Posts by Patched Out 260 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Oct 2013
What are you on about?
Looking up the meaning of FOCF, I get "Free Operating Cash Flow" which is a business term and can't "win" per se. The other definition is "Friends Of the Capital Forest", a mountain biking organization out of Olympia, Washington.
So you are afraid of a mountain biking organization winning the election?
I'm going to start selling AI retrofit kits on Amazon. Each kit consists of a purple LED pre-wired with a plug for the motherboard, an appropriately sized drill bit, and a little sticker to apply on the case next to the LED that says "AI Engaged". Oh, and a tiny installation instruction sheet with useless diagrams and instructions translated to Chinese using Google Translate, then translated back to English.
I hate to put this idea out there, since someone from Microsoft might actually read this and think it is a good idea:
If Microsoft wants to improve take up of Windows 11, all they have to do is force AI onto Windows 10 hold outs. ... but only if it is made so that Windows 11 becomes the lesser of the two evils.
Not a professional amplifier, but about 20 years ago, a colleague knew I was handy with audio equipment and asked me to look at a 20+ year old Pioneer stereo receiver that had developed a hum when the phonograph input was selected. I took a look and found that, in order to route the audio from the phono preamp to the main portion of the amp, the designers chose to run shielded audio cable across the board instead of running it through the PCB traces (probably to help reduce noise and hum pickup from other circuits).
I found on one end where the signal lead of one of the two channels was supposed to be soldered to a PCB pad, that the wire itself just had a solder ball and only mechanically (and electrically) contacted the plated through hole that formed the pad. The pad appeared to have solder mask over it as well. Some how it worked for all those years but didn't survive a recent move. Scraping off the solder mask and resoldering the wire to the pad made it as good as (actually, better than) new.
The inverse square law applies, but the power required for a unidirectional radiator with a small beam width is significantly less than what would be needed for an omni-directional radiator. My guess is this would be a point and shoot type weapon with a vary narrow beam width, therefore quite viable - especially if it is powered from a backpack-style, unlicensed particle accelerator.
I concur. I use IMAP on all my household devices except for one PC where I use POP3 to get local copies of all email. I have it set to not delete emails that are pulled down, but do delete emails off the server if I move emails to Trash on the POP3 client. This way I can manage my email without having to access my ISP's terrible web-based email interface.
I'll be looking at transitioning to Thunderbird for my home PC.
And this was all because IBM, in its infinite wisdom, chose to use memory-mapped I/O which took up the 64K just above the 640K base memory. The 8088 processor had a Memory/IO pin that they chose not to use. This could have been used as an extra address pin to remap I/O to another area.
For a while in the 90's, I owned a Victor 9000 (Sirius 1). The Victor 9000 was in every way superior to the IBM PC (except that it was not IBM PC compatible, having come out just before the PC, which led to its demise) and did not have this memory restriction. It had 896K of contiguous memory space for DOS and applications.
Mechanical pencils are banned in our electronics lab as part of our FOD (Foreign Object Damage) prevention program. As others have noted, the thin graphite can break off and fall into the equipment where it can cause short circuits.
I certainly wouldn't want conductive bits of graphite floating around in my space capsule or space station!
That's easy. Order some food to be delivered via robot (ideally using a stolen ID/credit card). Presumably the person ordering the food has the ability to open the robot's cargo container using same credit card. Remove food item and replace with nefarious item. Done.
That said, hopefully the developers thought to include safe guards against that sort of thing...
Since Mach is the ratio of speed relative to the speed of sound, every craft not within a planet's atmosphere is traveling at Mach v/0 which is mathematically undefined since sound doesn't travel in a vacuum.
Also to be completely pedantic, Mach 1.0 is not a constant. It varies with air density (atmospheric pressure and altitude) and humidity. (I.e., Mach 1 at 60,000 feet ASL is not the same speed as Mach 1 at sea level; and Mach 1 on Earth is not the same speed as Mach 1 on Mars).
You are absolutely correct. Not only would the connectors be seeing less per-pin current, the wires would have much lower I^2*R losses (which is the reason the wires heat up). Note that the current parameter is squared so any increase in current has a power of 2 factor on the losses (i.e., heat). Internally, the video card primarily uses 3.3V logic with probably 1.2V processing core voltage, so they have to have Point-of-Load regulators anyway. The DC/DC Converters used as the POL regulators can most likely handle a higher input voltage without modification.
The only problem is that customers then have no choice but to purchase a new power supply that would supply the higher voltage and I'm sure the marketing people didn't like that idea.
You should have bought a Pentax DSLR then. One mode dial, two or more function dials (depending on model). Lots of dedicated buttons (that are re-assignable if you really want to) plus the dreaded 6 way switch if you really want to get into the advanced stuff.
Pentax is well known for its ergonomic designs.
We were all issued "smart" power strips for our monitors. They have a motion detector unit that sit on the desk and automatically turn off the monitors after a time when no motion is detected. The problem is that they suck more vampire power than the monitors themselves if just left in standby ...
Way back when, I was in a camera club which hosted a guest photographer who was also a film tester for Kodak. He did not mention this story, but did say you would get better results shooting TRI-X at 200 ASA* and pull processing it** rather than shooting at the rated 400 ASA.
* ASA was the defacto standard for rating film speeds, later to become an ISO standard
** For non-photographers - Pull processing is shooting a film at a lower (slower) ASA/ISO setting than the film is rated for, then developing the film for a longer time to compensate. Push processing is the opposite - Shooting the film at a higher ASA/ISO than rated, then developing for a shorter time. Films used to come with detailed datasheets including developing time/temperature charts for this purpose.
I still purchase music on CDs and movies on DVD or Blu-ray. People think I'm a luddite, but I rip them to a harddrive and have the disks for backup. I don't trust that even Amazon wouldn't turn around and disappear a movie I paid for on their streaming service.
And I own no products that require constant connection to somebody else's server or cloud service in order to operate ... except my cellphone ... and I suppose my Windows based computers, though there are ways around the computer issue ...
I too had to create a massive VBA macro to convert data in Excel format so it could be imported (also in Excel format) into another tool. The macro was working great until I added a couple lines of additional code and then suddenly it didn't. It turns out there is an overall character limit for a Module. I had to break up the code into functions so that they could be placed in different Modules just to get around the character limit.
... is that the NHTSA has nixed the idea of user selectable sounds, but apparently, at least for now, have not retricted the manufacturers on what sound(s) they can use. So if BMW or Cadillac did decide to use some rap beat, that would be OK as long as it isn't user selectable?
Unfortunately, the political party that unwaveringly protects the 2nd amendment is the same political party that defunded our public mental health programs three decades ago and blocks any current attempts to increase funding for mental health programs.
Running Windows 10 a couple days ago, I saw a new icon in the task bar information area that looked just like the normal green highlighted windows update only with blue highlights instead. When I clicked on it, it was to install Windows 11...
I promptly exited out, rebooted my machine, and went into the UEFI BIOS to disable fTPM.
Oddly, after saving the change and rebooting, Windows Update still says I'm ready for Windows 11. I most decidedly am not!
I'm thinking that all the bulk spammers should now target Texas ISP email addresses since it is now technically illegal to block them. Even better have every Democratic, "liberal", and "left-wing" organization start sending bulk emails to them. See how quickly Texas citizens demand this law be overturned or amended.
It's good that the copyright office is holding its stance on this nonsense. I see this as a slippery slope we don't want to get too near. Now that we have "AI" software that can write software code, who gets the copyright for that resulting code? The person who ran the AI tool? The developer of the AI tool? The AI itself? This could get interesting.
Paris icon just for the question mark.
When I was just a teenage nerd, I acquired an old all vacuum tube Dumont oscilloscope along with complete service documentation. One Saturday morning I decided to give it a full service/alignment. Not being totally stupid, I knew I needed to discharge the CRT. However, I basically jumpered a large insulated handle screw driver to the chassis without any kind of limiting resistor to allow the charge to drain off in a controlled manner. As I moved the tip of the screw driver close to the terminal, an enormous spark jumped the gap and made a CRACK sound loud enough to wake the dog upstairs and set it to barking.
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