Posts by imanidiot

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

Re: Just give it to Poettering...

Don't even joke of such atrocities.

Linux Mint 20 isn't exactly bursting with freshness but, hey, there's kernel 5.4 and it's a long-term support release

Re: Linux flavours

Since when has anyone deemed "cool" EVER used a Linux/Unix variant of any sort?

Hey, Boeing. Don't celebrate your first post-grounding 737 Max test flight too hard. You just lost another big contract

Re: Learn from the smaller world...

MAX wasn't unstable by design. It's fully stable even at high AoA at full throttle. It's just that the elevator feedback forces were way too low.

If Boeing had chosen to go with a stickforce feedback actuator it would have been fine.

Re: Learn from the smaller world...

There is mechanically nothing wrong with the Max. It's perfectly flyable and well stable enough even without MCAS. It's just that the elevator forces decrease too much when in high AoA at full throttle to be the same as the 737NG series. If Boeing had chosen to go with a new type rating certificate and simulator training they wouldn't have even needed MCAS. Its only because they wanted a universal 737NG and Max type rating that would allow operators to put their pilots on either aircraft and thus have easier fleet and crew planning.

Two out of three parachutes... is just as planned for Boeing's Starliner this time around

Re: Have they demonstrated all parachutes yet?

They have done a 3 out parachute test too. (https://youtu.be/WWFgfUyqIxU) Their 3-out chute test looked better than the SpaceX parachutes too, less squidding and mutual interference.

Re: Technically

IIRC SpaceX safes (and now permanently disables) the fuel pressurization system of the super dracos once it's in orbit, meaning that it can't do propulsive landings anymore. It definitely can't do a propulsive landing after an abort (because it'll have used most of the available fuel for the abort), which is another reason they went with chutes.

Finally, a wafer-thin server... Only a tiny little thin one. Oh all right. Just the one...

Had a sort of experience like that recently. Loud bang, acrid smoke. In my case it was the wax-paper decoupling cap of an old sewing machine speed regulator pedal going off like a handgrenade. I was glad the thing was contained in a metal housing when it exploded. I could feel it explode under my foot through the metal.

Sorry to drone on and on but have you heard of Ingenuity? NASA's camera-copter is ready to head off to Mars

Re: Hard to test this

They tested it in the very large vacuum chamber at NASA Glenn Research Center to simulate the atmospheric conditions. They used a rope and pulley system to simulate the gravity difference. While this has some impact on the control behaviour of the craft, that difference is easy to predict and compensate

Re: Why

too much very important stuff up there that could get damaged if the takeoff somehow went bad for any reason.

Fasten your seat belts: Brave Reg hack spends a week eating airline food grounded by coronavirus crash

Re: If only...

Those don't really spoil, so likely they can just flog em to other airlines. Looks like these meals were approaching their best-before date and had to be either sold or thrown away. I can understand (and applaud) the decision they made to just flog em off cheap and recoup their money.

You'd think lockdown would be heaven for us layabouts – but half the UK has actually started 'exercising more'

Not wasting time commuting while working from home, the option to run around to the shops in a lunch break instead of only after work, not wasting time with sometimes utterly pointless social obligations, etc, leaves plenty of extra time in a day to actually do this exercise in. I also wouldn't be surprised to see that the extra exercise people get is running up and down the stairs 3 times per day and pales in comparison to what they actually do when working.

Segway to Heaven: Mega-hyped wonder-scooter that was going to remake city transport to cease production

Re: In the UK

I am of the opinion that e-scooters should only be made if they are legally obligated to have a sound system that blares "look at me, I'm a tosser" repeatedly at decent volume, so that I can hear the tossers coming, get out of the way and depending on how I feel point and laugh.

Getting repeatedly run over by the number 9 bus is too good for anyone riding one of those things...

Re: In the UK

Because it should never have NOT gotten a pass in the past? As far as substance abuse goes, marijuana is about as mild and non-dangerous as they come. You really need to go all out on smoking weed to suffer any lasting side effects any worse than smoking and it's unlikely to ever do anything close to the harm even moderate alcohol abuse can cause. The danger in pot use lies mostly in (excessively) combining it with other psycho-active drugs (including alcohol), that can cause far more dangerous problems. Drunks can be troublesome to deal with, those high on pot are usually almost completely harmless. Those high on weed AND smashed on alcohol can be really troublesome.

Dealing with someone suffering from underlying mental health issues, high as a kite AND smashed to the point of slurring his words... Well, let's just say it was a night I'm unlikely to forget in a hurry and police were involved. (note: this person had known underlying health issues and was known to get problematic on just alcohol alone. The only other case of psychotic break I've seen from drugs involved a lot of more dangerous substances like salvia. That person was only ever barely a danger to himself)

When you bork... through a storm: Liverpool do all they can to take advantage of summer transfer, er, Windows

Re: Sounds like a night out in this hack's often less than fair city of Brighton

No we shouldn't. Being polite and pretending not to notice is exactly the whole problem nowadays.

Machine-learning models trained on pre-COVID data are now completely out of whack, says Gartner

Re: AI?

Given that "AI" is just a buzzword given to Machine Learning algo's and pattern matching systems, yes, they're just matching patterns. There ARE no proper AIs. They're all still dumb as bricks most of the time.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

Ahh, the good old days when sometimes you picked up the phone and you went deaf from an ear piercing screech as a fax tried obliviously to send you data. Lovely. (Ohh god, I'm getting old. I doubt kids these days would even know what a fax IS, let alone what one sounds like...)

--> I need a few of those, maybe. Now get of my lawn -->

Re: I called the cops

Pretty sure NL is 031/+31

From unmovable boot screens to dead certs, neither are what you want to see in a hospital

"Ignore it. It always does that"

The words "Normalisation of deviation" come to mind. -> Sadly, more than once ->

Whose side you on, Nominet? Registry floods .co.uk owners with begging emails to renew unwanted .uk domains

Who's side is Nominet on?

Whatever side is going to allow it to pay out the biggest bonuses ofcourse. That much should be obvious by now

SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon cleared to hoist real live American astronauts into space

Well, we hope, anyway. Unless they come to take it.

Sound like you are describing the personal rescue enclosure http://www.astronautix.com/r/rescueball.html

Not exactly a high point in space-suit design ;)

Runaway Latvian drone found meditating in tree after shutting down nation's skies

Re: fully fuelled before its test flight and had a potential endurance of three days

yes, fixed wing UAVs can stay up for multiple days.

Like the whole Gatwick debacle wasn't enough proof of that already?

Beardy Branson’s 747-assisted sat-launcher can’t get it up

Re: To be fair

I blame a lack of thrusting

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Re: Also Microsoft

The Dems might have had a chance if they had put a believable candidate against Trump. The walking senile corpse Biden isn't going to beat Trump because many voters will choose to go with the evil they know.

Latvian drone wrests control from human overlords and shuts down entire nation's skies

I doubt the Latvians will have anything in their sensor package so advanced the Russians (or the 'mercans) would be even remotely surprised about or interested in it.

UK COVID-19 contact-tracing app data may be kept for 'research' after crisis ends, MPs told

Re: Well that's great confidence from GCHQ

They gave the keys to that nice bloke Tony at the country club and asked him to be "discrete" about it?

Square peg of modem won't fit into round hole of PC? I saw to it, bloke tells horrified mate

ain't no problem in the world that can't be solved with hot-snot

You can get a mechanical keyboard for £45. But should you? We pulled an Aukey KM-G6 out of the bargain bin

Gamers might choose something different if they are full time gamers. Most however use their PC also for other pursuits and might therefore need something suitable for normal applications too.

Sometimes one can go a little too far in search of isolation

A pump inspection involves just making sure that the volume it displays and the total monetary value displayed match the amount of fuel dispensed, and that the internals are leak free. Opening the counter mechanism to remove bugs might not even be possible. They're often built more or less sealed and tamper-proof. Likely the inspector doesn't even have the know how and the tools to do so.

ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks

Re: That's not a comet...

ah, hard liquor it is then. Bring it on ya' scallywags!

There are always two sides to every story – except this one, which is just a big billboard borked in all directions

"an outlet specialising in "true artisan bread" "

Well they're not likely to advertise with the likely more truthful "overpriced mass produced tasteless crap, but you're stuck at an airport, so what are you going to do about it you schmuck" are they?

Self-isolation champions fresh home from a jaunt in orbit wonder if they've returned to the wrong version of Earth

Let's see if I remember this time

I love watching these launches live, but I completely forgot about it with the last 2 launches... --> Hopefully only from the right end.

20 years deep into a '2-year' mission: How ESA keeps Cluster flying

Impressive

Very interesting read and impressive work. It'll be bitter sweet when those satellites finally re-enter and return to this ball of dirt spinning through the endless void.

How to make a stranger's insecure 3D printer halt-and-catch-fire – plus more alerts from infosec world

Re: Yes and no

It's more like trying random phone numbers and annoying whoever picks up. Not exactly nice to do, but mostly just a nuisance.

So how do the coronavirus smartphone tracking apps actually work and should you download one to help?

Re: First, understand the problem you're trying to solve...

The knob should definitely be as far away from government surveillance as possible, and likelily that will even mean lower long term cost too. As to death rate, nobody knows what the effect of certain measures is. It's too late to get the virus under control the way Taiwan and South Korea did through these means, so I'm unsure what the Western governments want to achieve by introducing them. Likely it won't even make a difference in the transfer/new case rate, since it has way too much of a delay between when people have contact and when they get alerted.

China and Taiwan aren't great friends. Zoom sends chats through China. So Taiwan has banned Zoom

Re: People don't learn...

This CoViD-19 crisis is slowly opening some eyes. I think things might turn around. I've certainly decided to try and avoid "made in China" as much as possible. This is however not so easy, as even things that are not marked as made in China often still contain many, many parts that originate there.

BOFH: Will the last one out switch off the printer?

Why suffer

Why would the BOFH not live like a king on the companies dime, instead of suffering like the rest of us schmucks in his "tiny" apartment?

mayfair and park lane are not actually all that great, they rarely get landed on. I don't get why people fixate on them so much

Stob's vital message to Britain's IT nation: And no, it's not about that

Re: Inspirational message

https://inspirobot.me/

--> Tongue very much in cheek

And "G" as in "Fish"

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

Re: I actually believed it for a moment ...

Not really true, most of the drawings for the rocket itself still exist. But they're useless without the production machinery of the day (and the skilled labour to operate them).

The main engines were actually not a NASA product but designed and built by Rocketdyne, which is why NASA has very little information on them. (There's still a lot available from whatever is left of Rocketdyne as far as I understand).

Same goes for many other modules, where NASA never had the drawings to begin with.

Also important to remember is that there was no "The" saturn 5. Almost every rocket was different from the last as they kept coming up with design improvements.

Re: Sensible idea

With all the will in the world, we couldn't build a new Saturn 5 nowadays. The skills and machinery needed just doesn't exist anymore. Redesigning it for use with more modern materials, production methods and construction techniques would be more work than getting SLS to work.

The problem with SLS isn't that it's a terrible design (though it is), it's Boeing.

Theranos vampire lives on: Owner of failed blood-testing biz's patents sues maker of actual COVID-19-testing kit

Re: Bad arguments

The original "true" patents required submission of a "patent model". Something you wanted to patent had to be specific enough that you could make a model of it to demonstrate it's function. It's true that it didn't have to work as such, but it DID prevent a boatload of the vagaries and trolling that happens with the current system.

Want to own a bit of Concorde? Got £750k burning a hole in your pocket? We have just the thing

Re: I have this mental image

As opposed to all but announcing you threw them out the window as the entire company sees and hears him fall to his doom? Stealthy and quiet is not always the BOFHs MO.

Makes me wonder

How did the seller come into possession of the thing, and how much did THEY purchase it for? Seems like a museum piece, not something to be broken for being made into utter tat (because that's what all that "office memoribilia" and "furniture" is). The mere thought makes me want to scream.

You've duked it out with OS/2 – but how to deal with these troublesome users? Nukem

If it's operating on DOS (or any Windows prior to 95 or NT 3.5) that filename isn't going to help you. At all.

8.3 Filename system

The relevant bit: 8.3 filenames are limited to at most eight characters (after any directory specifier), followed optionally by a filename extension consisting of a period . and at most three further characters.

I'm sure many a person here has groaned at the problems caused by too long filenames in DOS and early Windows. (I have and as a 30-something spring chicken I've barely used those)

No joy for all you Rover McRoverface fans: NASA's next Mars bot is christened Perseverance

Re: Perseverence Devs Engineer AI To Perfection

Laden or unladen?

Sadly, the web has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'nothing is true; everything is permitted'

Re: Penny for a cup of tea, guv?

Be very careful with that, because the point of asking for a small amount of change is often not really for the money itself, but for their buddies to see where you keep your wallet, so they can pickpocket you right after.

Other favourites include "beware of pickpockets" signs (because people reflexively check their wallet), "accidentally" spilling something on you and trying to helpfully wipe it off, tying "friendship bracelets" (often with the double scam of threateningly demanding ridiculous sums for it), some inane "street magic" act or 3 cup scam. More options available, but basically anything that gets people distracted.

Edinburgh-based rocket botherer seeks UK or overseas launch location for fun times, maybe more

Re: Ascension

It's worked perfectly well in the past (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch)

A partially submerged "oilrig" style ship is stable enough in weather permitting a rocket launch to not affect a launch in any way. The rocket will have stabilized it's trajectory probably before clearing the launch tower.