Posts by tony72 519 posts • joined 2 Jul 2008
Agreed. Three hundred yards is a long way away; if you assume the guy is 2 yards tall, and you hold up a ruler three feet away from you, the guy's apparent size on the ruler would be 1/4 of an inch. Not very big at all. Highly unlikely that you can reliably identify something that size at that range. I'm sure whatever it was kinda looked like a guy in a jetpack, but it most probably was not.
Unfortunately, these Backblaze reports are not at all objective. The results reflect only their own experience and can't safely be extrapolated to drive reliability in general. This has been pointed out several times since their first report was published, and they don't seem to have improved their method. They therefore smack rather more of PR than of real attempts to inform.
Backblaze make make no claim that there findings should be taken as reflecting anything other than what they are - their results, with their setup, under their conditions. That doesn't make it not objective; perhaps you used the wrong word there. Nor is there any particular reason why Backblaze should change their methodology to try to apply it to use-cases other than own, in fact they'd be nuts to do so. They happen to run a lot of drives, they can produce reliability statistics on those drives, and many people find their results interesting, even if they are a specialised use-case. I'd certainly rather have their results than not.
Have an upvote for the laugh.
To be fair, I believe Beagle 2 did actually land successfully and intact, just it failed to deploy its communications array properly once on the ground, so it should count as a landing. However it was British, although part of an ESA mission, so I'm not sure even then that the EU should get credited with a landing.
"According to preliminary estimates, the battery capacity of a 100W fast charge loses about 20 per cent of its capacity compared to a 30W PD fast charge," his (Google-translated) post reads. "Simply put, 5,000mAh becomes 4,000mAh."
No thanks. I bet there is accelerated long term degradation of the batteries too. Personally fast charging just isn't a selling point for me, I stick my phone on charge when I get home, it's charged when I need it, and there never seems to be a big rush if I need to top it up at desk or in car. I suppose there must be busy bees rushing around that would actually benefit from the few minutes saved, but personally I'd find the opposite a selling point; give me a slower charging phone that promises the minimum possible battery degradation over its lifespan, I'd take that. Dell offers a long-life battery option with its Precision laptops that does that, slower charge in exchange for longevity. I took that option, only time will tell if it actually delivers, but the previous machine's battery didn't make three years.
The review omitted to give the screen resolution, 720 x 1600 apparently. With a 6.55" screen, I'm thinking that's some fairly chunky pixels.
So has OLED become cheap now? I'm surprised to see an OLED display in a budget phone, but then I don't really watch the phone market, so maybe this has snuck up on me.
I was watching at the time. The video stopped updating but the telemetry kept on going for a while, before they cut to the presenter. The video freezing bit didn't look intentional - it froze rather than cutting to a logo, and I think it may have stuttered a bit before freezing, not sure. So there was nothing to see anyway except the altitude readout going the wrong way.
But yes, it seems to be standard practice for space companies to cut off the video feed in case of a failure. I guess they want the opportunity to analyse the failure themselves before the rest of the internet weighs in on it.
That's the same as the 'dust' scenario. If it's happened, you still see it, just in IR
That assumes that all the energy captured by the Dyson sphere is ultimately used within the Dyson sphere, ending up as heat. However if for example you built the Dyson sphere in order to create Kugelblitzes* to power interstellar craft, then most of the energy would ultimately leave the sphere along with the spacecraft in question.
*A Kugelblitz is a black hole formed entirely out of light, and is considered as a possibility for powering far future interstellar craft. You would need a lot of energy to create a Kugelblitz big enough to power a useful spaceship, as in capturing the entire output of the sun for some months or years, so creating them is one possible motivation for building a Dyson sphere (or swarm or whatever) in the first place.
... how do I sign up for the "no more updates" channel? Actually can we roll back a couple of updates to before the Outlook search box mysteriously migrated to the title bar, which is aesthetically and functionally just bizarre. I can't actually remember the last time there was a new Office feature that I actually cared about.
"We need to get them on the tit. That's what we do." - Marty Kaan
House of Lies may have been about management consultancy, but the mantra could be pretty much the same for cloud-based products. Once you depend on that cloud service, they've got you, and while you may be disappointed when they use the power that you've given them over you, you shouldn't be surprised.
Cue MCAS, a dual sensor automated "bodge" system, where apparently only 1 sensor was connected, with no redundancy, that faceplants into the ground when it glitches or birds damage it (even when pilots manually fight it). Oh yes - for added fun, the LED that indicates MCAS failure (dual sensor mismatch) is an "optional sales extra".
That was hardly a no-win design challenge. Obviously they could have conected two sensors if they wanted to, they could have installed that LED as standard if they wanted to, and so for the other changes required to make the system work, then it would have been a win. It wasn't the difficulty of the design that caused their problems, it was making stupid decisions, and then doubling down on that by seemingly avoiding proper regulatory scrutiny of what they'd done.
To be clear, it is said by Boeing that these two bugs, involving the autopilot and stabilization, are new and not related to the faulty MCAS system
So are these bugs new as in newly introduced regressions, or newly discovered but have been lurking for a while? I guess the latter, but the former possibility makes me wonder how scary it might be to receive a software update notification from Boeing these days.
Flash memory is technically "Flash EEPROM", i.e. it is technically a form of ROM. However nobody refers to it as ROM, so doing so is indeed liable to be confusing.
I find that less annoying than the use of the term "memory" by many non-technical types to refer to mass storage. Also technically accurate, at least as far as SSDs are concerned, but not the convention, or at least I've certainly grown up using "memory" to refer to the random access type.
[...] more than five flights will be needed per booster to make the figures work.
Anyone know which figures are being referred to here? Is this saying that SpaceX can't make a profit if they only reuse their boosters five times? I was under the impression that they make a healthy profit per launch already, with the levels of reuse already achieved. Of course that only gets better if they can do a hundred launches per booster.
I can't imagine you'd want to pay millions to spend a few days on the ISS just to twiddle your thumbs, and as far as I understand it the leisure facilities up there are somewhat limited thus far. Are these private astronauts going to be given tasks to perform, or take part in experiments while they are up there? I mean, taking that killer space selfie with the Earth behind you is great and all, but...
Honestly, did anyone think this was really glass on the screen? It's not known for being particularly flexible, unless it's a strand of optical fibre thickness...
Upvote for the first part of your post, but Samsung actually calls the stuff "Ultra Thin Glass", so ...
I have to say, of the four ways I have of watching iPlayer on my TV - Samsung app, Virgin Tivo box app, HTPC, or cast from phone - the Samsung app is the slickest, and the Samsung UI seems quite slick in general to me. But I haven't owned this TV long enough to comment on things like updates and such. I had no real interest in the"smart" features of the TV when I bought it, but you can't really avoid them these days.
Nimbus Capture is a Firefox add-on I use for producing as-it-looks-on-screen captures and prints of web pages or parts thereof; maybe it will be of use to the OP.
Who needs a future...
Bit dramatic, don't you think? I'm personally very keen on us becoming a properly space-faring civilization, and that is bound to involve us putting more and more stuff in space, around this planet and elsewhere. I'm sure that is going to cause some issues for ground-based astronomers, but I can't see us halting all exploitation of space because of that, so we'll all just have to knuckle down and focus on mitigation and make the best of it. But it's certainly not the end of the world.
Two pilots claim to see a drone that nobody on the ground can see, even though it should be clearly visible, that isn't detected by the sophisticated drone detection system at the airport, and that shouldn't be able to fly there in the first place due to DJI's geofencing. I think we must consider the possibility that, just maybe, these pilots were mistaken.
I find it strange. It would be so simple to point something like a dash cam (in fact an actual car dash cam would probably do the job) out the windscreen of a jet, and so be able to show video confirmation of some of these drone sightings, yet recorded evidence of them remains rarer than footage of the Loch Ness Monster. As long as that's the case, I put them in the same category as all other UFO sightings; I'm sure they saw something, but what exactly it was is open to question.
Hmm, it also includes "any articles or equipment installed in or attached to the aircraft at the commencement of their flight" in that mass, scuppering my first thought that a modular drone might provide a loophole. I suppose if you attached stuff to the drone after commencement of flight somehow ...
I suppose the silver lining is they are doing it under contract with NASA, not going the entirely lone way of Musk or Branson.
In what sense do you mean "lone way"? SpaceX takes cargo to the ISS, and will be taking astronauts to the ISS under contract to NASA, just two of the most high profile of many NASA contracts. Yes, they're planning a privately funded Mars mission, but they're also planning missions working with NASA and others. Hardly seems like a "lone way".
And Bezos is a competitor to Branson in the sub-orbital space tourism business, and he isn't working with NASA on that either, it wouldn't make any sense to do so.
A spider is still a spider if you pull four of its legs off*, is it not? So I think you get a pass on that anyway.
*which I am not advocating, before any animal rights activists get worked up, although they seem less quick to defend the rights of creepy-crawlies anyway.
To be fair, the light year is probably a difficult unit for Joe Bloggs to relate to, because it is so much larger than any distance we can physically experience. They probably feel that with miles, Joe Blogs will at least be able to relate to the base unit, and probably learned at school e.g. the distance from the Earth to the Sun in miles, so they have that as a yardstick. For those of us with at least a passing interest in astronomy cosmology, yes, not helpful.
I had this with NTL for almost two years, back in the day. They would send me a bill every month, so some part of their system knew I owed them money, but whenever I tried to pay it, they would say I didn't owe them anything, and the unpaid amounts vanished into the ether. I always thought that was proof of how bad NTL were; most companies somehow manage to only make mistakes in their favour, so you know it's really bad when they won't take your money at all.
I'm not a lawyer, but I find it unlikely that failure to guarantee updates for ancient devices beyond six years is going to legally qualify as "do not last for a reasonable length of time". There are plenty of devices out there with vulnerabilities, new and old, and as far as I'm aware there is no legal requirement for manufacturers to meet any arbitrary standard of security, or to patch vulnerabilities in any given timeframe; the onus is on the consumer to choose manufacturers that behave responsibly, if security is a concern for them. As I say, by all means take it to Trading Standards, and do let me know how you get on.
This is supposed to be a sanction to teach Google a lesson for abusing their monopoly
Not really. The sanction is the fine that was levied against Google. Giving other parties the opportunity to be included in the search choice screen is a change of the practice which led to the fine being imposed in the first place.
And if being included in the search choice screen is valuable, why should Google give it away for free? It doesn't make sense. There's a practical limit to the number of choices that can reasonably be presented to the user. If access was free, every Tom, Dick and Harry would want to be in there. The auction process seems a pretty good way of cutting down the field to serious contenders only.
Totally agree about the lack of feedback on touchscreens. However it's pretty clear that this wasn't inherently a touchscreen issue. They had port and starboard throttles split between two stations, thus confusing the helmsman; you could equally do that with physical throttles as well as touchscreen ones, and it would be just as shit of a design. Ditto for the AIS laptops being hard to access. It sounds like a cobbled-together prototype lash-up that somehow ended up in the field.
That may all be true, but whatever killed the Amiga, it was Doom that put the final nails in the coffin. Doom was a big deal, and the Amiga's planar graphics model was fundamentally unsuited to Doom-type graphics engines, requiring many more writes per pixel than on a PC. I had a boosted A1200 with a mighty 50MHz processor and 8MB of memory, but even then Doom clones like Gloom were no match for the real thing, and that was pretty much it for that generation of Amigas, and they didn't have a next-generation ready to go.
Remember back when Google search proudly proclaimed that it was an "and" search by default? Now you get to scratch your head at the irrelevant results, before noticing the tiny "Missing: <most important keyword>" bit below the results, because Google's mighty algorithms have decided that they know what you're searching for better than you do. Progress. Google is still the best general search engine IMO, but it takes more effort now to make it work properly.
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