* Posts by Mine's a pint

32 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jan 2010

Thar she blows: Strava heat map shows folk on shipwreck packed with 1,500 tonnes of bombs

Mine's a pint

There's the MV Captayannis sunk in 1974 off Greenock.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/MV+Captayannis/@55.9756092,-4.7438802,624m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x4889ae610ab4c12b:0x7a98169c821b5a5f!8m2!3d55.9756062!4d-4.7416862

'The capacitors exploded, showering the lab in flaming confetti'

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Re: Improbable

Agreed, although we are assuming that the PC was in a sturdy case as used at those times. Still.....

Official: Perl the most hated programming language, say devs

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Pint

Re: It has served me well

IIRC the usage of "Practical Extraction and Report Language" and "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister" are both said to be endorsed by Larry Wall in the first paragraph of the introduction of the O'Reilly book "Learning Perl".

The biggest British Airways IT meltdown WTF: 200 systems in the critical path?

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Typo? Looks strange

"shuttle failure was "necessarily" one in 105"

1 in 105? is this perhaps meant to mean "1 in 10^5"?

Norfolk County Council sent filing cabinet filled with kids' info to a second-hand shop

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Coat

Whatever happened to Izal?

Bronco!

Pulsating white dwarf described as a 'dynamo' found, no, not in the back pages, 380 LY away

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Headmaster

Over accurate units conversion

"at a distance of 1.4 million kilometres (869,920 miles)"

Should that not be in fact 10124009 Brontosaurus?

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

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I used borax to sprinkle in my socks to control foot odour (No, I don't have smelly feet but thanks for asking) but now I cannot buy borax, only "borax substitute". I don't recall plans for a borax bomb....

Zilog reveals very, very distant heir to the Z80 empire

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A modified Z80

with built-in sound system was also used in the GameBoy Classic.

Video folk, you'll love the 96TB, 2.6GB/sec LaCie 12big HDD

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Facepalm

Noise on the desktop

Just where you need it, 12 spinning drives and probably a few fans right before your ears.

Noise, noise, noise. </Grinch>

Tiny tech takes Turkish tin-rattling title

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Thumb Up

Learning to use other interfaces than the KVM

It could be used with Nanpy as a hardware interface for your Python projects.

Loneliest Pirate's EU copyright report secures MEPs' approval

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Double-take

Why did I read “freedom of panorama” as "“freedom of paranoia” ? It must be Friday.

JavaScript creator Eich's latest project: KILL JAVASCRIPT

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Aren't standards wonderful

Obligatory XKCD reference

https://xkcd.com/927/

NASA snaps first full family photo of Pluto and its five moons

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Units please!

"The probe is currently 55 million miles away from its target and is speeding onwards at four kilometers per second"

This confusion is just why we have the Vulture central units.

"The probe is currently 640 million brontosaurus away from its target and is speeding onwards at 0.1334% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum."

There, fixed it for you.

Helium-filled drive tech floats to top of HGST heap

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Low flying heads

Interesting to see how the heads fly above the platters in vacuum ( filled? emptied?) drives. Electrostatic charges perhaps?

Should spectrum hog TV give up its seat for broadband? You tell us – EU

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WTF?

694-790 MHz?

That's not much bandwidth, less than 100MHz. Ok for broadcast data streams but very small for VOD.

Are you broke? Good with electronics? Build a better AC/DC box, get back in black with $1m

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Re: Doomed from the start

I suspect the 450V and 10 Ohms are to represent a real life power source of 450V with an internal impedance of 10 Ohms so the 197W dissipated by the resistance will be internal to the power source and cannot be changed. There will also be unspecified losses delivering the AC to the load. The >95% refers to the DC/AC converter alone.

Traffic lights, fridges and how they've all got it in for us

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Re: Connected fridge - a small subset of first world problem

It's not about this fridge being better for being connected to the world, it's about added "features" so the consumer may select this model over that one based on the quantity of feature bullet points in the description. These days it seems that "Feature Stuffing" is seen as leverage to sell a new product to a consumer who perhaps is bored with their plain old model.

Portable toilet mistaken for killer Nork drone

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Coat

Playmobil

Reconstruction - or it didn't happen!

BBC Trust: 'LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENING' to this DMI mega-tech FAIL

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WTF?

Re: some DMI history

ISTR an article, probably on El Reg, saying that the statistics of OS types were gathered only at the bbc.co.uk base page and not recorded if the browser entered at a bookmark. This could not possibly lead to skewed reporting, could it?

Apple-aligned firm opens sapphire glass factory. iPhone 6 rumours, DEPLOY

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Prescient Sci-Fi

It's transparent aluminum, Mr. Scott!

Explained: How LSI and Oracle cooked up magical flash-embiggening sauce

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Facepalm

Double-size me!

Wow! We will soon see storage sold as double capacity assuming 2:1 compression, just like tape cartridges. More confusion as with hard drives capacity quoted in the strange units of MB which are 1000KB.

Solar enthusiasts rays idea of 'leccy farms on MOON, drones

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Final demand

Please pay your overdue energy bill promptly.

Note that our Death Ray\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Energy Transfer Beams are notoriously difficult to keep focussed on our receiving stations, we would not like an accident to occur.

Yours....

Martian MOM LAYS another EGG in SPACE - but it's not big enough

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Facepalm

two coils

Can anyone spell phase?

Radiation snatched from leaky microwave ovens to power gadgets

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Parasitic radio power

I recall a magazine project from around the late sixties which was to build a medium wave radio which was powered from a long wave receiver (Radio 4). Due to the small power harvested it could only drive an earphone. Such a step up from a crystal set using the received radio power directly?

Spaniards deploy self-propelled ROBOT BALLS

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FAIL

Old news

http://xkcd.com/413/

PGP, TrueCrypt-encrypted files CRACKED by £300 tool

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Pint

Hibernation?

Hibernation, is it really such a boon?

Behold: China's robot noodle army!

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Happy

Pictures or it didn't happen

Or even better re-created in lego.

Voyager ticks one box for interstellar arrival

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Pint

Voyager data integrity

In the early 80s I was on a CD player maintenance course and was told that the forward error correction used to make them damage resistant was Reed-Solomon coding, developed in 1960 and used for Voyager communication. It is still in use for DVD and QR codes amongst many others.

Vulture 2 trigger triggers serious head-scratching

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Pint

Going for a song....

I may have missed if someone has already suggested this, but whatever...

At ground level the speed of sound in air is about 340M/S, at 30KM or about 100,000ft the speed of sound is about 300M/s. An oscillator tuned by a resonant tube of air would fall in frequency by about 12% at this altitude. This could be measured and used as a trigger, also enabling the use of the phrase "LOHAN's Organ".

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

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Thumb Down

It's hard to choose,

But I would pick "Hardware". I watched it because it had a cameo of Lemmy from Motorhead.

ISS 'naut shoots first ever 3D footage in space

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Joke

I want my money back

I recently went to the cinema to watch a 3D movie. Disappointment ensued as it was only stereoscopic. I wanted my money back.

Germans unveil robots 'controlled by chaos itself'

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Alert

Digital rehash?

Sounds a bit like a Nervous Net

http://tnewton.solarbotics.net/robot2.html