Re: But when you start them...
Wrong - there is a transformer somewhere and until it saturates and sets up the magnetic field it is a short circuit - electronic theory 101
40 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Nov 2023
The comparison of the transmitter power to a charger is meaningless as we are talking about RF power.
Amateurs trying to operate this satellite will be using directional yagi antennas which focus the beam to an extent and since it's in low earth orbit and in the sky there are no obstructions.
You don't need a lot of power to work it; a 5W handheld with a good yagi can get through.
The pain in the backside is you need to track it across the sky as it will whizz across it in about 10-20 mins depending on the pass
I would suggest the police bimble round some of locations where habitual caravan-life aficionados dwell.
They are known to have an affinity for things, especially those things currently in the possession of someone else at the time.
However I suspect they are busy kicking in the doors of those who type hurty words on Twitter or FB.
Was this written by someone who never owned a VCR ?
PAL was much better than NTSC [never the same colour twice] and I can remember getting videos with full hi-fi FM encoded stereo sound even with dolby pro logic encoding. I had a really good sound system with full surround in 1993 for my video pleasure.
At one point last year I was running and insuring 5 cars:
Wife's new car
Wife's old car
Daughter's car
My MX5
My beater XR5
Now done to 4 thank god
However 8 for one person if they aren't used by family members is a bit nuts unless you are a collector.
The thing is - smart metering is not hard. It's been done all over the world and there are multiple technologies available depending on the geography, population density etc.
The logical approach would have been to roll out a common vendor with common technology [the transmission approach either Mesh, 3g etc would be the variable]. You could have hammered the price down this way
No - lets implement different technologies and different vendors across the country creating a mess.
It seems to be a common issue for many, many years in the US, no matter who is in charge, of under-investment in general infrastructure.
Many of its major bridges are overdue for replacement thanks to last of investment on replacement and repair.
US railways because they are privately owned suffer from track quality that is a joke compared to Europe.
US Airports are old and poorly designed compared especially to Asia and the major hubs in the Middle East - again is this due to the localised operational model where no-one wants to spend money rebuilding?
It always disappoints me that such an advanced and wealthy economy puts up with public infrastructure that is seriously sub-par.
Or is it just that the US voters and taxpayers don't see why they should pay for this - an argument which is pretty well moot in other economies, the idea being that in general voters and taxpayers understand that the Government invests in infrastructure [not always wisely though e.g. HS2]
I appreciate your point but that is unfair.
I work for a mob that has been in the press a fair bit getting lots of flak and pissing off customers because of a COVID and supply chain collapse but also the decision to take on too much work.
It's a large company yet colleagues have been verbally abused and even spat on in public because of it. They had absolutely nothing to do with any of that decision or its implementation so why should they cop the abuse?
I worked in a wafer fab in the mid 80s. Some seriously nasty acids and gases that would kill you if you got a whiff of them. And that is before I mention the diffusion furnaces where the hydrogen and oxygen used to grow oxides would sometimes go 'pop' blasting the quartz endcap across the bay at high speed.
I've had a bit of experience with Smart Streetlights. You put a smart controller into the standard photocell socket on the top of the light unit which then communicates on top of the electricity radio metering network back to base. It allows you to time schedule on/off, scheduled dimming [dimming lights at 3am etc saves money] and tells you how long the lamp has illuminated, its power use [useful for billing and energy management] and if something is wrong. Note this is designed for LED lights.
Now you can do it properly with the big industry players like Itron. It is not cheap but they very, very focussed on security.
Or you can do it cheap with some chinese junk and get owned.
The company I worked for in Perth in the 2000s employed an individual in an IT Support role - I knew him when he worked there.
Said individual had some bother later on with the Feds after finding religion: https://thewest.com.au/news/perth-mans-journey-from-druggie-to-tinnie-terrorist-ng-ya-298722
National Governments have form for screwing around when it comes to Frequencies.
A few years ago Thales tried to muscle their way into the 2m band for drone communication use which is heavily used by Radio Amateurs for VHF Communication, satellites and lots of other uses. The French Government needless to say backed them to the hilt and tried to get the ITU to roll over and give them access to it which would have severely buggered amateur use.
In this case the ITU told them to do one and go away thanks to Amateurs getting themselves organised and fighting back.
I do suspect thought as usual Starlink don't give tuppence for national or regional frequency allocations and are trying their luck.
No they do check - I know of one Patient System which runs regular Audit checks on the access audit logs especially around notable names or people involved in incidents in the news.
It's made clear to staff who have access that it's a sackable offence to look at information that is not relevant to your job or the care you are providing. Go the media with it and you will be breaking the law also
Whilst I despair at US employment law and the way corporates treat their staff, they should have perhaps read their terms and conditions of employment.
They aren't slaves they signed an employment contract. No-one made them take that job on. They can walk away and find a better paying job with better conditions.
In the US suddenly agitating for Union Recognition and targeting Google was only ever going to end one way especially if they are sub-contractors [and yes I am aware they definition is being challenged and rulings have been made]
It does smack of snowflakes finding out the world is a nasty place after all.
This is Australia - just about EVERY building has buckets of aircon around or on it. There are lots of Defence Buildings in very out of the way places [out of the way in Australia means hundreds of kms from the nearest town never mind city] covered in air con and power generation where you could hide it.
Same from my wife nurse of decades. CPR on a person of advanced years is often pointless. Even if you do get them back they often have broken ribs as a result due to their age and the vast majority will pass away within a few days anyway no matter what.
DNR is not an excuse to do nothing it's about being realistic about dying.
It's rampant amongst Tier 1 companies - reduce local staff and replace with temp visas - the usual US Model.
Ironically though the Tier 2 companies are snapping up all the talent let go that they normally wouldn't get and then chasing down and winning business the Tier 1's used to get because they have the right talent so it's a bonanza for them.
Believe me I have direct experience of one large IT organisation who over the last year has absolutely culled staff and replaced them with offshore workers on temp visas.
Note I don't have an issue with new immigrants to Oz - I am one and I hire them and work alongside them.
However this is blatant to cut the employment cost as the new people are not being paid the Australian equivalent.
Customers have voted with their feet because of this.
Don't get me started on ACS - a nice income stream for them.
We tried and tried to make the Hololens work but it was too problematic.
There was an absolutely screaming use of it outdoors in Mining and in maintenance of things like outdoor plant and electrical infrastructure but the headsets were heavy, battery life terrible and useless in anything other than a dark room. If they had GPS capability and a compass just the ability to look at an object, detect what you might be looking at and overlay some information would have resulted in customers kicking the door in with money.
Let's add in crap software and terrible performance and it's always been a money sink in search of gullible punters.
The lawyers will argue that the Post Office told them the information they were giving them was true.
If you think ANY lawyer will be so much as spoken to in a stern manner over this I have a bridge to sell you. One thing the legal profession is outstandingly good at is making sure mud doesn't stick to them.
One of the absolute shittiest things about all of this is it has been clear for a while now that the Post Office have been running down the clock as much as possible on paying out the compensation hoping that some of the claimants die, give up or accept less money.
I've been reading about this whole scandal for donkey's years and it's become depressingly obvious that not one person from Fujitsu [where some individuals in their Development Team have clearly lied on oath] or the Post Office will ever the inside of a courtroom dock. That would require the Establishment to admit they were asleep at the wheel for decades and that does not happen in the UK.
I worked for the Royal Mail [yes I know it's not the Post Office] in the 90s in their Head Office in Edinburgh. The investigators were all ex-coppers from CID sitting on fat pensions and were described to me as "utter bastards".
Let's wait for the phrase "lessons will be learned" which as we know is Civil Service/Government speak for "we got away with it scot-free"
I've lost count of the amount of arguments I've had with people over this who say it was a damp squib and a complete hype.
The reason it was a damp squib was the sheer amount of work done to fix it. I worked for a relatively small publisher in London at the time and we still found a number of things that needed fixed.
To steal from someone else, the tenders are structured in a way that only very large organisations can qualify and respond. The insurance and indemnity requirements along can be very, very large which rules about absolutely anyone other than a Tier 1. I worked for an ambitious Tier 2 but we were still shut out of contracts as the bond requirements could be a few million quid which we just could not afford to fund and have in escrow.
Many Years ago I was working on some C code in Oracle on Unix that did a lot of data analysis and reporting on pharmacy dispensing scripts which was then sent back to the drug companies.
The previous developer, who was f&&&ing useless but his mother was a Director...., had put in code to print "Happy Birthday" everywhere when it was his Birthday.
In a Production System.
Across all the printed reports.
Which were sent out to Customers.
Twat.
Previous poster has alluded to doing work in Northern Ireland with armed escort during the troubles. Even the bloke from the Post Office/BT fixing the phones would be considered an IRA target.
I was in Damman/Dharan working in IT during the Gulf War with bits of Scud missile dropping on the roof. It's more common than you think.
The core of a nuclear weapon will steadily decay over time until at some point it won't go pop but just "fizzle" - the term for a nuclear detonation that really doesn't no nuclear.
The US is going through a process of recycling the warhead material and refurbishing warheads with new material from reactors hence the reason plutonium manufacturing is increasing. The UK, France, Russia, China etc will all have the same problem.