'bout 20 years ago I spent six months writing F1 pitlane software. I never saw a racing car. I never even saw F1 data: our data set was from some lesser formula and well out-of-date. And it didn't take me long to realise that I *didn't* want to be one of the guys going on race weekends.
Posts by Dom 3
426 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Dream job: Sysadmin/F1 pit crew member with Red Bull racing
Your anonymous code contributions probably aren't: boffins
Post-pub nosh neckfiller: The fantastical Francesinha
Bloke in Belgium tries to trademark Je Suis Charlie slogan
Kim Dotcom vows to KILL SKYPE with encrypted MegaChat
Attn El Reg
The guy's an irrelevant tosser. Please stop wasting my screen pixels with non-stories based on whatever his latest self-aggrandising press release is. Or give me some kind of opt out. And if you're stuck for tech resources, I could code it for you: I wonder whether Mr. Schmitz could?
Ford dumps Windows for QNX in new in-car entertainment unit
Funnily enough QNX crossed my mind last night for no good reason. The QNX demo floppy is still one of the most impressive demos I've ever seen. On one single 1.44MB floppy they squeezed an OS, a web server, a browser, a text editor, and some other widgets. And the graphical demos would continue to run glitch-free whatever else you did:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0
This was really quite impressive in '99.
Mars needs women, claims NASA pseudo 'naut: They eat less
The precedents.
Yuri Gagarin was 5 feet 2 inches tall (that's 157cm) and weighed 153 pounds (69kg). From: http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/74867.aspx
Most of the early astronauts were quite short.
On the other hand when they started doing space walks they discovered that a very high level of physical fitness and strength was required. Basically (until they come up with a redesign of the suits) a pressure suit is a big balloon and doing anything in it requires bending the balloon out of shape - it's hard work.
So, errr, women to stay in the cave, I mean Martian lander, and look after it, and men to go out hunting for food, I mean rocks.
Yahoo close to investing $20m in disappearing chat app Snapchat
Extrapolation
Always get a bit narked when I see a small stake in a company extrapolated into a massive valuation. That 20MBuck investment probably has a number of components, of which the actual share-holding is the least valuable from Yahoo's POV. E.g. a look at the source code and internal roadmap, influence over same, direct dial numbers for engineers, blah.
US Copyright Office rules that monkeys CAN'T claim copyright over their selfies
Something's phishy: More holiday scam spam flung at real hotel customers
Forty-five years ago: FOOTPRINTS FOUND ON MOON
Fuel
A11 landed with plenty of fuel left.
http://www.aiaahouston.org/Horizons/Horizons_2013_05_and_06.pdf covers it nicely.
They had more than they thought - but they still thought they were good for another 40 seconds or so.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-28a_LM_Descent_Stage_Propellant_Status.htm has numbers.
And now for someone completely brilliant: Stephen Hawking to join Monty Python on stage
Tor is '90 per cent of the net' claims City of London Police Commish – and he's dead wrong
Everyone can and should learn to code? RUBBISH, says Torvalds
TrueCrypt hooked to life support in Switzerland: 'It must not die' say pair
You know all those resources we're about to run out of? No, we aren't
Fanbois Apple-gasm as iPhone giant finally reveals WWDC lineup
NASA agonizes over plan for Mars rock sample return mission
Giant pop can FOUND ON MOON
Crypto-guru slams 'NSA-proof' tech, says today's crypto is strong enough
@ Michael Hawkes - the difference between then and now is that we have the maths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_factorization.
@ NoneSuch - no idea where you get your information from. "Enigma" was the name of the machine, as given to it by the manufacturers. The main problem with U-boat traffic was the introduction of the fourth rotor. I've never heard it referred to as "Oyster". Wikipedia is over there -->.
Game of Thrones written on brutal medieval word processor and OS
"the misguided notion that teens getting married was the norm in days gone by".
How do you figure that? There's still plenty of places on the planet where it is *still* the norm. I was staying in such a place in 2005. There was some disapproval of a wedding going on in the next village. Because the bride was twelve, IIRC. They felt that was too young. But fifteen would have been seen as perfectly normal. Eighteen probably counted as "stuck on the shelf". Meanwhile I think that boys were expected to become working adults at about sixteen, the Big Men of the village were in their late thirties, and anybody over about fifty was past it.
In short, everything happens much much sooner. Maybe it's because of the low life-expectancy alone, or perhaps the subsistence agriculture and low levels of education come into it too.
China 'in discussions' about high-speed rail lines to London, Germany – and the US
Re: They have't built a copy of teh Concord because the idea is crap
BA ran their Concorde fleet at an operating profit despite being hampered by the short range (which meant the only feasible route was across the North Atlantic) and the tiny fleet which meant no economies of scale on training, maintenance, etc.
An SST which had the range to get across the Pacific could piobably sell quite well.
Japanese cops arrest man with five 3D printed guns at home
What HAS BEEN SEEN? OMG it's a thing that looks like an iWatch
Marauding quid-a-day nosh hack menaces teepee hippie villages
It's spade sellers who REALLY make a killing in a gold rush: It's OVER for graphics card mining
Re: ... "just to generate some data with no real (rather than arbitary) value "
"Even then paper money can still be used as toilet paper or burnt for fuel if the banks ever collapse completely." This has been tested, in Somalia. The value of the note drops until it is more or less what it costs to print and distribute it. Because everybody and their dog is free to try their hand at making their own.
A real pot-boiler kicks off Reg man's quid-a-day nosh challenge
Dell charges £5 to switch on power-saving for new PCs (it takes 5 clicks)
Parent gabfest Mumsnet hit by SSL bug: My heart bleeds, grins hacker
Apple poking at idea of bayonet phone fittings
Vodafone brings African tech to Europe
Facebook Oculus VR buyout: IT WANTS your EYEBALLS
Dear Reg: What is a 'Lag' and a 'Jacksey'?
NASA: Vote now to put flashy lights on future spacesuits
Improbable: YOU gave model Lily Cole £200k for her Impossible.com whimsy-site
5 Eyes in the Sky: The TRUTH about Flight MH370 and SPOOKSATS
Re: Not the least of "their" capabilities.
"1500 METERS below the water taken from another helicopter hovering 50 meters above the surface THROUGH THE PROPWASH. The helicopter under the water was upside down... and you could clearly read the aircraft identification painted on the bottom."
April issue by any chance? According to WP at a depth of "100 m (330 ft) the light present from the sun is normally about 0.5% of that at the surface." At 15 times that depth it is pitch black.
Bletchley boffins go to battle again: You said WHAT about Colossus?
Tony Benn, daddy of Brit IT biz ICL and pro-tech politician, dies at 88
Re: Concorde?
Boeing also won a government-funded contract to build an American SST. Before it got cancelled they'd chewed up more money than was spent developing Concorde, and they'd got as far as a plywood mockup of the cockpit (more or less). At the time of cancellation Concorde had 74 orders lined up.
Get Quake III running on Raspberry Pi using Broadcom's open-source GPU drivers, earn $10K
Call *me* a cynic...
but I suspect the main reason that large companies are reluctant to release their source code is the amount of work involved in making them fit for public consumption, starting with removing all the comments that say things like "//Fred is an idjit, look at this crap!" and then ensuring that something embarassingly piss-poor hasn't slipped through the net.
Oh, and management thinking that "this cost us 300K to develop, therefore it is *worth* 300K"...
But... you work in IT... Why aren't we RICH?
It's Satya! Microsoft VP Nadella named CEO as Bill Gates steps down
Re: Welcome to Toyland!
It would appear to me that on the contrary, there's been a large cultural shift in MS's engineering since BG took his hand off the tiller. Whereas BG famously argued against code modularity:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/06/ams_goes_windows_for_warships/
by the time of IIS 7, MS were trumpeting that very same modularity and replace-ability that Gates had argued against:
http://www.iis.net/overview/choice/modularandextensiblewebserver
Similarly you just have to look at the download size of the browser testing VMs that MS have made available to realise that they have put a lot of effort into modularising the OS.
Gates's point of course is that there's no *commercial* value in allowing other companies to release components that can replace your software - quite the opposite in fact.