Posts by hugo tyson

Iots of other internet radio stations...

I usually use http://www.listenlive.eu/uk.html

which launches into whatever player is relevant.

vague language?

IIRC the wording of the guidance we were all made to read, in response to the original legislation, ruled out stuff like "paying people to facilitate or expedite the business of the company" and "accepting money to facilitate or expedite the business of any company" which to me sounded like it's illegal to pay us, and illegal for us to do work.

My interpretation didn't catch on.

About Arabia

Well yeah, Herbert used a lot of Arabian desert ideas/culture/words as if he had invented them, thus giving Dune and the Freman a plausible hot dry desert dwelling feel. For example, "Baclava: a sweet dessert of the Empire" - no it's not, it's a sweet dessert of Earth dammit.

I like the first film; I'd rather see a film of "Doon - the dessert planet" with its wastes of sugar, and the mystic BEER which gives the red-on-red looking eyes of the users of BEER... &c &c.

Media bias

IMHO there are 2 reasons the media is reporting on the nuclear plants:

a) it has the word "nuclear" in it - dumb people love to be scared of that word

b) it is the only part of the current Japan crisis where

i) anything much is actually changing on short timescale - hour by hour

ii) and there's a chance it might change for the worse which makes a good story

....all of which sell papers and get people to watch (so sell adverts).

If there were no nuclear plant story the media would be very bored with the plain 'quake and tsunami cleanup efforts, don't you think? Even though 10's of 1000's of people have been killed, injured, rendered paupers and homeless, in the rest of the country, and if they're unlucky and there's an outbreak of disease, it could go way beyond that? But it's not good TV....

Phew!

Can we paraphrase:

I always dreamed I'd see the first flight of a reusable space vehicle*; I never dreamed I would see the last...

Yeah, I know, hope Atlantis and Endeavour also have safe final flights.

*I remember Columbia's safe return very well, live on TV.

Believe it or not...

...my bank does the same - online chat/IM/IRC sorta thing - once you're in the online banking system, and the human on the other end has been consistently good. Not that I asked anything really hard, I suspect, but they were waaaay better than a phone call.

400G/2ms

Yeah, 400G/2ms is a misleading notation, 400G x 2ms would be better.

A few sums later using v = at, v^2 = 2as, 400G for 2ms kills 8m/s speed.

8m/s speed is what you get from a drop of about 3.2m here on earth. So a 10 foot drop.

But stopping from 8m/s at 400G takes 8mm, which is either a very soft carpet or very pliable mountings/case corners &c...

Stopping in only 2mm takes 1600G for 1/2 a ms. That's your hard surface example.

Ambassador Zgurglvraaz

"...am I of Norweb Federation and in escrow 7.3 brazillion Galactic Wangs is there. In gratitude of advance assistance to regurgitate these funds extramurally can I ...&c &c"

Well, you get the picture, and it's been done better by someone else already. But that's what the first SETI decoded message will say.

Hansard

I wondered how long it would take Lewis to get on that story... a first for Hansard, is how it was reported elsewhere.

Surely direction counts?

Surely a threat is only a threat if consciously directed at the person/organization whose behaviour you wish to modify? Looks like the law *is* an ass in this case, making an offence of comment between friends - or as if shouted from a Speakers' Corner - just because it is in an electronic format. In other communications media - like talking in public, or sending letters - there's only an offence if the threat is sent *to* the organisation in question, surely?

Black Buck

Lewis writes: Black Buck [...] achieved very little - the Argentine aviators who so menaced the Task Force were based on the mainland, not the islands themselves.

Well yes, because the runway at Stanley had holes in it, holes made by Black Buck. Otherwise it would have been used by the occupiers - or at least Argentine air defence aircraft would have been there, making the Harriers' task that much harder, and large transports could have been used, to bring in loads of extra equipment, making... &c &c

Can I weigh those...

...for medical science?

Lost interest?

...because it was no help in making beer?

Capitalism

Yeah, future fiction is full of such organisations; problem is to be plausible they have always been mega-successful in some tech enterprise, *without* going IPO. So the family owners can embark on a long-term, risky, expensive endeavour. Meanwhile all real companies in this world go public and have to feed (reports of) profits to shareholders, to keep the price up or be bought and asset-stripped. So they can't do it.

Cambridge Symbian office closure

According to local rumour, the closure of the Cambridge Nokia (ex-Symbian) office (in Milton) was announced to the workers there yesterday. Bummer.

EXACTO knife?

Isn't an Exacto knife more-or-less american for Stanley knife? Actually, google sez it's more those smaller ones with multi-part snap-off retractable blades. AKA a "box cutter". That'll be why they like that acronym. Surgical strikes and all that. Yeah right.

Parachuting with a dog

...means you know when to brace 'cos the lead goes slack.

Won't someone think of the...

shipping...

http://www.ais-live.co.uk/aismap/AIS%20Maps/solent.html

It's a VW corrado

It's a VW Corrado(?) body though innit?

Waste their time

Yeah, the only moral thing to do is waste their time - whether a silent line or ideally a human. Hang on, I'll just get them... and just leave it there, is what I do every time.

Looks bulky to me...

..compared to the legendary moto F3.

Tar Heel?

When I went to NC and saw all the cigarette advertising, I assumed Tar Heel was a hideous smoking-related disease....

overall accuracy of 50%

Saying it's the same as a coin-toss presumes that 50% of the input data are lying and 50% telling the truth. Isn't it more likely that with input data of 90% truth, 10% deceptive, they flag it as follows:

85% : actually true, labelled true

5% : actually true, mislabelled lying

5% : actually lying, mislabelled true

5% : actually lying, labelled lying.

One might argue that's a 50% accurate positive detection rate, though its output overall is 90% accurate (only 10% mislabelled). Whereas a coin-toss would mislabel 45% of truthsayers as liars!

Re: Electricity transmission lines, "increasingly well-guarded"?

Transmission lines, you have a point. But is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that new substations/switchyards are much more "indoors" than they used to be. One new one in CB4 for a new housing estate has a roof and complete screen walls; another decades old in an ordinary side street has gained high sloping barriers all around - within the chainlink perimeter - that reminds me of nothing more than a N.I lookout post during the troubles. Both are now physically much harder to both get into, and to throw anything into, or pour a flammable liquid into. Hardened against casual infrastructure attack, if you ask me.

Did we just all learn a secret codeword?

Did we? Will the meal be served *with wine*? <wink wink>

But much wose if it leaks

>>> Carbon sequestration 'as bad as nuclear waste'

> Not too bad then.

;-)

I think we should all wish it was only that bad, but the problem is carbon storage requires physically immense containers, nuclear doesn't.

But if it leaks; you can detect nuclear waste leaking IFF it's problematic (still radioactive), with Geiger counters. If stored CO2 leaks, I expect it would be really hard to detect.

We tried to make a full-featured OS for ARM in 1985....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARX_%28operating_system%29

...but the Americans made it so overcomplicated that it was doomed to be too late.

Interestingly even at the start of that, I and a couple of colleagues tried to get essentially an Arthur made first, but the management were certain the hardware would take at least as long as ARX.

The BSD 4.3 port was OK, but the early ARM VM hardware had a fixed size associative page table, (so if you add more RAM the pages get bigger, not more) with far too few pages to run unix without a lot of swapping. Remember VAX pages were 128 bytes, in RISCiX they were 4k IIRC!

...It's Beer O'Clock....

Just in time for XH558's 50th Birthday

Fantastic timing; XH558 was delivered to the RAF on 1st July 1960; she'll be 50 in 8 days from now. Send money now - I do!

Slug pellets

Telegraph News reported they have slug pellets in their bums. Not slugs, or pellets, but slug pellets, which are IMO something else entirely.

@ShaggyDoggy: Original ARM FP co-processor

IIRC, the original ARM floating point coprocessor was a Western Electric device, google suggests the WE32106 or WE32206, I guess it must have been the 32206 because it certainly did have sin,cos,tan but they only worked on 0<= x <= pi/2, so the OS had to trap those instructions anyway and range-reduce. There was a "floating point protocol converter" chip developed which drove the FPU as if the CPU running the bus were its intended partner CPU. Nasty huh? Yes it was.

I think that's the one that was sold initially at least, then later a proper FPU was made that understood the ARM's co-proc signals directly.

The acronym FPU was often pronounced "floating poo".

Latent slow-down

...caused by the previous run's writes being less well-written, so when reading back, more prone to random ECC failures?

Unless they were properly isolating the tests by never ever reading a block which was not first written in the same test session.

Reminds me of the "Disk Fault 18" problem on the Beeb's floppies. Caused by the drive going overspeed briefly during startup. If you were really unlucky the block you wanted to write was right there at the instant it came ready, you write it, and because the disk is overspeed, the write spills over into the header of the next sector. It took a lot of pain to find that.

I would choose this way

How about this? (N really completely SFW)

http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/20112/Monty_Python_Meaning_of_Life_Part_7_Death.html

Too risk-averse

I note Harriers and air ambulances have also been grounded even though neither has any reason to go so high as the Deadly Ash[tm]. As always ignorant caution leads the way. No-one will take responsibility for saying "it'll be OK", the only arse-covering strategy is to say "ooo no, we can't take a tiny risk from the helicopter going up, we'll let people die for certain in remote car crashes instead". A sad day in this so risk-averse culture.

...and then...

...predators turn up. Shiiiiit!

Well duh.

At no time when I bought a car did the garage warn me that I wouldn't be able to drive everywhere at 70mph either.

The speed of the last hop to your hovel is not actually the bottleneck, it's the servers and the greater interwebs.

@AC: If we just had a proper, faithful adaptation of LotR and The Hobbit, that'd be grand.

...and it'd be about 50 hours long... you'd need dwarf bread...

Now, a faithful screen adaptation of *Bored* of the Rings, that I would pay to watch.

Paintball cannon?

...and no mention of epic WWII drama-documentary "Kelly's Heroes" ??

Counterfeit?

I agree, dummy is the word. Surely not a matter for Intel, but for trading standards or even the fraud squad? It's not that the item was not a Genuine Intel CPU, it's that it's not a CPU at all.

10

Looks like the bloke they chose was meant to resemble Dudley Moore in "10" or maybe "Arthur" and those movies... maybe that's where they started from?

All that trouble...

...just to deliver some chocolates...

Cold weather only?

I notice there's snow everywhere. Will it work in the warm, where the air's less dense and less cooling for motor?

Norrisisms

You omitted "Superman wears Chuck Norris pyjamas" and "when the bogeyman goes to bed, he checks beneath it for Chuck Norris".

Scare tactic

I expect some police/security operatives who are good at body language know full well that if you wave a piece of magic that "detects bombs" (or drugs or knives or pedos or whatever) at a person and make it look like it is saying "beep beep" then IF the person is indeed carrying, they get all stressy and nervous and you can tell and use it a an excuse to search them.

Like the classic "lie detector" ie. a photocopier containing a page that says "HE'S LYING"... and your assistant to press the copy button from time to time...

The local plod in the 3rd world making their own "bomb detector" out of a coat-hanger and some old calculator parts is one thing though... selling them for 40 grand, the scumbag must surely go to jail after being rendered a pauper by fines.

I agree, put him in a minefield.