Posts by ribosome
782 posts • joined Thursday 21st June 2012 13:12 GMT
Re: Gates vs Politician
Well, Andrew Tyrie opposed the Iraq war and is unlikely ever to be a Minister.(despite being far better qualified to be Chancellor than the present recumbent). He's just exposed the HBOS scandal for what it was. And Dennis Skinner seems to have made a career out of trying to get Ministers to tell the truth, despite easily having the ability to become a Minister in exchange for a little compliance. I can't think of any Lib Dems, though.
if you read the Daily Mail, you think that women and immigrants cause cancer
women, immigrants, and anything that affects the Editor's status as chair of the Ignore Press Complaints Commission.
Posted in 787 battery fix approved
Re: Manual update...
As someone who did research in ultrasonics, I'd suggest that the use of enough energy at the right frequencies to get a signature capable of detecting changes in a battery pack might itself trigger those changes. Unlike aircraft wings and turbine blades, batteries are not designed on the basis that if they are affected by ultrasonic inspection, they failed already.
Re: Mrs F....
I think the most important thing is that it continues to be possible to configure everything every which way on a BB without having to pay out of "apps" that basically translate as "stuff we should have fixed that you now have to pay extra for".
The old BB might have been clunky but it is still amazingly customisable.
Re: I love people who deny the basic laws of Physics...
You are extracting the dilute urea solution, aren't you?
Five minutes with a hand cranked dynamo and you will discover that you have to put more energy in than you get out. Otherwise, I would not need to put petrol in my Prius - in which one motor can indeed drive the other as a generator, to give an infinitely variable drive.
Posted in 787 battery fix approved
Only once the root cause is found for the existing incidents
Unfortunately the root cause for lithium battery failure is "yes, they sometimes do that".
A battery is either a bag of chemicals with more or less reliable support systems, or something rather large with components that can be examined in place. There is not room for the latter on an aircraft.
Re: Where's the justice here?
Indeed. My family lawyer is of the view (though wouldn't admit it en clair) that if the evidence presented is, say, contrary to the laws of physics, so much the worse for the laws of physics. The fact is that law is designed to function in a morality, philosophy and science free vacuum, because this is more profitable for lawyers.
Re: Mr Nerd, you need help. -If only there were some kind of publicly funded organization
Robert Peel for Prime Minister!
Re: Nope
Indeed, there is a legal saying in England, "The greater the truth, the greater the libel".
The thing is, something may be true but printing it could be construed as defamatory, as in "Politician X has not had sex with a donkey for over a month".
And it can be true but defamatory to print - for instance, revealing spent convictions. If Stephen Fry hadn't written at length about his youthful mistakes, it might be libellous to write them up in print just as he was about to become the public face of a credit card company, and they withdrew the offer.
Re: How odd
No, it's the CPS being told to cut the cost of the legal system. Crown Prosecution Service sometimes seems to be a bit of an exaggeration. But Crown Deciding Not to Prosecute Service doesn't make a convenient acronym.
"earn more money by taking back handers "
More police have gone to prison as a result of the phone hacking scandal than did as a result of the Operation Countryman investigation into corruption in the Met. Tom Watson has done more to stop police corruption than a whole slew of internal investigations. Andrew Tyrie, meanwhile, has done more to expose dodgy bankers than anybody else, and must be a right thorn in the side of Osborne and his attempts to let his rich mates off the hook.
Slightly OT but just a reminder that there are at least two backbenchers doing their jobs, and doing them rather well.
Re: Ah the incompetence of the police.
Yes but where were you?
In our small rural town a phone theft is news - and the last one I heard about had the thief caught within hours.
The Met has always been more about protecting the political and upper classes from the unruly London mob. When you get out to the sticks, the police want to make sure that the high quality of life in their home towns doesn't get disturbed by the underclass. Big difference. I suspect if a Russian oligarch living in London loses a laptop, they'll send at least an armed response unit.
Re: Also
If you use a Teflon strip - which is a good idea, btw - it makes more sense to have the contacts in parallel and mounted on springs, like relay contacts. Which makes it very easy to do - get the contact set off a suitably rated relay, using hard silver contacts rather than tin for obvious reasons. The rating is not too critical as the relay won't be required to disconnect after making contact.
Re: Stop Press
The Sun has been missing (ethics, integrity, you name it) since Hillsborough.
I am tempted away from the Apple to the Android but I like the idea of a closed shop
" it just seems a more secure way of handling my data."
You mean, relying on the underpaid employees of a large company to spot malicious applications when said large company gets paid by sales, not for support?
The Apple qualification process has apparently failed to stop malicious applications that dial premium rate numbers. This just doesn't suggest to me that I would trust them with anything without independent evidence. And if I have to consult forums to find out whether something is really OK or not, why pay extra for the illusion of security?
Re: Video conferencing?
Perhaps I want people to think I'm Sauron. It would help with getting the Council to do something about the pavement parkers.
Re: The obvious solution
50%? More like five sigma. Finding an honest premium rate service would be like finding dark matter with a miner's lamp.
There is simply no honest use for them.
Re: undecided too....
Some people think removable battery isn't needed, but the latest crop of teardowns from iFixit are very interesting. The HTC One gets 1 out of 10 for repairability, which means that out of warranty if it dies, bin it. You can't even get the battery out without a massive unwrap operation and damaging things. I was quite horrifed at how complex the inside was - it seemed to be built as layers from the battery out.
Meanwhile the S3 scored 7 out of 10 and the insides were well laid out. The BlackBerry Z10 scored 8, and would have done even better if RIM hadn't decided to glue a solid block of connectors very firmly into the case - I imagine for strength. The insides of the Z10 looked like a little masterpiece of industrial design with an absolute minimum of cabling and screening, whereas the HTC seemed to have huge copper strips (which might be needed to get the heat out, or for screening).
These things don't matter to a lot of people, but I recently did a new battery on a 2006 Nokia and passed it on to an OAP. Manufacturers that put in removable batteries and SD cards seem to care more about the longevity of their phones.
Re: I Should Know Better
You don't need to be an optical engineer to know that the sensor and lens on a phone is so tiny that it cannot possibly compete with even a cheap point and shoot. The marketing-number resolution is such that the wavelength of light is getting to be a serious obstacle to more megapixels. At 13MPx, you are looking at 4000 pixels along a baseline of 4mm. Each pixel has 3 sensors, so you have to fit three sensors into a space 1 micron on a side. And the longest red light is around 0.7 of a micron wavelength.
But, even more fun, the effect of dirt on the lens is magnified. In the bad old days wedding photographers got away with quite dirty lenses on their Rolleis and Blads because the image size was reasonable, but with a sensor less than 1/200th the area of a medium format frame, it doesn't take much to get the resolution much worse than a micron. What a phone camera does under ideal conditions and what it does in a pub are likely to be very different. PaS cameras usually have an automatic lens protector.
HTC have bravely admitted this with a 4MPx camera on the One, but, at the end of the day, trying to flog a phone on the grounds it has a good camera is a bit of a joke. The fact is that you can take perfectly adequate A4 photocopies with a 3.2MPx camera off a cheap phone, and that's the main business case.
From what I can see, Apple simply has rather good software to make the most of what's there. But for the price of an Apple phone with enough memory for lots of stuff, you can buy someone else's top of the range phone, and a good compact camera, and a big SD card, and still have cash left over.
Re: Smartphones are for yesterday's cool kids.
It has always seemed odd that weirdly shaped glasses are a fashion item whereas nobody produces "fashion" hearing aids. For something that calls itself the "reasonable animal", rationality has never been humanity's strong suit.
Re: What are they hiding?
Yes,whatever happened to Plan 9? I never really understood the documentation, such as it was, other than that it was so uberGeeky that if you needed to ask, you couldn't possibly understand it.
Re: The welsh lobby
Remember when the Public schools taught Latin? 'Cro-Magnon beasts ' is a bit harsh, the people who produced Lascaux and Altamira shouldn't be compared to the Government Front Bench. But learning Latin did no harm.
Re: The welsh lobby
I am surprised that Cameron hasn't suggested that, far from Argentina getting the Falklands, Wales should get Patagonia back.
Re: The welsh lobby
Yes, I wasn't clear. If the sales of print books in Welsh were sufficient, surely Amazon would want to flog E-books? I agree with the people who think Amazon is being annoying and I hope the EU has a word with them, but Welsh speakers do need to show the market exists.
Re: The welsh lobby
Because publishing is not a charity. If your Welsh speakers buy the books, people will spot the market.
Re: The welsh lobby
Too true. I read a leader in the Guardian about how the birds were still in hiding while the ones in our garden were busy building nests.
Re: The welsh lobby
When I read the headline I thought it was about Wikipedia. That would actually have been interesting.
Re: By "carbon"...
The dinosaurs obviously did, which explains a lot.
Re: Right... about... THERE!
Reliability is not the same thing as tolerance of operation outside the defined envelope. Of course I can damage a large cell by shorting it. That's why we have circuit breakers and fuses. Your comparison of shorting a NiCD with "Lithiums might need to be treated gently" is what is known in the philosophy trade as a "straw man argument".
You appear to miss an important point. Modern battery chargers can deal with the vagaries of batteries. The 4-stage chargers used for marine lead acid batteries do clever things like periodically stopping charging to measure the relaxation voltage, periodically applying an anti-sulphation overvoltage, and deciding when to switch from current to voltage control. They are not fitted on cars which is one reason why car batteries have such short life. Similar charging regimes exists for NiMH and NiCD, which is why NiMH traction batteries last so long. On the Dreamliner something went wrong that was supposed to have been designed out of the system.
c't cartoon
I remember a cartoon in c't once which showed a passenger looking at a laptop on the screen of which was
Bluetooth searching
A320 identified
Pair with A320?
Well, I thought it was funny.
Re: Every article I've seen about this neglects to mention the most important thing
The only time I remember anyone getting stopped was when a colleague took 5000 sample tantalum capacitors to Germany at the time of the Red Brigades. They look just like detonators. He spent five hours in a room with a man with a submachine gun before a hastily summoned expert pronounced them harmless (and gave him a lacture about having proper paperwork in future).
Re: Right... about... THERE!
Um...you do know they were lithium batteries which have known issues, not NiMH or NiCd batteries which are extremely safe and reliable?
Let's get downvoted again
Last time I wrote this I got downvoted, here's a chance to do it again.
The US is a special market. Carriers determine what phones sell. Their advertising determines demand. This affects BlackBerry, HTC and Nokia. But at least HTC and Nokia have American friends - MS and Google.
For BlackBerry, the US market may be only a sideshow (except for QNX). Their problem is the constant market manipulation that happens to companies quoted in the US.
Re: Never extrapolate a curve close to a turning point
Not good programmers - good software engineers who have specialist knowledge of a commercial or technical subject.
I am not the best programmer, nor the worst, but I am about to retire to part time consultancy because I know how, in a particular industry, to design stuff that gets shit done.
Re: Very much a "no shit, Sherlock" moment
OK so I'm obviously very wrong about something - perhaps some of the people who downvoted would like to say why? I wasn't trolling, I just thought that the Reg might be somewhere you could put forward a point of view and, you know, have other people argue with it.
If the "nuke" comment was in poor taste, say so.
Very much a "no shit, Sherlock" moment
It's been obvious for over a year that the world consists of three mobile markets - the US, Japan and everywhere else. The US is distorted by the de facto carrier cartel - for a supposedly business friendly country the US is very good at cartels that work against end users and new business entrants - which push expensive phones on expensive contracts. Japan is Japan. But everywhere else there is a more or less "normal" market with a range of everything from very cheap to Vertu. It isn't hard to see that in such a market, since the cost of features is now so low, even cheap phones will sell on features. And for the great majoity of people, cheap phones are more than good enough.
Blackberry is trying to stay relevant with their 9320, and are believed to be trying to get out a midrange phone with their new OS. Apple is rumoured to be planning mid-range iPhones. But neither of them exactly has a reputation for underpricing their products. (Though the 9320 is better than some of Blackberry's more expensive offerings - a straw in the wind?)
The difference is that both Nokia and Samsung have a reputation for doing cheap rather well.
I guess that every night the directors of Nokia face East, fall to their knees, and implore God to make little Kim launch off everything he's got at South Korea.
Nuke, because one well placed one would save Nokia.
Re: Hmmm
16MW of power a day that is a mere drop in the 1TW that we use daily.
We can always increase the prison population. Perhaps that's why there are so many people locked up in the US.
Re: That's FLÜMBLAR, please!
It doesn't matter, there aren't any umlauts in Chinese, which is what we're all going to end up using. Or Russian, if you live in Chelsea.
