* Posts by morningtea

12 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2019

Lego's Concorde is the only supersonic jet you can build for the price of a fancy dinner

morningtea

Cobi Concorde

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the Cobi Concorde yet, which has been available for quite some time: https://cobi.eu/product/concorde-g-bbdg,2615

It's not as sturdy and sophisticated as the Lego Concorde, but it does have its merits. The wings have two layers of plate bricks with slanted surfaces, while on the Lego Concorde, they're constructed from a flat wall.

Lego on the other hand gets extra points for the landing gear: On the Cobi, it can be folded, but not tucked away, and the mounting is quite fragile.

Indian tech minister vows to stop Google removing local apps from Play Store

morningtea

300000 GPS Transceivers?

I wonder what they need transceivers for.

Are they planning to spoof or jam GPS, or is this merely intended for providing AGPS services inside the trains?

Wouldn't a simple amplifier/repeater suffice?

ESA salutes Galileo satellite system meeting aviation standards

morningtea

Re: "We improved [..] Galileo purely by retuning the software in the ground segment."

Complex systems will inevitably degrade or fail, particularly if they're exposed to the elements (or space, as in this case).

The goal is of course to make them as reliable as possible, but it's far worse to sustain a failure and not be able to detect and report it.

Aircraft have many layers of redundancy, a single GNSS failure is not critical under normal circumstances. Even if all satellite navigation equipment fails, it will be perfectly possible to continue flying, but it will certainly make it harder to navigate. At least for now - traditional ground-based radio navigation stations (such as VOR/DME) are increasingly falling out of favor.

We'll see if recent GNSS jamming events can change that, so more resilience is built.

Steam client drops support on macOS, but adds it on Linux

morningtea
Linux

Re: The entire x86-32 platform is declining

i386 is still a supported architecture on Debian, and it will be for the upcoming trixie release*.

But what comes after that, nobody knows... unsupported Debian architectures usually end up being "ports", which means that all compatible packages will still be built for them, and repositories are kept alive. But there will be much less effort put into maintaining the packages, and if one breaks, it's silently dropped unless someone steps up and fixes it.

* With a little caveat - official installation images will no longer be provided: https://lists.debian.org/debian-cd/2023/08/msg00005.html

HashiCorp's new license is still open source-ish, just with less free lunch

morningtea

I wonder what consequences this change will have on 3rd party contributors.

The FAQ sadly doesn't address this, and it also doesn't explain *how* they're going to pull off the "free after 4 years" hat trick.

I have contributed to Hashicorp OSS projects in the past, and I might still do so if I know that my contributions remain open source.

If they'll be locked behind a commercial license immediately, that's reason enough to spend my time elsewhere.

Now, I do understand their point of view, and I'm sympathetic with them wanting to prevent other companies from making a quick buck using their software.

But I'd really like some clarity on what this means for people who subscribe to the give-and-take idea of OSS.

It would be a bit easier if they'd have chosen an existing license instead of inventing their own, but only time will tell how that plays out in practice.

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

morningtea

I was helping out with recabling the light fixtures in a mid-size department store once.

They were also doing some other renovation work besides the lights, and one work team was tasked with removing old unused cabling.

At some point, an announcement came on, ordering a building evacuation. They hadn't close the store completely, only cordoned off there areas where work was being done, so there were lots of customers in the building as well.

I was quite impressed how calm and quick the evacuation went. We spent the rest of the morning in a cafe across the road until they let us back in.

Turns out the colleagues ripping out cables were a bit too thorough: They cut off a bunch of sensors from the building's alarm system, and that had triggered the evacuation automatically.

I don't know what happened to those colleagues afterwards, but I'm sure the shop owners weren't happy about their lost sales.

Choosing a non-Windows OS on Lenovo Secured-core PCs is trickier than it should be

morningtea

Am I the only one here who thinks SecureBoot is actually a good thing?

The massive mistake was to hand over CA responsibilities to Microsoft, not SecureBoot itself.

Manufacturers screw up the non-Windows experience in many ways these days, it seems, but they really are not always to blame. Sometimes it's the whole industry that's screwed up...

Dell's rugged Latitude 5430 laptop is quick and pretty – but also bulky and heavy

morningtea
Linux

Linux Performance

I'd have preferred to see actual Linux performance, compatibility and battery life here, not how well (or, in this case, badly) it performs in VMware Workstation or HyperV.

Depending on how/where it's going to be used, the device might never even boot Windows once...

All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?

morningtea

Re: 'Abandonware' written all over it.

But who would want that?

Amazon Lumberyard is dead, long live the permissively licensed Open 3D Engine

morningtea

License agreement?

Can Amazon actually release Lumberyard code under a free license?

I'm sure there's still some Crytek code left in it, wouldn't they get into trouble for publishing that?

Jackie 'You have no authority here' Weaver: We need more 50-somethings in UK tech

morningtea

Re: Electronics sector is the polar opposite.

I'd blame this on "modern" technology making it too easy for kids to get something done. Instead of developing complex problem solving skills early on, they only ever learn to go for the low hanging fruit and are completely lost when they have to climb the tree.

Modern technology should make it easy to get the tedious stuff done quickly, so you can focus on solving the real problems.

The mod firing squad: Stack Exchange embroiled in 'he said, she said, they said' row

morningtea

Re: Is this just an English thing ?

You are actually both wrong.

Japanese does have pronouns, and also gendered pronouns for persons. There are even some pronouns that are generally used for or by one gender, but may also be used to characterise a person (or oneself), independent of sex or gender. For example, a woman could use "boku" for "I" to explicitly express a less-ladylike demeanour, instead of the more common "atashi". If no such expression is desired, a gender-neutral pronoun like "watashi" can be used.

There's also a number of ways to address a person, both gender-neutral and gender-biased.

In contrast with English, where the address is usually gendered, Japanese also has the nice concept of referring to a person by their profession, rank or last name plus the gender-neutral "-san" suffix. This can be used almost universally and elegantly avoids situations where the correct address is difficult to determine.