Posts by AlanS 69 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2010
Buzz Aldrin's novel Encounter ith Tiber addressed this: the dark side protects the telescope from Earth's noise, lunar night shields the Sun's interference, and Jupiter is the next major noise source, is hidden for a good section of time, and then the dark side is really quiet. Add a data relay satellite in the L2 position and Bob's your uncle.
During the first lockdown two years ago I watched a lot of "space porn": SpaceX Falcon launches, Tim Dodd's articles, Starship development... Amazed at Congress' cheeseparing for anything not SLS, I estimated that NASA's budget was the same as what Americans spend on cigarettes every year.
The software company I worked for was owned by McDonnell Douglas 1988-91 and there was no shortage of engineering-based management then, so Boeing's decline likely has other causes.
My view from England is that the US stock market drive changed: preferring rising share price to dividends. In the short term it's easier to cut costs and increase profit margins, rather than improve the product and increase market share.
(Icon 'cos SpaceX mostly use Linux.)
Reared on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border, my day-to-day cheeses are Lancashire and Cheshire, slightly sour and crumbly, with good bread and olives. Wensleydale, to me, is becoming too creamy, perhaps because they now export a lot to the US? My late mother did like the Wensleydale with cranberries, though.
IIRC, photons and matter are different under gravity. That was why the eclipse experiment was done during WW1, to check the displacement of star images near the sun during a total eclipse. Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts twice the displacement of Newton's theory of gravity.
IBM did allow access: when the PC came out they followed their standard practice for their equipment and published the specs, including the main bus. This allowed third parties to build add-in boards, while other manufacturers offered only their own designs, then when the BIOS was cloned, other people (eg, Gateway) could build compatible boxes, allowing the market to mushroom. Only now did MS bribe the clone makers to use MSDOS rather than, eg, DRDOS, for which they were duly fined after the competition were dead.
This is a solved problem bar minor technicalities: your observatory hovers in shadow by the Sun-Mercury L2 point, hanging from an annular sail. The thrust from the mirror stabilises the orbit, directs sunlight onto the cold cells powering the satellite, and the instruments look through the hole!
I was a systems architect for the Parasolid solid modeller in the '90s and we produced a prototype for Win/MIPS which ran well, unsurprisingly as we already had it running on MIPS under DEC Ultrix. IIRC, when the C compilers were handed over to MS to integrate into Visual Studio etc everything went titsup and we never went to production.
So the Commission reckons that if MS screw up GitHub, someone can easily create a competitor, but do not accept that Google search has an effective monopoly just because it works, not because no one can establish a competitor? I write as one who, when Yahoo and Google first established themselves in the UK, much preferred Yahoo, but after a few years, Google got better and Yahoo didn't.
I've just looked at this site (by its contents I'm unlikely to have registered) and the home screen says it's in still in beta! After more than two years! I used to work on CAD software and a beta that long would either be a pile of doodoo not fit for public display, or a cancelled project accidentally left on the system.
I haven't looked at this site since I was asked to rate the hotel I had just stayed at, along with another dozen places I had never heard of.
On a wider topic: I book overnight accommodation for my group of golfers. Algorithm: search web for hotel near course, call and ask whether they can cope with 8-10 50+ men on such-a-such date. 15 years ago, I used Yahoo! as they had a better index for England, now I use Google, as they have improved their stuff. Competition works.
I used to use Altavista and Yahoo in preference to Google, as they seemed to have better indexes for Britain. Then Google caught up and they are nowhere. I'm not bothered by targeted ads as 99% of my searches are for information, and for my (few) usual purchases I go direct to the company.
It's the spec. At this point we have a binary blob of known length B. The spec says the blob has a header byte, a two-byte payload length P, and some unspecified data which must be echoed. The intent is that the transfer mechanism can add padding so that B >= P+2+1 but there's nothing in the wire protocol to ensure this. The fault is not checking that P is appropriate to B and could occur in any language; other languages with bounds checking have been suggested in other threads but you still need a constructor - if the implementer uses "byte data[P]" rather than "byte data[B-2-1]" you have the same bug. Further, with hindsight you should use [min(P, B-2-1)] but would you think of that first?
I played Dromoland Castle golf course some years ago (you may remember it for the Pro/Celebrity TV programme over Christmas/New Year - which is why I wanted to play it). The original 9 holes were built in the days of yards, the second 9 in metres; the distance markers were accordingly in a mixture of metres (new holes) and yards (old). Problem: the tees and greens have since been moved and 1. not all the markers have been updated and 2. some of the 'old' markers are now on 'new' holes and vice versa; you really must use your eyes or be 30 yards wrong into the green!
Nationalise all telcos? Look up Britain's General Post Office/Post Office Telecommunications/British Telecom for an example. When I was at uni in the early '80s, we weren't allowed to run a network link between two adjacent buildings: it had to be run to a junction box half a mile away and then back again, by BT engineers, and took months. Good of the nation?
I have just been away for two weeks with my phone (HTC1X), my tablet (Nexus7) and my Kindle. My problem wasn't chargers, but wall sockets! I survived by plugging in my laptop (Lenovo 3000 N100: old but v.good screen), then using three USB-to-mUSB cables at once, remembering to insert into the Kindle other-way-up.
"chosen by Amazon to gain the most money for Amazon whilst crushing publishers and authors"
No: Amazon are prepared to take a small slice, wishing the pie to grow. Apple wanted a large slice for its iBooks so the publishers had to sell to Apple at a higher price than to Amazon, just to maintain their income. The MFN clause meant that the publishers would automatically stop selling cheaper books to Amazon => the pie doesn't grow &/or the customer loses.
Declaration of interest: I do have a Kindle but buy many of my books as EPUBs (not from Amazon) so I can emend the worst typos and then convert to MOBI.
The key was that IBM published the technical specifications of the IBM PC, just as they did for their larger, more expensive, products. That openness allowed other companies to supply add-in boards and peripherals that IBM did not supply, and when the BIOS was cloned, complete compatible systems could be produced.
As a *nix-based Brit, I do not know the exact details of MS's behaviour from personal experience, but the gist seemed to be 1. they promised system producers to undercut the prices of their OS competiors and 2. they would supply MSDOS even cheaper, if the manufacturers didn't offer a competing OS at all. This uncompetitive behaviour was eventually stopped, but too late for the competition.
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