It's a shame it didn't have a small nuclear battery
It has a very large nuclear battery, a mere 300M miles away, and coupled via PV cells...
Vic.
Posts by Vic
5860 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Dec 2007
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Lights OUT for Philae BUT slumbering probot could phone home again as comet nears Sun
Why did men evolve map-reading skills? They were PAID BY BONK - study
I'M SO SORRY, sobs Rosetta Brit boffin in 'sexist' sexy shirt storm
Oi, Europe! Tell US feds to GTFO of our servers, say Microsoft and pals
Walmart's $99 crap-let will make people hate Windows 8.1 even more
Mastercard and Visa to ERADICATE password authentication
Saturday 15th November 2014 20:22 GMT
Ahhhhh, loading your banks website in an iframe... What could possibly go wrong?!
VnV is even worse than that - it's loading an iframe that is most definitely not your bank's website, which then asks you for information...
Whoever thought that up must have had a really bad hangover an hour or two later...
Vic.
Dark side of the DUNE: Probot snaps shadowy comet surface selfie
Microsoft .NET released from its Windows chains... but what ABOUT MONO?
Microsoft: It's TIME at LAST. Yes - .NET is going OPEN and X-PLATFORM
Thursday 13th November 2014 19:08 GMT
Re: Will there be a Redhat of Linux .NET?
I'm quite honestly struggling to see what Microsoft's DotNet is going to offer that Mono didn't already.
If it's released under the Apache 2.0 Licence, as implied in the article, then what this offers is an explicit patent licence grant.
Mono always seemed to come with threats of patent prosecution if you didn't get it from Suse...
Vic.
My HOUSE used to be a PUB: How to save the UK high street
Thursday 13th November 2014 01:23 GMT
Re: Is there room for workshops and small businesses?
WTF were you doing in Bodge & Quodge? Is there no Screwfix, Toolstation or what have you in the vicinity?
Not that side of town, AFAIK. And if I'd have come home without the Right Sort of paint, I would have been in more trouble than I care to consider...
Vic.
Wednesday 12th November 2014 19:09 GMT
Commercial properties don't always make good residential ones
Commercial properties are generally intended to get people coming in - residential properties are quite the opposite.
My mate bought the old Post Office in Exbury. It was very disappointing - they ended up living behind closed curtains, because people kept trying to peer through the windows at all hours...
Vic.
Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of Patent WAR! Samsung strikes back at Nvidia
Thursday 13th November 2014 01:02 GMT
Re: Lawyers win
but do you work for free?
Frequently.
To really cut out all lawyers, you would really have to get rid of all laws
But we're not really worried about lawyers - we're worried about Lawyers.
I watched David Boies putting SCO's case against Novell, for example. He was supposed to be an Officer of the Court, with a primary responsibility to the truth. The arguments he advanced implied at leat one of the following possibilities :-
- He was so ignorant of the situation as to be considered negligent
- He was promoting his case to the detriment of what he knew to be the truth
Any lawyer doing his sworn duty would have done differently - but BSF charged[1] a vast sum of money for doing somthing that was immoral, probably illegal, and certainly detrimental to all parties involved in the case. And this is why we hate Lawyers, with a capital "L".
Vic.
[1] I'm not sure if they ever got paid, what with SCO declaring bankruptcy when they did. I fucking hope they got nothing,
'Tech giants who encrypt comms are unwittingly aiding terrorists', claims ex-Home Sec Blunkett
Monday 10th November 2014 13:42 GMT
Re: Badge of Honor
British passports haven't said "subject" in decades, and even then the only ones that did were for citizens born overseas, without right of abode.
Errr - are you sure about that?
I'm pretty sure I used to have a passport that declared me a "subject", and I most certainly do have right of abode...
Vic.
This 125mph train is fitted with LASERS. Sadly no sharks, though
Wednesday 12th November 2014 01:55 GMT
Re: Good, but not good enough
"You don't need X-rays for finding cracks in rails, eddy current detection is far easier."At line speed?
I'm surprised they don't use TDR. That wouldn't even need the train[1]...
Vic.
[1] You'd need some cleverness to ignore all the points, and to make sure you run tests at appropriate times to ensure coverage of all the switched bits - but that's the sort of problem easily fixed with a moderate confuser and a big database.
Monday 10th November 2014 15:53 GMT
Re: Good, but not good enough
I'd be surprised if detecting missing clips visually at that kind of speed is that easy
It's not too tricky.
The very first linescan camera I found on Google gives a rate of up to 80k lines/second. At 125mph, that gives you a peak resolution of ~700um without magnification (how's that for mixed units?).
Given the fairly repeatable nature of clip positioning, and the fact that they are bounded by the sleeper image, it shouldn't be a big job to detect missing clips.
Vic.
Fridge-size probot headed for comet touchdown
Firefox decade: Microsoft's IE humbled by a dogged upstart. Native next?
Tuesday 11th November 2014 12:44 GMT
Some people have problems with memory leaks or crashes, others don't.
My version of Firefox isn't exactly up-to-date, so I don't know to what extent this might have been addresses recently, but I do suffer from memory leaks.
What I believe I've determined is that FF leaks when you open/close tabs and windows repeatedly - a little more memory is used for each one which isn't returned on close.
That's sort of how I use tools - open a new window/tab to look up something, then close it once i've found what I'm after. I also tend to open new tabs for each link away from a search page - so the search results stay open in a tab. And I keep a lot of stuff open - I currently have 30 FF windows open, with multiple tabs in each window.
So my way of using FF is going to show up any leaks - and it does. Periodically, it slows to a crawl. A quick "killall firefox" bins the lot, and a restart brings my windows back - it's not a big deal, but it's something I would work on if I worked for Mozilla, rather than buggering around with UI changes all the time.
Vic.
Sunday 9th November 2014 20:03 GMT
Re: I'm not holding my breath
The GUI is a sticking point for portable software largely because we just didn't agree on how to do it. We had several different approaches that worked (X11, Mac toolbox, MsWin)
Don't forget XUL. That's all about using the browser rendering engine to create UIs for native apps...
Vic.
BlackBerry chief vows: We'll focus on 'core devices' and on, er, not losing money
Russia to ban iCloud.. to protect iPhone fiddlers' pics 'n' sh*t
Monday 10th November 2014 12:17 GMT
Re: 'right wing'?
The only family value that matters is as follows: teach the next generation critical thinking.That's it. It is the only thing that should be passed on.
No. They also need self-discipline.
That way, they have a *choice* whether to confront something they see as wrong, or to go along with it for now and change it later.
Without the discipline, the freedom of choice is missing.
And now I'm starting to sound like Lister :-)
Vic.
Friday 7th November 2014 00:40 GMT
If it's built in China, there's a risk, if it's using US designs/software or is from a US company, there's a risk
There is suspicion that Chinese kit is nobbled.
There is certainty that American kit is nobbled.
The suspicion above is largely based on statements from the people that ended up being the ones doing the nobbling.
It's not supposed to be this way round...
Vic.
Be Your Own Big Brother: Going to pot
Interstellar: An awesome sci-fi spectacle – just cut the hamminess, please
Saturday 8th November 2014 21:40 GMT
Re: "Gravity" was accurate and realistic? Really?
Shame you snipped the important part then: "as accurately as the plot and limitations of special effects allow"
That's like saying that my old Ford Cortina was supersonic, "as accurately as the roads and limitations of the car allow". It wasn't supersonic. It was barely mobile.
Vic.
Why solid-state disks are winning the argument
Saturday 8th November 2014 18:05 GMT
Re: Sequential Writes != SSD
SSD's are great at random I/O both read and write, and sequential reads. But at least for now, they are horrible at large sequential writes
I was doing large transport-stream captures onto SSDs a little while ago. Sequential writes were just fine (and *dramatically* faster than the RAID0 spinning rust I was replacing).
If your SSDs behave differently - you might have broken devices...
Vic.
Saturday 8th November 2014 17:47 GMT
Re: Developers need what now?
My favorite peeve is websites that were never tested other than on a Gigabit internal net.
I once had a customer whose (third party) developers told them that the new site was slow because it was running on a server on the internal LAN, and all would be well once it was in the datacentre. And kept a straight face whilst saying it...
Needless to say, the entire project was so slow and laggy, it was effectively unusable, The developers blamed the hardware, the nextwork, the colour of the sky. Two of us re-wrote the slowest bit[1] in a couple of hours[2], demonstrating that is was indeed their crap "design"[3].
Vic.
[1] They were passing the entire dataset to the client in XML, then parsing that XML in the worst piece of javascript you have ever seen. Some users were giving up after 10 minutes...
[2] I had to teach the other guy the rudiments of Javascript. Over the phone.
[3] I use the word quite wrongly...
Saturday 8th November 2014 17:37 GMT
Re: Will SSDs warn in advance of failure?
Certain hotspots in the drive get written to very often (directories, allocation tables etc.)
They shouldn't do - the wear-levelling system on the controller is supposed to prevent that.
And this is why it is essential to use an OS that properly implements TRIM; the alternative is to watch the SSD eating itself trying to reallocate data that you've already thrown away...
Vic.
Virgin 'spaceship' pilot 'unlocked tailbooms' going through sound barrier
3D printed guns: This time it's for real! Oh, wait – no, still crap
Why Comrade Cameron went all Russell Brand on the UK’s mobile networks
Thursday 6th November 2014 23:43 GMT
Re: You almost had me there for a minute...
Call me Dave standing up for the non-millionaires.
I can't be the only one thinking of Call-Me-Kenneth when reading that moniker...
Vic.
Trickle-down economics works: SpaceShipTwo is a prime example
Thursday 6th November 2014 22:02 GMT
usually funded or at least partially subsidised by the government - aviation fuel and train infrastructure being two good examples.
I don't believe aviation fuel is subsidised - it's just subject to less taxation. This is actually pragmatic; if there is too much disparity between two countries' policies, fuel would simply be tankered in and kept airside. This isn't good for anyone.
Even hiring a plane is expensive; the cheapest I found at a glance online was £350 an hour
I pay £144 per hour wet. And I only pay for flying time, not time on the ground; if I faff for half an hour checking out the plane, fly for half an hour to another airfield, have an hour's lunch, then fly half an hour back - that's one hour for which I pay, despite having been in posession of the aircraft for 2.5 hours.
Flying is very far from cheap, but it's not quite as bad as is often rumoured.
Vic.
Spaceplane fan sips sweet nectar from LOHAN's copious cup
Apple patents autographs. Checkmate, eBay
iBail: American Psycho actor Christian Bale rejects Steve Jobs role
New GCHQ spymaster: US tech giants are 'command and control networks for terror'
Tuesday 4th November 2014 21:41 GMT
Re: Not really thinking things through.
I'm not sure what exactly you are all afraid of, in a democracy, you can get rid of governments and parties you don't like through the ballot box
Can you?
At the last election, we voted against the party that brought in tuition fees and the IMP. We got a coalition of parties, one of which had promised faithfully no abolish tuition fees, and both of which had decried the IMP as abhorrent.
So what did we get? Same shit, different day...
Vic.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
