Posts by Orv

JetZero teams up with Delta to drag aviation into the future

Re: Flying Wing

If I'm not going to get airsick, I really need to be able to see the horizon.

Re: Flying Wing

Flying wings have some serious practical problems for passenger craft -- mainly the lack of space for windows. You can see a bit of that in this design -- there are only a handful of window seats, and the people toward the center rear are pretty much out of luck if they want to see out. With a full-on flying wing the only place you can put windows is in the leading edge, and that's usually avoided for bird strike reasons.

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

Re: This is how the City / County of LA actually works.. its run by batsh*t crazy people

The recycled paper thing is not unique to LA. It's a requirement for all public-sector entities in California. Is it dumb? Kinda, yeah, but LA didn't make it up, it was passed by the state legislature.

Not going to bother talking about your DEI fantasies. I've been involved with public sector hiring in the state and nothing requires hiring candidates of any particular race or gender, only that the process fairly consider them.

Also I doubt it really occurred to any of them that the same system would be in use 25 years later!

Re: At the sound of the chime, truncheon says bedtime

My theory: 2003 is the default, and they were using a window system where two-digit dates are interpreted based on an arbitrary cutoff. e.g., if it's >24, it's a 19xx date, otherwise it's a 20xx date. So "25" would be interpreted as "1925", which is probably outside the system's date range, and cause a reversion to default.

Cutoff windows like this were a pretty common way to handle Y2K problems in databases, because they didn't require touching all that much code. But everyone involved in implementing them knew they were just kicking the can down the road and the system would need to be fixed "properly" later.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

A large reason for games mostly being written in machine language on the C64 was the BASIC interpreter was slow, and when you're using a chip clocked at 1 MHz you really want to save those cycles.

That said, both the C64 and the Apple II (another machine with Microsoft BASIC) both had some commercial software written in BASIC. Just not usually anything speed-critical.

Some versions of the Apple IIe also had a mini-assembler in ROM, which was handy for putting together short machine language routines. Traditionally the dumping ground for those was the tape buffer starting at 0x300, since no one really used tape on an Apple II system.

Re: GOTO

Most chips I've programmed for have a jump-to-subroutine command that's a little more structured; unlike GOTO it pushes a return location onto the stack.

One third of adults can't delete device data

Re: Working Out their Frustrations

That's a good way to be sure. Realistically, though, once you've destroyed the relationship between the data platters and the platter with the servo tracks, the data is not recoverable by normal means.

Re: Surely

Yup. I use this a lot at work (or just do it through Apple Configurator) because I loan out iPads.

On Google Chromebooks the corresponding option is called "Powerwash".

Re: Working Out their Frustrations

A lot of platters now are glass. Hard, but easy to shatter.

Re: Working Out their Frustrations

Kids now hate email almost as much as I hate making phone calls.

Re: Working Out their Frustrations

On my iPhone it asks me if I want to let the car access my Contacts, and when i tell it no it just moves on.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

So you're saying we can cross "death ray" off our "mad science inventions we don't have yet" list?

Re: turrets, autoloaders etc are electric anyway

It wouldn't surprise me, because that potentially solves a lot of the issues that come with using gas turbines. The M1 Abrams' achilles heel has always been fuel consumption -- turbines are notoriously inefficient at low throttle settings.

Musk and Trump to fall out in 2025, predicts analyst

It may not be Presidential prerogative to delete sections of the US Constitution, but the Supreme Court has given Trump immunity, so the question of "who's going to stop him?" arises.

Re: "so no good Gawd-fearing Republican can ever attempt to take a pot-shot at him again?"

She should have retired before the Republicans took the Senate in 2014, then there would have been no problem replacing her.

Re: Plenty of stories about how Trump is already getting sick of Musk

Last I heard he was building a compound in Austin for himself and the rest of his polycule, but he was having trouble getting any of them to commit to living in it.

Re: All Musk needs to do is sit tight awhile.

It won't be that embarrassing. His supporters will just claim he never said it. That's part of how authoritarians enforce their power -- by forcing people to believe contradictory things.

Re: Shocked

Considering Defense, Social Security, and Medicare have all been declared off-limits it's hard to see how they get to $2 trillion. That would require cutting pretty much everything else government does, and a lot of those agencies have substantial constituencies relying on them in red states. Try telling farmers that there won't be any more subsidies and see how it goes.

Re: Value for money

He might be disappointed. While Trump demands loyalty, he doesn't return it, and in fact he seems to take particular glee in humiliating people who suck up to him.

Mysteries in polar orbit – space's oldest working hardware still keeps its secrets

There's also Transit 5B-5; it can't claim the title of oldest working satellite, because it stopped functioning shortly after launch. But it was launched in 1965 and still transmits garbled telemetry occasionally, making it the oldest satellite to still emit a signal.

The Transit system itself is fairly interesting -- it was an early, pre-GPS satellite navigation system, intended to allow Navy ships and (surfaced) submarines to re-calibrate their inertial navigation systems. It was accurate to around 20 meters if the receiver was stationary.

How US Dept of Justice's cure for Google could inflict collateral damage

Re: Oh, puh-LEEEZE!

The negative impact is the majority of Firefox's development funding comes from Google paying them to be the default search option.

Trump's pick to run the FCC has told us what he plans: TikTok ban, space broadband, and Section 230 reform

Re: Censorship Cartel & Section 230

Usenet is different because it's decentralized. There's no Usenet Inc. you can sue if someone posts something illegal or objectionable.

X also routinely censors people who say things Elon Musk doesn't like. Which isn't illegal, but is definitely hypocritical.

Re: Censorship Cartel & Section 230

Before section 230 sites had a choice -- they could do no moderation at all, or they could be held responsible for user-supplied content. Most sites chose just to not have user supplied content; things like message boards and comment sections didn't really become common on a large scale until after section 230 made them less legally risky.

Re: "Carr wants to revisit Section 230

Originally the guidance came from other parts of the Communications Decency Act, which required certain content to be blocked or restricted. Those provisions were invalidated by the courts, though, as a restriction on free speech.

Public developer spats put bcachefs at risk in Linux

There's always that guy who argues, "I'm smarter than all of you, so the code of conduct shouldn't apply to me."

Such people are only rarely worth the trouble. They may get things done but they're energy vampires to the rest of the team.

Re: If geeks got axed for swearing in development disputes, we would all still be using typewriters.

And it's systemd-free!

Musk agrees with fan that worries over orbital Starlink traffic a 'silly narrative'

Re: Elmo doesn't care...

At Starlink's orbit that's not that big a problem; debris would naturally de-orbit pretty quickly. (Small debris particles de-orbit faster than whole satellites due to their greater surface area to mass ratio.)

It's a lot more of a concern at higher orbits, where the debris might not re-enter for decades or longer.

Mozilla's Firefox browser turns 20. Does it still matter?

Re: Ta Ta Firefox

Browsers all use GPU rendering now, so it's not that shocking.

I used to have a machine where one particular buggy graphics card driver would cause Firefox to render all images as black rectangles.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Re: The study is behind a paywall

It's pretty common for professors doing research to put the preprints, or links to them, right on their website.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

I would not necessarily expect the filibuster to stand -- it's just a Senate rule and can be changed with a majority vote.

However, each of the departments Musk would like to target has a constituency who is sure THEIR favorite department isn't the wasteful one, it's all the other ones that should be cut. Representatives who are not in safe districts, and Senators who are in purple states, can be expected to resist cuts. It's not likely to be a straight party-line vote for most of these proposals. (This is why NASA's SLS keeps staggering forward -- contractors for it are spread across a bunch of congressional districts, making it essentially cancel-proof, because no one wants to be the Representative who voted to take jobs away from their voters.)

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: double take

Nothing yet. They're still in the preliminary stages of preparing it for test flights, from the sound of it.

Re: Why would that pose difficulties for a passenger jet?

If this ever became a commercial proposal, the FAA could probably be coaxed into issuing a waiver, assuming you could demonstrate it was safe. It's actually not that uncommon for aircraft designs to get requirements waived.

For now though it doesn't matter -- as a federal agency, NASA is outside the FAA's jurisdiction.

Re: Why would that pose difficulties for a passenger jet?

Never ridden in a B-17, but I rode in a 1929 Ford Trimotor once. It seemed primitive until I remembered that it was built only 26 years after the Wright Brothers; then it seemed pretty impressive to be in this all-metal aircraft that could lift a ton of cargo or 11 passengers. Loud, though. I'm told there's a saying that the decibel level inside a Trimotor is roughly equal to the cruising speed in knots. I'm also told that this is a myth, that the cruising speed never gets anywhere near that high.

Re: Great until

Honestly that ship sailed long ago. For at least a decade I've been seeing stories about how we'd already passed the tipping point. We should be focusing on adaptation, not mitigation.

Re: At the risk of harshing optomistic mellows. . .

"Who's gonna stop me" might collide head on with "why should we listen to you?", in that case. His brain will be pudding by the time his term ends; the infighting you saw in the Republican Party this time may look mild compared to what would happen if he tried to run again for a term he can't legally serve.

Re: "external cameras [..] provide a view for the enclosed operator"

I think ten-passenger supersonic business jets are a lot more likely than 500-passenger airliners. It'd be the next new toy every billionaire had to have, now that megayachts with submarines are passé.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to eject hundreds more workers

Re: JPL. . .

You saw it with how the Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate, and in the way that a bunch of CEOs lined up to congratulate Trump after he was declared the winner. They're all trying to get in his good graces by doing what he wants before he asks for it.

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Why?

I think at this point a lot of C programmers have seen new programming languages come and go, and they view Rust as just the latest fad. No point in learning it when it'll be gone in another five or six years.

Nolanverse Batmobile leaps barrier between film and reality – but it'll cost you

The Chevy LS is just the Lego brick of motors, isn't it? You can snap it into anything.

The fine is the easy part. Having it impounded and crushed, though, would hurt.

We know what Musk will probably dress up as this year: A victim

Re: ...tomfoolery afoot in Pennsylvania

In many states that's how it works, but the actual nuts and bolts of staffing the polls is usually left to the county.

Re: ...tomfoolery afoot in Pennsylvania

The thing about elections in the US is we don't have one election, we have thousands of them, with each county administering their own. Not all of them are equally good at it.

Combustion engines grind Linus Torvalds' gears

Re: Makes perfect sense

How the tank safety problem "ends" is hydrogen vehicles are given an expiration date after which the tank is no longer assumed to be safe and they have to be scrapped:

https://insideevs.com/news/326312/2016-toyota-mirai-do-not-refuel-after-2029/

Anyone who complains about EVs having a limited battery lifespan should REALLY hate hydrogen vehicles.

Re: Ah, an electric car

In California there's a substantial second-hand market for EVs and they draw a premium price compared to gasoline cars.

Re: Makes perfect sense

Typical EV efficiency is more like 90%; typical gasoline vehicles are about 30%. If you stack with generation and grid losses the EV still uses less energy, although how much less depends on the type of power generation in your area.

Re: Makes perfect sense

The life of a Wankel is short, but oh, what a song they sing.

Re: Hmmmm...

I've had two cars now that blended regen and friction braking almost imperceptibly -- a Chevrolet Volt and a Honda Clarity.

It's pretty much a solved problem at this point. Both those cars blend the two depending on how hard you step on the brake pedal. Friends who borrowed the Clarity didn't know there was anything unusual about the brakes until I told them.

Re: Hmmmm...

Counterpoint: From the rear, an i3 looks like an angry robot.