Posts by Red Ted 488 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2017
None of the paper books I own seem to have suffered from a discontinuation of support from their manufacturer, although a few have suffered from loss of support from their spine.
Nor do they try and show me adverts, track my location, or feedback to the publisher what other books I have been reading.
I recall writing a Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine (MENACE) implementation, and a significant part of the effort was converting the board, as 9 digit ternary number (each position can be blank, nought or cross) in to decimal and back again.
I remember leaving it to play itself (yes, you entered 0 for the number of players, I had been watching "War Games") whilst I was at school, and then played it once I'd got home again. It's wasn't great, but better than random. I suspect I hadn't got the feedback quite right.
It has occurred to me that modern NAND Flash encodes several different levels in to one cell, these could be the basis of a trit storage system.
As development progresses, you could increase the base of the system by going to Pentary {-2, -1, 0, +1, +2} and then Heptary {-3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3}.
<one quick search later> Someone appears to be looking in to: Pentary!
I should probably get my coat...
The lift had precognition so as it would know to be at the correct floor when needed, but that meant that it could also see that the building was about to be demolished so wanted to go down.
As with SCC robots they just ended up getting depressed and sulking in the basement.
If the elevator fails, there is no other way for the crew to get back into the vehicle.
Or, presumably, out of it, if it is non functional by the time it lands. Unless they are going for a variation on the Armstrong quote "One giant leap for (a) man"?!
One small issue that immediately springs to mind is one of safety as a high current supply at 800VDC is quite lethal.
If you accidentally touch a 48VDC bus bar, you will probably be fine. Touch an 800VDC bus bar and it will probably kill you.
For a sense of scale, these power systems are on a par with the sort of power system that is used for municipal trams!
The "AI bros" have sunk an awful lot of money are are desperate to show some use for all that investment.
MS have the captive audience that they can force it on to and then they show uptake in it because they'll count all the link-clicks that have caused Co-Idiot to launch as an interaction.
There was a recent article in the Guardian about the results of the cartoonist Martin Rowson (who has quite a large on line presence) asking an AI who his wife is (who does not have much of an on line presence). The suggested options are quite amusing (and all incorrect).
I asked AI to name my wife. To the hopelessly incorrect people it cited, my deepest apologies
A similar experience for me too.
With the caveat that across the bottom was ok 25 years ago when monitors were 4x3 aspect ratio. Now they are 16x9 it makes more sense to me to use an inch or so of the left hand side for the taskbar and maximise the vertical height available to the applications.
I think that speech has already been broadcast: Nixon mourns how Armstrong and Aldrin never made it home
The two original reactors were solely for the creation of materials for the construction of atom bombs.
They were air cooled nuclear piles using a graphite moderator. The moderators efficiency reduces over time but could be restored by annealing it (getting it hot), so at regular intervals they turned off the cooling air and let the pile heat up, then turned the cooling air back on and restarted operations. One day they left the cooling off too long and the graphite got really hot. On turning the air back on the graphite started to burn and then it was FUBAR. At one point during the recovery they took the access covers off and sprayed water directly on the graphite. The graphite was really hot by this point and it could have split the water in to hydrogen and oxygen that would then recombine in an explosion that would have taken the top off the reactor containment vessel.
The first power station at the site, Calder Hall, was also part of the atomic weapon program and so spent significant time not generating power but being used to create materials for the atom and H bomb projects.
...when you are in opposition and rather more difficult to do when in power[1].
I surprised that they didn't add "re-introduce national service" to the list too.
1) Given that the Conservative Party didn't do this whilst they were in power for 14years up until 18months ago, suggest it might actually not be as easy as all that.
Indeed.
Google, Meta, X, etc all have zero interest in child safety. They have 100% interest in their quarterly and annual financial results.
Whilst the ban could affect those, the fallout for not complying would, for the moment, be worse.
I am quite sure that they will be spending a lot of effort on working out ways around it.
Just a few co-ordinated phone calls reporting a drone sighting over an airport will shut the airport.
With care you could even do it without phones by saying loudly in a public area "isn't that a drone over there?" and all those far away lights will suddenly become rather closer drones, in peoples imagination.
The Spectre rocket was in turn inspired by images of the "Angry Alligator" that Gemini IX was meant to dock with but the conical nosecone shroud hadn't separated, so they couldn't.
Gemini IX Crew Found ‘Angry Alligator’ in Earth Orbit
The crew did suggest trying to knock it off, but that was deemed to risky!
So how do the engineers have fifteen months until a six-month timer wraps around again?
Because it's a sixteen month wrap around, not a six month one.
I do rather hope that a software engineer somewhere is now writing "I must unit test all my timer functions" a hundred times on a chalk board!
A back of envelope calculation suggests that they used a 32bit int to count 10ms ticks.
Here's a case study in to the failure, which is quite an interesting read and rather shorter than the full blown NASA report.
My attempt at a summary of the case study:
They had originally put this tank in Apollo 10, but then took it out again. In doing so they did the classic engineering error of talking all but one of the bolts out before trying to take the shelf out with the tanks on.
The lifting equipment (rather than the bolt) broke and everything got rather shaken up.
Then they retested everything and tank 2 didn't want to empty its oxygen out.
So, they encouraged it with the heaters (which is what they are for).
However they used the 65V Ground Control Equipment supply instead of a 28V one (the supply to the heaters on the Apollo were 28V).
The thermostats in the tank didn't enjoy being run at the higher voltage and failed closed circuit, so the heater didn't turn off as it should have done at 80degF (27degC) and could have made it up to 1000degF (540degC).
After that it was all rather FUBAR.
A few might disagree with that (although I realise this is probably the wrong forum to make this point)!
They've got four times World Rally Champion Juha Kankkunen; three F1 World Champions: Keke Rosberg, Mika Häkkinen and Kimi Räikkönen; the composer Jean Sibelius; the author Tove Jansson; film maker Ingmar Bergman, to name but a few.
One of the simple vacuum sensors is just a heater and a temperature sensor. The systems puts a constant power in to the heater and you measure the temperature, which increases as the pressure drops, because the heater cannot be cooled by convection, just radiation.
Ah splendid! A bit like the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain.
I can fine these:
Outage hits Amazon sites from Nov '99.
Amazon unavailable for holiday shopping madness from Dec '04 which seemed to drag on for sometime afterwards.
Would Ken care to comment?!
Having an interest in vintage vehicles, I seem to have developed rather more knowledge of thread systems than I really wanted to. So my early 1950s British motorcycle uses all of the following:
Whitworth (British Standard Whitworth - BSW) - Developed by Sir Joseph Whitworth and modestly named after himself. The hexagonal heads and nuts were quite chunky and in the early 20th Century nuts and bolts were being made with the next size smaller head.
British Standard Fine (BSF) - Developed in early 20th Century with a finer pitch than Whitworth and using the one size smaller head, but otherwise the same.
British Association (BA) - A metric system that starts at 6mm OD and 1mm pitch and then goes down in a geometric progression (as the BA number increases). Whilst the smallest used is typically around 16BA, you can calculate the dimensions of 20BA or even 100BA. When adopted by the British all the dimensions were specified in inches!
Cycle Thread - Mostly 26TPI regardless of size.
British Standard Pipe (BSP) - I suspect we've managed to inflict this on the rest of the world and almost the opposite of BA it's now specified in millimetres.
Although the British have now moved to the metric system there are still gotchas, such as the Japanese using a slightly different (finer) thread for some sizes!
As you can probably tell, I'm an absolute blast at parties (if I were ever to be invited to one)!
There are so many reasons for this being a massive challenge.
First up is that not everything that was done has been recorded. As an extreme example, some of the drainage systems in York were built by the Romans (what have they ever done for us?), so good luck asking the emperor where the GIS data for it all is! As well a the general poor record keeping that probably gets worse the further back in time you go. The work on the Botley Road Railway Bridge in Oxford has suffered from this in a big way.
Next up is that some infrastructure was variously defined as strategically important, so its location was not public knowledge (this is where the myth about the Post Office Tower in London being a secret location comes from - spoiler alert: it wasn't, it was marked on the public OS Maps).
Finally you have muppets who don't check (or trip over one of the above problems) and put their drilling machine through the infrastructure. See: Olympic cock-up knocks East London off Internet in 2009 and Obstruction of a tunnel between Old Street and Essex Road stations where the design of a building above a railway tunnel had several of the pilings going through the railway tunnel!
"One good method for dealing with the inherent flaws is to start a session by prompting the agent to review the codebase structure, documentation, and key files, before then giving it the actual development task"
Am I alone in reading that as "pour your IP in to the AI that belongs to someone else"?
Some numpty at IBM once managed to get the RJ11 modem socket next to the RJ45 network network socket on certain models of laptop. Those using them with dialup (this was a few years ago) were forever managing to plug the RJ11 plug in to the RJ45 socket and spending some time wondering why they couldn't connect and then finding that the landline didn't work so they couldn't phone Tech Support to help sort it out!
