Posts by midgepad

Double-detonation supernova could explain why the universe is full of candles

oddly

put.

(And how would a white dwarf pull mass off a white dwarf?)

UK puts out tender for space robot to de-orbit satellites

Collecting them together into a higher orbit would be nice

Rather than dropping unaccustomed quantities of Aluminium etc into our shared atmosphere.

Maybe something lingering, with aerogel and a solar sail.

Less one way...

Hook on, wind out the cable, spin, let go at the right moment.

Space droid up, deadsat down.

What could possibly go wrong.

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

the gap between

...people who want to say how things will be, and people who want to make things that allow various or particular activity, some of it new, is wide and being widened.

Very large lessons from a lifetime ago are being forgotten.

Xlibre fork lights a fire under long-dormant X.org development

My Gimp

Could be in one window, but then I'd be looking at a photo in part of a screen, with furniture, so no thanks.

My position

I'm sitting in my chair. Mundane, but a technology of work with some persistence so far.

I'd like a terminal in the top left screen, Gimp on the bottom right, Firefox windows on left lower and right lower.

And a text editor, just where it was last time.

Am I being unreasonable?

Oh, and I do like to run an X session from the other box, otherwise I get confused about mouse, keyboard, screen.

But I have views on window position

And I'd like some of the windows I use to go to the right screen and part of the screen, please.

Without me moving them each time.

What if Microsoft just turned you off? Security pro counts the cost of dependency

Re: It's all built on sand...

You exaggerate the necessary mental state.

However, getting the big suppliers to accept and deliver is indeed a problem. This week.

much of our evolution is in higher layers than genes

And selection doesn't need to be natural, or left to nature.

Whether you see the memes around antivaxism* as faulty or a competitive cognitive organism, that's where the need to remove, suppress, or patch is nowadays.

More Dawkins than his predecessor Darwin.

* etc

companies run for

The profit is more of a constraint.

What companies are run for is more various, including status, getting the CEO laid, a hobby, ideology, etc.

Breaking the nerd internet: Three overlapping generations of tech history – in one selfie

normalisation of actors

would be more general, subtle, and computable.

Your purpose not fit for people.

Tug reaches flaming ship carrying electric cars off Alaska coast

I think the last similar case was 2023

The Fremantle Highway, in European waters, and brought to port.

Confident statements that there was an electric car on board ...

ships or decks never catch fire

unless they have electric cars in?

If a car in the cargo has seawater washing inside its battery box and getting into the modules, I venture to suggest the ship already has a very large problem.

Different fires will have different characteristics, but the peak output of a burning car is similar, at 2-6MW, regardless of it's motive power, since it comes from the fittings, in the main.

An interesting difference is the burning petroleum that runs out of one sort, and spreads under other vehicles, and downhill if it isn't prevented. That's a hard fire to control.

Some provenance on the rumour or suggestion would be useful.

Probability of Asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon increases

give it a nudge so it does

it'll be another useful practice, and the echoes of the biggish bang would be informative?

Re: Seveneves from Neal Stephenson

A _lot_ of energy.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Not how the batteries are built or installed.

A marginally plausible approach if the battery swap method* of quick recharging caught on would be to ship them separately, but the batteries are going to be interesting cargo containers.

As would be loading.

The state of charge could be kept low, say 50%, but they are probably made and tested at over 80%, so that'd be quite a faff.

* Works well for scooters, with I gather 2 battery slots, and perhaps a convenient weight for hand-carrying.

For cars or trucks you pull up and a robot whips out your partly discharged leased battery, and inserts a charged one. Rather quicker than a tank of petrol, I gather. Not popular though.

Re: Li+ batteries

It is a bit informative.

Also a bit misinformation.

But first, you are not generally being asked to buy operate or use an EV. You are however being asked to stop using ICEVs, not all at once, but soonish, in order for the planetary ecology to survive in forms useful to us.

The UK Grid: total power demand is still well below its peak of some decades ago, so we are not going to overtax it;

BEVS predominantly charged overnight, when there is lots, and sometimes excess, of capacity. Not a problem (or rather a collection of problems easily solved over reasonable time).

Super gadget for taking one burning car out of a parking structure. Perhaps it could have taken the burning ICEV out of the airport park recently? Before there was running burning petrol from the others, which as with the Liverpool structure fire was a mechanism of spread, and I'd think a difficult environment for a robot.

Re: Since the Felicity Ace

The establishment the fire brigades use for research compared burning ICEVs and EVs.

They measured similar power outputs from each, peaking as I recall at 6MW

That's on of the two methods of lighting more cars.

The other is burning liquid fuel running downhill.

As to the logic of "the deck contained* EVs therefore the fire came from an EV", I hope the poster is not a programmer. A cause remains to be established.

* I noticed the report didn't say "only".

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

I don't think there is so much use of ClF3 that it merits abbreviating to what should be Carbon Trifluoride/trifluoromethyl (with either an H or an unsatisfied Valence).

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

FOOF is onomatopoeichemistry.

AWS forms EU-based cloud unit as customers fret about Trump 2.0

It didn't have to wait for Trump.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

numeric pad

Nothing to stop you having a separate one, is there?

Park your calculator -derived numbers where you like, and pull through big lever as intended with your right hand.

moles

I've not seen anything on the big pointing device shoved with a foot, in the depths below the desk. But it might rest wrists.

It seems likely that cycling quite quickly between multiple keyboards might calm wrists.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

Er...logic, and Brexit?

Incorrect toolset.

Re: Power cycling bigger kit is not a hobby I would endorse

Kettles:

The most obvious thing is if you want two mugs of tea (750ml) then put 760ml in the kettle. Remarkable how much the "power" is increased.

(And the external surface area to lose heat from is decreased, opposing a ise in wasted power).

We have some solar panels. Not enough to run a 3kW kettle, but often enough to run a 1.5kW one. That seems to me like a power saving outside the house.

Dilettante dev wrote rubbish, left no logs, and had no idea why his app wasn't working

It isn't actually harder

...to output properly formed grammatical English messages in and from programs, than to be overly terse or obscure.

A Humanities type might be good at that, but there's no reason the rest shouldn't be.

Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson wants AIs fighting AIs so those most fit to live with us survive

His Anathem contains some more topical internettery. On the Synaptic Reticulum.

Unending ransomware attacks are a symptom, not the sickness

Re: No Visible Effect????

NatWest are almost impossible latterly.

Computacenter IT guy let girlfriend into Deutsche Bank server rooms, says fired whistleblower

who else's girlfriend is she also?

And we're they in the room, or being reported back to?

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

revenge

Isn't it?

ISS resupply and trash pickup craft postponed indefinitely after Cygnus container crunch

Re: oops.

Not quite the same thing as a rocket launch.

From, say, London City Airport.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

your left foot being neither

Sushi, nor gimpy?

I think it is called

The GIMP.

As long as you call something Gimp* I shall have doubts about you.

* Doubts of the sort meaning I have reached a conclusion.

never

opened anyone's raw files, nor meant to.

Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

Re: why use a timezone?

Well, it may be a while before that seems wrong in some localities.

Re: The Open Source Definition from which numerous open source software licenses descend

A lack which anyone who distinguished it would be at liberty to distinguish themself by compiling, and if suitably licenced itself could be repaired or extended by anyone else.

Stuff a Pi-hole in your router because your browser is about to betray you

intrinsic adverts (more honest)

This doesn't I think stop adverts actually written into the page, with images if necessary, served from the server that delivers the page.

Which I find less objectionable, and also probably quicker.

And available for inspection by the page owner.

When the Web was mostly HTTP I made some use of the Squid proxy, which allowed analysis of the page, and replacement of some material with a short text: advert, or occasionally vile advert.

But building Squid with HTTPS and being Squid-in-the-middle is a step I've not taken, and I think neither have the distros.

Scotland now home to Europe's biggest battery as windy storage site fires up

Re: Reality Check

China is past peak CO2 is it not?

And still doing geometric if not exponential curves.

The USA seems to be working hard at making CO2, they are rather rather disappointing.

try Vanadium etc flow batteries

Hot salt isn't best charged photovoltaically - you could but it seems a bad idea - but by focussing sunshine on a tower.

So not great for Scotland.

Then it returns heat through the night which makes steam for your turbine, or hot water for your heat pumps.

Flow batteries OTOH look interesting.

gas is much too cheap

Tax it harder.

tide

There are no dunkelflauts for tides, nor do they wait for any man.

The tidal barrage across the Rance estuary paid for itself a while ago, and turns out a predictable pattern of power. For decades past and to come.

Having something like that, even if it isn't the whole of the Severn or Bristol Channel, is quite attractive. Given a couple of adjacent lagoons one could get clever with continuous power.

Re: @Doctor Syntax

Could you put a number on that "tendency"?

Combustion power stations are of course on fire 100% of their working time, and it shows, in radiation release from the coal ones and muck from all.

if giant, rarely local; if many, often on fire

For very low values of "often".

The likelihood of a fire is going to rise with the number of cabinets, but also with the number of installations.

The likelihood of someone bring there ready to do something will be high for a huge installation, and low for a small one.

I suspect arithmetic has been done.

dehumidifiers have interesting Physics

Using electricity to dry the air seems to be no less effective than using it to heat a tumble dryer.

And the power used is delivered inside the house, with an efficiency rather over 100% because the energy of condensation comes out as well, and the dried air is cheaper to warm to room temp than damper air - water has a high specific heat.

It gets complicated.

connections and curtailment

Scotland is connected to England, Wales, and the Irish Grid.

And windy.

So sometimes the connections, plus all the kettles in Scotland, are maxed out and wind has to be discarded.

Batteries near the generators allow more electricity to be captured, and it's release to be spread over longer periods.

Re: Back of the envelope

Part of it is degree of readiness.

If you need a thermal power station to deliver 4GW at a moment's notice it needs to be turning and burning.

With a day's notice it may not even need the pilot light on.

With a week's notice you could announce an unscheduled Bank Holiday.

Re: Back of the envelope

Not dams, per se.

You can't run surplus Grid into them easily.

Pumped storage, up to a point.

DIMM techies weren’t allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers

he is still robbing

you, therefore.

FYI: An appeals court may kill a GNU GPL software license

did they copy work for the product as well?

Or is their apparent recreation of something similar to a freely available FLOSS system all absolutely de Novo?