Posts by Michael H.F. Wilkinson 4257 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Mainly of the Acorn Atom and Electron, which were used throughout the 80s and well into the 90s in various labs here. Two key aspects were that you had the complete schematic, and that all external buses were buffered. It is quite hard to blow up buffered TTL buses, and believe me, various klutzes in the lab did their best.
The shipboard computer of Phobos-Grunt has the all new GPP feature (genuine people personality) and is offended about being given such a silly name, and is moping in orbit. Meanwhile the telemetry system is angry about what the mission control computer said about its software, and is no longer on speaking terms with mission control. Mission control is offended that Phobos-Grunt did want to talk to the Aussies, but not to mother Russia. None want to work before someone else has apologised.
The lesson we learn from this is that the last thing you want is computers with human-like intelligence.
Tight cloud integration is fine, until you are abroad, and data roaming charges apply (arm+leg, generally), even assuming you have connectivity at all (try mountain tops in Indonesia, or Uganda, or even in many national parks in the US). I want something that works really well locally, without internet connectivity, AND has good cloud integration for when internet is available. Other offers at the same price point just make more sense.
The casing of my (aging) VAIO SZ series machine is made of carbon fibre, and has withstood severe bashing around for years. Not perhaps as elegant as Apple, but if you want a tough, lightweight case, carbon fibre takes a lot of beating.
The MacBooks do look good in their simple cases, but I chose my machine mainly on combined merits of compute power, gpu power, and light weight. As we had just got extra funding price was not an issue. Looks did not come into it.
Extracting energy from the tides could theoretically increase the tidal friction which is drawing rotational energy away from the Earth-Moon system. This would make the moon recede faster and the earth's rotation slow down more quickly. The process stops when 1 day = 1 month = 50x24 hours (if I recall correctly).
I for one had never heard of the Garamantes culture. It does sound like someone wants to enhance the idea of a Libyan cultural identity that transcends tribal differences. Might not be the worst thing to try, but let's hope that political aim does not bury the science, which might find that, rather than being a single, unified culture, the Garamantes were a loose association of tribes, who bickered as much as current tribes (or the Gauls for that matter).
Fingers crossed.
In some sectors you can innovate quickly, and long duration patents can stifle innovation (potentially). In other sectors, innovation is slower, and patent duration might be longer.
Of course, you then end up with a question on how to judge the duration per domain, but it is worth a thought.
As others have said, the USPTO spends to little time evaluating patents. Things are a good deal better here in Europe, where investigation into prior art is generally quite thorough (as I noticed when I was (co-)inventor on a patent).
This could actually harm inventors. If I invent something, I might be better off selling my patent to a company capable of producing and marketing it and policing for infringement of the patent, rather than doing all that myself. After all, many inventors do not have the capital and resources to police a patent properly, and fight legal battles against potentially very wealthy players. I could of course sell a unique, non-transferable license for production or marketing, but what of the policing bit, would the license holder do that?
But to date (as a sunspot observer for quite a while), I have seen far fewer sunspots now than in the maximum around 33 years ago when I started, even though I have a bigger scope than I had in those days. So while the 11 year cycle is more-or-less on course in terms of the period, the whole 11-year wiggle seems to be superimposed on a downward trend. The last minimum was amazing. Months might go by without a single spot. I never witnessed that in the first cycles I observed.
They don't make sunspots like they used to! ;)
However, in a long piece about British Engineering and/or current lack thereof, can we let this pass: We mention ENIAC, but not Colossus? Especially following the brilliant bit on BBC last weekend on Bletchley Park's lost heroes (William Tutte and Tommy Flowers). Told me bits of computer science history I did not know, and I work in computer science.
The comment on ENIAC was logical in context (given women involved). It is surprising how hard it is to get girls into science and engineering over here in the West. I was at a conference on image processing last September and many women presented really good work (no surprise to me), and the vast majority were from India or China.
but what about radiation issues?
Besides, the stresses involved are way higher on the real trip, because the chances of anything going wrong are higher in a real ship, and the chances of anyone from outside being able to help if something goes wrong are effectively zero.
Still good that someone is still working on manned missions.
was the lack of proper separation between admin and user.
At home, I had to prevent the missus from removing such unimportant items as command.com in earlier Windows incarnations, so quite early on I installed Windows NT 4.0. Later I moved to 2000 rather than going through 95, 98 and (shudder) Millennium. I did not like the level of privilege I had to give users on XP, when that became the next step (as MS throttled support for 2000).
Windows 7 is a good deal better than XP in many ways.
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