* Posts by Chemist

2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010

Microsoft ejects DVD playback from Windows 8

Chemist

Re: Linux

I'd suggest you use a Live-CD ( or USB if you can boot from one) of a modern distro like OpenSuse 11.4 or 12.1 ) and see before you install if the wireless problem is still there. If it is then your wireless system might be rather a rare one. Most wireless chipsets are now supported, some of them officially by the manufacturers.

Chemist

Re: Linux

"the company does not provide them"

The company DO provide them but only as binaries. Hence the project to emulate them

Chemist

Re: Hell's freezing over!

I don't have an optical drive on my Linux netbook but I do load images of DVDs from my network to watch when travelling.

Chemist

Re: Really??

"Most people don't want to have to get on a forum in order for their PC to play a DVD."

Most people don't have to !

Chemist

Re : mplayer

mplayer certainly seems to use less CPU on any of my Linux boxes regardless of whether the video is accelerated or not.

Doesn't fit with your experience of hot or not but it's what I've noticed

Chemist

Re: Really??

I know you are joking but some people may not know that the VDPAU drivers for X give excellent GPU acceleration on modern-ish Nvidia cards

Chemist

Re: Linux

Something very wrong then.

I use DVDs on all my various Linux boxes without any problems also I can play HD720p on an old Celeron laptop and edit/play mp4 1080/50p videos on an old 2 core AMD using Nvidia/ VDPAU using ~5% CPU.

Sorry I can't really attempt to diagnose what's wrong but definitely something is.

Nokia dinged with shareholder lawsuit over poor Lumia sales

Chemist

"Cos no one want or needs a 3rd eco system"

No ? But we've been assured by those nice Redmond people that Windows Phone will mean genuine, honest-to-goodness competition - which is GOOD for the market - only a FOOL would want a complex technological market to be a monopoly.

I'll just get back to my desktop now ......

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Chemist

"what do you do with all the salt?"

It's brine that's higher in salt than the source. Just dump it in the sea - most of the pure water generated is going to end up there fairly quickly so the sea isn't going to get any saltier

Intergalactic speed demon stars bid Milky Way farewell

Chemist

Re: If you look carefully and from the right angle

Are you sure it's not : -

"We apologise for the inconvenience !

Dinosaurs were DRAINED of blood by GIGANTIC HORROR FLEAS

Chemist

Brave man

Equating Yorkshire accents and dinosaurs !

Moore's Law has ten years to run, predicts physicist

Chemist

Re: Optical network, embedded memory, Graphene, Nanoptube and TSV will replace silicone downsizing.

"Silicone tech may run out of steam in perhaps 10 yrs' time."

Silicone is wubbery polymer !

Basic instinct: how we used to code

Chemist

Dragon 32

Having butchered a Dragon to give it a PIA ( peripheral interface adaptor ) so that I could run my home-made EPROM programmer I then needed a 6800 assembler for a 6802 based burglar alarm I was building so I wrote one in BASIC - it took about 2 HOURS to assemble ~ 200 lines of 6800 assembler.

Never used BASIC again !

Chemist

Re: Shop demo models

I remember getting an Apple II for the lab and programming a little BASIC that put up a normal Apple prompt ( ] I think ) any keypress then produced a "SOD OFF" for a few seconds before the program then deleted itself and returned to the normal prompt.

Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros

Chemist

Re: UK101

Yes indeed, bought it, built it - it didn't work, debugged it with a xtal earpiece , found a 7400 not working and bob's your uncle.

MOST noticeable for a garbage-collection bug in the MS BASIC.

Cycle fires up 50,000-core HPC cluster on Amazon EC2

Chemist

Good luck

Having spent the last few years doing just this sort of thing I must explain that it's REALLY hard. Not to get software to filter out the 'best binding' ligands but to find that reality rather foolishly doesn't agree with the output.

Lesser-spotted Raspberry Pi FINALLY dished up

Chemist

Re: You want hardcore?

"MK14."

Got one , 256 BYTES of RAM, raw machine code programming, hideous instruction set, hex keypad and calculator display output

Death Star dinosaur aliens could rule galaxy

Chemist

Re: Astrosaurs

"I prefer the idea that most of the dinosaurs left before the extinction event."

You may prefer it but it is now known that it was the DOLPHINS that left (playfully) before the extinction event

Cheers Douglas

Windows XP support ends two years from now

Chemist

Re: Migrate before ...

"can you shove in a disc and let it do the set-up work for you? No."

That's what I've done for years with Suse & OpenSuse. since ~2000 - must run to a good few dozen installs by now as I currently have 6 machines

550,000-strong army of Mac zombies spreads across world

Chemist

Re: lol

"Linux viruses in the wild"

I didn't actually say that - the known viruses are more curiosities, they never spread far as the architecture is rather unfriendly. Most of the antiviruses look for Windows viruses to stop them being passed on.

Chemist

Re: lol

"dodgy stuff" account, you're still infected."

"dodgy account " is still infected true but it's all just still extra layers of defence. Other accounts will not be so 'safe' account is still less vulnerable. Of course if a further vuln. allow escalation then that is a different matter.

"dodgy account" by the way is deleted/recreated at weekly intervals

Too complex a topic to describe in detail here but LONG complex passwords, multiple accounts, firewalls, NAT routers, Firefox/Noscript/ABP and a lot of other techniques alongside using Linux have kept me safe over the years.

Keeping an eye on the logs is useful. I esp. look for SSH attempts which is my only open port ( protected by unusual port number, one unusual account name and a long, difficult password)

Chemist

Re: lol

It's well known that Unix/Linux systems can get viruses - the difference has been that they've never become a widespread problem.

In any case if you want to be more sure in a Unix type OS use different accounts for different things.

I have an account I ONLY use for really important stuff like banking and another for for visiting sites that MIGHT be dubious. It's so easy to switch why not. Unless you can't be ars*d in which case you deserve all you get.

Top Italian OPERA boffin steps down after faster-than-light mistake

Chemist

Re: Quantum mechanics disproves Einstein's special theory of relativity.

@Destroy...

Agree heartily with your comment

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/QuantumElectrodynamics.html

"Quantum electrodynamics is a generalization of quantum mechanics to include special relativity. Its governing equations are ....."

Chemist

Re: The Failure

"it should still have been presented in a very cautious way,"

It was originally presented in a VERY cautious way but the media ( as usual) hyped it

OPERA is an experiment at Gran Sasso and really all CERN did was provide the neutrinos

Chemist

Sounds more like ...

there has been a lot of strain in the OPERA collaboration - it's a big experiment (1300 tonnes) and a large, varied team. Measuring neutrino velocity wasn't the major reason for OPERA in any case - it was intended to look at neutrino oscillations from one type to another.

Hard-up Iceland plumps for cheaper open source

Chemist

Re: Free stuff

"I have nothing against it" & "not great for anything other than hobbiests or home users"

I think you might have something against it if you ignore the vast numbers of commercial Linux webservers and the large number of scientist and technologists who use Linux etc.

I think it's seen as quite good for supercomputers as well

Record-breaking laser pulse boosts fusion power hopes

Chemist

Re: "or do I err?"

Are you actually asking a serious question ?

That's why AC said "it's equivalent to 1000* the US consumption" NOT the US consumption. As others have noted it's only a couple of MJ anyway and that is probably built up in the capacitors over a period.

Hong Kong scientists claim 'self-charging' graphene battery

Chemist

@MadChemist

I had a quick look at the full paper and it's rather hard to see what is being exposed to electrolyte.

The electrolyte mostly being used is Cu(II) Cl2 but the suggestion seems to be that it's the graphene being exposed whilst the gold and silver electrodes are sealed away from the electrolyte.

My guess would be a slight leak, maybe impurities in the silver or some slight copper plating and the Cu(II)/Cu(0) pair.

Scarcely worth speculating if it can't be repeated

Windows 8 tablet freezes in Microsoft keynote demo

Chemist

Re: So what /should/ have been done?

I've certainly never known it NOT to work - except when a keyboard connection failed/or pulled out.

Oddly enough that always used to need a reboot - recently though it just seems to accept the keyboard being replugged - I've not tested it rigorously though

Chemist

Re: So what /should/ have been done?

"And hope that when X starts post-boot it doesn't freeze again."

Don't let it start X when you reboot ! - an installation that you can't bring up as a terminal session if you want to is a royal pain when hardware gives problems.

BBC Micro team to celebrate historic machine's 30th year

Chemist

Re: 6809

Reason I'm so keen is I've still got a couple - I made a home-brew FORTH system years ago, own boards, disk drivers the lot - great experience -it still works even though I've now virtualized the terminal and disk. Cranked it up a year or two ago to experiment with replacing one of the serial ports with a PIC microcontroller programmed to emulate a 6850 which worked a treat.

Great processor esp. for FORTH as it had an architecture/instruction set that matched the FORTH machines requirements. Great to program in assembler with its position independent code ( subset of the instruction set)

Chemist

Re: Bloody Noobies...

Ah, 6809 - Yes !

Now CHINA complains of surge in cyber-attacks

Chemist

Only looked at my router logs this morning

Usual load of Chinese scans of usual ports ( all closed/stealthed)

One persistent sod scanning the same ports from the same IP for weeks now.

My only open port is for SSH and that's a very high number - so far no-one has ever scanned that.

More evidence that neutrinos are NOT faster than light

Chemist

Re: still quite impressive

a) The mass in not known but is expected to be real but very small and therefore it cannot actually reach c although it may get very close and the closer it gets the higher its energy.

b) The neutrino (which needs to have a certain minimum energy) needs to 'hit a proton head-on" which generates a neutron and a positron. The positron then combines with an electron and generates two photons. Some detectors have relied on detecting the pairs of photos but the argon, I think, acts as a bubble chamber detecting the energetic charged positron before it is destroyed.

Chemist

Re: still quite impressive

@James Loughner

"why do they not have a huge energy/mass???"

We don't know how fast they are going or their exact mass but their energy will fit the SR equations - they will not be traveling at the speed of light but they could be close enough to make measuring the difference pretty difficult

@Christoph

"Maybe only a very little bit slower, but shouldn't it be measurable"

Depends on the accuracy they can measure to - the time differences could be REALLY small

Chemist

Re: still quite impressive

On the other hand it's only dense rock because most matter interacts well with it as does light - neutrinos don't which is why the ICARUS experiment used 600 tonnes of liquid argon in an attempt to detect a tiny percentage of the beam and why the many billions per cm^2 that arrive from the sun every second don't pose a significant biological risk. ( although anyone that is worried about that needs to wear a VERY thick tinfoil hat)

ARM's ultra-low-power fridge-puter chips: Just what the CIA ordered

Chemist

Re: You seem to've dropped a zero

Charles Moore's original FORTH hardware design was only 4000 gates

"The NC4016 is implemented using fewer than 4000 gates on a 3.0 micron HCMOS gate array technology"

Charge of the Metro brigade: Did Microsoft execs plan to take a hit?

Chemist

Re: Not a chance @vic

If this had been a support forum I would have suggested using a LiveCD to check out the hardware/boot as a first step.

I am sick of unverifiable posters saying things about Gnu/Linux that I know to be not so. The list is almost endless - HD video doesn't work, 3G dongles don't work, hardware-assisted H264 video playback doesn't work. - They all do - not on just one machine but all the machines I try them on.

On another point the consumer as we know buys a Windows machine preconfigured - no option -hopefully all the snags are sorted. If they add any hardware the same problems crop up - many people will have no difficulty, some will. Linux is no different. All the people (mostly seniors) that I've installed Linux for have no difficulty using it

Chemist

Re: Not a chance @vic

"These days, it's frequently easier in Linux than it is in Windows"

Agree entirely Vic, if you can't get a good Linux distro to install then you are doing something wrong.

Everything I've installed on in the last 5 years (~ 10 installs of OpenSuse) has worked without any problems and that includes all graphics cards, printers, scanner, 3G dongle, USB/serial converters, cameras, firewire devices.

(I did buy a new Canon 55OD where raw mode wasn't supported on the resident version of OpenSuse but the upgraded packages were available and just had to be installed.)

Apple iPad 3 packs LAPTOP battery

Chemist

"that thing called physics"

and chemistry !

Mobile banking security bypassed in fiendish malware blag

Chemist

Re: Actually this is a big problem...

My mobile operator requires a password for ANYTHING. Certainly for changing phone/SIM

Chemist

Re: This sounds silly...

I've also got a UBS account. Even if somehow you get hold of a replacement card you'd still need the personal agreement number and 6 digit PIN as well as the card reader.

I'd guess they wouldn't send you a card without the agreement number.

I think it's the best method I've seen although I'm fairly happy with the hideous 20 digit passwords I use for my other accounts.

Why Windows 8 server is a game-changer

Chemist

Re: seems a bit arse about face to me

"A lot of us actually do real work on Linux "desktops""

Ditto in science

NASA orders study for all astronauts over vision concerns

Chemist

"few minutes at 3-4G "

I don't think that is what they are saying. The evidence points to possible fluid accumulation in the brain during zero-g is compressing the eyeball - doesn't sound healthy.

"William Tarver, the chief of flight medicine clinic at Nasa's Johnson Space Center, said the results were suspicious but not conclusive of intracranial hypertension."

Chemist

Re: *

If by "perigrination" you mean the act of travelling or moving you've spelt it wrong

I don't want to labour the point but on Earth the difference in gravity head to feet is very small but standing in a modest sized centrifuge it would be quite large. Lying down wouldn't stress the bones and muscles.

Chemist

Re: half gravity = f half the effect?

"were you to build a centrifuge for the 'nauts"

To be physiological and counter the other BAD effects like bone loss and muscle wasting I'd guess that they would need to be able to stand and move around in it. Problem then is unless the diameter is large compared to body length the differential effect* between head and feet will cause problems.

* Force at head less than force at feet

Intel Xeon E5s pruned for single-socket workstations

Chemist

"old-fashioned, heavy-duty, desktop machines that are still called workstations"

or genuinely useful as they are more generally described

Warp drives are PLANET KILLERS, Sydney Uni students find

Chemist

Re: "Einstein's theory of relativity will be 100 years old very soon....."

"hot and cold"

A unit of hot gas has higher pressure than the same amount of colder gas.