small gas turbines
are inefficient due to the problems in getting micro scale gas turbines efficient because getting the clearance between turbine blades and the ducting small enough is very very hard
Posts by itzman
1869 posts • joined 28 Jun 2011
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Airbus and Rolls-Royce hit eject on hybrid-electric airliner testbed after E-Fan X project fails to get off the ground
What's the Arm? First Apple laptop to ditch Intel will be 13.3" MacBook Pro, proclaims reliable soothsayer
Monday 22nd June 2020 15:01 GMT
less pop for yer buck
I tried apple. I really wanted to love it. I hated it.
If you spent loads of money keeping hardware and software bang up to date you could get about 1/4 the performance of anything running Linux or windows.
This will be the death knell of Apple as a power workstation machine. Unless they keep intel for that.
It's more about battery powered toys for consumers
The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references
Friday 19th June 2020 09:17 GMT
Golly. Without Hitler.
There never would have been an EU!
What is the 27th letter of the alphabet? Or is it 26 since Brexit? ZZZZZZ
Do people REALLY believe in numerology?
AHAHAH. Oops. I must be a neo Nazi! Too many AHs.
Hard pencils are now BANNED.
BLACK LEAD MATTERS!
No more 18SWG sheet metal for sale!
Oh what a gay day! Here in my little cottage! Oops. I can't say that, it means something else now.
Talk about dog whistles. The Left is one huge echo chamber tuned to dog whistles. Blown by seriously large corporate interests pretending to be democrats and liberals, who are - gaspo - actually BELIEVED by the useful idiots of the suburban middle classes!
As Twitter blocks white supremacists posing as anti-fascists, FBI appeal is flooded with images of cop violence
This'll make you feel old: Uni compsci favourite Pascal hits the big five-oh this year
Friday 29th May 2020 12:10 GMT
pascal was simply useless.
..for any real software engineering.
I rewrote yards of it into C so that I could actually get code to work. It was so strongly typed that things like reading two bytes of a comms stream that might be a bit field, two bytes of data or a particular error code was almost impossible without creating a union of every possible thing it might be.
And if you were stuck at the coal face nested 15 levels of subroutine deep and you encountered the sort of 'line's dropped on you mate' error the inability to 'go directly to jail without passing GO' with a lon gjmp() produced a nightmare of messy code .
Academics loved it. Engineers avoided it.
Of course the fashion is now to type overloading, leading to an equal mess.
Academics should be banned from writing languages
Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil
Saturday 16th May 2020 08:51 GMT
Re: Choice of countries
I'm somewhat surprised by the choice of countries. For instance, why is a country like Namibia (with its fairly large mining, manufacturing and banking sector one of the rising stars of the continent) not included whereas a non-African country like Oman is?
Namibia has good fibre links to South Africa, and not a lot of population. Its also a hard country to get power to and from
Oman is full of rich people needing to play online video games.
I am sure that people laying this cable have done a full market survey of the data requirements of every place versus the cost of connecting to it.
This AI is full of holes: Brit council fixes thousands of road cracks spotted by algorithm using sat snaps
The Great British anti-5G fruitcake Bakeoff: Group hugs, no guns, and David Icke
Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables
Five years in the clink for super-crook who scammed Google, Facebook out of $120m with fake tech invoices
If it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is: Nobody can decrypt the Dharma ransomware
Tuesday 12th November 2019 08:39 GMT
Re: Can someone explain.....
'Offline' is a moveable feast.
Backup is a copy . Where it is and how connected it is are very variable things.
I do auto backup. If my data were corrupted the backup would be, if I didn't notice for 24 hours.
But I am protecting against hardware failure, not malware.
If I were concerned about that, I would do a check on file/backup and if the difference were massive abort and notify.
I don't consider that this particular malware is a serious threat on Linux.
Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told
Boris Brexit bluff binds .eu domains to time-bending itinerary
Monday 7th October 2019 07:11 GMT
Re: Brexit
On the contrary it should have been leave with no deal or stay.
Then we would be able to get on with life the day after the referendum and all te negotiations could have been done after leaving...wit a series of letter of intent in place in the two year period to sort out tit for tat arrangements, like you can fly in my airspace if I can fly in yours, and I wont hold your trucks up at Dover if you don't hold mine up at |Calais.
If the EU had been prepared to act like adults. that would have been it.
We're all doooooomed: Gloomy Brit workforce really isn't coping well with impending Brexit
700km on a single charge: Mercedes says it's in it for the long run
Sunday 15th September 2019 09:42 GMT
100kWh?
Ok, I'll buy that. That's about what - 10 litres of diesel? 2.19 gallons?
700km? That's around 437.5 miles
200 miles per gallon equivalent.
OK even with a power train at 90% instead of 30% efficient that's still pushing 66mpg equivalent.
Especially lugging that much battery around
But how long wail a fast charged battery last?
50 charges?
Before it's lost half its capacity?
I really don't see it.
The NetCAT is out of the bag: Intel chipset exploited to sniff SSH passwords as they're typed over the network
Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month
Yahoo! customers! wake! up! to! borked! email! (Yes! people! still! actually! use! it!)
Pentagon makes case for Return of the JEDI: There's only one cloud biz that can do the job and it starts with an A (or rhymes with loft)
Migrating an Exchange Server to the Cloud? What could possibly go wrong?
Sleeping Tesla driver wonders why his car ploughed into 11 traffic cones on a motorway
Boffins find asteroid with the shortest solar year of any space rock in our Solar System
Tuesday 9th July 2019 09:46 GMT
Two belts?
I think if you run the rather chaotic many body maths you will find that there are only a few attractors in the solar system and orbits that lie outside of these are unstable
I would be willing to bet that this particular asteroid will only last a few thousand or even million years in its current approximate orbit, before being perturbed [again?] by a close brush with Mercury or Venus
That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well
This weekend you better read those ebooks you bought from Microsoft – because they'll be dead come early July
Large Redmond Collider: CERN reveals plan to shift from Microsoft to open-source code after tenfold license fee hike
Friday 14th June 2019 07:24 GMT
Re: I guess people are just scared of command lines.
What an extraordinary comment.
Normal users simply don't go near the command line
In a supported environment like a large company users would never go there: they phone the support department and that is who goes there, if indeed it is necessary at all.
Once again a post from someone that simply repeats myths that haven't been true for decades.
Why?
How much skin have you got in the microsoft game?
Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug
Cali Right-to-Repair law dropped, cracks screen, has to be taken to authorized repair shop
Meeeemmory ... prices tanned Samsung's behind: Profits tumble 60% as semiconductor demand in freefall
Wednesday 1st May 2019 08:46 GMT 
semiconductor business...
..is now a cash cow.
Steady sales, not much innovation. Not much development.
Certainly not in the core CPU/RAM business.
From an ordinary users perspective, memory and CPUs not much different from 10 years ago.
GPUS have come along a bit as has FLASH RAM. And other custom chips for RF and the like interfacing...
But really its all a bit boring these days.
A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears
Tuesday 16th April 2019 09:42 GMT 
I remember similar...
The new cleaner was cleaning and dusting the console keyboard on the PDP-11 development computer... In the Room We Were Not Allowed In. (We developed code on PCs, uploaded it via serial terminals and compiled it on the PDP using the PCs as consoles).
One morning, no PDP...when the sysadmin eventually came in and went to the console the cleaner had pressed some sort of break key that halted the enitire computer..
Rust never sleeps: C++-alike language tops Stack Overflow survey for fourth year in a row
In the West, we're worried about shooting down drones. In Russia, drones shoot you
Campaigners cry foul over NHS Digital plans to grant policy wonks and researchers access to patient-level data
Sunday 24th March 2019 06:13 GMT 
What???
"Using patient information for funding decisions by policymakers is just toxic, and they know that."
So how else are they supposed to make funding decisions?
In response to minority moaning?
Virtue signalling for political motives?
I WANT someone to know that there is for example an excess of deaths from cholera in a given postcode.
It is fairly vital to know that, for example, those of 'certain ethnic backgrounds' are more susceptible to Thalassemia, and others to heart problems.
Blue sky research by private institutions is all very well, but the NHS has to be seen to be spending money rationally on a cost benefit analysed basis.
If it cannot see the results of spending, if it cannot see what money needs to be spent on, how can it do that?
Medical research is plagued by fads conjectures and outright fashion. It needs hard statistical data to prove its case.
Chap joins elite support team, solves what no one else can. Is he invited back? Is he f**k
Friday 22nd March 2019 15:55 GMT 
staggeringly similar story.
did a bit of coding for a client who sold a business app on either Elonex or Apricot PCS. yep DOS days of course.
"Does anyone buy the Apricot" I said'
"Yep its ten times faster"
He proceeded to demonstrate with much whirring of floppy disks.
I was puzzled, Processors and speeds wer identical.. then I had a thought. Sho nuff the elonex had in config.sys :
FILES=2
BUFFERS=5
on the apricot they were much higher.
I edited the file rebooted and said 'now try it'
Nobody likes a smartass do they?
Boeing big cheese repeats pledge of 737 Max software updates following fatal crashes
Wednesday 20th March 2019 11:31 GMT
Re: Want to try to reprogram it so it feels and drives like an F1?
If the angle of attack was zero on the runway the aircraft would not be able to take off.
Wrong.
1. Airfoils are capable of generating lift at zero angle of attack.
2. That's what the elevators are for - to push the tail down and the nose up.
Wednesday 20th March 2019 11:28 GMT
Re: Seafire conversion of Spitfires in the 1940s
First of all spirfires were always tail heavy and always flew with down trim. In fact being on the edge of pitch stability makes for a very very sensitive set of controls. An advantage in a fighting machine which is why modern typhoons are trimmed that way, and use software to compensate
The addition of more weight to the back simply made matters worse.
Ultimately spin recovery depends on getting the nose DOWN. Opposite rudder may get rid of the turn but unless the aircraft left to itself at almost no airspeed will put its nose down then you will fall off into a spin in the other direction.
Boeing... Boeing... Gone: Canada, America finally ground 737 Max jets as they await anti-death-crash software patches
Thursday 14th March 2019 15:36 GMT
Re: Negligent certification
As I understand it, the fundamental change was more fuel efficient engines. However these if placed in the logical place would have scarped along the tarmac.
So they were moved forward and cranked up a bit.
Changing the CG and the on thrust/off thrust trim by such an extent they put some software in to correct for it.
So downtrim when the throttles are opened, giving a massive nose down if the throttles are chopped. Before the trim returns to 'glide'
This was bunged in the anti stall software I think.
Thursday 14th March 2019 15:28 GMT
Re: "How do you show who put the dodgy line of code in, and when?"
As I understand it, its not a bug, it's the whole way the thing is implemented.
They bodged the engines in at an angle, for ground clearance, and that has ruined the planes inherent stability so they are trying to correct a serious fundamental hardware fault with software.
