Boffinish
Apparently calling an antenna a receiver is part of the new order.
861 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Aug 2012
Many years ago one of our teachers, he of the two tin legs, described the spaced microphone system. He said the hot wire sensors were mounted on Helmholtz resonators, whether made of kilner jars or not, he didn't say. He also said that the time of arrival to distance plotting was done with horse tail hairs. It is really good to have this more complete information after 60 years.
One: - the USA elected Trump. That was an utter mess-up.
Two: - the USA didn't elect Trump for a second term. Not a mess-up.
Three: - Biden defeated Trump. Not a mess-up, a pretty spectacular achievement in fact, given the state of American irrationality.
Dear USA, congrats on your new President elect and try to stay sane in future.
It doesn't surprise me that there is a lot of handy freeware floating around China to help Chinese industry get nice cheap stuff out there bringing in the foreign currency. And it doesn't surprise me when it is found to contain dodgy but potentially 'useful' code.
Whilst it is nice to hear that Zuckerberg is being sued by a bunch of looneys I am more interested in the 5G/corona virus conspiracy theory. It really is a flight of fancy of quite extravagant inanity. Well done loonys, you've just jumped the shark, and an anti-censorship court case thrown in for free.
Dave 126, you say "Focusing on developers in important, but ultimately developers don't exist in a vacuum - their efforts can only be judged in the context of bringing benefit to users or aiding worthwhile tasks...". Are you saying that creative engineers are worthless unless they support a business enterprise? If not what are you saying? Genuine question etc.
"But if you were regularly importing CSV into a spreadsheet, wouldn't you write a macro that set the column types first, then imported it ?"
No, I would continue to expect the spreadsheet to treat my data as data and not pre-mangle it into corrupted data. If some of the data required cell formatting I would do that, as and when I wanted.
Bloody stupid marketing departments !!!!!!!!!
You can magnetise a lump of iron by banging it with a hammer. It needs to be in a magnetic field when you hit it of course. Could the same sort of process occur in a chunk of a planetesimal body? This would require a halfway decent magnetic field somewhere out there but the hammer could be replaced by a lot of the stuff already whizzing around space.
All that effort is just a further education programme for a country's engineers. Whichever big organisation buys some shiny new gear also budgets for some good engineering analysis of said shiny product and publication of the information obtained.
If you were running a developing country with big ambitions you would likely have introduced a similar system. And after all, you bought the shiny products so you can do what you like with them,
"Ah, Racal," I thought, reading your comment, "whatever happened to Racal?"
The Wiki article starts, like so many other Wiki articles about once proud British companies, "Racal was".
I don't know why so many of our companies get driven into the ground. Don't blame Thales - ask why Racal was put up for sale.
I have much respect for the people of google, not much for their overall policies now that they are allowed to be evil and none at all for their approach to advertising.
Every time I get totally inappropriate 'targeted' adverts I cringe. Is this the best that a large number of the finest minds in the business can do for an algorithm. It clearly is not doing a good job of reaching out to potential customers, as opposed to 'targeted' customers.
Oh, I had a thought, Googles advertising methods are clearly working for google, perhaps that is the only thing they were supposed to do.
True that Huawei didn't have much choice in the matter but that's not the point. The point is that Huawei has played the hand it was dealt competently and with no lasting damage. Now what happens?
Anyone want to help Trump build a trade wall round China? It could all get a bit tedious. The long game is in China's interest not ours.
Excuse my French but, from the French report ," Cette rupture a eu lieu en raison d’un serrage incomplet de la vis de retenue de la ligne dans le corps du sélecteur." In other words an incompletely screwed up retaining screw allowed a cable to be forced out of the front seat ejection sequencer by the blast from the rear seat pyrotechnics going bang. This meant that the front seat didn't go bang.
The front seat belt-tightening and canopy-smashing pyrotechnics did work because initiated by a different cable from sequencer.
Someone didn't fully tighten a retaining screw - fortunately.
Nah, connector disconnect due to badly screwed up securing sleeve. If you ask me it's the base commanding officer that needs to be disciplined, the accident report is a masterpiece of comedy except that the matter is serious.
It beats me how the plane, pilot and passenger survived such a series of errors. Mind you, in a way, it is a good advert for the plane manufacturer (and not a good advert for the French Armée de l’air).
Fuck testing - the one true problem is that the human race has no immunity to this new (for humans) virus (excluding probably those who have caught but survived covid-19).
If you have a strong immune system you will beat the virus, if you have a weaker immune system you will get very ill before beating (or not) the virus. It is the sheer number of people with weaker immune systems (or no luck) that frightens most governments - no one runs a health care system sized for the worst worst-case scenario. Hence all the emphasis on flattening the peak infection rate, not reducing the overall infection numbers.
The overall infection numbers are "close to everyone". The question for politicians is "how many dead before I'm toast".
"we see better results from targeted ads than untargeted"
Funnily enough I am reasonably up to date on most things I might want / need to buy, I really don't need some geek's idea of a targeting algorithm to clutter up my reading or viewing etc.
For some reason Google seems to want to restrict my own product searches / comparisons and replace it with theirs I wonder why.
Many years ago a company I worked at drifted into a 'constant improvement' mindset. Products were changed to suit new contracts, newly available or cheaper components, response to competitors etc etc.
Manufacturing gamely tried to keep up with the changes but but many 'insufficiently documented' variants were manufactured and delivered. This seemed acceptable at first but customer complaints mounted and mounted. They never really recovered customer confidence.
Everyone knows the American way of doing things. But this latest bit of drivel from the US only serves to weaken their chances of getting an extradition. I suspect that they don't really want to get him into their legal system because it is so tediously nit-picking about things, and the good ol' boys can't deal with nit-picking.
I have been going back and forth across the Calais Dover link since the days of onboard passport checking and have come to believe that pretty up to date tech is already in use for screening and has been for some time. If you have triggered the system they (the UK authorities in the UK and, when they feel like it, the French authorities in France) will ask you to stop, get out and open the car boot. I guess that is for a very low level trigger but I guess also that is sufficient. If the authorities think this is necessary then a real smuggling suspicion must trigger a much bigger response.
Where is any sign of tech which could eliminate the need for live checks of vehicle and driver - it doesn't exist!
If the physical checks are for border control reasons it doesn't matter where they are done - they are physical border control checks.
Not amateurs but a research team led by Ko Arimatsu at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. But still, as you say, outstanding work and bloody brilliance to work out that "big science" can sometimes be extrapolated down to "petty cash account science" and still come up with big results.