people go there but no one really lives there.
Posts by Andrew Scott
501 publicly visible posts • joined 24 May 2007
Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson backs plan to do a Jurassic Park on extinct birds

Re: Edible?
from the conversation i'm guessing the first egg will never get a chance to hatch, probably sunny side up. This conversation is why there are so many existing animals such as rhinos that are on the verge of extinction just for having horns or other coveted things used for barbaric purposes that may be examples of traditional medical practices but probably have no truth in reality.
Court cancels FTC click-to-cancel rule on a technicality
Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done
Army and Navy have both asked for right to repair, now Senators want to give it to them
Britain's 5G experience 'among the worst in Europe' says MedUX
UK police dangle £75 million to digitize its VHS tape archives
Microsoft developer ported vector database coded in SAP’s ABAP to the ZX Spectrum
Epic Games settles its antitrust side quest that sought battle royale with Samsung

From my first Motorola droid there has always been an option to load apps from other than google. there was no option to do that at all on an iphone. At the time you needed to connect a iphone to a computer with a usb cable with itunes running on the computer to update the os or apps or pretty much anything. haven't used the feature since the days of the motorola droid razr, but haven't found anything i wanted. pretty much work with what's built in. think the only app i ever bought was something called acar, but don't use it anymore.
Nuclear reactors smaller than a semi truck to be tested in Idaho

Re: Mixed units?
yes, probably right, built in 1860 had 60 amp service when last bought with tube and post wiring in 1996. upgraded to 100 amps and got rid of the fuse box. still haven't got grounded outlets on the 2nd floor, but 100 amp service. do wonder why the lights blink when the keurig is brewing coffee.

think one of the selling points is that the operators don't have to sit on top of it, they can be hundreds of miles away monitoring the thing remotely from home. Probably easier to hire the operators if they don't have to be in the same state when something goes wrong. Seen heat pipes fail when they don't get enough air flow, caused the heatsink to warp and bend the pcb. Now you won't have to find a place to dispose of waste, you'll just have to find a way of disposing the entire reactor.
Double-detonation supernova could explain why the universe is full of candles
Airbus okays use of ‘Taxibot’ to tow planes to the runway

not sure they're thinking of doing a tow from the runway to the terminal if there's any chance the plane is going to continue to fly. once the engines are shut down there is a period where they need to stay shut down before restarting. believe i read somewhere that due to uneven cooling down in the engine the rotors can warp and starting up before things cool down enough can cause interference between the rotor and the stater. not desirable in a jet engine.

Re: Not really a Bot is it!
yes, but who will be held accountable if its wings clip another plane on the way to the terminal. pilot should be pretty aware of the space needed to maneuver his plane, and have a good idea of exactly where the plane needs to be parked, not to mention a possibly better perspective of the area from the planes cabin than the guy with his chin on the ground.
Let's Encrypt rolls out free security certs for IP addresses
Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Room temperature?
33 C here right now and supposed to get hotter. don't know the inside temp at work, but no air at home as the house doesn't lend itself to window air conditioners. Believe thy use co2 for heat pumps in some places. less toxic than some refrigerants and less flammable than others, and less ozone depleting than most. high pressure plumbing though.
Financial 'stretch' for UK to join Europe's Starlink rival, says minister
Mars was once a desert with intermittent oases, Curiosity data suggests
Wikidata: Attempting to bridge FOSS ideals and direct democracy
NASA tests shrinking metals to help it find more exoplanets
China successfully tests hypersonic aircraft, maybe at Mach 12

Re: Fake
at those speeds i would think that just a small maneuver would change the heat profile not to mention the drag profile and cause something moving at mac 12 to disassemble rapidly and unpredictably. Would wonder if accidentally hitting a poop from a high flying bird could have the same effect.
Microsoft Copilot joins ChatGPT at the feet of the mighty Atari 2600 Video Chess
Top AI models - even American ones - parrot Chinese propaganda, report finds
Japanese company using mee-AI-ow to detect stressed cats
Before the megabit: A trip through vintage datacenter networking

Re: Phone bill must have been astronomical
Haven't seen a "hand set" since the last public phones that i've seen in a while were removed from the T station up the road. Think they took them out about 3 years before covid. Think there were two phones on the first floor of one campus building more recently, but they're gone now also. there is a mail chute on the 4th floor to deliver mail to the ground floor for pick up. could still put a letter in it but doubt the mailbox exists any longer. There used to be two phone booths outside of the registrars office back when i went to school here back when they had a cyber 70, but they're gone now too. don't miss them until i realize i forgot my phone and need to make a call.
US Department of Defense will stop sending critical hurricane satellite data
BOFH: Peeling back the layers of the magic banana industrial complex
LLMs can hoover up data from books, judge rules
Mozilla rolls out Firefox 140 with ESR status and fresh features

been using firefox since i downloaded it's ancestor using ftp from ncsa. that's also where the original source code came from that's used in the A patchy server. originally because there was nothing else, but since because it was the easiest cross platform browser to find. like having a consistent look and feel on different platforms. also doesn't keep trying to get me to use different search engines.
The one thing SME IT can do that the big guys can’t: Change the world

Re: Text is better than graphics, graphics are better than video. Text is magic, ...
All i want it the damn manual in text of if necessary a pdf. today if you look for manuals you get a bunch of videos. takes them forever to get to the point, and with text or a pdf you can scan until you find what you need to know instead of listening to someone taking forever to tell you what you need to know.
Deal to 'save' UK colleges £45M in Oracle Java licensing fees followed audit requests
Techie traveled 4 hours to fix software that worked perfectly until a new hire used it

Re: I touch it and it breaks!
haven't got the desk space for something that large. 22 inch monitor currently there takes up most of the free space together with non working power supplies i haven't gotten rid of yet, disks from old non working computers that need to be erased before being disposed of, my morning coffee and the 4 docking stations in boxes that haven't got a home yet.
Microsoft broke DHCP for Windows Server last Patch Tuesday

Re: Au contraire
doubt that ms invented dhcp. we were using it on a system where only the clients were windows based, and mostly dos initially. they all got their ip addresses when the connected to the network in. had a subnet and used a server that handed out static addresses to mac's it recognized and ip's from a pool if it didn't recognize the mac. a variation of bootp that could hand out addresses to new computers but didn't handle leases.
/e/ OS 3.0: Slightly less clunky, slightly more private

google free phone
Thought the easiest way to get a google free phone was to get an iPhone or iPad. if my cell phone service had been allowed to offer iphones i would probably have one today, but back then i couldn't afford the service or phone, so waited until they offered the moterola droid. haven't felt the need to change and still don't. don't think there's much difference on what data is harvested and commercialized with existing phones or what might be offered in the future. just too much money involved for anyone to keep a promise not to commercialize your data at some point. expect even the ones that claim that your data is safe with them are simply using it for their own services.
Microsoft testing PC-to-Cloud-PC failover for those times your machine dies or disappears

Re: "ideal when physical machines aren’t usable."
hasn't Microsoft been selling a windows terminal that has a keyboard and screen but little memory or disk space? Seems to me i read something several months ago describing such a device. a new take on the diskless workstations they used to sell in the dos days. The did rpl to get dos running on the machine and then you load wordperfect or your app of choice from the file server. not much more than a keyboard with a built in network card some memory and a video card. Probably no graphics.