Posts by Fursty Ferret 226 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2016
Doesn't matter who they are, how much they earn or how important they think they are. Anyone yelling and ranting like that at me down the phone is just getting the call ended straight away.
Damn straight. The one time I was sworn at by a colleague (needlessly, I might add) I walked off the job. Cost to the company? €126,000. The man that swore at me is no longer employed there.
The energy released in a lithium-ion battery fire is from the chemical make-up of the battery, not from the electrical energy stored within. A fully charged battery has a higher potential to start a fire, but equally a deep-discharged one is also more prone to ignition. Which comes down to the fact that manufacturers specify a defined charge level for shipping (20-50% on average).
>> Are you implying it's okay to run over children as long as you don't make a habit of it?
I'm pretty sure that was a mannequin of a child, not a real one.
Like everyone on the internet the producers of this video have a point to prove and will selectively select footage that supports their case. It's cool to hate Tesla and Tesla-drivers at the moment (and there are excellent reasons for doing so, mainly led by the Nazi manchild who's superficially running the company), hence the downvotes on a comment which suggested that maybe, just *maybe* it might be worth having a closer look at the footage.
>> and it now supports dual-booting with a Bitlocker-encrypted copy of Windows.
Does it now? Be very careful and have a hard copy of your Bitlocker unlock key to hand. Microsoft has got this so tightly locked down that you need 2FA to login to Windows again after making changes to the UEFI partition layout, which may come as a bit of a surprise if you're on the road.
I'm disappointed that an install of Fedora with LUKS encryption is still a massive pain in the arse.
I don't want to be cynical but the only way this merger got approved is down to the traditional brown envelopes stuffed with used, non-sequential, £50 notes. Three has the worst customer support of any major operator ("Live Chat" with Indian-based representatives who don't have access to billing systems) and average coverage. Vodafone has a great customer service team and mediocre coverage. I'm willing to bet a leg (either leg, your choice) that the Throdafone merger results in an entity with Three's customer service team and Vodafone's network.
If they were serious they could have instantly enabled roaming across their paired networks, but haven't. There's a good reason for this: when they start cutting back on any areas of overlap, the combined quality will be worse than either.
Staff where I work are offered a choice between a Lenovo Thinkpad (Intel) or Surface laptop (Snapdragon). The overwhelming majority are now on Surface, and complaints are few and far between. We're not in a situation where we're rolling out the absolute latest Intel generation yet, but Windows on ARM64 for 99% of people is absolutely fine. While we're a Microsoft shop, we really owe Apple for proving that ARM architecture works well in the desktop environment.
if I were Intel I'd be worried.
Yes, but Windowsifying Linux is just putting users in the uncanny valley of operating systems where it nearly, but not quite, works as expected, and is utterly impossible to troubleshoot over the phone.
I'm a big fan of Elementary OS for people who want to move away from Windows.
Aviation experts at FlightRadar24 said the craft made a low-altitude flyover of the airport, likely in an attempt to have officials on the ground confirm the state of the plane and suggest next steps.
This is how you know they're not aviation experts. No one would overfly an airport in a commercial aircraft (even one as antiquated at the 737) in order to determine the state of it.
A few facts: almost every airport in the world has bird warnings from time to time. You might delay take-off for a flock of birds at the end of the runway, but unless there was an extremely compelling reason you'd continue an approach. If the birds appeared on short final, you fly through them and land. The risk to engines from bird ingestion is exponentially greater at high thrust than at approach thrust (at low thrust the birds tend to be diverted down the bypass ducts). Even if you lose one engine, you're almost at the runway and in the landing configuration, so WTF would you go around? Stopping distance on a limiting wet runway is less than 15% greater than with both engines running.
I don't know what happened here, but the birds are likely to be the least exciting finding in the investigation.
Assuming that the first thing to go will be the cheap PAYG packages with Three. The fact they still have roaming included when the full-fat contracts ditched it years ago is a little gem.
Having said that my experience is that Vodafone have much better customer support than Three. They at least answer the phone instead of forcing you onto Live Chat, who tell you that they can't help, and to phone...
Personally I'd be keeping a close eye on the driveway of the person responsible for approving this whole deal and counting the new Range Rovers that mysteriously appear in six months.
Reminds me of the time when a miniature Hitler came rocketing across the tarmac in his orange and white Hilux pickup “safety vehicle” at a large airport to inform me that I was going to be fined for not having my high visibility vest fully buttoned up.
“But how did you know it wasn’t done up?”, I asked.
“Because I could see you from ALL THE WAY OVER THERE”, he replied, without the slightest trace of irony.
I was working under IR35 at the time when I shouldn’t have been, so the fine was filed in the kitchen bin and the airport didn’t bother to follow it up as it might have raised questions they didn’t want answered.
What is interesting is that how much of it is almost subliminal. Occasionally I find my Tesla refuses to pass a slower-moving vehicle in the next lane. Almost invariably when I've taken over to accelerate past them a quick glance across shows the driver on their phone. The slight drifting and weaving in the lane is almost unnoticeable to me, but is obviously triggering something in its tiny brain.
>> no onerous health and safety regulations
What do you think defined the modern idea of "health and safety"? In reality it was the structured and logical attitude towards risk developed during the Apollo missions.
What you're conflating it with is litigation fear which leads to the circumstances where anything deemed slightly risky is banned outright because people are too lazy or incompetent to do risk assessments, and so "elf an safety" gets the blame. As someone who works in an industry revolutionised by modern safety practices, this casual blaming is an insult to the people in whose blood our health and safety regulations are written in.
Not necessarily related to OpenAI, but I've noticed this too. People that are (superficially) intelligent are falling for major conspiracy theories. There are now countless people who believe that Covid vaccines are a population control tool, that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is perfectly reasonable, and that the world is being controlled by a shadowy business cartel. One of them captains long-haul passenger jets, although I didn't push the case as to whether he believed in chemtrails or not.
While I subscribe to the fact that if you believe in conspiracy theories you're a moron, it's concerning that people who have demonstrated flawed analysis and decision making processes are in a situation where they might need to use the same skills in a life-or-death situation.
I, on the other hand, am not so impressed with the Affinity model. You can keep using the older versions that you paid for, but once about half the people you work with have upgraded you've got no choice but to follow suit as the older versions won't so much as look at anything produced by the newer one.
On top of that I paid for the full package about 2 weeks before v3 was released, and Affinity's response to me asking for an upgrade (or even a discount code) was a big fat middle finger and ****-you via email. So now I pay for Adobe CC mainly out of spite.
Every so often I turn off my ad-blocker in response to one of the guilting "Do you want us to starve?" pop-ups, but swiftly turn it back on when I realise what I'm getting. Smaller sites are suffering because of the decisions taken by big content providers (lookin' at you, Future) to bury the actual interesting stuff in a mixture of ads and sponsored advertorials.
To be honest, having the option to make micropayments in order to browse ad-free is quite appealing, but only to the extent that I'd like to add exceptions to ensure the particularly shitty websites (see previous on Future, or Reach) stay clear of my wallet. And they would be the first to take advantage anyway, probably hiding a million pixel-sized individual ads.
On Airbus that's no real problem, Airbus has automatic de-icing, so when ice is detected the de-icing is switched on and the cold wet air cools the inlets.
Just to clarify, the reason this doesn't affect Airbus aircraft is because they use a different inlet and a different version of the LEAP engine which won't melt if you fly with the engine anti-ice on in non-icing conditions.
Boeing can make working ice detection (ish, it mostly works on the Dreamliner but has a few bugs), they never fitted it to the 737.
Airbus has always had distributed production on account of being a pan-European business. Final assembly takes place in Toulouse and Hamburg. Airbus has a very different philosophy to Boeing from the ground up and are very difficult to compare on a brick-by-brick basis. Your typical Airbus has countless features to mitigate against the biggest risks in modern aviation. Boeing hasn't introduced anything new in over a decade apart from fixing a bug that allowed the autopilot to stall the aircraft.
That motor can apply significant force to the steering rack, easily enough to overcome most drivers. I've had the Tesla try to get into the wrong* lane before and the force required to overcome the computer was much greater than anticipated (you couldn't do it with one hand, and most people who hold the wheel lightly in two hands would have been surprised).
There's something funky with this setup because normally the steer assist disables with the lightest touch during a lane change.
* When I say "wrong", I mean the feckin' gap in the barrier on a dual carriageway to allow cars to turn right. And there was even a car in the space.
What's happening is that the spoofed position is about 60 miles west of the true position. When the incorrect position is first calculated, it's rejected by the flight management computers (FMCs) as it differs significantly from that derived from inertial positioning. Plane continues trundling on the correct course. So far so good.
Over time the FMCs start to take a closer look at the GNSS signal, and consider that it's been like that for a while. So they begin to give it a little more credence. What if it's right? So they start to bias their calculated position with an element of the (incorrect) GNSS location. You're still within the required navigation performance limits, but with some uncertainty. Various non-critical navigation systems have failed at this point, including position reporting and look-ahead ground proximity warnings.
Finally, your FMC locks onto a basic navigation beacon on the ground. Aha! We only know the line-of-sight distance from the beacon, but that's enough to confirm position to within a mile. Except that what's happened is that the sneaky Iranians have built a radio beacon that broadcasts on the same frequency as the one that your FMC is looking for. The FMC discovers that the calculated radio position matches the spoofed GNSS location and thinks "shit, I'm off course".
Remember how the spoofed position was 60 miles west of true? This means that to re-acquire the correct track you need to fly east by 60 miles, which is just enough to put you nicely inside Iranian airspace without permission. I think it's very unlikely that you'd be shot down, but a Western airliner forced to land at an Iranian military airfield is an enormous political bargaining chip. Would the Iraqis provide a warning that you were off track? Possibly. But given the Americans named the primary navigation waypoint in the country "Rag-head" and have vetoed attempts to change it for years, I doubt they'll be hugely interested in helping.
I don't think anyone disagrees that he's a right-wing bigoted opinionated self-obsessed childish prick, but do you think that as a tech publication you could focus on the tech news side of things? Ultimately SpaceX has driven the industry further and faster than at any point since the race for the moon, and that particular aspect I find interesting.
Musk is like Trump, he revels in controversy and publicity. Not mentioning his name at all is the most effectively way forward to silence the man-child, while we still get to enjoy the news of SpaceX etc.
This comments section is depressing. I would normally associate Register readers with intelligence and the ability to select out conspiracy theories and news peddled by GB News and big oil companies, but apparently not.
1. The grid will not collapse (source: National Grid[1]). The average person drives less than 10 miles per day to work, so that's about 3 kWh of electricity, filled up when there's an overnight surplus. Charge at work? Even better.
2. We won't run out of lithium. There's loads of it, it'll just be more expensive to dig out of the ground. The quoted figures are, as others here have suggested, based on current mine capacity. If there was an upcoming lithium shortage, you won't find in products literally sold to be thrown away (those awful vapes), and it doesn't seem to stop people buying phones.
3. Big energy companies like Octopus have been campaigning for the link between electricity and gas prices to be broken. This is what's driving the disparity at the moment. I don't disagree that Instavolt and Osprey etc are predators.
4. Laws need introducing to protect charging facilities. For example, Tesla put 20 Superchargers in a Marriott carpark at Heathrow but f***** up the contract. Marriott now charge £5 just to plug in, before any electricity is delivered. Can you imagine BP or Esso having an access charge on their pumps?
5. There is a massive education problem (see these comments ^^). EVs don't randomly run out of electricity on the motorway, and if stranded in snow etc will outlast most internal combustion vehicles without the risk of poisoning the driver. FWIW, a modern diesel may not produce enough heat to keep the cabin warm when idling.
[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/journey-to-net-zero-stories/can-grid-cope-extra-demand-electric-cars
It might not look like it but the 14 inch MacBook Pro is a brick in comparison to the Air. You need to balance out whether it's worth it for the brighter / faster screen and extra ports. I think the speakers are identical between the two (if not, the ones on the Pro are stunning for a laptop).
I use an iPhone while occasionally gazing jealously at the old featherweight Pixel 5 that sits on the shelf. However, the fact that iOS lets you block intrusive ads in Safari is enough to keep me there. The difference is stark if you open a page in Chrome via the Google Discover feed - mobile browsing is pretty much unusable anywhere without ad-blocking these days.
Except (especially in the US) the professor teaching a university module sets the textbook. Which is conveniently their own work and contains homework assignments that change every year.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Libgen for this situation, especially when you consider that the university library often doesn’t have a copy and the price of the textbook is upwards of $200 in some areas.
Thankfully when it was all done the owner was very forgiving, though it had cost an afternoon's online sales. And he did dock Jeff's pay for the cost of relisting everything.
Riiiiiiight.
Are all these stories made up now, or just part of them? You can't dock the pay of an employee for an innocent mistake.
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