Posts by Denarius 2180 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2009
some of the comments on polls and articles around what passes for mass media defy reason and common skepticism. Some of the phone polls I had inflicted on my shell pink lughole when I had a landline were like this ElReg effort. One could only choose a "correct" response, anything else was categorised as undecided.
that crap movies dont make money ? One gets tired of rehashes, repeats, remakes and same old, same old.. And theater prices for snacks, dont get me started. I digress. Since when has evidenced based approaches to policy ever been done ? Cant have that, too many pressure groups might be told to shut up.
@ YetAnotherLocksmith
Oxygen I get. Big insects in Devonian indicate maybe guess 30%. But brighter sun ? Everything I have read suggests a cooler sun in far distant past, assuming we have an accurate model for sun like stars. ITIRC one of the current conundrums in astrophysics is why the Sun is so stable for so long.
@Stevie 1) You mean WIG aka Wing in Ground effect. Lots of designs and some even flew. All based on Dr Messerschmidts work around WW2. Known long before that. Used on first powered flight around world to cross oceans as reduced drag cut fuel consumption. The ground proximity reduces wingtip vortices, hence energy loss, similar to winglets.. Best WIG wing shape seems to be a reversed delta with point at back, with significant curve down.
2) Soaring aircraft work really well with GE as the effect is related to 1.5 times wingspan as a rule of thumb. Not to be used by gliders as safety research shows it is dangerous for unpowered flight as one tends to get strained thru fences, trees, whatever. Far safer to manage energy and stay flying at safe speed. OTOH, nice to extend the glide after final flare on hangar flights as one can be below stall and "float" along runway. Note, runway, not paddock..
4) Not sure what you mean. Assume additional drag from fresh lunch. Same thing as for eagles. A bit more drag so it depends on wind strength and swell height.
5) Dynamic soaring has nothing to do with thermals. It relies on a rapidly increasing wind speed as one gains altitude aka wind gradient. Due to ground friction the greatest wind speed change occurs within 50 feet of surface, which suits birds. Done it once in rotor. At 5000 feet ground crew could see the plane rocket up. Weird having nose pointing up steeply and have ASI stay just under Vmr for 30 seconds. Like a winch launch if you want the experience. So the steep wind gradient over open ocean could generate enough energy to support big birds in flight dragging a sizable snack.
Ekronoplane aka Caspian Sea Monster had about 10 turbofans AFAIRC. Like a speedboat lots of power to get off water into wing in ground effect. Once in ground effect most engines could be shut down or back to flight idle. Many birds use dynamic soaring, especially seabirds. The latest glider designs are capable of this if the pilots can handle rapidly changing G loads. Would be probable that a large bird with those soaring wings would be able to use dynamic soaring on large ocean swells like albatrosses, even if this meant it restricted possible landing and breeding sites. A similar argument can be made for the larger pterosaurs. Not able to flap, but brilliant soaring animals. Smaller birds do dynamic soaring. eg swallows in right conditions. Look for birds diving across wind, turning into wind and climbing, then going cross wind again. It is using the increasing wind speed as it rises to maintain airspeed, thus gaining potential energy.
@Pete2. Agreed. Why voice control is not the goal of the next level of PC and tablet UI design I don't know. Natural language processing has improved to the point it should be feasible. But then, M$ tried helper agents producing much rancour instead. And sites like DamnYouSir still indicate even Apple have issues. However, M$ application GUIs have become worse IMNSHO. Is this a sign of a generational change or another example of a failing education system ?
thanks Phoummala . Your assessment confirms my decision to skip Win8. entirely. Now if only Office returns to something usable. in the meantime OfficeLibre works in a familiar way, but not so complex Word docs with tables can display badly. Even KDE has gone insane IMHO. I used KDE for over 15 years but have gone to OpenDesktop derivatives, but due to the balkanisation of the Interwebs sometimes I have to flash up a windows OS to do something,. I hate stuff that moves without express orders to do so. I hope Win9 will look like the best of the Windows desktops, Windows 2000. Stable, light, fast, familiar. Ducking for cover...
Boris, you did not read the articles published 20 years ago on how to build a nuclear device published in USA and copied in Oz among others. Data came from publicaaly released information. The point was just how hard and dangerous it is to make nuclear devices for the builders, not targets. No way to tell, but I suspect it might have encouraged non-nation actors to skip the idea. Meanwhile, while nations can make such devices I wonder what the effect of using a nuclear device by anyone in the Middle East might do to the various fighting groups there ? My enemies enemy is my friend is a stupid idea, but a common threat can create the oddest bedfellows.
Boris, Boris, Boris. Spook troll are you ? You should know that competent spies assume that all comms may be tapped and agents followed. NSA et al is nothing new for the bad guys. The few new bits like remote turning on of mobile phones on was spotted soon after the first drone strikes. The degree of surveillance of people who have nothing to with war de juer is the issue Snowden blew whistle on.
USSR diplomats were kidnapped once in Lebanon civil war. Within hours beaten to death bodies of male relatives of local insurgent leaders were being thrown over compound walls with a note saying one of these every hour or less until our people are back, safe and untouched. Anything Russian was left alone after that. Apparently they speak the same language as the locals.
Does Rumsfeld still believe in in "Once you have them by short and curlies, their hearts and minds will follow." ? Now here is the $64 question. If the spookeries surveillance was worth a damn, why is ISIS and current mess a surprise ?
Usual hopelessly optimistic crap. Yeah, 3 day weeks, paperless offices yada yada yada Who the hell wants to be interrupted by some self-obsessed droid while having a life or worse, "help" choosing clothes? I believe wetware to wetware interfacing solved that.
Thumbs up for those who noted an hour or two of quiet solitude can help one think.
Trolling or medication not working? Your comments might apply to some top echelons, but not the vast majority of coal face staff. Found more bureaucracy in private companies. Whats connection between politicians and the public service which only gets kicks from each change of government ?
There is such a concept as a natural monopoly. Briefly eaving technology aside, having multiple suppliers of the same product or service which requires massive upfront investment and small returns from most consumers is inefficient use of money and resources. The theory of firms as pushed by speculators and party donors freemarketeers assumes low entry and exit costs. This is not true for public infrastructure and a lot else. Adding non-market imperatives such as affordable access for non-urban sites does not affect the costs much. eg running fibre Adelaide - Perth and Darwin is not increased greatly if Alice Springs or Port Hedland get connected along the way. I agree that the last kilometer issue is not simple. In cities and large towns FFTP probably is best, but in scattered rural perhaps a decent wireless would be better. Something affordable and fast, so 4G is not it.
So NBN has a point, but also so do the firms running up FTTP. Conclusion, For no fault of its own, NBN has all the makings of another worst possible outcome driven by polticians who seem to be remarkably clueless. As someone observed long ago, it is hard to make a man understand something when his job relies on him not understanding it.
21 seconds I wish ! After 5 hours plus and careful H2O intake so not dry, not wet one takes a bit longer. And no, some gliders do have relief tubes so we dont fly under long distance attempts without a lot of clearance. As for the dull bits between flying, never felt the need to time myself. Another entrant for AIR ?
in any of our esteemed parliaments. Plenty of claims made there with little oversight. Li'l Johnny got rid of that department years ago for efficiency. Available roles include elected something, spin doctor media advisers and policy experts.
Joke alert because acceptance of corruption is now so endemic in some circles a few may think this is plausible.
according to the self-deluded ruling elites that cannot comprehend that sometimes things just work best if left alone. Remember this is a country that had bureaucrats waffle during the East Timor crisis that you just could not drop food out of an aircraft to starving people on the ground because there is no-one down there to manage it AFAIRC.
Aside from that Vodfailed had such huge delays in services that I doubt the management has the courage to take any risk that might load their resource stretched systems. But a whole 8kb/s, wow, big swamp might lose some 3G customers. Now back to trying to fix the Windows mess I have with Adaware11. Why do I love Linux, even AIX sometimes, let me count the ways.
the owners of current and past governments have a predilection for big software that manages everything, leaving to sticky mess from cuts in branch offices for those trying to do something. One feels that many citizens will be poor saps, not the vendor. So expect pronouncements about loving small businesses that precede purchasing preferences for foreign small businesses with turnover in the billions. "We love local small businesses, but only if they have a big presence overseas to prove their viability" will be the translated refrain.
A move away from virtual everything countering the cloudy winds. Is the fog clearing at last from the Cloud so appropriate architectures for each problem can be considered again ? Management of the IT infrastructure was always the core issue, virtualisation is only part of the solution pool.
those of us old enough to remember real privacy when cops had to ask and most organisations minded their own business (except media) due to resource constraints if nothing else, will continue to ask the BO question, "whats in it for me ?" Sending site sensitive data such as "no-one home" to unknown and probably leaky security suppositories repositories is asking for trouble. Wont even go on about how it enables power companies to shutdown house because they don't plan ahead.
After the boomers are flower food maybe the millenials will be gullible enough to be nice enough to give the wo/man unrestricted access to their lives but who knows. They might just take their hand off it as the local car safety adds go and get a "real life" . However, the total screwing up of comms in Oz brought on by multiple govs crawling to fad merchants means no chance of systematic IOT here. Too slow for the limited traffic now unless one lives next to exchange.
Big Swamp voice and SMS hung in there mostly, but 3G data north of ACT has been off all day. I note my modem alternating between two cells unusually quickly. There were emergency errors in modem logs and warnings about running on battery, which may not come from a device that is entirely mains powered.
Lost 3G completely for < 5 seconds a few times also. Dodgy firmware all round for a group patching session by all telcos ? Odd that DNS was the first service to die but Telstras DNS was always unreliable, even back in dialup days IMHO. Firewall box wound up with massive /etc/hosts file eventually so it did not interrupt service too often. Was it massed spookeries splicing in new snooping gear ? A very _slow_ service re-appeared around 21:20 so something fixed.
Using 3G phone tethered to PC had same lack of service all day so failure was not unique to modem. Tell me again about competition, I am doubting the holy received truth of economic rationalists.
now on a phone where battery life matters. Also is the thing visible in daylight? I am fed up with finding shade so I can see any phone. And no, those antiglare stickons dont work well in Oz or anywhere else in my bitter experience. Where are the reflective screens that work fine in bright light? Come back original Streak.
NSW/ACT system seems to work OK. One less irritation when the random breath test pullovers happen because they already know car rego is good so delay is shorter. So why did WA fuzz get a dodgy version when other states systems work ? No doubt some bean counter thought it might save 10c. Australia, a country of 6 quasi countries.
book "The Second Oldest Profession" claims idiot police poms in early WW1 set up surveillance state in UK which was model for others. I suggest that Good Queen Bess spymaster Wallsingham might take precedence. In a cynical moment, one wonders how many middling to senior Stasi have migrated to act as advisors to the democracies ?
job app update, as expected by Murphy, urgent and document won't open after update for open and close check. Did similar to Trevor initially, then went back to time stamped version of two days before and redid edits Office Libre was used. Much appreciated the hints for next time Trevor.
>> What's with this idea that we need to teach our kids an impossible amount of knowledge in their early years?
A more precise statement of an issue I was trying to express with the issue of limited time. I agree with you. Too much is being shoehorned into early life and education by the well meaning. Thats why I think a generalist approach like learning basic logic and reasoning is better than trying to learn a language to code in. I recall the late great Dennis Ritchie saying somewhere in his writings that the first part of design was to push the keyboard away and get pencil and paper. This was an approach I found very useful to help think about the problem before I attempted to solve it.
@Capn Server Pants. probably right. It appears the company has given up on HPUX in the C suite and is milking the corpse for as long as it can. There is no obvious support for the gallant crew trying to support customers systems, just more staff cuts and demands for longer hours.
@W. A bit unfair. ElReg has to make a buck. Aside from that, mocking M$ is not fun anymore. They are too predictable in stuffups and just another IT company, seemingly specialising in making their applications harder to use. Maybe they should hire some Gnome developers to show them how to really antagonise their users. <duck>
HP had a great OS in HPUX, wedded to a great processor that was 10 years too late. Cheap Intel i7s can do all Merced aka Itanic was going to do except the big-endian/Little endian indifference. HP refused to go to Intel CPUs for HPUX so they have a legacy unix business. Both have a similar hardware businessl. Both are wedded to an OS and application environment that is static. Static means with other OS and applications growing, proportionally shrinking to a more modest part of the IT ecology. Don't worry Trevor, M$ will be around, baring disaster, for long while yet unless they do another Vista or Windows 8.0
HPs stated goal seems to be a throwback to the golden 1980s of the propriety vendors. Does not matter if OS is open source if only one mob have the hardware. Will buyers accept that now? Doubt it. Critical issue is whether HPs proposed hardware can be built to an affordable budget and work as required. Given HPs recent habit of sudden start campaigns followed by catastrophic stops their announced goal needs to be taken with a shovel of salt. Dell may well survive, as they don't try to be leaders, but sell what sells. A satisfactory business goal. The other relics of the golden server age (IBM, Oracle) seem to have different aims. IMHO, oracle want tomorrow to be like today, only more so while IBM seems to be becoming a NPE, making money from a huge patent licensing pool. All of which makes ARM, AMD and Intel firms to watch, right up to the time the Chinese reduce them to a relic rump when their own hardware is good enough. Doubt it will happen but India or Brazil may also surprise the IT community.
flying cars do not seem practical using known physics. The disk loading for VTOL is disruptive no matter what the powerplant. See a V22 land vs a mere helicopter. Sikorsky prototype X2 is still big end of town but technology looks practical if expensive. So we need anti-gravity or a road system that is also a runway. yeah, right. And drivers who can fly. The driverless car might make the management feasible, but I thing the wrong problem is being solved. Why do large cities with dense populations outside of Hong Kong and the hellholes of western Europe exist ? Regardless, I applaud Musk. We need adventurous engineers and business people dreaming up new technology and machines. That 90% may fail is irrelevant. The few who succeed that matter. How many times was controlled flight tried before it became practical ?
common cliche description so no information expressed. IMHO, wrong, because it goes much further than that. Pig Iron Bob had his faults, but his governments were more progressive than the current crop of colonial crawlers. See John Ralston Sauls books on 1980s on political, economic and cultural trends. Current governments are a return to the days of absolute monarchs (hidden corporate money funding willing puppet organisations pretending to be political parties) infested with the new courtiers (spin doctors, advisers and corporate manager class)
Whenever a pollie, especially the most dangerous kind, the "charismatic" , see a fad, it is doomed to squander money, effort and create collateral damage. So it comes to pass. Lots of kids saddled with M$ indoctrination and 2 generations of obsolete OS and probably applications. Whenever glitterarty start babbling about a fad it should be mandatory major organ donation sentence for any pollie or bureaucrat to to push it with taxpayers money.
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