* Posts by ridley

488 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Aug 2008

Page:

NASA finds Orion heatshield cracks won't cook Artemis II crew

ridley

Re: I have a bad feeling about this ....

Apollo did use skip reentry techniques, it did it to allow time for the heat shield to "recover" between reentry events.

It rotated to use the lift from orientating the off centre of gravity attitude to steer the capsule during reentry.

ridley

Re: I have a bad feeling about this ....

Apollo used skip reentry

That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

ridley

Quite right.

Iirc the NHS system to bring all the records into one DB was abandoned after many £billions largely because they hadn't asked the end users, GPs etc what they needed...

Richard Branson to take balloon ride to edge of space

ridley

100,000ft is hardly "the edge of space"

Is less than 1/3rd of the way there.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

ridley

Re: Sometimes there's a hidden benefit with irritating clients

I know someone who was asked to quote on what he thought was a few holes to be drilled through some thick steel on a construction project.

He didn't fancy the job so he vastly over quoted.

He got the job for several hundred thousand holes in the Magnox reactor project that was starting up.

He built his entire business and retired a wealthy man on the results of that one contract.

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

ridley

Why?

I used to build 1000's of PCs a year all without entering a licence.

If course when the customer turned it on for the first time then they were expected to enter the licence number. In this case that number would be the one on the sticker usually attached to these type of PCs.

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

ridley

Re: Sad they have to do that

I am a teacher and I just don't spend money on teaching resources, why should I?

"Mr Smith your walls don't have great displays and children are complaining that you don't hand out pension"

"Show me the money"

To crew, or not to crew – that is the question facing Boeing's stricken Starliner

ridley

So to be able to use their spacesuits they need to fit a square peg into a round hole?

Best give Mr Lovell a call.

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

ridley

Personally, I always thought all boats were supposed to be buoyant, it's sort of what makes them boats.

Twitter must pay over half a million to unfairly dismissed Irish exec

ridley
Big Brother

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

But, but Freedom!

ridley

Tricky to sack a GP, they're self employed.

School gets an F for using facial recognition on kids in canteen

ridley

Re: "FRT can result in high data protection risks"

Saying "so few people are prosecuted for rape" based on how many people say they were raped Vs prosecutions is just wrong.

Without a conviction you cannot say for certain that there was a rape.

ridley

That's because you can't get an appointment in person unless you're at deaths door, but then you can't make it to the surgery.

Catch 22

ridley

So they were given a slip to see if they agreed with using FRT. What did they give students that didn't agree with it?

A ski mask?

Clock is ticking for NASA to fix bucket of issues before next Artemis mission

ridley

Re: Have to carefully manage the Huawei hate

It's not the same at all.

In the 60's the west's economy in no way was dependent in the soviet economy.

Today the west is almost completely reliant in China's economy, the west cannot afford to antagonise the Chinese, and they know it.

Eben Upton on Sinclair, Acorn, and the Raspberry Pi

ridley

Re: Backwards

"Again, a cheap Android tablet or even an Arduino gives a more reliable, focussed education platform than a 'easily fixed'"

Not really, there's a reason that Chromebooks/bases etc are popular in schools. Nothing needs to be updated, patched etc it just works, plus the actual suite of software is just superb for the school environment.

Currently I am at an office 365 school and trying to use it is like pulling teeth when you're used to Google Suite for Education.

Teams and One note? No thanks.

Different functionality with the app versions of word etc as

opposed to the web versions is such a block to teaching.

Give me strength.

Give me strength.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

ridley

Re: Think of the Grid!

I think you're being a little economical with the truth with saying you can upgrade your domestic supply to 350Kw, what exactly would be the point in doing so?

As you point out you could fully charge 21 100kwh cars with that supply from 11pm-6am.

Why would you want this in a domestic environment?

Nvidia slowed RTX 4090 GPU by 11 percent, to make it 100 percent legal for export to China

ridley

Re: Slower Version

It's not an urban legend.

I've seen what the IBM tech did no increase the speed of our printer at great expense, and it didn't involve any new parts and took seconds.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

ridley

Re: No imagination any more

Didn't notice a difference?

I did, the new one didn't let me change the team name, no doubt it does and has hidden it away somewhere but life is too short.

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

ridley

Re: Child protection

I remember tivo or it's like introduced technology that filtered out the adverts from recordings but was taken to court as this was "theft" and the sw was banned.

Didn't stop me installing similar software on my tivo.

I miss my tivo 1 even 20 years later, way ahead of its time.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

ridley
Terminator

Or Futurama

(3 more days!!!, he'll have to be a Bender substitute for now....)

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

ridley

Re: gigaspandrels

Good News!

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

ridley

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

How does this get down voted?

Audio is most definitely compressed to a few tens of dB in the main, that's not controversial it's just true.

Vintage vinyl also suffered from the loudness wars, finding a decent recording became very hard towards the end of vinyl.

ridley

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

4db? I know most digital "music" is compressed to 10db but 4db?is that real?

ridley

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

It's all very nice having a large dynamic range available on digital audio.

It's just a shame that the audio engineers in the main choose to not use it, instead compressing the sound to a few tens of dB so it sounds "good" in the car or via crappy headphones etc.

Finding well mastered audio is pretty damn hard.

Microsoft may charge different prices for Office with or without Teams

ridley

Whilst they're at it

Could they please take OneNote outside and do the decent thing.

SpaceX's second attempt at orbital Starship launch ends in fireball

ridley

Re: Starship hasn't had the most successful history?

Not convinced the launchpad survived that well given the amount of FOD raining down on cameras 3-400m away.

To make this computer work, users had to press a button. Why didn't it work? Guess

ridley

Re: Bad design

When you try to open a MS365 file on your phone. You need to press an "open" button after a preview is displayed.

However, as the preview is loading a "delete" button is in exactly the same place as the "open" button appears a fraction of a second later.

Get the timing wrong and panic ensues.

Why MS, Why?

The years were worth the wait. JWST gives us an amazing view of Neptune's rings

ridley
Holmes

"Neptune is rich in heavier elements, and looks blue due to small amounts of methane in its atmosphere."

I am pretty sure that the JWST cannot see blue light and any blue in the image will be a false colour added for the benefit of us meat bags.

Russia: Hey, don't act surprised if we're still on the ISS in 2030

ridley

Re: Fear

I would be very surprised to ever find a sink on the space station, the clue is really in the name.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

ridley

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

Doesn't make any difference if a radioactive element burns or not, the nuclei are still radioactive no matter what chemical reaction they go through.

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

ridley

Re: And the answer to the question is

The cost of getting it into space and to the lagrange point is nothing compared to the cost of the scope.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

ridley

Re: I'm generally a fan of Elon Musk but

Love him or hate him you don't get to have had pivotal roles in the formation and building of three large global companies and not be an entrepreneur and visionary.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

ridley

Re: Deja vu again

Not really going to help when the car has been wrapped up, the battery connections are unlikely to be all nice and easy to unbolt.

TBH it is not that hard to remove a battery pack once it is upside down or on a lift.

SpaceX: 5G expansion could kill US Starlink broadband

ridley

Re: 56k

Dial up & Fax was alive and well in a field in Herefordshire recently.

#EMFCamp

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

ridley

Re: Are you stupid????

Best pack some form of umbrella then.

Debugging source is even harder when you can't stop laughing at it

ridley

Re: Trust but verify...

The app is long missed.

Scam, pyramid scheme, environmental disaster: Vivaldi boss shares his thoughts on crypto-coins

ridley

Re: Wall Street?

What tangible thing underpins a currency?

DIY Sinclair clones: Left it too late to back the Next? Build your own instead

ridley

Re: 464

I used a 6128 to develop software to control a seawolf missile via a thermal imaging camera.

Went on to use it to develop software to help integrate a thermal imaging camera into the gunnery control computer on a T59 tank. We were selling the TI system the Chinese for resale to Pakistan.

Spent a year in Pakistan trialing the T59 with my trusty 6128, sometimes burning new ROMS beside the tank in the middle of the Thar desert, even with all the dust and 50+°C in the shade it never let me down.

Happy days

Fisher Price's Bluetooth reboot of pre-school play phone has adult privacy flaw

ridley

As a teacher let me assure you that they spend much more than a minute doing nothing.

Much, much more....

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

ridley

Re: Colour me impressed...

How can anyone give this comment a downvote?

Do you enjoy those compression artefacts popping up all over the place?

BOFH: Time to put the Pretty Dumb F in PDF reader

ridley

Re: Brilliant!

This reminds me of the situation at the school I work in.

We are an MS school and a MS system can become quite complicated to set up and maintain, esp for a sus admin of the calibre that a schools budget can afford.

We went O365 at the start of the pandemic, MS Teams/Onenote for remote learning is "sup optimal".

Two years in and we still do not have OneDrive installed, only the browser version. So no file manager integration...

We have been told that all our files are being moved into the cloud now, and we have been promised OneDrive "hopefully in 2022"....

How is this supposed to work?

(By the way why does file syncing take so long in O365? I mean, it can take hours at times. When I worked at a Google school syncing was near as made no difference instant)

What a bunch of bricks: Crooks knock hole in toyshop wall, flee with €35k Lego haul

ridley
Pint

Re: Playmobil reconstruction

He surely is

ridley

Re: Not again!!! The name is LEGO!!

The plural of Fish is Fish, but if you have different types of fish in a tanks you have different fishes.

Does that mean you can haves Legos?

Blue Origin employees complain of sexist culture that ignores safety concerns

ridley

Rapid progress

Compromising safety in order to make rapid progress?

This is Blue Origin we're talking about, right?

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

ridley

Same thing happened with the Amiga, especially when CBM released the A500.

Too cheap and too associated with games to be taken seriously, sadly. I still miss AmigaDOS

ridley

Re: Z88?

Was it to your mum?

ridley
Pint

The last Quantum Leap

RIP Sir Clive

Thanks for the thrills and spills.

I'll raise one of these for you tonight.

I can't help thinking there should be a ritual dodgy keyboard burning to help him take that Quantum Leap into the new DIM

Russia's Pirs ISS module scheduled to fall away, much like Moscow's interest in the space station

ridley

Re: 75 years gone

I think someone needs a word with H&S if you're going through 5 generations of engineers in 75 years.

Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service

ridley

Re: Forgive me for saying this...

Couldn't agree more, but TEAMS is Nirvana in comparison to its demon child OneNote esp the education version.

Microsoft if you tell me that if I put a document into this area it is read only, then please make it read only.

Oh and how on earth does OneNote even when minimised and not in use creep up and steal all of your ram? 25Gb is slightly over the top on a 32Gb machine.

Page: