Posts by John Smith 19

Essex girls beware?

Title says it all.

Good place. Not so good tech.

The EU has done quite a lot of work on solar thermal systems and this area and North Africa are the preferred locations.

Solar intensity can be 2x the average for Earth solar and its pretty constant day in day out.

But WTF is it with the hot oil. Most of the US pilot plans (and AFIK the Spanish ones) use reflectors to heat a central tower loaded with salt. (sort of similar tech to molten salt reactors but different chemical composition, like the one in the film Sahara).

Salt can run to 500c, which is just right to interface to use COTS steam turbine/generator tech, so no "topping up with natural gas (I'm guessing they use that rather than oil because they just burn it off otherwise?)

An interesting question is are the gaps between the reflectors as big as the reflectors themselves to allow swapping out if damage. A smarter replacement machine (like a narrow aisle stacker crack) could substantially reduce this.

People point out this is a solar thermal system, not a photovoltaic. Bottom line reflectors, being passive are cheap. Much cheaper than any Earth affordable PV grade. A poor thermal plant (like a gas, oil or coal fired power station) can get 30% efficiency easily 30% efficiency PV panels are top drawer tech. And remember (according to people who do combined PV/water heating panels) a 4c rise in PV temp -> 1% loss in conversion efficiency.

Something you might like to factor in if your planning a domestic array somewhere hot.

Thumbs up for someone putting such a plant in the right place.

The "cloud" Now you're offsite comms have become mission critical infrastructure as *well*.

Don't get me wrong. A properly engineered (and paid for) cloud infrastructure could be as reliable as a mainframe.

But despite the huge drop in what a MIPS of processing or a GB of storage cost it's not there yet.

The question is how long will it take to get there and, if you commit your business now what's the risk it'll get clobbered by an outage before your supplier reaches that level of reliability.

That's USA PATRIOT act

Just a reminder

"Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism"

Or perhaps the spy-on-whoever-we-damm-well-please act might be more accurate (but just a little more scary to people concerned with civil liberties).

A neat demonstration that when some a***wipe wraps themselves in the flag and starts talking about "patriotism" you'd better listen very carefully (and check the contents of your wallet) to find out what kind of snake oil they are peddling.

Availability?

Free Nelson Mandelal

With every 10 packet tops.

Obvious when you think about it.

Using the casino's own security system to watch the other players cards.

Obvious really.

I'll suggest the reallytricky bit is passing the information back to the player.

NFC anyone? It's (allegedly) been done before.

I'm fairly sure this will come under "mechanical assistance" of the player.

I know a few bars like that.

They don't have a doorman.

The regulars handle their own security.

They don't call the police.

" and will now wage war on gangs raiding Brits' online accounts."

Perhaps starting with the scum at Monster.com who "improved" the UK job search site into (by all accounts) a grossly insecure PoS.

We might proceed onto the Universal orifice portal site which appears to be a way for UK subjects to get their contacts from HMG without needing an email address, handy for a vast swath of people who don't in fact need an email address (unless they feel the need to twee "Under Victoria Viaduct trying not to freeze to death in cardboard box").

Except it's not.

Icon demonstrates my view. Somewhat behinds the times?

I'm amazed "how to create security holes" is not a part of *every* CS course.

Because it seems to be one thing developers across the industry manage quite well.

You've got to wonder, is it them? Is it the pressure to produce something now? Or are the vulns in the libraries their using that are not being fixed?

And of course the INtelligence services have always supported "gender preference diversity"

Even when it was illegal in British society.

"a joint venture of News International, United News & Media and BT."

Line One.

More like scum united.

And should anyone trust Stalk Stalk either?

Were I a business user I'd have worked out that any email address that incorporates my ISP's name is a bad idea which locks me into them forever.

But I knew that when I left Compuserve in the late 90's.

12000 Km -> Trans Pacific cable with *no* repeaters

Which radically simplifies cable design (no lumpy repeaters to design, no tricky power schemes to drive them).

That means big savings in up front costs and repair bills as the only things likely to damage the cable are physically cutting them or material breakdown over time.

The IBM stuff sounds like free space transmission IE no (very short) fibres on the board. Just lots of (highly directional) lights pointed at each other. (or possibly within the same package for intra-chip communications).

Both very impressive. But I think the Bell work will see application before the IBM stuff.

ON the idea of "One UI to rule them all"

If they want to migrate most devs to this language and toolkit what migration tools did they develop?

As others have noted the concept of a single UI across all your UI running appliances sounds great but then you get a)The OS to drive the UI becomes the resource driver when the actual control panel you're simulating is a half dozen switches and a few knobs. b)You design to a lowest common denominator. Designing a properly scaleable UI which has core commands and additional functions that can be layered and take advantage of the greater processing power without disturbing your well developed muscle memory for the lower level systems (or vice versa) is very tricky. The big one being where do you put all that cruft that sits on your big screen when your mobile is a few inches wide?

"If you have an optical microscope, "

That's the problem.

They don't.

At all.

So is it a tele operated remote handler or a true robot?

The former will need 1 or more joystick jockeys to do the clever bits. The latter something along the lines of a "Climb that ladder" command and it just does it.

"all commercial map service providers to locate their data centres inside the country."

Chinese govt IT staff smarter than UK Govt, with their "Do it in the cloud" mantra?

Sounds like a notion to me.

*Not* orphan

Stolen .

Then do have owners. But someone has deliberately removed this information.

This is starting to look like an advertisement for stenography..

That's "T/W >1" untill they throttled it down.

And all of their hover tests needed that to take off in the first place.

But an excellent piece of work and gradual expansion of the flight envelope.

Breaking the Mach barrier some time this year?

So another good reason to avoid twitter or an explanation for Steph Fry's more novel comments?

Inquiring minds......

Anyone wonder what happened to the spent round?

Something tells me the reason why the suspect was so keen to ditch it was that somewhere there is a person with an additional hole in them.

With such a small weapon you wouldn't run around with it unless it either had 3 rounds and an empty chamber or all 4 loaded.

Unless you were in a tearing hurry to get somewhere. Or get away from somewhere.

Might turn up in ER. Might turn up in the morgue.

I never thought of it before but Murdoch is the *real* model for Ken Castle.

He thinks it

You obey.

An impressive destruction of capital.

You have to be very special to turn $7.3Bn of other peoples money into an "asset" that maybe can be sold on for $750m.

Their investors must be so pleased with this performance.