Posts by GrahamT

@michael

At least us old "fokes" can spell folk's!

Re; Morphine is first aid, not a hard drug

Morphine is boiled with Acetic acid to create Dia-Morphine which has improved medical qualities. However:

"Dia-morphine is more lipid soluble than Morphine and so delivers the drug across the blood brain barrier more quickly and efficiently. Although dia-morphine itself does not attach to the opiate receptors in the brain, it quickly breaks down to Morphine and other metabolites that do." I.e it is the morphine that makes dia-morphine addictive.

Morphine addiction was known as the "Soldier's disease" because of its use on the battlefield. Dia-morphine was originally used as a cure for morphine addiction, because it was thought not to be addictive itself.

By the way, the Bayer trade name for dia-morphine is Heroin.

Not a hard drug, eh?

Vegan vs vegetarian

I really do wonder how they can call/make vegan meals containing eggs and/or cheese, and as someone already said, how can you have vegetarian coq au vin. Cocks don't lay eggs, so they can't get around it that way.

Obviously no Trade Descriptions Act in Napa Valley.

If we boycotted countries because of their food...

France would be off the itinerary for start:

Frogs, snails and horseys - terrible. I'll stick to my fried pigs kidneys, cockles and winkles and baby baa-lamb. (removes tongue from cheek - and serves with mustard sauce with capers)

I've eaten snake, jellyfish tentacles and tortoise in China, so dog on the menu wouldn't faze me - nor I suspect anyone making the trip. If you don't want it; don't order it.

Paris, because there they do the best steak de cheval avec frites.

I Aten't Dead

I remember 3.11 for Workgroups. I used it for a small office network. I had to reboot it at least once a day, and tape backups took over an hour for what must have been all of 80Mbytes (yes, M not G)

Then, I also remember 2.0 and 1.0 (like Kings and queens, it only got a number when it was dead and another one came along) Windows 1 only allowed you 4 windows, and they were tiled, not overlapping. About half as good as Desqview and twice as ugly. (There, now I've really shown my age)

As someone that started on PDP8s and "progressed" through PDP 11, VAX/VMS, CP/M and all versions of DOS from 1.0 up, then you are nearly right. Replace "long gone" with "soon gone".

(I must fire up 3.11 under VMWare on my Ubuntu server - I could do with a laugh)

At least things are moving in the right direction

Internal combustion engines are very inefficient, (25-30%) and near the limit of their theoretical maximum efficiency (third law of Thermodynamics?) so some of the energy density advantage of petrol/diesel is wasted. Energy density of batteries is low, but these new battery technologies are addressing that. Efficiency of electric motors is comparitively high (about 60%) and could be made higher.

There was research into "room temperature" superconductivity which potentially could push electric motor efficiency up to 80-90%. If this could be reached, then even at 1/3 the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels, batteries would become feasible.

50 litres of fuel weighs about 50Kg (Plus the weight of tank and pump) so if a 50Kg battery pack could produce the same performance, say 500 miles/ 800 Kms, before recharge and 50bhp/38kw, I think the balance would suddenly swing towards fully electric. (OK so a battery doesn't get lighter as the "fuel" is used like a fuel tank does, but the principal remains)

That just leaves the problem of charging. The battery would probably have to have 500 kwh capacity so to charge it in 10 minutes, i.e. at 3000 kw rate (the Lithium titanate batteries can be charged in one minute) at 99.99% efficiency would mean dissipating 300watts, (all mental arithmetic with lots of rounding). That sounds do-able to me.

I'm sure some of my working and assumptions are wrong, but the practical mass-produced electric car suddenly seems a lot closer.

@Math Problem

I suspect the chips are 64 Gbit = 8 GByte. So 16 of them makes 128 GByte

Acer Aspire One

SimplyAcer are quoting 11 August to have these in stock, at £219 for the base model, not £230. Expansys say they have them now, but at £234 for the base model.

Interesting looking at the websites and the price differences between identical hardware with Linux or WinXP: it is £50-53. That is a lot of Microsoft tax.

Another type of solar cell

Toyota are missing a trick here. Instead of photovoltiac cells, they should use solar-thermal cells. They can provide much higher energy transformation ratios than photo cells. Use an efficient heat pump and you should be able to generate steam. Either use that to run a steam turbine generator to recharge the battery, or directly to power the car.

Burn your biodiesel/biomass to supplement the sun's heat for your external combustion steam engine and Robert's your mother's brother. In times of shortage you can use anything inflammable, white-spirit, meths, coal, White Lightning...

Mines the anorak with the Stanley Steamer lapel badge, and the Ian Allen trainspotter's guide in the pocket.

"the 2 foot, 8-inch actor"

To paraphrase Mae West:

"Nevermind the two foot, show me the eight-inches"

(was the comma really necessary after foot, or was it to provoke this type of comment?)

Alternative digital radio

According to Wikipedia (spit!) Digital Radio Mondial (DRM; no, not that one) is going to be used on the freed up medium wave channels. This can give 17-35 kbps sampling on a standard 10 kHz MW channel, using MPEG-4 HE-AAC encoding - not MPEG2. The advantage over DAB on the FM band, is that it has the reach of AM without the interference.

Currently the BBC World service is trialling it on short wave, so theoretically you could listen to DAB quality (not FM quality) BBC radio anywhere in the world.

Perhaps this is not of interest if you only listen to the radio on the M4 into work, but I have spent, and continue to spend, time abroad, and it is nice to be able to tune into LW Radio 4 on the road in France for the news, or SW BBC World in Switzerland or Malaysia. What both of these channels share is absolutely terrible sound quality, with fading, whistling and more snaps, crackles and pops than a breakfast cereal.

Another advantage is the number of transmitters needed. One transmitter in Rugby provides LW coverage for most of northern Europe, yet FM transmitters only serve line-of-site locations, and so there are dozens of the things all over Britain. Hence signal drop out as your radio tunes to another frequency when you drive from one transmitter's range into another. This is one area where DAB seems better than FM.

I remember the early FM radios that you had to keep retuning because AFC hadn't been invented, and had all sorts of interesting sound artifacts, but people persevered because the potential was there. Now the majority of posts above say FM is the best thing ever and progress should stop now.

Digital radio, whether DAB, DAB+, DRM, or Internet radio, will continue to grow and improve. It is probably still too early to say which system(s) will come out on top, but once bandwidth is available, and co-channel interference with analogue is no longer an issue, then I would guess all the problems with overcompreesion and low bit rates should reduce, even if they don't go away.

Walter L Wagner

He can be ignored. If the LHC is safe, then he has no case. If it isn't, he (nor anyone else) will exist, so he can't pursue his writ.

(and how come a European - CERN - project in France/Switzerland concerns a Hawaiian's "tax dollars"?)

A few odd things here

"As soon as the sun hit that material, it disappeared" but it isn't in the sun. The shadows on the stereo picture are identical, so either the pictures were taken very closely together in time, or exactly one integer value of Mars days apart. I suspect they were taken one day apart, so it was in the sun at some stage, but we only have their word for it being the sun that caused the blocks to disappear. Maybe it is AmanFromMars messing with their minds by moving things around.

Also 2/3"? This is wierd even for septic scientists. If it had been 4/5" I would suspect a little metric (20 mms) to imperial (20/25.4 ~= 4/5) conversion, but why not 1" anyway? It's only a line added to the picture - unless it was already on the surface of Mars and disappeared with the blocks!

Are they telling us that one Martian inch = 2/3 Earth inches, therefore the Martians are only 4 foot tall? We should be told the truth.

Thanks for an interesting article

I started using Linux with Suse many years ago to keep my Unix skills current. I actually paid for a boxed set - no broadband then.

I then moved to Mandrake (now Mandriva) and have used Slackware, Knoppix, DSL and Fedora on-and-off. Now I use Ubuntu, and have it dual booting on a couple of machines and alone on my server. (I used to dual boot that too, but since I changed the motherboard Windows blue-screens on boot up - Ubuntu complained a bit but carried on working)

I like Ubuntu, I even got used to Gnome, though I changed the theme on the first two machines.

Maybe it is time to take a look at OpenSuse again.

"Beer for the men...

...and Wine or a fruit based drink for the ladies"

If it's 15 years old, it must be a vintage claret.

Actually, I will continue to use Wine on Ubuntu until there is a single Linux utility that does as much as well as Irfanview.

Ubuntu,(?) Vista and XP sp2 versions downloaded

Forgot about this until last night. A message popped up on Ubuntu 8.04 saying there was a new version of Firefox. It told me it was Version 3. I saw no mention of RC2. Installed automagically, quickly and painlessly and works great.

I then went downstairs and loaded FF3 onto my Vista laptop. (over WiFi, so a bit slower) Again painless.

This morning at work, despite having to find a backdoor in the company firewall, I downloaded onto my company XP SP2 laptop without issue. (I need it for testing our website developments - honest, Guv.)

In all cases all personalisations, bookmarks, etc were preserved, and add-ons updated.

I have been using RC2 on my Vista laptop, so no surprises. I love the speed of rendering. Pages with complex CSS still render better than IE7, but I can't see that they are better than FF2 yet.

I am a happy bunny

Correction: @Not practising what they preach...

It is not *this* article that confuses EC and EU, (sorry Kelly) but this article http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/11/eu_regulator/

However, many ACs commenting above don't seem to know the difference.

(Where is the icon for "smites forehead, one ohno-second after posting")

Oh my God!!!

The nuns are Glenda Jackson and Eric Morecombe!

That must be Ernie Wise underneath, with his short fat hairy legs.

@Rob Beard

According to CNET, it comes with Linpus Lite Linux. This is a Taiwanese distro based on Fedora, with a front end like the Eee.

WikiPedia says (crosses himself) "Linpus was designed specifically to fully support the Asian market" and The Linpus site shows that they provide a Chinese version of Open Office. I assume this will be changed for the target markets.

Personally I would have preferred (X)Ubuntu, but it should be easy enough to change.

Yes, it is nice. My son and I both have Acer laptops already and the quality isn't bad. I now have to persuade my wife she needs a new laptop (I don't think I could get away with buying a third laptop for myself) then "borrow" it. Hope she doesn't choose pink!

@New York

New York was named after the Duke of York (Later James II) who was titled from York in the UK, New York, Cleveland, Lancaster, Dartmouth, Boston, Birmingham, and half the towns in New England and Pennsylvania are named after British towns. Then there is Paris, Strasbourg and other European loan names.

Mad as a hatter

Clever sub headline;

Hatters, apocryphally, went mad because of all the mercury used for making the felt used in their trade.

I'm no lawyer, but ...

I believe that you can't be made to abide by a contract (which is what a license is) that you have not seen. The law of contracts states that both parties must be in agrement - usually by both signing, but not always - for the contract to be valid. If the EULA agreement was inside the unopened box, then common law should apply. The guy bought a box of software, not a license that he could argue he had no knowledge of, and resold it. He was a reseller, not a user of the software. This is what PC World, et al, do every day of the week.

I think for once, the judge is being sensible and practical. If AutoCad win, then they must have better lawyers, and the law is shown to be an ass.

Native speaker vs speaker

The last native speaker may have died in 1777, but there were many bilingual English/Cornish speakers up until the last century. During the first world war Breton and Cornish soldiers could talk to each other in pidgin Breton/Cornish though neither spoke the others "native" English/French.

Bearing in mind that the Celts moved from Cornwall to Brittany shortly after the Angles and Saxons invaded from Germany/Holland/Denmark, that is some continuity of language. Imagine us English speakers being able to talk to Germans, both in our own language!

As has been stated, Welsh and Cornish also share much of their vocabulary. The Celtic/Gealic languages, maybe because of their isolation, seem to have more in common than, say, the latin (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc) or Germanic (English, Dutch, German) groups of languages, which have diverged so much as to be mutually incomprehensible.

By the way, Latin is not dead; it lives in southern Europe and Latin America (the clue is in the name). It just evolved into French, Italian, etc., just as the Anglo-Saxon of Beowolf evolved into modern English, and Icelandic, for example.

Hmmmm..

A two metre high Chilli beef. I'll have fries with that, please.

My understanding...

...as an amateur photographer, is that I can photograph anyone or anything in a public place, and as photographer, I own the copyright, so can publish it as iI wish. An exception is that if the subject objects, I must stop taking photographs, or I could be guilty of harassment, but the subject can't make me hand over or destroy the images, nor prevent me publishing them. This is the common law.

There are all sorts of newer laws, including European privacy laws, that muddy the waters, so it is not quite as black-and-white (or should that be monochrome) as that.

Publishing is always fraught with problems, which is why papers and TV blur faces of children and other bystanders. Though the latter is probably just as much to do with people demanding payment as for privacy.

If you take some of the comments about 'illegally' photographing people at face value, you would have no "You've Been Framed" or other candid camera type programmes, and newspapers would have no papped slebs, nor crowd scenes.

Metro and Hello! would be very empty.

It's nearly there

One serial port is plenty. An optical audio output would be useful, as would DVI.

I like the PS2 ports to use my wireless mouse and keyboard, but a few more USB ports wouldn't go amiss.

Drop the price to < £200 and I've got my wallet out.

Version 2: include a BlueRay drive, in place of the DVD, and bult in WiFi, for £250 inc VAT.

I was going to but a motherboard and CPU this weekend to build my own. Maybe I'll wait a bit and buy one ready made for the same price.

Puzzled??

As the dancer's hands will be busy hanging on to the pole, where does she put the Wii controller?

No - surely not!

I wish I hadn't asked.

Cable to the door...

quote: "get the cable to the door via a 20mm-wide, 100mm-deep channel."

Is a 4inch deep cable going to be safe from 6 inch long spade or fork? Or do people with high speed broadband have no time for gardening?

The real reason?

In yesterday's paper it said that one of the reasons that drinking on public transport was to be banned, was that publicans and club owners had claimed that their takings had dropped as people drank on the bus/tube so didn't drink as much when they got to the pub.

This is either:

1 utter b*****ks, unless the publicans have proof for their accusations, or

2 a cynical sop to the licensed victuallers' profits at the expense of personal liberty.

Other cities allow drinking in public, and on public transport, (Paris comes to mind - no not that one; the city) and don't seem to have a problem with drunkeness.

Last time I caught a London night bus, I was drunk, everyone else was drunk, and the atmosphere was fine. I don't think anyone drinking on the bus would have made the slightest difference to that.

Footprint question

Does anyone know if the footprint is tight on the UK, or can it be received on the continent? The Beeb is very protective of its programmes and license fee, and tends to stop free output via IP being viewable abroad. I wondered if they were doing something similar here.

Did I tell you...

about the time me, Babbage and Ada Lovelace had this great idea about using Jacquard cards in the difference engine?

Ah... Nostalgia's not what it used to be.

@one in 20 drivers on phone

and about 80% of badly driven cars have a driver with a mobile glued to their ear.

Acid burned a hole in my genes

Headline in I.T. around 1967/8 when evidence of LSD's damage to genetic material became public.

Presumably the sub works for El Reg now.

Considering..

...the number of Martinis Bond downs, maybe Winehouse's "Rehab" should be the next Bond theme.

"Adults aged 18+..."

Well, I'm aged 18+, i.e. 18+40, so where do I apply - I can't see it on Reg Jobs.

I'm not sure what the market is for a balding overweight middle-aged men, so I can't bank on the 50% commission, but 10 quid an hour for doing nowt but lie around starkers sounds better than commuting into London every day.

Everyone will soon forget this...

it's just a flash in the pants.

Just say no

Do they care if foreigners are inconvenienced, humiliated and irradiated? I think not.

Last time I went to the US, my (new) suitcase was totalled (little note inside saying US customs wouldn't pay for the damage) and didn't make my connection. I had to run for my connccting flight with my shoes and belt in hand, even though I had allowed 3 hours for the connection time. Similar coming back to Blighty.

It was only after I got back home that I realised I had left my pocket knife in my hand baggage and it had gone through three sets of US and one UK "security" without being detected.

I have not been to America since, and I don't intend to go there again. I don't think either of us have missed each other, Though the money I and my employers would have spent might have helped their economy slightly.

@Anton Ivanov

My comment was meant tongue in cheek. Maybe I should have used the joke or coat icon.

However, I can't let a challenge pass: How about pushing the smelly methane through activated carbon filters - the carbon being made from the waste CO2 - then burying the carbon in landfill thus:

- removing the smell

- reducing the carbon load

- laying down future coal reserves for our descendents.

(yes, yes, completely impractical, I know)

Also, I seem to remember, from school chemistry, bubbling sulphur compound solutions through ammonia (from the urine) and the sulphur precipitating out. But that was 40+ years ago, so the chemistry might be wrong, and I'm sure the ammonia compounds formed would be just as smelly.