Posts by NorthIowan

NASA tries Curiosity rover's Mastcam to work out where MAVEN might be

Re: Speed Of Light

If they can get a few pictures of it, along with when the picture was taken, they can get an idea of what the orbit is. Then they can send signals to it when it is at least on the earth side of mars.

NASA loses contact with MAVEN Mars orbiter

Re: No one would believe

I've used 300 baud. It was way faster, but it didn't seem so fast at the time.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Re: Smart, But Also Bloody Stupid

I finally recycled my two 19" monitors to our local Staples a year or two ago. I remember when I brought the one in, the "kid" working that day asked what kind of computer it was.

Texas man accidentally shoots cable, brings internet down

Also likely, Hey, betcha can't hit that bird on the line up there...

Yup, I was right.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Re: Doesn't everyone have a pillar drill?

Ok, i had to look it up and found out it's what I call a drill press (US name?). I bought mine to make PC boards. Drilling small holes with tiny drill bits works better with a drill press. Your drill bits break less often.

And a drill press makes it easier to drill holes where you want them to be when making things out of wood or metal.

Let us git rid of it, angry GitHub users say of forced Copilot features

Re: AGI in the hope it will provide the "answer"

But we know the answer is 42. AGI just needs to figure out what the question is.

User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Wires will never go away

They go away in a flash, if they are small and you put way more current through them then they are rated for.

Japan's latest Moon landing written off as a failure after ispace probe goes dark

Re: Only the one laser?

> So, two lasers and if that fails, your on board system does the maths from reliable data, extrapolates and guesses what to do next.

Two lasers or at least a second altitude sensor, radar maybe? Something to increase your odds of getting data. And plan for dust getting kicked up.

And yes, have an on board computer plotting what it's supposed to be doing, and ready to take over quickly if the the data looks corrupt. Then it takes it's best guess of bringing it in safely.

> Crumple zones are not just for cars.

Or do it like they did on some of the Mars landings. Cover it with bouncy balls. ;-) You do have to make a ball that can handle the temperature extremes. So maybe you would need to use springs. Wait, temperature extremes problem again...

People find amazing ways to break computers. Cats are even more creative

Re: We had an issue with a rabbit

Raccoons help the squirrels out sometimes.

It was a clear calm day and the power company said it must be a problem with our wiring. No one else had a problem. So I check for voltage at the cartridge fuses under the meter. No voltage there so I called them back and finally got them to come out.

They noticed the fuse(/breaker?) feeding the power transformer on the pole had blown. So they used a bucket truck to get close enough to fix it and saw a hapless "red shirt" raccoon laying in the tall grass below.

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Re: Marketing

And are any planes susceptible to getting downed by this to?

Microsoft total recalls Recall totally to Copilot+ PCs

Re: Don't worry

If you still need the password it should ask for it often enough so you don't forget it. My phone does that.

Mozilla is rolling Thundermail, a Gmail, Office 365 rival

Re: pictograms

I guess MS got the hint about pictograms. I noticed a recent update to Windows 11 added text to the right click pictograms for cut, copy, paste...

Tech trainer taught a course on software he'd never used and didn't own

Re: been on many courses where the trainer has no answers

IIRC, way back when (before my time) chemists used to have a short life expectancy because they included taste as one of the traits to classify chemicals. So they didn't do well after they got around to working with mercury.

Apple hallucinated Siri's future AI features, lawsuit claims

Re: Given this....

So taking a page from the Windows playbook.

If they follow Windows 100%. They have to change how to turn it off with each update.

Earth's atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats

Re: Starlink? sats falling out of orbit and plummeting down in flames...

It is happening right now. That was the plan all along. Otherwise LEO would get filled up.

See: spaceweatherarchive.com/2025/02/19/unprecedented-starlink-reentries/

"First generation (Gen1) Starlink satellites are being retired to make way for newer models. “More than 500 of the 4700 Gen1 Starlinks have now reentered,” says McDowell."

Apparently getting 2 or 3 coming down some days.

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

New landing definition for "cratered"

Not as bad as the usual cratered, unless you are in the shadows.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: the storage packing up completely

Maybe they just need to require the laptop to have a 60TB SSD drive so there is room for the last 3 minutes of snapshots.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Re: notes said the RIGHT

They now try to eliminate that by marking which one they are operating on, but once in awhile they mark the wrong one.

Satellite phones are coming, but users not happy to pay much extra for the capability

Re: Maybe they should tell you what you're buying

I hiked to the top of Mt Washburn in Yellowstone Park this summer. Great cellphone signal as the cellphone antennas were on top of the ranger lookout station on top of the mountain. The view wasn't so good as there was a lot of smoke in the air that day.

Foot-thick wall workaround: Gigabit network links beamed through solid concrete

Re: That sounds great for exfiltrating data.

Concrete walls usually have lots of rebar (iron rods) in them. I would think you'd have to move these links around a few inches/cm to find a good opening.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Isn't systemd great?

I guess I'm younger, or just didn't get a hard drive as soon. I spent extra money to get a 100 MB drive for my Amiga.

And now days, 100 MB wouldn't be enough RAM to boot Windows.

NASA finds humanity would totally fumble asteroid defense

Asteroid 2024 MK

Is supposed to only get to within 0.8 LD of earth on June 29th. It's a "little" one that's only 162 meters (big error bars on the size estimates).

FWIW, meteor crater in the US was estimated to be 40 yards/meters. Crater is about 1/2 mile across.

I check Spaceweather.com every day and this one just showed up. So maybe enough time to figure out where it will hit. If it looked to be hitting us.

Underwater datacenters could sink to sound wave sabotage

Re: sound canceling headphones

Well design it as a noise canceling DC. Would be to too expensive to have Bose noise canceling headphone for each hard drive. And it would reduce cooling effectiveness. ;-)

Real-estate costs would up the cost of building on shore. And building on shore you have to consider hurricanes, rising ocean levels and tidal waves. All doable if you consider them early on and not after starting building.

One bank's brilliant upgrade was another bank's crash

Re: Extended Data Format Crashes System

So was that your first buffer overflow DOS attack?

;-)

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

Re: Hot or cold spares?

To expand on what Paul said. Satellites use old school spinning gyros to point the satellite in different directions. Saves on having to have lots of fuel to use thrusters to change direction. Especially important in an astronomy satellite that constantly changes direction to look at different things.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

Re: identify the guys working in the server room as suspects

Yes, I remember he said they were drilling holes. I was expecting a destroyed cable in the wall.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

Re: previous times this machine has killed a drive

I had one of those. An off brand PC that killed 3 hard drives. I decided it was time for that PC to go after the third drive failed.

NASA's Lucy probe dodges space traffic around Earth in gravity-assist flyby

Lucy in the sky with Starlinks

Glad Lucy missed all the junk in orbit.

Loathsome eighties ladder-climber levelled by a custom DOS prompt

Bill Gates

Wasn't Bill's comment that 32 MB was all you'd ever need for a hard drive?

And now you probably can't boot recent versions of Windows without more RAM than that.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

Re: Quite Impressive

I have fiber optic to my house and I live in rural Iowa. About 3 miles out from a town population 760 and the next town has about 7600 people. It's a local company so that's why we have fiber here. You can get phone Internet and cable TV from them.

Not an easy to read map but it looks like they provide fiber internet in most of a roughly 14 x 11 mile area. But there is a big hole in that of 5.6 square miles. They don't provide fiber on the lake.

Australian digital driving licenses can be defaced in minutes

Re: People don't run red lights when they know there is a camera on.

But I saw a person run a red light with a police car beside or behind them.

Not sure which because I was about to turn left when the left turn arrow turned green. I was glad that I saw them in time to stop. And I was unhappy at first that two cars went through the red light. Until I saw the second car was a police car with it's light on. ;-)

I have seen it one other time. But then I'm a bit paranoid at left turns now.

When management went nuclear on an innocent software engineer

Re: The place smelled of burned plastic...

This was my gut fealing on what was going to happen in Ellen's story.

Not to dis your diskette, but there are some unexpected sector holes

Re: I've never seen (or heard of) hard-sectored floppy disks before

Kids stop it.

You're making me feel old.

I Googled it and both 8" and 5 1/4" floppies came in hard or soft sector flavors. I'm guessing IBM PCs and clones all used soft sector.

Happy birthday Windows 3.1, aka 'the one that Visual Basic kept crashing on'

Re: At the AC, re: Zipping Windows.

Or Macrium Reflect.

Newly released Space Force data could save life on Earth

Re: go out in the rain and watch the clouds light up

I had a bigger one come down near me in late 1992.

I was inside so I don't know if it was raining. But reports on the news said people saw the clouds light up. I just remember the big boom. Sounded like a sonic boom from a supper sonic jet.

I looked out the windows to be sure neither of the two big (yard wide) natural gas lines within a mile of the house had a giant fire raging from a leak.

I remember the year because I was changing my first born kids diaper at the time.

The wild world of non-C operating systems

Re: Burroughs Large Systems There was never an assembler for it.

Learned a bit about the Burroughs systems after the merger with Sperry. Apparently some people had a hard time believing there wasn't an assembler.

It can take a bit of time to wrap your head around that. But hey, the compiler writers just need to know what binary to put out. Not much different then spitting out assembler code.

Mary Coombs, first woman commercial programmer, dies at 93

Re: Interference.

Most likely.

But valves can be sensitive to vibrations to. It would depend on how they were biased. If the logic was running in a too linear of a region they might perturbed by vibrations. And the drivers and receivers for the delay lines might well have had some linear amps.

Fujitsu confirms end date for mainframe and Unix systems

Re: mainframe emulator

Unisys went all emulated back in 2012.

A time when cabling was not so much 'structured' than 'survival of the fittest'

Re: Don't mix power tools and alcohol

Best tool for anyone drilling or nailing into walls. Non-contact AC Voltage detector, I like the adjustable voltage one. You can make it more sensitive for 24 V AC wiring or less sensitive to get a better feel for where a wire is. Never assume it's 100% right, but they are wonderful.

I first learned about them when I was having my dead dishwasher replaced. The installer used one to test that we had the right breaker turned off. The dishwasher was hard to turn on, so we couldn't just try to turn it on to be sure the power was off.

The return of the turbo button: New Intel hotness causes an old friend to reappear

Re: Kids!

Bah!! I maybe older.

My first pre IBM invented small computers was an RCA 1802 based COSMIC ELF running 3.579545 MHz. It could have run 6.4 MHz but by using the color burst frequency you could drive a regular TV from the "graphics co-processor" chip. Really a DMA driver chip that with the processors help could clock out bits and sync pulses.

All this worked with 4 K of RAM and about 2 K of EEPROM. I soldered all the chips onto the two boards. Only missed a couple of pins on the first go. ;-)

Speed was not that blazing as it used 32 clock cycles per instruction.

No shift lock key, It had a HEX keypad with a few other buttons. I wonder if the tiny basic cassette I never used is still readable...

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Re: Motion sensor lights in toilets

Motion sensor lights came out before cell phones had lights.

Back then you had to be quick or hope someone else came in for the next stall. ;-)

Perseverance rover drilled a rock on Mars and probably snaffled a core sample

Re: Qualifying parts for space ain't cheap.

It's been too long, so I don't remember if my professor actually work on a Mars lander mission or just was familiar with them. But he said the heat sterilization of a Mars lander took the electronics through 90% of their expected lifetime.

Fix five days of server failure with this one weird trick

Re: The "inspector"

Or pick one up by the hot end.

Well I was very intent on the next connection to solder. But I wasn't giving the soldering iron the attention it deserved.

After that, I finally bought a soldering iron stand with the nice spring loop guard.

I haven't bought new pants for years, why do I have to keep buying new PCs?

Re: When you say "pants",

They still make Brother printers, I hope.

I just bought one last week to replace my 18 year old HP. It prints and scans much faster. ;-)

The wrong guy: Backup outfit Spanning deleted my personal data, claims Cohesity field CTO

Re: buy a 1TB portable

Plan on buying at least 2 or 3. One can fail and you are out of luck if you find out after your PC dies to.

And you need to take a copy off site from time to time.

Houses can burn down, get hit my lightning or be damaged by storms.

Or even hit by a car. Saw the video of that a few years back. Car hit the second floor. The house was on flat ground. But the divide road by it had a curb and the car was going way too fast.

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Re: ensuring the diesel in winter ready

Some years it gets cold sooner than expected. Or there are newbie truck drivers from the southern US who don't know to not bring a full tank of "southern" diesel up north in a cold spell. Then their semi-trucks come to a stop when the fuel jells.

We know it's hard to get your kicks at work – just do it away from a wall switch powering anything important

Re: Why have the switch ?

Well if you can reach the switch on the outlet you can pull the plug. Most of the time. What if the plug only has bare wires coming out of it? I never saw a UK outlet so I don't know if the switch would help with that case.

The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout

Re: Fluorescents...

If you have an old fluorescent fitting just replace it with LEDs when the bulbs need replaced.

You can get LED tubes that fit in place of the fluorescent tubes. I plan to use the LED tubes that are made to be direct wired to AC without the ballasts. Some of the LED tubes are made to work with the fluorescent ballasts, but then you need to have a working ballast.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Re: The good news is that there appear to be literally trillions of possible battery chemistries.

That may be the bad news to. With so many possible battery chemistries it takes a long time to find the few good enough ones. And that does not include the time to figure out the non-chemical variations of all those chemistries such as making the anode/cathode with the right sized pores for that chemistry..

Oh, no one knows what goes on behind locked doors... so don't leave your UPS in there

Re: don't know what a floppy disk is

I can do better than 5.25" floppies. I still have my 8" floppies. Some let me boot MS basic on my OSI 8DF(?) computer. That is pre IBM PC that used a 6502 chip running 2 MHz.