Posts by Dom 3
195 posts • joined Wednesday 10th June 2009 15:04 GMT
And on Mir
In "Out of the Present", the documentary about (inter alia) Krikalev's 1991 stay on Mir, there's footage of him playing with a burning candle.
Re: How many articles is that on Dell now?
Same here, I'm on to my second second-hand Latitude ultralight (or whatever) laptop. They run a modern efficient OS just fine and can be picked up for a song. Often still in pristine condition, cos they've been sat in the CEO's desk drawer for three years doing nothing.
Bug report
Stupid bloody distro nicknames cause more hassle than they are worth.
I get the feeling the nerds love 'em, but I am a straightforward geek and I just want a readily understandable version number. And the Ubuntu system works just great because I can tell just how old it is.
In "out of the present" Krikalev is seen playing with a lit candle.
Wikipedia notes "in American English, its name is 'zee' /ˈziː/, deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form" and also points out that everybody else in Europe (more or less) uses a similar form. IOW the British version is the original. In this case at any rate - we've all gotten used to the idea of the opposite being true.
The American military used "zed" in their phonetic alphabet for a while:
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq101-1.htm
which may have given rise to the story.
Foale, Sellers, and Patrick are all dual nationals AFAIK. Foale has an American mother so always was, the other two acquired US citizenship along the way.
Re: Range
Yebbut I cannot see any intrinsic reason the drone would have greater range, except some slight weight advantages. The article implied that there was.
Re: Working remotely
I am all in favour of people trying to out-source to the sub-continent. It makes them all the more appreciative of a UK-based service once they've been burnt.
Re: Is Tim London based?
OK then - is your primary work tool a laptop? Mine is an IBM Model M keyboard connected to two 22 inch monitors (this is fairly modest by some developers' standards). Oh there's some sort of box that connects them together. Other important tools are a quiet room with nobody else in it, a large expanse of desktop and a chair that doesn't jiggle around constantly. I've tried writing code on a laptop on the train. I generally just give up.
Re: Why...
As said, some retro-rockets fire just before landing. If they fail, you'll live.
If you want to go for water landing then you need to launch over water in cause of an abort - look at a map of the USSR and you'll see that puts you way out East, which wasn't practical.
The thing about Komarov turning the air blue as he came in is essentially a load of cobblers. He would have been in radio blackout until just before the parachutes were supposed to deploy.
Soyuz 18a, 1975, had a launch abort and landed on the side of a hill.
A number of capsules have had ballistic re-entries so took a while to get to but I don't think it's ever been more than a few hours:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
Range
"It has a much longer range than piloted aircraft". Intrinsically?
A quick poke of Wikipedia indicates that an EA-6B could fly this sort of mission profile.
Re: That line.
Ah. I see.
I think I only watched a couple of initial episodes - a combination of me not being that much of a telly watcher, and not living in the UK at the time. So AFAICR I only heard the line delivered the first time it was used, and (honestly) had not realised that it was a running gag.
So thanks to all for taking the time to clear that one up for me.
(I particularly like the reel-to-reel tape recorder one).
I shall award myself a "FAIL" icon.
That line.
Why is it funny? If you've ever had to support typical users you'll have said it a bajillion times.
If you had a sitcom set in a bar, would the barman asking "would you like ice with that?" somehow become hailed as an example of comic writing genius?
Re: Not surprising Apache hacked?
The way this story has been reported and commented on is completely doing my nut. If you go back to the original sucuri.net post then you will see that what they are reporting is new behaviour by Bad Peepulz ONCE THEY HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF A SERVER. They are NOT reporting a new vulnerability in the server stack.
And it is, essentially, nothing to do with cPanel, or Apache.
Nor does there seem to be ANY evidence for SSH brute force as being the way in.
If you want root on a server (and you're not fussed which) it is a piece of piss. Scan the web looking for out-dated tim thumb implementations, or phpmyadmin installations with no root password, or whatever. Upload your shell. Now, out of all the servers you have collected, you are bound to find a few where the kernel is year or two out of date and there's a privilege escalation exploit available.
Look at this: http://heavens-above.com/IssHeight.aspx
Decay in LEO is clearly far from regular.
More free food.
In "my" bit of Spain I'd see people foraging for two things - asparagus, and snails. Snails of course need to be starved for two weeks first, and I expect that if asparagus grew wild at this time of year, Lester'd know about it.
Location
"As of 2013 the physical location of CyberBunker is unknown." sez Wikipedia. "Wot, completely unknown?" thinks I, "cobblers to that". Assuming that cyberbunker.com is self-hosted, we find it in.... London:
4 tele-ic-4-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.174.18) 38.563 ms 41.721 ms 43.102 ms
5 195.66.225.179 (195.66.225.179) 47.453 ms 48.694 ms 50.215 ms
6 108.162.197.100 (108.162.197.100) 51.692 ms 15.358 ms 14.103 ms
Re: You paid for bones from the butchers?
Yes, I was a bit surprised the first time I got charged for bones in a Spanish butchers'.
http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F3-540-61996-8_47.pdf
"This paper describes a new and novel steganographic method for inserting secret information into image files. The method uses fractal image compression techniques in the production of these steganographic image files. The method allows a user to specify a visual key when hiding the secret information. The visual key must then be used when retrieving the hidden data. The paper describes enhancements to the method which may enable the steganographic data to survive through normal processing which reduces image quality. The method may therefore be used to insert copyright labels into image files."
Re: Zero velocity?
Kilimanjaro.
"Ultimate goal" of SSTO - well, for some. Other rocket scientists have, apparently, concluded that as long as you are "spending most of your fuel getting the rest of your fuel up to mere subsonic velocity" (nice phrase) multi-stage is the only sensible option.
@Nigel11: errr, cos it's got zero velocity by the time it gets back up the other side?
@Skylon-fans: yes, I have a design for a cost-to-orbit of ten quid per kilo... somewhere round here on a bit of paper....
@sci-fi-fans - anyone remember the one that had a huge orbiting station that would "scoop up" shuttles lobbed up to orbital altitude and accelerate them to orbital velocity (which is where ~90% of the energy is required) by simultaneously DEcelerating a returning shuttle, i.e. transferring energy from one to the other?
Note on X-15 flights - quite a few pilots got awarded astronaut wings, cos the USAF deems space to begin at 50 miles (80km) up, not 100km. Both are of course arbitrary definitions.
Re: Could he have survived the flight?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19562101
Re: Gahhhh, when will people learn kettle style IEC leads are different to others?
Kettle leads do nicely for things like guitar amps too. As a student I soon learned that it was a hell of a lot easier to ask "can I borrow your kettle for a couple of hours" than it was to request just the power lead...
Docking
To be pedantic - Elon & co. have managed rendezvous. The docking is performed by the ISS, using its "arm".
Re: What does the Reg do?
El Reg certainly *used* to email out plain text password reminders!
FCB branching out?
"Barça" only ever refers to the football club, amongst locals at any rate. The city is sometimes abbreviated to "Barna". And while I'm at it, a reminder that Barcelona is a Catalan city and pronouncing it in English with a Castilian 'th' just marks you out as a tonk, as the Catalan pronunciation is more or less the same as the English.
Re: Am I missing something?
To me the Manchester mark 1 is undoubtedly the world's first modern digital computer, in that it is the first machine for which one can hold a meaningful and interesting programming competition: http://www.computer50.org/mark1/prog98/index.html
But then I am biased, because the programming competition was my idea (I suggested it to one of the rebuilders in March 1996).
Posted in Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC
Re: I want to like the BBC
<sigh> It is not compulsory. I had neither TV nor licence for over a decade.
Posted in Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC
Oh FFS.
Enough with the "compulsory tax" already. I did not have a TV or licence for many years. Then I lived in Spain and discovered just what a crapfest loosely-regulated commercial TV can be. Now I'm back in the UK and more than happy to pay for CBeebies for the kids. We get a choice about paying for the Beeb. What we don't get much choice about is paying for the commercial channels - it's quite hard to avoid buying stuff that's advertised on TV.
Posted in Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Re: Cores
AFAIK pretty much all the modern Core iseries chips under and overclock as needed. I have a three year old i5 rated for 2.66 GHz. Most of the time the cores are powered off completely and not running at all. When they are running it's usually at 1.2GHz. When there's actually a load on it'll crank one core up to 3.2 GHz. I'm not sure it ever actually spends any time at all at its official rated clock speed. I'd have to do something quite artificial like run four MP3 encoders simultaneously.
If you have a suitable O/S, this tool http://code.google.com/p/i7z/ allows you to see what the cores are up to.
Re: Agree totally on the Take-Aways
Familiar with Cambridge then? It has a large number of ethnic Chinese (and other Far Eastern). That means lots of Chinese restaurants and takeaways of the sort that have two menus - one for each market.
OH FFS!!!!!!
Nobody "subtracted £500 from his account and donated it to a charity". That would imply that they had access to his account and had his money in their posession. No. Somebody created a DD with his details. This is about the only thing you can do with someone's bank account details. The money is safe. The only people who can DD are big trusted institutions and the money is GUARANTEED to be returned if it is disputed.
He was not "dead wrong".
I have been "giving my bank account details" to people ever since I was first issued a chequebook back in the 80s.
He was dead right. The so-called experts who make out that giving account details away is inherently dangerous are pillocks who do not understand how 419 scams work.
Re: "Nothing could possibly go wrong"
Quite. That's not "tempting fate", that's knowing that *something* is going to fail.
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
Oi Lester!
Can you get Real Milk in your neck of the woods? When I lived near Barcelona, the local supermarkets would have more varieties of UHT milk than bottles of fresh... I was shocked to find that many of my compatriots had gone native and would use UHT with their tea.
Guitar
"He also took a guitar up with him" - the guitar has been there since 2001. Full details:
http://www.space.com/14938-space-guitar-astronaut-music-album.html
Don't blame UPnP...
if the DVR or NAS manufacturers decide to open up the admin port to the world. That is what UPnP is *for* - automagically setting up port forwarding. And within limits, jolly useful it is too.
"Expected to survive"?
No. Designed and built to last a *minimum* of 90 days. Let's say you want the system as a whole to have a 95% chance of still working as designed at the end of that time. That means that each component has to have more like a 99% chance of still working at the end of 90 days. Which gives a *mean* lifetime (for an individual component) measured in years. Which is what we are seeing.
Re: But...
Same old bollocks. In clock speeds, networking, and storage, K, M, G etc mean what they mean in every other context - SI powers of ten. Only in RAM / ROM chippery are K, M, and G used to mean Ki, Mi, Gi.
Bar codes and 666
An explanation here:
http://www.av1611.org/666/barcode.html
of why many people think that every barcode contains 666 within it.
Like with like
A great many Chinese still live in villages with one donkey between them.
I'd rather have lots of little earthquakes than one big one.
Re: That reminds me of Jeremiah Kurzweil
That implies that you were both so good that neither of you had a discernible accent, or you were both so bad that you failed to notice the other's.
Posted in Last moon landing was 40 years ago today
Re: "Ronald E. Evans was the unlucky astronaut left to orbit the moon in the [CM]."
Grissom, White, and Chaffee were the unlucky ones.
Posted in The best e-readers for Christmas
In praise of the codex.
I'm reading a paperback thriller. It cost me a one pound donation to a school in Africa. I can read it in the bath. When I'm done with it I can return it whence it came. How is a Kindle better?
Re: Off the list
They will continue to offer "Western or Japanese" to the passengers. The Westerners will choose the Japanese food, and vice versa. Japanese food seems to suffer less from altitude than Western. Don't write it off.
Posted in How to launch people into space...
TLI
"To end up on a lunar bound coasting trajectory, Apollo astronauts were subjected to three different levels of acceleration, one for each stage of the Saturn V. " Err, no. In Apollo, Trans Lunar Injection required a fourth burn: the third stage was restarted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-lunar_injection#History
Posted in How to launch people into space...
Re: "G-forces are simply acceleration induced by the Earth’s gravity"
Still broken.
Re: I think
The only scientific conclusion reached so far is: some people will believe anything.
Wrong tool
Seems to me to be a specific instance of something that happens wherever a user is allowed to make any sort of decision on how they use the IT kit given to them - they'll use the wrong tool for the job, usually because it's the quickest and easiest way of getting the job done (at the time they want it done). Like using email for file transfer. And so on.
Re: Ubuntu is not a UI
Ubuntu is a package repository.
The way I see the market share is like this:
.deb 53.4% = (32.0% 21.4%)
.rpm 44.4% = (27.8% 10.5% 3.7% 2.4%)
Other 2.2%
