Posts by Alistair

ESA's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter blasts itself closer to the Red Planet

@pdh

While I and quite a few others here will agree in general principle with the core of your argument, I think that the general pool of the populace don't have the same fascination with the finer points of these projects, so publicity wise it sells *very* well to do the 'alien life forms' tag out there.

Me, I'm loving the remote, self directed automation for landings. It just completely blows my mind that the "Rocket Scientists" get it right so often. Mostly since I get to see what is supposed to be automation in the IT world get it *wrong* so damned often.

I grew up remembering fuzzy black and white images of Apollo 11 on tv, and watching Voyagers and Mariners, the Shuttle and the first tiny bits of 'space station' go up. This stuff with New Horizons and Juno and whatnot will keep my youngest's imagination fired up as he gets older.

Beer for a well prepared Mars orbital entry.

Avoiding Liverpool was the aim: All aboard the world's ONLY moving aqueduct

Great stuff to read.

Added to the stuff to do if I get over that side of pond one day.

Perhaps Trevor and I could meet up in Peterborough. Not quite as old but pretty much just as impressive.

http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/on/trentsevern/visit/visit6/lock21.aspx

Tesla autopilot driver 'was speeding' moments before death – prelim report

truck image in article

> appears to be reversed.

Crossing traffic to turn indicates a left turn, not a right turn.

"Did not see trailer as it was white" -> not a good thing should be fixed. I'm wondering if the system spotted the *cab* since it would have lead the trailer out, and decided that the obstacle had cleared the field.

Would help if we had map location to reference. (i.e. curves in the road, trees, Bushes (there is one florida you know), billboards, dead alligators etc)

Now, I'll admit, there are always weird intersections out there but those tend to be rare around highways, and 60 is a highway in florida.

Eyeballs on the road. Period. Always. Autowhatsis or not.

Anything else, stupidity.

Did Donald Trump really just ask Russia to hack the US govt? Yes, he did

Re: Americans...

Actually, we Canadians tend to fire our PMs for perpetually screwing the populace. We pick them because they come across as being on the correct side of 'out of their mind'.

Getting comfortable with cloud-based security: Whom to trust to do what

Key phrase :

.....and buy into the magical thinking that "its the cloud, these guys know what they are doing and we do not"

Sums it *all* up.

Oops: Bounty-hunter found Vine's source code in plain sight

Re: "the problem was fixed in March"

@Pascal:

That request must be made through the correct API. *cough*

Juno's 1,300-pic Jupiter vid

Juno approaches Jupiter

interesting jitter in the object on top right. I suppose there were adjustments to be made to main body of the images in order to assemble them.

/agree -> thought they would have taken it much closer than this -- but then the bandwidth issue strikes <says the guy migrating data off tapes....>

Music? *shrug* - its Vangelis. I'll listen to it. Pretty much any time.

Nitwit has fit over twit hit: Troll takes timeless termination terribly

If it was me

Instead of Kieren, it would have a one line article. Mind you it would have had to have had two words censored.

It is relevant, as he *claims* to be a tech editor.

Re: Freedom of speech angle

@AC:

"And that unfortunately is where the Freedom of Speech / Right To Hate ..."

And if all us bodies on the ground are fighting each other ..... who comes out ahead.......

/just leaves that thought in plain sight.

Youth today. Tut. An enterprising streaker would take a selfie stick and live-stream periscope it.

FTFY

/pun

Boffins unveil 500TB/in² disk. Yeah, it's made of chlorine. -196˚C, why?

Cleaners will need to be well educated

No ammonia.

Trump? Terror? Turkey? Whoa, there's a Tentacool in that Bush...

The surreal part is that

We live in a *fairly* alive, but relatively quiet neighbourhood in our chunk of the GTA. In the last two weeks we've acquired small herds of folks. Sometimes (parent) and herd of smalls, sometimes herd of teens, and oddly, most often herd of (20something) adults wandering about sight seeing.

Fortunately, the *vast* majority of these herds are polite, well mannered and don't try to do stupid stuff, but I'm expecting that shortly we'll have a Darwin award cluster.

I've just gotten used to the fact that we really didn't see that many folks outside that often (generally only the dog walkers) around here and now .... clusters all over wandering about. Reminds me of when I were a small.

F.D. Every other body in this house is playing the damn game too. -- I'm just the hotspot.

AT&T: We wanna be a drone company, not just a phone company

AT&T -> command and control but

Cell on wings?

Mooooooo!

Coup-Tube: Turkey blocks social networks amid military takeover

Re: if you can read this you are probably one of the lucky ones

I'll note the Anonymous tag, and leave you in the troll bin.

To several of my relatives, this is right in the middle their *front* yard. Perhaps you might want to watch something *other* than Fox.

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

one of those other things ...

usb <-> ps2 dongles (2 at least)

usb serial port cable (both a 6 foot and a 16 inch one)

a Canadian tire magnetic multi slot screwdriver and a box with - 6" hex drive extender and 72 bits for the damn thing. Covers just about any screw head I've ever seen. (including those damned triangle ones that every oriental aftermarket tat assembler thinks are secure) The bits are from PrincessAuto.

1/4 and 1/2 socket drivers with 4" 6" 14" and 24" extenders, 48 sockets < that lot tend to stay in the spare wheel well of the car >

mini electric screwgun (with charger) < again, in the trunk most often >

Cable end crimping gun and I try to keep a dozen or so ends.

I actually have a parallel port cable, a serial to serial cable, and two USB2 A->B cables.

and not one but 2 spare 64Gb USB thumbdrives.

an 8' tested good cat6 cable. <helps if your TESTER is pooched. And I've met at least one>

I personally carry a 64Gb USB key that has ISO images for a *baseline* recovery image for *all* the OS's I support. And spare CD and DVD disks.

Re: CAPS LOCK Pournelle's law, well one of them anyway...

@Matt B.

upvoted - DAC cables, scsi cables, chassis interconnects on SGI and IBM boxes, EMC bus cables, fiber too.

Computers vs Ebola: Scientists use big data to predict future disease hotspots

Batty, just completely crazy

@ LINCARD10000: *food*. Some folks find 'em tasty when toasted.

.... I know an old woman who swallowed a fly.....

Graphene is actually self-folding origami, proclaim physicists

@ voyna

Personally I rather like Penrose, if only because I find his language 'translates' well to my comprehension. I can still find bits of his stuff that I find less .... "credible" .... if you will, but his tendency to throw thermodynamics out at the subatomic equation level seems to make sense ..... in the context of examining individual events. What with LHC *testing* a crapton of events at a time, and making so MANY more events to analyse, thermodynamics comes back into focus.

Still, considering my uncle is a Penrose student, my take on physics is somewhat biased.

Student Loans Company burns £50 million in IT project superfail

Banks running student loans

Experience speaking here:

DO NOT let that happen.

Banks are responsible to SHAREHOLDERS not to customers or clients. 11 years. 11 years of futzing around, changing targets, increasing interest levels (based on that magical APR value) and back and forth between the tax folks and the bank(s) that held the loans .....

And that 11 years of back and forth was just convincing everyone that the damn loan was PAID OFF. Hell, the BANK didn't even have copies of the paperwork that they'd sent me saying it was complete.

Tupperware vehemently denies any link to storage containerisation

Storage containerization in a Tupperware kinda world

Dammit .. this one needs an AMFM comment. It DEMANDS it.

Sadly, I am fairly ill equipped to place it for him.

Next month's Firefox 48 is looking Rusty – and that's a very good thing

Hmmm.

Does the new browser have a noscript plugin?

Perhaps called.....

Rustproofing?

/runs and hides.

Newly spotted distant dwarf planet orbits the Sun every 700 years

As a Canadian

I have to apologize for stirring up the orbital politics with this but.....

Google broke its own cloud again

@boltar - datacenters

I've seen, *cough* 4 DC power downs in 19 years. Two of them were outright mechanical failure of power delivery systems, one was human error on the part of a power provider and the fourth was bad planning of a change, resulting in a fire that took out the switches.

It is possible to have well supported and managed DCs go completely south. I suppose it should be rarer than in my experience, but it *does* happen.

Cloud, however, when it goes wrong, being larger, more widely spread and such, can take a *hell* of a lot longer to recover from the outage. The first three took between 6 and 9 hours to recover from, the last, for a smaller, outlying DC took 18 hours, primarily due to having to wait for the fire department to sign off on the rebuild of the damaged bits.

< times are from *oops* to *everything is back to normal* >

Facebook deleted my post and made me confirm pics of my kids weren't sexually explicit

Facebook. The descent of humanity

Sadly - amongst many folks it is the most convenient method of collating and associating.

Doesn't make it the best way - we all have to recall that we are the product, not the customer. I post bugger all there. I do use it to keep family connections and some long distance friendships that have lasted years but that is all that connection is for.

Automated Censorship.

You just have to read that as a technologically inclined individual. Don't know about anyone else around these parts, but it makes portions of my (male) anatomy retreat to locations they aren't supposed to be anywhere near at this age.

And since the good ship facebook is US based media for US based Advertisers driven by US based corporate media framework, one can safely assume that the censorship is there, has been for some time and is driven by the utterly screwed up moralist, egotistical, self centred, buy the shiny, bigger is better, fluffy bunny bullshit that the global media empire that is owned by wall street wants you to feel is the way the world works.

Now, dammit, where's my coffee.

< No, actually, despite the social, moral and ethical issues raised in the article, I quite literally could not care LESS what facebook does, to my account, or anyone else's for that matter. It is *NOT* the water delivery infrastructure. It is a crap tool. >

Samsung deals out microSD-crushing faster fingernail flash cards

urrrr.

"Incompatible with Micro SD"

Might need to find hardware that supports the damn thing before thinking about buying one. I know *I* don't have an S6 lying around.

NASA curious about Curiosity's fourth 'safe mode' event

Curiosity. Safe Mode. Weekend.

July 1st friday July 4th Monday.

It just wanted a long weekend to celebrate the national holidays. Yeesh. How hard is that.

@AMFM: Some days I think you own the copyright on my rising paranoia. But it isn't paranoia if they *are* out to get you.

Chilcot's IT spend: Tighter wallet than most public sector bods

Canadians - one reason to thank Jean Chretien

He said hell no we wont go.

We ended up in the soup *after* the fact.

One container to rule them all? No. Um, a plastic box* refresher

Re: Countdown Tech

--- Oh look:

What is this Locker thing? is it just like Docker?.........

Martha Lane Fox: Brexit is all about MEEEEeeee!

Sadly, from the left side of the pond

;

Every time I read MLF in there, I dated myself.

Reference material:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB7PRY1Aqds

Down to Earth: NASA's kilo-kitty balloon lands after 46 days

balloon develops fear of heights

..... Breathe in .... Breathe out .... Breathe in ...... Breathe out.....

Mozilla emits nightly builds of heir-to-Firefox browser engine Servo

Hmmm.

Using old libssl/libcrypto on build hosts?

servo]$ ldd ./servo |grep 'not found'

libssl.so.1.0.0 => not found

libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => not found

system is at 1.0.2h

will have to build from source to see.

Boffins boggle, baffled by blobs deep inside the Earth

Leftovers?

We did have one heck of a smack from something at one time (axial tilt + moon) -- perhaps our interloper left bits behind and we're still in the digestion process?

Could be ugly if it results in either a case of diarrhoea or even projectile vomiting.

Cosmo study: Middle-aged galaxies are rarer than you'd think

"Small galaxies are at the mercy of larger galaxies which can strip their gas supply away if they get too close."

Very much like modern businesses.

Jupiter's throwing a firework party for Juno – and Hubble's peeking in

Sheilds up Keptin!

..... Thats no moon!

Trans-Pacific FASTER fibre fires first photons, finally

talk about being caffein deficient in the am

I was wondering what the golden parachute was for that photon.

< we need a steaming mug. Coffee/tea will be covered >

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

Re: Missing the important question

..... And what PII was on the unencrypted SD card left in the local starbucks?

Visiting America? US border agents want your Twitter, Facebook URLs

Re: Is there a kickstarter fund i can contribute to....

@C.O.

*thank you* for putting a smile on my face in the office this morning.

DARPA's 'flying wing' drone inches closer to lift-off

if they're only dropping $18M on the research model;

FInal model prices should be in the $2-$5M range, and you can run far more than one in a flight. Makes a bit of a difference in the results when you send a swarm of bees/locusts instead of single eagle. There is *some* logic here. Rather rare if you ask me.

Countdown to Jupiter: Juno just seven days from orbit

All this jupiter info we'll be getting

May well destroy a book series I recall reading a *long* time ago - its somewhat vague, but involved someone becoming a benevolent dictator ruling from a moon around jupiter. It was a fun series. Can't for the life of me recall the title.

In any case, Cheers, but no beer till the orbits done. Want steady hands on those keyboards. Good luck guys and gals.

NVMe SSDs tormented for months in some kind of sick review game

NVMe devices

I'm old enough that calling them (or for that matter SSDs, SD cards etc) "drives" just doesn't quite feel correct.

@ ATCSNWT:

This was an example of Pottorture.

Trevor:

Given a distributed computing environment, and these being available in the 2G range, I'm actually considering one per node as scratchpad tmp space - we've an ETL that runs and generates up to 200,000 temporary files in a 100Gb lv that *might* just be precipitating internal timeouts. If we can serialize that we'd be able to keep it under 2G of data at a time. These just might be fast enough for that. Thoughts?

Beer for playing with toys.

Down and out in the Middle Kingdom: Beijing is sinking

Re: "delicious example of the challenge of science writing in non-metric America"

Interesting Putters. Leftpondian, only a few years older here. Being Canuck, I've learned Feet, Pounds, Gallons (*both of them*) Quarts, liters metres and kilos. And oddly, Stone, bushels, tons (*both of them*), acres, hectares and about 11 other ways of measuring land area. -- I think our British heritage and unfortunate proximity to them down south gave me the best and worst of both sides of the equation(s).

I wonder is there a Chinese version of The Tragically Hip?

'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

Re: So how long before ...

"So why should fuel at the pump rise?"

Because they are responsible to the stockholders, and there's an opportunity to make a profit.

PM resigns as Britain votes to leave EU

Far side of the Pond, watching.

Not having been day to day in the media over there, perhaps what I've seen offhand was not completely representative of what was in full flight.

Leave media presentation mirrored Trump's campaign, picking the lowest of denominators, inflating fear and hate, niggling "that nasty bugger over there is taking your cookie away" messages. Mostly insinuations that the money going to EU was effectively being stolen and handed to lazy, no good, invading, other (coloured/religion/political orientation/sexuality/hair style) people. Essentially the campaign appeared designed to appeal to the basest component of the lizard brains.

Remain media presentations sounded mostly like Clinton's campaign. Obfuscation, indirection, look at the cute bunnies from Europe, We'll get lots of cookies! etc etc.

At least in the US there is a third option.

What bothers me *most* (not just US election, BREXIT stuff etc) is just how much of what is being spewed by *all* the media sources out there is specifically designed from the top down to split the populace into groups. This is the *REAL* racism that is out there. More aligned with the idea that the target audience of the media needs to be alienated against the target audience of another media.

It appears to me that those running these media have every intention of enjoying sitting back and chomping on their popcorn while those of us in the trenches of life run around stabbing one another in the back/face/leg/arm/chest as frequently as we can.

Then again, perhaps I'm just awake, and not living the dream.

Beer, at least an attempt was made at a democratic process -- celebrate *THAT* at least.

Germany: If Brits vote to Remain, we'll admit Hurst's 1966 goal was a goal

Re: Dear Germany...

Sadly it applied equally in the Dominican Republic the last we were there.

Perhaps somewhat more disturbing was the noise one herd made when they discovered that the pool boys had picked them all up around 8:30 and put them back. That lot would give German tourists a bad name in any location. I assumed that they were a specific subsect of German.

GK, Have a cold one for affirming that its not a standard practice.

Zuck covers up mic and webcam because sharing isn't always good

Re: Trompe l'oeil

Hmmm.

A prescient french expression.

Trump lol.

*cough*

<je suis canadien, merci>

Re: Taping over the mic has no effect at all, it's just another membrane.

@Voyna, I'm assuming that all the quacking will cover the real discussion.

Put storage inside the individual hosts of a virtual cluster? You're CRAZY... Like a fox

@ Trevor:

Any word on integration with other tools with this set of toys?

Cloudforms etc?

Pretty little Fenec. It needs more treats.

Utah sheriffs blow $10,000 on smut-sniffing Labrador

Re: Porn? Oh, horror!

Potemkine:

No, they are not taking over. They've been running the show for the last 30 years.

Cash-strapped English and Welsh cops prepare to centralise all 43 forces' websites

@Alister

felt like upvoting myself.

Not smiling for the camera? Adobe's Creative Cloud suite can fix that

Re: It's interesting how things change back to where they were before

"Now we're heading back to the idea of editing reality"

Umm. Heading back?

You really haven't been paying much attention to mainstream media/social media have you?. Its just become a cultural phenomenon now.