Posts by brainwrong 197 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007
Not hiring somebody you've previously fired seems not unreasonable to me. I once worked at a company that had a policy of never re-employing *any* ex-employee. I saw one guy told to leave on his first day after someone realised he'd worked there before, which was unnecessarily shit.
Why 3 holes? Any particular location on the drive? Would the average user know to ensure all the platters are broken?
Surely it's better to encrypt the drive from the start, then I don't have to worry about how to wipe or irrevocably damage a non-functioning drive. It also protects my data in the event of theft of said drive.
Are we really supposed to believe fire resistance claims made by the building industry after Grenfell?
The linked website doesn't give me any confidence. They don't claim it won't burn, just that it'll last long enough to evacuate a building, assuming you over-specify the thickness correctly (go careful how you calculate bending loads). Even if it were extinguished, the building would probably need to be rebuilt.
The problem with VHS was that people didn't generally give a shit about quality. They used cheap tapes in cheap machines, then used the abomination that was Long Play, which doubled the recording time and shat all over the picture and sound. The author claims DVD's were better, they were shit too (lower vertical resolution, terrible banding). S-VHS was the dogs bollocks, though.
Hi-Fi audio on VHS offered better quality sound than compact cassette, and much longer record times. Panasonic machines were able to record audio only, with no video input signal. I used to record John Peel's show off the radio onto VHS, and scan through all the crap to find the gems to put on cassette.
Here in PAL land we got 576 picture lines, because that's what the signal contained. No scalers.
"as AI would enable everyone to use less energy by making technology and electricity grids more efficient"
If you make things more efficient, then you make it cheaper to use. If something is cheaper to use, then more people will use more of it.
I think the climate is fucked either way, it's the fundamental nature of technological civilisation.
I just watched a (bad) documentary about north korea, I was curious what their carbon footprint is.
My guess is that the password is hashed in some form using SHA256, which produces a 32 byte output. My guess is that someone therefore thinks that inputting more than 32 characters results in a reduction of entropy, and should be avoided. This is wrong because the input characters don't have 8 bits of entropy each, 2 bits would be typical for english words, 3 or 4 if you make an effort with funny characters and random upper/lower case. Hashing a 48 character password will very likely increase the entropy, despite the apparent reduction in length.
I think 256 characters would be a sensible maximum.
So what if we found a 300 million year old one of those created by a long lost intelligent species?
What would we do with it? Re-create what would be to us an alien, along with some of their technology?
Happy happy happy, Joy joy joy!
Has anyone made that film yet? There's too much sci-fi now for me to attempt to follow any of it, so I honestly don't know.
The coriolis effect acts in a clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere, but at less than 0.7 milli-rpm (depending on lattitude) is unlikely ever the dominant influence on plugholes.
Cutting tomatoes does blunt knives, humans can't avoid sideways forces on the blade, and your chopping board is harder than a tomato.
"Therefore, effective failure prediction must adequately make use of the exception timestamp information"
Err, that obvious, innit.
The news here should be that they're a bunch of idiots who weren't doing that in the first place.
These are the people who are building our future, seemingly no better than than the Nigerians are building Lagos-
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2ed9y3049o
I've never understood the logic of declaring that people who live off land, livestock etc., and have no need of money, must be poor.
Introducing money into their lives will make them poor, but they're gullible enough to join us because we monkeys like shiny shiny things.
Is there a point to modern technological civilisation beyond just trashing our house by holding a big party?
If UBI were to be rolled out nationally anywhere, then wouldn't that result in fundamental changes in the economy that render the current studies useless?
Markets will surely adjust, and effectively take the money back off of people. For example, they'll still all be in competition with each other for the same limited supply of housing.
The money for UBI will have to be taken out of the economy from somewhere via taxes, this won't be without consequence either.
It all sounds good, but I can't see it making things much better long term.
"Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong."
I tried that a few months ago and the article wasn't corrected. This one was funny, that is all.
It looks to me like you're using speech recognition to write? I can't see how that's a keyboard typing error.
Err, no.
The change is referring to the orbital period of the Didymos / Dimorphos system. They both orbit a common centre of mass with the same orbital period, which just reduced by 32 minutes.
The orbital velocity of Didymos (relative to their common centre of mass) will have changed by 1/104 of that of the change of orbital velocity of Dimorphos, because it's more massive and closer to the system's common centre of mass.
I'd be interested to know what the change of the orbit of the Didymos / Dimorphos system around the Sun is, but that wasn't the objective of the mission and will take a much longer observation time.
According to wikipedia, the two bodies were tidally locked. I imagine that lock has been broken (somewhat), and the eccentricity of their orbit also changed. This is surely worth investigating up close for an extended period of time, to learn something about how binary asteroid systems, and contact binaries, come to be.
"This means a future of abundance,"
Abundance of what? Jobs?
"implying that he hopes Tesla's robots might one day replace humans on production lines"
Oh, maybe not.
"A future where there is no poverty"
How will that work? Will the robots be dumped in a hole in the Congo to mine minerals for their own construction?
"make sure DART is on the right path and counting down the hours before it can attack"
Attack? Are there jewish space lasers on board?
"And then an hour prior to impact for the first time you'll see just one pixel in the field of view of our camera, or DRACO, and that's going to be Dimorphism. And so at that point, this is when we switch from guiding towards Didymos towards guiding to Dimorphos."
One hour seems rather last minute to correct course to target when going over 14,000mph. That's barely enough time for me to swerve to avoid pot-holes when driving.
Build large scale solar powered electrolysis plants to produce hydrogen gas to vent into the atmosphere. It will rise to the top of the atmosphere and provide drag on all orbiting objects on its journey to space. It'll bring all stuff down quicker, and maybe reduce sea levels to boot.
May need a big, well enforced no-smoking zone :)
I've never heard of cameras being used for this. Sounds unreliable, but I'm sure someone has patted themselves on the back for using high-tech.
"The new ones are much more focused so they can ignore vehicles making right turns."
You must be in different country to me.
Where I am nearly all light controlled junctions have induction loops in the ground, and a box with an opaque window pointed at each vehicle approach, and also at the pedestrian crossings if present.
Then somebody programs the controller badly and causes unnecessary traffic problems for the next several decades.
I believe the boxes here use RADAR because they are accurately speed sensitive, some pedestrian crossings are programmed to stop traffic if you drive toward them over the speed limit.
"This sort of thing is supposed to be address in V2X in a more cross industry wide basis. I would expect that the tech would eventually be mandatory in all phones / vehicles as an OS feature, not a 3rd party app. I think its based on broadcasting position and direction vectors."
So we can expect in the future for it to be mandatory to carry a beacon in public that broadcasts our position at all times, for our own safety, to protect us from self driving cars. I'm sure that won't be used for any other purpose.
"The camera based detectors which are on 95% of our intersections only pickup cyclists 25% of the time. "
They are not camera based, they are RADAR. If you wear a silly cycling hat then try sticking a metal corner-cube reflector on top, that ought to help.
It used to be possible to purchase shoes with steel toecaps in them, stopping and placing your foot on the corner of a traffic loop in the road would make your presence known to the lights. Modern safety footware no longer uses metal :( . Maybe your bicycle wheels are still made of metal?
"It will take less energy to heat CO2 to the same speeds as water, which makes for a more efficient system, which is the whole point of the article"
I thought the point of the article was that it was the lack of phase changes in the working fluid made it more efficient. To quote the article, "The Rankine cycle is inefficient and loses a lot of energy turning steam back into water", but I think it's a bit more complicated than that really.
And the available working temperature range is a bit better too, for future designs.
"are these REAL scientists?"
Probably. They're trying to translate it to what they think an ordinary american can understand, I see this sort of nonsense elsewhere.
I've never understood why it's degrees anything. Was Mr. Fahrenheit's thermometer a dial type using a Helix protractor re-purposed for the scale? Can we convert it to radians?
The grid connection is a publicity stunt.
The generator and its control systems are separate from the thermal cycle and the turbine, the two are connected by a rotating shaft running at a nearly constant speed. It's the CO2 based cycle they're trying to prove here, the generator part at grid scale was proven decades ago.
I was curious as to where the heat came from for this test, reading the press release confirmed my suspicion that it was an electrical heater, no doubt connected to the same grid.
I think more test rigs should recover energy somehow to use (if only to power the office lights!), but 10KW is pretty small beer.
"Plastic removed by the group is sent for recycling"
That irresponsible, I'll end up as trash in the environment again. It should be destroyed by incineration in a properly constructed and run plant to generate energy.
"Thus, if we repeat this 100,000 kg haul 1,000 times – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be gone,"
Utter bollocks. It's density will reduce, so the total will diminish approximately exponentially.
"A long chain of floating buoys suspended between two boats is dragged slowly through the water, collecting trash and funneling it into a collection area at the rear. A 3-meter deep net wall runs the length of the system and collects plastics floating below the surface"
How much sea-life did it collect?
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