Posts by Zuagroasta

Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station

Asked around, and it basically came down to "the solar panels are too degraded, the struts/trusses not designed for disassembly" as the rationale for deorbiting instead of bumping up. INNSHO the trusses would still be worth it bc we'll figure out how to cut them up in about 10 years. The rest is trash, especially the living space (besides fungi, there are myriad leaks and the tech is old as the hills, and don't even get me started on the heap o' crap that is the Russian part).

NASA nominee 'committed' to uprooting Shuttle Discovery for Houston trophy piece

Any volunteers to be Robert the Bruce to Red Cornyn?

‘IT manager’ needed tech support because they had never heard of a command line

Re: I've seen that type of manager before

You're right... not typical but also not that rare - must be since I have experienced it too. This one was an example of my worst nightmare - bean counter turned IT manager (regional, even!)... she was on record saying that she didn't even know how she had ended up in IT. However, she was astoundingly humble - unlike her best friend who had started as a cable puller and had forgotten everything she had ever learned. She always asked for expert input and actually listened to explanations at meetings, and listened to instructions when she (inevitably) ucked fup her computer. The only bean counter I have ever managed to get along well with.

Viking 1 at 50: NASA's first raid on the red planet

Re: Bicentennial

Funnily enough, the contemporary accounts speak of a divided nation, still scarred by Watergate and Vietnam and of a celebration that for some was not enough and for others a total glossing over of "how evil America was" for the others. This was one year after the fall of Saigon.

Scientists spot massive black hole collision that defies current theories

The image looks like the biggest pair of nostrils I've ever seen

Eggheads hold science fair on Capitol Hill to decry funding cuts

Re: Titles matter

"Egghead" is a term of endearment in Britain. "Legislator" was an insult in the Roman republic, and it continues to be so today.

Former reality TV star appointed NASA interim administrator

For the n+1 time, "Idiocracy" was not supposed to be a documentary

Northrop Grumman shows SpaceX doesn't have a monopoly on explosions

Shuttle - the endless cycle of overpromise, underdeliver, go crazy looking for pounds to shave to lift 2 more grams, BOOM! rinse, repeat. Since 1989 it's been the same shitshow.

Stranded in space: Starliner crew to remain in orbit even longer as SpaceX faces delays

I don't think anyone who gets to be an astronaut (showing that they dreamed of it since they were little human larvae) will complain about getting mire actual time in space.

Imagine being sent on-site to Tokyo, paid, expense account on tap... and finding out your poor soul has to stay in Tokyo, with a full expense account, no questions asked, for 8 months.

Hell, I want to be stranded in space, with regular supply flights, the best window view in the Universe, and water blobs to drink.

Starliner's not-so-grand finale is a thump in the desert next week

Re: NASA wastes so much money

Spirit Airlines is already having that problem with their planes... Pratt & Whitney ucked fup its geared turbofans and literally dozens of airplanes are grounded, and the cost advantages of model uniformity have comke round to bite them in the arse. OTOH, incompatible suits, crew assignment decisions, and so on are (comparatively) First World problems... For the 1st time in history, NASA has a choice that doesn't involve Soyuz (suits for Soyuz weren't compatible with Shuttle back then either) and they can pick and choose between vehicles, which was the whole point of the exercise. If I was in charge (of NASA, imagine that!) I'd pay Elon to keep some Falcon 9s and the 2 Dragon capsules around even when Starship is in production; it's not gonna cost more than building launch towers for the Senate Launch System

Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks

There are already tons of metal hitting the upper atmosphere daily. No appreciable deleterious effect can be seen.

This green FUD bullshit on the scale of the radiation scam that killed nuclear energy. Coal ash is 100 timjes more radioactive than nuclear energy per unit of energy produced and one does NOT see any stripes of radioactive death downwind of coal plants.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

Complete and utter bullshit. These idiots are the same who said Concorde wpuld eat up the ozone layer like ice cream in this summer. It's the same stupid narative that has hamstrung the West since the hippies began fearmongering for money in the 1970s.

Nearly 20% of running Microsoft SQL Servers have passed end of support

Heh. That undercounts trhe real older versions (<2000) dramatically. All those servers in factory/production line networks off the grid still running some version of 2000 server or 2003... and of course running SQL DBs set up by our grandfathers. Finance is NEVER going to fork over the cost of recertification and upgrade unless the 25-year-old hardware with a Compaq logo still on it burns up, and even then, they will try to tell us to revive it instead of jumping regulatory or customer hoops. Fsck beancounters.

NASA's Artemis Moon missions take a rain check until 2025 and beyond

It must be remembered that in Nov 1968 no hardware had reached lunar orbit and that Apolllo 8 had to carry a lot of water to orbit bc the LM wasn't ready yet. There's enough time to keep Artemis 3 in the calendar as is.

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

Re: Duping Stalin

Except... in 1947 Uncle Joe wasn't going anywhere. He had enough data from Klaus Fuchs and from the constant (and voluntary) dumping of all sorts of nuclear-related info the USA was just filling the USSR with to keep him busy... plus all the other Western & German data the KGB and the prisoner OKBs were busy digesting. Read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16889.Dark_Sun

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC vs managers

My buddies at the old pharma firm used to write my name in BIG BOLD letters with marker on any box/machine they wanted to keep - after the idiot manager got herself in trouble having to buy the expensive kit she had publicly forced me to throw away (with the attendant shouting match, threat of firing, dressing down from the global IT ppl and intolerable smug face from me)

No box with my name was thrown away, EVER. Fear of the crazy old man kept them reusing those boxes for 3 years after I was gone, until management realized that there were 5 guys with the same name, but the one that kept a server mounting rail beside his desk, labeled “UART Enterprise Edition”, was indeed out, and used an office move as an excuse to throw the stuff out; it found its merry way to my IKEA plastic tubs and those of my buddies, of course.

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Unmoderated forums (aka social media) are the biggest mistake of the 21st century. If Musk kills one of the cesspools of idiocy that all these unmoderated forums have turned into, more power to him, even though his way of doing it is a bit self-destructive. We have witnessed the fact that the old dictum “people are dumb because they lack education/information” is totally invalid, and that the screaming idiots will drown out any other participants if they are not excluded by a moderator or moderators. Enough is enough. States already fund or mandate platforms for idiots through public-access cable TV and various printed media… that luckily have higher barriers to entry than Yuckerberg’s and Dorsey’s benighted creations.

Linus Torvalds suggests the 80486 architecture belongs in a museum, not the Linux kernel

Re: DX2

I had a DX2 to play X-Wing (and do a few other things like write a thesis and other cruft)... I mjst have burned out that poor CPU killing Imperials. Good times

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

The German green party's first principles are that industrialization itself is the Original Sin of modern society, and that the Industrial Revolution should be rolled back entirely. They are also the original anti-vaccine movement, and the German equivalent of NAMBLA.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

We can't even get businesses to upgrade to W10 in time because they whine and moan about their legacy applications that were coded back when 640K was all the RAM one would need, and that were coded w/o any regard to security. Munich City authorities tried to change everything over to their own Linux distro, only to find out all their bespoke apps ran only on Internet Explorer (this was 2010-2013). They went back to M$ cap in hand to be promptly raped up the arse... as long as the bean counters continue taking the decisions [and we must remember that in the last decade most IT depts ended up under Finance in the reorganizations], the Linux desktop ain't got a chance; the cost of reworking the application environment, training support and retraining the users, and the increased support workload that comes with Linux, is simply too much for their little brains which can't get the concept of TCO inside.

This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15

Being a pr0n critic for pay

2nd Level for a big, big company, big, big Americas region. ‘Twas the time when storage was pricey, so the company paid us to look for all image/video files and anything over the magic 100MB; we used to joke that we were the only guys in the whole company who were paid to download MP3 collections and see pr0n at work… until it was no longer a joke. 2 cases of CP in MEX and 2 in BRA, some cloak&dagger stuff coordinating with the police in both countries and an arrest with drawn guns and lots of flashing lights down in Brazil. From that moment on, we reported all funny image/video/internet cache findings to regional security instead of IT, by order of global sec. I’m still proud of having sent those arseholes to 3rd world prisons where pedophiles get a very short, very painful stay.

Accenture announces 'Accenture Song' – not a tune, but a rebrand

The only song I will hear gladly which is connected to AssVenture in any way is a funeral dirge for that heap o'crap

NASA puts an Astrobee to work sweeping the ISS. Yep, floating cube good at taking pics and hanging around....

Abrahamic religions and robots

Why are Christians so afraid of robots?

No other culture insists on the inevitable and exclusive evil of mechanical thinking machines; the Jews have their ambivalent Golem, Asians love them and Muslims seem to have no problem.

Autonomous robots that can be injected? Not as far off as it sounds, say boffins, thanks to new ion-powered silicon legs

Re: Just wondering

Exactly. It's hard enough to restrain the conspiridiots as it is...

Russia drags NASA: Enjoy your expensive SpaceX capsule, our Soyuz is the cheap Kalashnikov of rockets

Oh, please, shut up. I would like to see what the actual consequences of setting up an "autonomous zone" in a Russian city would be.

Barbie Girl was wrong? Life is plastic, it's not fantastic: We each ingest '121,000 pieces' of microplastics a year

Are there any health effects related to microplastics... at all? Or is this only another way for the media to sell and get revenue through panic?

Forget that rare-earth element crunch – we can now just extract them from industrial waste

This means Nauru gets a second chance?

How much PG was left there after the island was mined out? That copuld help them get back to some decent income level after the phosphate ran out. I miss the guys racing their motorbikes against airliners taking off..

Did you know?! Ghidra, the NSA's open-sourced decompiler toolkit, is ancient Norse for 'No backdoors, we swear!'

Am I really the first?

Hail Ghidra!

Holy crappuccino. There's a latte trouble brewing... Bio-boffins reckon 60%+ of coffee species may be doomed

Panic sells

And I'm gonna see my doc this week about reaching 2020, forget about 2080... carry on, I kinda like long, hot summers.

Unbreakable smart lock devastated to discover screwdrivers exist

Re: Yeah - but if I am a "common criminal" I'll definitely find another non-indiegogo to pawn

Well, finally! Someone who realized why animals are no longer used on the battlefield - they are fragile

Apple's launch confirms one thing: It's determined to kill off the laptop for iPads

Re: Would they allow it if...

The much more Nietzschean Oberwang https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberwang also comes to mind...

Franken-firm DXC Technology is born today, the fun begins...

oh d0g

I wonder when they will start to outsource the outosurced... hope Kuala Lumpur is retained a few more years, good friends there. Mexico City too...

50 years on, the Soviet-era Soyuz rocket is still our favorite space truck

And who do you think built Korolev's toys? He was himself a guest in Club Joe before being hauled out to build airplanes

Mid-flight jumbo font smartphone text shock sparks kid abuse arrests

Re: Slip of the wrist

Lack of imagination. Ask the helpful cabin crew for a leftover bottle or can, create your own very sharp implement with said can, a bit of elbow grease and some time, and "trip" hand first into the perp's nads. Nothing to see here officer, purely reflex arm extension to break my fall.

Curiosity Rover digs into humanity's first alien sand dune

Re: Well, this rover will not last

Bi-lal kaifa!

Brit 'naut Tim Peake tucks into space bacon sarnie

Re: Probably Post Orbital Bevvy Neckfiller - Urban Legend

There's an urban legend that says crew chiefs in the VVS drank up all the ethanol meant for the planes' water-ethanol injection systems (takeoff thrust helper) and that this little habit caused major logistical headaches in winter because mission readiness went to hell...

And the reasons for buying new IT gear are as follows ...

5-year cycles

HA... HAHAHAHAHAAHHHBWAAAAH!

Right now at my VBE (Very Big Enterprise) I can look at my 11-year-old out-of-warranty core switch, my 9-year-old almost out of warranty backup core switch, and tens of switches from a company that no longer exists... this in the HQ for one of the VBE's multibillion-piastre core markets.

Cycles? Beancounters have invaded the cockpit, and they say "run 'em until they burn up"

Global warming stopped in 1998? No it didn't. If you say that, you're going to prison

Friend of fatherless!

Fountain of happiness!

Lord of the swill-bucket!

Oh, how my soul is on

Fire when I gaze at thy

Calm and commanding eye,

Like the sun in the sky,

Comrade Napoleon!

Scratch the green paint a bit and out comes the Stalinist, champing at the bit to rule over your life according to his holier-than-thou utopia and ready with the re-education whip and drugs if you as much as whimper. These guys haven't changed one bit since the days when they were funded by the Stasi.

Pale backside of lovely Luna flits past in imagery from 1 million miles out

Albedo

Indeed, and considering the side shown in the image is actuallz the brighter one - less basalt - it's really surprising how grey the old Moon really is.

Makes me wonder how things would have gone if we had something like ol' Enchiladas for a satellite, throwing shadows at night and all that.

AIDS? Ebola? Nah – ELECTRO SMOG is our 'biggest problem', says Noel Edmonds

Long to reign over us... pretty please?

Ladies and germs, the Queen! *gulpgulpgulp*

HP insists 'we don't have a global dress code' – while deleting one from its website

HP is schizo in so many ways... good memories. I used to catch some guff from my HP local DM while being an in-plant for a certain Nordic company that didn't have ANY dress code (Viva Suomi! Haakka päälle!!!) so we had a lot of fun needling her about being the only squares in a young, boisterous environment (my HP US managers didn't seem to mind, given that they were all engineers, hands-on nerds and went to work in 40-degree Texas heat in the summer)

That meant totally contradictory "dress codes" depending on which country you had an answer from... we ended up wearing whatever we wanted, and since the work implied everything from setting up routers and switches to actually moving and racking these routers & switches across Mexico City, I ended up wearing army surplus every day and once won a Halloween party contest in my unaltered work getup!

Professionalism? Like I told a HR interviewer once "The moment you find a tie that gives you a Cisco cert just by wearing it, call me! I want to buy some..."; habit and cowl does not a monk make, and if you want to look formal in an IT department, the old standby from the mainframe days is always available, highly practical, much more resistant than suits and ties, and impressive as hell: white lab smocks, preferably with company logo sewn on.

Creationist: The Flintstones was an accurate portrayal of Dino-human coexistence

Re: God give me strength

Any pointers or more detailed info on where I can find the Catholics' original stand on marriage? I need a few more ideas to prove to certain bigots in my life that their insistence on marriage (and their nosing around in my life) is based on total ignorance of their professed religion.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Cuy Chactado – Deep-fried guinea pig

Oh sí! Inca nosh is tops

I can totally vouch for this one - cuy is great meat, better tasting and more tender than chicken, almost as good as tepescuintle (aka paca, the next size up in the South American edible rodent line, from cuy all the way to capybara). Peruvian is one of the great cuisines of the world, and they do wonderful things to pork and fish too... but a good cuy or 2 before a night on the town are a definite must in Lima (or Arequipa, where the helpful lady in the video comes from).

Feds to auction off second tranche of Silk Road Bitcoins worth $19 MEEELLION

T-shirt wisdom

Don't steal, the government hates competition, or so it went...

Why has the web gone to hell? Market chaos and HUMAN NATURE

Re: How very "Guardian"

Indeed... the Graun complaining about how the hoi polloi won't follow its "enlightened" path... holier-than-thou leftist hogwash at its purest.

Funny how the defenders of the people always seem to complain so much about what the people do... perhaps they don't love them as much as they profess to do? *snicker snicker*

SpaceX 'Dragon V2' rocket podule can hover-land on Earth - or MARS

Re: SPACE!!!

Jeb Bush, don't think so. Karl Rove is dead.

Jeb Kerman, on the other hand, would make a perfect partner in Government for Elon Musk...

SPB's mountaintop HQ menaced by wolves

Re: An idea..

Animal cruelty. While wolves eat carrion from time to time, their digestive and immune systems are not adapted to that level of decay. Lammergyeren or king vultures would be required to cleanse said locales.

Globe grabbin,’ sphere slammin’, orb-tossin’, pill poppin’... Speedball

"Let the games begin" demon football

Was this the one that had a demon in the intro that said "let the games begin" in a Hell's-gonna-take-you voice? I only played Amiga games at a friend's house once or twice in the early 90s

Adorable, much-loved SEAHORSES are VICIOUS SLURPING KILLERS

Very interesting... As I recall, the US Navy was very keen on finding a way to eliminate wakes from its ships some years ago...

Meet the 'KARDASHIAN Phone' – what Apple bods nicknamed the iPhone 5s

Arsing

Well, since I do confess to Mix-A-Lot-like bottom preferences, that photo has pleased me quite a lot. And as a part of the demographic who prefers the Oola/Slave Leia/trashy alien woman (aka Star Wars) phenotype, I approve of El Reg's including such examples of badonkadonk in its image bank, even if the excuse for it is that sorry thing the fruit factory dares to call a phone.