
Re: Requires 20 years experience
“Kansas is going bye bye”
There, two film references!
442 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Mar 2017
"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!
The first of my home machines has now moved to Mint and the other will probably follow suit before the October deadline hits (although it could go to Win11, but my experience of it at work has put me off that idea).
Also, enough of the tools I use have Linux versions now and for the small number that don't, Wine seems to "do what it says on the tin".
The UK has four pump storage schemes in use: Cruachan (440MW) and Foyers (300MW) in Scotland, and Dinorwig (1800MW) and Ffestiniog (360MW) in Wales. These give a combined storage of 32GWh.
Work has started to upgrade Cruachan to 1000MW (using the same reservoirs so the storage capacity doesn't change).
Another one is probably going to be built in Scotland, the Coire Glas Project, which would provide another 1300MW, but with a capacity of 30GWh (full power for a whole day) and there are a couple of others that are at the proposal stage.
They *are* different pictures. The perspective of the two connectors changes from one to the other.
I think the damage is visible in the first picture (if you look at the high re copy), but the corrosion has run between the copper and the green solder resist. The silk screen is on top of that so appears undamaged.
The solder resist and silk screen probably came off when the board was brushed with flux remover after desoldering the caps.
"It's very easy to put all your big decoupling caps in a row, beautifully aligned with the positive bar at the top and curved negative side pointed down. Then you slap a bunch of GND at the bottom and slap in the power net labels at the top... Forgetting that one is negative and needs to have the cap flipped. Sails through review because everyone focuses on the "hard" sections and it just looks right."
Yes that's my take on this too. Has anyone found a copy of the schematics yet?
As the +16V rated capacitor had -5V across it and there was little load on that circuit it wouldn't have been picked up in Design Verification.
The "fun" begins when you swap the electrolytic for a tantalum. These are much more fussy about polarity and I have had the through hole version vaporise the orange body (with a suitable "bang!") on power-on, leaving you with the challenge of finding the two legs poking out of the PCB with no tell tale scorch marks to give you a clue that they aren't just a couple of test pins!
The photon propeller that keep it rotating so as it is evenly heated by the sun, is very ingenious too.
There are four VHF/UHF antenna that are painted black on one side and white on the other, so the difference between the absorption and reflection of the two sides imparts a rotation force on the satellite.
The court heard that the operation affected every owner of a TV show in the US, costing millions of dollars in losses to the industry.
My understanding is that these losses were from the lack of royalties for streaming the programmes. Which, as with Napster et al, all those years ago, raises the question of would the people using Jetflix have paid to watch those episodes via legitimate means? For certain, a percentage of the subscribers were using Jetflix to get the episode on the cheap, but there would have been a significant fraction who simply would not have watched the programme at all, which could be argued that it is not lost revenue.
why not just say "this is the price of the licence to use this portion of the spectrum"
Because it is very difficult to decide the correct price for something when it is such an unusual market. It wasn't the open market situation with lots of trades of a similar commodity that you could use as a reference point. An auction isn't a bad choice for finding that level in that particular scenario.
Also remember it was at about the peak of the dot com bubble and so money was (almost) no object. Then the bubble burst and reality set in.
Reg readers with long memories will no doubt recall the 3G license auction around the turn of the millennium, when the UK's mobile operators almost bankrupted themselves trying to outbid each other for the available spectrum.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for the telcos in this instance, and by implication that the British Government shouldn't have done it?
Personally, I feel pleased that the British Government managed to make that much money out of them. It made a change from all the stories of how they always overpaid public listed companies for services and represented the single biggest payment against the national debt.
The next common imperial units down from the mile are the furlong at 1/8th of a mile (220yards) and the chain at 1/80th of a mile (22yards).
So 0.7miles becomes about 6 furlongs and 0.07miles becomes about 6chains.
For greater precision you can combine with the next unit down (like you do with specifying someone's height in feet and inches) so the 0.7miles should be correctly described as 5 furlongs 6 chains and 0.07miles should be described as 5 chains 13 yards.
There is a sub division of the chain in to the Rod (also called the pole or perch) which is 1/4 of a chain so comes out at 16.5feet, but is not too useful here and is considered archaic.
Simples!
No, the Difference and Analytical Engines worked in decimal, which meant that any storage location had to store ten different states.
When Konrad Zuse designed the Z1 mechanical computer (a century after Babbage had worked on the Analytical Engine) it used binary, so each storage location only needed to be one of two states and that simplified the mechanism.
I do recommend going to see the Z1 replica in the Deutsches Technikmuseum.
microSD cards would be the way to go, rather than tapes.
Conveniently, Randall Munroe has done the sums in a What If?
Umm, what's a compositor, and why would I need one?
I realise I am starting to sound like Mel Smith in the HiFi Shop Sketch from "Not the Nine O'Clock News" all those years ago!
Hydrogen is not the way to go...
At 1bar and 25 Celsius is has an almost negligible energy density (In the old school science experiment that produces a test tube full of hydrogen, when you put a match to it there is a pop and it's all gone. Imagine doing that to a test tube full of gasoline!).
So you have to get it up to several hundred bar to get the energy density up to anything useful, this required a big and heavy storage vessel.
Then your fuel stations need really reliably equipment for connecting a store of high pressure hydrogen to the tank in the vehicle.
There's the problem that hydrogen is such a small atom that it just permeates through the walls of the vessel and leaks away.
Finally, as fuel cells can't produce enough power, you have to burn the hydrogen in an internal combustion engine and that then generates all the NOx pollutants that you currently get.
It all comes round again...
My spam-filled search index is bigger than yours! in this very organ from 19 years ago!
Perhaps the way to go would be to build it up in to something like the Z84C13 or C15 which integrated a Z80 with an SIO, PIO (only in the C15), CTC and some extra support logic.
A few years ago my daughter and I built an RC2014 and she the programmed it with help of some of my 1980s reference books…
Whilst it is a pity for the firms that depend on them, it is still an amazing testament to the success of the design that it lasted so long.
I did wonder about this too. 6MW is a fiddlingly small amount of power on a national power grid scale.
On average the UK (note, not Ireland) uses about 33GW (33,000MW) of power (all the time).
The power storage (Pump-Storage Hydro Electric) in North Wales is rated at 1.2GW (for about 6 hours, I think) and SSE are planning a new 1.5GW (for up to 10hrs) in Scotland.
171 miles of HSR for $40 billion?
That's only $234 million per mile. We've managed to make ours cost about $500 million per mile! Costings from this article.