Posts by Pope Popely

Amazon complains that Perplexity's agentic shopping bot is a terrible customer

Satisfaction

Seeing those companies fight increases my satisfaction with both of them!

Away from Oktoberfest, Munich's museums also serve science on tap

Oktoberfest beer is not excellent

Schankbier. I pass.

The real reason why Trump is killing the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawai'i

Well

transforming stinky industries and giving them back their responsibility, repairable and reusable products instead of buy cheap and throw away, restoring some nice forest, cheap power, coast lines with less plastic and interesting chemicals, less dead and respiration diseases, better working public transport so a car is less often needed and resulting less traffic deaths, cities with some trees spending shadow, less microplastics - well, what if we do this all for a liberal hoax?

Under-qualified sysadmin crashed Amazon.com for 3 hours with a typo

Job half done

Unfortunately, no permanent fix for Amazon.

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

Re: ICE?

Done badly, you are a federal republic as germany is and each federal state want's its station, and you get the situation that you get a nonstop track between Frankfurt an Cologne on one side of the rhine and state border and a few km away a Frankfurt-Limburg-Montabaur-Bonn-Cologne (But otoh, nice backup), or lines that go almost straight from A to B with just a small hook to just enter the edge of another state.

Talking about steam in production: In April 2024 a classic steam locomotive was booked to actually pull railway building material thru southern germany.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNDa-Gs97No

Also, are you wondering why the Bahn waits for failure of railways instead on maintenance? Basically, fixing is on taxpayer, maintenance on DB.

Aussie rocket foiled by premature fairing pop

Isn't anybody surprised?

A high-ranking Officer of the manufacturer himself risked something to protect actual assets, ehm, people?

After that 2024 Windows fiasco, CrowdStrike has a plan – job cuts, leaning on AI

hallucinatory interference

A lot of those on the net these days. Not necessarily hallucinated by generative AI.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: Chair on the floor tile

Arcy comments? Sparky comments?

Re: Phonetic Alphabets

A is for tree

V is for cow

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Military intelligence

One morning call during my mandatory service (10 months, germany), the guy in front announced that the facility is going to test it's emergency power generators and all unnecessary loads, especially calling out coffe makers, shall be switched off.

There had been two test events. Yours truly named the first event "NATO-Disco". Guess why. The second event went much better.

Static electricity can be shockingly funny, but the joke's over when a rack goes dark

The very seat I sit on right now causes the monitor in front of me to go black sometimes, just from hopping on it. Sometime i get haptic reminders.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

If the famous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ would still be working, it would have been great to use the "click here" link for a rickroll.

Is that a bird’s nest, a wireless broadband base station, or both?

Please let me seed this

ANY SIGHTING REPORTS OF THOSE BIRD SPECIES BEFORE 5G ROLLOUT ARE FAKE! WAKE UP!

EU buyers still shunning pure electric vehicles, prefer hybrids

So, sales dropped in germany? RLY?

Well, duh. The "Umweltbonus" was droppen iirc in december 2023. That made the decision pro BEV a bit harder, who would have guessed.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Any metallurgists lurking?

The starship doesn't end behind the colorized part. Heat got behind, CTE of the part might have applied a force to holders etc.

Arm reportedly warns Qualcomm it will cancel its licenses

"designed to strongarm a longtime partner"

I see what you did here

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

Re: 5 of Richard Branson's balloon adventures - in his own words

So, a liabiliy to public rescue services or is he bringing his own?

Biz hired, and fired, a fake North Korean IT worker – then the ransom demands began

Camouflaging destination

See, it's not that easy. Shipping adress for notebooks isn't "North Korea", its "Best Korea". A trap for you young players.

(Reminds me of GDR activity when a eastern agency luring west german soldiers used a WWII postcode starting with "W", suggesting western german origin.)

China claims Starlink signals can reveal stealth aircraft – and what that really means

Re: I have oft wondered...

The hole on a single frequency, with 3 objects (transmitter, receiver, reflector) will be caused by the reflector on the surface of one of some rougly egg-shaped space around the line of sight of transmitter and receiver, where the reflected wave arrives at (multiples of) 180° phase shift compared to LOS transmission, causing some cancellation of a portion of the direct wave energy (destructive interference). Several transmitters, same reflector and same receiver at the same time, those possible areas might overlap somewhere. And this is only the beginning. There is constructive interference, Doppler shift, too...

Best regards,

about every experienced ham radio operator.

More than 83K certs from nearly 7K DigiCert customers must be swapped out now

Am I the only one who can't comprehend the claim "LiFeS DePeNd On iT!" coming from people who makes this a) dependent on 3rd party certificates and a clock and b) can't be arsed to implement the rules right?

Starlink geofence appears to have some gaping holes

Re: Another headache in the making

Actually, physics does geofencing - you need to exactly know where your satellite relative to the others, ground stations and customers is due to lightspeed and the bits only so and so long, resulting in location-dependent timing requirements.

NASA tries to jog Voyager 1's memory from 15 billion miles away

Re: Lead free rubbish

First we have to catch it, using something like a Hakko, err, hook, then a Kurtz time später we might solder. Leaded solder might not be available to us mere mortals. Except the spools we saved. Or making our own from car batteries or ammo. But those guys would.