Posts by Nigel 11

Re: Lucas Electric Vehicles,1980s called, your sodium-sulphur battery experience is needed

And you don't want to be in downwind proximity to a large pile of burning Sulfur. Not the most toxic of materials, but most definitely unpleasant ( S + air -> SO2 + water -> H2SO3 + more air -> H2SO4).

I read about a proposal to use sodium-sulfur batteries in electric cars in (I think) the 1980s, and I thought it was one of the craziest ideas I'd ever read. I thought, like putting a shock-sensitive detonator in a petrol tank. (Now they're talking about CNG ... at least a CNG cylinder can't not be tough).

Re: Where are the attacks...?

Just as long as it's not SO smart that one can't simply "forget" to connect it to the internet.

Of course, that's kind of begging the question of how much longer broadcast TV will exist. I suspect Digital TV may go the way of analogue TV within a couple of decades. Internet TV or no TV thereafter.

Another idea

It's like bio-warfare. The Chinese(*) wrote it, but it escaped, and is now propagating itself beyond their ability to "recall" it. Scary.

(*) or anyone else, possibly including some near-autistic kid living in a council flat near you.

Re: Faster access to components?!

Funny, on the PCs I maintain today I've never needed anyting other than a #1 cross-head.

I do remember that early Dells were assembled with a nightmare mix of Philips, flat, Torx, hex-head, and OMG tamper-proof. But that was a LONG time ago.

Re: Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaenswitwe

I've now got to ask - how do Germans indicate a diaresis, given that the usual method of doing so looks exactly like an umlaut?

You could ask the same question about Gold, or any other fungible store of value. Whatever your nation enacts as law, is probably as good an answer as you'll get. In the UK, the rules are different for Sovereigns (=UK currency), Krugerrands (=SA currency) and gold bullion bars (commodity, not currency).

Re: it rapidly fills to a point of becoming unnavigable

It's not a design flaw. It's an easily user-configurable option. It's also perfectly usable, if non-optimal, straight out of the box, because it's self-documenting. A program can't read your mind about where to insert itself, so it puts itself under its manufacturer's name and leaves it up to you to move or copy its entry to your place of choice. (Some programs do ask; more should). It also remembers the things you use most often and offers them to you at the top level (which is probably why most people never bother re-organising it).

If there's any problem, it's remembering how to change language, if the usual user of the PC is Finnish, or Arabic, or Chinese. But that's a general problem not specific to the start menu. Would have been so much more useful if there was a button (called Babelfish? ) on the keyboard, instead of a Windows button.

Re: Really?

There is evidence of sudden level changes in the form of certain estuaries. Sea level fell quite fast, geologically speaking, creating a new steep run for the river down into the sea. The resulting fast-moving water caused rapid erosion of a steep-sided valley. Then sea-level rose again, and the valley flooded with seawater, preserving its steep underwater form because erosion below the low-tide level is very slow. Take a look at Dartmouth or the Wye. It's very unlikely that the level of the UK land-mass could change fast enough to account for this.. The UK is geologically pretty stable (large earthquakes are rare, for example). The Andes are an example of rapidly-changing land levels - frequent catastrophic earthquakes, river-flows reversed in their valleys, and beaches raised tens of metres in mere thousands of years, as noted by Darwin. BTW glaciation creates a straight-ish U-shaped valley (or fjord), river erosion creates a wiggly V-shaped valley, so we can tell these southern estuaries aren't the result of glacier erosion.

One can also calculate what sea-level will be if all the ice-caps melt. At the very least, that should put you off investing in any land or property anywhere near to present sea-level! More seriously, the worst-case scenario is so bad that I do think we ought to heed the precautionary principle before it's too late.

Worst-case is permafrost thawing releasing methane causing global warming causing more permafrost thawing ... a positive feedback loop that won't stop until all the permafrost has thawed. There is geological evidence that such runaway warming events have happened several times in recent geological history. There is also geological evidence that the long-term stable (say 30Myear-average) situation for the Earth is with no large ice-caps at all and a MUCH warmer climate regulated by percentage cloud cover. Ice causes instability and positive feedback loops. We live in climatologically interesting times.

Re: Unknown brand

Brand X is how it should be. You should be able to have the hardware of your choice running the software of your choice. As phone CPUs get more powerful, the arguments for software that runs only on a particular phone, or only on a particular manufacturer's phones, will look weaker and weaker. Lock-in? No thanks.

Samsung has just released a pure-Android version of the Galaxy. Looks as if they understand, and they should concentrate on what hey are good at. At present, they're much better at hardware than software.

Re: OK. What's wrong with XP?

Quite a lot is wrong, but the faults are well-hidden "under the hood" to use a car analogy. Your mechanic (IT staffer) deals with the bad bits. You use the UI, which is actually rather good (and I say that as a 75% Linux user). You don't know anything of the bad bits until it breaks down.

Windows 7 is much better under the hood, but regrettably changed the UI in a lot of ways which didn't make it better, just gratuitously different. It was an annoyance, but soon enough one got used to it. Same level of annoyance as buying a new car from a different manufacturer. Major stuff the same, minor controls all different but same basic functions once you find them.

Windows 8 is slightly better than Windows 7 under the hood, but the UI sucks mightily. Square steering wheel, pedals swapped around, instruments that require you to take both hands off the steering wheel to use them ... like someone resurrected the controls from a Model T Ford and piled a load of 21st-century stuff around them. Couldn't happen with a car, because that sort of change would kill people.

MS can still rescue itself. It should give XP at least one year longer before ceasing bugfixes, and develop a smooth migration path from both XP and 7 to Windows 9 for techies and unskilled users alike. But they are walking ever closer to a cliff edge with their eyes shut.

Re: AMD senior manager of client, server, and embedded products Gary Silcot

Excludes mobile products? (embedded may mean machinery and vehicles, excluding smartphones). Or does it indicate that AMD has been in distress, and two or three posts got merged?

Re: Where's the advantage over free space optics?

How much do lasers that can be modulated at 40Gbits/second cost, compared to this transmitter? That may well be the main advantage.

And does a 250GHz carrier go through or around a bird? Line of sight optical won't.

Re: You can call me AI

In the Culture universe, there's no competition for resources, expecially not between Minds and humans.

I expect that if we ever get as far as AI in our own universe, something similar will happen. Once we've accepted that AIs deserve to be treated as autonomous thinking creatures with "human" rights, it will become apparent that silicon-based intelligence is much better-suited to vacuum than to moist oxidizing atmospheres. So the AI-expansionist-tendency will expand outwards, leaving a few human-loving AIs to get along with the bio-life that can't breathe vacuum.

They''d also be much better-suited to the deep time needed for interstellar travel at less than light-speed. Somewhat ironically, the way to make ten-thousand-year journeys tolerable is to slow down one's clock-rate, thereby greatly reducing the subjective span of time.