Posts by Tom 7

NASA to begin first asteroid sample mission: Seeks 'pristine' specimen

Yarkovsky effect

err isnt that pretty well accepted and understood? We have a huge amount of data on it from all the shit we have flying around up there.

Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell for Linux, Macs. Repeat, Microsoft has open-sourced PowerShell

re Linux guy at Oracle

I see what you didnt there!

BT best provider for 10Mbps USO, says former digi minister Ed Vaizey

Re: Exchange only lines - no chance of faster

My cabinet was 2 miles from the house and 4 miles from the exchange so when I heard we were getting FTTC I was delighted. Not so delighted when I found the cabinet the council paid for the fibre to go to was at the fucking exchange, the cabinet I was connected to is no longer a cabinet, and I'm no better off.

Re: Gigaclear

I worked in the high speed chip design group of BTRL then we could have had 2.4Gb 10Km bidirectional runs of fibre for a lot less than the price BT pay now. The hardware price would have been in the low hundreds of pounds then - the power supplies being more pricey than the FO stuff.

RE a leased line 2.5km from the exchange

A raspberry Pi, a couple of helical aerials on the wifi, a decent battery and a PV charger should be able to provide a bidirectional line of site relay for less than the price of putting it on a big stick and provide pretty much 24/7 cover. And if you can use a friends connection to BT and not them you can share the cost of his BB.

'Flying Bum's' first flight was a gas, gas, gas

Re: Hindenburg

My granddad was an engineer on the 196m long R33. I think they must be talking biggest flying thing now.

Ancient radioactive tree rings could rip up the history books

Re: Them is... it's rather saddening.

And then Bayesian analysis makes it all quite happy again.

Intel fabs to churn out 10nm ARM chips for LG smartphones next year

Makes you think

the Pi3 has a 40nm SOC (as far as I can tell) stick a 10nm one in and thats some grunt.

Air gap breached by disk drive noise

Re: Network interface?

If it hasn't got a network interface what is the method of infection?

Seems a bit daft putting a piece of software to read out data at a millionth the speed you could steal it anyway if you have access to the machine!

£1m military drone crashed in Wales after crew disabled anti-crash systems – report

So if ISIS were to to set up shop in the Lake District

they would be immune from drone attacks!

'I found the intern curled up on the data centre floor moaning'

Not so much on call

as doing an all nighter watching a job that needed to be finished asap and ran on an old OS on the same machines that ran Prestel. The job would just stop for no apparent reason and when restarted carry on quite happily. So there I was every twenty minutes of so banging a couple of keys to see if it was still running and around 2 in the morning I started to doze off and leaned forward to press myself into a standing position to go for a walk and the roll chair shot backwards and up the wall behind me leaving me face down on the floor with the chair pressing me down in a position that even your most supple porn star couldn't achieve. It bloody hurt and I couldn't move without it hurting even more. I think I stayed it that position for three hours until my back went into spasm and I think I dislocated both shoulders and my hips involuntary forcing my way through the side of the desk I was trapped under.After an hour or so of rolling around putting myself back together I went and found another terminal and restarted the job and finally logged out at 10 in the morning after it finished and it being a Saturday went to the pub for the rest of the weekend.

The worst bit came on Monday morning when no-one believed my explanation as to why there was a wrecked desk and monitor, a chair with two broken wheels and a filing cabined that had somehow got involved and needed cutting open with a hacksaw as it was so badly dented two drawer were jammed. I was not inclined to demonstrate and still am not sure how I managed to get stuck in that position let alone get out of it.

NASA dumps $65m into building deep space hutches for humans

Lots of road containers.

Send em up one at a time and just lego them together into a big sphere and eventually it will be safe to live in the middle. We send enough up the mass of the earth drops and it gets cheaper!

A similar technique can be used to make massive floating pontoons at sea - the outside ones will damp the waves and it would be nice in the centre.

NASA test foiled by rocket shaking power cord loose from camera

Re: Stereo?

Probably one of the few occasions when 16 bit sound was not sufficient.

16 bit weighted would have done it if the weight was a couple tonnes of acoustic padding.

Re: Astonishingly detailed patterns

I'm wondering if I can use the picamera on one of my A motors now the local rocket club has folded....

Watch hot 'stars' shower ... again. It's Perseid meteor showtime

Re: Up to 200 meteors per hour doesn't sound very impressive!

Well in 1833 there were 240.000 meteors in 9 hours during a Leonid shower.

During a similar shower there were many suicides by people who thought it was the end of days and they've had to tone it down a bit since then. Health and Safety gone mad if you ask me.

As for visibility I live in a Dark Skies area so I guess we wont get any bright meteors. C'est la Vie!

Re: Confused

Given the glowing tent I'm guessing this is really a montage though it could be just looking away from the radiant which sometimes leads to more erratics (meteors not from the storm just the random ones we get) in a long exposure.

Never sure why photographers seem to find a need to pollute sky pictures with earth based objects.

Bungling Microsoft singlehandedly proves that golden backdoor keys are a terrible idea

RE: This is refreshing to hear.

The lowest steps of the OS Godhead? I think you are missing the fact that the largest portion of OS Godhead tools and apps that you think are there to run your systems are there to allow you to manage the failures of the system. Linux doesnt have all that flashy stuff to clear up after itself as its not that incontinent.

As we say down in the west country when asked for directions "You dont want to start from here".

Facebook to forcefeed you web ads, whether you like it or not: Ad blocker? Get the Zuck out!

Diaspora

really need to get an install of diaspora for the RaspberryPi with DDNS and all that crap so people can just set it up with the minimum of effort.

Once I get off the Vulture of course

Hot iron: Knights Landing hits 100 gigaflops in plasma physics benchmark

100GFLops at what power?

The Adapteva parrallella 64 core jobie can do 102GFlops for 2W

Oracle Java patch problem? Browsium rolls management fix

Re: Java in the Enterprise

I did some MUMPs once - not for long though, my lower intestine tried to rip my eyes out while reading the manuals.

Mars' 'little green men' buried alive by merciless meteorites – new theory

Re: Depends what you call "life"

One of the fascinating things about life is we still dont know how it started here. We've got a vague idea what Luca was like - not capable of generating its own energy and probably surviving of energy produce by hydrothermal vents at well above 100C. On earth it seems to have been a one off event around 3.8 billion years ago. Mars is a lot smaller and apart from being round is not geologically very close to earth.

We're very lucky to be here, I'd be really really happy to find some life on Mars but I'm expecting to win the lottery first and I dont do it.

"to find the specific conditions needed for organic matter to survive blasts"

I think that might be a very small needle in a very bug haystack, and the haystack is on fire and hot enough to burn the needle.

We've got the perseids peaking this week. They come in at 37 miles a second. When something hits the ground near that speed the shock breaks quartz crystals - organic compounds dont stand a chance!

Breaking 350 million: What's next for Windows 10?

It seems the RaspberryPi3 will now boot from a USB drive

so for the price of W10 you can have a whole new PC that you own all of.

For a lot less if you dont have to buy a monitor and plug it into your telly. OK you cant play silly games on it but it seems to work pretty well.

Email proves UK boffins axed from EU research in Brexit aftermath

Re: From the number of downvotes

"The French and Germans have ALWAYS been anti-British" well not quite - they've always been cautious of the British as we were often seen as being in the club purely to cause trouble and slow down its development on behalf of the US. We joined the ERM at a level that was designed to fail and, then as now, we pissed in our own chips and came out far worse for it.

Whatever happens now needs to happen fast - we're obviously in the worst of both worlds.

Re: Thank you Mr. Cameron - blame Cameron

He was the dickhead that offered the referendum in the hope that not too many of the rabid right wing of the tory party would skip over to UKIP and possibly loose a few tory seats.

Its totally his fault - even if people try and blame someone they also claim to be totally ineffectual in the same breath there is only one person to blame - the twat that offered the referendum and, unlike every other policy promise they break the moment they get into office, actually went though with it.

Render crashing PCs back to their component silicon: They deserve it

Some equipment has an EIV detector fitted.

An EIV detector is a special piece of kit that can be remotely triggered causing problems that mean you HAVE to call in support at shitloads for a call-out. The EIV detector then senses the Engineer In Vicinity and the machine returns to functioning normally until the company charging for the engineer need some cashflow. The support company only needs people who can drive and carry the EIV transmitter with them so no real training needed.

Sometimes the EIV detectors fail to reset and the machine will perform faultlessly until the engineer drives round the corner out of sight and will not answer the phone until it counts as a complete new call-out.

BBC detector vans are back to spy on your home Wi-Fi – if you can believe it

Capita

says it all really.

BlackBerry DTEK 50: How badly do you want a secure Android?

We can improve the security enormously in Android

by dumping all that java shit and just using the Linux it runs on.

Shirley?

Londoner jailed after refusing to unlock his mobile phones

Re: Well?

You've not been in a city centre on a saturday night I take it. The average brit should not be in charge of anything more dangerous than a kebab. And they can be very dangerous too and I'd like to thank those refugees for coming here and serving them for me when I'm in that state.

Re: How long for theft? self-incrimination ...

Presumably to prove you are going to self-incriminate yourself you'd have to unlock the phone!

PC pioneer Gary Kildall's unpublished memoir revealed

I still want a teletype!

I did spend some time trying to convert an IBM golfball typewriter to work on my MK14 but then got a Superbrain with CP/M and a C compiler on it. Whoo hoo!

ISTR using CP/M-86 on the first IBM PCs we had at work and then we moved to DOS for some reason.

Cheers Gary Kildall may your memory never be zero'd.

Perlan 2: The glider that will slip the surly bonds of Earth – and touch the edge of space

weighs just 1,800lbs (816kg) fully loaded

what a way to find out you're not chosen!

Pass the hash for peace, love and security in the quantum computing age

I welcome any stronger encryption

but I have yet to be told how a quantum computer can actually crack encryption. Being able to work out all the prime numbers simultaneously is not the same as knowing which one is actually the correct one.

VAMPIRE SQUID romps stun scientists: Unique sex lives revealed

Re: I'd imagine..

It seems that whales dive deep to eat things and generally shit at the surface - resulting in algal and other blooms and these fed similarly large populations of their predators and so on all the way up (down) the food chain. Given the reduction in the number of whales due to our greed and stupidity its thought the barren deeps were not really so barren a couple of hundred years ago.

Australia to spend a billion bucks and seven years on SAP project

SAP

Swallows All Progress.

The only software that turns a computer into a 'Not doing that' gate and ensrines the concept of the 'Do What?" loop.

Boffins shrink light-twister to silicon scale, multiply bandwidth 10x

If a fibre optic setup is an order magnitude faster

can BT hear it?

Android's latest patches once again remind us: It's Nexus or bust if you want decent security

Re: Google are wasting their time

They're wasting my time - I dont get a usable signal at home so its not on much - but when it is all it ever does is bloody update update update.

Dark scientists' LUX-ZEPLIN doubles down on WIMP hunt

Cant put my finger on it

"There is approximately only one WIMP interaction per kilogram of ordinary matter per century"

Except we dont really know do we - what with not having seen an interaction yet.

I wish them luck but its a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack when you dont know what the needle looks like, or the haystack come to that.

Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update tweaked to stop you disabling app promos

Windows is not free

When I buyed a laptop a month or so ago I saved £79 by not having Windows 10 home and £109 by not having Windows 10vProfessional. That is 30% of the cost of a low end laptop.

How much more I've saved by not having anything MS cloud based like anything MS is anyone's guess.

Ex-Citibank IT bloke wiped bank's core routers, will now spend 21 months in the clink

Re: In Texas, he would have been pardoned...

The company he worked for were lucky they didnt give him a patent on this and hand the company over to him.

IPv6 now faster than IPv4 when visiting 20% of top websites – and just as fast for the rest

Re: And what about BT and Virgin?

"IPv6 will be disabled on your BT Home Hub and BT Broadband Network until supported by future services"

according to my router.

Microsoft blames dying Surface Pro 3 batteries on software bug

And the update is

W10?

NASA puts lenses through a different drill to stare at the Sun

Old hat

My tin foil hat has used this technology for years allowing me to focus my thoughts on approaching alien vessels and repulse them. It works quite well!

Microsoft dangles code candy in front of iOS devs

Re: Windows is becoming irrelevant

But ObjectiveC has been available for years via MinGW and Cygwin. I have vague memories of writing Mac code on Windows 20 years ago.

Openreach to split from BT... so they'll be 'Legally Separate'

FTTP

Fin Takin The Piss.

Crashed and alone in a remote location: When paid help is no help

Tisleton Scars - not very remote

I could be in the Hill Inn in twenty minutes from there.

By 2040, computers will need more electricity than the world can generate

Not to worry.

BT and Openreach have a special bottleneck organise that should keep computing requirement at 2016 levels for ever.

Microsoft's 3D Jedi phone explored

Re: Wave your hand and hope....

I've got a caddy and the radio is indeed relatively easy to control - if you dont have two early teen girls who delete your settings and a misses who seems to think traffic news from the whole world should interrupt the funny bits on r4!

Is has recently taken to showing a star in between a couple arrows. It was never there before and is not mentioned in the manuals and is really getting my OCD ccts overloaded. I may have to drill a whole in that bit of the screen to get rid of it!

Silicon Valley's contribution to the US Republican Convention: Gayness

@voyna

they dont read the bible for the 'fixing your society' bits. Its the smiting they go for every time. They probably become semiconductor engineers because they hope to make the ultimate smiting machine.

Whats the name of the condition

where you try and get Stockholm Syndrome?