The worst
Had a (potential customer) call last Friday. "My dog peed on my laptop, do you clean that sort of thing". Uhhhhhhhhhhhh, NO!
48 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Mar 2018
Cash is still easier to move around - the cost of a cash transfer for payment of an item is minimal compared to say, selling Bitcoin to pay for something. Cash is much more easily traceable because the systems have been in place for so long and the rules are well established. But AI is changing that - you want to buy something or move crypto around, it's getting a lot easier to track. Tax man must always be paid. Ask Al Capone.
No word yet on the boiler room scam business hiring - you know that the Covid situation in India is bad when our business from cleaning computers of people conned by scammers falls 90%. If the crooks can't even work, the country is in a world of hurt. And latest reports say up to 4 million people may have died of Covid so far in India alone.
Ohh yes, back in the great days of crashing budgets the command was sent down to turn all thermostats to 65F - a very unpopular setting, especially with the secretaries who's desks were posted right by the front exit to the breezeway.
One day we came in to find a damp towel placed over the sensor cover of the thermostat, and a secretary with a spray bottle of water. Evaporative cooling meant we had the warmest office in the building.
1. LEO latency sucks for FP shooters
2. Given the shear volume of the sphere relative to the size/amount of the satellites, the "useful" space around Earth might be .00000001% more crowded than it was 10,000 years ago.
3. The biggest hazard to satellites and space stations of all types are still going to be the tiny particles of natural space junk - the earth moves through many paths of comets that litter the orbital environment each year, for example.
4. Any Ham worth their salt still learns morse code, and has a 100 ft tall antenna in their back yard that screws with their neighbor's tv reception.
Or the limits of the pocketbooks of the era!
I laugh at hardware reviewers today that act like a 20 buck price difference is going to mean something to most of us who started back in the DOS and earlier days. When I got my first 486 - I spent $350 on 8 MEGS of ram, and $60 on a half meg of vid ram (so I could run real svga). And I still remember when someone came into the shop and ordered 128 megs of ram for the giant database he had to run. We were in awe.
It ain't over until the lawyers have milked HP and all out of more money than the cost of the write down in question. Expect appeal after appeal after appeal, and then a long drawn out settlement process - what I want to see is the Autonomy execs found guilty, and the judge award HP $1 or 1 pound sterling.
Inkjets and cheap refills are my way - HP has one advantage in that they do continue with driver support for even some of their oldest inkjet and laserjet models regardless of OS and updates. If I could get my spouse off color I would go for a cheap laser - we use HP cubes for our work printers and they print for ever (except for the one that had a 3 pound/1.5 kg drill bit dropped on it when they were installing HVAC equipment on the roof of our building - they had to fix the roof too). Gashed the top of the machine nicely. Still printed but what the heck, the roofing company bought us a new one.
How many hundreds of millions of Windows computers are there? How many millions of different configurations? I don't care what OS, be it Windows, Mac, Linux, Android or whatever, anytime changes are made a certain percentage of computers are going to have issues. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are rather random and relatively few systems are impacted. At my workplace we have had no users contacting us about this issue, and many are the type that call if they accidentally forget to turn the machine on and there is nothing on the screen. If it doesn't get a CERT alert and/or start flooding my techs with complaints, it gets moved to the "curiosity" shelf and we move on.
Umm, you double the amount of CO2, you are back at the age of the dinosaurs - no ice anywhere and much higher sea levels. Me thinks you lack an understanding of how much the impact of even a 5% greater rise in CO2 will cause.
450 ppm (High risk): “The OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050: Key Findings on Climate Change” summarizes predictions by climate scientists’ models: we have a 50% chance of stabilizing the average global temperature at a 2°C increase over the pre-industrial period if we keep concentrations of CO2 under 450 ppm. A November 2013 report by PwC, Busting the carbon Budget, says that at our current rate of fossil fuel usage in the global economy, we will exceed that limit by 2034.
Add 2C increase, and global temps are high enough to create great changes in weather and sea levels. Doesn't sound like much, but ask people that live along the coast what that will mean - add say, 10ft to sea levels, no, make that 5 ft, and places like Bangladesh lose huge amounts of land. Cities like Miami, New York City, Shanghai, etc, lose big chunks too.
The US has a falling output of CO2 due to the swap from coal to natural (aka Freedom) gas, though that will be somewhat offset as nuclear plants close and are not replaced, forcing the use of more fossil fuels.
And natural gas (methane) has a thermal retention capacity of 30 times more than CO2, so as we shift to natural gas, and drill for natural gas, and the warming melts things like permafrost which allows the plant matter to decay and release methane, that impact has to be taken into account too.
I am curious (but not yellow) as to any supposition being put forward by a true physicist, rather than a sort of normal person like me, that the initial inflationary episode in space-time during the first Plank Moment is related to this relatively new recognition that the physical universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate. Space-time is still inflating - for perhaps the first 9 billion years after matter started forming, the gravitational effects on space time were sufficient to slow inflationary expansion, but once a relative decrease in density of the overall physical universe due to a constant amount of matter occupying a larger and larger volume, then the forces governing the speed of inflation of space time started gaining the upper hand again. And all us matter based things are just along for the ride.
The ready availability of quantum computers is predicated on room temp operations - from what I can see, like superconductive materials, quantum computers need chilling to near absolute zero - not easily achieved without a big bankroll and technical capabilities well beyond the average hackophile. We've been waiting decades for room temp superconductors, and the quantum computing environment is a whole nother level beyond that. So not concerned about my stuff, or my local retailer's files for my credit cards.
Nation-state spying is what it's going to be all about. Later than sooner.....no, wait, my 7 year old grandson has made sure he has better system security than most government agencies. Why are we worrying so much about quanta when good old silicon is still all you need to thrive in this world of failed security.
and all those people in this thread looking up data in Google to provide examples to justify their answers here are introducing new biases in Google's predictive "AI" algorithm - at the end of the day the world is now different, just because of this one little query storm. When a (technical) butterfly flaps its wings in El Reg.....
GIGO - whoever has control of the datasets has control of the output, and there isn't a single data set that isn't biased by some rule(s) that has to be decided upon arbitrarily. Someone will round to whole numbers, for example, while someone else might round to 10ths, and someone else to 100ths - something that simple when run through any algorithm will create more and more distortion over time. Then there is the guy that, in setting up a simple data set (what data needs to be imputed to make sure an airplane will make it from point a to point b) assumes that the 20000 represents gallons, rather than pounds, of fuel), and the plane lands 2000 miles short of the runway.........
sounds like a money minting operation; why would he intentionally close down a vanity domain that people are willing to remain a part of and all he needs is some basic server hardware that gets cheaper to update and run every year. but then again it is summer down there, probably popped off to the beach, partied a bit too much with the penguins, and is now only coming out of his herring vodka haze.
Why would NASA have concerns over a failed return booster? They just care that the mission was successful - SpaceX is the one who cares as they are trying to reuse as many of these boosters as they can - and the landings of the boosters are still considered experimental. A controlled landing into water for a giant empty sealed tube that floats and can be retrieved for analysis is not a really bad outcome, just not the one they wanted. This is nothing like a critical failure during launch, not even close.
OK, every other month, a new battery or battery formulation is announced, yet it's sort of like the fusion reactor thingie, always "just 5 (50?) years away". I would someday like to see something that is really in the system and/or on the retail shelf. All we get are Lithium Ion + + (++++) because the 10 nm, whoops wrong promises, newer composition batteries vanish into the post "we've done it!" atmosphere.
Tired of cheshire cat-ions.
Once again, a piece of NASA hardware has long outlived expected service time, and it is experiencing a probable transient fault, and the article makes it sound like a major failure. Doesn't the Reg realize that Scottie is just pulling his "I'm giving it all I can" thing so that when he does get it fixed he will look like a hero?
I started out with a Kobo, transitioned to a Nexus 7 2012, and now have a Samsung 8" - I don't want to pay for a $600+ phablet with a screen too small to easily read a book, which my tablet provides and is primarily used for - as well as browsing the web and a lot of email (voice to text is convenient)
My phone is a device for calls and a camera combo that can do basic internet stuff if needed. My tablet has supplanted my notebook because it is so much more portable and powerful enough to do a lot of the notebook based stuff of years gone by. The notebook sits in the case like a the just in case fire extinguisher, waiting for that travel moment, which more and more the tablet has taken the place of.
If I am at home, I would much rather work on my 8700k desktop with dual monitors than the 15.6" laptop that cost as much as the upgrade to the 8700k.
Long live the $300 8" tablet!
I have a friend, has been chasing and recording severe weather in the US for many years. There is someone who is posting his video on Facebook illegally, and Facebook can't seem to understand where the copyright violations are and won't delete the illegal video from the their system. Please use your bully pulpit to assist my friend.
https://www.facebook.com/cld9trs?hc_ref=ARRY2p1-PvGmGbjDVh4YjN7vGM4kahoLWixPaD0LTeN0MMXrKE1TQPy2Og32BVdcI74&fref=nf
look for the post with the hail in the frame - it will be perhaps a few posts below the top, but it is quickly found.
I worked for a company that went through a very traumatic experience. One of their employees got their smock caught in a piece of machinery and was unable to break free - the site was gruesome and they went through and set up all their machinery to have an auto-stop if any tension even slightly approaching that level was detected. I knew long time employees there that were excused from working in that room.
The thing most SETI enthusiasts, vs. the scientists with interest in this area, fail to realize is that size matters. Even with articles like this, it is really hard for the average person to come close to wrapping their minds around just how much space and time are involved in even just this galaxy. And the universe is far larger than what we can see (only 13.4 billion years or so worth).