Posts by Nigel 11

Re: @Scatter - look at the numbers, not the technology

I've already assumed that they are morons, and have purchased a lifetime's supply of halogen bulbs just in case they become unobtainium. In the process, I discovered the vast difference between wholesale and retail prices! Also (see my other posts) not all Lumens are equal. The spectrum matters. Especially if you suffer, even mildly, from SAD.

(I can imagine it now, circa 2040, someone trying to get his GP to prescribe GU10 halogen bulbs. "But Doc, they're prescription-only these days! ")

Re: Not for Fanbois.

Probably relevant: broadband in South Korea is way ahead of the rest of the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_South_Korea

"It is important to note that 100 Mbit/s services are the average standard in urban South Korean homes and the country is rapidly rolling out 1Gbit/s connections or 1,000 Mbit/s, at $20 per month,[12] which is roughly 263 times faster than the world average and 100 times faster than the average speed in the United States.[13]"

Re: I dont get it.

I'll just give another plug to a "forgotten" battery technology: NiFe

On the minus side it has a low energy/weight ratio (worse than lead-acid). It also has a high self-discharge rate, so it's not useful for storing energy for more than a few days. Pretty useless even as a starter battery for a conventional auto.

On the plus side this battery is made of Iron, Nickel, and Potassium Hydroxide. Things that you can go out and purchase by the megatonne, that aren't in any sense hard to obtain or in danger of running out of. The battery also has a longer service life, and a greater tolerance of abuse, than any other battery technology I've ever read about. They are virtually indestructible. I read about somebody finding one made in the 1930s that had been sitting in a scrapyard for decades, and putting it back into service.

Ideal for storing solar energy, once solar becomes cheap and plentiful enough that there's an economic justification to store electricity by day and sell it (at a higher price) by night.

Re: Antactica is melting too

That is where our conversation should be focused. If the plant was susceptible to a positive forcing then it would have destroyed itself a long, long, ... ,long time ago

Faulty logic

The sun is getting hotter as it ages. One of these years, this planet will tip into "cold Venus" thermal runaway. Consensus is that year is several hundred million years in the future, and that the worst that anthropogenic global warming can do is to melt all the ice, thereby flooding a lot of real-estate. Thereafter there's a nice stable region where increased surface temperature would cause increased cloud cover, reflecting more sunlight, therefore reducing temperatures. Negative feedback until cloud cover saturates at 100%.

But the "cold Venus" tipping point will be reached eventually, and maybe it's a good idea to consider the possibility that it's much nearer than our consensus suggests. We won't get a second chance if we're wrong.

Re: Your stuff is crap but it's free so I'll take it.

If you don't hve a clue, use Google to get one! I want to find something in a text file on Linux, so Google ... let's see ... "Linux search text file". Never let it be said that I make comments like this without trying it out. My very top hit had grep halfway down the first screen as the first suggestion. ( http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000757.htm )

There are also hundreds of guides for students of various sorts of ability. Then there are complete books, although you usually have to hand over a few quid to the author.

Re: Ban interest and live within your means

Unfortunately, hard currency doesn't work. REALLY doesn't work. If you think the modern economic system with soft currency and inflation and interest is bad, you need to find out about the economic history of Europe during the middle ages.

In brief, all the currency disappeared into rich men's treasure chests. Gold to the aristocracy, silver to the merchants, copper to the slavedrivers. There's no incentive to spend money, when by not spending it you raise its value. The remaining 90% of the population were serfs who had nothing to spend -- free under the law, but slaves in every detail that mattered. It's not a joke that often, the only thing that they had of any value was their daughters' virginity. Sometimes this was indeed traded for money. Other times the local landowner thought this also was his right and just took what was his.

The only way to kick the world out of this ghastly deflation-trap from inside was either a big war (pillage, ransom) or a big plague (when the dead outnumbered the living, labour became scarce and inheritance took unusual paths). Wars failed (the Crusades, the wars of the roses, the war against France, and that's just England). Maybe the black death succeeded.

Money is one of those things where everything has been tried, and nothing works well, but what we have may be the least bad thing that's been tried so far.

There's another even more depressing interpretation: that the human world, like the natural world, is a dynamic system optimised to the edge of chaos. Economists are just spotting false patterns in randomness. Such a system is good in the run-up to the next catastrophe. Is there any alternative? Only an enforced stasis, taking the form of the post-catastrophe trough, frozen forever.

Re: Growth

Digression

As any fule kno, growth cannot be sustained indefinitely. It's impossible, yet market bods consistently tell us that if you do not have growth, you're in the shit. I don't get it.

Growth of the money supply can be sustained indefinitely(*). It's called inflation. And a steady-state economy would therefore "grow" forever at the same rate as inflation. Once every few generations there would be a "new" currency with a few superfluous zeros deleted.

And so any company that grew 0% last year, in fact shrank by minus RPI% in real terms.

The ups and downs of an economy are actually the working out of things which grew faster than inflation, and things that grew slower, and the fact that there are different rates of inflation for different sorts of goods and services.

Small rates of inflation, up to 6% or so, serve a useful purpose. They "tax" unproductive money that is saved under the mattress, in bank vaults, etc. This prevents the mediaeval deflationary catastrophe where all the gold had migrated into rich men's treasuries, all the silver had migrated into merchant's treasure-chests, and the majority of the population were wage-slaves (serfs) who were lucky to see more than a few copper coins in a year. The only way to get such an economy moving was a large-scale war (pillage, ransom) or the black death (dead outnumbering the living, inheritances, labour shortages). Eventually, the Spanish pillaged lots of gold from the Americas and history shows how the (surprising?) result was to doom their own country, while exporting useful amounts of inflation to the rest of Europe for long enough for modern economics to get established.

Do economists understand that the first thing they should do, is take the logarithm of every sum of money they are researching? I fear most of them don't.

(*) hyperinflation excepted. That's the opposite death spiral to deflation. Left spiral or Right spiral, both end up as a smoking heap on the ground with scavengers crawling over it if the pilots can't break out of the spiral.

Re: The trick is *useful* energy

Scale this down to house-sized? Sounds as if you could have 2-3kWp of electricity, and store the hot water in a tank (somewhat larger than the standard one with immersion heater). Can you say free hot baths for the whole family almost anytime they want?

Yes, you might have to dump some surplus hot water at the height of summer, but so what? You still have the electricity. I suspect it's possible to dump the heat into the earth through a ground source heat pump running backwards in summer, and reclaim much of the heat in winter, but that would be another story. Or use a large (underground, well-insulated) tank of water instead of ground?

The main question is whether this sort of solar PV panel can be cheap enough compared to the ordinary sort, once the supply of free hot water is factored in.

Linux Desktop

Well, in a way it's nice to see that Microsoft has added multiple desktops (workspaces) to windows. Pretty late to that party - it was by no means a new idea when Linux arrived on the scene.

As for using Linux desktop, the Linux UI is superior to the Windows UI in most regards (the exception being raw performance achieved at the expense of seriously compromising the system's security).

So you must mean the apps. Well, they are Microsoft Proprietary. If you think they are good enough to lock yourself in to the Microsoft walled garden, that's your choice. I'd just comment that if you have a corporate Windows license, and if you don't need the ultimate raw graphics performance, I'd say the best place for Windows is running in a VM, displaying in a Linux window in a workspace on a Linux desktop.

If nothing else, you get snapshots this way. Next time installing something borks Windows (or it gets a nasty dose of malware, or it auto-borks) just revert the VM to the most recent good snapshot. What about your recent user data, you ask? Well, if you have any sense it's on a Linux host filesystem presented to the VM as a network share. And (separately) snapshotted.

I wonder when Windows will get something as useful and reliable as btrfs? 2030? (And yes, I am quite aware that btrfs is not fully mature yet, and there are more reliable similar filesystems out there, such as ZFS. Talking of which, ZOL is also coming along nicely).

Re: Missing 9 - A bad idea, and here's why.

It's a mistake in Chinese ... 9 is one of the few lucky odd numbers in Chinese numerology ...

This is partly owing to the fact that the number 9 has traditionally been associated with the emperor (viz. the number of rooms in the Forbidden City) and partly owing to the fact that the sound byte for "nine" is close to that for the word "longlasting"

So Windows 10 won't be with us for particularly long and it won't be taking over the world.

I'll happily listen to music on a cheap FM transistor radio (just as long as it's amp is passably free of crossover distortion and its speaker isn't scraping on its magnet). Or listen to a pre-war recording that happens to be the best-ever interpretation of a work. What comes out is music, plus harmonic distortion that is melodically indistinguishable from the music (just a change of timbre), and minus some bass and treble (again a change of timbre). Oh, and some interference crackles that are easy to ignore if not repeated too often or too loudly. I'd far rather a crackle, than a digital silence.

Music after MP3 compression has added - repeat ADDED - non-harmonic distortion. That means random if faint notes of random frequency, that are not related in any way to anything on the original. If you have a musician's ear (ie perfect pitch or perfect relative pitch, and a deep love of harmony), this rapidly takes away much of the enjoyment in the recording.

As I've commented, it's not a problem with speech, only with music.

My mother is 87. Last time I visited her, her music sounded horrid. A quick inspection while she was out of the room revealed she'd accidentally switched the receiver from FM to DAB. I switched it back and said nothing. A couple of days later she asked me if I'd done anything to it "it sounds much nicer since you left ... I was going to ask you about it but I forgot." QED. DAB sounds crap, even if you're 87. The best you can say for MPs is that they are less awful, in the same way that a mozzie bite is less horrid than a bed-bug bite.

Re: Why the love for the original twingo?

You can't explain love, or character. How else to explain the longevity of the 2CV, and the fact that well-preserved ones are still much sought-after?

Some of it is simply a desire not to be in an identikit-near-clone of everything else on the road that's a similar size and price. Same reason that when I'm shopping for a used car, one of the criteria is "NOT silver, black or white". Simply because far too many cars out there, are.

Re: Aluminium?

@Jeffypoooh: Thanks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_alloy

6000 series are alloyed with magnesium and silicon, are easy to machine, and can be precipitation hardened, but not to the high strengths that 2000 and 7000 can reach.

7000 series are alloyed with zinc, and can be precipitation hardened to the highest strengths of any aluminium alloy.

There's more, including Scandium alloys, further down. So is this an example of (not quite) good-enough quality? A company putting a few dollars above shipping the best possible product?

( I don't care a lot - it's Android that sold me a Samsung. It was much cheaper, plastic, and strong enough for me. And I can swap the battery. )

AFAIK

As fas as anyone knows. That's the problem. I'd far rather have media warrantied only three years but which can be expected to degrade gracefully thereafter, than something warrantied for ten years but with a greater risk of sudden and total failure.

I'm old enough to remember some of the unfortunate ageing problems that have hit computing in the past. Purple Plague and Black Death of chips. The DEC disk drive where a beancounter substituted an adhesive marked "DO NOT SUBSTITUTE", and thereby doomed every disk coming off that production line to die from surface contamination within three or four years.

Re: "a parasite that's so successful it's killing its host"

A successful parasite doesn't kill its host. In fact the greatest success is to become a symbiote, such that the host cannot survive without the (former) parasite.

Methinnks I've just over-extended the analogy.

Re: Thumb-tacks

You must have an enlightened employer with good fire sprinkler coverage.

Often, between health-and-safety and tidy-minded managers, this practice is banned. Health and safety do have a point - large amounts of vertical paper will make a fire spread faster. As for the managers, "a tidy mind is an empty mind" and they are the un-dead proof.

Seeing the centre of our galaxy clearly is much harder than if we had a view "down" on it. Obviously distrance restricts resolution, but there will be a lot less dust in the way if we can look "down" on some other galaxy, rather than at the edge of its disk.

OTOH being *precisely* on the rotational axis of a disk surrounding a huge black hole might be extremely unhealthy. One can probably say that if there were another galaxy with its axis precisely aligned on us, we wouldn't be here to notice it.

Re: Slides don't surprise me

Why would you go into a phone shop if you wanted to avoid a sales rep?

To look at and handle some phones?

This might be part of their demise. Back when phones had buttons (and features rather than apps) touch and feel (and even sales-guidance) was important. Now they are all touch-slabs running Android(*), you don't need high-street outlets. Especially don't need high-street outlets not working for you (the phone network).

I knew what Android was like from friends who'd got a smartphone before I did. Choosing a phone was mostly down to internet reviews and simple parameters like size, weight, and (reviewer-compared) battery life. Then I bought through Amazon at lowest pricce, and it turned up the next day (with a user manual in Estonian, but what hey, nothing wrong with the phone).

(*) Yes I do know about iPhones and WinPhones. I just don't want one.

Re: Poor eyesight

An interesting case is people who need to enlarge something because of their poor eyesight. Use a magnifying glass, you say? That's not so good for piano music!

Actually, it probably is, unless the poorly sighted musician is also a wizard sight-reader, and has a very good page-turner to assist him. Mostly, musicians have memorized what's on the page a long time before they've perfected their performance, and the sheet music in front of them is more for reassurance than out of necessity. Some will perform without any paper at all.

Blind musicians don't have the paper option. It doesn't seem to impede them. I wonder, do they learn completely by ear from recordings, or do they need the help of a sighted teacher to learn a new work?

Mozart heard a secret papal mass - once! - as a child! - and then wrote down the entire score, note-perfect. But he was a genius.

Re: the public was never in danger

Professional / Military grade non-detonating explosives are not particularly dangerous, and the greatest risk is probably the toxicity of heavily nitrated hydrocarbons. They need a detonator to make them go bang. If you manage to set them on fire, they do burn well, but probably less well than gasoline (and they're solid, not liquid).

I do wonder why the police used a significant amount of (presumably well-wrapped) explosive, rather than a minuscule smear, unwrapped. Both would give out the same concentration of vapour so they'd both smell the same to a dog. Maybe they were actually testing a scanner (which failed!), rather than training a dog,

Computers

Having a computer take over as many of the boring pre-flight checks as it has instrumentation to perform is likely to increase safety. A computer will do the same thing over and over again with almost 100% reliability. It won't ever get bored or distracted. Humans aren't like that. They tend to miss items from long checklists, and sometimes miss even a red flag if they're bored.

I agree about actually flying the plane, and the handling of critical situations in the air. In these cases, an experienced pilot's instincts are likely to work better than a computer following a completely fixed rule-set. It's a completely different situation to running through a checklist.