Posts by Andrew J. Winks

Base of the wing...

Boeing found with the Dreamliner that they had to strengthen the wing spars near the point of insertion.

I fear that you may need to do the same - by strengthening the box where the spars come together, the weakest point becomes the spar in the wing, near where it joins the fuselage.

You might need to double up the spars near the fuselage and terminate the additional, short spars at slightly different places, to make the bending mode of the wing less abrupt.

Let's have a useful precision

If you want to "sell" us a clock that is out by a second in 200m years, then we expect it to last at least that long. Why not, for instance, claim 5 nanoseconds imprecision per year?

Iconography

It seems to me that we have a marvellous opportunity for an El Reg survey: a vote for our favourite comment icons.

Reader suggestions for new icons could also be solicited. Steve Atty's suggestion could go on to the list right away.

I'd be quite happy for us to lose the peculiar one of Bill Gates under the hair-drier. It's hard to imagine it being used anyway, what with there being no irony icon as yet. (And there's the limit of one per comment.)

Perhaps even the traditional use of "Yahoo marks" could be reduced to the use of a custom icon.

How apt

"Beskerming" means "protection" in some Germanic languages.

Nobody likes sneaks, but...

Qualcomm come out of this looking increasingly evil, but, as they have gleefully pointed out, there was no finding that any infringement of the "written rules of the standard setting body" had taken place.

H.264 has over 20 IP rights claimants, there is no unitary licence in place and royalty arrangements are 'complicated'. Furthermore, the actual ITU/IEC/ISO joint standards document contains a strong IP rights disclaimer that is effectively a warning. In light of this, those drafting the standard, or wishing to enter the market, ought to have performed their own extensive patent searches.

This is by no means the first time that IP has been smuggled into a standard, nor will it be the last. But it seems without precedent to suppress patent rights because technical elements from patents may have been injected into a standard.

It's a satisfying idea, but it is clearly a decision that will need to be made in a higher court.

"Obsolete" means the same in Africa

Martin Gregorie illustrated the case for Linux very neatly.

But the actual intention of mentioning the hardware minima was that the stuff already being sent to Africa frequently does not meet even the documented minimum hardware requirements for the operating system concerned. The PCs that will be dragged from the attic as a result of sudden WEE-directive-inspired generosity promise to be even older and thus worse.

A major international computer recycling organisation that supplies PCs to Africa currently offers Windows XP as a £5.00 optional extra. 90% of their PCs are shipped with a mere 128MB RAM, which is half of even the Microsoft recommendation!

The same charity only raised their minimum hard drive specification to 10GB in mid-March of this year, which gives one a notion of the obsolescence of much of the kit being donated to/dumped upon Africa.

Oops

Too wide.

Can't ever be too narrow, can they?

How changed does an IMEI need to be?

Martin Blunden is correct in stating that IMEIs stored in write-once memory cannot be updated, other than by replacing the chip.

That is being circumvented.

The latest wheeze is to rewrite the accessible copies of the IMEI and then to flash the phone software so it merely ignores the last, unchanged copy of the IMEI on the write-once device. The new IMEI is supplied by the phone whenever it is challenged.

If one is to believe the claims of the flashing-software vendors, there is scarcely a phone that cannot be nobbled.

The readily availability of such software indicates the extent to which there is an illegal demand, since there is no legitimate reason for changing a phone serial number.

It is still done just by attaching the mobile to a PC.

No metal chassis

The last mobile phone with a metal chassis was dropped from high altitude to destroy a gun emplacement during the second Gulf war.

Modern phones simply do not usually have a metal chassis, the absence of which contributes to their light weight.

If you remove the battery from your phone you will typically discover that it has four electrical connectors, not the two that one would expect. The extra two are used for battery management.

From this we can conclude that mobile phone batteries contain WIRES, which if one is terribly smart and does not upset the circuitry, can be used as an antenna. This is similar to the technique for using headphone connecting leads as an aerial in small radios.

Risto Savolainen is doubtless biting his tongue, at least gently.

That's my guess.