Posts by Tom 7

Re: A CEO being held accountable?

Worth remembering he's totally imaginary!

Re: Certainly a moment to watch live (even if only on YT), given all the set backs.

According to my fading maths to be visible at 500miles it would need to be roughly 30,000 up feet so it has the potential to be visible.

Re: The Hospital versions..

Most of the smart people I know are pretty much uninterested in being rich, Not quite on the H2G2 level of talking to tables to see how they react but smart enough to realise chasing money above what you need to safely live on is economically inefficient.

Re: Brings back memories

Not the plotters problem - it just does what its told. The plotting software has to be smart enough to sort these things out. Early PCs were barely fast enough of reliable enough to do the relatively simple calculations but I worked in a chip design place and we had software that would pretty much minimise the plotting time - alas the pens just ran out without the software having any knowledge so you have to watch them - and be able to hear a pen running out or hours would be lost. I had a chip with 4 thousand transistors on it that a pen would run out two or three minuted before the end of a 6 hour plot so I had to work out how to drive the damn thing so I could change the pen before it ran out. Learned a whole lot of programming and stuff and then someone pointed out I should just wait till the pen had done about half its work.Bastard!

Re: Wrong

or Boost.

Re: You also get the problem ....

I live in Devon and we had field boundaries called Devon Banks which are basically hedges on top of 4 foot or so earth and stone walls. I went up my drive way when the idiots announced their intention to ban PV on farms and looked and realised that most of the boundaries are aligned n/s or e/w and that in about 4sq miles there was enough sth ish facing banks to put up 2MW of PV that would not take up any of the grazing land which is the main use here. There's probably >2GW of 'land' free south facing banks which would have a profound effect on CO2 reduction and make a lot of cash for cash strapped farmers. I personally have a stock fence that needs replacing and I could use PV as the barrier and install 50KW with very little loss of land utility. £5kpa or 10% return PA. Or I could wait for the perovskite which may provide 150KW in a couple of years for similar investment. Though if I could put up wind I could do a further 300KW and get my money back in 5 (well probably 7 as I'd have to bribe my next door neighbour unless he realises he could do it too!

"without any kind of attribution." No room for that!

Re: we can dream

I've just had to rebuild a machine because I updated to the latest LTS and as far as I can tell systemd didnt like the changes I'd made to the Apache, PHP and a couple of other daemons and refused to finish the configuration and make the thing even slightly bootable,

TBF Fax data is easily faked too.

Re: browser warning

Expired cert 'problems'.

Re: The chances of anything coming from earth are a trillion to one, they said...

If you accelerate something on Mars over 100m to a speed required to break out of its gravitational field you need to accelerate it at 50000G.Accelerating a piece of rock like that would make it quite hot.

I've yet to see anyone come up with what looks like an even vaguely plausible attempt at getting panspermia going that doesnt involve a 3 stage rocket.

Re: More answers than questions?

Cox was on the telly saying the date is spread on the edge of the event horizon the other day, to us it never crosses the event horizon. Unless you have a whole new theory where gravity at any point is different depending on the direction.

A friend made me an HD with it installed and I ran it on a 486 and it seemed like a rocket compared with the WIn NT 3.5 I'd got for coding without 64k boundaries fucking everything up. Manage to get it running on a 16Mhz 386 with 4MB of ram and 2048*2048 desktop on a 768/480 screen. Seemed like all the worlds problems were being solved!

Re: Just got a new smart TV for a holiday cottage.

I hope it goes wrong again - then with luck I can use it as a primary monitor.

Re: Hah

The accuracy dropped enormously but then so did the jitter!

Re: Not so.

TBF EE is going to shit now BT seem to have got in to their computer support.

Re: Poor article

"China is still a long way from having the skills to design them". Is it? How do you know this? How much would it take to employ the right people with those skills? The only way the west can stop people going there to work is to become a state like them.

Re: Small decentralized, please

The one you linked to seems to be 5kw peak for 10kW daily output. That would probably do most domestic properties with proper pricing on overgeneration from renewables for most of the year. and its about dishwasher sized.

Re: @Lars

But Germany is putting in 10GW offshore wind every year till 2030 so they're going to be far better that we will by then. We wont really be making significant progress for 15 to 20 years when Johnson's first nuke may or may not go online.

Re: Insufficicent

Be nicer to get some form of 1km interferometer.

Re: "The team believes Mars must still be geothermically active"

It will still be generating heat in the whole of the solid stuff. The heat will diffuse to the surface but its cold. They even stuck a drill on a probe with the intention of digging down a couple of meters in to gauge just how much heat there was coming up but they couldnt get it in more than a few inches. Cold does that to you!

Re: Nuclear fusion power produces abundant amounts of energy

Heat pollution from fusion is nothing compared with that from AGW.

However it may be fatal for fusion. I'm not sure being a few meters away from 100millionK is something materials science can crack in time.

Re: Give them a chance

OOOOH we could get the tosser to actually install enough wind if we told him it was the Klacks!