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Comment Re:Transmitter? (Score 1) 74

It's a telescope, so it's a receiver. Why - and, indeed, what - was it transmitting?

It could send out radar pulses to objects within the solar system, then listen to the echo. This could be for basic ranging and getting precise orbital parameters, it also could be used for imaging otherwise dim objects, like asteroids. This is how, for instance, we could confirm that asteroid Didymos had a moon, which made it a perfect candidate for smashing an impactor into.

When you think about it, this is pretty wild. They have to time to outgoing radar pulse and direction such that, after minutes or hours of propagation at the speed of light, it intercepts the target. Then, minutes or hours later, they need to point re-point the telescope to capture the return image. It's planetary flash photography, but with significant delays.

And, yeah, they also occasionally broadcast messages to the cosmos.

Comment Re:And so it begins (Score 1) 71

i found a Dell Latitude that runs circles around a Raspberry Pi for 200 dollars

Yes, but that doesn't work well for my (and a lot of other hobbyists') use case: toggling GPIO and providing easy access to an I2C or SPI bus. Sure, you can get a USB-connected aardvark or FTDI bus adapter to provide that pin-level access, but now you need to add some sort of extra driver or device tree to the OS; the pi does this out of the box.

Comment Branded products are nice (Score 2) 71

The branded products are nice for ensuring maximal compatibility. But as Jeff Geerling on Youtube has documented extensively since the Pi5 came out, there are lots of M.2 HATs out there that work really well. Many, by breaking modestly from the official HAT specification, allow for substantially larger SSDs - up to a 2280 module size.

Comment An interesting counterfactual (Score 4, Insightful) 34

It's interesting to speculate about, but too far back in the timeline to say how things would be today.

It certainly would *not* be the case that everything else would played out the same - NVidia's increasing dominance in GPUs, then becoming the de-facto for machine learning (CUDA's first stable release wasn't until 2007), then the bedrock of current AI stuff, leading to a $3T market cap - but just with Intel as the owner. Mergers and Acquisitions simply don't work that way.

Comment Good news for now (Score 2) 33

8 miles per hour = 7:30/mi pace = 12.9 kph = 3.75 m/s = 4:40/km

Compared to my typical running pace, it's nice to know I could still outrun this thing. (And with much better form!) Furthermore, as my weekend runs extend for more than an hour, I probably have greater endurance than whatever batteries it hauls around.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 95

Well, the article indicates that the current floppy-based system "was expected to last for 20 to 25 years." Alas, hewing to true modern journalistic standards, they didn't bother to mention how old the system actually is. But since they added that detail, presumably it is now substantially outside its original life expectancy. So call it 30 years old: deployed in the mid-90s, using a design and technology from the early 90s or late 80s.

They didn't specify just what kind of floppy they're talking about. It's not necessarily 1.44 MB 3.5": maybe it's 5-1/4", or even 8"!

Comment Huge tracts (Score 5, Insightful) 120

I built this country up from nuthin'. When I started here all there was was swamp. They said I was daft to build a Communist paradise in the middle of a swamp. But I built it all the same - just to show 'em. It lost its soviet patron and sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one! That lost its charismatic founder and sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That lost its electric grid, got hit by a hurricane, then sank into the swamp.

But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're going to get, lad: the strongest Communist paradise in these isles. Viva Cuba!

Comment Re:Fuel (Score 1) 128

a wooden framed building is its own fuel source

For stick construction of small buildings, this is obviously the case. House fires happen all the time. However, for mass timber, they really don't sustain a fire very well. If you've ever built a fire, you'll know that a thick log won't burn very well. Same too with these mass timber elements: you can put a blowtorch to them and they'll just char on the surface - they won't burn on their own.

Comment Re:Oh the irony (Score 2) 69

Most of these thermal drilling projects rely on depth not horizontally drilling.

The enhanced geothermal the article is talking about isn't just a single bore hole. It goes down, then horizontal for a good distance to pick up a lot of heat, then up a different bore hole. So there's an injection well and one or more extraction wells. See images. Some systems are like a giant U shape, some are just vertical bores. But most have the injection and extraction wells running parallel to each other, with significant stretches of horizontal drilling in the hot rocks. (This parallel approach lets all the equipment live within a single building, and makes it easy to close the loop for the working fluid.)

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