xioxox

14 ms·

121.
by xioxox 5y ago
The cylinder approach (actually paraboloid-hyperboloid or Wolter-I optics) is the main design used today and for future telescopes for lower energy X-rays. Focusing optics have a big advantage of having a lower level of background compared
122.
by xioxox 5y ago
One of the interesting things about the telescope on Integral [1] is that it uses a coded aperture mask [2] to image the sky in high energy X-rays to gamma rays, rather than a focusing optic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
123.
by xioxox 5y ago
I was wondering how quick an emulated 6502 could go. This project claims 10GHz+ using JIT emulation: https://github.com/scarybeasts/beebjit
124.
by xioxox 5y ago
You can already disable the linux memory overcommit feature if you want linux to never allow more memory to be allocated than exists. However, you may run into problems with programs which rely on the ability to allocate more memory than th
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by xioxox 5y ago
BepiColombo has an X-ray telescope on board which will measure the X-ray colours of the planet from X-ray fluorescence. This will be interesting, as it will enable the composition of the surface to be measured down to 10 km scales [1]. [1]
126.
by xioxox 5y ago
Interesting. I thought about writing a Matplotlib version of my Veusz GUI plotting package [1], but at the time Matplotlib was far too slow. Veusz is quite nice in that the Python-based widget-based plotting library is the backend to the GU
127.
by xioxox 5y ago
KDE works pretty well for me. The defaults are not bad, but it has lots of customization options. I mostly leave it on defaults, except for switching on focus follows mouse. You don't need to manually edit config files. It also has som
128.
by xioxox 5y ago
Yes - Windows update is one of the most unreliable pieces of software I've had the misfortune to use. On one of my machines checking for updates hangs indefinitely. The whole update service is stuck and can't be stopped. I can do
129.
by xioxox 5y ago
It's not great in DE for bank transfers. Either the account does not support sending SEPA instant or it's quite a large charge. Often savings accounts don't seem to be acceptable as destination accounts for SEPA instant.
130.
by xioxox 5y ago
There's also NICER ( https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/nicer/ ) and MAXI.
131.
by xioxox 5y ago
I think he's wrong about reflectivity on passports too. My European passport picture page is extremely reflective - it's hard to read anything on it at the wrong angles, and the reflective holograms make my picture very hard to se
132.
SETI in 2020(arxiv.org)
1 points by xioxox 5y ago|0 comments
133.
by xioxox 5y ago
Doesn't Fortran 90 have the MERGE(IFTRUE,IFFALSE,CONDITIONAL) function as standard which is similar to the XIF used here? (as usual, Fortran chooses some weird names for its functions). Perhaps the difference with the conditional discu
134.
by xioxox 5y ago
I wonder if a frequency approach might be more accurate than relying on the left/right channel gain accuracy, providing the signal changes on timescales much longer than the wave period. Just generating pulses at some frequency might b
135.
by xioxox 5y ago
There are also the X3 games from Egosoft (e.g. Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude), which are great fun for building a space trading empire, exploring, waging war or being a pirate. Warning: they can suck up a lot of time. They aren't
136.
by xioxox 5y ago
Personally, I didn't feel it was particularly great. All the sound seemed to come from in front of me and sounded like the stereo effects occasionally used in music tracks. Perhaps it's due to the shape of my head and ears not mat
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by xioxox 5y ago
You also have to always wonder what the environmental impact of these security fixes is, both in terms of extra carbon pumped into the atmosphere and the resources going into replacement CPUs. It's probably very bad. I wonder whether i
138.
by xioxox 5y ago
Never or ever? I have to use it for a work project. It's ok when dealing with numbers or matrices, but very painful in many respects. It's missing quite a few features found in more recent languages. I don't recommend it pers
139.
by xioxox 5y ago
I've heard part of the problem is that the Post Office were allowed to conduct their own prosecutions. If the public prosecutor (Crown Prosecution Service) would have been involved, they would have asked the Post Office for any materia
140.
by xioxox 5y ago
In one case (Seema Misra) the judge asked the jury this in his/her summing up: “There is no direct evidence of her taking any money... She adamantly denies stealing. There is no CCTV evidence. There are no fingerprints or marked bank n
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by xioxox 5y ago
Of course! Presumably you could use heated gases in the gas giants (like hot air balloons). I found this rather old JPL page which suggests it could be possible: https://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/adv_tech/balloons/outer_ju
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by xioxox 5y ago
Cool! I wonder why balloons have not been used much on other planets? Is it the weight of the gas? The USSR had the the Vega 1 and 2 balloons on Venus, but presumably further missions could be pretty useful for studying planetary atmosphere
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by xioxox 5y ago
I have a Toshiba R500 - it's a machine ahead of its time - transreflective display, SSD, very light, long battery life, nice keyboard. Unfortunately the CPU and memory are limited, otherwise I would be using it today.
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by xioxox 6y ago
In many astronomy programs, we have to put up with the PFILES convention, where arguments are given like so mytool infile=foo.fits outfile=bar.fits Some parameters need to be given (and will be prompted for if not given), and some
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by xioxox 6y ago
Yes, reading this thread as someone from the UK makes me realise the US is very different culturally from the UK. I'm sure the proportion of people for whom religion is important in their lives is much much smaller in the UK than the U
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by xioxox 6y ago
One very useful program on Linux is "tsocks" which allows you to use many command line programs transparently with a SOCKS proxy. It works using LD_PRELOAD to intercept libc network functions. It hasn't had much development w
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by xioxox 6y ago
Also the sodium lights are also much easier to filter out if you do astronomy. So much lighting is bad nowadays - lighting the sky rather than the ground.
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by xioxox 6y ago
Dave Green's CubeHelix scheme is excellent for this: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/ There are lots of parameters which can be varied to choose which colour range to cover.
149.
by xioxox 6y ago
The US should take up the nice UK gender-neutral term of Postie.
150.
by xioxox 6y ago
Unfortunately Google is making it much harder to run ROMs now due to the new Safety-Net bootloader checks. You'll no longer to be able to use many bank apps (or even the McDonalds app!).

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