.html and then IBM got to 330TB with sputtered media https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/ibm-and-sony-cram-up-to-330tb-into-tiny-tape-cartridge/ and I've also read of Strontium Ferrite as a future replacement for Barrium Ferrite so who knows where the limit is.

Re: 51st state

My understanding is that anyone born on US soil automatically becomes a US citizen regardless of their parent(s) status and also if born elsewhere to at least one US citizen parent then all that parent has to do is simply apply for citizenship status for their child by way of supplying documentation of birth and custody and then its just granted.

Can you quantify that "extra strain" as I can only see two potential problems and that is the head loading/unloading cycles and thermal shock from going from cold to hot and back again. The first is not a problem as even consumer PC's have at least 400K to 600K head unload cycles so daily shutdown will only account for 365 of these a year so no problem there until you get aggressive APM spinning down idle hard drives in some cases in just 8 seconds so some people have racked up hundreds of these cycles in a matter of hours especially in external hard drives, enterprise hard drives usually have more unload cycles available than consumer drives even though they don't need them. Secondly I haven't seen any statistics where tests are done on hard drives which are say fired up and run for maybe half an hour to warm up to their working temperature and then turned off for maybe half an hour to cool off and this cycle repeated over and over until failure occurs so I presume this is a non-issue either unless you can point me to some research somewhere.

Re: Awesome!

Depends on how they increase the storage size whether by increasing the track density or the DPI and if say you assume the drive will be 4 times bigger by doubling both then it will still only take twice as long to access all of it as you will get double the data in each rotation of the platter so ZFS Raid-Z3 will probably suffice and it doesn't even matter if they are shingled because even Solaris introduced sequential re-silver I think in version 11.2 in 2014. If you don't use the raid array whilst its re-silvering you're hardly working the actuator heads as they will be gently clicking over from one track to the next and the fluid bearings won't wear out and also being enterprise drives they will be adequately cooled so no problems there either. I've sequentially re-silvered an idle ten drive Raid-Z2 array of 3TB Toshiba DT01ACA300's in 7 hours with an I7-4820K CPU processing 1 GB's and my other array in another PC with an E5-2670 v1 CPU does 1.3 GB's and in enterprise systems with more grunt they should go even faster, so yes it could take days but so what? with ZFS the procedure should eventually complete successfully no matter how long it actually takes.

Yes, cassette tapes are good for this reason as firstly they are analogue and the special machines they should be using also record alongside the audio track some special tone(s) so that if you cut and paste the tape or edit out sections of it this is detectable, but to answer your question if you use the ZFS filesystem you can snapshot the data on the hard drive so for example ransomware thinks its encrypting your data but all its doing is writing fresh data whereas the source data is in a read-only state and immutable, also if you record to LTO tapes you can also get a special variant WORM (write once read many) cartridge that could conceivable satisfy this requirement.

Re: Thanks to the recording industry...

Perhaps you might want to consider storing your data using LTO drives and accessing the data on the tapes using LTFS which appear to be completely free from the tax you mentioned according to how I read this document http://www.copiefrance.fr/files/Tariffs_ENG_2017.pdf.

Re: Poor tape, gets no respect

I agree and from what I've read it appears datacentres with tape libraries with LTO-X wait until LTO-(X+2) comes out about 4-5 years later and then they spend a couple of months moving thousands of tapes over to the new ones needing on average about a fifth in number as the LTO-(X+2) drives can still read the LTO-X tapes. They can then finally get rid of the old perfectly good drives which are still reasonably good value to other people and the one main advantage of the new hardware is if they do actually need to recover data then they have much faster drive speeds with which to do so. I expect to see a lot of this happen again when LTO-8 comes out presumably somewhere in the expected October-January 2018 timeframe. I'm not sure what they do with the old tapes but either they sell them off or they just keep them as they are because they are a perfectly good backup of the original data for another 4-5 years until LTO-(X+4) comes out and the process repeats again.

Re: real problem - they don't want to pay telstra etc

I doubt that's the case because if your read their explanation here http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandscience/foxtel-reveals-source-and-scale-of-the-glitches-that-crashed-game-of-thrones/ar-BBEEZkR?li=AA4Zor&ocid=iehp where they say 'The company claimed the issue resided in its identity management (IDM) system' and also this here 'Ordinarily, the IDM handles around 5000 requests a day, the company said. But on Monday, it "was hit with 70,000 transactions in just a few hours".' how much bandwidth is used for authenticating credentials? I presume similar to online bank logins (several tens to a couple of hundred kilobytes perhaps) so if you take 'several hours' as say three hours (10800 seconds) then dividing this into 70,000 transactions gives about 6.5 transactions per second so hardly bandwidth intensive. I'd say its probably more of a case of slow implementation of a database server if anything probably running on some Raid 5 array of spinning rust with consequently low IOPS. I presume once people successfully logged on and got authenticated they had no problems with the actual downloads of the video stream which would be several orders higher in magnitude as far as bandwidth goes because there weren't any complaints in that area.

Re: I have a new 1PB+ storage option.

No, not more compressible but don't forget that even though the algorithms are fairly simple like that used for say NTFS compression that was introduced in Windows NT 3.51 it could easily reduce the size by around 50% for easily compressible data (whereas WinZip or WinRAR would shrink it down to say an eighth of the original size) .

Newer tape drives will have better algorithms and even if they don't they will most likely have larger memory buffers and work on larger chunks of data and something like LZW compression even back then would have gotten better results if you used a larger workspace going from a 128 KB buffer to say a 1 MB one and the last time I checked these drives may have like one GB of on-board RAM so its not inconceivable that they can get this sort of compression. Obviously if they get fed like Mpeg-2 data or random numbers then compression will be zero.

Re: First sort out frame rates

I agree as interlacing was a brilliant idea as for still images it showed full resolution and for moving images it was updated 50 times a second (analog PAL). I'm not familiar at all with the method of broadcasting for digital TV but if you consider Mpeg-2 P-frames I don't see a problem (as a concept) of replacing each full frame (assuming each frame was already a P-frame) with two half frames (giving 100 Hz of updates) or even 4 quarter frames giving 200 Hz of updates. Alternate options conceptually could be possible as well like say simulcasting on another effectively available channel intervening frames e.g. frames 1,3,5,7... on the main channel and frames 2,4,6,8.... on another one and if your TV is sophisticated enough combine the two together to double the Hz. From a practical perspective nothing like this will probably eventuate however.

As far as I understand it 100Hz and 200Hz TV's simply interpolate between each of the 50p frames and display intermediate results which as far as I can tell works reasonably well so that's another reason nobody will probably be bothering to do anything about this issue. We might have better luck if more films are created with double the normal picture rate (e.g. The Hobbit, Avatar 2+) so when 4K broadcasting takes off they may well consider this and build in this higher refresh capability up front. We can only hope!