Posts by hugo tyson

2012 Body-paint

Previous years were pretty hot too, it seems; but no objection? Do we take it that body-paint-only is OK with the Church of Rome?

They're consistent liars

They continually leaflet our house and the 20 others in the close, saying it can be installed in X days. Except their cables don't come down our street. We requested phone and TV from Cambridge Cable 15 years ago when we moved in and they lied and lied and lied and eventually gave up. Cambridge Unable => NTL => Virgin by acquisition and they're still consistently lying; they certainly haven't been round to dig up the street.

If I had the energy I would invite them in for phone and broadband and telly again, adding "time is of the essence" and have fun suing...

But at least the floating cars won't get tickets

From the BBC:

NYC Mayor's Office tweets: Alternate side parking and meter regulations are suspended citywide tomorrow. #Sandy

What are those things?

I see 6 anonymous black things in there. Are they all cells of the battery?

Front page link to here seems bad

It goes to reghardware where the rest of the link 2012/10/18/apple_loses_uk_appeal_ipad/

doesn't exist...

Accountants taken over the asylum

This problem occurs over and over because society/guvmint has decided that regulatory bodies work by fining organisations for breaches. Everything is reduced to the financial. So you get schools fined money for failing to do something that the guvmint demanded because the guvmint didn't give them the money to do that thing; hospitals fined ...ditto... Utility companies fined, does it come out of the Board's bonuses? No, it goes on our bills. Train companies fined for lack of punctuality.... Your local Council fined for not cleaning up some fly-tipping soon enough, or failing to recycle >50% of waste...

Where do the fines go? To fund the regulator? Thus giving the regulator a perverse incentive to find fault. They get their own metrics to get so many convictions... like the Police's perverse incentives, and Environmental Health, and Trading Standards, to get so many convictions - their goal should be no crime, so no need for convictions; similarly the regulators' goals should be no breaches, so no fines.

Maybe a solution might be to give the executives of non-company bodies (schools, hospitals, council) similar status to those of companies; at least some personal responsibility, with the possibility of the regulator sacking them, banning them from holding such office in future, or a pay-cut and no bonus... (which then sadly leads to the tribunal about their contract - need law that says the regulator overrides and that's that....)

desktop - amazing?

Who is it that wants the desktop to be amazing? I just want it to do what I expect, it's a tool not a hobby.

(Staying with 10.4LTS for now, heard too much horror about 12)

She does know it's not quite a starship?

Fabulous. Where are my silver space trousers? Are they with my flying car?

Correlation =/=> Causality

As others say, maybe the peak economic well-being of those ancient cultures was caused by good weather, and when it suddenly went colder, food and materiel shortages caused the empires to collapse.

Well I for one...

...welcome our Nazi Buddha overlords from Spaaaaaacccce!

Well no-one else had said it...

Double glazing

Mass-market double glazing sealed units aren't filled with anything exotic, just dry air. The silver metal strips around the edge which separate the two panes have many fine perforations, and are packed with silica desiccant. They unwrap the strips from their sealed packaging, cut to length, assemble the pane and seal the whole thing with tape, the air in the gap soon enough becomes dry enough to make condensation impossible, and that's all there is to it.

Anything more exotic and it would be impossible to assemble arbitrary sizes in a plain light industrial shed.

Better things to do

...with £250k you could, for example, not go to work for 10 years.... unless you have silly expensive hobbies....

What is a "breakout room" ?

<EOM>

Download in advance (Re: Huh?) / Film of film assumed to be ripoff?

It's not the streams of video being shown in the background at the event that were shut off, I agree they would be downloaded &c in advance.

It's the live stream to a worldwide audience of the event itself that was shut off, because it had other video in the background. Isn't it? For "Copyright reasons"?

So, what caused this? Is it because the live stream, with some people talking a bit and video in the background, kind-of resembles a ripped off video of a current movie that someone recorded with their phone in the cinema? Do we think they detect video of a projected film sort of thing by whatever artefacts you get, and *assume* that's a copyright violation? Looks like it to me. Arses.

Best bit...

...is at the end where it looks like Micro$oft eats itself, and disappears.

Solar

Can you power the heater using solar? Single figure Watts doesn't take much. That would save mass....

As for pre-heating on the ground, I would use an oven - KISS? initially, then try to maintain temp during assembly with this device. Start off with a core temp of 80C rather than 15C and you've got quite an advantage.

Hat

Why is that man wearing a hat indoors?

Heating a rock...

...with your phasor to keep warm. That deserves a shot in any drinking game!

Hard to see stuff is realistic

...in rain or with a foggy windscreen, &c &c. Just sayin'.

What if....

> What would have happened if everyone assumed this was a joke and then something did happen?

...then you could be certain that it wasn't actually anything to do with that bloke. Duh.

Correlation =/= causality nor even connection.

Fabless

OK, I'll bite: CSR is not fabless in the sense that it meant in the 1990s when ARM was new: it does not license its designs. CSR pays TSMC to make chips that CSR owns and sells; CSR does not own a fab itself.

But these days young people call that fabless too, because of the not-owning-fab aspect.

So finally....

...there's a reason to visit yahoo? Sorry, I mean Yahoo!?

That's right up there with...

Mega-Shark vs Giant Octopus!

Windows compatible?

Looks like Windows compatibility to me; this crap Windows XP laptop here at work does that if I actually have to use it to do real work rather than just mail and web and reading PDFs. Ie. running MATLAB and an IDE and compilations. It runs out of handles and everything goes to shit.

"Provably correct"

I can't help always misreading that as "probably correct"....

Regression-to-mean denialists

There, you can use that to refer to Acolytes of Climate Change.

As we just had the whole month's rain in the 5 days during a drought....

The War on Standby

And I thought the article would be about how the MoD keeps things we might need for a war, but as there's no war this is a terrible waste of money. Apparently.

He said kN/s

...which I suspect means even less as a physical quantity, but maybe they mean force averaged over one second. Can't tell from 'ere...

Problem is...

...anyone afflicted by this will also blame the bank, when it's not the bank's fault at all (in this particular case). I do hope they don't end up having to compensate people for this too, Hester==git notwithstanding.

Remember, for most people who have some money in account float for emergencies, it's not been a problem, If I read El Reg right: it's incoming payments that have been delayed. You can still use your debit cards and get cash out of machines, provided the funds were there already, right? (As it happens I've not had to, coincidence)

As if...

Yeah right...

They wish...

Bubble wrap

I'll be taping some bubble wrap over the lens of all my cameras now to get that effect....

"Free speech"

USAans: remember that your right to Free Speech is only with regard to what your own government is permitted to do to restrict it. Corporations* are not bound by that limitation, except to the extent that restricting speech might have negative commercial implications. So if you don't like Google's attitude to your treasured Free Speech, don't shop there; that's the extent of your recourse.

[*]including your own employer

Anti-bribery training

Having had the pathetic multiple-choice anti-bribery training here at work, I have to agree. The letter of the law appears to say that you can't fit in with local culture when abroad. For one thing it's extra-territoriality.

But yes, it's been my opinion for ages that this stupidity will just cause UK plc to fail to get any foreign contracts.

Recommendations good regardless of climate

I'm skeptical about both what the politicians say we should do, and about the predictive power of models based on cherry-picked data, about climate change, but I don't think anyone would argue against the proposals for:

* reducing world population,

* reducing per-capita resource use,

* reducing the role of fossil fuels,

* improving energy efficiency,

* increasing the efficiency of food production and distribution,

* "and enhancing efforts to manage as reservoirs of biodiversity and ecosystem services, both in the terrestrial and marine realms, the parts of Earth's surface that are not already dominated by humans."

since all of these make us less likely to *run out of things*. Even totally absent climate change, they're a good idea. No?

Holding your breath

I watched the Apollo landings as a child and whilst it was enthralling I didn't have the context to understand its importance, so I didn't get the same emotions as later on watching the very first shuttle mission - when that was a New Era dawning - not only for the safety of the people aboard, but the future of manned space travel and so of all of humanity. When it landed safely the very first time I suspect millions finally breathed again....

I agree this has the same feeling about it. Commercialisation should open up lots of possibilities, again the future of mankind in space is at stake. Plus the heart-in-mouth feeling that if the ISS were destroyed, or nearly so, very possibly no human would go to space ever again.

OK, I know the Chinese will, actually, and independently of the West+exUSSR, if they can, but nontheless, that's the feeling....

Performance loss at altitude?

Um, don't they mean that at altitude the vacuum you can get is going to be less *in comparison with ambient*. That is, if you're trying to test a thing to withstand vacuum inside and 1Bar outside, doing it at altitude is no good. Ie. if you start at 800mBar, you can only pump it down to 800mBar below ambient ie. 80% of the relative pressure that you might want.

But for your application, you only care about absolute pressure in the vacuum vessel, so it doesn't matter at all that you're at altitude. IMHO. So your losses are coming from somewhere else.

Weekend bibbles

I assume the weekend pulsing has been smoothed out of that graph. For a while Chrome consistently overtook IE at weekends, as people used their own machines where they have a choice, then IE goes ahead in the week when people at work use their IS mandated setup.

Was there any reason except bloat for the graph to be a flash animation?

Paralysis

Just: he's absolutely right about the paralysis of basically the whole of the West AFAICT in executing on anything new really, not just big stuff. Building *anything* new seems to be prevented by allowing objections on the grounds that people will go there, and the building traffic will be noisy and dangerous, so we're doomed to endure the infrastructure we have and no more; ever. ;-(

Telegraph idiots....

...say "Wind farms cause climate change". Deliberately misleading dontcha think?

The Atom was more a system 3

albeit with totally different video. But a system 1 had no video and no qwerty keyboard at all.

Best machine ever made, the Atom.

Problems with this...

This would be OK so long as it's the link speed you get to your exchange. But the same eejits who complain about their net speed right now would complain that their download speed from Timbuktu was 6kB/s even though their local link speed is 24Mb/s. So it doesn't solve the problem of the general public not understanding what any of it means.

The result of course would be a tripling of the nominal price, because many people pay only 1/3 of it... so...

Second problem, so I'm fortunate enough to live near the exchange. I'm happy paying $OldPrice; they introduce this and my costs triple. Can I have it backed off to 1/3 the datarate for 1/3 the money?

From Newsbiscuit

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2012/04/08/james-cameron-astonished-to-learn-there-really-was-a-titanic/