Posts by The elephant in the room

Wasn't it Einstein who said...

If an untidy desk signifies an untidy mind, what does an empty desk signify?

Bumptop may not appeal to hyper-organised people who are naturally pre-disposed to carefully filing their documents, but not everyone works like that. The semi-organisation of piles and the chaotic mixing of items saves on precision-organising time and may even allow serendipitous connections to be perceived that would not be apparent in a more rigid system. The ability to make piles and also view them in an organised way is having your cake and eating it.

I think this is a step in the right direction to a user-experience enhancing significantly 3d OS, and Google getting on board surely makes such a thing more likely.

It still seems a bit limited to me though - I'd like tohave folders (or boxes or rooms if you prefer), with the inside of each being a bumptop desktop. Doors or portals or some other connecting metaphor would join everything together. And dare i propose you might even have Windows to look in or out of...

The Laughing Man

I hope the next stage of this research is to come up with a countermeasure that superimposes a logo of your choice over your face in the manner of The Laughing Man in Ghost in The Machine: Stand Alone Complex.

Leaping facehuggers + 3D

Wear brown trousers to the cinema!

Hyperbole?

"applications like AutoCAD that consume billions of gigabytes of data to build files and render extremely rich graphics"

AutoCAD does not consume *billions* of gigabytes of data. Nothing does. Even the datastream from the Large Hadron Collider is a mere 300 gigabytes per second.

While border controls, immigration & the wealth of nations is a serious subject...

... this sounds like desktop tower defence made real! They should have a contest to see who to put in charge of the towers - I think I'm in with a shot as I finished all the levels!

Going underground...

Just like surfers riding big waves when the red flag is flying or maniacs who change printer toner cartridges without wearing safety glasses, if you were born to roll cheese, if it is in your blood and defines Who You Are, you are not going to stop just because The Man says it is too dangerous. A hill. A round cheese*. A gravitational field. Game on.

The word is there is a movie in development where Vin Diesel goes undercover in the underground cheeserolling scene...

*soon to be banned and replaced by square ones.

"Top & bottom" mode

Is that for when you are lying on your side?

So its a bird scarer

Like the ones that have been deployed by farmers for many years.

Under Siege 3: Under the Channel

I mean really, this whole idea of melting snow shorting the electronics is doubtful - that would mean the trains wouldnt work in the rain either.

What really happened was the secret services got a tip-off that there were terrorists with a nuke on the Eurostar. So they stopped the trains in the tunnel, reasoning that if they couldnt do something about it it would be preferable for it to detonate under the sea bed rather than in a populated area. Out of the 5 trains, the1st, 2nd & 3rd were just normal trains full of irate passengers unaware of the real situation, to provide a cover story for the media once they were extracted. Having hung around to report on 3 lots of trains and collect more than enough soundbites about how it was a disgrace and that Brunel was turning in his grave, the media would be bored and go home. The 4th train had the nuke on it, but the terrorists hadn't counted on one man on a (rail-based) booze cruise:

Casey Ryback.

Setting his facial expression to "Concerned" he did what he does. The 5th train was full of special forces and bomb technicians, who arrived just too late to see Ryback roundhouse kick the lead terrorist into a crate of smashed Absinthe bottles, dying just slowly enough to hear Ryback quip "This service terminates here - Take a replacement bus to hell" as he flicks a cigarette to ignite the alcohol. Then Erika Eleniak pops out of a big gateau and we see her boobs. Fin.

What is a girl doing watching a program about trains anyway?

Thomas The Tank Engine is a Boys program. No wonder Shauna Wilton doesnt understand it. She should stick to watching programs about dolls and ponies, then she wont make a fool of herself.

PR disaster

Incompetent regulators with no feeling for consumer sentiment and complicit cynical manufacturers of unupgradable hardware (some of which they even have the audacity to market as "green" technology) have contrived to create a PR disaster. Millions of recently upgraded licence payers are going to feel hoodwinked and will say "screw Freeview HD - I'm not pissing more money up the wall, I'm going to wait till Freeview XH3D comes out". And that will probably happen within 5 years.

For now all the looser-vision shopping channels and unnecessary "+1" channels should be switched off to make enough space for proper channels to be broadcast in HD using the DVB-T standard.

Cool!

I was making a kebab on tuesday evening and discovered I had no lettuce, so went down to Sainsburys to get some. But I saw they had PS3s on offer, so picked one up, hitting them with £3 off and double points vouchers at the same time. Now I hear 3D is coming, which proves it was a wise investment rather than a rash impulse buy!

They are clever chaps and chapesses at Sony - I expect they will find a way to coax some sort of 3d out of the Playtv hardware too. Its a pity the UK is going for the DVB-T2 standard for Freeview HD, otherwise that little box would truely revolutionise my lounge.

How many dumps can they take?

I'm wondering if they can dump into a dump core more than once, because it sounds like they are expecting they will need to dump more than once, and it would be very inconvenient if they had to remove 750 tons of radioactive material and install 750 more tons of unsoiled material every time they needed to take a dump.

Inept graphic design

The physical shape of the box isnt bad, and the 8-segment display is dated but not offensive; but those big ugly white logos have been specified by someone bereft of visual taste & style, and it cheapens the unit to the extent I wouldnt give it houseroom next to my beautifully styled Pioneer HDTV.

You'd never see design of this low quality from competing brands like Sony / Samsung / / Humax.

Sagem need to pay attention to the details and realise that good design costs the same to manufacture as bad design if they want to sell products that are prominently displayed in the living room.

Run that mastering process by me again

I thought the whole point of holographic storage was to write data in 3 dimensions, through the depth of the storage medium as well as its length & width. How can you quickly mould that off a master disc? What am I not understanding? Just laminating 2d layers together isnt really any cleverer than existing multi-layer discs is it?

Wasnt Tom Cruise in this film?

Its beginning to look like we should start stockpiling weapons to defend whats left of our civil liberties with.

Why are intel naming their chips...

...after shopping malls in the north of England?

Mine's the hoodie I nicked from Primark.

One

would be nice!

Firing instructions:

Insert finger through ring & pull!

Is it up to NASA to decide to deorbit the ISS?

Typical, Americans need reminding they dont own the ISS, just as they dont own the moon, as China will show them.

What if the Russians, Europeans, Canadians. Japanese and other countries that "I" stands for dont want to deorbit it just yet because that would be the biggest waste of money in the history of money?

Maybe Branson will buy it for a song as a destination for Spaceship 3.

Bat-eyed more like

With observation skills like that I bet when this security guard isnt misinterpreting aerial photos he spends his time harrassing "terrorist" photographers while right in front of his nose men wearing black & white stripey tops & eye masks load whatever he's supposed to be guarding into bags labelled "swag".

Paris, because she can tell the the difference between a monster tentacle and a boatload of seamen.

An embarrasment

I cant believe they took this underwhelming contraption to Edwards Airforce Base - a place where serious records are broken. The Yanks must have been pissing themselves looking on. Barely exceeding a 100 year old record in front of experts in hypersonics does not promote British engineering on the international stage, rather it makes us look like a bunch of eccentric backward-looking hobbyists. I wonder if they were all wearing top hats & 3-piece suits and drinking tea in fine bone china cups under the desert sun just to complete this preposterous spectacle.

Next time these tinkerers want to have a crack at the record they should dispense with the absurdly overstated Max Power body kit & parachute brake (a much faster 2 ton Bugatti Veyron manages to make do without huge twin tails and a parachute) and put a big hydrogen peroxide steam generator on a skate board. That should break the record in a supermarket carpark! (OK they need a measured mile - maybe a quiet stretch of A road then, but dont take it to Edwards AFB unless they are sure its going to go a lot lot faster than a standard spec IC engine road car.

A great media centre

Adding Play TV gives you a twin tuner freeview PVR with built in CD/DVD/mp3/Bluray player, web browser & media streamer for less than £300, which pisses on pretty much everything available off-the-shelf in the world of home entertainment at the moment.

Or at least I hope it does because that is what I want to buy it for; and I might even play the odd game on it.

I've learned

a new phrase today!

I was hoping for a helicopter

Paris, because she's got an electric chopper in her bedside drawer!

If I had one of those I'd be pointing it at all sorts of different things

What happens if you fire it at the ground? Either deliberately or if you miss your target as the USAF sometimes does... I wonder how big & deep a hole that would make.

Could you burn a hole in a submerged submarine? Probably not, but you might have a chance of holeing a surface ship below the waterline.

And if you miss and the beam instead heads out into space, with no atmosphere to dissipate it would it go on for light-years and accidentally take out an alien spaceship, bringing intergalactic retribution upon us?

Was this thought up by someone who hasnt watched TV for the last 5 years?

Worst idea ever, considering they are still making excellent TV films & series in an already reimagined BSG universe - looking forward to more Caprica.

Why dont they reboot Superman a 2nd time or The Hulk a 3rd time instead?!

Viewmaster

@Wize:

To make your own Viewmaster card eith relative ease you will need to track down one of these and some colour slide film:

http://www.vmresource.com/camera/camera.htm

Defence against attack by robot bats

"We're using an alloy that responds to the heat from an electric current. That heat actuates micro-scale wires the size of a human hair, making them contract like 'metal muscles',"

Quick - someone invent an ice ray to counteract the heating current. Or maybe a heat ray would work equally well to send them out of control, and would be easier to engineer.

Paris, because she likes a "metal muscel".

spaceflights for all?

Its bad enough that the lower orders are allowed on aeroplanes!

"...to seek out fights with new worlds and civilisations; to boldly puke where no chav stag party has puked before"

Or, you could buy a thicker laptop!

But it is a good concept, with the compact 4-way adding a huge extra benefit that is probably more useful that the ability to fold the plug in the first place.

I dont think it would be impossible to find suitable materials to make the design robust enough to get BS certified.

Now we just need a 10mm thick transformer to go with it.

I dont think so.

He seems to be confusing hardware convergence with VR. "Playing directly on your TV" is in no way virtual reality. VR implies an immersive experience, in the past using some sort of motion-sensing stereo vision headset, and in the future maybe something akin to a holodeck or direct neural interface. It may happen, but mainstream VR entertainment remains decades away. Its hard to speculate what hardware might be required, but it definitely wont be built into your TV.

In the nearterm it might make sense for Sony to give away PS4s by building them into their TVs to boost platform deployment, but they would still need to release a stand-alone version for the vast majority of people who wont be changing their TV just because a new console has come out. Microsoft & Nintendo arent going to start making screens, but could conceivably form alliances with say Philips & Samsung; but the ability to plug several makes of dedicated console into one dedicated TV is better from a consumer's point of view.

Paris, because she's virtually real.

Going to the moon is so 20th century

I cant see the US being able to tolerate the Chinese or Russians or even the Indians getting to the moon before they return there - it would be a humiliation that shows they are no longer the pre-eminent power.

But for just a few billion more the Americans could just forget the moon, which they've already ticked off, and head straight for Mars, which no other country can currently contemplate doing - that would really piss on the commies bonfire.

But its an expensive game to play when your economy is in bad shape, and just as the US bankrupted the USSR with the arms race, the Chinese & Russians are forcing them to spend hundreds of billions on manned space landings when there are election-swinging domestic issues they'd rather be spending on.

Hit 80 before deploying a braking parachute?

Simplify! - You might as well use basic off-the-shelf car brakes at the speed this thing goes. Fan as I am of record-breaking engineering projects I've got to say I find this an underwhelming endeavour that seems to use a lot of technology to achieve very little. The car *looks* like it would do 500mph. What do you need giant twin tails & parachutes for if the height of your ambition is to go slower than many fairly normal-looking petrol-powered sportscars?

Fight juice might have something to do with it...

I do hope I'm the first to make the joke that I'm getting my coat because I'm Southern.

Looks fantastic but...

...doubt it will be as cheap as 55k if it ever gets made; which is still a lot more money than a Mazda MX5, which I'd take as the benchmark of an "affordable sportster" .

How is that useful?

Its a picture in the direction of the interior of the craters, but the black shadows completely hide any detail that might or might not be interesting to know about.

Green hydrogen?

Straying off topic due to the whole is the Tesla a white elephant & the Insight the Jesus car debate, I wonder how much energy is required to create & distribute liquid hydrogen (even pretending for a second that it is made on the same scale as petrol & every fuel station has hydrogen pumps) compared to creating & distributing petrol.

Just because burning it only creates water doesnt mean that it is more energy-efficient and objectively better for the environment than petrol.

I must say the refuelling of the Insight was the slickest hydrogen fuelling I've seen - no bulky cryogenic piping covered in ice or giving off clouds of gas, but I am still unconvinced that it is THE FUTURE.

If I had the money and the brains to engage in heavyweight R&D I'd investigate a petrol fuel cell. It would strip the hydrogen off the octane & burn it in the same way as the Insight's cell does. The carbon-rich tar residue left behind would be sucked out by the pump at the same time as the tank is filled with petrol. The tar would be collected & used as a plastics industry feedstock or power station fuel (which would give off CO2, but at least you'd have powered the car without having done so).

I'd also look at batteries where flat electrolyte could be sucked out and replaced by charged electrolyte at the fuel station. The flat electrolyte would be trickle charged by solar & cheap-rate electricity, then pumped into the next customer's care when charged. Over-capacity at the filling stration could be fed into the national grid, and indeed the national network of filling stations could function as emergency battery-backup to the whole grid.

I didnt see that coming!

Should have gone to Specsavers.

Here is the designer's resume:

http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_profile.asp?from_url=true&individual_id=142236&sort_by=1&

If he's also made a working prototype then fair play to him but otherwise my Dragon's Den money remains in a big stack on my desk until I see evidence that the optics work as advertised.

So if you follow standard aiming procedure...

and target the perp's body one of the diverging darts is going to make for an eye and the other for a bollock anyway. Serves 'em right too.