Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Hubble Space Telescope to switch to backup memory module after instrument computer halts

Yes and no,

Many of the objects don't need observing at the same time - if we have Hubble data in the UV/Visible on file then observing it in the IR in the future with JWST.

The real mission for JWST is to observe things that are only IR. The early universe with stuff that is now redshifted to being IR, and are too faint for Hubble anyway.

There might be boring nearby, low energy, objects (like planets) that people might want to observe multi-wavelength at the same time, but nobody cares about a bunch of non-cosmologist stamp collectors

Yes, at least in the early days of Hubble in normal mode that I'm more familiar with.

The campaigns are planned well in advance in long cycles to minimize maneuvering, which wastes time and fuel, instrument changes, and to fit around all the constraints of a Hubble observation.

If the observation (or observer) is important enough it could bump somebody else out of a slot in the next cycle if the telescope is pointing in the right direction and the right instrument is online - this mostly happened if some country/group had lost some guaranteed time and politics was an issue.

I suspect that it is now in a degraded mode where things are more limited

Re: Yes, but can it give 110% like is expected in the workplace...

>I'm not sure what limits the life of JWST: it may be the cryogenics but I think it's the fuel.

It's fuel, there are no consumable cryogenics everything is cooled by fridges.

The limit is orbit keeping fuel. The orbit is far enough away that although it isn't absolutely stable you don't need to maintain a very precise position or boost the orbit.

I suspect it will have a much longer mission life than advertised, guessing that some smart scheduling algorithms will let you use much smaller movements / fuel burns and eek out the fuel.

Re: Yes, but can it give 110% like is expected in the workplace...

The Webb Space Telescope will exceed its ie hubble's capability

Microsoft loves Linux so much that packages.microsoft.com has fallen and can't get up

Not a conspiracy

It's just that it was running on office365+onedrive and it was on Bill's credit card that expired, nobody knows the password and the recovery address is an expired hotmail.com

Spacewalk veterans take a trip outside the ISS to pump up the power with new solar arrays

The thing about the ISS is that to reach it from Kazakhstan it's in an orbit that covers the continental USA and most of Europe, as well as India and China - so an opportunity to hit lots of people.

Re: ISS' swansong?

The Chinese station is small and wont be continually manned - so less than the USA/USSR were doing in the 70s.

The only point in having people in LEO is to learn how to have people in LEO, so not having any people currently there doesn't really cost you anything or give control to China. Not having a person continually on the peak of Everest doesn't take away your ability to climb Everest.

Continuing to support a LEO space station - initially intended to keep cold war rocket scientists gainfully employed when the cold war ended - as opposed to manned Mars mission seems short sighted.

Re: Solar Panel long-term performance

>The ISS is a good test environment for solar panels in a worst-case environment.

On the other hand

No snow,

No leaves,

No dust,

No pigeon shit,

No wind,

No footballs

The awesome power of LEGO

They can get a space walk just to force people to buy the new ISS kit

Intrepid Change.org user launches petition to make Jeff Bezos' space trip one-way

Re-entry

It doesn't re-enter because it doesn't get to orbit. There is a big difference between getting 100km up and falling back and getting 100km up AND doing 10km/s horizontally.

This rocket is doing the same as a 1945 V2, although with a payload that does more damage to the workers of London

Re: Waste of oxygen

>rather than admitting that they are too stupid/lazy to succeed.

That's the trouble with the poor, too lazy to get off their arses and get a $50Bn bailout for their "space" project

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

>Those are human issues, not CompSci issues.

Ultimately they are civil engineering issues - if you are the BOFH

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

But cock was the common use, Noah Webster and others deliberately went looking for non-naughty terms to keep American sensibilities decent

Re: Just shift the letters along...

It would be funnier to refer to the BNP as COQ....

If you are going to start imposing rigid gender rules on poultry the internet is going to have something to say.

Re: A clear case of English supremacists.

Whereas the alternative is a bunch of old men running around saying "non, you cannot say 'podcast' " you must wait 5 years until the next meeting of the secret society where we decide its gender.

Re: Bad names

And if you only know one tiny bit of it you use the singular

Re: Vin

el'reg - come for the dick jokes, stay for the ecclesiastical Latin puns

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

Also the reason the treasonous colonials use faucet instead of cock for a tap

Re: For us Germans it is "WIX" or "wix.com"

Only Germans could become excited by Windows installer XML

Re: Vin

Was her name Gloria and was she sick?

Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks

Re: Actually ....

Also for non-tangible assets.

I can own an original frame of Snow White, framed and certified by Walt Disney corp.

What if I wanted to buy an original .tiff of a frame of Toy Story?

Do they have to print it onto film, do they have to print out the hex file and frame it?

NFTs are a way of autographing digital assets - the assets might be worthless but that's not the NFTs fault.

Re: Nothing Fecking There

>A paper (or vellum) document, certified by accredited witnesses

Who gets to do the accrediting?

The UK court system, CERN's IT dept , the NEXT corporation shareholders?

In this case the signed by witnesses in a British lawyers office is reasonable but what about a Banksy style artist, working in Russia or China ? Would you accept a certificate from the CCP giving you ownership of an online video protesting the policing in Hong Kong

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

You mean will it have a toolbar in the bottom middle of the screen (just like Mac) with icons that popup and do pointless animations (just like Mac) but have configuration dialogs from NT4 once you get down into the weeds of disk management ?

You may think so - I couldn't possibly comment

When security gets physical: Mossad boss hints at less-than-subtle Stuxnet followup

Re: This is terrorism

"If the man constitutes a capability that endangers the citizens of XXX, he must stop existing,"

So it would be perfectly legitimate for the Russians to assassinate Boeing engineers.

Or for the British to kill anyone working on RISC-V

'Welcome to Perth' mirth being milked for all it's worth

Re: Question

I wouldn't say wild - they are really quite reserved

Re: Question

Of course the Australian koala is non-migratory

If HAL did digital signage. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that...

Perhaps it's part of a giant city-wide text adventure game?

Presses Ctrl-D

You are attacked by Orcs, flee toward Southampton

Want to keep working in shorts and flipflops way after this is all over? It could be time to rethink your career moves

Re: Funny....

Scorching hot UK summer temperature 300K, freezing snow on the ground temperature 273K

So to one significant figure they are the same.

Re: Clothing?

I missunderstood the nature of a gender-reveal party

Re: Clothing?

Can they force you to wear clothes in the office ?

Ireland warned it could face 'rolling blackouts' if it doesn't address data centres' demand for electricity

Re: Clearly...

The tax breaks to pay for the data center are big enough, do you know how much the tax breaks to build a power station would be ?

There isn't a magic money tree to pay for the private companies stuff AND the infrastructure to run it.

You get the planning permission to build the data center in 3 months, construction takes 6 months and it's ready in time for the ribbon cutting on all those new jobs just before the next election. The data center shuts 3 years later when the equipment is obsolete and somebody else offers a better tax deal.

Planning permission for the power station takes 10 years, it takes 5 years to build and 15 years to pay back the construction costs - even if the market for its power hadn't closed a decade earlier.

Re: So much for Moore's Law

Surely then the problem then is basing your data centers in a land known for the eloquence of its native people ? If the data centers were in say Yorkshire you would need much less power and bandwidth.

Re: Lucky Ireland

But without the tax arrangements and 'accomodating' regulatory bodies nobody would have their HQ in Ireland.

All Ireland needs to do is work out some legal arrangement where the HQ, tax and data protection remain in a brass plaque at a post office on Craggy Island while the actual servers are in a bit barn in Germany with decent connectivity and power.

UK tells UN that nation-states should retaliate against cyber badness with no warning

Re: That's a delusional idea

Obviously any ransomware attacks in English must be from England

New York State Senate first to pass landmark right-to-repair bill – but don't go popping the Champagne just yet

Re: Lawmakers

Their job is to get re-elected.

So their day job is to fund raise for their election campaign - anything else is a distraction.

One of the drawbacks of this is that roles that don't attract a lot of industry bribes doesn't get smart ambitious lawmakers - the worst one of these is science.

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: My suspicion

New product idea.

Arduino with a screen saying 'testing and a counter' but does nothing

Re: Reminds me of a server issue we had.

Well if you want to just give in and surrender to the machine

AWS Frankfurt experiences major breakdown that staff couldn’t fix for hours due to ‘environmental conditions’ on data centre floor

environment will be safe for re-entry within the next 30 minutes

Currywurst ?

BT 'welcomes' whopping £2bn investment by French telco Altice

Re: But what about Brexit?

When it comes to Brexit I think we can all agree we have had enough of facts

That's why I can now enjoy my red, white and blue straight bananas

Re: But what about Brexit?

Well this deal wouldn't have been allowed by the Eu competition authority - but now free of their red tape we can have British infrastructure owned by the French

'I put the interests of the country first': Colonial Pipeline CEO on why oil biz paid off ransomware crooks

They play a vital role in keep M2 high which is critical for any economy

I put the interests of the country first

Ahead of shareholders?

Isn't that the very definition of communism ?

That thing you were utterly sure would never happen? Yeah, well, guess what …

Re: Ah, will you not have a cup of tea father...

I always use "dialog with stakeholder", "lessons have been learned", "we are innovating for your pleasure" or "leveraging synergy"

That way if there is a bug and the message goes out to a million users I don't have to apologise, or even fix it.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The best time to build a semiconductor foundry is 5 years ago

Re: True for some parts

I'm guessing the light source is different.

You aren't going to keep your insane EUV light to make 65nm parts - so you are going to need some expensive rebuild

'Vast majority of people' are onside with a data grab they know next to nothing about, reckons UK health secretary

Re: "the vast majority of people are strongly onside"

>Do you wear clothes ?

On zoom nobody knows you're naked

Re: we can use this modern asset

Your medical data is very much an asset.

It's valuable when I'm thinking of hiring you or selling you life insurance and once the NHS is privatised and sold to Kaiser/Cigna it will be very valuable in setting premiums and deciding who to cover.

Re: Will GP optout be effective?

Somebody with the same surname and initial as me is getting IVF in a town I used to live.

I know because I kept getting letters from my GP for them

I did tell the receptionist but they weren't interested, I did mention Data Protection but she informed me that GPs were exempt.

I'm hoping that being a guy apparently receiving IVF won't affect me once Facebook get all "my" records

Re: "the vast majority of people are strongly onside"

> "the vast majority of people have not objected"

Nobody has objected to my becoming el'Reg Emperor so I assume you are all onside ?