Posts by Rich 10

The worst

Had a (potential customer) call last Friday. "My dog peed on my laptop, do you clean that sort of thing". Uhhhhhhhhhhhh, NO!

As someone old enough to remember looking at the moon during the first landing and thinking that there were actually people up their - to see 4 "everyday astronauts" get 3 days in orbit is a part of history that I thought would come much sooner - time to start building the Bigelow hotels.

If Blue O had been on the original Apollo - the uber big Von Braun rocket - we'd still be getting to the moon sometime after 2025, it would just be for the first time.

Me thinks our bastard doth protest too much.....but one must clean up the evidence.....sounds like a marmite sort of Breaking Bad moment for Jim.

No word yet on the boiler room scam business hiring - you know that the Covid situation in India is bad when our business from cleaning computers of people conned by scammers falls 90%. If the crooks can't even work, the country is in a world of hurt. And latest reports say up to 4 million people may have died of Covid so far in India alone.

Looks like a good time to build power generating facilities, that would be the best investment.

1. LEO latency sucks for FP shooters

2. Given the shear volume of the sphere relative to the size/amount of the satellites, the "useful" space around Earth might be .00000001% more crowded than it was 10,000 years ago.

3. The biggest hazard to satellites and space stations of all types are still going to be the tiny particles of natural space junk - the earth moves through many paths of comets that litter the orbital environment each year, for example.

4. Any Ham worth their salt still learns morse code, and has a 100 ft tall antenna in their back yard that screws with their neighbor's tv reception.

It ain't over until the lawyers have milked HP and all out of more money than the cost of the write down in question. Expect appeal after appeal after appeal, and then a long drawn out settlement process - what I want to see is the Autonomy execs found guilty, and the judge award HP $1 or 1 pound sterling.

"what's this new $15/mth per line charge on my bill? Cell Phone Spam Call Protection Fee? Ok...so you are shaking me down now instead of the spammers.

Inkjets and cheap refills are my way - HP has one advantage in that they do continue with driver support for even some of their oldest inkjet and laserjet models regardless of OS and updates. If I could get my spouse off color I would go for a cheap laser - we use HP cubes for our work printers and they print for ever (except for the one that had a 3 pound/1.5 kg drill bit dropped on it when they were installing HVAC equipment on the roof of our building - they had to fix the roof too). Gashed the top of the machine nicely. Still printed but what the heck, the roofing company bought us a new one.

How many hundreds of millions of Windows computers are there? How many millions of different configurations? I don't care what OS, be it Windows, Mac, Linux, Android or whatever, anytime changes are made a certain percentage of computers are going to have issues. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are rather random and relatively few systems are impacted. At my workplace we have had no users contacting us about this issue, and many are the type that call if they accidentally forget to turn the machine on and there is nothing on the screen. If it doesn't get a CERT alert and/or start flooding my techs with complaints, it gets moved to the "curiosity" shelf and we move on.

Privacy?

What privacy - lol.

I am curious (but not yellow) as to any supposition being put forward by a true physicist, rather than a sort of normal person like me, that the initial inflationary episode in space-time during the first Plank Moment is related to this relatively new recognition that the physical universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. Space-time is still inflating - for perhaps the first 9 billion years after matter started forming, the gravitational effects on space time were sufficient to slow inflationary expansion, but once a relative decrease in density of the overall physical universe due to a constant amount of matter occupying a larger and larger volume, then the forces governing the speed of inflation of space time started gaining the upper hand again. And all us matter based things are just along for the ride.

HIPPA - Having Individual's Personal Privacy Assaulted

What's MySpace?

The ready availability of quantum computers is predicated on room temp operations - from what I can see, like superconductive materials, quantum computers need chilling to near absolute zero - not easily achieved without a big bankroll and technical capabilities well beyond the average hackophile. We've been waiting decades for room temp superconductors, and the quantum computing environment is a whole nother level beyond that. So not concerned about my stuff, or my local retailer's files for my credit cards.

Nation-state spying is what it's going to be all about. Later than sooner.....no, wait, my 7 year old grandson has made sure he has better system security than most government agencies. Why are we worrying so much about quanta when good old silicon is still all you need to thrive in this world of failed security.

chaos theory

and all those people in this thread looking up data in Google to provide examples to justify their answers here are introducing new biases in Google's predictive "AI" algorithm - at the end of the day the world is now different, just because of this one little query storm. When a (technical) butterfly flaps its wings in El Reg.....

sounds like a money minting operation; why would he intentionally close down a vanity domain that people are willing to remain a part of and all he needs is some basic server hardware that gets cheaper to update and run every year. but then again it is summer down there, probably popped off to the beach, partied a bit too much with the penguins, and is now only coming out of his herring vodka haze.

Why would NASA have concerns over a failed return booster? They just care that the mission was successful - SpaceX is the one who cares as they are trying to reuse as many of these boosters as they can - and the landings of the boosters are still considered experimental. A controlled landing into water for a giant empty sealed tube that floats and can be retrieved for analysis is not a really bad outcome, just not the one they wanted. This is nothing like a critical failure during launch, not even close.

OK, every other month, a new battery or battery formulation is announced, yet it's sort of like the fusion reactor thingie, always "just 5 (50?) years away". I would someday like to see something that is really in the system and/or on the retail shelf. All we get are Lithium Ion + + (++++) because the 10 nm, whoops wrong promises, newer composition batteries vanish into the post "we've done it!" atmosphere.

Tired of cheshire cat-ions.

Once again, a piece of NASA hardware has long outlived expected service time, and it is experiencing a probable transient fault, and the article makes it sound like a major failure. Doesn't the Reg realize that Scottie is just pulling his "I'm giving it all I can" thing so that when he does get it fixed he will look like a hero?

And this is why I backup 8 different ways, even to the extent of keeping a copy in my safe deposit box (neighbor's house burned down and it seemed to be a rational step after that)

I started out with a Kobo, transitioned to a Nexus 7 2012, and now have a Samsung 8" - I don't want to pay for a $600+ phablet with a screen too small to easily read a book, which my tablet provides and is primarily used for - as well as browsing the web and a lot of email (voice to text is convenient)

My phone is a device for calls and a camera combo that can do basic internet stuff if needed. My tablet has supplanted my notebook because it is so much more portable and powerful enough to do a lot of the notebook based stuff of years gone by. The notebook sits in the case like a the just in case fire extinguisher, waiting for that travel moment, which more and more the tablet has taken the place of.

If I am at home, I would much rather work on my 8700k desktop with dual monitors than the 15.6" laptop that cost as much as the upgrade to the 8700k.

Long live the $300 8" tablet!

Whatever you can create, someone else can create a filter for - the assumption is that these fake bugs will probably be very similar, so that ultimately a filter can false flag a false bug, and be trained to ignore them.

Can you help rattle Facebook copyright people's cage for a friend of mine?

I have a friend, has been chasing and recording severe weather in the US for many years. There is someone who is posting his video on Facebook illegally, and Facebook can't seem to understand where the copyright violations are and won't delete the illegal video from the their system. Please use your bully pulpit to assist my friend.

https://www.facebook.com/cld9trs?hc_ref=ARRY2p1-PvGmGbjDVh4YjN7vGM4kahoLWixPaD0LTeN0MMXrKE1TQPy2Og32BVdcI74&fref=nf

look for the post with the hail in the frame - it will be perhaps a few posts below the top, but it is quickly found.

Great, now "Microsoft Tech Support" can call me and Jake from India(nna) can tell me that my computer will explode unless I buy their lifetime tech support for $999.99, and it will cost them less.

Disco was the absolute worst

But it was where all the girls went, in packs, and all they wanted to do was dance. Hell has a sparkly ball hanging from the ceiling and posters of the BeeGee's on the wall.

Score another one for SpaceX - China is still trying to get a big rocket to the moon, while SpaceX is on the road to Mars with their first try - though the great Elon said he would not be surprised if the FH blew up 200 ft off the pad.

Ummmm, the USA NWS starts issuing categorical risk of severe weather 8 days out, and more detailed risk of Tornadoes, hail and straight line winds 3 days out.

and in still other news, dog wets fire hydrant, sun rises in the east and oxygen is a by-product of photosynthesis

The thing most SETI enthusiasts, vs. the scientists with interest in this area, fail to realize is that size matters. Even with articles like this, it is really hard for the average person to come close to wrapping their minds around just how much space and time are involved in even just this galaxy. And the universe is far larger than what we can see (only 13.4 billion years or so worth).

At least one of the guilty parties in this Uber-FUBAR situation is going to get something of his just desserts. That entire technical management team deserves to get charged with at least criminal negligence.

Twitter is going to die of "old man's disease" - what kid is going to want to use something that is dominated by 60+ year old's - especially politicians and social trolls, false news and pundits.

I Exspecter a core Meltdown.