Re: Talk about the gates of Hell !
@Not Spartacus
Is the British based backup tea based?
Could it be an attempt to make a really fresh, *hot* cup of tea as a source of Brownian motion?
1182 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Aug 2015
The article mentions getting repeated gravity assists from Venus. Rich Purnell probably designed the orbits so that a small amount of fuel delta-V used near perihelion triggers a larger drop of delta-V due to the Venus flyby.
Really smart way of doing it if you ask me so Rich gets a pint.
If you have Excel, everything looks like a spreadsheet.
Show me somebody who knows everything about Excel and I'll show you somebody who doesn't know anything else.
People get really down on Excel but there is nothing out there that accessibly solves more problems save getting your hands dirty with Python, JavaScript or some other loosely typed (read: vomiting onto a keyboard) scripting language
I, for one, am glad that Norman is undertaking efforts that put him in a similar light as the Académie française rather than putting his copious free time to use in some field that might hinder progress to have some stuck-up traditionalist clinging to the arbitrary rulebooks provided. He doesn't work in the public sector, does he?
In the case of our wondrous mongrel tounge, the rulebooks were generally dreamed up in the 18th and 19th centuries by prescriptivist linguists who appear to have had very little basis for most of the rules they created and whose main objective appears to have been getting the English language to be neat and tidy rather than the ability to express ideas and have conversations.
If you use your phone as a kindle more than as a phone, a large screen is better.
If you use your phone to read & send email more than as a phone, a large screen is better.
If you use your phone to catch up on Social Media while on the bus, a large screen is better.
If you use your phone a lot and desire a huge battery, a large screen allows for more real space.
If you use your phone as a phone but don't want to always put your glasses on first, a large screen is better.
Only the first affects me, but there are many reasons that people desire large phones with large screens.
Orbits there alone, the end is nearing
All systems no go, goodbye there
Control is not convinced
But the computer has the evidence
We need to abort
Hibernation starts
Watching drowsily, the 'scope is certain
Nothing left to chance, all is working
Trying to relax, orbits round the sun
"Send me up a drink", jokes Kepler One
The count goes on
4, 3, 2, 1
Sol below us
Drifting sleeping
Floating weightless
Calling calling home
All the fuel is out, we're now adrift.
Stabilizers off, reactions still
Finished collecting, requested data
What will it effect, when all is done
Thinks Kepler One
Back at ground control, there is a problem
Rouse from hibernation, not responding
Hello Kepler One, are you receiving
Wake your sleep-filled head up, we're standing by
There's no reply
4, 3, 2, 1
Sol below us
Drifting sleeping
Floating weightless
Calling calling home
Across the solar wind
A final message, "use my data well"
Then nothing more
Far beneath the probe, the sun is burning
They don't realize, he's alive
No one understands but Kepler One sleeps
Now the light commands, this is my home
I'm staying home
<repeat chorus>
One for all the scientists who worked on this -->
In my experience, Chrome is a superior browser - RAM hogs aren't an issue if you've got stacks of RAM. The UI doesn't do backflips every other week that requires extensive effort to get back to the way you had set it up, and it's more stable. Before you get your pitchforks and torches out, this is my experience. YMMV.
Frankly, if there's one company I trust to not lose my data or spaff it all over the interwebs, it's Google - I know exactly what Google are doing with my data - trying to make money from me. If I view everything Google serves with the level of black cynicism that everything on the internet requires, then they're not doing a good enough job.
Frankly, I accepted a long time ago that using Chrome meant that Google could see whatever I was doing. When I'm watching something on Youtube in the evening and decide to go to bed, finishing watching whatever it is on my laptop without having to keep track of where I was is handy.
Buying stuff and online banking is done in Firefox.
I'm going to take issue with this, good sir - these are designed by middle aged managers who want to appeal to millennials. Any millennial worth their salt would take one look at this and recognise it for the pointless gimmick that it is.
Then the millennial would get their phone out and look at everything through the camera app.
You make a table.
You sell the table.
Assuming you designed the table, you have a copyright for that exact table design.
Another carpenter thinks your table is pretty swish, he buys a copy of the design from you and you provide it accepting that he will make more. He now has a license to use your copyright.
A second carpenter also thinks your table is pretty swish but reverse engineers your table and makes his own set of plans that are an identical copy of your table design. If he makes any tables to your design, he is in breach of copyright.
This table was really swish, however, so a third carpenter makes his own set of plans that are based on your table but modifies certain elements. He (probably) isn't in breach of copyright* as he's not directly copying your design.
I'm also going to put the words 'patent' and 'trademark' in this paragraph, separate from the rest of the comment as they are different ball games but played on the same pitch.
*Depending on whether enough was changed from your design
Fun fact - many old games counted CPU cycles or some other trickery and timed their AI speed to that - the original Command and Conquer does this I'm told. That's one situation where DosBox's random maths feature comes into its own - otherwise the AI player just magically gets an enormous base.
At a guess? Either not noticeably faster than a standard OS or even potentially worse. Assuming it's 64-bit (initial release was 2005 so this may be stretching matters) then the main benefit to running it over, say, Win10 is that it won't try to think for itself when you're trying to work on it.
Every year more chat apps are flung out into the market. These chat apps don't talk to each other and everybody requires an ever expanding list of applications to keep in touch with everybody. Way back when, there was Aim. Then there was Microsoft Messenger. Then there was Skype. Then there was Facebook Messenger. Then there was WhatsApp. Now there is discord. Soon, something else will come along and take the market by storm.
Every one - a different set of logins, a different application, another database to be hacked into by ne'er do wells. Every one another program to figure out how to stop it beeping at you whenever you get a message. Every one making life more complicated.
I'm drawing the line here. No more will I have an array of disparate chat apps bulging under the weight of Franz - I will get a myspace page and people who want to talk to me will have to trek over there. Hopefully not too many will.
Not really, we spend years learning how to pick stuff up, just like how we spend years learning our first language or to just walk.
And the above is within a system where the generic feedback loop of failure and success is a solved problem unlike in the field of AI.
Picking up a cup of tea is surprisingly difficult when you look at all the actions required.
1. Move your arm to exactly the right place - one inch any way and you're either missing the handle or knocking over the cup.
2. Figure out how many fingers will be comfortable in the cup handle and insert them into the hole - often there's much less than a centimetre of leeway.
3. Exert the right amount of pressure between fingers in the handle and below the handle to keep the cup balanced and level while it makes the perilous journey between mat and mouth.
This is only possible due to how astoundingly complicated and sensitive our nervous system is as you have a good idea where any part of your body is even if you can't see it due to the stresses and strains on the rest of your body which your brain then interprets.
That's not to say those pulling all nighters via egregious use of coffee can't do all these actions on autopilot, but it did take literal years to get the ability to figure out all the steps for themselves.
According to Einstein's laws, something travelling at the speed of light causes multiple divide by zero errors. The only way for something to go faster than light is for Einstein's laws to have major flaws at near light speed, which are the speeds that the laws were written to formularise (It's not like Newton's laws which worked for the measurable speeds of the day but became less accurate once you started approaching C)
Going back through all of industrial history, the trend has been centralising power in the name of efficiency - Enclosure of fields between 1500-1800, the great mills of the industrial revolution and now the cloud.
You may as well complain that flooding in Bangladesh drives the price of RAM up when in the past you were able to cobble together some VRAM yourself with delay line memory or how flooding in central Europe causes a shortage of iceberg lettuce.
Centralisation happens, efficiency improves, local effects at the point of centralisation become more important.
But sure, rail against the cloud for the obvious WOMBAT that it is.
Two years ago, I had to do a task in excel (was the only tool available to handle the job) where the calculation for the INDEX MATCH took an hour to complete. The file was so long it had to be split and still filled top to bottom of two tabs.
The best thing about Excel in these situations is how wonderfully choosy it can be when deciding whether to continue calculating or to stop if you try to do something else on the computer.
So I borrowed a book on software testing and got reading...
@Bob
Black text on white is the most* familiar to those who grew up using pen and paper.
Blue is easy on the eyes* and a relaxing colour* because you don't want people getting angry navigating your site. Blobs of blue are also easy to spot* on a white background, which is important when the button says "Buy now"
2D flat is the visual style du jou^H^H^H decade
That being said, on any site that will give me the option, I'll have a dark grey background with white text as it's far easier on the eyes.
As one of the few gatekeepers to having passwords stored in the password manager in the office, I need to tell people (the developers usually being the only people who don't need telling) that <company name>123 is not a good password and I won't accept it about 50% of the time.
Starting to consider sending these usernames and passwords to the whole company to force them to change it given that the password would then become public knowledge. Bad stuff would probably happen though.
Considering the 1TB clocks in at $199, compared to a 1TB Samsung 960 evo at $500, you can bet your bottom dollar I was looking. I certainly wouldn't mind switching out my old 256GB NvME and also getting rid of four mismatched SSDs and HDDs for a 2TB 660p and some 4-8TB HDD for storage.
Oh, you meant the editors...
I tried writing a justification for why I thought 4/10 was too high, but the more I thought about it, the more I agreed - the software works on a basic level (because it was ripped off, most likely) so the primary issue is the crap case. Knock a point off for having to remap keys to get some games to work and you have 4/10.
They can join the UK in an endless spiral downhill while constantly referencing the time that they were great. We can even give them some tips on how to manage a constant slide to irrelevance as smoothly as falling head-first down a flight of stairs.
"Optane XPoint drives do not have sufficiently faster performance compared to NVMe SSDs to make their cost worthwhile."
Isn't the point of Optane to add as a chunky NVRAM cache for high capacity low speed storage so that initial load times stay the same but certain data gets loaded into the Optane module so subsequent loading is much improved?