Posts by mtp

Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it

Re: Thermostats

I have a related gripe with boiling water. Furiously boiling water is exactly the same temperature as only just boiling water so there is no need to leave the gas on full power and fill the room with steam.

Scientists find a common food dye can make a live mouse's skin transparent

Re: Tartrazine is pretty awful stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartrazine

Don't know how trustworthy this is but the wikipedia article says that tartrazine causes allergic symptoms in about 1:10000 people but the other 'well known' issues are all just urban legends. It might be a case of scared because they 'read it on the internet' so it becomes true by repetition.

Icon - well he might be drinking soda.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

Re: NASA has learned..

I suspect that internally everyone including the bosses knew this was the way it would go at weeks ago but it is such a huge PR issue that they kept putting it off in the hope that something might change.

Re: NASA has learned..

Gemini 8 had a uncontrolled thruster burn that spun the capsule upto almost 1 rotation per second - just imagine being in this and how hard it would be to function. Neil Armstrong (pre moon) was in command and somehow managed to get thing back under control without blacking out or otherwise being disabled by the spin.

Truely the Right Stuff.

Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor

I had a set of units that came back from customers as faulty but it was very hard to reproduce. I eventually discovered that it was due to a micro crack caused by a common event on these boards that only showed up when the device was in a certain orientation. When on my desk this was not the natural orientation and it worked fine but in the machine it was at 90 degrees and the weight of the sensor opened the crack.

Caused much head scratching until I found the pattern.

Re: We used to blow VAX 11/780 cards regularly

I had a battery powered scope which was ideal for such things - a lovely little bit of kit. More recently I was using a big old CRT scope and got zapped from it because the earth was disconnected, I know why because when it was connected it caused other problems.

Battery power is much better than no earth.

ESA's Juice probe dances with Earth and Moon before shooting off to Jupiter

Zooming between the moon and Gotham

"Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

Troll icon as it is very Joker.

US standards body proposes atomic clocks in lunar orbit to keep Moon time

Re: GPS?

There are going to be some interesting decisions to be made on orbits of any LPS (I vote for LPS) system as there are no radiation belts or atmosphere which gives more choices but the moon has a messy mass distribution which means that more stationkeeping tweaks are going to be required as the orbit gets lower and magnetorquers wont work so there will be a increased fuel burn to maintain orientation. I suspect the answer would be proportionally higher orbits where each one can be seen from more of the moons surface. This is good for reducing the number of satellites and improving orbital stability plus do you really need a 20 satellite fix on the moon? Being between skyscrapers is wont be a issue for a while.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

Re: They're going up one way or another

True. If the US bans mass satellite launches then in a few years the world will switch to using Chinese satnav and satphone services.

Re: A Rare Rant from Me

Lets add some maths

Radius of Earth 6380 km

Altitude of satellite 1000 km (random guess)

Diameter of satellite 10cm=0.0001 km (thickness of shell)

Area = 4*pi*(6300+1000)^2= 7e8 km^2

Volume = 7e8 * 0.0001 = 68000 km^3

At a density of 1000 kg/m^3 = 1e12 kg/km^3 (water) this has a mass of

Mass = 68000 * 1e12 = 7e16 kg

A falcon heavy can launch about 10000 kg so to make a 10cm thick shell around Earth at a height of 1000 km would take about 7e12 launches. I think we are safe for now.

(Please check my maths)

Elon Musk claims live Trump interview on X derailed by DDoS

3rd term

As Trump claims that he won the last US election he is now campaigning for his 3rd term which I belive is frowned upon by the US constitution. Just a random thought that came to mind.

NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says

Re: FYI

Maybe flotsam vs jetsam is relevant here. As it was deliberatly 'thrown overboard' it would be jetsam in which case NASA no longer owns it.

https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/flotsam-jetsam.html

"Under maritime law the distinction is important. Flotsam may be claimed by the original owner, whereas jetsam may be claimed as property of whoever discovers it. If the jetsam is valuable, the discoverer may collect proceeds received though the sale of the salvaged objects."

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: DC power is used in solar batteries as well and it is dangerous

"transition to zero volts 50 or 60 times a second"

Make that

"100 or 120 times a second"

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re magnetic bowl

Ordering one now

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

Problem might be more the reader than the poster

The problem is more that people believe stuff they read on the internet from sources as unreliable as social media.

Schools should have compulsory courses on critical thinking and general how to identify poor information and this should be done early, no later than 10 years old.

Won't fix it but at least it is a start

Bad vibrations left techie shaken up during overnight database rebuild

Re: Earthquakes...

Many years ago I was on a Twin Otter fully loaded with fuel drums. We headed off on the great white expanse but we were too heavy to get off the ground. After 10 mins or so of very fast bouncing and probably skipping over many crevasses we finally limped into the air. It was the EPICA project at 2892m altitude which can't have helped. Apparently there is now a station there (Kohnen) but it my time it was in the middle of nowhere with a high snow accumulation rate.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

necessarily the right but I'm not in reading bits order all the

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Re: Wow

I once built a pendulum clock from PC components. The pendulum was hanging from the head arm of a HDD and used the coils to nudge it when it slowed down. The swing was monitored by a mechanical mouse sensor that incremented the clock on every swing and measured the swing speed by looking at the time taken to traverse the mouse sensor.

All done in discrete 74xx and 4000 series logic - lots of it.

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

Re: Are the United States

If you cant beat them then ban them - just think up a plausible reason for the ban such as the perpetual classics of 'just think of the children' and 'national security'.

BOFH: In the event of a conference, the ninja clause always applies

Re: You have to know the obscure rules ....

And then there is the matter of the missing personal transporter..

Google Groups ditches links to Usenet, the OG social network

Good while it lasted

Usenet was good in the 1990s, comp. and sci. groups were my lunchtime viewing and I even used Emacs as a reader. Took a break from Usenet in the late 90s and when I looked again the signal/noise which had been deteriorating for years had dropped to the point were it was not worth the effort.

I hate to think what it is like now.

Sad that it is gone but it had no defence against spam so once the threat of your university / company taking action against you if you made a bad post was gone it was doomed.

Missing tomatoes ketchup with ISS crew after almost a year lost in space

Re: they were discarded

Who gets to be the hologram - is there anyone the ISS called Arnold?

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Iain Banks had this idea first (well close enough)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_(novel)

Microsoft dials back Bing after users manage to recreate Disney logo in fake AI-generated images

But is it wrong? Given publically available data to it the answer to 'an average woman of Afghanistan' is basically what it produced. It is going to be a merging of the images out there and 90% of them are going to be the iconic image so it is no surprise that the result is very similar to the original image but impressively facing towards the 'camera' which puts this in a different league to a simple copy. What about the other lesser influences to this image? Where do they stand? When it comes to copyright this is a minefield.

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

Re: Child protection

See black mirror "Fifteen Million Merits"

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: No corruption here.

My smart meter saves me loads of money. I am on a tarrif where the price changes several times per day and I charge my home battery when it is cheap. Eventually I will export when it is expensive which will aid the entire grid by smoothing the load.

One door opens, another one closes, and this one kills a mainframe

Re: Tech support call

Sugar is nothing compared to antifreeze. It leave PCBs covered in blue fuzz which dissolves all the copper and has a good go at the FR4. Or as H.P.Lovecraft would have put it they are left verdant and squamous.

Icon - because HPLovecraft would approve of this.

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: re: Though for no obvious reason.

Godwin's law has been triggered.

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: Silly Mistakes

"500v supply by putting two adjacent 240v sockets in series." - Ouch, I see exactly how the thought process of your colleague went on this because if you think about it from a certain point of view it makes sense.

Sadly from another point of view connecting the live of one socket to the neutral of another would not have the desired effect!

I have also got to wonder why anyone was trying to get 500V from the mains. Wanting double heat from a portable heater maybe?

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

I cycle into the office slowly but fast when heading home. Gets around 90% of the sweaty issues.

Auroras – the solar system's universal light show (except Neptune... sorry, Neptune)

Re: Magnetic field ?

The word theory does not mean what you seem to think it does.

"A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed"

Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain

Exit is only the start of the fight - you then need to send the kit back

I left nearly 2 years ago after a epic fight and I still have all my virgin media kit in a cardboard box - locked TIVO, cable modem and a few RF connectors. I have tried to contact them to get them to pick it up but it always ends up with me being asked to give a 1..10 score on how good the pick up process was and the process ends there.

I might need to take it to the local tip to get it disposed of cleanly.

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Friendly immigration

I was once flying home and the lady at the immigration desk commented that she had the same date of birth as me and gave me a friendly smile as I came through. Never forgotten that.

Airline puts international passengers on the scales pre-flight

Re: optional?

There is a quote "a front heavy plane flies poorly but a tail heavy plane flies once"

Intel mulls cutting ties to 16 and 32-bit support

Re: Spite, I tell you, spite!

I have some shuddering flashbacks to near and far pointers and then I drifted dangerously close to remembering EMM386 before I managed to save myself.

Pager hack faxed things up properly, again, and again, and again

Re: Last pager I saw...

We had "the phone of doom". When a machine was on a long term test someone was given this phone overnight, the closer to work you lived the more often you had to take it. If the machine went wrong the phone rang and you had to go in to fix it and start it up again.

Always a stressful night (and unpaid) but luckily I lived a hour away so only had it rarely and doom never struck me.

Fax related

A little tangental to the topic I admit but this mention of fax machines dug up a dusty memory of a TV program called "The Secret Life of Machines" and their very simple fax machine.

Here it is if anyone wants to reminisce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk

Unilever claims it's a 'cloud-only enterprise' – now with added OpenAI

Don't need my daily dilbert after this

@ChatGPT

Write me a article full of management buzzwords with the vague theme of moving everything into the microsoft cloud. The article should be written in the style of a dilbert management consultant.

Psst! Infosec bigwigs: Wanna be head of security at HM Treasury for £50k?

Re: Only reason to take the job

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

clearly applies

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

Re: Back in the day

I still have a box of virgin media kit awaiting collection from when I cancelled back in Jan 2022. It even includes a pretty good virgin media locked tivo box.

I have tried several times to get rid of it but there is no way to contact them and every attempt just ends up with them sending me a survey asking for a 1-10 score on how well the close of contract process went.

Answer is very badly. When I tried to cancel they kept finding dodgy reasons why they could not start the cancellation process or a few more days which would have pushed me into a extra month of billing just after hugh price rise. Eventually I got them to cancel before this date but by the end their excuses were getting increasingly desperate.

Vital change of payment hidden in the small print

I was renting and at the time had paper electricity bills that came quarterly which I always paid on the time. After few years I received a red bordered final demand saying that the bailifs are due imminently. When I contacted them they said that I had not paid 2 bills in a row and looking back at my records I discovered that they are right and this was because I had not received any bills.

It turns out that in the small print of my last posted bill they said that they were switching me to a online account and this would be my final paper bill but I had only read the bill part of this and paid it without even looked at the next page full of text. They eventually admitted that I had never logged into the account, this final demand was not preceeded by any postal communication and they had not made it clear that they had decided to stop posting me bills and that I had not agreed to this change.

I was very stressed as I was just in the process of buying my first house so if this had landed on my credit score I would have been ruined.

Anyone want an International Space Station? Slightly used

Re: um

Getting it into the Sun requires accelerating it by about 30 km/s plus a bit more to get away from Earth. You could reduce this by going for a decade long twisty gravity assist through the inner solar system but it would still need a strap on Saturn 5 to get things in motion.

Re: Mir

I think the nudge would need to be somewhere in the km/s range to bring the perigee down into the atmosphere in one go without using atmospheric drag which would be too unpredictable to allow for a accurate crash site.

Intel offers desktop chip that can hit 6GHz if everything goes right, you can keep it cool, stars align, pigs fly

Move work to the compiler?

x86 CPUs are working as hard as they can on instruction ordering, branch prediction and then there is the entire groups of spectre/meltdown/... that should be grouped and called precognition bugs all of which consume transistors and power. Most of this logic of this is known to the compiler so it should be able to take the one off hit in creating efficient code instead of letting the CPU do it on the fly.

Hmm - I think this has been solved before at least twice (RISK and dare I say it Itanium)

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: new fitted benches had been installed over the shutoff valve

I must admit to 'fixing' a leaking pipe somewhere at the back of my toilet by spraying expanding foam at it. In my defence the leaky bit was in some boxwork which would be very hard to take apart and the actual leak was out of site and even touch. So I just bought a tin of expanding foam, pointed the nozzle in the general direction that the leak was coming from and pressed fire. Most of it fell off and created a big stalegmite but it stopped the leak. I know at some point many years away someone will take that boxing apart and see this and I will feel the much deserved derision.

A brand new Linux DRM display driver – for a 1992 computer

Re: Falcon, ST, AmigaOS et al

The ST and I think the Amiga had a 68000 and this did not support preemptive multi tasking, this was fixed in the 68010 onwards.

I agree about the sound chip in the ST - poor at best.

There was a non preemptive multitasking upgrade for the ST written by someone with no connection to Atari - I can't remember who wrote it but it was a one man job in about 1990. I just about remember his (usenet) post when he said that this is free to the world. Can anyone remember who this was? I used his multitasking for a few years and it was pretty good considering the hardware.

Atari ST Mega 4

I think I still have my Atari ST Mega 4 somewhere - it was the peak of the 68000 based ST range. I upgraded to this from a 1040STFM.

Had many good times with this machine and after my BBC Micro it was a huge step up. In the last few years of using this I used Minix as a OS which lead to SCO OS (a unix variant with a bad track record) and then Linux.

I learnt alot from this machine.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

Re: Bah!

I bought a trivial low power 12V plug in from Maplins (RIP UK supplier of electronics kit) about a decade ago. I plugged it into my wall outlet and there was a big bang and the main 32A breaker tripped. I removed it and there was a notch missing from the copper so proving the well known truism that fuses blow after the damage has happened.

I took it back to Maplins for a replacement and insisted that they plug the new unit into the wall there before I accepted it. She did so with notable hesitation and a worried look but it was fine

Re: Poor flake

Lets raise a pint for Lester Haines. The special projects bureau is much missed and Lohan seems destined for a life without the airborn glory (and probable disaster) that it was born for.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/27/the_life_and_times_of_lester_haines/