Re: Could be worse

At university in the 70s, and this is entirely true, one of the women researchers in agricultural science used to take great delight, when asked by visitors "What do you do?" in replying, simply "Rape". She was an authority on the plant.

She also had a Ferrari. I never got a lift in it but a friend did. He said that his entire life did not flash before his eyes, but that this because the (normally 40 minute) journey was over so quickly, there wasn't time.

Re: ****ing managers

So...do think think it's a good idea or not?

Re: Just as buzzed about this announcement as I was with iPhone 4

...and a replaceable battery.

...and it doesn't phone home with all your private data.

...and it's Canadian. I know Canada isn't the most virtuous place on Earth but I increasingly have grave doubts about anything that comes out of the cut-throat maw of Northern California; the more one learns about them the more all the companies seem to be run by dysfunctional [redacted] who would give everybody to the Devil if it meant another yacht (or corporate jet, or whatever). Whereas RIM was founded by guys who gave a lot if it away to encourage engineering and science, and watching the current CEO I don't have the constant feeling I had with Jobs, Ellison, Page, Fiorina, Zuckerberg et al that at any moment a zip might give and a 12 foot lizard emerge. Heins is German after all, and that makes him one of us.

They may not succeed, but I'm English and I don't want the nice guys to finish last.

Re: HP

This is HP. Doing the obvious is not the HP way, that is why it is so successful.

...that's what the marketing department would tell you, anyway.

Re: @Steven Jones

Handbrakes may have a mechanical linkage - Bowden cable - but even my mother's Morris Minor had hydraulic main brakes. I know, I renewed the system.

Re: @bazza

Brakes! Please get a better spelling checker.

Re: 1.5kW?

Someone else has noted that Dekatrons are cold cathode, but it's worth perhaps noting that a typical computer double triode consumes about 2.5 to 4 watts in the cathode(s) and about 2W in the anode circuit. A relay uses between about 300 and 600 mW. I am giving away my age here.

So allowing about 5-6 double triodes per decade, you are still looking at maybe 30kW rather than megawatts - and the calculations would have been much faster. As the Flowers said to the Newman.

Re: sorry but that should read:

I think you will it was Roosevelt and co. who gave half of Europe to Stalin. They knew how many American deaths there would be if they advanced past Berlin, and decided it was politically unacceptable to have to explain to American mothers why their sons were dead when Hitler would have lost the war anyway.

Re: "Oldest Working Computer" - stop on exception

Baroness Trumpington is around 90 and still attends the House of Lords, though I don't know if she ever did any manual computing at Bletchley.

Re: Dear Anna ....

I expect there are plenty of alive Steve Jobses, but they are all still hidden under the RDF.

Re: This is NOT method acting!

Upvoted because realism and insight are such rare qualities nowadays.

Jobs was the perfect example of why scientific medicine is the best we have, and "alternative therapies" aren't.

Homoeopathy, fruitarianism and so on work fine on people who have nothing wrong with them. It's like Shaw's comment at Lourdes when shown the discarded crutches: "but where are the wooden legs?"

Re: Kutcher,

Actors are very sensitive people and shouldn't be judged by the standards of common folk. That's why they call us "civilians"; because unless you've been through the Hell that is acting, you cannot possibly understand it.

Re: Guns!

Yes, but you can't use a semi-auto rifle to facilitate a serious criminal activity like unlocking a phone. Guns are harmless! - it's people that kill people.

The problem is that most unlocked phones are sold at inflated prices to protect the "carrier subsidy". Look at the price of the Nexus 4 (if you could get one) versus the price of other 4.7 inch phones. Either Google was taking a big loss on each one, or someone is getting ripped off.

Re: @ribosome

No, according to Bookstaber the problem was in between implementation and design.

The issue was that at the time APL was an interpreted language. As a result, it was efficient if one if its terse constructs was able to manipulate a lot of data in one hit, but not if loops were needed. This meant that it slowed down dramatically if a range of values had to be calculated that required more than the available memory space.

I am prepared to concede that hedge fund traders, despite their PhDs in maths, failed to realise that they shouldn't have been doing it that way.But 6/6 hindsight is given to all of us.

French coding

I once had to work with a Thomson-developed RTOS for which we had documented source (and we needed it). The comments were written in a mixture of English and French. The English comments were the usual standard of 1980s documentation, i.e. they were formally correct and told you nothing of any use. The French comments were often rather amusing, and frequently referred to a "tas de merde", which was good to know when you were wondering what the hell something actually did.

Re: @Suricou Raven, you owe your english teacher an apology.

You seem to have a problem - your # and {} are at the wrong ends of the lines, as is your <iostream> and your <<ENDL...

Re: Kashida

Neutral language? Latin? The vengeful ghosts of the Persians and the Germans will prove you wrong. As for the Chinese and the Russians, they didn't even notice the Roman Empire.

That's what is wrong with Esperanto - it is an "international" language which assumes that everybody either knows Latin or speaks a Romance language.

Re: Re-invent the wheel

To quote my tutor in manufacturing technology,

"British and American operational researchers wrote books on how to improve manufacturing. They were read in the UK, the US, and Japan. The difference was that the Japanese, not being privy to what went on in Western factories, believed them."

"If you can't remember a dozen words (or symbols)"

Fair enough (and those of us who are real old timers learnt octal, not hex codes...) but it isn't a dozen or so.

If you use a left to right language based on the Roman alphabet you can create understandable function names no problem, but right to left languages do present a bit of a problem. I expect someone will tel me they have a C compiler that accepts mixed Arabic and Roman for C, because some people will do anything, but it is hardly mainstream. The program on which I currently work has thousands of descriptive function names, whereas remembering a couple of hundred opcodes compared to having all those in a foreign language you don't know is easy in comparison

Re: Next stop: A language based on either Elvish or Klingon

I now understand ("Specifications are for the weak and timid") that I have indeed worked in the past for Klingons.

Re: Come back APL

APL a language was, with syntax worse than JOSS

And everywhere that language went, it caused financial loss.

(the use of APL was blamed, in part, for 1980s hedge fund failures, because its use of matrices in the restricted memory of the day meant that people simply didn't sum enough of the outlying cases and so failed to estimate correctly the probability of loss - or so the books, including the one by Bookstaber, tell me)

Re: "Those Specs In Full"

Isn't it around 0.0000000001Gflops?

Re: I am so glad ..

The next fork should be moominDb.

Look, I use MS SQL, but an RDBMS from a fellow admirer of Tove Jansson - how cool is that?

Re: Off topic.

So long as they are painted, a very long time. There are glass fibre boats still in use which date from the 1960s and 70s, and that is cheapo polyester, not epoxy.

Re: I like my aircraft to have metal, not glorified plastic

Hermann Goering, a bit of an expert on the subject, was both impressed and infuriated by the Mosquito, which was an extremely effective military aircraft that was almost invisible to German radar owing to its wooden construction.

Hitler, however, was sold on jet aircraft as superweapons of vengeance. They had to be made out of metal, given the technology of the day, to prevent them catching fire. He also had the problem that they were very wasteful in fuel, and Germany had a fuel shortage (which would have been even worse if more Mosquitos had been made and fewer Lancasters, and the Mosquitos had targeted fuel dumps and refineries.)

Carbon fibre/kevlar/epoxy is basically wood brought up to date.

Re: I like my aircraft to have metal, not glorified plastic

Wood is a quite sophisticated composite. One thing about it is that it has virtually unlimited fatigue life due to its combination of stiff fibres and a flexible lignin matrix. The bad news is that it mostly doesn't like fresh water and is food for a lot of beasties, fungi and bacteria.

On a pedantry note, "carbon fibre" is not a composite as in the article. The whole idea of a composite is that it is made of several things to get the best overall results. The little boat I am building will have a core of two layers of mahogany to give stiffness with light weight, over which goes epoxy laminated kevlar for strength, some carbon fibre to put additional stiffness where needed, and some glass fibre for scrape resistance. Overall will go external coating to resist UV and fungus attack.

Some people use balsa for the core but I got a really good deal on the mahogany. It's a pity it won't be visible in the finished product, but I'll know it's there and that's what matters.

That's a composite. Materials to do what is needed where it is needed, held together in a matrix that binds everything together firmly enough to keep things where you want, but with enough flexibility to handle bumps, thermal expansion and vibration.

Making planes out of composites is a Good Idea, because aluminium is nasty stuff - limited fatigue life, prone to corrosion.

Using what seems to be the wrong kind of battery - perhaps not such a good idea.

Re: This is cool

Where is the massive redundancy and overdesign?

Given the limitations of rocketry, anything that makes it to Mars is likely to suffer from neither of those things.

Good design is expensive for a one off, true, but I have a picture of Curiosity on my desktop and I can't see any obvious redundancy. Unless you would have gone with three wheels and hoped there weren't any adverse inclines.

Re: The Little Rover that Could

No...

Something in which so much human skill and effort is invested ought to elicit an emotional response. That "little Rover" took more effort than building a cathedral. It is what it represents that matters.

It would be nice to think that one day, long after I'm dead, it will be in a museum somewhere. On Earth, even on Mars.

To Dave126

In the Latin it says 'et replete terram' - and fill up the Earth. Are you suggesting creative translation may have taken place?

Re: Thinking Monty Python here ....

Ratzo thinks every tweet should be sacred. Good luck with that. He obviously follows about as many people on Twitter as I do (0).

Re: I know I am a bad person

I hope you recover, but my experience of your fellows is that it's like being an alcoholic - you'll always be a Catholic but with care you will avoid any ill effects.

Zen Buddhism can help.

Re: Seriously

Wrong bigot, it's Julie Burchill who has a thing about transgender people.

Re: Market manipulation..

They are surely approaching a plateau as more people have bought iPhones than, one would think, have the disposable income to replace them every year.

iPhones are expensive for what they are. There are virtually no Android products that compete directly. They concentrate on bigger screens, more features or lower price, and are thus aiming at new markets. (Anyone with a 5 inch or above phone is likely to be someone who doesn't want to have to pay for both a phone and a tablet, for instance, so they are a lost sale to Apple both for phone and tablet). Outside the US, where the price tends to be less carefully hidden in the contract charges, even a "cheap" iPhone 4 looks a bit old compared to comparable Android products.

The nearest anyone seems to be going to a direct head to head is RIM, with the Blackberry 10 platform. They seem to be trying to capitalise on people for whom an iPhone 5 is now a bit too common and want something different. But they are hedging their bets by aiming to keep the old keyboard form factor as well.

So Apple's problem is a bit like Rolls-Royce cars, till they were taken over; the risk is of market saturation and the only product alternatives in your range being older and cheaper variants of the top of range product, with no benefits other than price.

Re: The Downside Of Being Fashionable ....

Isn't the point that the iPhone sales are more heavily biased towards older models, because the 5 is too expensive for what it is?

This, and the success of the iPad mini, implies that future growth is going to be driven by cheaper, lower margin products, while the competition is technically ahead at the same prices. So the future earnings projections need to be adjusted down.

If they had sold 47.8 million iPhone 5, Apple should be back at $700. But they did not.

Re: UX - nothing very new here

It's actually WebOS/maemo about 50%, as is everything else.

Re: print to go?

It doesn't appear as a straight network printer, but basically you are right. It already exists on the PB, and it works rather well.

No memo needed, it would be done by corporate policy rolled out through BES. (A relative who has one and works in a bank comments that everybody hates Blackberries because nothing seems to work, and they don't realise it is Bank IT enforcing it.)

Re: Only in a Well-regulated militia - 1792 Militia Act defines that

You're not supposed to combat the NRA with boring facts.

Re: Playbook

The HDMI works perfectly (and with iPlayer).

I'm waiting to see if the Z10 phone has the same features, otherwise I'll have to find a second PB.

Re: I was shocked

Bearded...and tits? People need to be warned about this kind of stuff.

Re: Oh, the irony!

But...the rediscovery of classical antiquity was all about art, and nothing at all to do with providing an excuse for rich patrons to hang up pictures of young ladies who had forgotten to get dressed before leaving the house.

Mrs. Disraeli to a hostess: "I find our bedroom contains an obscene painting. I have been up all night preventing Disraeli from looking at it". How, was not specified.

Re: "That's not art"

You missed the bit, pointed out to me with much amusement by an ANC supporter in 1980, that unmarried Zulu women often go around bare breasted. But they were Africans, so it didn't matter.

Re: Why not wait for the hardware to be released and take a view then?

I agree with you but for one thing. The BB10 hardware is unadventurous vanilla, not too expensive and designed for ease of maintenance. It is all about the software.

As someone who likes SD cards and removable batteries, I am all in favour of unadventurous engineering.

Re: Apple's own platform

You are downvoted perhaps because server backend plus network plus RT OS plus user interface plus several APIs plus package manager - if that isn't really a platform, then what is?