Posts by Black Betty

Re: Remeber those heady days of the Apollo missions well

Five year old me wanted to know what was in the hole* to one side of the moon's far side.

My grandfather (who built a TV** from scratch to watch the landing) carefully explained to me, with the aid of a bedside lamp and balls why part of the moon was in shadow.

At the end of the explanation, I collected my shovel and went outside to dig a shadow.

* There is indeed a dark side to the moon. It's what you get when there is neither sunlight, or Earthshine to illuminate the moon's far side.

** Bare chassis valve set that never killed a single child in the several years it served our family.

< subject > for Dummies.

It's not entirely reasonable to expect any politician to be knowledgeable in the subject for their portfolio prior to appointment, but it should be an absolute requirement that they read up on the basics of the subject once appointed. Enough that they can both understand and instruct their subordinates.

Secure alcove for bank ATMs

A bank here in Australia put some of it's ATMs (those in high street crime areas?) behind glass doors to prevent muggings of customers making late night withdrawals. In theory the customer was to swipe their bank issued keycard through a reader to open said doors before being able to access the hole in the wall machines. In practice, ANY card with a magstripe would cause the doors to open. Train ticket, hotel keycard, photocopier card, any card at all, didn't matter.

Result, nicely corralled victims with zero options for escape.

Re: Ancient memories

Inline data.

JSR do something.

data here

more code here.

something: POP the stack.

index through data,

process data.

PUSH to stack.

RETURN

Made for very readable source code, but don't even think about trying to disassemble the binary.

Who remembers the universal keys for early windows products.

Three digits (which I no longer recall) and a string of "1"s

Re: Why? Just why?

My brother's boss tried that on him at the ordnance factory where he was apprenticed. Several legit customers came and went before the stores clerk thought to ask the kid with his heels up reading a book what he wanted. Bro carefully marked his place, looked at his watch, said "I guess I've waited long enough" and returned to his station.

Re: Many values for true

Assembler library code is a likely culprit.

That or porting code from a language with strong data typing such as PASCAL in which booleans have exactly 2 values (TRUE and FALSE) to one that defines TRUE as any non-zero value.

Optimizing compilers (particularly early ones) can do strange and unanticipated things to code. Best practice is simply to never explicitly test for a TRUE condition.

Re: Had to think then

Round my parts they're called "barker's eggs".

Re: when you charge more per hour

Hit with hammer :- $5

Know where to hit :- $95

Re: Racist?

Poor syntax and grammar are deliberate. They're used to weed out those who might stop and think "hey just a sec" halfway into the scam, thus wasting the scammer's time. They want seriously clueless people who'll pay up without question.

Re: I expect to be flamed

RTFA: Skelton was specifically tasked with providing that payroll data to KPMG. Whilst doing so he took a copy for himself.

Re: anti-crime

Scrumping (the proper technical term for nicking fruit from a tree) is still theft.

Re: FFS

Telstra's online support chat censors even the mildest examples of Aussie vernacular.

Re: The "Smart Home" crashed?

Danny Dunn saw this coming the year of my birth,

Re: 'None of the actors can be taken at face value

Query regarding embedding chips in the motherboard substrate. Is this even a part of the normal manufacturing process? If it isn't, we can probably discount that part of the story as hyperbole.

Re: The only news here is the 'NZ' part... Maybe...

You're entirely free to exercise your right against self incrimination, but that won't stop you being in breach of the mandatory device unlock law.

Pro tip: Don't carry evidence of crime through policed checkpoints.

Primary problem is Western investment comes with onerous conditions.

Generally along the lines of, privatize and sell off the public sector to finance or underwrite loans.

China's loans come with no strings attached.

Maybe, maybe not.

First of all, pretty near all new systems are going to ship with a 250-500GB SSD, first in laptops and then soon after desktop systems too, because people just won't put up with sub-par performance once they've got a taste for the speed of an SSD.

Spinning rust will survive for a little while for media storage, and possibly ultra-high bandwidth applications.

But ultimately, I foresee some sort of ultra-high density write-once media being developed for long term archival storage.

Re: Disk Doctor

NDD saved my backside after I made the mistake of typing RECOVER *.*

Re: This isn't really the batteries fault

Don't see many flashlights with safety vents. Tactical ones even come well knurled for maximum fragmentation effect.

It's called "Setting a mantrap."

It's got nothing to do with crim's rights, and everything to do with ordinary people not falling foul to random booby traps.

Thus ended letterboxes with "teeth" and garden walls with embedded glass shards. It's why you and I can't erect electric fences with razor wire.

2 horse's arses is the legacy metric.

3.7m is the largest diameter rocket body that will fit down a single railroad tunnel. The dimensions of which are built around the standard rail gauge of 4' 8.5". Early rail cars were built on the same jigs as horse drawn wagons. Wagon wheel spacing was dictated by the ruts Roman chariots wore into Roman roads. Roman chariots were built to be drawn by 2 horses.

http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html

They do if it's Krugerrands.

/no text

Re: Enough with the replacement part conspiritards.

And some idiots put no-name brand oil in their Testarossa, so what's your point? You do the repair and pocket your profit.

We're not talking about products sold at (or below) cost here, but products often sold with a huge margin, and policies deliberately formulated to discourage repair and encourage (if not outright force) replacement when those products fail.

So no itsame99@domain.com?

The vast majority of "meaningful" email names are variations on a theme.

Re: Ah yes, proper 5-pin DIN

Had a mate with a bit of a temper, who got physical with his keyboard. His only issue was finding the last keycap.

Re: Speed

A Holman orbit, is a Holman orbit, is a Holman orbit.

Absent the use of a continuous thrust engine, or a ruinous waste of payload mass, the time to Mars is a fixed quantity. Particularly if you plan on stopping. The whole point of a Holman orbit is to ballistically "kiss" the destination planet's orbit while travelling at very nearly the same velocity as the planet.

And that's the point of the multiple inner system flybys that a number of recent missions used. Each planetary pass is used steal momentum from that planet to expand smaller orbits into larger ones with a minimum expenditure of fuel, until eventually (if everyone did their sums right) the spacecraft creeps up on its destination slowly enough to chuck a u-turn around the planet and throw out the anchors.

It doesn't matter where you're going, if you're means of travel is primarily ballistic, ie. rocketry, then no shortcut will ever get you there any faster than a significant fraction of the orbital period of your destination. The only shenanigans practical or permissible with rockets is to increase total travel time in order to reduce fuel requirements to achievable levels.

Bigger will always let you send more to the destination, but the fuel requirements for faster travel increase exponentially. Only continuous thrust technology can break that impas.

Re: cellphone, mobile, handy

Aussies will laugh and correct you obscenely.

Re: Feeling Old...

I see what you did there. And now I feel old too.

Re: Clear cut...

Jaywalking laws aside, if a pedestrian/cyclist is going to cross a road at a non-designated location then the onus is entirely on them to not move out in front of moving traffic. Newton's Laws will alway trump traffic laws.

Re: Ah, the "good old days" ...

Back in my penny pinching days, I recall reloading worn out film ribbon cartridges with regular cloth typewriter ribbon. The print head would gum up every six months or so, but it was easily cleaned.

Fan fold? That stuff cost money. A roll of butchers paper run through the bandsaw a few times saved more bucks for the important things like a second computer.

Did you see the monkey trying to put the cork back in?

<no body>

Cleanability.

In my experience, an ordinary damp cloth can be safely used on functioning kit provided it is well and truly wrung out. This doesn't necessarily apply to Apple kit, since a fly can apparently kill a Macbook with a wet fart.

Re: "The main problems..."

Apart from the obvious creep factor of having random strangers peering over your shoulder whilst you change your kid's messy bum, what of older children?

Plenty of kids roam about the house in their undies or less.

Re: Not a UK plug, but a useless Continental one.

Because you're in the UK with the continent just a loud fart away:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ydv9Ef-99I

It's just something everyone should have chucked in the back of a drawer because it's a problem pretty much everybody is going to be faced with at some time or another.

Re: Persistent memory has been failing in the market for decades

Somebody has to succeed eventually.

The question really is why bloody servers? Between grid reliability and UPS persistent memory has limited utility.

On the other hand, portable devices seem like a match made in heaven both utility wise and demand.