Posts by Andy The Hat

Re: Small to invisible

Micrometric improvement?

Makes me wonder if Win10 to Win11 is Microsoft's vision of Sinclair's "quantum leap"?

Re: Aahh... yeah.

I'll have you know I heat both my second mansion in Scotland and my Tesla batteries using but a single tealight in a flowerpot, whilst simultaneously shrinking my prostate with triple filtered Highland Spring and a crystal of purest Green ... spam pah! :-)

Re: Enough with the Elon Musk Snark

The big hole left was, by definition, not full of anything apart from hole ...

The concrete was up to 2' thick, reinforced, refractory grade stuff and basically you can't buy better for that application.

Unfortunately the rocket, being the most powerful ever built, took one look and decided "Puny concrete! Hulk smash!" and dug out the crater (although, strangely, it may have started to produce a crater *first* which caused the pad to fail ...)

Re: Unwieldy

My concern are not the little things like windscreens but if the "1/3 nose" is a requirement then it becomes (a) a weight issue for an industry where weight costs money and (b) a size issue for access to ground facilities. In addition, if the top mounted engine set very low in the fuselage is a design requirement that becomes a capacity restriction.

So, it's quiet, quick and looks great but as a significant passenger vehicle will be too big for terminals and have a low passenger capacity, therefore would at best be developed as a billionaires' private jet ...

Re: Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlig klær!

Only -40C? Call that cold? When I were a lad we froze to absolute zero, licked glaciers to warm up for breakfast ... :-)

Re: Some data is better than nothing

Excellent that the BE4 apparently performed well. Just got to prove their reliability and the ability of BO to produce them now ...

Only obvious issue I can see for ULA is using BE4+SRB on first stage and RL10 on second stage. The big advantage (at the moment) for SpaceX is that Merlins are used on both first and second stage so economies of scale both for engine manufacture and system integration can be applied. ULA will not have that benefit which probably means they will always be chasing financially, even if they can develop some measure of first stage reusability. Perhaps the economic problem is insignificant if ULA can rely on having enough military payloads where the military will just pay, whatever the cost ...

Re: Think of the Grid! - running costs are a thing.

So you don't work shifts then?

Re: Californians can just pretend that someone else was driving?

... and in the event that the registered keeper (UK) or owner (US) declares the driver to be "the self driving software" then that should be the party that is liable (fines, making the company boss liable for jail time etc)

This will do two things :-

1) make more sense of current rules and regulations without them sinking in a mire of political poop and

2) make self-driver software companies log what they are doing to demonstrate the infallibility of their systems.

All that would then be required is to implement a general limit as to how many independent incidents are required before that software has to be recalled/withdrawn and be recertified for road use.

money isn't a consideration here - perceived security implications in public services are. If the Government says jump, the councils will have to jump. The question I posed is whether the Government will give that instruction or decide that all council data is "secure enough" and let them keep the hardware?

Re: Mugs

Free software ...

"Oh, my £100m company has an issue with it's free software that throws an error, I'll just phone the free support line and get then to raise the issue with the obviously free developer."

I see nothing wrong with that as a completely sustainable system of "slaveryware" - or perhaps you'd prefer to throw them a half-gnawed bone occasionally and only call it "serfdomware"?

Re: So, Mrs Rosenworcel is cleaning up Pai's mess

"begging for subsidies" and trying to get a nose in the taxpayer-funded troughs are two different things and always have been. trying to get something when you have little is "begging", trying to get more when you have plenty is called capitalism - or "democracy" in the USA.

As soon as a group passes any law, in the process exempting themselves from that law, there needs to be a revolution. NOBODY should be above the law.

Re: Hop

"Granted they weren't tall like a rocket so less of a balance issue, but way way harder to do it on another planet where you don't get second chances"

"Balance" isn't a thing - moments of inertia, center of gravity and thrust control are which can sometimes make a landing rocket easier to control than a roughly spherical lander. The major problem you neglect to mention is that a lander generally does it once with a single burn of the engines, a launcher has to do it a lot of times reliably (otherwise there's no point) and, in Falcon 9's case, with multiple engine ignition sequences per landing.

Also, last time I checked, if a booster doesn't land properly on the Earth it didn't get much of a second chance either ... the terms "kaaboom" and "enormous kaaboom" spring to mind.

Re: Ah Doom

Frak was available on a floppy somewhere ... was that the wussy version of having a Frag? :-)

If you close the "Wobbly Fun" and "Oh My Vicar!" 4K streams running in the background I find it helps speed ...

Re: Completely Meaningless Agency

I would far rather see then be proactive rather that wait until market dominance has already been established and competition crushed at which point the CMS become a toothless tiger.

Re: Not a Snapdragon

Question: does this phone run hotter or cooler than a Cray love-seat?

If you had one phones in each back pocket, things may feel surprisingly familiar. And, being more powerful than a Cray, modern phone love-seats can, in real time and without using vector arithmetic, control a vibration interface :-)

Re: Spread too thin

"He expects other employees to spend at least 40 hours/week in an office/on a worksite,"

I believe you demonstrate either a fundamental lack of understanding or simple jealousy here.

One of the basic benefits of owning a company is that a person decides how much to work whilst writing job descriptions that state how much their employees should work and what their wage will be.

If a person wants to have their nose in ten troughs (like many executives and politicians) that's between them (and possibly the boards of the companies*).

Welcome to capitalism 101.

*I exclude voters having any say in what their representatives do as "an employee of the State" because the entire system seems corrupt.

Re: photos of people where the subjects are unknown are of next to no value,

That's only nearly completely wrong by only referencing "people".

I, for instance, have a lot of barely in focus pictures that in themselves and to most sane people are completely useless. However, referenced together with other pictures taken at the same time, it turns out that they actually contain key insect id information (a leg or a wing for instance). Without them the rest of the set has much less scientific value.

I'm also currently searching for a grave - the *only* reference I have to it is a faded black and white photo of a flower-covered internment from the early 60's. No name or clues to who is buried there but important enough to be worth taking a photo of at the time. Completely irrelevant to anyone apart from my family (possibly) but may form a part of my family history or could be where the family silver is buried ...

Basically you cannot predict what *may* be important to a future historian without actually being one ...

Until the "Unsupported hardware <blue screen>" update for a "major security issue" is distributed ...

Re: keeping the data

"It's NOT being kept. RTFA."

Thanks for that. I did and I didn't see anything about data storage/retention/privacy policies ...

Re: University 1987

40 PCs? Looxury ... compiling programs at 3am on a TVI920 connected to a PDP11/750 was so much more fun ...

Re: Guy I used to work with...

clattering bell end?

Does that ring with anyone? :-)