Posts by David D. Hagood
1110 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
/me slaps forehead....
I think we all missed the most obvious and useful gesture:
Both hands out, palms toward TV, alternating between open palm and fingers brought down to thumbs in a pinching motion:
BOOBIES! SHOW ME BOOBIES!
AMPS
Cicadas sound like an AMPS (Advance Mobile Phone System, the US analog (and now defunct) cellular system) control channel.
And yes, ONE cicada is 100dB. Imagine an entire woods full of them.
It's quieter on Main street in Sturgis the first week of August.
For starters....
OK, for starters, how about allowing Google Mail users to specify how long items are to be held in trash, sent, and spam before deleted (rather than the fixed 30 days it is now)?
"To fondle big Boomis"
I thought Boomis was The Porn Company That Shall Not Be Named In The Same Sentence As Wikipedia.
So I thought Dell was going to be supplying their servers.
The good news
The good news:
The "Kill all Gungans, as violently as possible" level.
The bad news:
It's DLC.
A couple more
Hands on top of head - Tune to the next police procedural/COPS/CSI/Law and Order/NCIS/etc.
Hand clutching chest - locate [Steptoe|Sanford] and Son.
Index finger extended and circled around temple - Next reality TV show.
Holiday vs. work
"Don't be silly. I can't go on holiday overseas* using the internet or a transcontinental rail link, and boats are too slow."
When you are going on holiday, you aren't in *that* much of a hurry. I don't know the endpoints of your trips, so I'll use the ones I am personally familiar with: US to UK. That trip, on a normal aircraft, is about 5-8 hours (depending upon from where you leave the US.) For a holiday, spending basically one day getting there and one day getting back isn't a big deal.
For a business trip, it can be a big deal - you may be talking about a couple of days of meetings, and then you are looking at spending as much time traveling as working. Depending upon where in the food chain you reside, converting those 2 days traveling into half a day can be worth it.
Yes, converting those days into a few minutes to set up the link is even better, but for some types of business, being there in person is more valuable than being on the other end of a wire.
But I agree with the grandparent post: in *many* cases, the cost to use a proper teleconferencing setup, with cameras, shared whiteboards, good speakers and mikes, etc. is much less than traveling (and WAY less than traveling supersonic).
Re: On course for UK - Oz in 30 minutes
"Force is measured in Newtons (N). Mewton-meters is meowmentum."
FTFY.
(I know, I hate it when I let a speling [sic] error like that through as well.)
Re: Icahn = Death of Dell
Death Knell of Dell - FTFY.
Posted in Flat mobe battery? Just light a fire
Re: Butane is pointess
"In the 1970s, I remember some encyclopedia giving instructions on how to build a Seebeck device to power a single transistor radio."
World Book encyclopedia - I had a copy. They used themocouple wire and a candle flame, and a very low power AM receiver design. A modern BiTe module would do a lot better.
50 picowatts
Or about -73 dBm. Of course, since we don't know the bandwidth of the signal in question, we cannot compute the noise floor.
The fact this continues gives the lie....
The fact this affair continues gives the lie to a saying a friend of mine has:
"Never be more trouble to somebody than the trouble to have you killed."
Since Icahn is still around, and is causing significant trouble to Mr. Dell, and the cost of a Mr Dirk D Deeds is dirt cheap....
Posted in Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness
The first movie of the reboot did it for me....
The first movie of the reboot did it for me - I decided that Star Trek was officially over. I'd almost reached that conclusion with the last of the STTNG movies, and with the disappointing final season of the TV show "Enterprise", but the movie drove the last nail into the coffin.
The pilot for any series sets not only the tone for the series, but greatly defines the scope of what you can expect - what is "possible", in a science fiction series. If the pilot has people eating magic pills and growing 6 times more massive with no matter input, you know that you can expect that sort of thing later on, and can throw that whole "conservation of mass" out the window.
Both the series "Enterprise" and the movie introduced, right off the bat, time travel and altering the time stream. However, unlike Doctor Who, the rest of the basic premise of the show wasn't built around that idea, so it feels very kludged on. It means that at any point in the show, if things get dicey for the characters, you could see a magic deus ex machina from the future/past/alternate time stream to pop in and fix things (something that you rarely see on Doctor Who precisely because the "rules" of the series strongly discourage Doctor[n+m] from coming back to help Doctor[n].
Then there is the whole "younger, edgier characters" of the movie. OK, so Kirk's dad died as Kirk was born, and that changed Kirk. OK, but why is Spock so different? How did the destruction of Kirk's dad's ship alter Spock so much?
Lastly, there are the McGuffins of the plot - like, WTF is this "red matter" crap? And if a drop will implode a planet, WTF does Old Spock have what seems to be several tens of litres of the stuff when all he needs is a drop? And how can there be an ice world close enough to Vulcan that you can see the destruction in the sky? It cannot be a sister planet - they'd both get the same amount of sunlight and you'd expect them to be similar in surface temperature.
Yes, I'm nitpicking, but: when I go into a movie, I have a certain number of "suspension of disbelief" tokens I'm willing to give the movie. It gets one big one right up front: if you want to have dragons and magic, OK, you have dragons and magic. You want FTL spacecraft and aliens that can never-the-less breed with humans, OK. But there's only so much the movie can charge on that first token. After that, every token the movie asks for jars me out of the enjoyment of the movie. Make the movie good enough, and I can get back into the swing fairly quickly, but it's better to not do so in the first place. ST-ETM (Enterprise the movie) wasn't good enough to survive the number of tokens they wanted.
Which is a crying shame. The characters were interesting, and had the producers just put a bit more thought into the movie - just removed the need for some of those suspension-of-disbelief tokens - I could really have enjoyed it. Hell, a simple "There are a multiplicity of timelines, these are the adventures in another timeline, deal with it" could have easily been covered by that first "token", and they could have told the rest of the story without any BS (No magical red matter - you want to destroy Vulcan, go Footfall on it and hit it with a large asteroid moving at .7c - ditch old Spock, have young Spock' watch it on a long-range sensor readout. Have the bad guy be from that timeline - hell, keep him a Romulan but don't let the characters know what that is.)
Re: (... for some values of ordinary)
"What, you mean like diesel?"
Pretty much. Normal JP4 (or Jet-A) is kerosene, JP7 is much more like diesel.
Posted in Star Trek: The original computer game
I'm surprised nobody's made a Javascript version for a browser
I'm surprised nobody's made a Javascript version for a browser.
(he said, waiting/hoping to be provided with a URL....)
Posted in Star Trek: The original computer game
Signed overflow
On the Apple, you could exploit 16 bit signed overflow: convert energy into photon torpedoes - make enough torpedoes, and the energy it cost to do so overflowed from 32767 to -32786 (or more/less), and you got positive energy and positive torpedoes.
Re: Nipple implant
So long as Kochanski doesn't get one:
"So I'm with her, right? playing with 'er funbags, then all-ov-a-sudden she starts in
"Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down"
Ya'know what a mood-killer it is being Rick Rolled?"
Hipster will get one....
I can see it now: A hipster gets one, and the immediately voids his warranty by putting a big gauge piercing through it.
Re: On course for UK - Oz in 30 minutes
Going fast doesn't say anything about acceleration. You could accelerate from zero to 7200 km/h (roughly Mach 6) in 3 minutes at 1 G (1.4 G experienced by the passengers, since you'd have 1 G downward due to gravity and 1 G horizontally due to acceleration, take the vector sum at 90 degrees and you get 1.4G).
It would take longer than 3 minutes to climb to the altitude you'd need to be at to safely travel Mach 6.
(... for some values of ordinary)
"The US military may have finally achieved its goal of powering a sustained hypersonic flight on relatively ordinary jet fuel[....]"
For some values of ordinary - JP7 is NOT something you find at your local airport. It was the fuel that the SR-71 used; is almost impossible to light under normal circumstances (you can drop a lit match into it and it will extinguish the match, the SR-71 had to use a special hypergolic chemical to light it - tetra-ethyl-borane).
Still, being a liquid at normal pressures and temperatures, and not a cryogenic liquid like LH2, it is much easier to work with.
Re: This is daft
"Therefore it would make sense to take a picture every time I blink[...]"
Do cameras work against Weeping Angels?
Re: Very impressive.
"A sort of mosquito squadron."
OR, the anti-mosquito laser curtain that has been worked on.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/03/laser_mpsquito_repellent/
Re: No naked wobbling!
Oh, the huge man-titty!
Sandbaggers....
I'd love their take on Sandbaggers.
Staring at the sun - not a good idea, even at ~1.5AU.
Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun
But mama, that's where the fun is.
Re: Another app?
"I actually prefer GM because I can start a session on my phone and continue it on my PC and back again."
Agreed. Also, I can have my workstation at work, my computer at home, my various tablets, and my phone all on the same IM account, so whatever is closest to hand is what I can use. And when I am this big Faraday cage of a building I work in, and my phone gets no cellular signal, I can use the WiFi to do my chats.
UNAMERICAN!!!
How can you be in the land of the supersized free refills all you can eat and NOT be eating? Holy moley get thee to a Wafflehouse STAT!
Re: Time to go foraging?
Do they not have dandelions in Spain? Go out, pick the greens - salad.
Posted in Ten ancestors of the netbook
No DratShack M100?
No mention of the Radio Shack M100?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100
Posted in Boffins strap turbocharger to BitTorrent
Multicast...
*IF* we could get multicast to work well on the Internet, and *IF* we could get Bittorrent set up to use multicasting efficiently, then we could see this sort of super-linear scaling, because a peer's upstream could be reused across all clients needing that data.
Of course, we just
a) need to make multicasting work on the greater Internet, not just local networks. How many ISPs correctly handle the needed messages to allow a customer to join or leave a multicast net?
b) since multicasting doesn't work well for acknowledged packets (TCP), you need to use UDP, and thus you need to deal with dropped packets more gracefully. You'd need some form of drop-tolerant forward error correction to be applied.
c) If your download speed is 4Mbit/sec, and the guy feeding the multicast is running 1Gbit/sec, you aren't going to get all the packets - you aren't going to get MOST of the packets. There would have to be a way to allow for that sort of asymmetry in the speeds (e.g. high speed sources would have to put out a large number of low speed multicasts).
Maybe this could be the "killer app" to make Joe Bloggs give a Murinae rectum about IPv6.
Rave on!
So, when McCloud takes his "date" to the rave....
(As Mike Jagger said to the Scotsman: "Hey! McCloud! Get offa my ewe!")
Almost, but not quite, totally unlike Wikipedia
I respect several things about HG2G:
1) No deletionistas
2) No drama-kiddies and flamewars
3) None of this faux-posh "We are an encyclopedia and must be written like one."
However, I fear that, should HG2G ever get to the popularity of Wikipedia, it will suffer the same "September that never ended" that all online communities suffer (cf. Slashdot, Reddit, and to some extent El Reg here) as the mass of children descend.
Fiat? I could understand Mitsubishi
Fiat? I could understand Mitsubishi doing this, along with the "zero suspension travel" slam-down, "rubber band on huge rims" t[iy]res, "day-glo paint", "undercarriage neon", "stupidly high 'spoiler'", "large number of stickers", and "Krylon black windows" options that seem to all go together.
Oh, and lest I forget, the all-important "chrome phart-pipe exhaust" option.
There are very few "names" I would trust....
There are very few "names" I would trust for audio - most performers have no clue about the technical aspects of sound (ESPECIALLY what passes for "music" "performers" now-a-days).
I *might* buy headphones with Tom Scholtz's name on them - the man has a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, as well has having proven himself as understanding production. I *might* buy headphones with Alan Parson's name on them, because again, he's shown he understands production.
But really, the only name I'm really going to jump on would be Bob Heil, because he's shown over the decades that he understands how to make things that make music.
Re: Thought it said Free Software Foundation on the door
"Did they change it to "Free Content" and I just never noticed?"
There is nothing about not wanting DRM that implies that all content must be free - if you keep poking that straw man the Tin Woodsman's going to bitch-slap you.
The thing about DRM is that it is not possible to have a DRM system that can be implemented in Free software - if a Free program can decrypt the content to display it, it can decrypt it for any other purpose, and that goes against the basic concept of DRM.
So if you allow DRM, you insure that Free software will always be the bastard-red-headed-stepchild under the stairs - never allowed access to anything other than the moldy breadcrusts that Big Media throws its way.
You can create content and make it available without DRM and still charge for it. You just have to make GOOD content that people want; a skill that Big Media is rapidly forgetting.
Re: Adobe killed themselves here, though
Really, this is sort of like the "Cheese shop" sketch:
"Welcome to Adobe! Can we interest you in our cross-platform solution?"
"Great! I've been peckish for a good cross-platform solution! Does you platform support iOS?"
"Well, not so much. No, really. Never."
"Hmm. OK. Well, does it support Android?"
"Yes!"
"Brilliant! then I can get my code to work on Ice Cream Sandwich"
"Well, no. We dropped all support for Android past 3.0."
"Oh, well, at least you support Gingerbread...."
"Not so much, not anymore, no."
"Oh. I see. Well, then you support Gnu/Linux?"
"Yes! Yes we do!"
"Smashing! I've been looking for a way to run on the Raspberry Pi..."
"Sorry, we don't support ARM"
"Oh, I thought you said you supported Linux?"
"We do, yes!"
"... just not on ARM."
"No, not on ARM. But we do support Linux!"
"... on PPC?"
"Ye... well, no."
"Hmm. On MIPS? SPARC?"
"No."
"x86"
"YES YES"
"-64?"
"... No. Not anymore - not with the latest version."
"So, just on i686, is that it?"
"Yes, we do support Linux on i686!"
"So you really don't support Linux, just a specific Linux architecture."
"Yes, we do support Linux."
"So, what other platform do you support?"
"We support MacOS!"
"... on PPC? No, what am I saying, of course you don't"
"Yes"
"Yes? You do support Flash on PPC!?!"
"Yes, we DON'T support Flash on PPC. or 68K"
"I see. What other platforms do you support?"
"Windows! Yes, we support Windows. We support WinXP, Vista, Vista/64, Windows 7, Windows 7/64"
"Will you support Win8?"
"Yes!"
"For how long? <sotto voice>he asked knowing the bleeding answer</sotto voce>"
"Forever! We will never drop support for Windows!"
"Just like you never dropped support for Android or Linux x86-64?"
"...."
"So, your 'cross platform' solution really only supports two major platforms at this time, with no guarantee of continuing support in the future."
"Yes, that's about it, yes."
"Not very cross-platform, is it?"
Their real purpose... is sinister.
You all assume the purpose of the test is either
a) to assist the unemployed in gaining employment
or
b) to convince the unemployed they could gain employment.
But the real answer is:
c) To identify all the malcontents and dangerous "persons of interest" who fill out the form in ways that would make a BOFH shudder, and add them to The List. Congratulations to everybody who filled out the test in the worst possible way: your IP has been noted, and every camera will now track you as you go about your life.
Sounds like horoscopes and fortune cookies
This test sounds like horoscopes and fortune cookies.
And "Meet singles in your area" ads.
Whaaaa?
"Apple can take heart from one fact: if you cut out the no-brand tablets from the Android tally, it’s back on top - just."
Does this work elsewhere?
"Boeing can take heart from one fact: if you cut out Embraer from the airliner tally, it’s back on top - just."
"Ford can take heart from one fact: if you cut out Toyota from the car tally, it’s back on top - just."
How do you justify taking out the "no name" Android tablet sales from the total tablet sales? "Why not include the white-label tablets? Because only seven million of them shipped during Q1, compared to 40.6 million branded products." So? Either the while label sales aren't a significant part of the total, in which case removing them shouldn't matter, or they DO matter, and you shouldn't remove them.
Julienne fries
Aren't those the ones with rounded edges?
Gateway? In the sense gates block you, yes.
My own experience with an iPad as a peep over the walls of the "garden" that is Apple was a gateway all right - a gateway with the gate firmly locked, an armed security guard posted, a list of fees, rents, and costs beside it, and a big sign over it saying "Abandon all money ye who enter here". Considering that at every turn the iPad blocked my ability to do simple, common things without involving iTunes or the iStore, buying expensive iApps to do things my Androids all did out of the box, it was a gateway I quickly determined that I would NOT be passing through.
Posted in Boffins explain LED inefficiencies
Re: So use a few more LEDs running at lower current?
"[...] but do you need to light your whole room with one LED?"
If you are building a projector, you want your light source to be as close to a point source as possible (think movie theaters, video projectors in your office, etc.)
If you are building a light source designed to illuminate things far away, you want your light source to be as close to a point source as possible (think flashlights, car headlights, spotlights.)
If you are building an architectural wonder, you want your lights small so you can better hide them.
If you are pumping a military weapons-grade laser's gain medium, you want your sources as small as possible.
If you are driving an optical fiber, you want your light sources as small as possible.
If you are making an LED video display, you want as much light as possible out of each tiny pixel (ESPECIALLY if you are going for sunlight readability).
Could be worse: could be LBJ
At least Mr. Gates doesn't pull all the crap that President Lyndon Banes "Look at my HUGE" Johnson did (http://www.cracked.com/article_18945_6-presidential-secrets-your-history-teacher-didnt-mention.html among others).
Talk about your ugly Americans! (one of my least favorite presidents; it goes to show the idea of "I'll put this guy in as my VP so he cannot hurt anybody" is a really mindblowingly bad one (yes, I went there.))
Re: Privacy is orthogonal here.
"This used to be true in IPv4.
IN IPv4 the MAC is usually part of the IP address"
1) I think you meant to say "In IPv6 the MAC is usually part of the IP address".
2) That is no longer true for the routable IPv6 address (the link-local address MAY, or may NOT, have the MAC as the lower octets), precisely due to the security issues.
Beamforming
Even with beamforming (even with ANY directional antenna!) you have sidelobes of the signal - your main lobe may be pointing at you, but there WILL be sidelobes pointing elsewhere, causing interference. Yes, those sidelobes will be somewhat lower power, but still present.
Re: I'm crushing your head!
Or:
"Why is that creepy guy trying to zoom my boobs?"
Re: Huh?
Who said the camera is what is detecting a blink? A simple IR LED and phototransistor could detect a blink, a slightly more complex setup (think: on the order of the chip in an optical mouse) could detect blinks and position.
Re: @jake: MAC not MAC-Address
@Jake - how do YOU think a media access controller works? News flash: MAC is a generic term; not all media has the concept of a unique address for a device, so not all media access controllers have a media access controller address. Just because all the media with which you are familiar has a MAC address does not mean that all media has a MAC address.
Re: Could anybody explain...
Obviously, what they need to do is follow the model of the human ear: a sensitive mic, with a mechanical damper that can be actuated at need, like the human tensor tympani muscle.
Then, if somebody claims prior art.....
Oh wait. I forget the courts will allow people to patent things already in the human body.
Wiggle your ears...
What about those of us who can wiggle our ears? Will that be supported?
