Posts by Guido Brunetti
26 posts • joined Wednesday 23rd January 2008 09:40 GMT
Re: "NASA's current prediction of the comet's path."
The influence of Mars on the trajectory depends partly on the relative speed of the comet. The higher speed the less influence since the time spent in the stronger parts of Mars gravity field is very low. At well over 100,000 miles per hour the comet isn't staying long enough to produce a big, visible bend in the trajectory curve. The big curve in Nasas graphic comes from the sun, not from Mars.
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Plugging my Computer into the central heating? What should that be good for?
In Winter (when I use the central heating), my computer heats my room just fine. Every Watt of electricity that goes in comes out again as heat plus some shifted bits in my SSD. If that heating isn't sufficient, my room thermostat kicks in hot water from the central heating, so presto, problem already solved.
So why would I reroute the computer heat through the central heating and then into my room through hot water, when the direct path works just fine?
Re: The only reason anyone is angry at Bob...
Doesn't matter. They probably put in some skilled people from their foreign intelligence department, not from the company itself. Getting an authorized VPN-channel into a critical infrastructure, getting all sorts of system specs, getting to write code incorporated into these systems and then even getting paid for it must have been a no-brainer for them.
On the other hand, they probably would have been smart enough to use a U.S.-proxy then. But now that the contractor is out of business with this client, they probably sell all the information they gathered to the highest (chinese) bidder.
Re: On the bright side...
They only noticed the problem because their credit lines ran out. So they couldn't lose any more simply because no one was giving them any more money.
Re: igniter box
Lipo? Forget it, it has serious issues when getting cold. Ask any electric model plane flyer.
Re: interruptable...
Getting rid og MW? You just need a resistor with some fracking big cooling fins. I always wanted to buy one of those for the times when leccy spot prices go negative (Like Germany, Late night, Lots of wind),
Paris, 'cause she's hot, too.
Re: long live the oh my god particle
"Massive amounts of energy"? Nor for a that single proton. A good baseball thrower would apparently be enough :-). If you take them all together though...
PRAM
At this point they shouldn't refer to these things as "Drives" any more, because there is little resemblance to the original meaning of that word.
What about "PRAM" (persistent RAM) as opposed to "DRAM". Technologically it is much closer to DRAM than to harddrives anyway.
Posted in LOHAN fires up sizzling thruster
Thrust measurement
What is the weight of the fuel? You have to add that to the measured thrust over time to get the real thrust. Near the end the real thrust would be the measured weight on the scale plus the weight of the already burned fuel since the initial "0" measurement included the fuel weight.
So if your fuel weight was, say, 500g, the peak thrust would actually have been measured at roundabout 1900 grams near the end.
Write Only Memory
or WOM. Around here that's called a NUL device.
Not to be confused with WORM (Write Once Read Maybe) Memory.
"The masses have more voting power"
But what if the elected people don't do what the voters had in mind? Happens all the time but somehow the voters don't get what they have to do to change this. Do you get it?
Makes me remember the old times:
*DUMMY MODE ON*
Source
OK, let's do the math.
Here is the measurements of radiation in the water sample taken, according to Tepco:
http://www.tepco.co.jp/en/press/corp-com/release/11032503-e.html
The dominant radiation comes from Ce144 with 2.2 million decays per second per cm³. This emits a (rather weak) electron (beta decay) on its way to Pr144. That element has a half life in the seconds range and thus goes almost immediately into another beta decay to Nd144, this time with a very strong output (~ 3 MeV), which gives it a high penetration range (> 1 cm in water/tissue, up to 15m in air).
Organ exposures and effective exposures are both measured in Sievert. As I said, the total dose
was significantly less, "more than 170 mSv", according to Tepco, but since most of that dose occured at the feet through direct contact with the contaminated water, it creates an organ equivalent dose well in the single digit Sievert range. These workers may or may not get radiation sickness, but their cancer risk is already orders of magnitude raised.
BTW: The existence of relatively large amounts of Ce144 in the water confirms a significant core meltdown. One cm³ (!) of that water can contaminate a thousand litres of ground water with over 22.000 Bq/kg, which is way over any safety limit. And with a half-life of 284 days that problem will stay for a while.
Wrong base
The 10.000 times factor is not related to the background radiation but to the normal level of water in a running reactor core!
The total dose taken by these men at the feet-level was 5-6 Sievert! Total dose was less of course, but that's still pretty much and something like a "light sunburn". Not at all.
Not really
That's like three *thousand* vacuum cleaners in a row (3,6 Megawatts)
This is what you call "under control"?!
http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-66135.html
Mine is the lead lined coat, btw.
Posted in The True Cost of Desktop Support
Still missing the mark
There is an iceberg of costs that isn't even mentioned here: Time wasted by employees to work around artificial restricitions.
You want to take home some work but can't, because IT has disabled your USB-Drive? Now you have to zip/crpyt it and send it through email.
You need to find out a certain parameter of your SQL-Server but don't even have the reading rights necessary? Go off, find an admin, file a lawsuit or just ignore the whole matter until the server blows up.
You can drive down the support calls to zero by not allowing your users to do *anything*, but your business will suffer. Throughput is what matters, not cost!
But because the untold wasted minutes for circumventing IT can't be measured, you just ignore the matter altogether. The result can be watched in almost every larger organisation: Loss of intrinsic motivation, loss of throughput (everything seems to take ages), loss of customers. The response: Cost reductions of course!
No problem
Let's have a hundred trillion planets with a trillion people each, then every person can still have a trillion IPv6 Adresses. If we ever reach that point, changing to IPvx is going to get tricky, though...
3.5 includes 2.0
Doesn't make sense. 3.5 is a superset of 2.0 and uses the same runtime. Basically 3.5 is just 2.0 plus some additional framework librarys and a new compiler.
Different runtimes exist for .NET 1.1 and 4.0. All of these can be installed on the same machine.
Silverlight
Playboy has a very nice Silverlight site. Check out http://playboy.covertocover.com/
SkyNet
"The Pentagon wants one system to control and harvest data from any of its unmanned vehicles."
Right. Let's name it "SkyNet".
Posted in Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail
"Ted" and "square root"
Both items actually yield very impressive results! You just have to help WA a little bit with the context. Fortunately it makes it very easy to do so.
1. Enter "Ted" and search.
2. Click on "Use as a given name" instead.
3. Be impressed
4. Enter "square root" and search
5. Click on "Use as referring to math instead".
Paris, because even she would have noticed the quite obvious links.
I also bought a Vista recently
Dell just won't sell you an XPS Laptop without at least Home Premium.
About 10 Minutes after the package was delivered, Vista was gone and is now replaced with an actual upgrade: Windows Server 2008 Standard x64.
Thanks to El Reg for pointing me to the relevant blog article.
Paris, because she's as cute as my M 1330.
@Tim
Until they know the real reason, yes. There are hundreds of flights with this type of aircraft and engine every day and they don't seem to fall from the sky all the time. So risk assessment is exactly what's happening here.
Posted in Germans launch flights for nudists
Re: Does this mean Paris H is a communist?
Quote from above:
"In the event of a drop in cabin pressure, you may find your nether regions are shrinking...."
Not so! In fact, the reverse will be true. That's why such things as certain feature-enhancing pumps are sold in erotic stores all over the world.
So a better announcement would be: "In case of a pressure drop you will find that certain oppurtunities offer themselves to you - or should I say "arise"?. Use them quickly and we will guarantee you a happy landing."
I had this, too ...
... on my Dell Inspirion 8600.
It's not noticeable during normal work, but when I was on the beautiful island of La Palma in December, I noticed a tingling sensation when touching the frame of the screen while plugged-in. The strongest "shock" was touching the shielding of the svga-socket while blindly searching for the usb-slot on the backside. It was quite uncomfortable, but not painful as such.
At this time I was barefoot on the ceramic tiles in the house. Not surprinsingly, it went away when I put my (cork-soled) sandals on (though I thought, the ceramic tiles shouls be pretty good insulators, too).
At that time I thought that maybe some strange wiring in the house was responsible for it, because before and after that holiday I never experienced that sensation again.
