Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

It's primed and full of fuel, the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to be packed up prior to launch

Re: Why so long to fill?

Is good reason tovarisch

Re: Why so long to fill?

Well obviously they are also toxic and corrosive - it wouldn't be any fun if they weren't poisonous AND explosive

Re: Why hydrazine?

Hydrazine is well known, this mission has enough challenges that you don't want to find out that some other propellant eats through a seal after 5 years.

There is a lot of work on alternatives with more boring ingredients. Apart from the Nasa greenwashing it's a pain for university cubesats or SpaceX type quick turn around launches if the fill up has to be done by a guy in a bomb disposal suit and then everyone else has to hide in a bunker a mile away.

Hubble couldn't use propellants at all because of the need for manned servicing missions - this isn't stuff you want to get on your space suit and then bring indoors.

Re: OS ?

Problem is if you want a rover with lots of image processing / autonomous decision / "AI", then you either need university labs full of AI researchers who know VxWorks, or you hire 1000s of engineers to port opensource libs and algorithms they don't understand to space-grade HW.

More common is to use regular Linux running all the very high level stuff as a job (don't know the technical details) under something like VxWorks that is in charge of uptime/reliability - rather than trying to put a realtime Linux on the bare metal that can run everything.

Re: OS ?

JWST uses VxWorks. Remember it was basically designed/built 10years ago and has a much simpler task than the various Mars rovers. Point to next target, trigger instrument, store data, transmit back to Earth.

The fuel is mostly to nudge it back I to place, L2 isn't a stable minima so any slight movement will cause it to drift away.

Hubble uses the Earths magnetic field to lean on to point itself, ie to unload the reaction wheels. I suspect this will re-point a lot less than Hubble, it doesn't have to avoid the Earth/Sun/Moon as much, it just points mostly in the general direction of 'away'

Re: New! Improved! oxidiser

It's spraying out into space with a velocity.

In space there's no wind to blow it back.

Although it's a problem not to end up in a cloud of exhaust

Re: Why so long to fill?

The two chemicals are hypergolic = basically explode on contact with each other.

The craft cost $10bn and took 20 years to build

They do not wish to become featured in a future "Who, me?" column

Thought NHS Digital's wind-down meant it would stop writing cheques? Silly you. It's gone on an IT buying spree

Re: Deck chairs

The White Star is announcing invitation to tender for contract deckchair movement services.

No previous experience of deckchairs or ships required

Having been to same school as captain an advantage

Re: overseas

So the solution to the NHS is identity cards and making people speak French ?

"Pas de Problème"

But the old system would have been really difficult (or at least obvious) to privatise.

Now you can transfer an NHS primary care provisioning facility into being a self-managed autonomous treatment center owned by a special purpose corporation with scarcely a yawn

Re: IT helps administrate treatments

By which logic, toilets are the heart of the NHS.

See how long you can go without a 'dynamic cloud strategy to leverage data' compared to how long the patient lasts without peeing.

Tech Bro CEO lays off 900 people in Zoom call and makes himself the victim

Re: Glassdoor...

The risk is if security escort you "off the premises" !

Re: Glassdoor...

Most US states are 'right to work' (the 'ethnic cleansing' of euphemisms) which mean you can quit with no notice.

I did ask my first US boss if this meant that a 747 captain could slam on the brakes halfway down the runway, trigger the escape slide and walk off into the sunset. He just gave me the worried smile that most bosses seem to have with me.

Shocking: UK electricity tariffs are among world's most expensive

We're hoping that "wires causing 5G cancer" nuts would persuade them to bury the wires up here in the Pacific North West - but it's cheaper to send out trucks to remove the fallen trees and replace the wires the day after each storm (apparently)

Did have a cool demonstration once where we had a suspect fault in an underground line to the lab. They bring out a big truck with a serious generator and some fun-sized coils and send a mega-zap (technical term) into the cable to find the weak point = a bang and a jet of steam come out from the lawn showing you where to dig.

Re: Think it is bad now?

Have you thought of taking back control ?

Yes, the private industry is now free to buy electricity from Libya.

It just needs the government to pay for the infrastructure to get it to you

Re: 70's electricty

If you extracted all the wind... yes

But there is rather a lot of wind energy. A single Hurricane is about 10^15W ie. 1 Million nuclear reactors.

We should go back to native coal supplies feeding native power stations, then we can have the power reliability we had in the 70s.

Assuming we decide to let any of this power go to southerners of course....

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Why does Oracle keep MySQL ?

Is MySQL just Oracle's gateway drug ? When your application becomes big enough the Oracle salesman calls?

Or is it to do the "MS-Office effect" and stop anyone else getting market share? It's an alternative to pirating Oracle for people who can't afford Oracle but it means nobody else can charge money for any low power solution ?

I'm assuming that if MySQL didn't make $$$$ for Larry's yacht fund it would be shut down. Not a database person so no experience.

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

The obvious answer would be:

“Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.'

Now, they have two problems.” -- D. Tilbrook

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

R. (The language, not the letter)

The correct answer is AWK

Hot not-Spot-bot spot: The code behind Xiaomi's CyberDog? Ubuntu

Re: Points of the dog (Are its knees backwards?)

Took my non-cyber dog to the vet recently.

They said they would put the jab in it's right "arm" - I looked slightly confused for a while before working out that they meant the front leg

Galileo satnav system gets two new somewhat confusing satellites

Re: France having conveniently kept an empire

That's what we did wrong.

If India had been defined as part of Greater London (perhaps zone 5++ ?) nobody would have noticed and we could have kept it.

> jamming, need devices in situ and are of limited range

But if you are using GNSS for military purposes you are generally in limited range of your enemy, and they are probably entirely within their rights to jam your signal.

The best approach is to stick to only attacking enemies with a medieval technological level and hope that Aliexpress don't start selling high power jammers

Galileo specifically has a USA kill switch - it was part of the agreement that the USA wouldn't jam it

The original reason for Galileo was that in the event of a US-Eu trade spat a very-stable-genius US president might turn off GPS across Europe crippling Eu transport - but might not go to the extent of shooting down NATO ally's kit.

Re: User count?

"Provided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here - they provided it whether anyone wanted/needed/used it.

France having conveniently kept an empire - or at least a few bits near the equator

Uber's gig economy business model takes a blow from London legal double-whammy

Aren't black cab drivers self employed ?

Personally I'm fully on-board with the medieval guild model.

If people without the maths degrees knowledge weren't allowed to touch these calculating machines the world would be a better place

Cuba ransomware gang scores almost $44m in ransom payments across 49 orgs, say Feds

Re: Where to?

Redmond of course !

What will life in orbit look like after the ISS? NASA hands out new space station contracts

Has anyone been on ISS longer than people had already done on MIR?

Re: The best technology of the '70's. Again.

>I wonder if Musk would actually build an Arthur C. Clarke style "spinning wheel" space station on his own

I'd be more worried about him building a spherical one

Re: Different way to launch small satellites

If you want the resulting payload in the same orbit as the ISS. If not you need quite a strong astronaut to chuck it into say a polar orbit.

Perhaps an East German shotputter or 80s West Indian fast bowler ?

And at this point if the purpose of the ISS was to learn how to keep people alive in space for the length of a Mars mission - we might as well send them to Mars

It kept Boeing-Lockheed-Martin-Grumman inc in business between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror.

It kept a similar bunch of Soviet rocket scientists from going to work on their tans and private projects in the middle east.

Re: Recycle

No way to boost it. Plan is to let it come down.

Once the panels and truss break off it becomes a bit more brick like and slightly more predicatable.

There are motors on some core bits to do a bit of control, but not enough to give it anything like the precision you would want.

Also to allow the Russian launch site easy access it is in quite a high inclination, so can potentially hit a range of Northern (and Southern but who cares about them) latitudes.

edit: Inclination is 51.5 deg so all of USA, the habitable bits of Russia and Canada and most of continental Europe, but only the southern coast of Blighty, are in the touch down zone

NixOS and the changing face of Linux operating systems

Re: ITYM ...

You have a boot floppy and a root floppy.

If you need to roll back you use an old copy of the root floppy - simple really

How to destroy expensive test kit: What does that button do?

Isn't pre-wet the state of the equipment before hitting the button? Shouldn't it have been marked post-wet?

Or better still a knob that turned between pre-wet and post-wet? Bonus marks if you can turn it back!

In the Royal Navy I would assume a button marked pre-wet would dispense a pre-lunch pink gin

New UK product security law won't be undercut by rogue traders upping and vanishing, government boasts

Re: We need more laws

There should definitely be more laws, in fact the laws should be so strict that only the likes of CISCO has the infrastructure to meet them. Then we could have a choice of one $1000 home router.

Anybody else remember the days when you could buy a 300baud modem from BT and that was the only approved modem you were legally allowed to use ?

re: I would have thought

And that Sir is what disqualifies you for a role in government.

But IIRC Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft do no business in the UK. All the sales occur

in Narnia

Re: Taking a local hostage

So any directors of Aliexpress store314159 that live in the UK better watch out ?

Re: Laugh

>Yeah, well. There also has to be a bit of enforcement, something that the UK is not too good at lately.

Didn't we just send a gunboat to show those orientals ?

UK data watchdog fines government office for disclosing New Year's gong list

Is this a problem?

Presumably a Knight of the British Empire would be able to defend his castle against any internet riff-raff that might discover the address?

Leaked footage shows British F-35B falling off HMS Queen Elizabeth and pilot's death-defying ejection

Re: It's a feature!

The Japanese navy anti-submarine kamikaze squadron weren't a great success

Re: Ooops! - Watch nerd

It's nice - but everytime you knock it off the bedside table it explodes and throws the face back at you

Re: Well...

>I am wondering why those condtions aren't detected and lead the aircraft to abort takeoff safely.

Physics.

It's one thing for the computer to say. We are 1m from the end of the flight deck and 100knts too slow = sys.abort() . And quite another thing to stop in time.

UK Space Agency wants primary school kids to design a logo for first Brit launches

Re: cheap publicity stunt

Brexit benefits not actual size ?