Tuesday, December 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 December 2022

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised Edition

Top Story


Tech News

  • Moon's haunted: After a successful trip to and around the Moon, NASA's Orion spacecraft* has had some issues with ghost breakers. (WCCFTech)

    The computerised circuit breakers are supposed to trip on command or when something goes horribly wrong, but instead half of them tripped for no reason at all. And cut off half the maneuvering thrusters in the process, something that could be inconvenient if it happened at the wrong moment.

    The next Orion flight is expected in, uh, two years.

    * Not old bang-bang, sadly. See Niven & Pournelle's Footfall if you're not familiar.


  • The making of Dune II. (Read Only Memory)

    I always wondered why the sequel to the Dune computer game was in a completely different genre - the first an adventure game, the second a real-time strategy title.

    This article explains that: It wasn't a sequel, not even in the strictly temporal sense. Once the producers obtained the rights to make Dune computer games, they hired two studios to produce two entirely different games at the same time.

    Dune I was unremarkable and is largely forgotten. Dune II on the other hand pulled together all the elements of a real-time strategy game for the first time, and is the direct parent of the entire Command & Conquer series.


  • You can't let just anybody look at the sky! (Scientific American)

    The US government plans to require public release of all date from publicly-funded science. The article argues that this is bad for science, because other scientists can look at the data and, well:
    I have a friend in Minsk
    Who has a friend in Pinsk
    Whose friend in Omsk
    Has friend in Tomsk
    With friend in Akmolinsk
    His friend in Alexandrovsk
    Has friend in Petropavlovsk
    Whose friend somehow is solving now
    The problem in Dnepropetrovsk

    And when his work is done
    Haha! Begins the fun
    From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
    By way of Iliysk and over Novorossiysk
    To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
    To Tomsk to Omsk
    To Pinsk to Minsk
    To me the news will run
    Yes, to me the news will run!

    And then I write by morning, night
    And afternoon, and pretty soon
    My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed
    When he finds out I published first!
    I didn't say it was a very good argument.


  • How "goblin mode" became Oxford's word of the year. (NPR)

    First, that's not a word.

    Second, people voted for it. It was an online poll. And it mopped the floor with the competition, because the competition was "metaverse" (which is at least a word) and "#IStandWith".

    Third, I wonder if that's in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. I shall take a look, because that just arrived too. (I'd love to get the full 20-volume set, but it's pretty expensive.)


  • Twitter turns its back on open-source development. (ZDNet)

    Is it true?

    No. It's just more wishcasting by another left-wing pro-censorship journalist. (Which is pretty much all of them.)

    Interesting tidbit from the article though: Twitter was developing its own custom JVM, which is a really dumb idea. The company isn't nearly big enough - let along profitable enough - to support work like that.


  • Setting up container backups on the new server. Much cleaner than the old rsync-and-hope system.

    I plan to migrate the old MyISAM tables to either Aria or InnoDB, which will make them crash safe. Not certain that the code will work correctly with InnoDB, because it's properly transactional, but Aria is just a better MyISAM.


Disclaimer: And who deserves the credit? And who deserves the blame? Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:43 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 737 words, total size 6 kb.

1 Ruh Roh, what unfunctioned on the Tab M8?(gives the one in front of me a bit of side eye and a finger poking.)

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Wednesday, December 07 2022 03:52 AM (YBLgY)

2 Thanks for that reprise of a classic Tom Lehrer, which I haven't heard in years.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, December 07 2022 04:16 AM (g0n8K)

3 Bob - it's the microUSB port.  They're not very robust.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 07 2022 07:49 AM (PiXy!)

4 Ah, yeah that would suck, I started using one of those little cables with the apple style magnet hook up a few years back just to minimize the port wear and tear.  Seems like just about everything with a micro-usb port fails there at some point. I've got a little Dell 7" tablet from years back that I did have luck repairing with a new jack purchased off of the Ebay, wonder if it could be done with your lenovo?

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Thursday, December 08 2022 12:34 AM (YBLgY)

5 Given that Dune II was developed by Westwood, and Westwood have previously released a game with real-time game play in the form of The Crescent Hawk's Revenge (A very early Battletech game for the PC, when the rights holders were not complete idiots - see lawsuit; response to Harmony Gold's.), it would be more accurate to say that Dune II was a polishing of the concept first seen in CHR.

The funny thing is that the first game is probably more notable for its' developer, Cryo Interactive.

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, December 08 2022 12:00 PM (2tHvf)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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