Posts by David D. Hagood
1107 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
Re: Or as Clint said...
Correction:
"Nothing like a good piece of hickory."
(It's been a while since my last good Spaghetti Western party.)
Or as Clint said...
"I do love a good piece of hickory"
Simple solution
1) Hire Samuel L. Jackson look-a-like.
2) Dress in suit.
3) Issue 9mm.
4) During any meeting, if anybody speaks like that, empower him to draw and say one of the following phases:
* "Say Paradigm again - I dare you!"
* "What part of speech is 'incentive'? Does it look like a verb to you? Then why you tryin' to use it like a verb?"
* "ENGLISH MUTHFUKA, DO YOU SPEAK IT?"
Posted in Texan scientists create tiny, tiny laser
Re: Texan scientists create tiny, tiny laser
In Texas, even the smallness is bigger.
Simple.
Posted in Texan scientists create tiny, tiny laser
Re: Emission wavelength?
Thanks for the catch. However, the band gap of InGaN isn't that much different than InGaAs, so my question stands. A laser that size supporting a standing wave in the gain medium would either have to have one hell of a refractive index - like, 100 or so (way larger than any material of which I am familiar) - or would have to be operating in the extreme UV to soft X-ray part of the spectrum. And if these guys had made an EUV or X-ray laser at those scales they'd likely be booking a flight to Stockholm pretty soon.
Posted in Texan scientists create tiny, tiny laser
Emission wavelength?
The rod is InGaAs, so I'd guess the natural wavelength of emission to be around 640nm, but the rod is shorter than that, so how do they get a standing wave to form? I didn't think the refractive index of InGaAs was over 10. What is the emission wavelength of this laser?
Do you really want to use your tongue...
Do you really want to use your tongue to play Half Life? Do you REALLY want to TASTE a headcrab?
I can only think of one group that might get behind this, so:
Are there any Pierson's Puppeteers in the crowd? Raise your heads!
Watch out, Sony!
Sony: "It's not our fault, uhhhhh, you're holding it wrong!"
<knock/><knock/>
Sony: "Hello?"
Process server: "You're served. Apple is suing you for IPR infringement."
(seriously: If getting gunk on the contacts can burn it up, somebody needs to lose their EE degree.)
Posted in Apple Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review
Re: @David Hagood
The singular of data is not anecdote, but: I had a Win7 machine, dual booting into Linux, so grub was installed on the linux /boot partition, which was the active partition so the *bog standard* MBR bootloader could find it.
Win7 needed a service pack, which ABSOLUTELY INSISTED upon the Win7 partition being the active partition before it would install (nevermind that Win7 know which partition it was on, naturally). So, I set the active partition back to the Windows partition, figuring I could later just flip the active partition back to /boot and all would be well.
Win7 proceeded to jump up and down upon both the MBR and its own partition with hob-nailed boots, such that even attempting to switch back to /boot as the active partition failed. I had to boot from a live CD, re-install the standard MBR, and reactivate /boot as the active partition.
Oh, great.
I can understand an Indian accent. But a Wisconsin accent?
Posted in Apple Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review
Re: One Partition
If it is true, then Apple had better watch out: Microsoft will be suing them for violating Microsoft's patents on "method and apparatus for making an operating system totally incompatible with a computer having a multiplicity of operating systems installed already" and "method and apparatus for destroying other operating systems on a computer during installation" for which Microsoft can site prior art going all the way back to Win95.
Re: Is there an end point?
Given what we know and what we theorize, the smallest things that make any sense to talk about are one Planck length big. That's about 1.6*10^35 meter - about 1/(5*10^19 ) of the "width" of a proton, so we have a long way to go before we get that small.
And the assumption that the Planck length is the limit is due to our current understandings of gravity and mass at small scales - and we KNOW we don't have a good theoretical model that merges General Relativity (gravity) with Quantum Mechanics (mass and small stuff). When we find that theory that lets us deal with both in the same set of equations without it blowing up in our face with infinities and negative probabilities, we may discover that you cannot get that small, or that you can get much smaller, or that there are more dimensions in Heaven and Earth than are drempt of in our philosophies.
Re: Worldwide collider project
"Is the vacuum of space good enough at reasonable altitudes"
No. There's WAY too much still there, even several thousand miles up. Resistance from residual atmosphere and solar wind are significant factors in satellite lifespan, even at 22000 miles. When you are whizzing particles around at .99999999C you want them to hit stuff ONLY where you have detectors, and ONLY stuff that has a known make-up.
To get the kind of quality vacuum you have in a particle accelerator, you'd have to be outside the heliopause - say hi to Pioneer and Voyager while you're there.
Posted in Santander's banking website craps out
Strange, new use of "soaring"
"Did it melt in Blighty's soaring temperatures?"
This must be some strange, new meaning of the word "soaring" of which I had previously been unaware.
I show the UK high at about 31C, we are pushing 40C. And we are thankful - it's a break from what it has been.
Posted in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean review
Re: Am I the only one...
"I've had mixed results with Siri. British English has a far greater variation in accents and dialects than is found in the US"
Boggle.
You'd not been to:
the South
Wisconsin, donchanow
Texas
like, California, fur shur
San Francisco (they have their own accent)
Any Barrio area
(just for starters)
Yes, US TV would have you believe we all talk like Kansans, but seriously, we have as many incomprehensible accents as the UK does.
ITYM
"[...]realistic RF range at 80MHz is more likely to be measured in metres rather than kilometres.'
I think you meant "80GHz" - considering I can listen to 89.1MHz FM about 60 miles from the transmitter around here.
Posted in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean review
How about fixing loss of signal behavior?
How about fixing what happens when the phone loses cellular signal?
Right now, when the phone loses cellular signal, rather than shutting down the cellular radio for a period of time (like a minute or more), and then re-activating, looking for signal, and repeating as appropriate, the phone goes into the Yorkie separation-anxiety moment of "OMG NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL HELLO TOWER HELLO TOWER OMG NO SIGNAL NO SIGNAL TOWER TOWER CAN YOU HEAR ME OMG" and burns the battery down to nothing in no time.
True, some of that behavior is in the radio system firmware, which is outside the Android framework - but Android can see the RSSI value, Android controls the power to the radio system, Android can say "OK, take a breath cellular system. We have no signal, the odds of that being fixed in the next 2 milliseconds is pretty low, chill and we'll check in a minute, OK? - Breath!"
Re: For [Insert Diety here] sake
"Just changing the port SSH runs on doesn't make it anymore secure."
True. BUT: You can now configure your firewall to say "You tried to frob port 22: ON TO THE BLACKLIST YOU GO!" You can do that IMMEDIATELY: no waiting for a log in failure to be created. Under Linux, you can have a firewall rule immediately add that IP to a "recent" IPTables rule, and have that rule be checked at the very beginning of checking an incoming packet.
You can place the REAL ssh server on another port (with mandatory keypair needed, no keyboard-interactive, no root log in, FAIL2BAN in effect) and greatly reduce the amount of time J. Random ScriptBot can have at your system.
Ditto for any other well-known port you AREN'T making generally available: Put a (metaphorical) land mine there - touch that port, immediately be blacklisted.
Not evil enough
Nine words (including these)
Justin
Beiber
Hey Hey Hey
The chicken^Wrat heart was kept alive
in a special solution
thub thub. thub thub.
The XXXXXXXL orange shirt with the initials F.A. on it.
Oh, boo hoo
"Without a coherent competitor the operators will lose control of mobile payments just as they lost control of ring tones, mobile applications, video calling and (increasingly) voice and text messaging, leaving them with little to do beside sell data by the byte. "
And the farriers stopped being able to charge everybody to maintain their horse and buggy. The ice man no longer cometh, as I can make my own.
Why should the phone companies be able to charge exorbitant rates for things other than pushing packets to my phone? Why should they interpose themselves between me and my phone's ability to play ringtones?
What if you are spectacularly good at Guitar Hero?
What if you are spectacularly good at Guitar Hero? Good enough that there is no measurable difference between the patterns you've learned and the patterns you haven't - one of those people who gets a Perfect on Free Bird?
Well, Gallifrey is sorted...
OK, so we know where Gallifrey is located. After all, Rassilon was a stellar engineer....
Re: Usually you are better of finding an italian or a german, ... (@Mephistro)
">That's bollocks!
They cook those, too?"
That would be the American Cowboy place, up the street. Ask for the Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Re: Maybe...but...
650km and 10 minute recharge time, OR... 1500km and 6 hours recharge time. That would be enough range that you could drive all day, and let it recharge overnight. That would mean you'd only be recharging at about double the rate you discharged, which is much more reasonable. That way, not only could you support in-city running around, but longer driving trips as well.
1500km (900 miles or thereabouts) is about the limit of what can be driven on the US Interstates in one day (unless you are doing tag-team driving). That would allow you to drive all day, and if (h|m)otels had charging facilities, charge overnight while you slept. I'd guess the numbers would be roughly the same for Europe - you might have higher speeds on the Autobahn, but I'd guess you wouldn't want to put in a 12 hour day either.
Re: Lightnessness?
Really - lightness is a property of an object: "her iPad was lighter than her Bulgarian Airbags".
What we are looking for here is density. I would propose the Reg adopt the MPS as the measure of density - one MPS (Member of Parliament Skull) is the density of the cranium of an average Member of Parliament. (Us US types can use the CCS - CongressCritter Skull. (Un-)Fortunately, they seem to be identical to the MPS).
This material would therefor be approximately one nanoMPS in density.
Posted in Micron mass-produces Phase Change Memory
Re: You're getting your SI units confused
Actually, you are BOTH getting your units confused, in different ways.
OP is going from 1Gib (2^30 bits) to 139MB (1.39*10^6 bytes).
You are confusing Gib (2^30 bits), MiB (2^20 Bytes), and Gb (10^9 bits) and MB (10^6 bytes).
Re: Snake oil and flying pigs?
Similar to the 419 spammers - pick something so outlandish, so trivially disprovable, that anybody with more than a quantum of common-sense and skepticism would flee, and the only people left investing are so blindingly stupid that you needed worry about them filing charges against you, as they are barely able to draw breath and metabolize at the same time.
A couple of issues....
"Another inconvenience is playing music. There's really no open, interoperable standard for taking songs on a mobile phone and playing them wirelessly on any speaker – whether it's in a rented car, an office or a friend's house."
Ummm - Bluetooth/A2DP?
But the real issue is this - I will happily buy content, but I insist upon one thing: DON'T TRY TO SCREW ME. I have a multiplicity of devices - tablets, computers, (semi-)smart TVs, phones - all of which can play media. DO NOT try to lock media to only one of those devices. DO NOT prevent me from backing up the content. DO NOT require special software to access it. Now that I can buy MP3s from Amazon, with none of that silly lock-in, I do so. I don't do Ultraviolate (mis-spelling deliberate) because it won't work on all my devices - why not just rip the DVD for my own use? I also do not like media which requires a phone-home to use - unless the media vendor is willing to escrow unlocked versions and the funds to distribute them to all rightful owners in the event of them getting out of the business.
Am I so evil, because...
Am I so evil, because I wish this would happen to a plethora of other tech leaders, beginning with:
* Steve Ballmer
* Larry Ellison
* Anybody from SCO
Posted in Sigma SD1 Merill 46Mp DSLR
GPS? HDR? Pano?
At those prices, can this (or any other) camera do
* GPS based geo-tagging of the picture, either with a built-in GPS or with an external GPS and Bluetooth?
* Automatic high dynamic range capture (it can leave the actual combining to an external system, so long as that system can be other than Windows)
* Automatic panorama assist (again, the stitching can be done externally)
Yes, to quote Mr. Mercury, "I want it all, and I want it NOW" - I want a large form factor sensor with good low light performance, lots of lenses, standards based image capture, HD video, HDR, Pano, GPS - and a pony! and all for $500 or less. Yes, I know I'm not likely to get everything on my list, but those are some issues for The Reg to consider in a review.
You want a good test case for a camera - show me a camera that can do the Grand Canyon justice, then do justice to Carlsbad Caverns.
Posted in LOHAN fizzles forlornly in REHAB
Re: Wah?
No, that actually cleared it up - but the original post isn't being clear.
IMHO, what he should have said is:
"Given how thin the air is up there, the rocket will have to be moving almost the speed of sound before the fins create enough force to stabilize the rocket. At that altitude, even moving at 300m/sec, the fins will only create as much force as they would at sea level going 35m/sec - not enough to stabilize the rocket. They had better plan on the rocket going supersonic, and design it accordingly."
Re: ac@15.14
No, because the international regs requiring Morse are long dead.
Why not combine them?
A Pi should have enough CPU to do narrowband software defined radio - why not a kit that acts as a receiver front-end and tie that into the Pi.
Let them build receivers for broadcast AM, broadcast FM, and some of the amateur service bands (and broadcast shortwave). Have Pi software already set up for AM, FM, SSB, RTTY, PSK31, and CW. Also package up OSSIE or GnuRadio if they want it (but, I do this *for a living* and I find OSSIE and GnuRadio a bit difficult - hence why I suggest canned stuff first).
Then, let them get their tickets, and THEN let them build some low power transmitters in the 2 meter band (and if they get HF licenses - build 20M rigs.)
You could even set up some D*RATS (!yuck!) or other modulation schemes that can push reasonable data, and move some QCIF video at 10fps using H.264.
(and if the damn D*STAR idiots would use a Free codec like Codec2 rather than a proprietary codec like AMBE, they COULD implement a D*STAR system.)
73 de N0YKG.
Posted in LOHAN fizzles forlornly in REHAB
Wah?
The International Civil Aviation Organization has the speed of sound at 100kft being 303.0 m/sec, not 35.5 m/sec. You seem to have a decimal misplaced.
Were Mach 1 35 m/sec at 100kft, then a U-2 would only be able to go about 35 m/sec (being a sub-sonic craft), and we'd be seeing more of them shot down.
Posted in LOHAN fizzles forlornly in REHAB
Adding oomph
Were I doing this here in the US, I'd just half-fill the cavity with a little loosely-packed, slow burning double-base smokeless rifle powder, put the igniter in, put some more double-base over it (again: loosely), and then some electrical tape (or Duct tape) over the bottom.
DO NOT USE HONEST-TO-PETE BLACKPOWDER. Or fast-burning stuff like for a pistol.
Posted in Is the Higgs boson an imposter?
The big reveal
Fred: "... and the Higgs boson really is..."
[rips off rubber mask]
All: "OLD MAN HIGGINS!"
Old man Higgins: "I would have gotten away with it too it it weren't for you meddling boffins!"
ROOBY-ROOBY-RU!
Posted in Google Nexus 7 Android tablet
Re: SD slot
Only if the USB port is capable of being a USB host, and supplying current, which many tablets are not. Why tablet makers don't make their devices use micro-AB connectors and support USB-on-the-Go I don't know, as the support is built into the chips, but... they don't.
If the port cannot supply current but can act as a master, you'd have to have a powered hub or a powered storage device.
Posted in Finding the Twitter psychopath ratio
@TeeCee:
"<Yank drawl>"
Yank's don't drawl. Southerners and Texans drawl.
I have a system like this....
I have a system like this. It cost me no where near US$140. It is a thermostat with a scheduler, and a WiFi connection. (Google for Filtrete Radio Thermostat).
Yes, a thermostat with a good 7 day scheduler will get you most of the advantages of this system. There are 2 main advantages to having the WiFi enabled thermostat:
1) Easier programming. It is MUCH easier to set up a good schedule using a REAL user interface (e.g. browser) than the UI in a thermostat.
2) *IF* you travel, it is nice to be able to set the away setting (minimizing energy usage), and be able to switch it back to normal mode the day before you get home, so that the house isn't [freezing code/boiling hot] when you get home and you spend hours waiting for things to get reasonable. Yes, you *could* just tough it out - but what's fun about that?
Of course, advantage 2 only happens if you don't have anything else living in the house during the time you are away: no pets, no plants, no SOWMBO.
And as for the "tied to an external server" - that is done largely to work around the issues of firewalls - if you have your home network firewalled from the Internet, how do you access your thermostat from outside? Yes, you could configure your router to pass the traffic in to the thermostat, set up a dynamic DNS for your network, and use that - IF you are a hard-core networking geek. Granny Fanny? Not so much. So by having the thermostat poll an external server (which will work through most residential firewalls) and by having your app contact that external server (thus giving the app a fixed name to look up) you work around that issue. Would I prefer not to have the external server? Sure - I *am* a networking geek, and could make it work. But if that were the only set of people to whom they could sell this product, they wouldn't sell enough of them to make a profit.
Then there is the advantage that, IF you set up your physical location, the external server can look up the projected temperature for your location, and can use that to help your thermostat better control what is going on ("let's see - I'm supposed to have the house down to 27C by 17:00, it's currently 35C and 16:00, and it's 42C outside. I'd better start now....", or "I need to warm up to 22C. It's -15C outside - better turn OFF the heat pump and light the burners.")
I wish zoos and such would do this
While I understand why shopping malls would salivate over the chance to be in Google ("Consume and reproduce. Stay asleep.") I'd like to see more zoos and museums do this - especially if they make the appropriate links to the displays (e.g. the bears cage links to info on the bears, the Liberty 7 exhibit links to the restoration information, etc. - bonus for zoos with webcams on the animals).
I know of one user of this
How many people need to have a 3D map? Most of us really only have 2 degrees of freedom in our lives, unless we are in a high rise, and generally, if we are in a high rise, do we really need a map on our phone (as opposed to, say, just a directory of businesses and what floor they are on)?
I can only think of one user, who frequently needs to be informed of not only his lat/lon, but altitude.
So, Mr. Wile E. Coyote, this app's for you.
SNMP
I don't want my fridge to track my food inventory - or rather, I don't *need* it to track my food inventory, so it's not important to me.
However, having recently had my fridge die on me, what I do want is for my fridge to be able to tell me "Boss, the freezer section is getting a bit warm: temp now 1F, up from -1F, trending up by 1F per day. I am still in tolerance, but you should really get me checked out. Compressor outlet pressure is down 20% - a freon leak is likely."
In short, I want all my house's major systems to speak SNMP. I want my fridge, my heat pump, my well head, my sump pump, my water softener, my propane tank - EVERYTHING - to be making their status known. I want to know, in advance, if something is heading for failure. I want irrometers in the lawn notifying me if it's time to water. I want my garage door to tell me if it didn't go down because the damn neighbor's cat ran in at the last second. I want to be notified if somebody rang the bell when I was out. And notice the pronoun: notify ME - not some third party monitoring service. MY server, in MY basement, answerable to ME as its Lord and Root! OK, if they want to make a monitoring and maintenance service available to Granny Fanny that's wonderful, but it needs to be OPTIONAL.
Re: Kansas!?
To those of you not familiar with the history:
Originally, Kansas was to be rectangular. Kansas City was entirely within the borders of Kansas. Then, it was decided that the north-eastern border would be defined by the Missouri River. Like most cities on a river, Kansas City straddled the river, so it was now in both Kansas and Missouri. Normally they are referred to as KCK ("kay see kay") and KC Mo ("kay see mow"). Each city has a different character - not quite "good twin/evil twin", but different like "Dick York" and "Dick Sargent".
KCK has many high tech companies - Sprint and Garmin being two right off the top of my head. This roll-out was to be in KCK and it's suburbs of Overland Park and Lenexa.
But yes, Google wasn't looking to roll out fiber elsewhere in Kansas - a pity, I would have loved to seem them roll it out here in Wichita.
Re: What Julian Needs...
A large pouch, enough to hold a human?
What about a body bag?
Whatever they use, please let it be air tight and soundproof.
Blocking harmful sites?
OK, so will they block these sites, known to cause irreparable harm:
http://www.vatican.va/
http://www.churchofengland.org/
http://www.lds.org/
http://www.scientology.org/
I can go on.
Sorry, thumpers: you have what YOU consider "harmful", and I have what *I* consider "harmful".
Re: Absolutely
If we accept the premises of:
1) Climate change due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is true
2) Said climate change will have disastrous results.
3) We must do everything in our power to change this
(which seems to be the assumptions "they" want us to hold)
Then logically, it seems to me that we should see "them" out there chanting
WHAT DO WE WANT? NUKES!
WHEN DO WE WANT THEM? NOW!
But since I don't see the (for want of a less emotionally charged term) "pro-global-warming" crowd doing that, it causes me to question the validity of the premises (or at least question if the "pro-global-warming" crowd truly holds those premises to be true).
I expected this to happen
When all the EU stuff started, I said (unfortunately, not here in this forum) "This is similar to the way the US was in the very beginning. I wonder how long it will be until they make the same steps along the path of (bunch of independent entities flying in loose formation) -> (bunch of semi-sovereign entities under a limited federal government) -> (federal government asserts all power, states have no real power) that we have made/are making?"
And *IF* the EU goes down this path, you WILL have your "War between the States". I don't know what the precipitating issue will be (I seriously doubt it will be slavery), but I know it will be horrible and divisive. It will have to be something about which the various constituent (nation-)states have strongly held - and wildly differing - opinions. Whatever it is, you will have a block saying "We want A! Give us A!" and another block saying "A? Are you mad!?! A is barbaric! Not-A, for the good of the union!" The first block will say "Screw you, we want A, and if we don't get it, we are out of here!" And at that point, you have the choice: let them secede from the Union, or tell them they cannot - that they don't have the right to secede (as we did to the Southern states). And you will have your Civil War.
If I had to bet, I'd bet on the "triggering issue" being related to Islam - one bunch (say, France) will say "You may have some freedom of religion - BUT NOT THAT MUCH! No veils, no Sharia law" and somebody else (say, Spain?) will say "BULLSHIT! You cannot have 'some' freedom, you are Free or you are NOT FREE. We want the freedom to (make our women) wear veils." (and I truly am not trying to be a troll here, but from my outsider's view this seems likely).
Mission: Impossible?
Does this remind anybody else of a (modern era - Cruise version) Mission: Impossible action sequence?
Against whom might Google want to deploy such antics?
Perhaps that explains the flak cannon shipments to Redmond?
