Re: "could hear the telescope motors start humming"
My communal laundry web booking system - if you want to cancel a booking you get a confirmation box "Are you sure you want to cancel?" Where the choices are OK and Cancel.
271 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Dec 2017
Thankfully the M1 MBP series re-introduced all the ports that Apple locked away in the safe since I think 2016 or 2017, and ditched the touchbar. They also, oddly, fattened them up too, such that physically it's almost identical to the 2012 - even the ports, with the exception of no thunderbolt & USB-A, instead just 3 USB-C. It really was a happy accident my 2019 MBP didn't take kindly to imbibing honey sweetened coffee in November 2021... The only downside was the lead time for the M1 ended up being over 4 months, so it was back to the 2012 with the decaying screen coating (that being the 4th replacement screen for that issue).
Not a fanboy here but with the processor you're not comparing oranges to Oranges.
Last year's 14/14 plus had an A15. This year's 15/15 plus has an A16. So yes the A16 is a year old, but then it's a year newer than that in the 14/14 plus. If you want this year's processor you need to go to the pro models. If you went from a 14 to 15 pro, you'd be advancing 2 generations.
Sure they could put the same processor in the standard and pro phones and differentiate them in other ways, but they choose to give the non-pro phones last year's pro processor, which is almost certainly why the non pro 15s still have USB2, as that's what lightning is.
Clearly they never though anybody would be naughty enough to supply an invalid / rogue flight plan. I mean why would somebody want to do that, they* wouldn't be allowed to fly if their flight plan wasn't valid, and by filing a flight plan they clearly want to fly, hence pointless exercise so an impossible situation to arise.
*Along with all other flights in UK air space.
Hibernation brings you back to the point where you left off - that unsaved document is still there and still unsaved. Fast start, well applications may open, they may open documents that have been auto-saved from a checkpoint.
This new soft-reboot is just that, if you have a running system, you could do a normal restarted aka warm boot, a cold boot where the BIOS/UEFI goes through all it's init stuff, or the systemd-boot where you basically skip the BIOS/UEFI part and the bootloader. Starting from cold/hibernation then this soft-reboot has no effect there.
On gentoo (without systemd), you're free to restart pretty much anything you like. Upgrade core packages, restart the daemon and off you go. The only thing you can't update and restart is the kernel and I suppose init. Why you'd want to restart init after upgrading - init's job is to initialise so restarting fot the sake of init is somewhat pointless unless there's some serious bug there. As systemd can only restart with the current kernel then this fast restart seems somewhat useless.
If there's a zombie process, does that actually get killed? Then maybe that's a reason, but if I'm going to the trouble to restart & kill everything, I'd rather spend the extra few seconds to be able to simultaneously load the latest kernel / kernel patches.
Jumping to conclusions. If he was honest he would have suspected it being a Google car (good chance it was), and 'confirmed' it by the writing on the vehicle (although how hard is it for somebody to get Google Street View printed and stick it on their car) but simply seeing the camera is no confirmation.
I knew the suspect was reaching for a weapon in his pocket so I shot him. Turns out suspect had an itch just there and no weapon.
Point being, seeing a streetview style camera on car is not a guarantee that it is indeed a Google vehicle, or vehicle operating on behalf of Google. To say that's how you concluded it was Google is blatantly false.
"The officer present, Chief Landon J Dean, dutifully began pursuit – the speed limit on interstate highways is 70mph, 15mph in a school zone – and said he was able to identify the vehicle as a Google Maps car by virtue of the 360-degree cameras mounted on the roof."
I call BS. It could have been any of several companies who do this, the fact it has a camera on the roof doesn't identify it as Google or anybody else. The text on the rear of the vehicle, however, gives the game away.
Big Clive is just starting to introduce (mid-video) adverts in some content. He's be vehemently anti-ad interruptions, but having discussed with his Youtube 'handler' they recommended adding mid-vid ads to older videos as a compromise so the latest content can be free of interruptions but back catalog has interruptions.
Why even bother? Well, it gets more exposure for the videos with ads, so yes it's the content creator's decision (if they're monetising the video, else it's entirely YT's decision) to add more ads to videos for better exposure. So indirectly YT is forcing creators to add ads. "Put ads in and we won't hide your videos" kinda thing.
In this case, the launch 'worked' - it didn't completely destroy the launchpad. The vehicle got lift, yet several engines failed. They'll have data on the engines, but sounds like they understand they currently have an engine failure rate of X, so once X is low enough that there should be sufficient good engines to lift the craft then you can start full assembly testing.
Today they learned that the separation has issues - would it have been better to spend however long it takes to get an engine failure rate to near 0, then launch sometime in the far future, only to discover the separation has an issue? Now they can in parallel continue developing the engines and also investigate the separation issue.
Funnily it happened to me yesterday.
I'm the sole user of my car. There's a switch to alter the light setting - off, auto, parking, along with a light above it indicating the lights are on. Unfortunately this switch and light are 100% obscured by the steering wheel and to look at them you need to shift your head a good deal to the left. On the instrument cluster display, the only light indication is for when you're on full beam.
The switch lives on auto and works perfectly.
Took the car for annual inspection last week, and it would appear the inspector fiddled with this switch ultimately leaving it in the off position. Cue a coach frantically flashing me yesterday when it was approaching dusk, me bemused. After a minute or so, I tilted my head to see... that b*ard inspector!
Interesting question, if you bring the car back in one piece then insurance is moot. If you were to have an accident then that would be dealt with as vehicle taken without consent, in which case I've no idea what happens as I don't plan to borrow a vehicle without consent :)
Simple just like any other smart card (although manufacturers may go the dumb route). Key says "hello" to car, car replies "calculate the answer to X using your private key". Key replies with correctly calculated answer. You can record this, but unless the car asks the same question twice, your recording isn't of any use,
Then there's the relays used for stealing cars when the key is still in the house - it shouldn't be difficult to calculate the latency of the comms to decide how close the actual key is i.e. 1m away or 5m away.
Why ask an infinite (OK finite in this case) number of possible ways for which the boss does NOT want the cards sorted, as opposed to the single possible way the boss does want the cards sorted.
Customer walks in to a car dealer, asks for the car in red.
"Are you sure you don't want it in black?"
"No, red"
"Are you sure you don't want it in white?"
"No, red"
etc for all the available colours.
vs
"So to confirm, you want the car in red"
"Yes"
There's dynamic 'contextual' interfaces and boring static interfaces.
Personally I like starting at a fixed point and knowing where I'm navigating to, consistently, regardless of what Clippy thinks I may be doing.
Same for these modern vehicles with Ipads for centre consoles. I like being able to adjust the heater without taking my eyes off the road, as the knob has one function and is always located in the same place.
Contextual can be good if you are genuinely lost (although your state off loss may be down to the contextualness), but for speed muscle memory FTW.
EVs aren't exactly a good idea here. If you plug your car in overnight expecting it to be charged for the morning (as I expect is how the majority of EVs are used) then where do you set your minimum price? It ends up being a gamble between cheap charging and having a full battery in the morning. A gamble that's likely not what most people want to take.
Other processes that can be effectively started with little to no notice and shutdown just as fast could work well here. However I can't see anybody wanting to build a processing plant that works maybe 30-50% of the time on cheap electric and sits idle the rest of the time.
The point being for Sweden or the UK to get to net zero would take a lot of effort, but the resulting effect would be negligible.
If indeed one believes we are in a climate crisis, then how is reducing a small fraction of something to zero going to have any immediate or noticeable effect? Blocking roads to stop oil use in the UK and other 'rich' nations (so no plastics then either, better start growing trees 50 years ago to replace all the new plastic things with wood) isn't worth the effort.
China needs convincing to reduce its reliance on coal - chances of that happening by blocking a road in the UK or via political pressure? More effective action would be working with and helping LEDCs in moving to a less carbonised system offering the knowledge we have gained so far.
If you have one room in your house lit with filament bulbs and one lit with CFL. Which room do you fit out first with LEDs to get the greatest reduction in energy use? Hint, not the room with CFLs...
Saw a post on the faceache from a company claiming to be building a fence of vertical solar panels at FRA airport, so as to reduce shading and the impact to the flora and fauna. Seriously?!?! Waste the resources to build a perfectly capable solar panel, then nobble it by mounting it vertically. Why not use fewer solar panels, mounted correctly to get the same equivalent power, thus needing less panels and shading the same amount of area. Point being if you're panel isn't creating shade then it's not collecting energy.
"(The difference between the UK doing nothing and the UK doing its maximum to reduce greenhouse emissions would be less than 0.1C on the global average temperature - the UK only emits 1.1% of the worlds greenhouse gases.)"
Oy that's Sweden's job to punish their citizens such that should Sweden's emissions be 0 then the overall difference to the global emissions would be lost in the error bars. Ideas like the plastic bag tax because plastic ends up in the ocean and kills the fishes. When was the last time you threw your plastic bags in the ocean? Or just threw them in the nature i.e, not in the rubbish or recycling where they don't end up in the ocean. Sounds green on paper, actual difference? 0.
Yes please more unstable energy!
Another 'problem' with renewables I've recently heard of - when the wind blows then the wind doth blow. Windfarms produce 'free' energy by the bucket load. The energy markets turn round and say hey stop sending us so much energy, spot price dives (sometimes negative) so the wind farm owners get a pittance for their energy but consumers momentarily happy. Then the wind stops, prices go up, wind farm owners get a pretty penny per unit now, times almost 0 produced units.
Once again, the energy crisis isn't completely down to Putin, it's just been helped along by Putin thanks to terrible 'green' (aren't nuclear fuel rods /radioactive things often portayed as glowing green? :) decisions. Hint hint shutting down nuclear reactors early, deciding Russia's a great place to rely on for (almost?) 100% of your gas supplies.
You could say it's like you've been driving your car for 30 years and never had an accident, so why carry around the weight of seatbelts that serve no purpose. Get rid of the airbags while you're at it (explosives are dangerous afterall). You've been warned they do serve a purpose even if you don't perceive any use from them. Then unfortunately a moose (the 4 legged creature) runs out in front of you and you plow straight into her. You go splat thanks to lack of seatbelts and airbag, but if it wasn't for Mrs Moose you'd be fine!
It's a phased array so the signal from one satellite arriving at one antenna will not correlate with the same signal arriving at a different antenna (unless they set the delays such that they are focusing on said satellite). It does increase the noise though, so SNR suffers. Fortunately with radio astronomy, for most objects you can simply spend more time on the object to get more signal.
It's fiber all the way - 100GbE out from the two sites (then carried over links to the various continents with data centres who ingest the data) so by todays standard nothing particularly special, by the time it's complete we'll probably be seeing 100 GbE ports on consumer devices :)
Whilst Ethernet negotiates itself from low to very high, USB 1-2 and USB 3+ are actually separate buses. You could have a port that supports only USB 3+ and not USB 2-.
Things get even muddier when using adapters. I have a Samsung S8 that seems to have a not uncommon problem whereby it detects liquid if charging with a C-A cable and refuses to charge. Works perfectly with a C-C cable.
Techmoan recently posted a video where he also found some Minidiscs refused to work with some software when plugged into an A port (USB-A devices), but worked fine when using an A-C cable plugged into a USB-C port (still using the USB-A bus on the host side).
Back in the day God (USB Forum) created USB, which then had two flavours - low speed and full speed. Both being USB 1 - woe betide you got confused with a USB 1 peripheral/hub that wasn't what you expected. Then came USB 2, using the same cables/ports, but with a new colloquial name High Speed. Then came USB 3 with a same-looking USB-A connector (with more pins and typically blue), along with USB-C ports.
Then came a plethora of things using the USB-C port, but offering a multitude of different capabilities, USB3, USB4, Thunderbolt... Not necessarily a bad thing, but if you have a port supporting one of these, it's not instantly clear what subset of features your port has. Some laptops only allow charging on one of the USB-C ports just to confuse things more. If your device has multiple USB-C ports, why should they not all be identical?
To me it seems a mess, I mean it's nice that you can use the same USB-C port for charging the device as well as charging devices from it. Using the same ports for Thunderbolt - if they support it, but the naming conventions just seem wrong. Not that I have any better ideas though :)
Oversimplication it may be, but it's not wrong.
Indeed for the traditional Corrie-break-kettle-boil moments (which were so predictable they can be ignored) you need a PDQ ramp up of supply. For solar and wind - do you pray to Njord for some wind when this happens? Pray to Sol if it's daytime?
Wind & Solar most definitely have their place in modern energy production, but without any ballast to support their and the consumers' fluctuations then you need a rather responsive on-line generator that can ramp up (or down) - gas, nuclear, hydro (coal & oil if you're that way inclined).
"virtual inertia" love that! Describes well solar & wind.
The Grid relies on inertia from the large generators to keep the frequency stable - replace these with unstable renewables and expect consequences. Unfortunately most politicians don't understand that and seem to assume you can replace an X GW nuclear generator with X+(some extra capacity) renewables and nobody will notice (or just shut down the dirty nuke plants, don't plan for any replacement (yeah energy comes if you dream enough) and bury your head in the sand blaming Putin). Sweden + Germany spring to mind....