Posts by midgepad

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Re: Christmas Fun

I* don't recall that at all.

* Retired GP.

British Army zaps drones out of the sky with laser trucks

It might have a capacitor.

The Challenger, I recall being told, has 30 seconds braking. I inferred that if it then let the brakes cool it would have 30s again, until it needed it's brake pads replaced.

Why do you think a tank wouldn't have electrical braking?

Plausibly worth having just for going downhill, but the bonuses of providing power for the boiling vessel and being alternately a motor along the lines of the Formula 1 car might be appreciated.

I don't know what the clutch life on tanks is, I suppose there's a torque converter, but you might even find a fully electric transmission is useful, as on trains, heavier and faster vehicles running on tracks that they are.

Get clever enough, and you run a combustion unit at its most efficient speed to generate power, making it smaller and quieter.

Submarine cable resilience board announced on same day maybe-cut-by-China Baltic cable repaired

Charges...

They might not now be the only people to plant charges near cables.

A few notations "Do not anchor in minefield" might maintain the attention of the navigation teams.

Open source router firmware project OpenWrt ships its own entirely repairable hardware

Excellent, and ...

... the licencing means that none of the clever people who think of improvements can be prevented from getting on with making* those improvements.

* Or paying someone else to make

NHS major 'cyber incident' forces hospitals to use pen and paper

Re: It shouldn't make too much difference.

It isn't clear to me that the library needs to be on the same network as the patient records.

Even if it is being used on the same desk.

(Indeed, working on two screens is probably more effective than one, particularly if the clinical record is designed to use all the screen.)

Re: Not the first

Really only one colour.

Again.

Re: IT System Design & Acquisition Failures [was: while scheduled procedures are canceled]

The NHS maintains a central list of patients.

Ramping seems a widespread problem

Ambulances being held outside hospital doors is widespread enough the Australians talk about the ramping problem.

This may ramp it up a bit though.

Another 'major cyber incident' at a UK hospital, outpatients asked to stay away

Bad software

Doesn't help doing medicine.

Good software can.

Who buys the good stuff...

India's Moon orbiter was shifted suddenly to avoid Korea's and NASA's craft

Re: The odds of an actual collision would be astronomical

But ... when the spacecraft manoeuvres, why do you think it takes its cloud with it?

You'd have both dodge, so as to avoid each others clouds.

I will say that's the first time I'd heard that theory, and traces of atmosphere, minute differences in orbit, radiation pressure, and possibly earth and solar magnetic fields might be reasons why.

NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics

I can spell

cite.

Re: "prevent future pandemics"

Incompletely effective isn't is not similar to "hVnt been shown to work".

But by all means go and do some Ebola nursing without a filter.

In 1633

we were less sure about what worked and didn't work, and why.

Since then we've learned a few things, well, the fact-based community have.

So yes, we do know what we can do.

Re: 'real-time surveillance system'

You'd need to show some workings there.

San Francisco billboards call out tech firms for not paying for open source

So is the atmosphere

...but it is in everyone's interest to maintain that.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Car repairers

The car repairman can keep your car until you've paid.

Mechanic's lien IIRC

CrowdStrike fiasco highlights growing Sino-Russian tech independence

Obscure functionaity

A bit like minor surgery = surgery on someone else.

A consequence of Open Source is that if someone wants to add a function, one they want to use, then they cannot be prevented from doing the necessary work to produce it.

I see that as benign.

(It doesn't ensure anyone is capable of the work, or that anyone else incorporates it)

Re: @Doctor Syntax - If Russia gets away with destroying Ukraine :o

I know more history than that.

I'm not so old as to remember the Great Game.

Russia's rulers do not want adjacent countries doing better and having fun, it sets expectations domestically.

Nor, I think, do they want a large reservoir of people able to accomplish the next revolution. The cull continues.

Copyright notice

Have you actually seen any Open Source software?

All Linuxes ship with a copyright(left) notice.

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

Negatives

Negatives are very durable.

One of their positives.

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

Ghastly,

are they not!

The first 2000 or so, last century, were individual and interesting, and reflected the somewhat varied approaches and natures of the partners and places.

Re: There is absolutely no reason

Up to a point.

Re: An idea

Vellum. Obsolete of course. What was the more durable replacement again?

German state ditches Windows, Microsoft Office for Linux and LibreOffice

LibreOffice

Would be application claimed to be being departed.

(Using word processors as ersatz desktop publishers to produce complex documents to send to customers or other agencies may not be ideal).

"collaboration needs a server"

Can that be proved?

Local government...

Probably doesn't do much 3D milling.

Bloomberg financials being inaccessible may not have a downside either.

Re: it's the DATA

Local government doesn't need to be very complicated in its basics.

It does need to be very stable and persistent.

Malicious xz backdoor reveals fragility of open source

Many eyes...

And one found it, and mentioned it.

Whether any found it and stayed quiet, banked it, we don't know. If so, they've been frustrated, also.

Theres a paradox about finding such a fault, attack, crime etc.

Once found and announced, it has been found. It can't be found for the first time again, snd yet we are told that being found only by one person shows a system isn't working.

A moral hazard

Is something different.

This is a hazard.

Is it unique to Open Source? (No).

Is its discovery specially Open Source? (Maybe).

Post Office slapped down for late disclosure of documents in Horizon scandal inquiry

Speed of construction

Ships take 5 years.

Aircraft take 1 year.

So building a carrier before the aircraft are available isn't daft.

Other way round, not quite so little.

(Much lower, since

I gather it floats)

Techie saved the day and was then criticized for the fix

Re: Things Resembling Locks

Likewise. Different model.

The lock is only

to tell people the door is not for casual opening, usually.

If there is no lock, it is hard to reprimand someone for opening the door.

If there is a lock (or other alleged security mechanism) then it is clear to anyone without the key that they need a reason. As indeed he had.

There's where his manager was the inverse of adequate

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Panels and battery?

I think for z month of diesel you could have laid out a few solar panels and a battery and ckntjnue to charge your UPS to this day.

Please install that patch – but don't you dare actually run it

Pink or silver

So put components in a pink bag inside a silver one to protect against external threats.

Ideally perhaps they'd not expose live points.

Barbossa's approach

"...it is more of a guideline".

Ford pulls the plug on EV strategy as losses pile up

I see above nobody will buy EVs because they are expensive, and i see above that 2nd hand EVs are going to have lost much or all or too much of their value.

Should you talk about that amongst yourselves?

Meanwhile in the last year I have seen one new petrol station in 6000 miles, can think of three that have closed within 50 miles of here, and see charge places popping up like a rash.

You'll be able to make a living selling petroleum, for a while.

Energy density and amount

After rather a lot of posts telling us the battery doesn't hold enough energy and is heavy, so low energy density, we have one telling us that if it held more in smaller volume it would be dangerous.

C4/P4/TNT no, but something approaching the density and total energy of 20 - 40 litres of Diesel/Kerosene/RP1 would match or surpass the capacity of standard uk cars (which are mostly not topped up nightly)

20 litres because more than half of a petrol tank is turned into heat - a wastage if you are driving it, and a hazard if containment fails. 40 litres because it takes longer to fill up.

Leasing magically changes economics?

I remember when a megabyte of RAM was a big expense.

Routes round here are electric

I think there are areas of the uk or even England where this hasn't happened yet, but the routes round here have multiple charging places along them.

There is no dependence on charging at the destination, although it is nice if that downtime can bd used.

Stopping for a pee has morphed jnto a charge discharge cycle ;)

Start undoing the work of the latter with a cup of tea from cafe or flask, and you can be on your way.

Chargers are popping up like a rash.

What I don't see are attended charging points. I'm old enough to remember when people worked the fuel pump for you. Given a surplus of cars over sockets at a destination that might catch on, and indeed anywhere that parks cars for you might return them charged.

Re: Once upon a time....

...so they kill us slower.

Trailer brakes

We might yet see trailer wheels that regenerate, electric braking as with the main vehicle.

(Given those can double as motors, it would be tempting to drive it from its own battery as well.

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

Scotland and wind

Currently Scotland can't export all its spare windowed to England, Norway and NI.

The connectors sre not big enough. This may change, OTOH there's more wind and tide/current there.

So setting up a "gasometer" or two next to an existing combined cycle gas turbine /steam plant and putting low pressure H2 into it when otherwise wind turbine operators would be paid to not make power seems at least plausibly sensible.

The 1.2GW wind turbine? Very Big Panrls?

I tend to think of a power station as being 1GW, but that perhaps raises steam in a couple of boilers, and/or uses it to spin a couple of turbine-generator sets, and each can be switched off on occasion.

I suspect your 1.2GW wind power station is made up of several turbines.

I've not seen one larger than 16MW mentioned, but perhaps they are larger. Even so, they'll be 1 to 4 dozen to the GW, and arranged in groups, and the groups into groups and so on.

Which begins to look a lot like a small grid.

The solar panels on my roof are rated at 300W peak, let's say we can have big ones at 500W. That means 2000000 panels per GW.

Now we could wire all 2000000 in series and put out 60MV DC directly, but I think among the very many reasons not yo the old Christmas tree lights problem, one panel failing means the whole string does, is almost the least.

They'll be in rows of several dozen to a hundred, and wired to a sensible compromise. They may not even all be in the same field!

So again, modules, redundancy, and concentration, but not magically a single machine.

DC and Carrington

AC grids could be arranged to survive the next Carrington event.

DC ones, I think actually cannot. It might not be absolutely impossible Physics, but you can't put a capacitor in there.

Japanese space lasers aim to clean up orbital junk

Things that are orbiting low enough to be laser ablated down...

...will ALL be moving at about 7.5km/s that being orbital velocity there.

Not "some of which"

(If they are in a markedly eccentric orbit, that'll be average, but you probably want to zap them st apogee. Good luck St thst)

Running DOS on 64-bit Windows and Linux: Just because you can

Re: if you just want to run some DOS productivity app

His work is productive, his children went through college. I gather.

White goods giant fires legal threats to unplug open source plugin

Re: So the washing machine connects to AWS

A remote detector in the washing machine just might be useful.

I'd prefer it didn't talk about it outside the house, though.

Boffins demo self-eating rocket engine in Scotland

Scheduled