"George 3 for me!"

- preferably running applications written in PLAN3 or Algol68R

Re: "... a possible obtain everything, analyse later approach"

The data volumes for Call Data records aren't that huge. They average out at about 400 bytes per call and are well-structured enough that they can be tipped straight into a conventional data warehouse's star schema.

If you do it properly, you even get data compression and deduplication for free because the key fields are a lot bigger than the soft DBKs you'd use to link the natural dimension values to the fact table.

I like "The Algebraist", but it pushes the limits of big and complex.

You can do a lot worse than start in on the Culture novels by trying "Consider Phlebas", followed by "The Player Of Games". IMO these, plus "State of the Art" are the best of the Culture books, but if you 'get' the Culture you'll probably want to read the rest as well.

I also like "Feersum Endjinn" a lot, but then I have a weakness for books written in not-exactly-English such as Antony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange". "Feersumm Endjinn" is another non-Culture novel.

Re: You're late to the party

"When a couple of friends and me were playing with the then rather new FreeS/WAN some of our US peers (who ran a home server) actually got some questions from some law enforcement agency because they had been showing "suspicious behaviour". This was around 1990!"

That's not looking nearly far enough back to find the roots of US Constitutional decay.

The early 'anti-Commie' witch-hunt promoted by Joseph MaCarthy and enthusiastically helped along by J Edgar Hoover in the early 1950s is a much better candidate for the beginnings of their democratic decay.

Re: warbots carry on

I'd suggest Philip K. Dick's "Autofac" (1954) as an early example of fully autonomous killbots.

Yes, the factories design, make and deploy war machines but the resulting harm to humanity is only collateral damage. The real purpose of the killbots is to beat other rival killbot factories to the resources for making still more killbots and consumer goods, thus using up the remaining resources ever faster.

Re: I don't much like drones....

@AC, who said "[The UN] did. Shame some countries refused to sign, but then who's going to force the US or China to give up their toys?".

Even the Americans and Chinese can be shamed into signing up to the landmine ban if they are rebuked sufficiently often about not doing so.

Re: Lens

"Is the lens up to this level of detail?" is exactly the right question to ask.

The short answer is that boosting the megapixel count behind a crap lens is pure ad-hype, even if its true, and does nothing whatsoever for picture quality. Here's an example: I have both a DSLR and a snapper, both made by Pentax, so direct comparison is a fair test.

The DSLR is a K100 with a 6MP 24x16mm sensor and uses good quality lenses - I use both the standard f5.6 35-100mm 35mm equivalent kit lens and the M-series lenses off my old Spotmatic F.

The snapper is an Optio WG-1 with a 14MP 1/2.3" sensor and the usual unspecified small, plastic lens found in this class of camera. The WG-1 has the lens and sensor entirely inside its body behind a waterproof pane of glass, so it makes a good comparison with a mobile phone camera.

Shooting the same subject at the same distance with both cameras (using the kit lens on the K100) clearly shows that the K100 has about three times the resolution of the WG-1, i.e. zoom right in on the image and compare sharpness: the D100 image is very obviously sharper. This shows that lens quality and sensor size are all that matters and pixel count is utterly irrelevant given the diffraction effects that limit resolution when lens and sensor are shrunk to the size needed to put them inside a 25mm thick body. Since no mobe is anything like that thick, it follows that their camera resolutions will be even worse.

Re: Round and round we go!

SQL's big advantage is that its a standards-based DML with implementations that are sort-of, somewhat compliant with the standard. Compliant enough, anyway, that devs and DBAs can work with most implementations with a minimum of training.

NoSQL might become flavour of the month if it acquires a standard DML that has a greater percentage of fully compliant NoSQL implementations than SQL has of its standard.

Re: Note what's impressive.

s/rare/expensive/

and I'll agree. Its a very useful advance in the art of DNA analysis.

Re: Microsoftese at its finest

> Seriously....who in the REAL WORLD actually talks like this???

MBAs.

Re: Junk Science

The references posted by Nissemus and MdB predate the set of results that Iain Thompson is reporting. This latest information would appear to address to objections that were raised previously.

Alan More's Rat King? Pah: a mere latecomer

Kornbluth & Pohl: Wolfbane (1959) was there first with surgically linked human brains used as computers by alien invaders. Like all their novels its a good read with carefully thought-out ideas and insights.

Re: But does it work for local PDFs?

" is it still possible to use an external viewer in preference to the Firefox one"

Of course: just edit the PDF entry in Edit:Preferences:Applications so it uses the program of your choice. I use xpdf.

Opera used to be good....

.... until the last few v12 releases with their odd habit of wrapping some of El Reg's ads round the back of the window so the right half of the ad appears on the left of the screen and an annoying habit of converting the Beeb's home and news pages into a 6mm wide vertical line at the centre of the screen, apparently of near-infinite height. I reported this to Opera when it appeared, some 3-4 upgrades ago and keep checking new releases, but no fix has appeared, so I'm now using FF for most browsing and will continue to do so until Opera fix their rendering engine.

FF has some less than delightful features but at least its doing a better job of rendering pages than the current Opera release.

Re: Wouldn't it be simpler ?

"To just have BT and other UK carriers, block any calls coming from overseas which do not have full CLI attached so at least the recipient knows its a call from overseas and treat it accordingly."

A much better idea would be for BT to block all calls from a number on the TPS list or from overseas and which are either silent and/or have the "withhold caller ID" flag set. The caller should be charged a premium for the privilege of being blocked. This would stop the nuisance calls and keep BT happy because it would be getting paid for doing the blocking. As others have said, this would work because BT always knows the actual caller - without that information it doesn't get paid for the call.

Re: Games addiction (there, I fixed it for you)

Yes, I'd say this is addictive behavior. What else can you call it given the steady trickle of Chinese and Korean players who are so hooked on a game that they don't stop to eat, drink or sleep until they die.

That is either suicide or an addiction with fatal side-effects. IMO addiction makes more sense because it doesn't seem that those players intended to kill themselves.

Re: The key may be in the name.

"Being a SANDY island, could it be that it comes and goes depending on prevailing tides and weather washing the seabed around?"

Doesn't sound at all likely since the Australians say the ocean is 1400m deep at X marks the spot.

Re: ...over-rated tat-bazaar that is Forbidden Planet

"Anyone else old enough to remember "Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed" when they were in Berwick Street?"

YES - and very good they were too.

Even "Forbidden Planet" were pretty good a few years ago, though judging by their online catalogue they're no longer worth bothering with.

Disclaimer: I am massively disinterested in comics and graphics novels, but DTWAGE and FP (but no longer) were the places I went for my SF fix.

Re: "A method for inducing cats to exercise"

No inducement needed - a cat will chase a small red laser spot without needing encouragement and appeared to enjoy doing so when I tried it with my sister's cat.

I made sure I stood behind the cat and didn't shine it on it or near its eyes, so it never got direct sight of the beam. Nonetheless, its something I'll never do again. Afterwards the poor moggie spent some minutes twitching its ears and shaking its head: I think even the reflections off the carpet (a brown haircord hallway one) were too bright for its eyes. This was a Maplins Keychain Laser Pointer. No power given, but at a guess it would be no more than 1mW.

Re: Gaps

This just beat me to it. Here's my take on the earliest personal, portable computing devices:

Slide rules fully deserve their place in this history.

Several generations of engineers and scientists used slide rules, an essential tool from their invention in the early 1620s that remained in common use into the late 1960s. Arguably, these were the first portable calculation devices unless you want to include the far earlier, but less capable, abacus which, in its modern form, was in use from the 2nd century BC and printed tables of logarithms, which appeared in 1617.

Curta Calculator

However, a slide rule, though portable and deserving its place in every engineers' desk or briefcase, wasn't really pocketable. The Curta calculator gets that slot. It was far from the first mechanical calculator, but all its predecessors were heavy, bulky desktop machines, while the Curta was a comfortable handheld device and much loved by the rally-driving fraternity.

HP-35 calculator

This was the first really good pocket electronic calculator. It was not only affordable, but a real game changer because it was the first that could replace a good slide rule, being capable of dealing with logarithms and trigonometric functions.

Re: I'm so old...

"I'm so old......I remember when HP stuff used to be good quality."

Same here. I fact I still have all the old HP stuff I've bought, and it all still works:

- HP-21 calculator (1976) that would run if I replaced its NiCds (again)

- HP-28S calculator (1990), used when I need a calculator. Runs forever on N cells.

- HP 7475 plotter thats used when needed, but getting pens is difficult

- Laserjet 5 - best printer I've owned and currently my only printer

Re: Public vs Private

"But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."

I agree: this is possibly the statement that got Rumsfeld the most derision of anything he said. But it should not have: the abuse merely showed the ignorance of his critics on this one point. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 'black swans' are just a restatement of the same idea.

...but the eye damage is real

Your typical 5-25mW red laser pointer may be fairly harmless. However, any IR or visible light laser over 30mW (new classification) or 500mW (old classification) is considered to be unconditionally hazardous to eyesight. So, where does that leave the readily available 400mW watt green lasers of those 1W blue laser light sabres? If you think these are hard to find, just search the internet for 'green laser' or 'laser light sabre'.

This isn't just a US problem: there are plenty of British idiots who think targetting aircraft is cool. Reading GASIL incident reports shows just how common this stupidity is.

Re: Patent... too late!

A container "for an electronic device or other object" has been prior art from around 1970, when the first fibreglass glider trailer came on the market. This is highly relevant: the fiberglass assembly is structural as well as forming the exterior shell.

Re: Airless

You've all missed the main problem with trying to run the disks in a vacuum chamber: in all hard drives the heads fly above the disk surface on a thin layer of air - think of it as an air bearing. This will work with any gas provided the operating conditions are adjusted for the density and viscosity of the gas in the chamber, so helium should be OK.

However, the heads can't fly in a vacuum.

Current drives do not have a sealed chamber so they always operate at the local atmospheric pressure. Consequently they have a specified maximum operating altitude, usually around 10,000 ft. Above that height the air is too thin to hold the heads clear of the disk surface and the heads will crash, destroying both themselves and the disk's recording surfaces. Airliners are pressurized to about 8,000 ft, which is why you can use a laptop while flying at 30,000 ft. in one

Re: He is right that more can done by machines, but...

Actually, there seems to be a two-pronged approach being tried: (1) a 'virtual doctor' application that uses a database of disease literature and case notes to generate a diagnosis and course of treatment from the patient's symptoms and (2) using a database of drugs, trial results, etc to aid a doctor's search for appropriate drugs during a consultation, the idea being that this reduces the doctor's workload of keeping up with current research and new drugs.

See http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528796.400-watson-turns-medic-supercomputer-to-diagnose-disease.html for more details. Both look like reasonable approaches though, as they are based round IBM's Watson system, the kit is currently rather expensive unless it can be used as a shared resource for a group of practices.

Re: Burn the heretics!!

"Do they do proper bacon?"

No. Its paper-thin stuff that ends up resembling tasteless brown papadums no matter how you cook it.

I once tried some american 'bacon' that had apparently been cured in maple syrup. That made the frying pan smell of maple syrup while I was cooking it but there was no detectable difference to its taste.

Re: HSMP

It would seem that these days you're crazy to use IBM for applications development or outsourcing: their last good developer is about to be thrown out the door. See the recent set of articles by Robert Cringeley.

This one is directly relevant:

http://www.cringely.com/2012/06/14/an-it-labor-economics-lesson-from-memphis-for-ibm/

Or, for all his recent columns on Big Blue, look here:

http://www.cringely.com/tag/ibm/

The coder, by miles

...and Turing wasn't the first to write an algorithm when he had no place to run it.

According to what I've read, Ada Lovelace did exactly the same, only she did it 106 years earlier than Turing wrote his chess program.