Posts by Tom 7

The James Webb Space Telescope has only gone and deployed its primary mirror

Re: Obligatory

If its anything like mine they will adjust the primary mirror, then adjust the secondary mirror, then twiddle with the primary again and then it will cloud over.

I thought I'd seen video on the https://jwst.nasa.gov/content/webbLaunch/whereIsWebb.html site that were from cameras. Then I saw your post and thought -329F. Good simulations though

It's all going too well!

Long may it continue!

To err is human. To really screw things up requires a wayward screwdriver

Ah good old ICL

While doing my engineering degree we tried to learn Fortran IV on the uni ICL 1902 (IIRC). I lived 2 miles from it and in trying to do my thesis which involved programming I'd sometime walk there and back 4 times in a day, arriving to be greeted by a large sign on the wall lit up with 'HARDWARE FAULT'. After a term of this I was allowed into a small office where there was a PDP11 and Fortran and rather than writing a bit and then coming back later to fix the errors I could do it within a minute. No physical explosions but my brain exploded after that!

Re: Sometimes the hardware harms you...

My favourite is when working in underfloor ducts. In order to prevent too much knee an back creaking a pile of recently used tools collects within arms reach. Frequently near a desk in such a way as anyone approaching cannot see them, but fortunately in a place where someone could not step on them. Without approaching you first and then backing away from you so they stand on the one tool that rests on another and all the others rest on the other end of it and so are launched in an arc of steel that would make a good Roman helmet topper. And strangely they all come down (or go up) point first except for the network crimping took which never comes down anywhere!

Not looking forward to a greyscale 2022? Then look back to the past in 64 colours

Re: 64 colours?

My googling comes up with nothing on the official site so you meant NO.

Re: 64 colours?

Its amazing what you can do with just 8 colours. Seem to remember doing some coding decades ago with relatively high res 8 colour monitors using dithering to extend the colour range which others found jaw dropping.

Re: 64 colours?

Are there any NSFW Calvin and Hobbes?

Google: We disagree with Sonos patent ruling so much, we've changed our code to avoid infringement

Re: Real Class

Because Sonos investors would have benefited financially for no reason at all?

Less than PEACH-y: UK's plant export IT system only works with Internet Explorer

Are you sure its not government interference and cuts?

Feeling virtuous with a good old paperback? Well, don't. Switching to traditional media does not improve mood

Re: My 2c

I tried re-reading my original paperbacks not long ago only to discover they are now a pack of cards!

They're not too keen when you sit on them while pulling on your socks either!

Some of the books I read will damage me. Its got a lot worse since I discovered I can order large print books from the library for free! These are ideal for reading in bed as they are still legible in low light but they tend to be hardbacks and you nod off with them above you can blind and if they just rest in your hand as you doze cause all sorts of elbow complaints!

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: Humble

Honesty is generally the best policy. Largely because it confuses the fuck out of those who would never dream of it having never tried it getting their incompetent arses as high as possible,

Re: Blue flash

We had a chappy doing some landscaping with a very large digger in a neighbouring field when he cut through an off record mains cable with a blue flash that was visible for miles and a bang to wake the dead. We we playing footie in the yard overlooking this and saw the driver climb out of his cab and leap from the top of the caterpillar tracks a good 20' horizontally to the ground around 5' below the track. His boss commended him on ensuring he didnt allow himself to become part of the circuit by climbing down off the top of the track. Turned out the reason he jumped was because he couldn't see to climb down due to the several hundred joule flash and was in serious flight not fight mode due to the flash bang and wanted to get the fuck out of there asap.

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

Re: ZX80, ZX81 -- some of us used real computers!

One of my fellow students made a Z80 in ECL for his thesis.

NASA confirms International Space Station is to keep orbiting through 2030

Any manned trip to Mars is going to need a lot of radiation shielding,

I wonder if old space station would be suitable,

IntelliJ IDEA plugin catches lazy copy-pasted Java source

While I'm all for proper code attribution

I have a collection of code designed to create code for various purposes for me. I normally cut and paste this into various IDEs. I wonder if I can just create files from it and import them?

You wood not believe what a Japanese logging company and university want to use to build a small satellite

Re: At last

Made a lot of cardboard ones.

Re: At last

Its not like we have an ozone layer either! Having said that the speed these (well the metal ones come in quick) things come in it likely the material will be ablated from the surface and in the plume well behind by the time the temperature drops low enough for chemistry to start up again.

Re: If anyone can...

Head clog is the nearest I can get!

Re: 13,000 Knots *per hour*?

Not if its an incorrectly united speed.

Did you look up? New Year's Day boom over Pittsburgh was exploding meteor, says NASA

Re: Other reason

Its just a space Squirrel to distract them.

Re: Pedant Alert!

Well yes - at Mach 1 its a sonic boom. At Mach 60 a meteor disintegrating is mostly vaporised and the local air heated up rapidly (think thunder) so you dont actually hear the sonic boom as its drowned out by what can only be described as a big fuck-off explosion.

ASUS recalls motherboards that flame out thanks to backwards capacitors

Re: Reminds me of a place I used to work at

The packaging these things come in mean you CANT put them in the wrong way. Or if you can then you NEVER use that supplier again,

Re: Does no-one do ERC these days?

ERC should be part of an integrated system so that the pick and place was driven by the cct diagram. If the capacitor was the wrong way round in the cct then the ERC would have picked it up. There whole engineering paradigm then was - people fuck up, that's really expensive so lets make sure there is no way for them to fuck up. There is a little custom PCB place I visited not far from here and anything with a run of more than 50 boards is all automated because its simply not worth letting humans get it wrong.

Pissing off a customer costs more than the couple of hours of computer time involved in dotting the T's Crossing the i's and pointing out to an extremely well trained but human cct designer that you do not connect that bit of a capacitor to a net that connect to that bit of a fet.

Re: In their defence

Its a long time since I worked on these things (80..90s) but you COULDNT put things in the wrong way round! And if a supplier provided them in packaging the wrong way round they were toast.

Re: It's fairly easy to tell if your board is effected?

Gaming motherboards - no need for a case!

Re: It was fun when I saw that happen

A bit like emoticons - frequently used words get their own code or abbreviations. Speeds things up enormously. Best not used when trying to get a nuke underwater though!

Re: QC fail

I suspect overly tight QC being overridden? Obviously NOT overly tight QC.

Re: Reminds me of a place I used to work at

They let people put the components onto the PCB? What is this the 70s?

I'm fucking gob-smacked! Does no-one do ERC these days? And do they not have some connection between the CCT and the thing that puts the components into the motherboard?

A moment of tension as the James Webb Space Telescope stretches sunshield on way to L2 destination

All done now.

Time to chill!

In space

no one can hear you pucker!

Microsoft rang in the new year with a cutesy tweet in C#. Just one problem: The code sucked

Re: Coding, Sigh

Compilers will warn about common possible errors nowadays. As a software engineer I used to try and write code to add to check for things I could work out how to check for so code was always as thoroughly automatically checked before it hit the compiler.Even in the 80s there was a shed load of code and tricks to leave your C code free of most of the things that still haunt many today.

You wait until we get to the year 10000 problem!

Predictive Dirty Dozen: What will and won't happen in 2022 (unless it doesn’t/does)

Re: I predict that Toyota is going to remove functionality ...

Too late - they've all discovered WFH and bought up 90% of everything available in the countryside this year.

Some errors fill the screen. And some come from the .NET Framework

No change given?

There seems to be a trend round here not to take cash. You have to download an app and pay via that only to discover the 60p for the hour advertised at the parking meter that wont take your money has rocketed to 75p.

Yule goat's five-year flame-free streak ends ignominiously

Re: Say it with me children!

I've had curry goat that lived up to that name and hope to eat many more!

Re: Well

We used to burn several tons of wood for our bonfires but we always made them on the day - basically moving a pile of wood to another spot. Caution was then thrown to the wind with several gallons of petrol being hurled into the pile and rockets launched from a distance to light it - we piled a lot of heavy stuff on the outside - the party started not with a bang but with a loud woof and a 100 foot pillar of flame which pulled in the pool of fire that rolled out along the ground for a moment or two.

Always had great bonfire parties there - and you could bake spud in the ashes the next day which were sometimes annihilated by unexploded fireworks as we threw everything we could collect from around the large garden which had entertained maybe 30 families who all turned up with unreasonably large collections of fireworks. Uni science departments seem to be filled with idiot pyromaniacs!

You've stolen the antiglare shield on that monitor you've fixed – they say the screen is completely unreadable now

I had the unfortunate experience of withdrawing some cash late after pub chucking out so I could hit the kebab van only to discover on the way to the kebab van someone had deposited chilli sauce on the ATM and I had the unusual experience of standing ordering a kebab while my eyes streamed and screamed before I'd even got the bloody thing!

Can you get excited about the iPhone 13? We've tried

Re: Stuck in Outbox?

I get about 5 days on my Samsung Galaxy A22 5G.

Please pay for parking – CMOS batteries don't buy themselves

Re: Press F1 to Continue Shirley?

Keyboard not found. Please press ESC to continue.

Europe completes first phase of silicon independence project

Re: "efforts to create made-in-Europe chips"

And held back computing for 10 years or so!

Boffins' first take on asteroid dust from Japanese probe: Carbon rich, less lumpy than expected

Is life likely to have started in space? No, it would probably need a planet with lots of water for natural chemical experiments so something like earth. So once its started how do you get it off the starter planet into space? On Mars you'd need to accelerate it at 50,000G for 100m to achieve escape velocity. The only way to achieve that would be next to a meteorite impact which would more likely fry any life and destroy the rock it might have been hiding in as it tried to escape Mars thin atmosphere.

The thing about life is its a bit delicate. Also the universe didnt start with any of the shit needed to make life - it took a couple of generations of stars to get most of the ingredients. Once they were blown out of the supernova that created them it will have taken a while for them to coalesce into another suitable solar system in a quiet arm of a quiet galaxy where they could take a few billion years to get to some form of multicellular animal form to develop a conciousness to while away the boredom of existence. Its unlikely that the earth is the first source of life in the universe but it very possibly the first where its lasted this long and where it was created first will probably have been somewhere so supernovaly active that it didnt get much of a chance to evolve much before being gamma-rayed out of existence, If we look at things rationally we will see 'goldilocks zones' where nearby stellar activity is calm enough to allow life to develop but by the very inactivity required its likely we are amongst the first to have survived this long.

If its randomly clumped together then in all probability it will have to travel much further to hit another planet. And the square law will make it even more unlikely. This is just a fact of space. And remember I was fucking generous with the initial conditions.

I've yet to see anyone come up with way of spreading life by comets/asteroids that is anything other than laughable. You do realise space is big? If all life on earth was made of dna and you blew the earth up without harming the dna and by some magic it could cross space without harm by the time you got it to Alpha Centauri there would be only one molecule of dna for every 73 m^2. The statistics involved make it so vanishingly unlikely the only way its going to happen is on specifically designed craft aimed with great precision.

The results are exiting for proponents of panspermia theory

because they will grasp any desperate stick they can,

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

Re: Pronouncing...

Jif? No wonder it turned out to be a lemon!