Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
The book also contained a design for a 100 W/channel power amplifier, but it wasn't really suitable for home use as it needed a 3-phase power
Two questions:
- wasn't it actually a space heater that someone at Ferranti bolted an amp design to for some obscure reason?
- my hobby room does have a 3-phase power outlet, fused at 25A. Can you give me the title of this book (I take it it's pre-ISBN)?
Just yesterday his leaky org claimed blackmailers had threatened to reveal "sexual" things alongside other details of Assange’s life inside the embassy; the group claimed that miscreants were trying to squeeze €3m out of it.
I get those mails too, suggesting that the non-existent webcam in my 'device' (apparently they don't bother to detect whether it's a laptop, tablet or desktop, and which of the dozen or so it was I allegedly used at the time) can record me fapping, so lack of internet access shouldn't be much of a problem either.
" lived on the island 700.000 years ago' or " started populating the islands 67.000 years ago"
These bones are 67k years old; other finds point to humanoids living on the islands 700k years back, but those might not have been the same species as no direct evidence to that effect has (yet) been found.
I have a 12" single by Kissing The Pink called The Other Side Of Heaven.
Aha, that's the one. I knew there was such a record by one of the British New Wave bands as the record library I was volunteering with at the time had it in its collection, but my brain kept suggesting Fiction Factory even though I could not find a title that appeared to be the one.
The program showed an animated wireframe figure.
7" flexidiscs have been used for distributing programs (there's one in our computer museum's collection); for normal audio they don't sound that bad anyway, and are probably one step above no-name cassettes played on a cheap recorder with a misaligned dirty head.
Is it only me, or was floppies (1.2M) in general more reliable than stiffies (1.44M)?
The 1.2M drive's tracks are a little wider (alignment less critical and better signal) as well as having some more distance between them. But I haven't really encountered any noticeable difference in reliability between them as long as you didn't go with bargain-bin no-name disks.
“Hey,” he said, “is that really a piece of fairy cake?”
He ripped the small piece of confectionery from the sensors with which it was
surrounded.
“If I told you how much I needed this,” he said ravenously, “I wouldn’t have
time to eat it.”
He ate it.
I always take with me some superglue, that I use to patch small cuts in my fingers*
One day way back I was installing some wiring in my dad's house. Lacking stripping pliers I resorted to using a Stanley knife to take off the isolation; press down wire onto cutting edge with thumb, roll it around a bit. With the blade rather dull one needed quite a bit of force to cut through the isolation.
Then came the moment I got to look at the inside of my thumb, as someone had put a new blade in. It was a nice clean, almost surgical cut, with almost no bleeding. So I held it closed, grabbed the superglue, put a drop or two over the incision, added a sticking plaster to keep out the dirt and went on working. It healed without a problem, although the misalignment in the fingerprint is still visible after forty years.
and don't look removable without a special set of tools (or a wrecking bar, which I rarely take on a trip).
You don't?
I find that just having my Leatherman on me reduces the possibility that a stubborn bit of hardware would be giving me grief to near-zero, and the few that still do either get compliant PDQ or they just fail to live to regret it. It also gave a receptionist at the Natural History Museum the full-on heebiejeebies, but that's another matter (I wanted to leave it at the reception desk like I had done several times in other museums around London, and he wouldn't even touch it to put it in a ziploc bag in a locker)
Exactly! But two is not numerous!
These are the two only MAX8 accidents. Not just the two that appear to be similar from a larger number of accidents, but the only two accidents so far. And they have rather striking similarities., enough so that it's quite likely attributable to a common cause.
Technically, the DeHavelland Comet is more reliable at this point. 2 were lost after a year in service.
Just looking at the number of crashed aircraft done in by a particular failure, yes (there had been two other write-offs before that, but those were respectively an actual pilot error on takeoff, and structural failure of the main wing spar in a severe thunderstorm). But crashes are usually counted against either flown distance, number of takeoffs and landings, or passenger-miles, depending on what metric you're interested in. Comet just reached 112 aircraft total with a fair number of them built after the 1954 losses; there are over 350 MAX8's in operation already (well, maybe not at this moment, IYKWIM). So the statistics are slightly different.
The contenders for 'worst aircraft accident stats' are probably the Caproni CA60 (one built, only a single short flight, pilot unhurt, plane totalled) and the Caproni CA48 (again only one built, wing failure at 1000m altitude, 14 fatalities)
The fact Boeing already know in which direction to patch is the most worrysome to me. How can they already know how to fix an issue they don´t know yet?
Boeing were already working on a fix after the Lion Air crash (and the not-crash preceding it), but those things need to go through the relevant authority (in this case the FAA) before they can be rolled out.
Trump's Wall Tantrum (a.k.a. the recent US govt shutdown) delayed that for five weeks.
It's blind assumption that anything coming up on the screen must be right.
Working at DEC you get a badge with your employee number, and I was to get a freshly-issued one when I transferred to a different department. The first thing I note is that the employee number is wrong; it has two digits transposed. However, the security bozo handing out those things was adamant it was the right number.
"Do you really think that the number ABCDEF that I've been assigned, and used for over the past six years is the wrong one, and the number ACBDEF that happens to be on your screen and on this freshly-made badge is correct?".
"It says ACBDEF on this list, so yes."
"Well, you can wipe your arse with that list because it is wrong. This <showing well-worn badge> is my badge, and that one <pointing at new one on desk> is not. Go poke HR to send out a new list, and let me know when you have a badge with the number ABCDEF for me to collect. In the meantime I'll be wearing this old one even though it's not for this department. Good morning."
When did you last commute by train?
I did, yesterday. And on Monday. And the entire week before. And the one before that, except Thursday. And so on for at least the past fifteen years.
Most days I can get half an hour of reading or work in both ends of the day.
Reflectors and headlights are both strongly directional.
Reflectors cast back most of the light in the direction from which they are illuminated. Spoke reflectors and reflective tyre sidewalls happen to be very good at pointing out there's a bicycle ahead of you if you're not approaching it from straight on or behind. Especially since the 'two wheels' shape should immediately clue you in on what's that thing ahead of you.
And I can see those reflectors well before they're in the actual headlight beams.
They could evaluate the car with the code, put it to some tests, perhaps...at whose expense?
Who else but Uber?
If someone builds or significantly modifies a vehicle (and turning it into an autonomously moving lump of metal is, IMNSHO, at the significant end of significant), it needs to be tested for roadworthiness at the builder's expense, and if it fails and needs to be re-tested after fixes are applied, again at the builder's expense.
So if whatever department is responsible for the roadworthiness of Uber's flimflam decides to test it, it's Uber who'll have to foot the bill. At most they can say that the bill would be excessive and retract the vehicle from the test, but then it won't have a roadworthiness certificate and Uber can't go out and mow down pedestrians with it.
Yes? An entirely different kind of tracking that Google et.al. want to achieve: knowing where you are, who you interact with, what websites you visit and what stuff you buy from whom. CONTINUOUSLY. So that they can determine patterns and use that data to sell advertising space.
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Facebook: they all want access to the one tracker we keep on us: our mobile phone.
For values of 'mobile phone' equal to 'smartphone'.
Tracking my phone[0] is restricted to the people having that kind of access to cell phone tower data. So not none, but severely restricted. And I've yet to see that info being used for advertising by entities other than my provider.
[0] apparently called a 'feature phone', even though its appeal is its utter lack of features.
One of the items to be disposed of was a CRT monitor.
I once heaved a TV set out of a fourth floor window. This was one that had a pane of security glass in front of the face of the tube, so pre-1960-ish. Case was left intact and the back cover was still on too, plus the impact area was well-marked and cleared of anything that might go 'ouch' or worse.
Nearly all of the splinters were still inside, save a few that had exited via the crushed side panel into the pavement.
Do you know that it only takes a couple of strokes with a hacksaw to remove a Kensington cable lock?
In one of the past department moves I ended up with a desk that someone else's laptop was still chained to. Lacking a hacksaw, and not having my cordless angle grinder with me I took to the cable with my Leatherman. About two minutes later my desk was utterly devoid of any Kensingtoned laptops except my own, and the offending one was put in a cupboard with the ominous frayed cable end still attached.
Two weeks later the laptop's owner came to collect it, and was seriously dismayed to find it not locked down, instead just put aside like that. It was my day off, and my colleagues feinted ignorance of the unKensingtoning; "We found it like that and put it in the cupboard."
The laptop was the company's security officer (whose previous laptop was nicked by some thieving scrotes who had just heaved a pavement tile through a ground floor window and had made off with half a dozen lappies that hadn't been locked down).
It stood out in the rain for a year until it was a rusting heap and was eventually sold for scrap metal value. Brand new and unused.
I know of a mid-end cutting plotter, part of the inventory of a signage company that went bust. It was rendered scrap by the company taking over the remnants as one of their geniuses needed a small fan for some decoration project; the (only) person in the original company who knew how to operate the plotter and who would dearly have loved to keep it, was still owed well over the value of said plotter
If the equipment survived a week or two of their testing, a box was ticked and equipment declared "ruggedized for combat".
From an Usenet .dig: "If being dropped from an airplane into what's essentially a minefield is considered 'moderate handling', what would be considered 'rough handling'?"
"Being shipped USPS"
One of the tings that I take with me is a USB wallwart and every type of cable I can think of.
UNHCR has involved IKEA in creating refugee shelter housing. The units come equipped with, among other features, solar panels and an USB charger.
They can even be assembled without the need for a hex key or any other tool.
(I wonder if the assembly instruction booklet has the IKEA Person running away from falling bombs, a tsunami and an armed terrorist as its first panel)
Is C14 the C13 with a notch?
C14 is the inlet for a C13 which is the female end of your standard equipment cable. 'Kettle lead is actually incorrect, as kettles and the like need C15 (female) and C16 (male) connectors because of the higher temperature rating, and these are the one with the notch. You'll find that C13/C14 plug bodies tend to be thermoplastic, C15/C16 are thermohardening and the cable has a higher temperature rating too
Back when the first thumbdrives (Hah. From their size and capacity they must have been built using core memory) started appearing, those cables were pretty ubiquitous, allowing people to plug in those drives without blocking the entire I/O panel and most of the ventilation grids. Some even came with those drives, and you could buy ones with the female end in the form of some lump so that you could put it on your desk and not have to dive behind the tower case to plug in or retrieve the drive.
When travelling I take a 6 way 13A UK mains block plugged up with all the power blocks & USB chargers, then fit a single international adapter on the 13A plug.
Back in the mists of time I acquired a four-way socket with an IEC14 inlet. Unfortunately, after several moves it's now Somewhere In A Box, and I look forward to the day That Box emerges from the Large Stash Of Boxes.
Some preliminary crash details released by them: ADS-B data from the flight suggest that at about 12:37 the aircraft entered a rapid rate of descent. The NTSB stated that at 12:39, while the aircraft was at approximately 6000 feet, radio and radar contact was lost. CCTV footage located by the NTSB shows that the aircraft was in a steep nose down descent before it impacted the water of Trinity Bay, approximately 60 km ESE of the destination airport.
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