Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"In rural areas in North America"
I got the impression from the article that this system is intended as an assist/replacement for where GPS etc doesn't work or can be outright wrong such as built up areas where the sat signals may not be visible to the device. Out in rural land, GPS etc is all you need unless you are in a narrow mountain valley or gorge.
"accuracy to the decimetre (why not '10cm' or 0.712857 linguine?)."
It's not a commonly used unit, but decimetre is a valid unit. I remember the school rulers we had in primary school when the metric system was bring introduced in schools back in the day. There were various useful things engraved/printed onto the wooden rulers to be helpful, such as inches down one side, centimetres down the other, millimetres marked along the first 10cm and definitions of things like decimetre=10cm=100mm and dekametres=10meters (That would be decameter in USAian although why they would choose to have a different and unique local spelling of a metric unit in a non-metric society is beyond my understanding :-))
"egress buttons are usually similar to the Big Red Button but are Big Green Buttons instead."
Most of the time :-(
When they have a "push to exit" button and it's not the almost standard big green hemisphere, it can take a while to figure what to push to get out. I've turned off lights before because it's the only obvious nearby switch. In at least one case, the doors actually open so slowly that the "fix" was the place the button on the wall about 10 metres down the corridor. (An old Victorian building with heavy solid wood doors) The "fix" to the button being so far away was to place two signs. One near the button on a "music stand" affair that's actually quite hard to miss telling you this is "The Button" and another at the door telling you to go back 10m to find the button. :-)
Another downside of gas fire suppression is the sheer force of it going off. ISTR a story on this illustrious site of Glasgow City Councils data centre being severely damaged because the shock of the sudden pressure wave of the gas release kill all or most of their hard disks. I can't remember if this was a deliberate or accidental discharge.
I remember a 5.25" 40MB MFM Seagate running off an RLL controller to give me 65MB. It was standing vertically on it's side outside the case for some reason I don't remember when I knock the desk with my knee. It fell flat and never worked again <sob>[*]
* Both tears and me shouting out Son Of a BITCH!!
I remember when Morgan Computers used to sell "free" printers, inkjet and laser. Just buy three sets of ink/toner carts and they'd throw in the printer for free. IIRC they were mainly Dell branded printers. No idea if they were any good though. Probably crappy Windows-only GDI printers that needed clearing out of the OEMs warehouse.
Yes, their now discontinued Pagewide stuff is quite impressive with very few moving parts and very fast. Printing double sided is ok if it's just text, but if there's a lot of graphic on the page it can sometimes not quite dry enough and smear a bit going through the duplexor. Likewise, if printing on specialist paper which may not absorb the ink enough. The print speed can be slowed down and therefore increase the drying time. It's supposed to be clever[*] enough to that itself, but sometimes you need to get into the service menu and manually set a slower speed.
[*] Probably "Powered by AI" LOL.
"with long periods of non-use, it has never blocked/dried out"
All but the cheapest will, if left always on, burst into life every now and then and run a quick nozzle clean. If you leave it on long enough with full ink carts, it will run out of ink without ever printing anything at all. Not to mention the power used in "stand by" all that time :-)
To be fair to the poster you are replying to, you are comparing apples and oranges. He's talking about heavy duty business grade inkjets, a very different beast from the consumer grade stuff. Going back some years to the start of the rot at HP, it's like comparing a crappy HP1100[*] with the HP4000 or HP8000 series, the former being cheap plastic with an almost unreplaceable fuser, the latter being devices built like a tank and designed for relatively easy maintenance.
[*] Anyone else remember the debacle with the paper separation pad meant to last the life of the printer but had to be replaced under warranty with the stick-on pad and the cardboard template to help guide it into place? And the almost total tear-down to replace a failed fuser, also meant to last the life of the printer.
"my old Samsung printer is going to stop working with Windows before it runs out of ink on my usage patterns."
I wonder if a Raspberry Pi Zero or similar bottom end single board device running CUPS as a print server would be more economic than a new printer? Windows would just see it as a networked Postscript device and CUPS and/or Ghostscript can convert the PS from Windows into whatever the printer needs.
"Looking on Wikipedia tells me it is between 17 and 20 years old."
If you print out the status page, there will be some dates on it that will, sans firmware updates, tell you more or less when it was actually manufactured, eg the date of the firmware version. I've seen older, still in use in business, where the page count has cycled around after overflowing the storage space for the value, possibly more than once. On the other hand, I can think of one customer running 200,000 pages a month on one printer that was classed as "out of warranty" after the first month as the page count is well over the monthly duty cycle :-)
Older HP laser printers were built to last...and they did/do to this day.
"An OEM cartridge for my Brother HL-1210W costs £36 and a pattern one, which seems to work just as well, costs £9. Both last about 1,500 pages of A4, which is 2.4p or 0.6p per page."
Cost per page for lasers is a moving target though. Depends on how often you use it. Cost per page as a function purely of the toner, when comparing with inkjet makes it seem much cheaper. While still cheaper, you also need to take into account the drum/developer unit if separate from the toner unit and also the fuser unit. Likewise, the use case. Lasers can't hold a candle to inkjets when it comes to photo quality printing.
I've got an old Epson photo printer that's almost certainly dried out now, but was very good with an external tank mod for much, much cheaper bottle fed bulk ink. The second-hand colour laser went to the tip when the cost and time of replacing the transfer belt[*] got to be more then the printer was worth, and I'm quite happy with the new mono laser, my primary wishes being an Ethernet port and duplex. My use case has changed over the years :-)
* Actually economic on the non-duplex version, but my duplex model was a royal pain in the arse to change the transfer belt and nearly twice the price! Part of my job includes printer repairs, and *I* wasn't prepared to spend that amount of time money on it, which tells you something about the shitty design of that printer and probably why I got it for next to nothing in the first place. Still, it did give a few years of sterling service :-)
On the other hand, as someone mentioned earlier, Putin might see it as a way to keep Yandex "relevant" on the world stage and he has the power to make them do as he wants. I'm sure he still has stocks of Polonium and Novichock and the secret service to deliver it where and when needed if the Yandex.NL board don't do as "asked". There's cathedrals in NL that have to be seen to be believed. Those spires!!!. They also have coffee shops.
"The "normal" search is ok but too focused on Russian sites."
I wonder if that's because they do less localisation in their search results? Google used to be (and often still is) very USA centric in its results. Unless you are searching from another country where Google has a presence and a local national level domain. English speaking countries, eg the UK, still get a lot of USA based results whereas if you VPN via, say, France, you'll get many more local results in French. Of course, a lot depends also on what you are searching for.
Beer powered spaceship? That gassy "Bud Lite" from the US should work well and at least it would be put to doing something useful for once :-)
As an aside, I "won" a so-called "basket bonus" after shopping at the local supermarket. The prize? a 4-pack of Bud Lite "for watching the World cup". I didn't even bother claiming my "prize" :-)
"Also with water you have to stop it freezing which adds complexity over gaseous reaction mass."
On the other hand, there's likely a lot of frozen water already out there in space that eventually may be able to be collected in enough quantity to use as further reaction mass so long as you have enough fuel to do the convert to steam bit, eg solar panels or nuclear.
Apparently Musk is saying Apple have withdraw most or all of their advertising and are threatening to pull Twitter from the Apple store.
it made me smile when I read "Apple has not responded to requests for comment from the BBC."
El Reg is in good company then :-)
I suspect he's more of a Cheeky Girls man :-)
Yes, those who clicked the link, that IS the lyrics and no the record wasn't actually stuck :-)
Yeah, I was thinking that too. In orbit, being shy one leg likely isn't much of a handicap, if any.
He said "what it is about having a physical disability that makes it trickier and overcome those hurdles."
To be fair, I suspect he and they won't actually learn all that much that isn't obvious simply because this is one physical disability and possibly the one that will have the least effect. I'd imagine it will be great for him being microgravity and not having to deal with the earthbound problems a prosthetic leg can have, but I suspect people with other physical disabilities will not benefit much from this experiment, eg those missing a hand or arm, blind or deaf.
On the other hand, it's one small step (no pun intended).
"…everyone will be carrying an android or apple device into those same "sensitive" areas."
If it's truly sensitive, no, they won't. Everything with a camera or storage is placed in a lockbox at the entry point. Anything inside the sensitive area with storage is not taken out again in form where the data could be read.
Not so much sending all the feeds direct to Communist Part headquarters, more creating an entry into whatever networks they are connected to. Whether it could or will happen is a different question, but there have been reported instances of CCTV cameras and other IoT devices being co-opted into DDoS attacks, so if it's accessible, then anything is possible.
"The most dangerous manoeuvre on a motorway is changing lanes."
Only if it's relatively busy and you are not paying attention.
That aphorism is about as useful as "Speed Kills". It sounds scary and, IMHO, is part of what has led to the endemic lane hogging we see so much more of these days.
Of course changing lanes is more dangerous than not changing lanes. But not enough to matter for a competent and aware driver.
Disclaimer: I've been driving 40-60,000 miles per year for the last 40 years and have never had a prang yet. I'm constantly expecting that to change, which may well be why it hasn't happened yet :-)
Yes, this is exactly what I have found in traffic queue too. In general, the middle lane is quicker for exactly the reasons you state and my own experience.
On the other hand, on a less congested 3-lane motorway, but not "clear" by any means, I'm finding more and more that lane one is nearly empty, just lorries, often well spread out, Lane 2 a bit more congested, primarily cars and vans, most of whom will rarely move back to lane 1 even when there's lot of room and time before needing to pull out and pass the next lorry. Then there's lane 3, where everyone who wants to drive to the speed limit or faster are nose to tail, often never quite reaching the speed limit because the traffic in 1 and 2 keep coming into lane 3 because lane 1 is doing 56mph "lorry speed" and the cars not in a hurry are staying in lane 2 doing 60mph with the occasional trip to lane 3 when a lorry is passing another lorry.
I would imagine the view from above is almost the exact opposite of what you'd expect in terms of numbers of vehicles in the lanes, ie 3 is busy, 2 is medium and 1 is nearly empty.
...and I can't immediately think of a single story that envisaged telescope able to discern this level of information from such a distance :-)
Many of have postulated all sorts of "scanning" devices to identify the planets and habitability of a star system when the starship gets there or working from data sent by a probe that travelled there but I don't think any SF author actually wrote about this level of telescopy. I'm probably wrong, and I'm excluding anything written in the last 10-20 years where this level of telescopy isn't actually fiction, but fact.
This all excellent science, and it's especially nice when it out sciences the science fiction :-)
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