Posts by hoopsa 45 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2020
Unless my reading skills have abandoned me, that article says that now they've figured out how to do solid-state LIDAR instead of expensive spinning mirror things, it costs about $1000 to add automotive LIDAR. That is about the same cost as upgrading your Model 3 Tesla from White to a fancier colour like er, black. So would hardly seem to be a dealbreaker?
For many years I exclusively used emacs; then for one reason or another I shifted to using vi and have used that for probably the last 15 years. I always recommend vi to new techs because it's (nearly) always there on the server if you need it. Come to think of it, that's probably the reason I stopped using emacs in the first place.
This article (and this post in particular) got me to try emacs again just now though. Can't work it at all. Trying to remember how to is quite fun though and actually it's weird how that muscle-memory is still lurking back there with just a little bit of prompting...
Years ago at work we had water coolers which had a knob which could be turned to set the temperature of the water. In the height of summer, I often found that of the water was actually rather tepid which defeated the object of the cooler. Investigation revealed that one of my colleagues was actually turning the temperature down because he didn’t like the water to be “too cold“.Arguing that he could just let it sit in his glass for a few minutes to warm up fell on deaf ears, so I fixed his little red wagon by the simple expedient of turning the knob to “practically ice”, then pulling it off it’s spindle and replacing it so that it was indicating about midway to ‘room temperature’.
And there it stayed. Apparently the water was the right temperature so long as the little indicator on the knob said so.
Yes, probably. We used to live in a remote part of Scotland with no adsl, and got a community group together to install a satellite link and local antennas to provide an adequate broadband service.
It wasn’t cheap, and without a grant we couldn’t have done it.
Then BT promised to bring ADSL to the area and under the terms of the grant we had to knock it on the head. Took them two years to follow through too, the bastards.
So, I installed Bitwarden and it was easy to import my lastpass data and 2FA and it seems to work very nicely.
However the Import did screw up some of my bank account and social security numbers (by omitting some fields - it imported notes, but not bsb and account number, for example) so if you have that sort of thing stored, go and check that it’s all there before you kill lastpass off.
Well I suppose they have to make money somehow, although I must admit I was a bit startled to read about the way they're doing it this morning.
I've been using Lastpass for a good number of years now. I'm sure that I used to pay for the ability to use it on more than one computer back in the old days.
Having said that, it feels like a matter of principle to move when they break existing functionality and force you to pay to get it back, even though it's not a huge amount of money.
Maybe I'll check out Bitwarden, unless anyone has other suggestions.
While maintaining fitness is a great thing to do, I’m not sure there’s really much you can do to prepare, since COVID seems to affect people to such wildly different extents regardless of their apparent condition when they acquire it.
Continue to work on avoidance, would be my suggestion - masks, distancing, hand sanitizer and all that. They’ve kept you away from it so far, long may it continue!
" In light of the MAX tragedies, it is unfathomable that there remain such poor quality controls,"
I think that was the bit that surprised me most. You'd think that after all that has gone before they'd be a little bit tighter on their software design and testing but it seems they've not learned enough yet.
Maybe; the time between Kennedy's "Let's all go to the moon" speech and them actually landing on the moon was only 6 and a half years and they were starting from a lower technological base than we are today.
I agree it'll likely take longer but I think technically it's feasible to do it in the suggested time. Whether it's politically feasible is another question but I wouldn't be surprised to see SpaceX (and maybe even Blue Origin) pushing on semi-independently.
I'd love to see it happen.
The thing is, they could still have used the Google/Apple solution and got one of their mates to make millions writing the app that is needed to employ it. But they decided to go it alone, even though they were warned that it wouldn't work as they hoped, because they wanted to gather a whole bunch of extra data. Instead of which they got - nothing.
The SQL Tool we used at work has an auto-commit function. I was often mocked for turning that off because 'I should have faith in my SQL'. But it always struck me as an accident waiting to happen and I preferred to commit as a separate step; that way I had the option of doing rollback as a separate step if something unfortunate had occurred.
For those who doubt that this would be possible, I seem to recall that Grytpype-Thynne and Moriarty successfully lowered the level of Loch Lomond by the simple expedient of getting Ned Seagoon to drink from it. While I concede that a Loch is not a river, their solution to the level rising was simply to make him drink faster and I see no reason why it wouldn't also work on the Parramatta River.
The only time I've broken a phone screen is when it got swept off a table and landed fully flat and face-down on a hard floor. My old iPhone 7 has some actual dents in the metal case where it's hit the ground, but no other damage. Amazing, really. I don't make a habit of dropping them, all the same.
According to CERN's own website:
"By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers - 2000 of which were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second."
So I suppose people must have been doing *something* prior to 1995.
I have been mocked for many years for habitually using vi even though many better editors exist. Ah, but when you're out on site working on a customer's server and none of the fancy editors are available, suddenly an ability to use vi makes you a hero. Not for long of course, but it's nice while it lasts.
I've got an old Audi in the garage that uses red lights on the dashboard at night; I presume it's meant to be less tiring or at least allows you to play U-Boat commander. I've got a new Audi that eschews all of that in favour of full-colour LCD dials that become slightly dimmed versions of themselves at night, so I guess whatever the reason was for the red lights, the thinking has gone out of fashion.
@Chris 239 Well of course it depends on the amount of play doh you can lift into LEO, not sure how much research has been done into the feasibility of this. I, for one, would very much like to see a giant play-doh "Tootie Unicorn" in orbit.
Also, shooting your family would certainly stop them from catching Covid-19 so I assume this comment indicates your tacit approval of the plan.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
