Posts by John Browne

From my own experience.

When I joined ny junior school, aged 7, one of the teachers had a similar arm to Cerrie's. We were interested, sure, but upset, no. He was a nice guy and a good teacher, and we liked him. We soon ignored his 'disability', except when it caused him inconvenience; we then watched how he worked around it, or we helped him. We learned to accept another's disability.

This had another benefit; when a new boy with a similar arm joined the school, he had no more problems than any other 'New Kid on the Block'. In other schools he could have been bullied, but not in our school.

This was an ordinary primary school in Birmingham (UK) 1955-56. Nothing special.

Bottom line is that we should let children know about disabilities as soon as they can understand the concept. Any of us could acquire a disability; after all, how good a driver are you? Not just your car, your body.

Keep going, Cerrie, and ignore the tabloids.

This takes me back

About 15 years ago, I and my colleagues were invited to the opening of a new club, at short notice. Free drinks etc. Trouble was, their dress code required us to wear ties, and we geeks had none. We broke out a reel of 40 way ribbon cable, as used for IDE drives, peeled it down to 25 ways and made ties out of that. And why not? Free drinks, after all. Problem solved.

Nice book reference...

"The Door Into Summer" is one of Heinlein's best. Having a cat named Pete as a leading character is a nice part of it.

As for the robot stuff, no, we do not have anything remotely resembling Hired Girl, but Heinlein was a visionary and had it right with Drafting Dan from the same story; the precursor of today's CAD/CAM software. Not bad for 1956.

Not the only tech prediction he made that came to fruition: in "The Man Who Sold the Moon" he suggested PIR-controlled lighting, as a sideline, not part of the main story. Now it's everywhere. In "Waldo" he proposed a remote manipulator, called the Synchronous Replicating Pantograph, although it's possible they already existed. Also, in "Waldo", or possibly in "Magic, Incorporated" he refers to routing problems with a mobile phone, not far from today's issues with roaming charges.

Nice one...

And long overdue :-)

Strange...

When I saw the headline I assumed it would be "Road to Nowhere".

So, how much would a sheep weigh...

If it were made of collapsed matter?

From your earlier article, (brilliant, by the way) I propose two further units of mass; the cf (cupful) for collapsed matter and the MtEv (Mount Everest) for ordinary matter. For convenience, the volume of a cf could equal 1 gf (grapefruit), as defined earlier, assuming a generous coffee mug rather than a dainty teacup.

Oh, and how much would Wales weigh?

Somebody else can do the maths, my brain is a bit off today.

Probably a good thing they can only do it in black

After all, it is the best colour for dissipating excess heat 8-)

Why use an oxidiser, when we're surrounded by oxygen?

Bizarre choice of propellant, and not safe. Some kind of fuel, combined with atmospheric oxygen, would make more sense. Of course, it would need a catalytic converter in the exhaust.

If I had to use a prosthetic arm, I'd rather have it powered by you-know-who's laptop batteries than by Goldfarb's system.

I would get me coat, but the left sleeve has been blown to shreds.

No real progress,then

Since 1909, when Alberto Santos-Dumont designed the Demoiselle, a lightweight (250 pound) high-wing monoplane.

It worked a treat, and quite a lot were built by others, as Santos-Dumont had given away the drawings for free, in an early form of open-source. The drawings were published in Popular Mechanics, June 1910.

Sure, engines, airframe materials and instrumentation have improved considerably since then, but are we any closer to a personal skycar?

I doubt it.

Not very secure, either.

Six or seven characters are not enough; also their suggestions all put the only capital at the beginning and the only numeral at the end.

If that is a consistent pattern, it should be fairly sraightforward to modify a cracking algorithm to deal with it.

I roll my own passwords, and the ones for serious business have letters capitalised randomly, and numerals interspersed, also randomly. Not always easy to remember, but I get by.

Wi-Fi is the wrong target.

If they want a culprit, they should consider the cheapo CRT monitor.

Those things chuck out a lot more RF energy than a WAP, plus some ozone and a small amount of X-rays. Filthy things.

Sure, TV sets have done the same since the 1950s, but the TV is usually on the other side of the room, while the monitor is 18 inches from your nose.

I found life easier after my CRTs were retired and replaced with LCDs.

Re: Dub Dub Dub

If I have to verbalise www, I just say Dubyas. Kind of appropriate.

Seconded

Never before have I felt that El Reg should kill a story, but this may be the exception.

There really is no need to feed the arrogant King ego.

YouTube should kill the video as well.

We ought to ignore King and get on with our lives.

And a note of sanity...

What do we want El Reg to be, a news journal or a discussion board?

At present, most content is written by journalists and expert contributors, and I would like it to stay that way.

If nested comments were allowed, the Reg editorial staff could find themselves spending too much time moderating flame wars, rather than researching and writing real news.

Flame wars are hardly ever interesting to anybody apart from the protagonists; real news is bound to get much more interest.

Decades ago, broadsheet newspapers had to address this issue in their letters columns. Eventually the editor would add the comment "This discussion is closed" after the last published letter.

Discussion boards are ten a penny; real news journals are relatively rare.

Another solution looking for a problem?

Where would one use mobile TV anyway?

At home? Nope, anybody with the price of one of those will have at least one regular TV already installed.

While visiting? Nope; if an important show is on, you can ask your host for the use of their TV; otherwise you can act like the antisocial type who, in the old days, would sit in a corner and read a book.

In a car? Illegal for the driver to do it in most countries. For passengers, or when parked, in-car TVs are already available.

In a pub, club or restaurant? Many of those places make their own arrangements, and have big screens and big sound systems to prove it. Other, quieter venues may well chuck you out for bothering the customers and putting their license at risk.

In a park or on the beach? Why go there in the first place? Stay home and watch TV, if that's what you want.

On the street? Gotta be kidding. A sure-fire way of getting mugged, at least while the thing is fashionable.

For bling purposes? Maybe, but it won't last, and it won't make a sustainable market.

My old mobile died some time ago; the next one will only have to do voice and text, and will be as cheap and reliable as possible.

No fancy stuff required, although GPS (or Galileo??) would be neat.

Two possible reasons for this.

One, it might be a half-assed (geddit) attempt to help the police integrate with yoof culture by wearing trousers with the crutch at knee level.

Two, it might be sabotage by a foreign power, as exposed by the Goon Show on the last day of the 1950s.

That particular attack involved shirts; details at http://www.thegoonshow.net/scripts_show.asp?title=s10e02_tales_of_mens_shirts

Inerestingly, the shirts were also made in Leicestershire.

From the viewpoint of an engineer...

Sounds like a fatigue failure of a solder joint. Soft solder, used in PCB assembly, has low fatigue resistance, and the newly introduced use of environmentally friendly lead-free solder may make it worse.

Fatigue can be caused by temperature cycling (hot laptops, remember?) or by mechanical flexing of the board in a case that is not sufficiently rigid. Both are more extreme in a laptop than in other PC housings. Advice: keep it cool and treat it gently.

It can be mitigated by placing large components away from hot areas of the board, providing support and stiffening, and sometimes by changing the orientation of components.

Trouble is, with speed and compactness as marketing priorities, thermal and mechanical considerations take a back seat and mistakes are made.

Apple should admit to this one.

By the way, my old TV set recently suffered the same problem, but then it has seen 15 years of service and cost a lot less than an iBook.

That's no way to run a railroad.

They can't even spell the name of the turbine right; it's Darreius, after George J Darreius who invented it in the 1930s.

There's so much wrong with this, I hardly know where to begin.

First, the Darreius turbine is not self-starting, so is the worst type to use when the wind is intermittent, as in traffic. The Savonius type would be the cheapest usable alternative. Those annoying rotating signs work roughly that way.

Second, the way it's shown in the magazine, it would replace the crash barriers and could turn a fender bender into a pileup. Even without a pileup, the repeated damage to turbines would make the system prohibitively expensive, unreliable and difficult to maintain.

Third, even a modest 2 car light train needs at least 150 kilowatts for a quick getaway from a station, and there's no way those turbines could do that. A backup energy store or a connection to the power grid would be essential. Better designed and located located wind turbines can assist the grid.

That's it. The article already demolished the other foolishness.

They could try a 6 month shutdown of school WiFi...

But please give me fair warning so I can get down to the bookies and lay down fifty quid on it making eff all difference.

I keep the WiFi disabled on my router when not needed, but that is for security reasons, not health.