Posts by midgepad

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Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source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

Here's the ugliest global-warming chart you'll ever need to see

paid denialism

Nobody, or no team of nobodies, would be this persistently annoyingly stupid without being paid.

Who are the paymasters?

Oil?

Russia?

Aliens?

Rapture Xians?

Or is it a conspiracy of all of the above?

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

complicated...

The prediction is that the asteroid will cross the earth's orbit at a quite accurately known time, but a less accurately known location. So there is some geometric figure which is at risk, which includes the cross-sections* of the earth and the moon.

As the accuracy improves, the figure gets smaller.

But the Earth doesn't.

So the probability that the asteroid passes through the part of that figure occupied at that moment by the Earth ... increases.

At some time the figure contracts to not include the Earth, and the risk declines to zeroish, or alternatively the figure contracts to not include anything but the Earth, and the risk rises sharply to unity. Binary, what.

Whether we can refine it to 0||1 before it provides the worked example I do not know. Probably someone does.

* Solid, plus atmosphere, plus gravitational effects.

dialled down

The Tsar bomb was said to be 100MT but among the problems that presented was that nobody believed an aircraft could drop it and survive the detonation. So it was adjusted.

A megaton delivered as 10 warheads rather than one was thought to be harder to intercept, and more damaging, and was said to be a targeting mode for MIRVed missiles.

SpaceX Crew Dragons swapped so ISS crew can go home early

Where would astronauts rather be?

In orbit or on the ground?

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

Re: nuts

For treason the nuts were ... involved, also.

Democrats demand to know WTF is up with that DOGE server on OPM's network

Re: Inexperienced kids acting like know it alls - what could go wrong?

How is their accident rate so far?

Re: Fishy

Unlikely. Complicated and expensive, and with known failure modes.

Whereas paying everyone (of an age) and taxing everyone is easy and in place.

Human?

Bots are rarely so daft

Why UK Online Safety Act may not be safe for bloggers

Re: is the existing act fit for purpose?

Mumsnet Conservative??

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

The armed officers ...

...whose paths are to their Constitution, and are around the GOP and administration?

No, I don't think they should be resigning.

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...