Posts by ridley

NASA points fingers at Boeing and chaotic culture for Starliner debacle

Re: only manage a maximum of 5 reuse

The Raptor 3 engines on Super heavy are about 50% MORE powerful than the RS25 engines.

Sure, there are lots of them on superheavy but that's because it's very heavy and doesn't have solid rocket boosters.

Re: perfectly good, NASA-managed rocket in the form of the Space Launch System

And Boeing are a major contractor for SLS....

Re: Never Never

Except prior to McDonnell Douglas buying Boeing (with Boeing's money) engineers did become heads of Boeing.

I would question whether some is good at "costing stuff" if the stuff in question is a few dollars cheaper up front but costs million/billions further down the line*.

*But that don't matter for tye CEO whose driven the share price up, collected the bonus then taken a huge payout when the sticky stuff hits the fan.

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

A nuclear power plant on the moon does have the advantage of the large heatsink it would be attached to.

Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers

You reckon you'd be able to find 500acres, IE 2sq km, of contiguous brown field space in one city?

I don't think so.

(Maybe Detroit...)

From pr0n to playlists and paperclips, trio of breaches spills data of millions

I have a bridge for sale that I am sure you'd be interested in.

AI nudification site fined £55K for skipping age checks

Re: Kids will be going old school

If the porn is legal then downloading and sharing it isn't creating and distributing illegal porn, no matter what age the downloader.

Retro Games opens pre-orders for THEA1200, a full-size working Amiga replica

Re: Want

I have a horrible feeling I scrapped my Amiga A3000 and Amiga A4000 (with 68040 daughter board*)

<Hangs head in shame>

*I bought the daughter board sans CPU from CPC(?) on back order in the early 90's for IIRC £50, they took my money then didn't deliver for over 6 months. One day, many months later, I received a parcel opened it and there was my board, complete with CPU.... A quick check on CPC showed that they had 6 of the £50 boards now in stock, what to do.

Call them and tell them that they've made a mistake or order the lot.

I'll leave you to wonder on what I did...

Decomposed dinosaurs make Texas a top destination for AI bit barns

Decomposed Dinosaurs?

<pedant mode:On>

There's not much point in extracting decomposed dinos from the ground, the energy is now in the decomposer...

<Pedant mode:off>

In my defence I have read far to many students exams that state that fossil fuels are the remains of decomposed organisms, partially, maybe, decomposed, no.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: I think the word "space" is a bit poorly defined

Tricky to leave the Earths Gravity...

Banning VPNs to protect kids? Good luck with that

Clearly you don't know many teenagers or even pre teens, 11-12 year olds are very aware of VPNs and how to use them.

Leading 3D printing site bans firearm files, but home gun makers have better options

So it's nothing of their noses to appear to be reacting to the directive.

Makes for good PR.

Something tells me that they'd be copies of the tube with a spring that was the sten gun.

You really couldn't make a simpler sub machine gun than the Sten

Re: one 3D printer use that hadn't crossed my mind

Something tells me that you haven't done a search for such things...

The trendline doesn’t look good for hard disk drives

Re: So make large capacity SSD's cheaper then

UNRAID can help you have some protection for your data.

It's saved mine in several occasions.

(144Tb R720 and a disk shelf)

Techie traced cables from basement to maternity ward and onto a roof, before a car crash revealed the problem

Re: At my last place....

During the second world war the RAF kept seeing on their new fangled RADAR huge numbers of German aircraft forming up for a raid over the continent early in the morning.

This led to us readying/launching many many squadrons who then couldn't find any formations and the RADAR signal disappeared.

When it was realized that they were seeing the Sun, scientists went "that's interesting", radio astronomy was born.

Elon Musk calls for International Space Station to be deorbited by 2027

How would giving up a "lucrative contract" free up funds to develop anything?

Surely it's the lucrative contracts that provide the funds?

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

Re: It's an easy go to

Tell me, do you get a discount when you buy tinfoil in bulk?

$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker

"SMART" LIGHT SWITCHES

Smart light switches sound like a good idea until the time your internet goes down and you realise that they don't work without the internet...

Re: Not A Bad Thing

Something tells me you have never tried hiring a nanny

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: Yankee employment conditions go home!

But, but Freedom!

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: gigaspandrels

Good News!

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

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.

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

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

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

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

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

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

"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

Re: Fear

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