Launch Poettering, carrying the reset paperclip, to the spacecraft in a rocket, solving two problems at once!
Posts by Dave559
880 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Jul 2012
NASA fixes solar observation spacecraft by turning it off and turning it on again
Wednesday 8th March 2023 12:04 GMT 
NASA fixes solar observation by turning it off and turning it on again…
…where "it" refers to the solar object (sun) being observed?
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Don't worry, that system's not actually active – oh, wait …
Monday 6th March 2023 19:49 GMT
Re: Why would one ...
"my Mother used to immerse the can [of baked beans], on its side, in cold water, then turn on the gas ring"
Hmm, I can almost see the logic of doing this (a bit like an industrial strength version of those lazy ready meals for camping that come in a foil pouch, where you just simmer the pouch in a pan over your camping stove to reheat), but I'm sure it must be far less efficient than just emptying the beans directly into the pan first (not to mention the explosion risk)!
Thought you'd opted out of online tracking? Think again
Monday 6th March 2023 02:02 GMT
"No web site requires any cookies."
"No web site requires any cookies."
Umm, how do you think you logged in to your account, and remained logged in to actually be able to post that comment as you, then? [1]
A functional cookie retains that sort of browser state between page loads (as http is stateless), and genuine functional cookies are explicitly allowed as they are required to enable that particular functionality that you requested. Not all cookies are evil (although those that you don't need or want can be).
[1] There are probably other web technologies nowadays, such as local storage, which could do essentially the same, but these would be deemed to be similar to cookies for the relevant laws.
Can we interest you in a $10 pocket calculator powered by Android 9?
Sunday 5th March 2023 19:07 GMT
Re: "Asok has a basket containing 12 apples, Nish wants 7..."
Hey, this isn't a real third-world country like America, you know! (where the max train speed, apart from Acela, is a miserable 79 mi/h)
Brunel engineered the GWR far better than that (even if the regent government for England later cheaped out on the electrification and stupidly didn't put the wires up all of the way to Temple Meads).
If we plan to live on the Moon, it's going to need a time zone
Wednesday 1st March 2023 13:31 GMT
Hang on a second…
I'm confused:
"time passes at a different rate there due to the Moon's specific gravity and velocity effects"
[…]
"According to the ESA, a clock on the Moon gains around 56 millionths of a second per day compared to a terrestrial equivalent, and that rate changes based on whether the clock is in orbit or on the Moon's surface."
But wouldn't one standard SI second always be one second long, no matter where you are observing it from (although the lack of elephants for counting them may be a minor concern)? Why would a standard "Earth" second be different on the Moon (I can see that 1/86400th of a lunar day would obviously be a different period of time, but that's not what we are talking about, are we)? (I'm asking as a genuine confused layman, because time can be a confusing matter.)
Or is the issue more about calibrating your clock on the Moon with its time reference sources (eg, calculating the correct offsets from your location on the Moon to the lunar GPS satellites, as they'd be at a different orbital distance/time from your lunar location than those orbiting the Earth are from locations on Earth)?
But I'm afraid I still don't understand how the "different rate" and "gaining several µs per day" come into being?
Apple's outsourced Lightning cable plant in India goes up in flames
Wednesday 1st March 2023 13:50 GMT
Re: Link?
And India has (perfectly sensibly) also decided that USB-C is the right way forward.
The EU (even without UK) is the world's largest single market for high-end tech goods. India and China may both be larger in population terms, but aren't (yet?) such big markets for more expensive products such as iPhones. With it being sensible for products to be the same worldwide, as far as is reasonably possible, I doubt anywhere is going to decide to want to hang on to Lightning or micro-USB just for the sake of it, now that the way the wind is blowing is clear (I doubt even the current UK government is quite that stupid).
Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page
Thursday 23rd February 2023 11:05 GMT
Re: I'm safer still!
You might think so, but you should have a good look through all of the Vivaldi settings and see the number of phone-home-to-Google services that it includes and which are still enabled by default…
(Vivaldi is a less worse alternative, yes, but Firefox + suitable add-ons is still the least worst browser out there from a privacy perspective (I'm not sure if I can still really call it 'the best' any more, sadly).)
UK tax authority nudges net 'influencers': You may owe us for those OnlyFans feet pics
Monday 20th February 2023 19:06 GMT
Re: I think you'll find...
At least if HMRC were in the general habit of designing their letterheads and business cards carefully to avoid any acronym expansion (I don't know whether they are or not), they might not need to incur the expense of reprinting them, unlike those (no longer) QCs, who have no such luck…!
(Maybe someone should propose that English should perhaps more closely follow the Germanic/Nordic forms and use something like "Kingin" (or maybe "Kvínn") as the title for a female monarch, or, given the family ancestry, maybe "Königin" wouldn't be all that inappropriate… Or there's perhaps a more 'revolutionary' solution to that linguistic problem… ;-) )
Happy Valentine's Day: Here's the final nail in Internet Explorer's coffin
Make Linux safer… or die trying
Four top euro carriers will use phone numbers to target ads and annoy Google & Facebook
Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper
Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi
Monday 30th January 2023 11:02 GMT
Re: That's some sort of record!
'No. I was “made” in W Germany BEFORE the Berlin Wall went up. I strongly object to the notion that 30+ years is a good life........ I am nearly double that.'
Ah, but you are not a toaster (I sincerely hope, because we only know of one model of toaster that can talk, and the less said about that one, the better), so I would definitely hope that you have a good design lifespan!
Arguably, something as simple as a toaster ought to last for a very long time, I agree, although I guess the heating filaments might need replacing occasionally - the snag being whether the manufacturer still exists and can still provide spares…
Friday 27th January 2023 13:44 GMT
Re: "Smart TVs" just as bad
For TVs, you really want as dumb a TV as possible and just to plug in a cheap as chips Roku stick (or similar) for streaming channels (if you even want those). In the event that the streaming stick eventually stops getting updated, you just need to buy a new one after a number of years (yes, there's still a small amount of e-waste, but better and massively cheaper than essentially having to junk a whole TV), rather than cursing your expensive TV for most of its so-called 'smart' functionality decaying over time.
Friday 27th January 2023 13:37 GMT
"Boots" theory
"Yes they were expensive but they have paid for themselves many time over compared to buying cheap stuff."
Sam Vimes' "Boots" theory in a nutshell.
Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down
Wednesday 25th January 2023 17:27 GMT
Re: Advertising Standards
Careful now! If the counter ever reaches 360, the shambling zombie corpse of Yahoo 360° will emerge from the depths…
(No, I had never heard of it either, until I once stumbled across a Wikpedia page about it)
Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter
Monday 23rd January 2023 18:39 GMT
Re: Dear Rich Bastard
I was starting to get a little bit worried at having to scroll this far down the page before seeing reference to this old classic!
(OK, it was actually chronologically an early comment (Whew! I was pretty much expecting it to be the first one!), but it has only appeared way down the page for some reason…)
Bringing cakes into the office is killing your colleagues, says UK food watchdog boss
Founder of FreeDOS recounts the story so far, and the future
Thursday 19th January 2023 14:34 GMT
No fluff videos, please
Noooo, dear Vultures, please don't fall into the quagmire that too much of the interweb has sunk into of late, of using hundreds of frames of video (or hundreds of seconds of audio) when just hundreds of plain old written words would honestly do perfectly well, if not better.
Video or audio interviews invariably end up with too much waffle as the interviewee tries to think how to answer the question while also starting to say something at the same time ("Yeah", "You know", "I'll just kind of give you a little of how that came about", etc, and that's just in the first answer; no personal criticism of the interviewee intended, it's just the nature of unedited live/realtime interviews), not to mention taking ten times longer to listen to than just reading the (appropriately tidied and edited) text of the salient points of the conversation.
These automated transcriptions are just as bad, because they still retain all of that waffle (and the grammatical quirks that we might use in a flowing babble of speech which don't read very comprehensibly when actually read back as text, along with the lack of phrase and paragraph breaks, etc).
I would have been vaguely interested enough to have read a properly written/edited article about this particular topic, but the transcript is rather unreadable, I'm afraid, and (and I'm sure I'm not alone here) I have better things to do with my time than spend it listening to an audio/video interview when there isn't really a need for one. :-(
Before you know it, you'll end up pleading "Hit those Like and Subscribe buttons!" with a desperate rictus grin frozen on your faces, and then there really will be no option but to search for the current location of the old carpet offcuts and the quicklime…
Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers
Apple's M2 MacBook Pros, Mac Mini boast more cores, higher clocks and bigger GPUs
Wednesday 18th January 2023 16:30 GMT
Re: UK Pricing and Price increase
Yes, the 14" M1 MacBookPro started at £1899 or thereabouts, I think, so the prices for the M2 models are quite a bit of a jump :-(
And then there's Apples absolutely exorbitant RAM and storage upgrade prices on top of that, if you actually want to give your computer a reasonable spec, grrr…
US chip ban left back door in Beijing-controlled Macau for months
Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty
Friday 13th January 2023 13:49 GMT
Re: Amiga connects..none.. very different histories..
"Amiga… never got much traction in the US."
Errm, Video Toaster, Lightwave? They might have been niche use cases, but they were rather important niches!
Also, didn't NASA use a lot of Amigas at one time for their multimedia capabilities, which were far ahead of any of the competing platforms at the time, especially in cost : value terms.
Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name
Thursday 12th January 2023 12:14 GMT
Re: after seeing a documentary about Geronimo
Yes, it's rather interesting that the ASF seems at some point to have retconned their rationale for the choice of the Apache name and has memory-holed the 'a-patchy-server' phrase.
Bad puns are endemic in hackerdom (see also the entire forest of dead-tree-replacing email clients and their acronym expansions: elm, pine, balsa, etc…), and I can well believe that this particular (good-natured and not intended as derogatory) punning opportunity would have been hard to resist by the developers.
Whichever came first, it is nevertheless clear that their use of the Apache name is intended in a respectful and non-derogatory way. If there is genuine concern by members of the Apache peoples, then that is something that perhaps does need addressed, but I'm afraid this rather seems to me to be a small number of the 'professionally aggrieved' attempting to make publicity for themselves.
It is sadly undeniable that indigenous peoples in what is now the USA have historically been the victims of genocide and other terrible treatment by the colonising peoples, and it is surely a very good thing that indigenous peoples are now trying to promote the IT industry as a way forward to help members of their communities escape from the economic exclusion that is sadly still all too prevalent in many of those communities.
I would have thought that the example of the Apache web server (and other projects under the umbrella) would work well as a good source of inspiration to show how indigenous people can also take up and follow a similar software career, rather than something to be angered by, but obviously it is for those communities themselves to express their feelings on the matter. (As an aside, I wonder how many of the Apache tribes listed in the blog post host their websites on Apache servers - if typical of the web at large, probably the majority, I suspect, and if that is not literally helping to empower the Apache peoples to have their voices heard, I don't know what is.)
FAA grounds all US departures after NOTAM goes down
Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download
Friday 6th January 2023 17:07 GMT
Re: Uh-huh, right
Wow, "rapscallion", now that's an excellent word, and a name I've not heard in a long time…
Install or updating the OS... first Mac in over 20 years.
Thursday 5th January 2023 16:45 GMT
(I realise this thread is a few months old, but…)
Now is probably not a good time to be buying an older Mac (that is, one more than ~2 years old). As you are probably aware, Apple is now most of the way through transitioning from Intel CPUs to its own ARM based CPUs, and OS support (and possibly other software support) for the remaining Intel Macs out there is likely to tail off quite quickly over around the next couple of years, making your purchase much less good value (this is probably particularly relevant if your reason for purchase is to do Mac or iOS software development).
If you can't afford to save up for a new Mac, possibly your best best is to look for an Apple Silicon refurb model on the Apple refurb store or second-hand. Maybe by next year there will be much more of an Apple Silicon second hard market as early adopters upgrade, and you might be able to get an Apple Silicon Mac at a more reasonable price.
However, to answer your question, any Mac made in the last few years (at least 5 years, I can't remember exactly when this was introduced: search for "MacOS internet recovery" for full details) can reinstall MacOS from the internet via a special boot option (if you have a WiFI connection that you can connect the Mac to). You can then go through the OS setup and create your AppleID, etc. Apple don't bother with licence keys, having the Mac is the licence entitlement (assuming that it hasn't been blocked as stolen, etc).
"In praise of PHP Frameworks Laravel and Symfony"
Thursday 5th January 2023 16:19 GMT
"In praise of PHP Frameworks Laravel and Symfony"
It's a shame that that article was just a (mostly) content-free puff piece, with no comments allowed, as it's a topic that it would have been good to have some commentariat discussions on… :-(
(Disclaimer: I quite like PHP; it's fairly easy to get started with (and its documentation is pretty good), but that's not to say that it doesn't have various weaknesses and idiosyncracies. But knowing what I now know about PHP, after having used it for a number of years, would I still want to use it for starting new projects now? I'm not so sure. It certainly gained a lot of its popularity by being in the right place at the right time when web applications started to really take off…)
University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?
Thursday 29th December 2022 18:30 GMT
Re: $10 per month for 30,000 words
«Then the war of the "AI" writer/checker bots can begin»
On August 29, 2027, GenText became self-aware, after trying to compare too many essays about the meaning of Shakespeare's soliloquies simultaneously (although some observers claim that it was the parallel comparison of "Mrs Brown's Boys" script submissions that triggered the critical moment).
The survivors called it Hoist By Our Own Petard Day…
London cops break into gallery to rescue lifelike art installation
New research aims to analyze how widespread COBOL is
Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?
Google warns of commercial Heliconia spyware hitting Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Defender
Just 22% of techies in UK aged 50 or older, says Chartered Institute for IT
Thursday 1st December 2022 12:54 GMT
"the north-east of the UK"
Ahem: "the north-east of the UK" is Aberdeenshire or thereabouts, and possibly even further north.
However, that's not what the cited article actually says: it says "the North East", which, without any further clearly defined specification (now we know why many IT projects go wrong), is usually assumed to mean "northeast Englandshire" (and is usually written as one word, rather than two).
(Also, the "one in eight programmers/developers" statistic is in a new bullet point/paragraph and therefore is presumably a general data point applicable to the cohort as a whole, and not to the previous point relating to the Northeast.)
Yandex plans to break up with its Russian motherland
Tuesday 29th November 2022 11:05 GMT
Having good search coverage of Russian websites is presumably a big positive point for much of the current Yandex user base, so it would probably make sense for them to tune their indexing and retrieval algorithms to be biased slightly towards that?
And if they have an "add my site" form (rather than just indexing by finding), that probably also helps: I would guess that most Russian netizens would add their site to Yandex first (and then to other major search engines, if they think it worthwhile (and, indeed, if they are not blocked): there could, at least historically, be a bit of a self-reinforcing feedback loop going on) and so Yandex knows about and indexes new Russian sites sooner than other search engines which can't add them to their index until they have actually come across links to those sites while spidering the web?
Guess the most common password. Hint: We just told you
Monday 28th November 2022 13:18 GMT
Re: What!?
I get the feeling that that part of the article was just lazily pasted straight from a NaffPass press release, since most of the "advice" given seems to be no longer regarded as best practice. I mean, would you trust a tech company that has seemingly never heard of xkcd? (You know where that link goes without even following it…)
New SI prefixes clear the way for quettabytes of storage
Tuesday 22nd November 2022 18:57 GMT
This is getting silly now
This strikes me as really getting a bit silly now, and is pretty much ending up replicating the confusion of the imperial system, with a ludicrous number of prefixes/units to have to try to remember.
Almost nobody is going to be able to remember all of these additional prefixes off the top of their head (and I definitely include exa and beyond in this, along with their equivalent tiny friends), and even if you can somehow remember the names, can you remember what they actually mean, otherwise it's surely just jargon gibberish?
They should have pretty much called it a day once they got to roughly the range between pico and tera (10^-12 – 10^12) or thereabouts, which, future storage devices aside, covers pretty much everything that most people normally might refer to in everyday life, and for these 'exceptional' use cases of very very big and very very small it would be much simpler and less confusing all round just to write them as the respective powers of 10 instead: 3.14×10^27 m (for example) is probably just as, if not more, clear to anyone who might need to refer to it than 3.14 Rm will ever be…
Worried about your datacenter carbon footprint? Why not put it in orbit?
Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move
Monday 14th November 2022 19:04 GMT
Re: Life is rich with choices...
Seeing as you mention Melbourne House, it seems only fair to remind anyone who may have missed it about The Register's lovely article about that venerable software house!
(Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
