Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

Like it or not, in a commercial environment, time to market and ease of coding trumps the quality of code. The history of software development demonstrates that.

"Kepler's laws only apply around a common star."

I deleted a rather long caveat about this. (I've learnt my lesson.) Yes, you have to know the region a set of rules operate in. But, as you point out, it was fine. We were trying to determine the orbital "radius" of the planet and a quicker orbit around a lighter star means it must be closer in than the earth.

(And while I'm here, I meant aphelion---or apastron, if you're being a real pedant---not apogee.)

You've ignored the birthday paradox. There's a 50% chance two of them will share a hash if you have a pool of 1E77 programs.

Re: A singularity enters an event horizon

I wouldn't think about singularities too literally. They're probably not a real thing. They're just a placeholder in the maths for whatever actually happens inside black holes. We'll get back to you when we've figured that out.

Re: The security guard monitoring it wanted to see

Actually, when stopped, I normally leg it and see whether the guard can match me for speed and endurance. And if they do catch me, then I enjoy the expression on their face when they realise I've not nicked nothing. But I couldn't do that because I was in my heels...

Seriously, imaginations are getting carried away. First, I was in my own world when it happened so I was half way through the process before I came to my senses. And all he did was ask me to step through the arch again and then check the number of items on the receipt matched the number of items in my carrier bag. He didn't look in any of my other bags (where he would have found an old DVD that probably triggered the false positive). I was miffed. But being banned would be an inconvenience. And, on reflection, what he did was proportionate and reasonable.

The arch had gone the next time I was in there, and hasn't been back since. I hope my false positive counted against it in some metric. And I got to learn the limit of their processes.

RTFA

"If their system just takes a payment success flag from the front end only, then they've only got themselves to blame."

It's made clear in the article that the back-end is validating the payment. The problem is the front-end rewriting valid data so that the back-end rejects it. The bug reporter then goes on to speculate about how much this has cost them in lost sales.

Re: Third interstellar visitor?

I've skimmed the paper and I couldn't see anything to suggest it was extra-solar. And you think they'd make a big fuss if it was an interstellar asteroid.

Re: Space ist -really- big and for the most part depressingly empty

"Even at a rate of 2 Million in 2 years there would not be a goot chance of any direct hit with any solar system body, let alone tiny earth ..."

My napkin suggests that, at a million/year, the earth would be hit within a millennia, although we're having a debate about whether that's an over- or underestimate.

The odds are only so high because they're isotropically distributed. If they were all aligned with the ecliptic, we'd be in trouble for sure.

And Venus looks to have the biggest cross section since it's almost earth sized but orbits at three quarters the earth's orbital radius.

Re: No more call centers? What a wonderful world we live in!

How different would it be to what we have now where the operator just follows a script? We are using minimum wage workers as voice recognition/data entry systems.

Confer with your twin.

Only if you assume there's a universal clock that all observers agree upon. Einstein did away with that.

You might side-step that by saying, "Well, suppose we send a probe there, having synchronised its clock to atomic time (TT(TAI)) - what would that probe say?" And the answer to that depends on the route the probe took to get there and where we parked it when it arrived. (The probes are near a black hole so the gravitational time dilation is not to be sniffed at.). Two different probes would give two different answers. And it's not clear which we should give priority to.

But, most importantly, if it decided to beam a blast of gamma rays at us, we will experience it today, and not 27,000 years in the past.

Bambiraptor. And Stenonychosaurus is another that could probably pick up toys.

And can't you pick up Lego between your toes?

Re: Don't panic

TBH, the world is so fucked up that I would be underwhelmed by the arrival of aliens. "Aliens, huh? D'you think they're Brexiteers or Remainers?"

Re: Welcome to the 90s

I remember having the idea of introducing a "support right". Essentially, the idea of charging to support a product should be restricted to the developers, unless they sold on that right.

Re: Google has become a lot like Microsoft in that respect

It's also a handy workaround for manufacturers not keeping their phones up to date. So even though Morotrola won't update the core OS, my phone has an uptodate browser and access to all the new features in play services.

Re: Proper requirement analysis

But you want these missions to succeed 99.99% of the time. So they are deliberately over-engineered. And if that extra capacity remains unused it can be retasked once the primary goal is achieved - provided the politicians can be talked into the opex.

HMRC will be sent out of court with a flea in the ear if they try and claim a contract for a single day is covered by IR35. Six months exclusively working for one employer is probably a good rule of thumb and what I plan to use.

Re: We seem to be unable to adequately sterilize our spacecraft

A lot of steps are taken to make sure we don't transmit microbes to other planets. (Remember the tardigrades were deliberately carried into space. And they remain in suspended animation - although if any did hitchike to Europa, they might reanimate in the ocean.)

It's probable that life on Europa won't be compatible with Terran life. So viruses won't be an issue - even if it Europan life uses DNA/RNA (unless Hoyle and Wickramasinghe were right). The risk is life from earth out competing or poisoning Europan life - or just plain eating it. So more Australia than America.

Re: Good. I'll never have to use it, again.

"Adding real file copy and rename metadata"

hg copy

hg rename

Re: Help me understand something here, please...

It kinda makes sense if the advert is in the iframe. You could obscure it with another UI element and have that pointer-events: none. That would mean the user thinks they're clicking "loks of nekkid ladies" and the add for disinfectant would get another click.

Predator becoms prey when a bigger Predator turns up.

We've got so used to exploiting other people that we don't realise when we're the ones being exploited

According to the paper, that would fall under "planetesimal enrichment and vaporization" and the verdict is "...relevant models typically cannot produce an extended diluted core [as is seen in Jupiter and, to a lesser extent, Saturn]."

Translation: proto-planets would have disintegrated, and their metals sunk to the centre and been deposited on a conventional rocky core. (Think growing salt crystals.)

Whereas Jupiter's core hasn't fully condensed into a solid lump. (Although it might do eventually.) And the authors' model model suggests a head-on collision that happened at a very late stage in planet formation would produce that.

Re: Those customers affected...

I've just sandpapered mine off. It seemed safest. I might draw some on with a marker pen if I have time.

Switching to Firefox doesn't help for long. Nobody is going to bother renewing EV certificates when ~80% of the market sees no benefit. So the indicator will disappear from Firefox, not because Firefox has removed the code, but because Google has declared it dead.

Re: Why is this API available without permission ?

It doesn't provide full filesystem access - only a cache directory.

We'd be the first people to complain about storing personal data "in the cloud" or on somebody else's server. Storing your data on your computer obviates the whiff of impropriety. (It also saves the bucks on storage and bandwidth.) It's particularly useful for app-like functionality.

That said, the filesystem API is a nightmare; IndexedDB, although itself a pre-Promise PITA, is a better bet.

Re: To think

"...a sense that colliding with each other was imminent on a human scale."

200,000 years is human scale. I mean you hairy apes have been around that long, haven't you? Most things in astronomy have timescales of billions of years.

_{They're probably only going to collide because of gravitational losses, which are obviously small and so slow. Without that they'd be as stable as an electron orbiting an atom.}

Welcome to the ergosphere.

"Time clearly isn't a dimension."

What do you mean by "dimension"? If you beg the question and define "dimension" in such a way that only the three, extant spatial dimensions can satisfy it, then of course you're correct. But then we already know that time and any extra dimensions are not a spatial dimensions of the sort we see around us - at least, not at temperatures we can survive in.

But if you define dimension as an "independent" variable necessary to describe your position, then time is a dimension. (And, potentially, so too is electric charge.)

Re: Rural rage

Surely their first complaint will be they're not receiving any subsidies and are having to compete with tariff free imports?

"Gideon, forget I said that."

Even on Star Trek, they had to say "computer"...

A remake of Star Trek IV wouldn't have Scotty picking up a mouse and talking to it. Instead his confusion would arise out of not knowing the computer had to be addressed as "Alexa" (or whichever company had paid for the product placement).

_{Personally, I plan to take a leaf out of Blake's 7's book and call my computer Slave.}

"Every contractor who goes perm will result in less overall tax paid by them (permies are paid less)."

Fair enough. But where does the missing money go? Because it could reach the exchequer via a different route.

For example, if the company employs two half-baked permies instead of one skilled contractor, then the overall tax take could stay the same (or even increase - I can't be arsed to work out).

Equally, the money might surface somewhere other than "payroll taxes". Although with pledges to further reduce corporation tax, it may be the money won't get to the treasury. But my point is just because you are paying less tax, doesn't mean there is less tax coming in. Complicated systems can be subtle and need detailed analysis.

<guess>I don't know the specifics. But my guess is this javascript using the media capture API. If a web site uses it, the browser prompts. But the localhost is probably exempt. So if you serve your page from a locally installed web server - there's no "annoying" prompt.</guess>

Re: Who's been copying AMD's homework?

"Or go further back to the discreet floating point coprocessors back in the day, and you're on to the problem of making them talk to each other."

FWAIT

Re: What transition?

But it's the human side they really screwed up on. They underestimated the drag of millions of sysadmins having to unlearn everything they know and learn a new, harder system. (Probably because sysadmins were fewer in number, smarter, and better paid, back in the day.) If sysadmins perceived IPv6 as the newest and greatest, they would be pestering bosses for the cash and smuggling in the kit; the transition would happen. Instead, we're still debating the notation. And given that we're still debating whether to use tabs of spaces (and how many spaces) I don't see that debate ending any time soon.

Re: Julian dates WTF

You're not wrong. Section 1.252 of the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac defines a Julian Date to be a Julian Day Number plus a fractional time of day; e.g. 20145.5. Even, Meeus, bless his cotton socks, grudgingly admits 'In many books we read "Julian Date" instead of Julian Day.'

If you'd asked me before I'd read this. I'd've said it was either a count of terrestrial rotations from the Julian epoch or a calendar date expressed in the Julian calendar. But the adjective Julian gets liberally used in astronomy.