Posts by John 62

Re: No 90s alt-rock reference?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha_(disambiguation)

interchangeable sensors

I thought it was called called changing the ISO setting (aka gain, for electrical engineers). You can also tweak many DSLRs to mimic different film characteristics (or invent new ones).

Apparently some south africans

train surf just because there's nothing better to do. The danger is part of the attraction.

Indeed, as Blackhawk Down

As Blackhawk Down shows, it's not the US military budget taking bread from the mouths of toddlers in the third world, it's more like the African warlord's military budget that is killing people.

Recently a branch of the Kenyan civil service estimated that the country could support almost 300 million people. That's twice the population of Russia. At the minute Kenya's population is ~41 million.

Anyway. So you decide to divert the entire world's military budget to feeding people. Then what? Will people suddenly become virtuous, industrious, _and_ peaceable? There is vast wastage in all military budgets and we should spend more on disaster relief and development, but spraying resources around will not magically solve the world's problems.

is that the Northern Telecom that...

became Nortel Networks, which became Nortel and then went bust :)

Ska bands

are still lamenting that neo-nazis took over the skin-head fashion.

OSX, Bluetooth & iPhone

I really miss BluePhone integration like I got with my SE k750i. I loved being able to write text messages on my Mac, and search them on my Mac (ditto calls and call history, and then there was the handy remote control app I could run on the phone). Though of course, iPhone/iTunes backup and restore is handy.

There's no reason Apple can't come up with something better than BluePhone, especially when Android phones could potentially be better integrated with your mac than an iPhone.

It caused lots of problems for the Vidiians

But didn't George Costanza's Syndicate (or whatever it was called that wanted to keep Jeri Ryan (understandable)) cure it?

propulsion system

a propulsion system was one of the main barriers to the Wright Flyer. No-one believed they could get the power density from a reciprocating piston ICE they ended up with, and 100 years later a bog-standard one of those nowadays in a lawnmower would laugh at it, let alone a Type-R powerplant, and that's before we start with turbofan jet engines. So both you and the man you scoffed at had good points. 1) a flying machine needed a new propulsion system over what was available at the time 2) the Wrights themselves were heavily involved in that development, just like I'd assume the people behind this project will be thinking a lot about propulsion. A generational ship is one thing, but you don't want it to take too many generations to get anywhere.

OS updates

Actually MS has been known to provide quite a bit of functionality through service packs and they know that most people don't upgrade their OS, they buy a new PC. They know that if they get in on the fondleslab action for reals, it'll be the same, but if they don't get in, they can't expect the license revenue (or marketplace revenue - though their Azure push means they can offer cloud services to people pushing android/ios frontends)

maybe

but probably better to tell them exactly how the incident happened. Tailgating? mobile phone? mechanical problem? Not looking in mirrors? drink/drug/sleep driving?

It's one thing to get people to see the outcomes of pile-ups, it's better to tell them this could happen to you if you don't wise up.

surely you mean Mark Sanger

And the studios wonder why there is Piracy?!

Anyway, I watched the Talladega Nights DVD that claimed to be an extended cut. I didn't see the Theatrical release, but I think I would have preferred it. There's a lot of funny stuff in Talladega Nights, but that extended cut seemed a bit loose and could have done with a bit of editing to tighten things up. And this from America, which, back before Hollywood even existed, cut all the flim-flam bits out of the French silent film comedies to increase audience appeal.

On a related note, I think Celtic Pride got me in a good mood by going straight to the main menu. The DVD of Seraphim Falls (and Black Sheep, both from Icon) got me in a bad mood by having unskippable trailers.

maybe my university was wrong

but I thought engineers used j as sqrt(-1) and mathematicians used i, and that mathematicians are wrong :)

Also, our lecturers used I for DC and i for AC. I can't remember if they generally used U for potential difference (though they nearly always talked about pd instead of voltage in diagrams)

Granted I got my lowest marks in my first electric circuits module and steered myself to computing modules, but I did slightly better in the communications and signals modules later on when there were fewer nasty matrices around (though less said about my comprehension of compound trig the better)