Posts by Guido Brunetti

Space-wrecks: Elon's prototype Moon ferry Starship blows its top during fuel tank test

A (not official) source said that a communication problem between pumps and sensors led to a massive overpressurization. So the tank/hull construction likely wasn't at fault.

Windows is now built on Git, but Microsoft has found some bottlenecks

Re: SourceSafe

SourceSafe had the same issue as Access: Not being a real server, so relying on the network file system to handle multi-user concurrency - bad idea.

TFS on the other hand uses a proper SQL Server Database to store things. It has absolutely nothing to do with VSS anymore and in fact Git is now the preferred source control system in TFS. All in all TFS is probably the best and fastest developing ALM tool around today.

What should the Red Arrows' new aircraft be?

The Super Tucano

With the Brexit imminent I would opt for something cheap, reliable and still capable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_314_Super_Tucano#Specifications_.28EMB_314_Super_Tucano.29

Sysadmin flees asbestos scare with disk drive, blank pay cheques, angry builders in pursuit

The customer is always right!

I saw this ad for a DIY store on a billboard regurlarly when driving from Vienna to Bratislava around y2k. Still funny :-)

http://www.wanderinformatiker.at/galaxy/hobbys/obi1.htm

What's up, Zuck? FTC to probe Facebook for WhatsApp phone number mega-slurp

Re: Why the deafening silence from the EU on this?

There is no silence at all. The EU commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager, is already looking into it and "talking to Facebook". Also, at least the German antitrust agency ("Bindeskartellamt") is doing an investigation of the issue, saying, "we have to look in the Facebook engine room to understand the implications for competition".

Testing times as NASA rattles Mississippi with mighty motor burn

Re: Steam launchers

Even if this would work (big if), it just takes the rocket straight up. But that is just the easy part of a rocket launch. Now you have to accelerate to 17.000 mph *sideways* to get it into orbit.

Phabba-dabba-do: Samsung hypes up Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge

Re: And their USP is...?

Nokia/Microsoft 730. It costs just a third of the top models and is also available with dual SIM. Now if Microsoft would just start paying a few percent of its marketing budget to get more important apps ported to Windows Phone ...

Sony Pictures MEGAHACK: Securobods pull out probes, analyse badness

Proof the N.Koreans did it

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--7iigPzJ9--/18ir476zicywojpg.jpg

Evil hackers at work!

China building SUPERSONIC SUBMARINE that travels in a BUBBLE

Re: Why use the military?

The single largest holder of official federal U.S. debt is the Federal Reserve Bank - a private institution with strong ties to "old money", followed by China, Japan and Brazil.

Right now, China and the U.S. depend on each other, both economically and financially. But the Chinese work on both fronts to make these ties severable. And they pour lots of money in military technology to actually survive the eventual severance and become the next superpower.

Tesla's top secret gigafactories: Lithium to power world's vehicles? Let's do the sums

Tesla demoed a battery swap station here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5V0vL3nnHY

And no, it wasn't actually faster than the gas fill up, if you take into account that the Audi got more than double the range out of it, but it was close enough to count.

Powershell terminal sucks. Is there a better choice?

Re: Why not use jpsoft / bash

Because PowerShell (incl. ISE) is installed on every recent Windows system by default and bash isn't :-)

Because on a recent Windows Server you can script every single server function with it, which you can't do with any other shell.

Because a lot of server software nowadays comes with it's own PowerShell provider plug-in, which makes scripting this component (Exchange, SQL Server, ...) a whole lot easier.

Just use Powershell ISE

Installed automatically with Powershell 2.0 and upwards.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dd315244.aspx

Coming in 2014: Scary super-soldier exoskeleton suits from the US military

Re: and I'll say it again....

Because controlling even a single droid like that requires serious wireless bandwidth. Did you ever try to operate a W-LAN-like connection over a few miles with a mobile target in combat conditions, especially when the opposition can just setup a 1 kw broadband noise emitter.

It's one thing to operate flying observation drones that way cause flying is actually quite simple once you get the hang of it. Operating on the ground is much more complex. More obstacles, hindering your vision, your movement and blocking your radio connection. Then there is the issue of light speed. Controlling a drone in Pakistan from U.S. with one or two seconds latency may be OK, but try playing counterstrike with a 1 sec latency. You just get your ass handed to you - every single time.

Our week with Soylent: Don't chuck out your vintage food quite yet

Nothing new, really

As the soylent guy I was uncomfortable especially with the lunch options at most of my changing work locations (too much fast food, or too low quality of the food). However, what he found out through (self)experimantation has long been found out by people who need to feed patients that cannot eat through normal means. And they produce well-tasting spin-offs for non-patients, too.

I'm a bit overweight, so I also wanted a method to control my calory input. Just keep it a little under what I actually consume, to promote a slow, long term loss of weight. Worked pretty well over the last year, I'm losing about a kilogram per month.

So this is what my routine on a work day looks like (on weekends I just eat normally, my wife cooks then for both of us):

I start the day with a chocolate croissant from a dealer at the train station (around 400 kcal) at 07:15 to lighten up my morning mood :-). At around 10:00 when I start to feel light hunger, I down a 200ml can of Fresubin 2kcal chocolate flavoured energy drink, giving me another 400 kcal. This Fresubin stuff (just my personal preferred choice for taste reasons) is what the nutritionists call "fully balanced" meaning that with three cans of that all my vitamins, minerals etc. are fully covered.

Lunch around 12:30 is a wholemeal bun with some spread (tuna, egg, or whatever tickles my fancy, i try to avoid the high kcal ones), an apple and a carrot - another 400kcal. In the afternoon another 400kcal can, then one more in the evening and that's it, apart from 1-2l of sparkling water over the day. 2000kcal input. At my height, weight and sport level (2-4 hours of light sport during the week), my daily need is around 2500. I sometimes cheat with a little treat or a nonalcoholic beer after sports, but in general it's working in the right direction (as opposed to working in the wrong direction when I didn't control my calory intake).

Prosecutor on Private Manning's Wiki-leaks: 'Arrogance meets access'

PFY

Bradley certainly has the looks of a PFY (PFC is probably just a typo). And while Julian certainly is viewed as BOfH by the Amerikanskys, I doubt his qualification in that role. Which makes one wonder where the real BOfH hides?

Incoming comet will probably miss Mars, says NASA

Re: "NASA's current prediction of the comet's path."

The influence of Mars on the trajectory depends partly on the relative speed of the comet. The higher speed the less influence since the time spent in the stronger parts of Mars gravity field is very low. At well over 100,000 miles per hour the comet isn't staying long enough to produce a big, visible bend in the trajectory curve. The big curve in Nasas graphic comes from the sun, not from Mars.

First, servers were deep-fried... now, engineers bring you wet ones

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Plugging my Computer into the central heating? What should that be good for?

In Winter (when I use the central heating), my computer heats my room just fine. Every Watt of electricity that goes in comes out again as heat plus some shifted bits in my SSD. If that heating isn't sufficient, my room thermostat kicks in hot water from the central heating, so presto, problem already solved.

So why would I reroute the computer heat through the central heating and then into my room through hot water, when the direct path works just fine?

Security audit finds dev outsourced his job to China to goof off at work

Re: The only reason anyone is angry at Bob...

Doesn't matter. They probably put in some skilled people from their foreign intelligence department, not from the company itself. Getting an authorized VPN-channel into a critical infrastructure, getting all sorts of system specs, getting to write code incorporated into these systems and then even getting paid for it must have been a no-brainer for them.

On the other hand, they probably would have been smart enough to use a U.S.-proxy then. But now that the contractor is out of business with this client, they probably sell all the information they gathered to the highest (chinese) bidder.

Software disaster zone Knight Capital bags $400m lifeline

Re: On the bright side...

They only noticed the problem because their credit lines ran out. So they couldn't lose any more simply because no one was giving them any more money.

Pyrotechnic boffin poised to light LOHAN's fire

Re: igniter box

Lipo? Forget it, it has serious issues when getting cold. Ask any electric model plane flyer.

Supercomputers need standard shot glass to measure out juice

Re: interruptable...

Getting rid og MW? You just need a resistor with some fracking big cooling fins. I always wanted to buy one of those for the times when leccy spot prices go negative (Like Germany, Late night, Lots of wind),

Paris, 'cause she's hot, too.

Cosmic ray source riddle mystery now even more mysterious

Re: long live the oh my god particle

"Massive amounts of energy"? Nor for a that single proton. A good baseball thrower would apparently be enough :-). If you take them all together though...

Fusion-io demos billion IOPS server config

PRAM

At this point they shouldn't refer to these things as "Drives" any more, because there is little resemblance to the original meaning of that word.

What about "PRAM" (persistent RAM) as opposed to "DRAM". Technologically it is much closer to DRAM than to harddrives anyway.

LOHAN fires up sizzling thruster

Thrust measurement

What is the weight of the fuel? You have to add that to the measured thrust over time to get the real thrust. Near the end the real thrust would be the measured weight on the scale plus the weight of the already burned fuel since the initial "0" measurement included the fuel weight.

So if your fuel weight was, say, 500g, the peak thrust would actually have been measured at roundabout 1900 grams near the end.

BOFH: I'll get my bonus even if it kills, well, someone

Write Only Memory

or WOM. Around here that's called a NUL device.

Not to be confused with WORM (Write Once Read Maybe) Memory.

Aussie carbon tax in actually-makes-sense shocker

"The masses have more voting power"

But what if the elected people don't do what the voters had in mind? Happens all the time but somehow the voters don't get what they have to do to change this. Do you get it?

BOFH: CSI Haxploitation Cube Farm Apocalypse

Makes me remember the old times:

*DUMMY MODE ON*

Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate

Source

OK, let's do the math.

Here is the measurements of radiation in the water sample taken, according to Tepco:

http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11032503-e.html

The dominant radiation comes from Ce144 with 2.2 million decays per second per cm³. This emits a (rather weak) electron (beta decay) on its way to Pr144. That element has a half life in the seconds range and thus goes almost immediately into another beta decay to Nd144, this time with a very strong output (~ 3 MeV), which gives it a high penetration range (> 1 cm in water/tissue, up to 15m in air).

Organ exposures and effective exposures are both measured in Sievert. As I said, the total dose

was significantly less, "more than 170 mSv", according to Tepco, but since most of that dose occured at the feet through direct contact with the contaminated water, it creates an organ equivalent dose well in the single digit Sievert range. These workers may or may not get radiation sickness, but their cancer risk is already orders of magnitude raised.

BTW: The existence of relatively large amounts of Ce144 in the water confirms a significant core meltdown. One cm³ (!) of that water can contaminate a thousand litres of ground water with over 22.000 Bq/kg, which is way over any safety limit. And with a half-life of 284 days that problem will stay for a while.

Wrong base

The 10.000 times factor is not related to the background radiation but to the normal level of water in a running reactor core!

The total dose taken by these men at the feet-level was 5-6 Sievert! Total dose was less of course, but that's still pretty much and something like a "light sunburn". Not at all.

Not really

That's like three *thousand* vacuum cleaners in a row (3,6 Megawatts)

This is what you call "under control"?!

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-66135.html

Mine is the lead lined coat, btw.

The True Cost of Desktop Support

Still missing the mark

There is an iceberg of costs that isn't even mentioned here: Time wasted by employees to work around artificial restricitions.

You want to take home some work but can't, because IT has disabled your USB-Drive? Now you have to zip/crpyt it and send it through email.

You need to find out a certain parameter of your SQL-Server but don't even have the reading rights necessary? Go off, find an admin, file a lawsuit or just ignore the whole matter until the server blows up.

You can drive down the support calls to zero by not allowing your users to do *anything*, but your business will suffer. Throughput is what matters, not cost!

But because the untold wasted minutes for circumventing IT can't be measured, you just ignore the matter altogether. The result can be watched in almost every larger organisation: Loss of intrinsic motivation, loss of throughput (everything seems to take ages), loss of customers. The response: Cost reductions of course!

Defcon speaker calls IPv6 a 'security nightmare'

No problem

Let's have a hundred trillion planets with a trillion people each, then every person can still have a trillion IPv6 Adresses. If we ever reach that point, changing to IPvx is going to get tricky, though...

Microsoft's .NET at ten: big hits, strange misses

3.5 includes 2.0

Doesn't make sense. 3.5 is a superset of 2.0 and uses the same runtime. Basically 3.5 is just 2.0 plus some additional framework librarys and a new compiler.

Different runtimes exist for .NET 1.1 and 4.0. All of these can be installed on the same machine.

US military chokes on stream from robots' fat pipes

SkyNet

"The Pentagon wants one system to control and harvest data from any of its unmanned vehicles."

Right. Let's name it "SkyNet".

Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail

"Ted" and "square root"

Both items actually yield very impressive results! You just have to help WA a little bit with the context. Fortunately it makes it very easy to do so.

1. Enter "Ted" and search.

2. Click on "Use as a given name" instead.

3. Be impressed

4. Enter "square root" and search

5. Click on "Use as referring to math instead".

Paris, because even she would have noticed the quite obvious links.

'We could wake up smarter' - Ballmer hints at Win XP reprieve

I also bought a Vista recently

Dell just won't sell you an XPS Laptop without at least Home Premium.

About 10 Minutes after the package was delivered, Vista was gone and is now replaced with an actual upgrade: Windows Server 2008 Standard x64.

Thanks to El Reg for pointing me to the relevant blog article.

Paris, because she's as cute as my M 1330.

Heathrow 777 crash: 'No anomalies in the major aircraft systems'

@Tim

Until they know the real reason, yes. There are hundreds of flights with this type of aircraft and engine every day and they don't seem to fall from the sky all the time. So risk assessment is exactly what's happening here.

Germans launch flights for nudists

Re: Does this mean Paris H is a communist?

Quote from above:

"In the event of a drop in cabin pressure, you may find your nether regions are shrinking...."

Not so! In fact, the reverse will be true. That's why such things as certain feature-enhancing pumps are sold in erotic stores all over the world.

So a better announcement would be: "In case of a pressure drop you will find that certain oppurtunities offer themselves to you - or should I say "arise"?. Use them quickly and we will guarantee you a happy landing."

Sparks fly over electric shock dealing Dell laptop

I had this, too ...

... on my Dell Inspirion 8600.

It's not noticeable during normal work, but when I was on the beautiful island of La Palma in December, I noticed a tingling sensation when touching the frame of the screen while plugged-in. The strongest "shock" was touching the shielding of the svga-socket while blindly searching for the usb-slot on the backside. It was quite uncomfortable, but not painful as such.

At this time I was barefoot on the ceramic tiles in the house. Not surprinsingly, it went away when I put my (cork-soled) sandals on (though I thought, the ceramic tiles shouls be pretty good insulators, too).

At that time I thought that maybe some strange wiring in the house was responsible for it, because before and after that holiday I never experienced that sensation again.