Posts by Ramiro
62 posts • joined Friday 11th February 2011 15:52 GMT
Posted in Review: Sony Xperia SP
Re: As a piece of hardware...
You can tape it to the top of your head and pretend to be a Cylon.
Re: Call that a gun!
That looks like something Hellboy would be proud of.
Re: Way to miss the point...
Or a glass knife that you make yourself, if you are of an Inuit persuasion (thanks Neal Stephenson).
Are we all going to be interviewed by the british secret service?
Re: (... for some values of ordinary)
The reg is the only place where I meet the word "hypergolic" (which I didn't even know existed) regularly!
Re: Judeging by your
I love how we all think it's important to emphasize *live* woman.
Fusion no fission
That's a fusion device, I'd expect fission devices to be a lot more compact, a lot simpler, and a lot more rugged.
I'm told even fission devices can make a loud bang.
Cryptonomicon
Excuse my ignorance, but I didn't know acoustic memory was real. I thought Stephenson had made that up. I should have known better, of course.
On a different note, Nigella is milftastic.
Re: Film or True Story
Your wish my command.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2043757/
It's got Carmen Electra on it, so it must be good.
To be honest, I'm sure I saw a different one, so there are probably more two headed mutant shark films around.
Isn't it a bit late now?
Hasn't he moved on to Apple?
(Much to my great joy, being the committed freetard that I am and having always considered him a traitorous Judas ;)
You are implying that there is 100% compatibility between different versions of PowerPoint, I don't have the same experience. In fact, (I'm in academia) we mandate students to print all presentations to pdf files to avoid surprises.
I agree with everything else though (except for outlook, but then again I'm not in the industry.) The typical user doesn't even know Word numbers pages automatically.
Magnesium?
I don't know if it blends, but it should burn most beautifully.
Re: Goog.TV
The YouTube application for the PS3 works like this, it can be controlled by the smartphone. It's quite uncanny.
Re: I always say.....
I was halfway posting very much the same comment, but saw yours.
I had also considered giving you laptop to relatives, and forgetting to wipe the disk, and having everyone in the family having a laugh at your "media files"...
Scott "Renton" Pedigo
Seek help :)
Re: Best application is drenched over three slices of Canadian bacon
I'm a lousy cook, but I have one culinary principle:
Everything tastes better with bacon.
Re: Oh, awesome.
I'm going through the bother of rooting my phone *exclusively* to uninstall the facebook app.
Re: Scientific and Engineering Computing
Have you ever seen Holerith format used in anger? I have :)
I know about the Fortran holdouts, they're the crazy people I mentioned :)
Things are of course different when you have a code base in Fortran that has been developed for 35 years, you'd be crazy to just chuck that out of the window and restart from scratch in C++. Perhaps the majority of academic and scientific programming is writing and modifying a couple of subroutines in an existing program. Even if it takes the student six months to make heads or tails of the program, it's still better than rewriting from scratch. It'd be years before you had anything working, without any scientific advance, and no M.Sc., no Ph.D., and no papers during this period. All around Career Seppuku.
However, every once in a while, people do start new projects from scratch. It's a good time to start looking around for alternative development environments. If the project involves computational mechanics and finite elements, it's quite likely that by using FEniCS/Dolfin (for instance), you'll get results a lot faster.
At the end of the day, I think we'll see evolution in action, if you depend on writing computational mechanics code to get scientific results, you'll get them so much faster with a proper environment (say FEniCS/Dolfin or OpenFOAM) that you'll leave old school scientists/programmers behind. You can't just wait for the old professors to die out (that hurts a little bit because I think I can be considered one of them), because they (we) tend to leave our disciples in our places. It's necessary to out evolve the strain :)
I'm pretty language agnostic as well, and I also use Python a lot (and matlab, and fortran, and macro languages of commercial finite element programs, and pretty much whatever it takes..) It's not really a question of C++, it's much more a question of the supporting frameworks, that nowadays are mostly written in C++. In fact, some of these have excellent interfaces to Python, using these interfaces really is the best of all worlds.
Scientific and Engineering Computing
Which was once the domain of Fortran, is now almost exclusively C++.
The computing core, not the the GUI, of course.
There many high quality, high performance frameworks that can be used to write amazingly complex simulations that would be just impossible to do in a single lifetime (ok, I exaggerate) if you'd start from scratch.
If you're curious about what can be done with C++, check these things out:
http://www.dune-project.org/
http://www.samrai.org/
https://computation.llnl.gov/casc/SAMRAI/SAMRAI_Software.html
http://fenicsproject.org/
These are just a few I have used one way or another, there are many many more. These mostly use very advanced C++ techniques, template metaprogramming and all that horrible stuff to provide tools that do very sophisticate operations with a reasonably simple interface. It's basically what one of the first posters to this discussion said: you have to encapsulate the C++ complexity. For many domains in scientific computing, this has been already done for you.
It really is quite unthinkable today to consider developing a large, complex simulation code in another language (but of course there are a lot of people who do that; I just think they are crazy :)
Re: A proper keyboard?
There aren't many left...
Posted in Review: Mio Cyclo 300 cycling satnav
Re: Or you could just use your mobey?
I think the problem with this, for cyclists, is the british "weather".
I think that was the point of the main picture in the article showing it soaked.
Most smartphones wouldn't survive that. (Apart from defys, etc.)
(It's a raincoat, obviously.)
I've just checked it out
There is only one model of kindle advertised, one of the simplest ones, I think. It doesn't have touch or a keyboard or a backlight. It's the 6 in e-ink e-book reader.
No mention of 3g, so I guess it's wifi only.
It's selling for about US$140. So it's about twice as expensive as it is in the US, which is pretty much the normal mark up we have to pay due to import taxes, duties, etc. etc.
I don't know about the book selection, sadly I've been out of the market of reading for pleasure for a few years, but there are no engineering books, which probably isn't their fault, most probably the publishers don't see a market.
You can buy e-books in other languages, probably amazon is making available everything they can from around the world that is not subject to regional controls. This is very good, the prices are very good compared to printed books, most of which you wouldn't be able to find anyway. I typed Nel Gaiman, just to see what would come up, and there were thirty *pages* of stuff.
It's claiming that the top selling book at the moment is Fifty Shades os Gray, so it seems that ipad wielding moms are the main market right now.
The second one is another Fifty shades of bullshit.
The third one is a hagiography of the founder of one of the largest evangelical churches in Brazil
The fourth is a self help diet book.
The fifth is a George Martin book.
Interesting variation!
It'll be interesting to see how this holds up against the e-shops of the other large brazilian bookseller chains, Cultura, Saraiva and Siciliano, which also sell e-books (and real books, and other physical stuff like the american amazon store.)
Re: Looks nice, but horrible to use
Lynx? It sucks.
I think you meant "links".
(Yay,! Text browser flamewar!)
Re: Call me back...
Yes, I was mildly disappointed too.
It would be ok to ride on wheels if it *transformed* into (and out of) a vehicle. A rolling humanoid shape is kind of daft. That said, I wouldn't mind having a go at one :)
Ramiro.
Colossus
I saw this movie as a child and was rightfully impressed for years and years.
For some reason better left to child psychologists, I was really shocked when it "says": There is another system.
I say that, every once in a while, to this day :)
Auto
From Wall-E.
Engineering and Scientific Software
Engineering and Scientific software still can make use of the fastest, largest desktop machines you can find.
It's a cliché, I know, but nowadays we run simulations on our desktops that would have required supercomputers a few years ago. And we are very happy for it. It really *does* make a big difference whether you're running on a dual core atom (or equivalent) laptop, or on a 8 or 12 core desktop beast.
It's a bit worrisome to me that if "normal" people stop buying fast desktop computers, we'll return to the time when to run engineering software you had to buy dedicated workstations that cost 25.000 dollars.
Perhaps we'll have to run this stuff "in the cloud"...
Up to 1.7x
For a finite element code, isn't really that much, is it?
Customers are *not* seeing big performance gains from Xeon Phi coprocessors.
Might as well use another cpu, simpler and possibly more power efficient.
Training
Top Bloke. I wonder how long it took to train the muscles to control the hand. I'd expect it to be the most difficult part of the process, but perhaps not that much different from what they already have to go through with physical therapy after a traumatic accident.
I'm curious about how long the battery lasts, I suppose it'll be a battery race, hand or smartphone ?
Of course you could put a bigger battery in the arm, an usb plug, and chard the phone from the arm. Or just embed the smartphone in the arm,
Or a laser.
The possibilities!
Is this russian product?
Why "Surface this", "Surface that", and not "The Surface blah blah blah" ?
Sounds like fake russian villain accent.
Genuine question, I'm not a native english speaker.
Re: Hard as I try
At these speeds, doubling the power would most certainly not double the speed (I know you didn't say that, but people might be tempted to do the linear extrapolation ;) considering the air resistance would grow at the very very least quadratically with the speed.
.A less lazy mechanical engineer than I could probably guesstimate the extra speed of the full power run. I'm not saying that their achievement is not amazing, I love things that burn stuff to go really fast, just pointing out that it's not a given that they'd be supersonic at a full power run (you didn't say that either ;)
Re: Points 2 and 2 ...
I'm going to root my android phone pretty much just to remove the built-in facebook app, whose very existence annoys me. While I'm a it, though, there's a load of rubbish that'll hit the bin too, but I really wouldn't bother to go the trouble were it not for facebook.
Not even then
After the french found the black box of that downed flight, I wouldn't trust "hiding" anything at the bottom of the ocean.
I'd drop it inside an iron smelter.
Re: Thermodynamics FTW.
How you disapoint me.
"... all your JOULE are belong to HEAT".
What passes for engineering education these days...
Re: Proper resolution!
As fate would have it, it got here a couple of hours after I posted ;)
Didn't put it to any serious use though. Looks gorgeous, IMHO. The screen is excellent.
The problems are what I knew beforehand: small ssd disk (128G), small memory (4G), no VGA connector, colleagues get really jealous, etc.
Re: Proper resolution!
You could take a look at a Samsung Series 9 (NP900X3C-[I think this last bit varies with the country]). It supposedly has a 1600x900 screen. I've requested one, but it hasn't been delivered yet, so I cannot actually recommend it.
Of all the many *impossible* things that actually happened
This picture of the parachute phase takes the top spot.
It's just totally, completely, incredible.
Cheers all around!
Re: Fantastic OS
Please excuse the bad form of replying to myself.
I just checked out their site, and an *obvious* model for this project just jumped out: motorola milestone 3 (I'm one of those sad sad people who loves hardware keyboards.)
The choice would be between this and CM, and I don't think it's clear which one is "better" (if we can even ask this without objective criteria.)
Re: Fantastic OS
I think he meant it could be an interesting alternative to, say, cyanogen, to use on western handsets.
You could then buy a pretty decent handset, that has been released one or two years ago, and has been abandoned by the manufacturer (plenty of samsung models spring to mind) relatively cheaply, and have a nice modern looking smooth os running on it. It would be a nice geekish project.
Re: Wild Wild West
Yeah, me too! Though the first thing I thought was -- THE SCIENCE OF HIDRAULICS!
Re: Vacination program
There was one guy that survived in Brazil a couple of years ago, also.
I just checked it out, it was a teenage boy, he spent four months in the ICU in an induced coma. No joke, eh?. It says here that he was only the third person ever to have survived after the symptoms of rabies had appeared.
He was a normal boy, but after his "recovery" he looked like he had cerebral palsy. Again, this disease is no joke. It was also caused by a bat bite.
Don't mess around with vampire bats.
The shop is still up
And the anonymous tee shirt features prominently on the first page of the site (maybe it's a referrer thing :)
Why the sky crane?
Why did they have to use the sky crane? It's not like the russians have not landed *tanks* using rockets just to slow down their rate of descent.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uGfOppQD_g&html5=True
Obviuosly:
1) BALLS OF STEEL needed for tank crew, if they land inside it (I certainly hope not);
2) Curiosity is a wee bit more delicate than a russian tank;
3) I think the video says the retro rockets are "_almost_ perfectly reliable".
HTC leaving Brazil?
Since when were they ever here? I never saw a top of line HTC being offered by a reputable store (local e-bay doesn't count). Samsung releases newer models pretty much simultaneously with the rest of the world, Sony and Motorola not that far behind.
If they were officialy in Brazi in the smartphone market, they were really quiet about it.
Re: Almost waited...
Yes, I was looking for a dual sim android for my wife, most are really crap.
The least awful I found, but still haven't made up my mind (and she's partial to a much simpler nokia C2-06) is the Samsung Galaxy Ace Duos S6802, but probably you don't get that in Europe. Dislikes: no web cam, android 2.3 (and samsung doesn't even bother to lie about upgrading.)
Xperia Pro ICS update
The phone is the one with the slide out qwerty keyboard. Upgraded last week. It may be the placebo effect, but things feel faster and the battery seems to last longer. It looks nicer also.
Updated via Sony Update Service, without a hitch.
The phone has only 512MB of RAM, and I was *really* concerned that it wouldn't be enough to run ICS smoothly. There have been plenty of reports of degraded performance after the update, but there have also been reports of suceess, so I went for it.
After installation and a reset (the one that clears stuff but leaves your data and applications in place) at the very least it's certainly not slower than the previous version, 2.3.something. It could be that it's running a different mix of services.
Sony did take their bloody time getting it out, though.
Re: Is it so hard
Most brazilian banks do this also. They charge a small fee though, but it is very worth it.
Ultraviolet
I'm happy to see I'm not the only one that likes Ultraviolet.
Re: Untick
Or, you have a somewhat borked linux install that you have no time to fix or upgrade, on which firefox locks up constantly, and chrome is rock solid. I think I know by now what a browser is (links :)
Posted in Ten... Kitchen Gadget Treats
Re: Engraved handle on a kitchen knife...
Japanese knives are serious stuff.
I got one as gift from a friend. Every adult in my household managed to get cut with it. I mean, it would cut you finger off just by looking at it sideways.
Mucho respect.
Posted in The best April 1 gags … or were they?
Re: I thought the Gmail Multitap was awesome!
I *loved* it. If someone implements this, I *promise* I'll finally learn morse code.
Can't be more difficult than hiragana/katakana.
