Posts by that one in the corner 2475 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
> Microsoft senior manager of a product intended for business use could not possibly imagine a scenario where a business activity needed to have a time associated with it
Time? Be glad he didn't ask if anyone *really* still needs a Date field.
Because whenever anyone asks a senior manager when something is needed, they always reply "yesterday"!
> Hand up, I bet quite a few here were on Demon's "tenner a month".
Sir, me, sir. On the list with my prepayment, so he could get it set up in the first place.
Not forgetting hacking away at Phil Karn's KA9Q software to streamline it a bit for DIS, then it gained a termulator, TextWin[1], that let you do more than one thing at a time. Under DOS!
[1] glad you reminded me of DIS now, as the bottom of that URL (the first hit for TextWin) lists one John Washington as the author of TextWin: he appears to have taken on the maintenance of TextWin (glad someone did), but Anthony McCarthy (sadly no longer with us) was the original author, as noted here (buried in a long chunk of text). I helped test & debug TextWin with Tony, so I've made myself a note to go and have a proper look at what became of it.
> people would pick a service on the basis of their file library and how much it cost
Ah yes
> per hour to download them from the online service to your PC
*or* how much they would charge to pop a floppy into the post with Volume 11 : Best of LaTeX on it! Far cheaper than downloading - and it felt a lot faster as well (no babysitting the connection)!
> BIX, anyone?
Nobody ever got raked over the coals for running up an obscene (really, really obscene) 'phone bill from sitting on BIX well into after-office hours. Nope, didn't happen.
> Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX).
That was a Great Thing. As well as reducing the 'phone bills compared to BIX (!) and having forums for properly local people to share news in (Bristol, Avon not Tennessee!), they released the offline reader Ameol, which made it even more affordable - and I still use Ameol as my primary email client[1]
[1] Ameol - it does everything that I want it to do, avoids things that I want to avoid - and the only time that it seemed to have gone bad and refused to show my emails (it is a Win32 exe and can not index into archive files bigger than 2GB - or was it 4GB?) one simple use of "Purge anything you've explicitly marked for deletion" and all was well. They just don't make them like that any more.
> I don’t understand why you would have more than one or two tabs open at a time
Right now, I'm working my way through talking to some sensors across I2C using Python - nothing World Changing, but I've not done it before. I have tabs open for the MCU specs, the sensor specs, the pin assignments for the dev board, the pin assignments that the software expects, the tutorial that I'm working through, the example code that tutorial is working towards, some more example code that relates more closely to the dev board I *actually* have, multiple pages in my personal Wiki so that I can quickly add a sentence - or a URL, with all the context that a "bookmark" totally fails to provide - about each item as and when I realise that would be useful. Plus a diary/logbook Wiki page into which I note down all the commands and actions I *actually* do whilst following the tutorial, because, hey, I'm fallible, I'll miss out a step by accident and need to backtrack. Oh, right now, I also have open The Register, as I'm taking a break, and sometimes a concert video in *another* tab, as I like a bit of music while I work.
One or two tabs? Heck, I have these spread over multiple *windows*, both for convenient grouping (boring old specs sheets stay together) as well as to allow the logbook page to stay open on the portrait monitor.
I guess I *could* keep closing and re-opening each tab, but that doesn't exactly make for a smooth workflow.
None of this is meant to be boasting - as I said, I'm not doing anything groundbreaking here, just playing with a sensor (and, soon, blinky lights! Yay!) and, finally, finally, getting around to learning a tiny bit of Python, like the Cool Kids do. But hopefully it illustrates that having more than two tabs open *can* be productive. This is all the sort of thing that I do *now* to keep on top of stuff - and I *really* wish that I'd figured it out (and had the physical means to do it) e *lot* earlier, when I was still working, especially in the early days. So much stuff would not have been forgotten - and would not have had to be re-implemented purely because it had been forgotten.
> Why not just bookmark stuff?
Because the browser's bookmarks list is utterly dreadful for organising and providing context for the URLs; no, adding folders of bookmarks isn't The Answer: which folder does that really belong in? It is great for keeping track of a dozen or so items, like the *correct* URL to keep up with The Register, the easiest way to read XKCD or the homepage for remote-controlling the DVR[0], but the URL for the tutorial I mentioned above is, for my purposes, important in at least three distinct contexts (two for the hardware it uses - and one just for "this is what I did in 2023"!); expressing that in a bookmark list just won't fly[1].
And by the time you've bookmarked a hundred items or more you are starting to spend time just searching for the URL in that list. Assuming you even remember that there is anything worth searching for.
You could start to edit your bookmarks, removing things that, say, you haven't looked at in six months. I won't do that, because, if this sensor and lights thing works then the hardware will last for years - but I'll want all the records about how it works, why it *doesn't* do "something, when asked to "make it do something to be different last time".
> Who cares if a 30 year old file isn’t readable any more?
How about putting together a memory board (and in case you want to dismiss those, consider funerals and dementia) - and you are handed a file from a distant, and thoroughly non-techie, relative of the memorialised, who happened to remember he had this sitting in an old directory buried on his hard drive: it is all the notes from when we got together 30 years ago and first had the ideas which she surprised us all with when she turned them into that book, the one that made her World Famous in Richdale. That file obviously means bugger all to you, Dexter, but now they know it still exists, it would mean absolutely everything to that group of people.
[0] grr - El Reg won't allow an href to 192.168.254.40 for that DVR homepage; it is obviously used to commentards trying to be "clever"!
[1] which is why I use a little personal Wiki: I can add a note about *why* I've saved this URL. I can add it into lots of different places, I can reorganise at my leisure. Other solutions for organising URLs are available, even websites (which are just single-use Wikis, aren't they? With the advantage that you are sharing all that information about your interests with the website operator).
> TIFF (yes even TIFF) ... TIFF is a container for a whole lot of options that you can shove inside and still give it a .tif extension.
Aaaaaarrggggh TIFF!
I have long, long been of the opinion that practically nobody who suggests anyone use TIFF can even say what it name expands out to, let alone what data formats it can contain! Tagged Image File Format - and even if Aldus (oops, Adobe) still play gate-keeper to the list of "known" tags that won't stop some clever-dick from reading and acting upon the Wikipedia article:
> However, if there is little or no chance that TIFF files will escape a private environment, organizations and developers are encouraged to consider using TIFF tags in the "reusable" 65,000–65,535 range. There is no need to contact Adobe when using numbers in this range.
And we all know what happens when you create data that isn't intended to "escape a private environment", especially if a salesman spots you using it..
Even in the last year I recall seeing someone urge the use of TIFF "because it is uncompressed" - sob, bang head on desk.
Sorry, rant over[1] - and sorry for that list scraping over your scars.
[1] Go on, tell us about XPS, we know you want to :-)
> I do not particularly want to pay writers of modern software to implement compatibility with file formats that never show up
Neither do I, which is why I said:
>> providing a way to dump to structured text (or just publish the damn format!)
That is, when you are about to drop a file format, complete the job and dump the information you already have onto the public (especially easy since the rise of public repos - SourceForge to GitHub).
Of course, you can argue that they never had that information to release in the first place - and I wouldn't doubt that many are in that position[1] - but then that gives you another data point to access whether you really want to ever again rely on someone with that level of competence.
> Yes, this annoys me, but not as much as it seems to annoy you... People posting here know perfectly well which formats are open or not and they knew that when they created those files.
As I've said before, "People posting here" are the minority, the Cognescenti, the Privileged Few - and lording your Privilege at the expense of all the other poor sods, the Ghastly Hoi Polloi who have just been dragged into this situation through no fault, and certainly no desire, of their own is the position that *actually* annoys me.
[1] I have spent too many working days implementing dumps because other people in the same group haven't bothered to and, guess what, during code changes errors have crept into code used to write the data! Surprise! So we have to hunt down what those errors are (dump the data to text - and grep like your life depends upon it!).
> I am surprised to see "XML" in that list...useless without the metadata...
Indeed.
Which illustrates that this area is still a work-in-progress.
If enough of us, politely, pass on these observations to the people drawing up those lists, hopefully things can get better (although my contact in the DPC does a very good eyeroll when I get to ranty about the whole subject of metadata/DTDs/schema).
> I suggest that this problem can only get worse over time.
Sadly, it will. And the impact that has is never considered by those responsible.
Archivists are concerned about this and try to publicise the problems, for example Recommended File Formats for Digital Preservation, but not only us the fight against inertia and "that is your problem, not mine, why are we paying you archivists?" but look at the list and notice the lack of "whatever is Word's current format" under word processing. Now, we all know of the news stories where one body or announces that it will no longer use proprietary formats when Microsoft et al swoop in and spread the FUD (heck, look back over suggestions in Register comments that we'd be better off using Open/LibreOffice than MS Office and spot all the claims that that just isn't feasible, being polite about the arguments against).
And that is just (!) when talking about Very Important Documents, ignoring all the data lying around which Society (and certainly Big Important People) considers trivial, but actually has a big impact on people's lives and is therefore actually worth preserving: digital entertainment, such as games. The death of Flash and the creation of the Flashpoint Archive is taken seriously by the Digital Preservation Coalition. Meanwhile, all sorts of bits of information are going missing because the people who *could* make it preservable, the software authors[1], consider it their right to be able to (effectively, and sometimes literally) chuck it away.
"What", you say, "literally chuck our information away? Nobody does that!". Have you checked everything that is sitting on Someone Else's Computer?
Records of interactions that you sometimes want a reminder of? Of course *you* religiously download your own copies of everything you might want to refer back to - but then you realise the email invoice just has the part number on it and you have all been relying on the online system's copy to have hyperlinked that part number to the full description page, until their sales system was Improved and all those links died: you still have the data but have just lost the means to interpret it, without which it is just so much noise.
And in all of this, Register readers are the Privileged Ones: we know that They do these things to us and (hopefully) take the time and trouble to take appropriate measures.
Meanwhile, the poor unsuspecting in The Sea Of Users out there are gambolling in the shallows, unaware that they merely on the top of a sandbank that can suddenly erode away beneath them.
> Yes, that will happen
Gawd, I hate that attitude: the creators can't be bothered to keep their own software compatible and your response is to shrug your shoulders and lay the onus squarely on the user: "well, if you *cared* about it, you would have bought every update and made sure you spent countless hours loading and re-saving every file".
And, of course, that should apply to *every* *single* *user*, no matter how techie they are - or aren't.
The creators who simply can't be fagged to support their own file formats, not even to the point of, say, providing a way to dump to structured text (or just publish the damn format!) so that everyone has a fighting chance of recovering old files - those are really annoying.
But that kind of "roll over and play dead for the pretty creators" attitude is simply loathesome. And that is when the attitude is pointed at other commentards! We Readers of The Register are the lucky ones, we are the ones that *know* creators will simply abandon us. To expect - nay, demand, else they clearly don't care - that understanding from all the Users out there is simply beyond the pale.
> People who hoard physical items, filling their homes to their own exclusion, are rightly considered to need help
Between ascetic minimalism and the point where hoarders literally exclude themselves from there own homes there lies a very large range of options. The same behaviour can lead to dramatically different outcomes purely due to circumstance: the avid collector of foibles is either an interesting old duffer, whose glass cases of oddments are preserved for future visitors to his country house or a leathery corpse buried under piles in the bedroom of his two up, two down mid-terrace.
With modern storage, we can all choose which route to take: and we csn apply as much organisation as is useful & comfortable to ourselves, right now: if you would *like* to be able to find that photo of the funny kitten, you can decide how much effort it is worth it to yourself, today[1].
But for the interests of the future:
> but most of the rest will evaporate with my own demise and if it were to vanish sooner it would not be a tragedy.
Find yourself an archaeologist and ask them to talk to you "middens". Take a packed lunch, you will be there a while.
The illregarded and the discarded are what paints a picture of everyday life: our future researchers won't be getting that from carefully preserved presentations from the movies or TV (if every pub exploded with the regularity of the Old Vic we'd need flack jackets to safely visit the village corner shop!). In terms of bulk personal digital storage, "discarded" is not so much the contents of the Windows Recycle Bin that you never bother to empty, it is more the files you put down, can not for the life of you remember where they were, but there is plenty of space left, just forget about them.
Even if we haven't got the software tools to automagically organise and make sense of all this stuff today, I think we can safely act as though it will become available, one day.
For now, we just need enough to keep ourselves supplied with virtual Victorian glass display cabinets - and have a Serious Think about how & where to keep all our old NAS devices so once we've popped our clogs they aren't just wiped.
Maybe the future would *want* us to keep putting PCs and NAS drives into (designated) landfill, just so that they know which techno-middens to dig in once they have perfected the datamatic trowel and measuring stick.
[1] FWIW these days I seem to spend up to day a week - being retired - just adding cross-references and filling in blanks of "things that I won't forget, no need to write down" in my personal Wiki, which has been keeping track of things for me since the late 90s; all just to make it work for me when I do want to recall something. Oh, how I wish I'd dome more of that cleaning up as I went along.
>> most Android users are on their own as the OEMs get bored of updating their phones so quickly...
> I understand your angst. But I am very trailing-edge, yet I looked around and my only 'fone with <=10 is...
Huh? How is that a response to the comment you quoted from? So you received a message about one particular bit of software which will no longer support Android 10, what does that have to do with OEMs not bothering to pass on updates?
Were you perhaps reading the statement from the article that "Fixes for these issues that affect Android 11 through 14 are available to impacted OEMs" and believing that meant all the OEMs actually *will* update *every* device that has versions 11 upwards on them?
'Cos, nope, Google having a fix available is nice and all, but it has bleep all bearing on the OEMs actually pulling their fingers out, applying the fixes and delivering them to anyone other than people with a 'phone that was new to market less than, ooooh, five months ago, that is about how long we can expect their interest in us to last!
PS this tablet is stuck on Android 6.0.1 so guess I'd better never turn the BT on again!
> There are various possible attack scenarios ... posting a number of images online and waiting for them to be scraped by a crawler, which would poison the resulting model given the ingestion of enough sabotaged images.
> "Where these attacks are really scary is when you're getting web scraped datasets that are really, really big, and it becomes increasingly hard to verify the integrity of every single image."
So:
* you are scraping the web for damn near every image you can lay your hands on (there will be some filtering applied - don't bother with the 1x1 tracking images, for example - but broadly speaking, every image).
* some sort of data within an image counts as "poison" and you only need a very small percentage of that to ruin your dataset
* up until now, nobody knew what this "poison" looked like, so nobody could have been on the lookout for it[1]
* random images scraped from random places *will* have random data in them[2]
* Now, what are the chances that some of the images you have all already consumed aren't accidentally, randomly, poisonous and all your datasets are already deadly if eaten in excess?
For that matter,
> hard to verify the integrity of every single image
if you're taking arbitrary images, what on Earth does it even mean to say you are "verifying the integrity of the image"? An image can be anything, absolutely anything at all, that is sort of the point of images, and expressing art in your images!
If, on the other hand[3], your "integrity of the image" *really* just means "a malformed file, the PNG standard says that byte should really be..." then you aren't talking about "poisoning images", you are talking about "your image parser is rubbish, what, did you copy out of the UEFI code?" in which case the scrapers should be subjected to Howls of Derisive Laughter, Bruce.
[1] even assuming that they *can* be on the lookout for it - I haven't read the preprint properly yet: it is possible that this "poisoning" is like some of the old antagonistic image changes, where they just fuzzed the image until the classifier puked, but never actually understood what was going on inside the the blackbox 'Network that upset it so. So those trials didn't provide a description of what was important about the changes and therefore what you could do to look out for similar "poisons". That is, they had a demonstration as Proof of Concept "you can ruin the results" and that was it.
[2] You say that I've poisoned that photograph, I say I just went at it with GIMP for artistic effect.
[3] As I said, will get around to reading the preprint, but right now...
> IBM CUA didn't adopt them till later
Rather, IBM gave up on CUA and didn't tell anyone.
CUA: Cut is SHIFT-DEL, Copy is CTRL-INS, Paste is SHIFT-INS
Windows does [1] honour CUA keystrokes (just tried those three in this here browser edit box) , but if you are using CTRL-X, CTRL-C and/or CTRL-V then you aint usng CUA.
Liam may well be using CUA, but I'd venture that is a dying art (says the person who admitted to using CodeWright and its decidely non-CUA, non-Windows-common-usage keystrokes: Copy is GREY-+ (on the numeric keypad) and always will be!
[1] although not necessarily all programs under Windows!
> No other editor handles large text files as quickly
Much as I like Notepad++, I have to disagree with that. And I will now come across as a total fanboi for *my* fave editor :-)
As a test, I just dropped a 1.9GB[1] file into CodeWright[2] and then into NotePad++.
CodeWright: no time to react, was just displaying the file, I had not time to start counting. Go to end of file: tap tap tap, counted up to three (as it gave a mini-dialogue box and progress bar explaining that it would be a moment) and ta-da; after that first pass, skipping top to bottom is as fast as I type Home-Home-Home then End-End-End.
Notepad++: on first load, had time to watch the swirly thing for a count of nine (sort of seconds); no progress info. After that, Ctrl-Home and Ctrl-End are just as fast (as it is all in RAM these days, of course; CodeWright was working that well when the entire hard drive wasn't 1.9GB in size!).
[1] Yes, it *is* a binary file - a YT video about "Improv Everywhere" - but I'm not interested in an editor that can't hack binary!
[2] Yes, CodeWright! Maybe these days it doesn't get as many new features as NotePad++, does but since 1992 I've sort of built up muscle memory for the keystrokes; if anyone has a CW32 keymap (the mapping that uses Alt-L for line select etc) for NP++ I'd love to know of it: maybe I could swap over: NP++ *did* open a 4.7GB file (count of 21) which CW32 politely refuses...
> partition for the OS & another for my data.
And then Windows makes it harder and harder to not keep everything on the C: drive (not to mention an apparent decrease in installers not bothering to provide an option to choose the install path - you are really not helping, guys; and as for that little scrote who decided that Arduino should ever be less than 100% portable...)
> Footnote: Borland did also develop OWL which was something of a dead end. But if you compare it to the competitor of the day - MFC
OWL was released before MFC, it really didn't have a competitor for a good year or so.
Sadly, the story at the time (which I don't have a citation for - anyone?) was that Mucrosoft had developed a Windows framework that was on par with OWL (basically being nicely Object-oriented) but it was chucked away because it didn't "look like proper Windows programming", so they spent 2 & 1/2[1] days writing MFC and making sure that all the data members were public...
Then, because it was "official", MFC steamrollered OWL (making OWL into a dead-end unless you were allowed to be a maverick). Even after Paul DiLascia's book "Windows++", published the same year as MFC, showed just how much nicer Windows coding could be, even if you weren't fortunate enough to have BCC and OWL.
[1] well, it couldn't have taken any longer to do MFC v1! Even years later, MFC was refusing to make full use of basic stuff, like const ref parameters, causing so much pointless object copying. You could markedly speed up programs that did a lot of, say, time-based calculations by duplicating the code for CTime then adding in all the missing constness and refness. At least they provided the source, so that was possible, although it probably went against the licence.
> do you want to watch a video of someone else watching that video you just watched.
How else are you going to find out if you watched the original video properly?
Did you gasp at the correct time? Get outraged as expected? Laugh at the things you were supposed to (and not at the "serious" bits)?
YouTube are just thinking about your best interests, ensuring you know how to fit neatly into your little box[1]
[1] PS don't listen to them! Break out of your assigned box! They can't stop <carrier lost>
> a simple "hello world" level program compiles to.... about 130MB.
Hmm, sounds like you've left something out; according to Microsoft coding guidelines, it should waaaay larger than that.
You don't seem to be using upper case, that would shave a few megabytes off, but not quite so much as you have managed. Are you absolutely certain you have *both* words showing up when you run the app? Both "hello" *and* "world"?
> Why put yourself in a position where you have to depend on one guy who may have to give up supporting this one day for any number of reasons?
>> The developer claims to have resolved many of the bugs and issues that plagued earlier versions of Tiny11 and, importantly, it appears that the Windows Update functionality is now working. This means the flow of fixes from Microsoft should – and we use the word "should" advisedly – keep the installation secure.
So right now, today, it isn't up quite up to snuff - which means it is "only" of interest to those who want to play around, shove it onto something small lying around unused. *NOT* anyone who is worrying about ongoing support and whether he will ever demonstrate that the update issues really are all wrinkle-free.
IF he gets the wrinkles out - well, you have a (teeny), but entirely Microsoft, Windows install which is getting the updates from Microsoft. Unless you think you will feel a real need to do a total re-install any time soon, and that that *has* to be from a Tiny11 cut of a later copy of Win11 than he has worked his magic on (instead of just using the latest installer and letting the update process run for a while) then his job is done, you don't need this "one guy" to do anything more for you.
IF he DOESN'T get those wrinkles out, then you won't have installed it anyway - and once again, you are not reliant on this "one guy" to keep supporting you.
> Is it so inconceiveable that government employees actually do their job and deliver the plates themselves?
Huh? It is the job of the employees of the Transport Agency to go out and deliver the plates themselves? Should they be hand-delivering all their other postable items as well? That sounds like it might take rather a lot of their time away from getting on with the rest of their regulatory work.
Or are you referring to the postal workers? PostNord is a state-owned company, but that doesn't make them "government employees" in any way that is different or special to employees of, say, any of the other parcel carriers (or even indicate *which* government they employees of - 40% of PostNord is owned by the Danish, so that is what - most of the posties' left hand sides?).
Or are you just saying the postal workers shouldn't be allowed to strike?
> but to try and make it seem like the union is targeting Tesla specifically is just more of the usual shite people have come to expect from anything involving Twitler.
But "the union"[1] *is* explicitly targeting Tesla, that is sort of the whole point! And more power to them.
[1] which particular union you are referring to is a bit ambiguous, but from the one supporting the original group who are striking for better conditions, to all the ones acting in sympathy towards the first union, yes, they are all targeting Tesla.
> allow Tesla to collect the licence plates themselves. Though I can't help feeling that might just backfire.
Like trying to figure where the plates are?
The postal workers took delivery but, you know, the old memory just ain't what it was, we're sure we just put them down for a moment. Never mind, you Tesla blokes look like bright lads, you'll find them. Dearie me, we never did get around to fixing the lighting circuits in there, did we. Careful now, that door tend to slam shut then it sticks something rotten - what, no, sorry, the chippies are out in sympathy, along with the sparks, but feel around, when you find a stuffed tiger you're getting warmer.
> Said exec believed her importance to the company should be reflected in "the square footage of her office."
Knowing that sort of person, had a happy daydream about movable partition walls being tied into the company dashboard metrics for a bit of real-time, real-world infographics.
Hmm, CyberMonday; just looking for any sales on pneumatic rams...
> nasa seems to think it's important to model this shit
Well, yes, of course.
NASA - and every responsible engineering project - will model everything they can. NASA have been modelling this stuff for decades[1] - surely this can not be a surprise to you?
As expected, any time somebody comes up with new models, especially ones like the one reported on (with good matching of the model to previous physical reality), NASA will take it on board. And, yes of course they'll then use it to test claims such as the ones I've put forwards. Maybe even the wild idea at the end!
If - note that word, if - they do find that some current lander designs and/or descent profiles don't just safely blow stuff away but instead are indicated to cause problematic damage then, gosh, gee, they will inform the relevant parties, who can then modify the designs and profiles to bring them into acceptable bounds. After all, we know for an absolute fact that there is an workably safe design/profile combo, 'cos it was used successfully more than once. We can also reasonably assume that there are unsafe ones (trivially so - unsafe descent profile: don't turn on the rocket again after decelerating from Lunar orbit!). Models like this latest one help to draw the bounds between the two.
> make sure your not talking out your ass.
You leave my donkey out of this! Perhaps you meant to say "make sure you're not talking out of your arse"? Note the apostrophe and extra letter 'e'.
[1] NASA have only been modelling for that short a time because NASA has only existed for decades! Simpler models have been used for over a century - Tsiolkovsky's famous equation dates from the 1890s - and improvements have been made ever since, especially as new data became available: after all, there were still otherwise respectable people who fully expected Apollo 11's LEM to sink deep into the dust! The models were updated as soon as we saw how deep that famous footprint was.
> They can't even build new Saturn 5 engines anymore
It is not considered cost-effective to build to that design any more
> so yes a load of experience was lost, like tears in rain...
Please learn to distinguish between "experience" and "tooling, workshops, test fittings, ..." which were indeed removed/demolished/used for something else.
All the same reasons we can't even build a Model T Ford anymore, and most certainly not at the rate they used to roll off the production line (which, by extending your logic, would appear to mean we can't currently build anything better than a Model T...).
> We all know the moon is covered in dust
Well, until someone lands a rocket on it, then - as you keep telling us - dust gets blown away. Anything that isn't blown away on landing isn't going anywhere on takeoff (definitely not for the first missions, where the whole point is to leave stuff behind, so taking off with a much lighter craft).
Keep landing around the same area and you'll blow away all the horrid dust and be left with a nice rocky area to use as a pad. No need for any of this silly concrete stuff, which is only there because they didn't bother digging the Earth-side launch complex down to the bedrock (life - it just gets in the way, making all this soft and soggy stuff on top).
Just an idea: you could even land lots and lots of times around the circumference of a great big circle and push all that dust into a great big pile in the middle. If you planned ahead and dropped a few domes and cylinders there first, you've just buried them under a big pile of shielding, useful for hiding (stuff) in when that big old Sun gets a bit feisty.
> it will uck this dust into its rockets
Rockets famously don't "uck" - they don't suck either! Rockets are more of a blowy sort of thing.
> why did NASA use a two part design for the lunar module
To avoid carrying unnecessary bits of the LEM back up from the Lunar surface to rendezvous with the Command Module.
You may want to read up on Tsiolkovsky's Rocket Equation[1]: basically, it shows that carrying the empties back from the Moon would mean a larger amount of fuel needed in the descent stage, a larger rocket with more thrust to handle that extra fuel, which would need a bit more fuel to support the bigger engine which needs a slightly bigger engine to support the fuel which needs .... And once you've figured out how heavy the entire LEM would be, you get to do the same calculations for the delta V from the Support Module to get safely into Lunar orbit. And then you have to do it all over again for the Saturn V stages, starting from the top and working your way down the stack.
[1] or just work out the Rocket Equation from scratch yourself - even if you don't get precisely the correct result, that exercise will be useful for you to understand these things
PS
> Your reply is broken....
Hmm, the URL worked for me - did you need me to type the HTML so you could click instead of copy'n'paste? That might have been a friendly thing to do, but given how much of a pain it is on a touch keyboard, I thought you'd ok manage without.
> on the last launch some of the engines got fucked by the reflected blast throwing shit into the engines.
First - the last launch? Of Starship on its own motors from Earth? And its engines got fucked? You sure you aren't thinking about the last launch of the Starship atop the Falcon Heavy? Two completely different situations.
The question of which launch you are talking about aside: that reflected blast - and the shit - was being carried on/in/by the thick atmosphere that was rushing every which way being pushed by the fiery stuff coming out of the engines. The blast was even reflecting off the atmosphere - what we call "shock waves" and even "sound".
Guess what the Moon lacks?
And, before you say it, Mars has far less of a problem in that regard *and* there is time to tweak things if combined experience from both Earth and Lunar launches shows how things could be improved (oh, and "tweaked" can be as simple - well, I say simple - as changing the firing order of the engines).
Well, we do have a long history of using aerobraking manned missions into the Earth's atmosphere (as in, AFAIK, all of them) and it has proven very useful (ref the recent use of controlled skips to navigate during re-entry), so we'd probably be looking at doing something to use the Martian atmosphere rather than just using more fuel to overpower and generally ignore it.
but, yes, a fully powered controlled descent can work anywhere - and it may be a bit of a coin toss whether the first missions stick solely with powered descent (more fuel but simpler trajectory).
> How is this going to be reusable on space
That is a tricky one. How *are* they going to manage to reuse (presumably, you mean restart the engines and accelerate away) "on space"? Because, as we all know, there is nothing to push against when you are on space; unless they take a launch pad up with them and swing it down under the engines before restarting them? But then it might float away too soon, so they'd have to tie it onto the back of the craft. Hmm, not as easy as it sounds, you may be onto something.
(/s 'cos you really never know...)
On first reading, this article seemed to be approving of this whole idea, and I reacted (somewhat negatively, cough) to that view.
But now I am thinking, in that last paragraph:
> instead, we move from complexity into ambiguity
That *is* just a carefully worded subtle jibe, designed to turn around the whole meaning of the article and show the author's worry about and contempt for the concept, isn't it? Reassure me that this is the correct way to interpret that last paragraph.
Please, please, don't let it be the case that this last parahraph is meant to be taken at face value and that Mark Pesce wants us to accept that knowingly introducing ambiguity into an end-user's interface is merely something we have have to shrug our shoulders about and accept as the price of improving things for - well, of improving things for the person who wants to foist a new chatbot on said end-user and do so without having to bother their pretty little creative head with anything as dull and dreary as a "developer", or an "analyst" or, worse yet, a "programmer".
> effectively removing the bar between an idea for an AI chatbot and its realization as a GPT
Great. Remove the barrier between a half-arsed "idea" for yet another chatbot and dumping the useless thing on the world.
Also, I note in the glowing uncritical approval of this article, no consideration of how to check that your marvellous creation actually bears any resemblance to what you think you wanted: with no knowledge or understanding of the options available when creating a new GPT, the proud new chatbot owner has no idea what has been assembled in their name even if they bother to examine it (are they even given the opportunity to read the set of chosen options?)
The Computer spat out a chatbot, put it into service. By the time it has been running long enough to be demonstrably useless[1] the creative person has moved onto something else and forgotten what they even said when they "set up" their montrosity.
Blindly trusting one LLM to create another! What a concept.
[1] and you will be lucky if it only turns out to be useless!
> This is also why supply vehicles don't dock under their own power, they park within reach of the Canadarm and are retrieved.
The Russian and US vehicles all need the helping hand, certainly, but the ESA ATV manages on its own, as described for the ATV Jules Verne: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/ATV/Europe_s_automated_ship_docks_to_the_ISS
Although the ATV isn't as good at getting materials back down from the ISS as the other vehicles can be.
Ta for that - I know his "Sector General" stories but haven't seen this one.
Hmm, Amazon: second result for "deadly litter" is called "Sanicat", but no indication if that litter is deadly in and of itself or is just highly recommended as the litter to use when the target is "deadly".
> String. Everything can be solved with string.
As was demonstrated by Raymond Baxter on Tomorrow's World, courtesy of The Goodies:
https://goodies.fandom.com/wiki/It_Might_as_Well_Be_String
(Sorry, couldn't find a YT clip of that bit: the string song is easy to find, but around here we want the sciencey bit)
> X also told us it urges the CCDH to "engage with X first," so it could "provide context or ensure that the proper actions have been taken."
However, as
> British non-profit said it ... reported them using X's moderation tools
this is therefore an admission by X that using the moderation tools is *not* considered engaging with X first.
In other words, the "moderation tools" are just a sham.
>> It's getting more and more closed and locked-down. Soon it will go Arm-only ... Arm kit is much less amenable to ripping the back or bottom off and upgrading it with cheap used off-the-shelf bits: maxing out the RAM with 2nd hand DIMMs and cheapo 3rd party SSD and HDD.
> The feeling of being 'locked-down', as I'm sure you know, is largely down to SIP. This can very easily be disabled, but I wouldn't recommend it. Frankly, KEXTs are a terrible idea
Anyone else getting whiplash from the sudden change of direction in this reply to Liam's comment?
A good pub has more than one bar in it! Pick two or three from the list you just gave, each has its own differing charms (well, "charms" may be pushing it for some establishments!).
Add in a function room or two upstairs, a garden and maybe a separate dining area. Kid an families are welcome (but keep the rugrats out of the crumblies-only bar).
Couple of large, friendly dogs by the open fire.
Then you have the makings of a really decent pub.
Do you feel at risk from a cyberattack?
Where do you feel at risk from a cyberattack?
From this list, where do you think you are most at risk from a cyberattack?
Do you think there is any genuine difference between a hotspot you sign into compared to one without a password? Have you considered that signing into one means you have just given your email to somebody and agreed to their terms, without reading them very, very carefully? Want to change your mind about your last but one answer?
Do you have any idea what a cyberattack actually is and how much damage could realistically be created by one? Compared to the damage you leave yourself open to by just posting all that stuff on social media in the first place?
Are any of these surveys worth reporting?
Or is the real value from these surveys that they give people the chance to pontificate on why does anyone risk public hotspots, and go on and on and on about how clever they are, always using VPNs and two hundred disposable emails, aren't all those other people just uninformed fools who don't know how to survive in the modern world? I.e. be online pub bores?
> also an homage to William Gaines and Mad Magazine.
Or to faithful fans of Stan Lee and Marvel's "Not Brand Ecch" (whatever happened to Forbush Man?[1])
> Does the word find use in the UK as well?
Less and less in my experience[2], as Cracked made the move to the web, leaving Mad behind. Oh, for the glory days of publishing, 1968, we hardly knew ye.
[1] Now, that is a story I'd like to see, but would we get Moore or Gaiman interested?
[2] your experience may differ, speak now or ...
> I saw a recent interview where Elon Musk stated the percentages of which the "extremely naughty/bad" content had been reduced.
Well, yes - the number of such posts reported to Musk has been reduced.
Every such post moderated has been counted and that total reported back to Musk (as a percentage of the whole).
The problem is, who is left at X to actually try and moderate? Who is there to run the searches for naughty content (and check to be sure they are running correctly)?
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