Re: "provide emotional support"
But the day some mechanical contraption is supposed to be my emotional support is the day I'm asking Dirty Harry to put me out of my misery
Do you feel lucky ...
632 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2020
Nearly 20 years ago I did some work for a customer during which I wrote some C code that was used to generate derived telemetry parameters for a satellite system that was, at that time, being developed. When I finished I delivered a comprehensively documented, carefully formatted C module along with the test results that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it worked. A fun couple of months.
About 18 months later I got a call from the lead developer asking if they could have a couple of weeks of my time since the satellite had been launched, but the code I had written needed to be tweaked because some bugger had wired a part of the system incorrectly. The satellite still worked fine, but the derived parameters where generating incorrect values. Unfortunately, I was busy on another project so I had to tell them that I could not be made available for about 6 months. The response I got was: "that's all right, I had a look at your code and it was so well documented that I could figure out what I needed to change in about 2 minutes - it's working now".
I've spent over 3 decades working in the space agency on the right-hand of the pond; much of that time involved working on ESA-funded programmes. I can say, from first-hand knowledge, that ESA would prefer to work with partners such as NASA simply because it is easier to do big projects when the costs of spread across multiple partners, plus having multiple perspectives can enhance a programme and bring in completely unexpected benefits. However, ESA has a huge capability to stand on its own two feet (more so than many detractors understand or accept) so while cut-backs at NASA are not great news, they are not as catastrophic as some like to make out.
(Mine's the one with the blue touch-paper for an Ariane-6 in its pocket).
In the same way that the demon Crowley encourages his houseplants to grow
Crowley never actually murdered his plants in front of the rest. He would take them around the others to "say goodbye" then carry them off; sometime later he would come back with an empty plant pot. The implication was there, but never the deed.
Mines the one with the dog-eared copy of "Good Omens" in the pocket.
As a post-grad research student in the 1980s, I spent 3 years taking tutorials on COBOL for both under- and (MSc) post-grads. That got dumped on me since I was the only person in the CompSci department other than the lecturer who gave the COBOL who actually new anything about the language (or at least, the only person who would admit to it).
Just so the students know what was about to hit them, I would start the first tutorial comparing a C "Hello World" program against the corresponding COBOL programming.
All certificates have an expiry time cooked into them; this cannot be changed and defines the life of the certificate. Mozilla have stated that the root certificate is hard-coded into that version of Firefox, so you probably need to go to a later version to get a new root certificate.
I heard about some stars that emit a lethal jet of radiation through their poles when they go boom, and these were calculated to be lethal for over 1 million LY in the direction they happen to aim.
That only occurs when a giant star goes supernova via a core implosion, where the core then collapses right the way down to a black hole. You tend to get high-energy particles emitted in a pair of very narrow polar jets. These are suspected to be the source of the long-duration gamma ray bursts that hit earth.
You are correct for a Type 1b, Type 1c or Type 2 supernova - they are all caused by stellar core implosion and the star needs to be at least 8 solar masses to trigger it. However a Type 1a supernova is caused by the deflagration of a white dwarf; it only needs to be somewhere around the Chandrasekhar limit.
Hmmm ... another long-standing KDE user here, using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Nvidia-powered laptop (so I have the latest-and-greatest KDE, Plasma & Nvidia drivers installed). I've not had any issues running KDE under Wayland, its been pretty much rock solid. However SUSE do seem pretty good at getting desktops to work the way you would expect, so this may be a reflection on their capabilities than Wayland.
Saying that, I tend to mostly stick with X11 since (1) I normally auto-login to my account when I power the laptop on, a use case that Wayland simply cannot handle for some reason, and (2) I honestly don't see what benefits Wayland brings to the table over a mature, well-defined and widely-used technology such as X11 (which I have been using for over 35 years now).
They've already brought space bacteria back. The Apollo 12 astronauts brought parts from Surveyor 3 back from the moon where they had been sitting for several years. When scientists looked at the parts they found them contaminated with bacteria leftover from the probes construction. The bacteria were still alive.
... reliant on the wild hope that a complex piece of equipment will still be working over a decade after the original intended return mission date for a plan that originally didn't rely on it still working ...
To be fair, NASA has a long history of over-engineering space & planetary missions meaning that they remain operational long after their designed lifetimes. The Voyager missions are a case to point.
...It all looks like it has moved from a real plan (in terms of schedule/cost/methods) into the realm of something that won't happen but no one is willing to admit that so they keep their planning meetings going anyway...
The real problem is that instead of sticking to a simple mission plan that is highly likely to succeed, they are now making things more and more complex because (a) it looks sexy and therefore might capture the public's imagination, and (b) they vainly hope that it might save money and therefore unlock the purse strings controlled by Congress. The reality is that they are forgetting the first rule of space missions - Keep It Simple!
Ahh, yes - COBOL. An abomination unto Nuggan, and must therefore be shunned.
Many decades ago, when I was a research student at university, I made the serious mistake of admitting that I had done some COBOL programming in the Real World. This unfortunately meant that my Comp Sci department had precisely two people in it who new COBOL - a lecturer who was providing courses in the language to under- and postgrad students, and myself. Guess who got to take most of the tutorials!
The biggest problem I had during this time was trying to teach the students how to work out which error message was actually the meaningful one, and how to identify and discard the many errors generated because the compiler had developed a headache and wanted to lie down. I think the record was 1 meaningful message embedded in about 200 spurious ones - again caused by a missing full stop at a critical point.
Read the article!
Auntie (i.e. the BBC to those who don;t know its nickname) did not use AI to generate the headline. Apple used AI to summarise an article published by Auntie and in doing so managed to completely screw it up in a way that only AI seems to be able to achieve.