Posts by HammerOn1024

That awful moment when what you thought was a number 1 turned out to be a number 2

Go away kid...

Go away kid... you bother us.

It's time to track people's smartphones to ensure they self-isolate during this global pandemic, says WHO boffin

Pesky thing...

that First Amendment to the US Constitution: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

SpaceX beats an engine failure to loft another 60 Starlink satellites

Re: "Shows value of having 9 engines"

No. Nearly the same amount of fuel burned; energy is energy, work is work.

NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off

Nitwits-r-Us!

You have GOT to be kidding me. NASA... get your SHIT together.

Forget James Bond's super-gadgets, this chap spied for China using SD card dead drops. Now he's behind bars

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!

Four years?! Four years! Dear Judge, it should be LIFE, a short walk off a short plank into deep water or a rope around the neck and a short drop!

America: We'll send citizens cash checks amid coronavirus financial hardship. UK: We'll offer £330bn in biz loans

Not quite. It goes into the national debt and is covered by a treasury bond sale. The buyer is the treasury itself so it's like a self eating watermelon or "qualitative easing" depending on how you like to spin it.

As the economy improves, the bond is paid back to the treasury or sold off to the market.

Good luck pitching a tent on exoplanet WASP-76b, the bloody raindrops here are made out of molten iron

Iron Mining

Well then! Orbital iron mining will be the way to go! Just drop a ceramic caldron down to collect the molten iron, hoist, dump in the holding hopper and repeat.

One can take the hopper back to a refinery straight away; no smelting required.

Grab a towel and pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster because The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is 42

Ah yes...

The five book trilogy... brilliance. All of it.

Starship bloopers: Watch Elon Musk's Mars ferry prototype explode on the pad during liquid nitrogen test

Re: Wasn't planned

That's ok... it's why we test. Me, as a test guy, am not surprised. SpaceX's mantra of build, test, rebuild, test is great! Yes, maybe a bit more costly for development, but the results speak for themselves. Where's Boeing's competitive booster? NGC's? Lockheed's?

Yeah, testing can lead to spectacular finishes, but this is no failure; lessons were learned.

Boeing didn't run end-to-end test on Calamity Capsule, DSCOVR up and running, and NASA buys a Falcon Heavy

Testing Axium

Never be caught hardware poor. Boeing... shame on you. The minimum number of units is five (5):

- Murphy will take one

- Engineering bench testing will let the smoke out of another

- Environmental lab testing will consume another

- Simulation Testing 1x minimum, two (2) preferable since Murphy is still out there waiting

- Flight 1x; Two (2) is preferable... Murphy again.

So while five (5) is a minimum, an ideal is at LEAST seven (7). Seven... huuummm... a statistically relevant number... huuummmm.

Chipzilla or Chipzooky? If Intel's server CPU sales keep on shrinking, El Reg will have to update the branding

"Why would anyone buy Intel?"

Installed base.

We regret to inform you there are severe delays on the token ring due to IT nerds blasting each other to bloody chunks

IT Stands for...

And thus was born my interpretation of "IT": Idiots in Transition. To date, more than 25 years on, I've not been proven wrong.

Good news, everyone: The US military says it will be ethically minded about how it develops AI

Yes... we have. And a lot more.

:-)

Early adopters delighted as Microsoft pulls plug on Mobile Backend as a Service. Haha, only joking – they're fuming

Utter Bovine Excrement

"Microsoft has always been focused on enabling developers to be more productive, to achieve their ambitions, and subsequently make the world better for it."

Bull hockey! Microsoft is in BUSINESS to make MONEY! Nothing else. There clearly isn't enough cash being generated by the product to keep it breathing. There's a reason we dubbed Microsoft back in the 80's Moneysoft.

Jeff Bezos bungs $10bn at climate change after chump change for Oz bush fires

Go-Juice?

"And the fuel used by Bezos' engines isn't quite as horrid as some of the other go-juice found in the rocket industry, although the generation of the many, many..."

Really?! And just WHERE do you think the ENERGY to create that oxidizer and fuel comes from; the energy faeries?

First, one cracks water to get the O2 and H2 gas - lots and lots of energy, then one compresses the gas - lots and lots of energy, then cools the gas - lots and lots of energy, then rapidly expands it to liquefy it - very little energy use to maintain temperature, then in liquid form, pumped into cryogenically cooled storage tanks - OMG, OMG there's a lot of energy used here!

Cryogenic fuel is NOT about the environment, it's about energy content: To date, no oxidizer/fuel combination has the energy density of good old O2 and H2 burning.

I would like to see the actual energy budget for producing O2/H2 and O2/RP1. Since only the O2 portion of the O2/RP1 (Refined Kerosene) needs to be kept cryogenic, and since the O2 can be pulled straight from the atmosphere since we don't need the H2, I'd expect it to have 1/3 to 1/2 the energy needs of the O2/H2 bandwagon. And yeah, that does take into account the energy used to find, drill, pump, transport, refine and store the RP1.

Please educate yourself.

Google lives in an Orange submarine: Transatlantic cable will get by with a little help from some friends

The Repeater System

One thing that I've always had a question about with under sea optical cables is how do the repeater stations get power to do the job? One does not push 6,000 km without them.

Also, what happens when one dies or needs maintenance? Do they pull the cable up to a ship and make repairs? I would think that near impossible do to finding the cable post installation and praying it doesn't snag on something... or some creature building their house over the top of the thing.

Good news: Neural network says 11 asteroids thought to be harmless may hit Earth. Bad news: They are not due to arrive for hundreds of years

Re: Knowing our luck

Uhmmm... you do know that Huawei buys a lit of IC's produced in the US right... right?

Crypto AG backdooring rumours were true, say German and Swiss news orgs after explosive docs leaked

Ladies and Gentleman...

Ladies and Gentleman... HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahaahahaahahaahahaha!

AAAAAAahahhahahahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahaaaaa!

<falls to floor>

SUCKERS!

Parks and recreation escalate efforts to take back control of field terrorised by thug geese

Funny...

Funny... where I'm from we call them shotguns. They are very effective in removing said geese problems. The same system is very useful for getting rid of all sorts of unwanted lifeforms. Cheep to operate, train folks to use and quite safe to transport to multiple locations.

Environmentally friendly materials for the system are available too. And the remains of the offending lifeforms are compostable... either directly or post cooking and served with a meal.

Jeff Bezos: I will depose King Trump

Go away kid...

Per the legendary W.C. Fields: Go away kid, you bother me.

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Chicken Little Head of DOTE Spews Again

The "head" of DOTE is on his bullhorn again screaming doom. This guy does get old. And as to Agile being 'high risk', he needs to get out of his crack parlor and go see how it's actually done. There are plenty of DoD programs running this model and it works great; lower cost development and more functionality sooner than giant bloat releases.

He needs to go.

Quite frankly, Agile makes HIS people work for their pay... they whine a lot.

Will Asimov fix my doorbell? There should be a law about this

Harsh

"Brexit means we are at last freed to obey whatever the Americans instruct us to do."

Harsh man... harsh. It's not so much as we order you, it's just we strongly recommend, that if you want to do business here, we will be rather insistent. Think of it as speaking Python, Monty Python that is, back at you with a touch of a mafioso boss: One may not like it, but at the end of the day, we all will make money and proudly fly the bird at Europe. And at the end of the day, any chance to flip off Europe can't be all that bad now can it?

So you locked your backups away for years, huh? Allow me to introduce my colleagues, Brute, Force and Ignorance

The "Drop"

Had an old XT that stopped booting at school. Same thing; a frozen drive. So while everyone was running around with their hair on fire (Lots of homework on it apparently.), I picked the drive up, it was disconnected, and whacked it on it's side against the table. Everyone froze. The blood in everyone's face left for other areas. Everyone's jaw dropped. I was amused, after all, there was nothing left to loose. I plugged it back in and turned the computer on, it spun up and booted.

"Now then, back it up and go get a NEW drive." I said and walked away.

UK energy watchdog to probe National Grid and Scottish Power over fault-plagued subsea cable

Re: The future for undersea power cables

Actually, if one is going to go to Greenland, there's no obstacle for hooking into the North American grid. Currently, only China and Brazil have larger renewable energy grids than the US, and Canada rounds out the top 10 largest producers. And with the US actually adding capacity rapidly, contrary to popular opinion in some regions, spreading the load would be ideal operationally.

Over the Moon? Not quite: NASA boss has a good whinge about 'counterproductive' Authorization Bill

Testing... is this think on?

To the intellectual midgets who believe doing an Apollo mission to Mars is the "Best Way" forward: PHOOEY!

Get back to the moon and us IT as a test site for all things MARS! That means equipment testing, that means space craft testing, that means habitat testing, etc!

If it works there it will work on Mars. And if it doesn't, then it's better to be 3 days, any given day of the year, away from ones home base than 22 MONTHS once a year!

These mental midgets are setting anyone who wants to try for a direct Mars shot up for FAILURE.

'I am done with open source': Developer of Rust Actix web framework quits, appoints new maintainer

Owee

Boo hoo... baby got an owweee. Look. The nastiness everyone could do without. But PURPOSELY deleting bugs? Yeah, that would get my boot up side your backside.

Ignoring peoples issues? Simply having a list of bugs to be fixed and their order would address that.

Simple stuff here, so it's probably a good idea for someone with thicker skin to take on the job.

China tells America, with a straight face, it will absolutely crack down on hacking and copyright, tech blueprint theft

Re: Dealmaster

Well gosh, Trump is the FIRST president in 40 years to call China on the carpet for the IP thefts. And you're whining?

Grow up and smell your own hypocrisy. He is not an ideal president, but at least he cares about IP far more than any other president in the last 40 years.

Linux in 2020: 27.8 million lines of code in the kernel, 1.3 million in systemd

Dear "Maintainer"

Dear "Maintainer"

Nuts!

Remember the Dutch kid who stuck his finger in a dam to save the village? Here's the IT equivalent

It's called masking tape... :-)