Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

SpaceX's Elon Musk high on success after counting '420' Starlinks in orbit and Frosty the Starship survives cryo test

Re: This may be a really obvious question.

>"through-planet neutrino communication"

>Is that really a thing?

Transmitter = yes

Receiver = no

So 50% of target achieved

Airbus and Rolls-Royce hit eject on hybrid-electric airliner testbed after E-Fan X project fails to get off the ground

True but a lot of features debut on ludicrous hyper-cars and are then standard on a hatchback a decade later

Re: Standard engines + fuel vs fuel + gas turbine + electric?

Sorry was reading an earlier post where they said we could use the little electric engine on the ground to be quiet and only switch to the massive powerful jet in cruise

Re: Electric planes?

Aircraft are designed to be moved by tugs very slowly and carefully

If you wanted to tow a fully loaded and fuelled 747 at 30mph you would need a much stronger towing point - especially if you wanted the ability to stop quickly. F=ma is a bugger.

You would probably also need an interface to allow the tug to control the brakes on the main gear

So the airline would have to pay for heavier nose gear and carry the weight on every flight for the benefit of the airport. So unless a major continent made this mandatory at all airports you have a catch-22.

The APT project's problems were beyond anything to do with the turbine.

I wonder how practical a mass-produced turbine hybrid car engine would be?

A small 50-100Hp turbine with an integrated brushless type generator, so you don't have to make a 20,000rpm gearbox. It could run at a constant speed/load just charging the battery

Safety containment shouldn't be any harder than a turbo. Modern control is trivial (lab turbo molecular pumps run at 100K rpm safely) . They can burn pretty much any fuel and should be hot enough to have very little particle exhaust.

Re: Electric planes?

Virgin tested this at Heathrow as a green program.

It wasn't capable of towing at anything like taxi speed (max 30knts for the 737, 25knts for a 747).

IIRC it was abandoned because it was limited to little more than walking pace, a combination of a safety requirement (eg. stopping distance) and nose gear strength.

It would make a lot of sense from noise, cost, pollution, safety etc - but I suspect it's one of those things where the aircraft makers, airlines, airports, aviation authorities all have to align to enable the changes.

Re: Electric planes?

If you have passengers that can breathe engine exhaust

Re: Standard engines + fuel vs fuel + gas turbine + electric?

Unfortunately you need the other way around. Big noisy jet engines on maximum power (and afterburner ;-) on take off and minimum engines at cruise altitude.

Re: Electric planes?

>"It's a genuine question, I'm not an aero engineer but I struggle to see the benefits of electrical propulsion beyond the "look how clever my engine is" bragging rights."

For super small private planes it might be worthwhile. ie a Piper Telsa. Mainly if you can reduce the service costs over a regular engine.

I strongly suspect this project is a combination of Greenwashing and a way for RR to score some Eco grants/tax-credits to do R&D for their small turbine on-site generator business.

If you can have 2.5MW on a pallet, compared to their current container size powerplant then a lot of on-site diesels could be replaced.

Re: Electric planes?

It's economic when oil prices are high but abandoned as soon as oil prices drop.

Main problem is that you can't tow at very high speeds (tugs would be massive and you would have to strengthen front landing gear) so it really slows down your airport operations.

Unless you can guarantee such tugs are available at all airports that the aircraft type would ever serve you still need the engines to be able to run in taxi state so don't gain as much

Re: Electric planes?

Would you still fly 100 people to Atlanta so they can sit in the same room and all watch the same CEO give a Powerpoint about leveraging dynamic synergies?

Or a motorbike

US threatens to turf out four Chinese telcos amid concerns over national security... and COVID-19, doctors, schools, jobs, communists, etc

Re: We contacted each company

Not allowed to reach out to at the moment

Happy birthday, ARM1. It is 35 years since Britain's Acorn RISC Machine chip sipped power for the first time

Re: Cheers...

Call it "agresive sleep mode" in the documentation

We could have pwned Microsoft Teams with a GIF, claims Israeli infosec outfit

Re: Seems like a lot of hoops

Or one machine in an organsiation needs to have already been compromised before the weekly all-hands bullshit meeting

Less is more with OpenCL 3.0: Implementing the 2.x spec was tricky – so now everything beyond 1.2 is optional

So just like OpenGL.

It's a standard but you have to check for every single feature being available before using it or program to the lowest common denominator.

Then certain makers <cough >Microsoft <cough > who implement the single lowest feature and then claim OpenGL compliance

Cosmo Communicator: Phone-laptop hybrid is neat, if niche, tilt at portable productivity

If only separate peripherals was a thing

Microsoft decrees that all high-school IT teachers were wrong: Double spaces now flagged as typos in Word

Re: Younger style

Since so many recruiters demand 10 years experience in C++17, I assume you use your Microsoft tardis

Australia's contact-tracing app regulation avoids 'woolly' principles in comparable cyber-laws, say lawyers

Re: "Here I Go, Again On My Own..." - DLR

In this version. Remember how all those new security laws were temporary after 9/11 and were only going to be used against terrorists?

This phone shows you drove past Mr' known to police' so you are now also a suspect, subject to being the right (ie wrong) skin color.

Re: "experts" should be ashamed

Can't they just use the laws of Australia to override what mathematical rules are in the device?

Re: REally?

You'll cooperate with the police/immigration/local council dog walking inspector - if you know what's good for you. Therefore they are health workers

We're in a timeline where Dettol maker has to beg folks not to inject cleaning fluid into their veins. Thanks, Trump

Re: A bleach alternative

Imagine if house and car ownership were also only available through your employer - but that would be ridiculous.

>he and Pence are proof there are no gods.

Cthulhu disagrees

(Is it slightly worrying that Cthulhu is my phone's autocomplete dictionary?)

Re: Give a child the information in the wrong order.

>What's the difference between Trump and Biden?

One is a politician, the other is a reality TV actor

Re: Suggestion

Pah I see your H2O2 and raise you FOOF

Re: The question just has to be asked ..... Is US President #45 Madder than a Hatter*?

amanfromMars is widely believed to be an AI, or just a Markov chain seeded by Fox twitter feed.

This might just be the debug log.

(There is another theory that Fox's twitter feed is just a Markov chain fed by amanfromMars)

Re: Time to re ignite the "Make America Great Again" campaign

Nixon's looking pretty good right now, eh ?

Re: "Orange Man Bad!"

Presumably, unless this was some horrific supervillian accident, he chose to be that color !

Re: "Orange Man Bad!"

>Finland! That's the "country" that was invented on the Internet. Do you not know anything? FFS!

Finland the country is fake, but the people are real

America the country is real, but all the people are internet deep fakes

Re: "Orange Man Bad!"

Well if you believe America is real and not something made up on the internet

Re: Trump's Base

Unfortunately the dead can't vote (Chicago excepted)

Suggestion

Presumably a thermonuclear explosion would also destroy the virus.

Just putting this out there, its worth testing, I'm very smart, what does this red button do ?

Royal Navy nuclear submarine captain rapped for letting crew throw shoreside BBQ party

Re: Tomahawk missile range

>A bit iffy for London to Moscow (1540mi),

Although it's well known that all British nuclear weapons were targeted on Slough

Re: The military is supposed to blindly obey orders.

Interestingly that was the British Army rule upto just before D-Day

Then somebody realised it might give the hun a bit of an excuse and it as changed,

- listening to Al Murray and James Holland's excellent podcast. "We have ways of making you talk"

Re: Epic level of nominative determinism here

I want to believe some navy family hoping for an illustrative career for their son named him, Rear Admiral Smith

Spyware maker NSO can't claim immunity, Facebook lawyers insist – it's time to face the music

Re: "NSO Group has argued it is immune because it only sells to governments"

Obviously not, since it only sells to governments it's immune from such requirements

Re: Bollocks Bingo

>Save lives -

Except for journalists

Famously flawed, it is 30 years since the Hubble Space Telescope was launched

Re: Mirror

That's part of the same faulty thinking though. A full test in a proper test range for this mirror (designed to support itself only in zero g) would have been complicated and expensive. A quick knife edge test with a business card would have shown the error - but you aren't going to do a dumb high school physics test on a $Bn program

Re: Mirror

Just cos it's Friday, Im bored "working" from home and el'reg readers like to geek out.

The error is interesting.

To precisely test a mirror like this you assemble a bunch of lens to have exactly the same optical specification on a smaller scale (ie. a unit test) called a null corrector.

Obviously vital that you get all the spacings in this precisely correct .

So you make a very precise length metal rod out of Invar, a super hard version of stainless steel that changes very little with temperature (and is a real basterd to machine - I still have scars)

You focus a microscope on the end of the rod and then you know that when you replace the rod with the optics and are in the same focus you are in the same place. This way you never touch the rod.

You don't want some PFY to damage the ends of this rod you put a lens cap over it with a little hole for the microscope to look down. You then paint the cap back so you don't get any stray light.

Unfortunately a speck of paint came off the cap and went down the hole. The microscope got focussed on the resulting area of shiny metal on the top of the cap, a gnat's whatsit above than the end of the rod. The rest of the optics got assembled to this wrong position, the mirror got polished to match the optics and a lot of astronomers got very pissed off - and a bunch of us doing software deconvolution of out of focus images got bought a lot of very nice Sun wokstations. So it all worked out in the end.

Mirror

I think you have your urban myths crossed.

The mirror was made by PE on the same production line as the keyhole spy satelites - the Hubble being optically a keyhole facing up.

The polishing was 70s technology so if the polishing machine was computer controlled it was only for very small values of "computer". The shape fsck-up as nothing to do with the computer it was pure user error.

Kodak had bid to make a pair of mirrors so to have a backup if anything went wrong in polishing.

Although if they had used the same standard testing technique as PE and made the same mistake any error would have equally applied to both. The polishing technique had nothing to do with the error.

The big failing was PE not to have done a very simple test of the mirror to show any gross error - it relied on having a single super precise test that it did wrong. And then made a super precise mirror to the wrong shape. The lesson is that it's often worth doing a quick and dirty back of the envelope measurement/calculation before trusting the 10decimal place answer from the super precise machine with the flashing lights

They didn't do this test because of time constraints, although ironically Hubble then sat in storage for years after the challenger accident.

Why should the UK pensions watchdog be able to spy on your internet activities? Same reason as the Environment Agency and many more

Re: How come I am reminded of Yes, minister?

Same reason we are reminded of Idiocracy over here

Whats the sketch from Yes Minister about some Eu rule:

The Germans will love it

The French will ignore it

The Spanish and Italians will be too incompetent to implement it

Only the British will object to it

Google says no more shady anonymous web ads – if you want your billboard up, you've got to show us some valid ID

Re: Malicious ads

The "who supplied this ad" link will simply go to an ad agency or PR company. Presumably they have no obligation to reveal who their client is and then if their client is a single person or think tank they have no obligation to say where they got the money.

That's what they did here with $5K limits on corporate donations. Certain oil/mining companies simply hired a bunch of consultants. Coincidentally the consultants then each donated $5K personally, of their own free will, to a campaign for the candidate who looked favourably on the extraction industries.

Re: A Good Step

She didn't do it to get into Harvard - she was already a staff member.

Harvard did, rather less excusably, use it to claim that they had a black professor and therefore weren't racist.

Re: A Good Step

So the ad protesting wind farms will goto "society for protecting fluffy bunnies.org" and a Delaware business number, but won't tell you which oil company owns them

IBM Watson GPU cloud cluster Brexits from London to Frankfurt – because GDPR

Re: Watson...

But with Artificial Intelligence - IBM now being completely devoid of the genuine variety

Welcome to life in the Fossa lane: Ubuntu 20.04 let out of cage and Shuttleworth claims Canonical now 'commercially self sustaining'

Re: @ragnar - I still don't see the purpose of WSL

>what is the difference between getting access to Linux command line with and without WSL ?

If you are using the Windows machine purely as an admin console = nothing

If you need to test and develop the server stuff locally then I have a Windows laptop (email/office/corporate stuff) a Linux desktop (development and test) and then cloud/remote server to deploy.

With WSL I could do a lot of the development on the laptop and then push directly to cloud rather than having to sneaker-net it to the laptop first. Which would be really handy in this current lockdown

The benefit to MSFT is that if I had any control over corporate IT would throw out the windows laptop and replace it with Linux.