Posts by Dave Bell

Trying to be fair...

The trouble is that they can't give a 100% guarantee, even before hardware failures and the like which can afflict any communication service. OK, there are things that can be done to cover the initital situation, where it becomes apparent that the customer can't get a reliable connection to the network. But that's a whole different sort of problem from them messing up business admin. It's a shift from "Ye cannae break the laws of physics," to the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.

Who to believe?

Even if HBGary have originals which are safe to publish, they've "had these emails for days": which is the fake?

Reality is a complicated place,

This works with the direct signals from the Tx aerials, close to the wi-fi box, which are also the strongest signals. A few metres away something is reflecting the two signals, fillinf in some of the gaps in the pattern. Yes, that can of cola on my desk is necessary to provide a good signal on the other side of the office,

I used to be able to tell if a truck was coming down the road because of the effect on the digital TV signal. I got a better signal by pointing the aerial at the church tower.

Wavefront .obj format.

Yes, it is plain ASCII.

It's not perfect. For one thing, there doesn't seem to be any way of recording the scale (except as a comment in the file). 1 unit in Poser is around 8 feet (it's changed between versions for no apparent reason), while in other systems it might be a metre or a foot or a half-fathom.

There's usually three sub-sections to the file. First, the set of vertices. These can be referenced by the modified line-number. Then the UV coordinates of each point (Mapping the 3D point onto a 2D texture--limited use here). Finally the polygons, made up of edges defined by pairs of vertex numbers.

Poser uses 6 digits after the decimal place, which for a scale of 100 inches per unit means you can define a shape to 1/10000 of an inch. Is that excessive detail?

There are elements of the format, such as defining the material of a polygon, which have little obvious use. In the example of the dinosaur footprint one might want to distiguish the footprint from the surrounding surface. And the UV map data might be useful for rendering software, allowing 2D images to be mapped onto a 3D model.

It's maybe easier to translate to some future format than some file formats are. Does it record enough the right data for this use? I've noticed quite a few resolutely proprietary formats in the world of 3D models. They can be a pain in the butt.

Not just mislabelling

There's a strip of non-existent woodland on one OS map. I know, because I measured that field up for IACS purposes, after somebody questioned the area marked on the OS 1:10000 mapping.

Baen work at it...

Baen Books is a pretty determined operation, and they've been working the internet hard as a publicity source. Free books, and free sample of books, as well as a paid-for ebook service. They include CD-ROMs with hardbacks, giving you ebook versions of a whole series with the new novel.

I have a substantial stack of printed versions.

And, you know, publishers have always had people giving away their products, letting them be read for free. These heinous criminal have a special name: "librarians".

Costuming matters a lot

I have to agree.

Halle Berry's performance was pretty good, I thought, but she looked her best in the semi-improvised costume she wore mid-film, rather than in the "designed" costume worn later.

Yes, I know that both were "designed", and neither was inconspicuous, but that mid-film outfit was something you could believe she could use without a convenient phone-box to change in.

A useful stunt?

There's certainly some excessive hype in this affair, but both journeys tell us something. Perhaps it would have been worth mentioning that Jeremy Clarkson drove a car from London to Edinburgh and back on one tank of diesel. And perhaps it would have been worth mentioning that electric cars, when the infrastructure exists, will potentially reduce pollution within cities.

I'm reminded of the way that LPG was promoted as a fuel, and I remember how few places there were to get it. Locally, there was an agricultural machinery dealer (who would also convert your vehicle), and the district council transport depot. Ten years later, it's still two places, a different two, as far as I can tell (and the site I checked for that goves a price comparison from Novermber 2009).

But the ugly reality is that electric cars are going to be for those in well-paid jobs, and the rest of us will, as fuel costs rise, become dependent on public transport. It was Tony Blair who linked his name to the phrase "joined up writing", and failed to deliver on the promise of more-coordinated government. This lot don't even seem to be trying.

Chorophyll

I'm not sure of the exact spectrum that chlorophyll absorbs to power the growth of plants, but remember that the green we see is what is not absorbed. And green plants do reflect a lot of red light. Maybe there could be a more efficient source of the right colours of light than a simple hot-filament bulb, but it is going to be something special.

Legionnaire's Disease?

This should be a a well-known risk, and should be manageable with the right routine maintenance, but if you're not used to dealing with water evaporation as an air-cooling method, I can see it catching somebody by surprise.

Non-sucking tech in novels.

Charles Stross does a good job.

Waste Heat

There's always going to be heat generated in the motors and batteries. Even with liquid cooling for the battery, that heat has to be dumped into the air eventually.

And besides, this is a modification of an existing vehicle design. Don't expect big bodywork changes. The next generation of vehicle might be designed differently.

Older than Hotmail

As I recall, it was AOL who banned Scunthorpe. The customer who they almost lost then signed up with the name of one of the villages which were combined to form Scunthorpe.

Frodingham: it rather sounds worse, doesn't it.

More of the usual

So it's the normal broadband speed advert?

Up to infinity, and beyond!

Clarke's Communication Satellite ideas

They were published on the October 1945 issue of Wireless World. Not a novel, a technical paper in a technically-oriented publication, with some calculations of such things as the power needed. That's a different thing to a novel.

I've very mixed feelings about the issues

In the end, there seems to be something fundamentally misogynistic about the sex industry, whether within the law (such as porn) or not (prostitution). And it all reinforces some rather ugly thinking about women, with depictions of fun activities overloaded with hatred.

Yes, all this stuff about the failings of the law needs to be sorted out. But Las Vegas was built with money from organised crime. Legal gambling didn't get rid of the bad guys. It needs a much more radical solution, if only because some police officers will always be finding ways to use the law.

As it happens, I met a sex worker once, though she seemed to be more on the porn side of the line of legality, but what maybe makes her significant was that she was a union organiser as well. Look up anarcho-syndicalism and consider how that might work out: it's the sort of control that would be needed. implicit in the idea of prostitutes banding together for mutual protection. Without it, all we do is re-label the pimps. Human resources managers?

Patent Failure Modes

I'm not sure that this is a good idea, because it would make all patents harder to get. But if the prior art is as obvious as it seems to be in this case, which suggests incompetence on the part of the USPTO, maybe they should have some liability.

In this case, the prior art is something that is widely used. Is it really plausible that a patent examiner had never come across this double click trick on a computer they were using. I mean, I've just used it in Windows XP, and that was released in August 2001.

Since the defendants in this case will be doing the job the USPTO should have done, it doesn't seem crazy that the USPTO should be paying at least some of their costs.

Nervous about Europe

If they decide not to prosecute, their answer will have to satisfy the European system, but I really don't like the idea of the European administration forcing a prosecution. A big chunk of the system is based on the National Governments writing and enforcing their own laws to comply with an EU directive. And I doubt that other countries would like any precedent being set.

Was Linux a mistake for Asus?

I can't say I've found Linux to be a problem, though I've sometimes had to do a lot of hunting for info. But I don't think that Asus made a good choice: the Linux distro they chose was somewhat obscure, they had to provide support, and it all turned sour.

After an upgrade to Firefox, via Asus, prevented a couple of other programs from working, and there was no way to back out, short of reinstalling from the DVD, I switched to Ubuntu.

I suspect that Asus didn't have enough sales of Linux to maintain the staff needed to support it. I wonder how much of the hardware could have had the drivers open sourced. Did they try to keep Eee PC Linux under their control, and missed the point of Open Source?

Windows, on the other hand: no supplier of chipsets is going to ignore Windows support.

And also...

USS Lexington (CV-2) for one.

Also one of the ships Robert A. Heinlein served on.