efaardvark
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Status Updates posted by efaardvark
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I'm intrigued by the holes in the rocks...
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I've been "working" on my computer today, just cleaning up and doing some file maintenance. Found some *OLD* text files from an online game called Dragon's Gate. DGate was a text-only multiplayer game hosted by GE's "GEnie" online service back in the early 90s. Pre-internet. Pre-MMORPG. Dialup-only. It may have even predated Compuserve and AOL. One of the files shows a 2400 baud connection at the beginning.
I think this may have been the first multiplayer online game I ever played.
Not for long though. Long distance phone calls cost around $0.25/minute so playing for an hour was like $15. This back when gas was like $1/gallon so that'd be around $50/hr at today's prices. I knew a trick to call through a chain of "local" BBSs to pay about 1/4th that, but it was still expensive. Especially for a lowly student whose only regular income was a monthly allowance!
Blast from the past...
Welcome to... ...........|\...................../|............. ........./ \..|\__..__/|......./ \........... ........./ / \.\ _ \/ _ /....../ \............. _ .........../ / / \.(I)\/(I)....../ / \ \........... (_) ..........| | | / \\/(oo)\/...../ // |\ \ ............. ..........| | | | \|V,,V|\... / / | || \|........... ............| | | | / |A^^A| \../ / || || ||........... ......../ / / | | TTTT__ \/ /| || || ||/\ /\ /\..../ / / / / |______/ /| \ \ || || \/ \ /\ /\ /\ /\/ \../ / / / / /\_____/ |/ /__\ \ \ \ \ / \ / \ /\ / \ \/\ / / \.| | | / / /\______/ \ \__| \ \ \ \/ \/ \/ \ \/ \| | | | | |\______ __ \_ \__|_| \ / \ / \/ | | ____ /\______ ____ \_ \ | / / \ | |/ /\_____ / \ \__ \ | \ |/ | |\______ | | \___ \| D R A G O N ' S | |\______ | | \_ _ ___/| |\______ | | /\ \ ___ G A T E / \_/ \ \________\_ _\____/ / \__\_| \ ___/ __ __/ / __/ /__ \__/ __ \__ _/ / \ / ___/ / ___/ \ / \ |__ | / |/|/ |/|/ \__ \ \ | Usage charges started -
I* ran folding@home's servers out of work units!
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The Folding@home team know about the work unit shortage.
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It's happening because of an approximately 20x increase in demand.
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The Folding@home team are working on it and hope to have a solution very soon.
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Keep your machines running, they will eventually fold on their own.
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Every time we double our server resources, the number of Donors trying to help goes up by a factor of 4, outstripping whatever we do.
(*I and about a jillion other people.) -
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If you ever feel in need of a smile then all you need to do is google quokka, and click on “images”. Just look at that face!
You're welcome.
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If you’re having trouble keeping track of the 4 Mars orbiters and 2 (soon to be 3) landers and who’s relaying data from whom, try this site: https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/explore/mars-now/
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Is it wrong that I've had the 18th of Feb.
marked on my calendar for 6 months now but didn't realize that tomorrow is 
day until about 20 minutes ago?
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It has been a while since I cleaned under/behind the bookcases.
In case you're wondering, this is a "tinybopper" from a microgame called "RIVETS" that was released in the mid-late '70s. I bought them all as they came out, and still have most of them. Er.. somewhere.
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holy crap.. you can even still buy this game!
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It would be so cool if we could see Betelgeuse go supernova. Probably not going to happen any time “soon” (on a human scale) though. Probably.
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It's that time of year when my car starts looking a bit like a Rose Parade reject. (Those white specks are flower petals from a nearby tree.)
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Just applied for a job working for JPL! I've actually been working -at- JPL for years now but as a contractor, not as a direct employee. This will mean my paycheck comes directly from JPL. (Well, CalTech actually since the university manages JPL as a NASA center.) It will also mean I'll probably wind up being even more busy but it'll be pretty much the same job with more money, better benefits, and fewer contract management chiefs to deal with. And in fact my immediate boss will probably be one of my old bosses too so that will be a nice side-benefit since I got along pretty well with him back in the day.
Really hoping I get this "lateral promotion"
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Just found a place that has "Science Fiction and Fantasy", and "Sword and Sorcery" genres. WTF?? Why bother to have two separate categories if there's no meaningful separation? "Science Fiction" IS NOT the same thing as "Fantasy", and it is annoying as heck to have to dig through the one to find the other!
No name or link because I don't want to risk sending them any clicks.
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"Fantasy" is not-real, by definition. "Science" is real, by definition. If I'm looking for something not-real then I am definitely, logically, absolutely NOT looking for something real, and vice versa. I will certainly allow that bad SF can be considered fantasy, but that's generally the author's fault not the genre. There's also stuff like Sword Art Online that certainly looks like fantasy, even though it is actually science fiction.
That said, as a buyer I can't use a label like "science fiction and fantasy" in any meaningful way. Lumping them together is simply being lazy and/or ignorant. They might as well be just saying, "Here's a book. You figure it out."
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Well, they might have a point. After all, you might need quite a bit of fantasy to believe that something was actually meant to be science fiction
Also, with 'alternative facts' being a thing nowadays, who knows what's 'real'
Seriously though, personally I'd expect quite something different from the 'fantasy' genre than from the 'science fiction' genre. Science fiction being something that while it might seem like magic still being able to be described in some way by natural sciences (and often related to some 'tech stuff'), while fantasy being something that functions on a completely different level (and often related to some flashy 'magic stuff').
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Just found out that Tonikaku Kawaii is going to be made into an anime by Kenjirō Hata, the same person who did Hayate no Gotoku. AND it will be on crunchy in October. Might be a bit diabetes-inducing, but I'm going to put it on my list anyway.
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Just read that there may be enough uranium in coal that it might actually be marketable. Of course uranium isn't flammable so when you burn the coal the uranium just winds up in the ash pile with the rest of the unburnables, like cadmium, arsenic, and lead. But that's ok because the regs say it is.
BTW, I never understood why radioactive material is EVIL while stuff like arsenic is ok. I mean, just the fact that it is radioactive means that at least it'll all go away. Eventually. That's what "half life" means. Something that has a half life of 10 years will be half gone in 10 years. As opposed to the arsenic which will be around literally forever causing trouble.Not that I'd want to eat either one of course.
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Just saw Elon Musk's SpaceX anniversary talk. The guy is crazy... in a good way maybe, but still crazy. Hard to believe it was only a year ago when he announced his "BFR", and now he's already got an engineering prototype that's supposed to start test flights in a matter of months, and "to reach orbit in 6 months". True, those are "Elon months", but still. It'll be interesting to see if he actually gets 2 of these rockets done in time for an unmanned Mars test flight/mission at the next transfer window in 2022. He's also previously said that he might land one on the moon during testing.. because "It may literally be easier to just land Starship on the moon than try to convince NASA that we can."
https://arstechnica.com/features/2019/09/after-starship-unveiling-mars-seems-a-little-closer/-
It is absolutely insane how much he has accomplished in a few years (especially compared to ESA/NASA). If he actually manages to achieve his planned goals in the next 5-10 years, I seriously think NASA should just hand over their budget to him
My uncle (worked on astrophysics stuff) is a huge fan of his, so I always get the latest updates from him
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I would love to see that happen. NASA has their own planes and such for research purposes, but they don't own and operate their own "NASA airlines". In the same way I'd like to see NASA do the same for space R&D and regulation and just buy transportation to/from space like they do for air travel. Cost-plus contracts and Congressional pork seem to be the main obstacles to commercial space these days. Don't get me wrong, NASA does a lot for air travel, safety, research, and regulation. That first "A" in "NASA" is for "Aeronautics" after all. I'd really like to see NASA do things the same way for the "S" and drop the semi-operational, perpetually over-budget NASA-sponsored programs like SLS in favor of buying commercial services from the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin.
NASA does have a "COTS" - commercial off the shelf - program for some space operations like satellite launches and cargo delivery to the ISS, so there's some progress there. I'm hoping space travel will quickly commercialize as a transport industry like it did for airplanes back in the day. The time between the Wright Flyer in 1903 and the Ford Trimotor (airplane used in the first commercial airline in the US) was only about 8 years, and the DC-3 was in service by the end of the 1930s. I'll make allowances for space travel being harder - not to mention that there's no established extraterrestrial destinations to justify a scheduled service to - and give them a little more time but I'm really looking forward to the first regular commercial "spaceline" service!
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Just thought I'd poke a bit at an entry-level threadripper system. I know, that's kind of a strange thought when all the gamers are still salivating over a i9-9900k for the single-core performance, but it turns out that a low-end 1900X CPU, 2 sticks of 16GB, 3200MHz DDR4, and a really (like, really really) nice motherboard can be had for less than $1k. The motherboard is totally overkill for the initial RAM and CPU, but with AMD it should be upgradable for many years. Maybe in a year or so - when the bleeding edge has moved on - you replace the 8-core 1900X with a 16-core 2950. At some point you buy another couple sticks of RAM. Did I mention the MB supports quad-channel?
If you already have a decent case, power supply, etc., then swapping out the guts for an 8-core system (that would have been considered a monster just a couple years ago in the old Intel era) might make sense. With that MB you could go all the way up to a 32-core/64-thread CPU and 128GB RAM. It also has *3* nvme m.2 slots, not to mention dual network ports (one of them 10Gb). For games.. ok, maybe not so much. (Yet?) But if your workflow includes things that might benefit from a lot of cores..... maybe. It is also quite possible I'm just a tech geek looking for new toys.
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Sure. I don't mind advising, and I like planning new builds, though do I tend to spend way too much time obsessing over little details. I'm also not a "cheap at any cost" advocate. The systems I build for myself tend to be a bit on the pricey side. (My current system, for example.) Unless I'm building a system for a specific task I like giving myself a bit of elbow room. Consider yourself warned?
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Just yesterday I was reading that the drought in the southwestern US, to include the Colorodo river basin and the central California valley, has reached such a severe stage that soon many gigawatts of hydro power will be lost due to no water behind the dams. Going to be interesting to see if we can run the air conditioner here in the desert in a few months. Now I read that a recent heat wave in Greenland has melted enough of the glaciers there to cover Florida in two inches of water.
Glad climate change isn't a thing or else we might all be in deep trouble.
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@RZ. melting tundra is problematic. Buildings built on supposedly solid "perma"frost are falling over and/or sinking as the ground thaws. Then there's those craters. A lot of Alaskan islands and coastal areas are also in trouble as the ice that used to protect them from the sea disappears. Gotta pic my new homestead site carefully!
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Keeping an eye on the "bobcat" fire that's wreaking havoc over in the foothill communities east of me. Friday it was almost 13 miles away. Today it is just under 10. It is creeping closer, but also seems to be dying down in intensity with the cooler weather. (Well, relatively cooler. Still supposed to get up to 93F today.) Not a problem for me yet except for air quality and ash, but I'm concerned that there's nothing between the fire and me except for the national forest area. That area is wooded, mountainous terrain that has plenty of fuel for the fire but makes it hard for the firefighters to fight the fire in. In the past fires in that area have been a problem because they can't really be attacked in the forest itself, but as it burns through that area it can suddenly flare up and cause problems, especially if the wind picks up. Worst case we get one of our hot, dry "santa ana" winds coming from the high deserts in the north and east that fans the flames and quickly drives them into the populated areas. Keeping my fingers crossed for this one. 2020 has been kind of an asshole to me so far.
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Like your profile's cover pic. Looks like Reki from Haibane Renmei.
