Posts by Simon Harris

"I could conceivably turn off my wifi at night - but the only way to do that for me means my phones stop working. Arguable whether I need them, I suppose, but I don't think I'd use more than 1-2 kW in the whole night on those appliances."

Sorry, but downvoted for confusing power with energy.

Assuming you actually mean 1-2kWh, (120-240W assuming you have an 8-hour night), are you sure you're not providing wifi for the whole town?

For comparison, the current highest speed Virgin hub requires a 12V 1.5A power supply, so allowing for inefficiencies in the converter, probably about 20-25W at the wall (that's 0.2kWh over night).

Re: Superb!

I thought bowls were pretty much, by definition, concave, or the soup would fall out.

Re: So how do you rate this 'success'?

IMDB estimates a production budget of $35 million.

Just out of interest I made a time-line of some of the major series (or what turned out to be) and a few other notable movies to see how their budgets varied - inflation adjusted to 2016 in brackets:

2001 $12m 1968 ($83m)

Star Wars IV $11m 1977 ($44m)

Close Encounters $19.4m 1977 ($77m)

Star Trek TMP $35m 1979 ($116m)

Alien $11m 1979 ($36m)

Star Wars V $18m 1980 ($53m)

Star Trek II $11m 1982 ($27m)

Bladerunner $28m 1982 ($70m)

Star Wars VI $32.5m 1983 ($79m)

2010 $28m 1984 ($65m)

Terminator $6.4m 1984 ($15m)

Star Trek III $17m 1984 ($39m)

Aliens $18.5m 1986 ($41m)

Star Trek IV $25m 1986 ($55m)

Star Trek V $27.8m 1989 ($54m)

Star Trek VI $30m 1991 ($53m)

Terminator 2 $102m 1991 ($180m)

Alien3 $50m 1992 ($86m)

Star Trek VII $35m 1994 ($56m)

Star Trek VIII $45m 1996 ($69m)

Alien 4 $75m 1997 ($112m)

Star Trek IX $58m 1998 ($86m)

Star Wars I $115m 1999 ($166m)

Star Wars II $115m 2002 ($154m)

Star Trek X $60m 2002 ($80m)

Terminator 3 $200m 2003 ($262m)

SW III $113m 2005 ($139m)

Terminator 4 $200m 2009 ($224m)

Star Trek XI $150m 2009 ($168m)

Star Trek XII $190m 2013 ($196m)

Star Wars VII $245m 2015 ($249m)

Terminator 5 $115m 2015 ($117m)

Star Trek XIII $185m 2016 ($185m)

Star Trek The Motion Picture may well have been the most expensive film dollar wise at the time. However, mostly since then they seem to have had tighter budgets than their most contemporary Star Wars film. Having said that there are almost twice as many of them - adjusted for inflation Star Wars total budget $884m at 2016 prices, Star Trek total budget $1184m.

Most notable perhaps is the budget jump from The Terminator ($6.4m) to Terminator 2 ($102m). Also quite noticeable is the amount pumped into Terminators 3 to 5 and Alien 3 and 4 ($801m in total at 2016 prices) and they were all a bit pants.

Re: Thanks for the migraine

Stop complaining, or they might put a big picture of Theresa May on the front page!

What's that? They have? Please El Reg, make the nasty woman go away!

Re: BBC has completed root cause analysis

"after "the car" had emerged from the printer, somebody got in and drove away."

3D printed petrol - that could solve the world's fuel problems!

Re: Apart from that

Some of that information is here

http://spaceflight101.com/juno/spacecraft-information/

Re: and over at the entertainment industry . . .

Although much of the time you're at the mercy of what the conference AV department tell you to use (most of the ones I've presented at, the presentations need to work in PowerPoint), and if you do use your own laptop you usually have to suffer the undignified wait while they try to reroute the video source, find the resolution doesn't match the projector, and then discover all the video clips just appear as a black box or somehow play upside down (I don't know how that even happens, but I saw it at a recent conference- probably configured for the Australians in the audience).

Re: Move on the ISS

Grrr.. Mice on the ISS...

How did autocorrect manage to screw that up so well?... And how didn't I notice for a whole day!

Re: Pointless

So, decades ago you could have a battery powered 200GByte wireless NAS that would easily fit in your pocket for around $100?

Small 200GB hard drives came out about 1 decade ago - the nearest self-powered pocketable mass storage device I can think of from around then is the 160GB iPod Classic (from 2007), but 3 1/2 times as expensive. So I guess you could have built something around a 2-ish inch drive just about 10 years ago to do something similar, but decades is stretching it somewhat.

Re: A stellar achievement

"You mean interplanetary, right?"

Both craft are beyond any known planets in our system, and outside of the plane of their orbits, so I think interstellar might be a good description of them now.

At least she didn't marry a theatre stage manager - her present would have been wrapped in gaffer tape and she'd still be trying to get into it.

Re: My pet gripe is

In my last company on official documents all dates were required to have the month spelled out as a word, and the year as 4 digits just to be sure there could be no ambiguity whichever order the day, month and year came.

Re: "Rammed" (quoting Rimpel)

(of a place) be very crowded.

"the club is rammed to the rafters every week"

That one comes from the Oxford University Press

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/ram

When it comes to words, I generally assume they know what they're talking about.

Re: downvote here

Don't conspiracy crimes generally have more than one defendant?

They'll probably use one of those CSI resolution enhancers to read the serial number off your chair.

Re: Windows 8.1 is NOT an upgrade...

"BAAStards"

BaaS - Bugs as a Service?

Re: Still free if.....

The original might more accurately have been coined 'Beware of gifts bearing Greeks'!

Re: wank around waiting for a printout

It's the new greener way of sticking the pages together without needing staples.

Re: If I hear a single pensioner...

If anyone says 'Independence Day' or 'Take Back Control' to me today, they may well get a punch in the face too.

Re: But how long...

Only the ones that suffer from hayfever.

That must be a bugger if your one job is collecting pollen.

Re: Too stupid to vote

If the train's a Eurostar, then that would be pretty stupid - last time I went through the ticket barrier at St. Pancras for one, the woman in front of me was turned away because she had less than 30 minutes to go before her departure.

"There's a hell of lot more info to be scraped from even the shortest of invitations to listen into meatspace."

Even more if they can read your lips too.