Posts by spider from mars
53 posts • joined Monday 12th May 2008 09:40 GMT
first step
it sounds like a decent first step, but they really need to raise the bar on what's patentable or not - there are far too many "obvious" patents in the system.
Re: Why?
free tethering is still a thing (although not for me, as I bought mine unlocked)
Re: Hmm
according to what I've read, Taranis is not designed for ground attack but for air superiority. I'm not qualified to know how well that works out, but it sounds like a whole different kettle of fish.
Posted in Supersymmetry takes an arrow to the knee
Re: whack-a-mole
nice try, but no. There's a difference between cutting down the parameter space of a theory and testing the theory itself: there's no falsification going on; we're not approaching the "truth" in any meaningful sense.
Posted in Supersymmetry takes an arrow to the knee
whack-a-mole
Eh, chasing SUSY is like playing whack-a-mole. The parameter space is so vast that for every bit you rule out, the theorists can just move their models to a higher energy scale.
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Actually
"It's one of the "difficult" bits of relativity: even if you and I are travelling in opposite directions at 55 percent of the speed of light, the sum is 100 percent, not 110 percent"
actually, .55c +.55c = .84c
see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula#Special_theory_of_relativity
Re: £6.99 ?
apple's mail client handles gmail very badly - doesn't do conversations or labels properly - both of which I can't manage my email without.
I'm pretty gutted by this, as it likely nixes the upcoming Sparrow ipad app.
Well to wheel efficiency
the well to wheel efficiency of an EV is something between 1.5 to 2x that of a petrol car. Even accounting for 20% losses, you still come out on top.
Maths. Use it.
Posted in Google Drive IOS or Dropbox
Dropbox - mainly because I've got it already
And it's already integrated with a bunch of my other apps. (PDF reader, Browser for downloading files, Flashcard app, etc.)
Saying that, I rarely if ever use the actual Dropbox *app*, partly because the bundled reader is so bad.
Posted in Ten... celeb headphones
bluetooth
any chance of a roundup of bluetooth headphones? (headphones, not headsets, or those poxy earpieces)
Re: Absinthe makes the farts blow longer
Apparently the BigBoss repro is being hammered and keep timing out. if you keep refreshing it'll download the packages eventually. My iPad required a factory reset the first time as well, but was fine second time round.
favourite JB tweaks:
- Springtomize: allows you to make a lot of little changes to the UI, hide undeletable app icons etc.
- browserchanger: change the default browser from Safari to whatever you want (Grazing, in my case)
- manual correct: no more DYAC!
- cardswitcher: new UI for app switching
- swipeselection: can move the cursor by swiping the keyboard. SO much easier than trying to tap between the right letters
- Retinapad: makes iphone apps look nice when zoomed.
- sparrow+: makes sparrow the default email client and enables push.
still wont play MKVs = still worthless
will it work with FeliCa?
uh..
guys, this news is over a month old. The ICARUS study was published on the 17th October.
Posted in Apple opens iCloud to world+dog
years too late
this is all very well, but... I've already got Google Apps and Dropbox. Everything I would want to sync via iCloud is already synched over those services.
If i was a new adopted this might be nice.
Mr Page
your analogue media storage device has a surface defect causing the playback head to seek backwards and read out the same data segment in a repeated fashion.
you were funnier when talking about robot overlords
I know Lewis reckons we should just buy everything from the yanks, but I do think it's worth financing these projects to maintain a domestic technology base; no sense them having all the fun. 150 mil is small beans, in government terms.
Posted in Renault DeZir: 'leccy sex machine
enough with the concept cars
put something into production!
Posted in Beeb sends teaboy outside with iPhone
aargh
god, could they not at least have run it through photoshop to adjust the levels?!
schlub w. digital camera =/= photographer.
so what happens when missiles become obsolete?
all those expensive carriers with their plane-delivered ASMs suddenly look at bit silly...
man what
I think you're an "ill wave"
scaremongering rubbish
"economically useful". And as demand rises, lo and behold what was un-useful becomes useful. Part of the reason lithium deposits are so unexploited is the current sources are so easily available; we've barely scratched the surface on the rest.
Posted in Next-gen iPhone rumored for April
@Paul Naylor re: ringtones
your can't use uploaded ringtones for alert sounds such as text messages or email notification, only for the actual phone ring or for alarms etc.
Posted in Plug-in Prius production plan posted
man what
i'm a big fan of electric vehicles, but this is rubbish. They're just trying to dress it up as a serial / range extended hybrid but it's really nothing of the kind. Come on Toyota, why aren't you developing the next generation of technology?!
But what of the Lithium?
you can bet that as demand goes up new sources will be found - like this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427385.700-battery-lithium-could-come-from-geothermal-waste-water.html
ASHP++
score another vote for air-sourced heat pumps here. You've also be well advised to hook in solar hot water, which is much cheaper and more efficient that PV, and produces useful supplementary heat even in gloomy Blighty.
one hitch with both schemes it that they both require you to fasten boxes to the outside of your house; the planning laws need to be amended so you can do it without the nimbys whining.
@Ammaross Danan
FFS, do we have to have this argument debunked every time electric cars come up? go read up on "well to wheel efficiency".
Posted in Apple IDs the next-generation iPhone
Big in Japan
the article doesn't mention the real reason for Apple to implement this technology - Japan. RFID technology is already being used in phones there for transit and e-money (Mobile FeliCa / Suica / ICOCA etc), and its lack has been cited as a barrier to iPhone uptake.
Posted in EU says 3G on GSM now the law
so..
how long are we talking about before this actually reaches my handset?
why these things look so wierd
there's a simple reason - these are the kinds of car the designers have always wanted to make! the jump to a new technology has just given them an excuse.
Posted in Slime-powered Toyota Prius demoed
@Disco-Legend-Zeke
"pounds per acre"? what an unfriendly unit. I assume this is something like a pound weight of oil-substitute per acre per year, right? a pound-weight of petrol is roughly 0.6 liters. So, roughly, your acre of palm oil will produce ~360 liters or petrol a year, or ~900 litres per hectare. (for comparison above, that's ~0.1 W/m^2)
the UK uses ~50 billion litres or fuel a year, requiring ~50 million hectares, or twice the area of the UK.
biofuels do not add up. we will never produce then in sufficient quantities to do anything other than make food more expensive.
Posted in Slime-powered Toyota Prius demoed
typo
apologies - the value i gave for corn biofuel should be 0.2 W/m^2
Posted in Slime-powered Toyota Prius demoed
pointless distraction
algal fuel generation is another pointless distraction. we can't possibly grow enough of the stuff to be a significant contribution.
"In a sunny spot in America, in ponds fed with concentrated CO2 (concentrated to 10%), Ron Putt of Auburn University says that algae can grow at 30 g per square metre per day, producing 0.01 litres of biodiesel per square metre per day. This corresponds to a power per unit pond area of 4 W/m2 – similar to the Bavaria photovoltaic farm. If you wanted to drive a typical car (doing 12 km per litre) a distance of 50 km per day, then you’d need 420 square metres of algae-ponds just to power your car; for comparison, the area of the UK per person is 4000 square metres, of which 69 m2 is water (figure 6.8). Please don’t forget that it’s essential to feed these ponds with concentrated carbon dioxide. [...] And without the concentrated CO2, the productivity of algae drops 100-fold."
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/cD/page_284.shtml
can you really see us covering over 10% of the countryside with slime? ridiculous.
Posted in Slime-powered Toyota Prius demoed
@ElReg!comments!Pierre
'"So, is getting algae to produce hydrocarbons more efficient than just covering the same space in solar panels?"
I would bet so.'
you would bet wrong. domestic solar thermal heating - in Europe - delivers around 50 W/m^2. PV is between 2 and 5 W/m^2 (the former for cheap amorphous silicon panels - the latter for expensive panels or large-scale industrial facilities). Algal biofuel, as noted above delivers between 0.05 and 5 W/m^2 - the best alternative biofuel is sugar cane at 1.2 W/m^2 (but can't be grown in most countries) and the USA's darling corn weighs in at a whopping 0.02 W/m^2
Posted in BMW unveils futuristic Vision
ah, the hydrotards are back
hydrogen is never going to be a realistic option. The power-station-to-wheel efficiency of hydrogen is around 25% - optimistically! discounting tank leakage etc. - compared to 86% for an electric vehicle. ie, a hydrogen car requires three and a half times the energy.
That extra electricity has to come from somewhere. With electric vehicles the efficiencies are such that you can generate the electricity conventionally and still save carbon. But with hydrogen the sums don't add up. Hydrogen's even less beneficial when "renewable" energy is added into the mix, as the amount we can plausibly generate is limited by land (and coastal) area, so every kWh over that is disproportionally more CO2.
(FWIW I heartily recommend everyone reads "Sustainable energy without the hot air", read it online or download the PDF for free at http://www.withouthotair.com/ . It's written by a physics professor, so it's all hard numbers - power consumption, efficiencies, how much solar power you can get from a given area, etc.)
ugh
So every Tøm, Dîck and Hårry can host their own photo album at their own url? someone's missed the goddamn point. You'd have though that in these days of social networking and content aggregation that the idea of returning to the days of Geocities would be buried at a crossroads on a moonless night with a stake through its heart. Sites like Flickr are powerful because everything's in one place. That's the point. I don't have to visit a bajillion "democratised" site to see photos of whatever. Plus there's the added bonus that with "undemocratic" sites there a limit to how badly the end user can screw it up. Do we really want to return to multicoloured text, tiled background images and animated gif clip art?!
Posted in iPhone 3.0 - born on schedule...
searching email
don't know whether it's because i'm using IMAP, but spotlight only seems to search email titles. Pretty lame, if you ask me. Plus, some sort of preview in the search results is necessary, as otherwise checking each result by opening and closing Maill every time is a right ballsache.
@scub
you're on the right track in that gravity "travels" at the speed of light, so for 8 1/2 minutes (roughly) we wouldn't notice anything diffrerent. Then all the bodies in the solar system would fly off in different directions. Of course all the planets are still gravitationally interacting: the trajectories wouldn't be straight lines as the planets swung around each other. I haven't done the maths, but I suspect none of the relavive velocities are low enough for them to end up gravitationally bound.
As a rough esitmate, life on earth's surface might last a week. Longer for deep sea and hydrothermal vent critters - the ocean stores a hell of a lot of heat, but it would ice over very quickly. After that the atmosphere would start to liquify and the earth would end up a frozen slushball with occasional vulcanism.
current affairs
how many Amps will it be rated for?
Better something that I know is dubious than something that pretends not to be
*All* information is biased, partial and possibly innacurate. Personally I think the fiction that news sources are balanced and unbiased is much more harmful.
USB
"The 3.0 update will give developers access to third-party hardware peripherals using the iPhone or iPod Touch's dock connector."
does this mean we'll be able to - shockers - use it as a USB drive?! for all the kerfuffle about cut'n'paste this is the thing I miss most.
(Yes, you can get apps that do similar things over wi-fi, which our office network and PCs do not have)
more muzzle flash
Can't see the video at work, but the muzzle flash could also indicate they're using a plasma armature.
Re: Swings and roundabouts
true, but given that jet engines have a power output measured in tens of megawatts, I wouldn't worry about it too much.
@Rune Moberg
Saab Saab Saab can you Saab Saab in a Saab? I Saab that a Saab Saab might be Saab Saab the Saab ;)
/Saab?
Posted in BNP membership list leaks online
hypocrites
The bit that made me laugh was the temerity of Nick Griffin on the TV this morning, claiming his members' human rights had been violated.
ORLY? and which party was it that rails against European law in general and the EU Human Rights Act in particular?
Posted in Sony pumps up PSP screen
microphone for online co-op?
recent propaganda for FF Agito XIII has been touting online co-op play; I'd been wondering how the hell that was going to work without even a keyboard for chat..
bring on the drones :)
i'd far rather be sat in a nice air-conditioned bunker playing RTS with a squadron of UCAVs.
re: job security
in this case it's no bad thing: English tuition in Japan is legendarily bad. Most teachers can't speak the language, and pronunciation is usually mangled to fit katakana. This is why most Japanese students end up with an excellent grasp of English grammar, but can't speak or understand spoken English.
