Posts by Graham Newton 62 posts • joined 3 Apr 2007
I saw it from a playing field near my town centre. Once you knew where to look it was fairly obvious with the naked eye. I did find it at first by scanning with my binoculars checking each star for a bit a fuzziness when the tail appeared spread right across my field of view. A real WOAH moment.
My final year project at Uni was a mathematical model of the human eye at low light intensity. Like the article it relied on loop within loops. The university computer was a DEC 10 and the program was written in Fortran.
I spent a lot of time ensuring that the program would run to completion without intervention. Unlike my fellow student who would babysit their programs overnight.
However my program consumed 12 hours of run time and was terminated. I got a "see me" email.
I was worried, this was my final year project.
They didn't bollock me but suggested that I sent my program to Manchester University . Not knowing about modems I thought I had to send my program by post but was put straight on this.
After a compile failure a CDC (Control Data)machine executed my program in less than a second.
This taught me that you had to program to the machine, not try to make it do things it wasn't built to do.
So for example I have:
Used the Transputers ability to do 2D memory manipulation and paralleled processing and CPU core linking to to do image processing for world class astronomical telescopes.
Produced a minimal memory and CPU cycle timesliceing OS to run experiments on the Cassini Huygens lander.
Programmed SHARC DSPs to operate on multiple audio streams concurrently using the SIMD mode.
Normal programming makes me weep, it's sledgehammer all the way, no artistry, no finesse.
I sit and wonder WTF when it takes several seconds for a word document to load.
When I worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory we used to send heavy equipment to our observatory on the Canary Islands by freighter. We were very surprised when we were informed that a Harrier jump jet had landed on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alraigo_incident
I had the pointless form filling which had to be done for everything software related. One of the boxes was "Impact on organisation" i.e. would our organisation be splashed all over the papers if we cocked it up?
One of my "items" was a computer system on the Cassini Huygens spacecraft. Which would have been a BIG DEAL if it went wrong. Fortunately we just did seconds since mission T0, no dates involved.
As it turned out they need not have worried about Y2K as a disaster of a replacement accounting system made the front page of Computer Weekly and the NAO list of worst public IT failures.
I got that here in the UK. My house is called The White House, 'cos it's white. However further proof of address was required from my bank because on the bill it said The Whitehouse which was different. The other three lines including the house number were identical.
I had a similar problem with wing mirrors.
Both wing mirrors were stolen off my ancient Vauxhall Cavalier. I ordered some from a scrap yard and they didn't turn up. I enquired as to where they were and was told they had got lost in the couriers system and they would be delivered next week.
Then the car was stolen, the next day I got two wing mirrors.
I initially thought it would be a single satellite in lunar orbit. Receiving and recording when in contact with the lander and then re-transmitting when in contact with Earth, like Cassini Huygens.
However you are correct and there is quite a lot of interesting information in this link.
https://gbtimes.com/change-4-update-queqiao-relay-satellite-in-halo-orbit-longjiang-2-returns-amazing-images-from-moon
I would have approached it differently. From Earth the Moon is the same angular size as the Sun.
The Earth is approximately 90 million miles from the Sun so at the current 15 million miles the probe is 6 time closer so the Sun would appear 6 times bigger. At closest approach at 3.9 million miles, say 4 to make the maths easy then it is 22.5 times closer. So maybe you have a factor of two missing somewhere.
Well I find it works on Linux really well now. I don't even have to call "Skype" and listen the annoying upbeat message "if you can hear your message then your mic is working" (if you can't you are a hopeless loser). As for Skype for Business well that's pitiful. Like most things in office 365 the so called integration is abysmal. And I've discovered recently that Skype for Business does appear to have echo cancelling.
DO NOT use the solar eyepieces that come with some cheap import telescopes. These are very dangerous
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5xb3b-vRd4
As mentioned before use Baader Solar Film at the entrance to the main aperture so filtering the light before it enters the telescope optics.
As primarily a Linux developer a Windows developer commented on C# and some useful RPC functionality. So I had a look and it seemed to sort of work.
There were obviously massive gaps in the functionality between .NET and Mono so I monitored the progress of Mono on Linux.
It soon became clear that with the creation of Xamarin then Mono on Linux wasn't really going anywhere. I am of the opinion that de Icanza is a politician. He'll tell you what you want to hear but if something better comes along he'll go for it. I don't blame him for furthering his career but it's not because he is a great coder or really committed to open source.
I don't believe the open source team were always talking to the .NET guys because why would Mono have so many deficiencies. de Icanza may have been talking to MS but I don't think it filtered down to open source but de Icanza used this to get to where he is now. Just like a politician.
I have found the views expressed here to be quite enlightening. I thought it was just me!
OK step 1
Open (or log into) wallet.
Right, don't have one of those.
Try
https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
Mmmm -- most of them say they are vulnerable. That doesn't sound good.
Right try Bitcoin Wallet as it is not vulnerable.
Description:
"Have your Bitcoins always with you, in your pocket! You pay by quickly scanning a QR-code. As a merchant, you receive payments reliably and instantly. Bitcoin Wallet is the first mobile Bitcoin app, and arguably also the most secure!"
Not convinced.
Yes it runs Windows. Full stop. The ARM version. You can load as many exes as you like, nothing will happen unless they have been compiled for ARM. Which they probably haven't.
I did try it and it was very painful. I have learnt the error of my ways and gone back to raspian, cos it just works.
It's no different to measuring the mass of any other object. It's not special just because it is a black hole. The obvious way is to measure the orbital period of orbiting objects.
The other way of looking at is if you can walk away from a car you can walk away from a black hole with the mass of a car.
This unfortunate fact along with Hawking radiation scuppered my invention of the black hole vacuum cleaner.
Having worked on Cassini Huygens, which I presume from the comments by the Beagle team must have been an uncontrolled European spacecraft landing, I find it strange that the radio transmitter was under four solar panels that had to be correctly deployed in order before radio transmission/reception was possible.
We were always concerned about single point failures and despite the compactness of Beagle's design having 4 single point failures before the radio is operational seems unthinkable.
India and Thailand both have road rules very similar to the UK. But watching the traffic you wouldn't know it.
e.g. Turning right from a minor road on several taxi journeys in India the driver would positioned them self on the right of the road and left turning traffic would have to pass in front and drive round the taxi.
If the VCE is designed by the same engineers that designed the homehub I was sent, which:
Wouldn't allow a 10.x.x.x subnet
Only allowed a specific set of ports to be opened
Changing the SSID was an advanced feature
Regularly drop the PPoE session
Regularly generated 255 phantom Wifi hotspots one after the other
it will work really well.
The final mission has already been decided and is known as "Grand Finale". The orbiter is to be manoeuvred into a polar (vertical) orbit such that the closest approach is between the rings and the planet which will give some fantastic photos of the planet. This culminates after several such orbits with orbiter falling into Saturn's atmosphere.
I know Surrey Satellites know their stuff BUT is the phone really unmodified? First of all it has to survive launch vibration. Once in space it will be exposed to radiation and be in a vacuum. Normal electronic don;t really work well in a vacuum. Circuit boards tend to arc so destroying themselves. Non radiation hardened parts will probably fail pretty quickly.
I don;t think the data rate information is correct.
Doesn;t agrree with this.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communicationwithearth/data/
I'm surprised that they have had to upgrade the OS especially after such a short trip. I wrote the s/w for the SSP experiment on Cassini Huygens and the last thing I would have wanted to do was significant s/w upgrades. I didn't use an OS as they are too resource hungary..
On that my data rate allocation was about 2 to 10 slots of 100 bytes per 12 second cycle. (From memory)
However having carried out such an audacious landing procedure an OS upgrade should be a walk in the park.
Apart from a few notable exceptions I am astounded at the comments on here. I expect this type of hysterical ranting on Digital Spy which is why I don't go there.
So Nominet changing its rules to allow Websites that are engaged in serious criminal activities to be shut down rather than having to find a loophole to do the same thing is bad?
Nominet obviously think there is a need to be able to do this so they are looking for solutions. Which don't appear to be found here!
/^v.+b$/i
We have a pond with frogs in it. When then die they do tend to bloat and then float to the surface presumably because of gases being created and held inside the frog. Really nice to remove -- not!
So I suspect that is what happened in this case and was probably aided by the heat as a previous commenter has noticed.
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