Posts by Murray Pearson 1

This reminds me of Dave Winer

I used to have a paid license for UserLand Frontier about 12 years ago, and I remember the circuses resulting when Dave Winer would want to focus on making Fancy New Things (and bragging about being Bill Gates's BFF) to the extent that major, reproducible bugs I documented in Frontier's debugger were completely ignored. Since I was desperately trying to finish a Frontier-based project so I could feed my family, this was a distressing situation. I made a little website called "crazytalk" that showed sequential snapshots of stepping through code in the debugger and the cursor was acting in "completely impossible" ways. It did no good.

Turned me on to open source. I swore I would never depend on a closed, proprietary system ever again. And when was the last tie you heard of a UserLand product? (It's too bad, because Frontier was pretty cool back in the day.)

@Your alien overlord - fear me

What YOU clearly fail to see, is that with continuously operating engines they can do these wacky things called "course-corrections." They had four main ones during Apollo; a plasma drive and a computer could make it continuous and automatic. In other words, navigation accuracy and efficiency would also improve, not get worse.

Those are jets all right...

...but pulsejets (not turbojets, turbofans or turboshafts, which are other possibilities); pulsejets are by far the simplest jet engines as they require no moving parts, but they're not exactly puissant.

This is the second-best use of pulsejets I have ever seen; in first place is the Kiwi offering plans for GPS-guided, pulsejet-powered cruise missiles that can be built in your garage with parts that US cutoms will allow past their border with no questions asked. In third, I would have to say the same bloke's pulsejet go-karts.

Re: Leszek

"It's a shame though that they do not ship Linux and/or BSD pre-installed, along with the fruity mess."

They do. You can get, factory-installed, your choice of any 2 of the following: OS X, Vista, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, CentOS or Ubuntu Server. You just have to buy an additional hard drive (since Apple restricts BootCamp to Apple-branded machines):

http://store.psystar.com/dualboot.html

And then, if you feel like it, you can plunk FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or whatever your heart desires, onto the machine.

Disinfect that shower head (occasionally)

A few years back I was one of those unfortunates to suffer from a Mycobacterium avium infection. It almost killed me — it was really, really horrific. The bacteria formed an abcess which had to be drained, and the subsequent dressing changes inflicted "ten-out-of-a-possible-ten" levels of pain, for which no painkiller except hypnosis was effective (not even morphine worked).

So, while these infections are rare, they are NOT to be trifled with.

That being said, the docs also informed me that about 75% of all people have M. avium circulating in their bodies all the time; probably I do right now, with no ill effect.

But just the same, I think I'll descale my shower head with vinegar and then give it a little bleach-soak and rinsing.....

Re: Linbox, in the spirit of Mark Thomas

That's a great idea! In fact, I see no reason why this can't become an international movement..... anytime anyone anywhere in the world puts on any music with anyone else present, then send in a Form 696! Imagine the mountain of useless paperwork, the idea of burying these morons in irrelevant work is enough to make me willing to stump the postage from Canada! Ha ha!

Re: I guess the scoreboard will tell

I *have* had security problems on my Mac: I recall the viruses like Scores, nVIR and WDEF in, um, 1987–1991 or thereabouts; none of them actually did anything malicious. Also I recall a few years back my Mac was suddenly appallingly slow and I realized I had accidentally turned on Windows file sharing: legions of zombies were trying to pwn my machine....... entirely unsuccessfully of course, aside from the performance hit that went away when I killed the service.

I'll be installing SL as soon as it comes out.

Re: ASLR doesn't make much sense on a Mac!

It doesn't matter much how often the randomization happens as long as there is SOME degree of randomization. Otherwise all machines running such-and-such-OS will have component X in memory location Y; with any degree of randomization this goes away regardless of the infrequency of the reboot. (My Mac has been rebooted about 10 times in the last year, because I sometimes carry it to the living room to watch movies.)

Well, as far as getting off Mars goes....

Rockets won't cut it for a long-term solution.

Fortunately, nature has already come to our help: the caldera of Olympus Mons is almost in outer space; the rim is 76,000 feet higher than the surrounding plains. Why not just make a gigantic Gauss gun? Accelerate across the caldera, ramp up over the rim and WHOOOOOOOSH! into orbit. At the very least it would be a great way to get bulk cargo into space to construct an interstellar craft.

Now, as far as ALICE goes, I noticed it does burn very very fast (the commercial engine, probably an Aerotech motor, had a burn time probably 10x longer) and so while the THRUST is great with ALICE the IMPULSE is not so hot. This is backed up by the comments at the end of the video where someone commented they "hoped it'd be higher" or something like that.

Or MAYBE.....

.....people, like myself and my wife, have found that 3.5 is a dead-slow, buggy POS which crashes all the time. We're both switching back to 3.0.

Carbon savings

Even if fossil fuels need to be burnt to generate the electricity to run a car like this, it will be better for the environment than burning fossil fuels to run the car directly. Why? Because large-scale, stationary power plants can achieve far greater efficiency and can be fitted with pollution-mitigating (and possibly carbon-capture) devices far more easily than can, say, an individual automobile.

Of course, for those like me that live in Quebec where we have more hydroelectricity than just about anywhere on Earth, it's even better. I wonder if it could stand up to a Quebec winter, though, or for that matter a Montreal spring: we get many, many vicious potholes which could probably swallow that car whole!

@Lionel Baden

"and shiny ipod white really doesnt suit bikers all that well"

That's because a black one wouldn't look like it's made by Siemens. Pearly white is perfectly appropriate! I wonder if it's sticky?

Once in an industrial park I noticed two adjacent tenants were Siemens and Cummins. I should have taken a photo!

And now a word from Stevie Wonder...

"When you believe in things that you don't understand then you suffer / Superstition ain't the way"

Personally, I believe in refraction and solar energy.

Best committee group nave EVAAARR!

Given their behaviour, I think El Reg missed a solid-gold nicknaming opportunity: the semi-expansion of the hideous abbreviation WHATWG into the apt "WHAT Working Group"?

Of course, you can also replace "Web Hypertext" with "The Web". That gives an even more apt acronym!

Plane-ly should be....

Since "high-altitude glider" abbreviates to HAG, why not the Vulture HAG?

I don't think we should be so pedantic about the fine points of wood-vs-paper; that is, unless the electronics you're inserting into it are ALSO paper.....? Surely the plastic, metal and glass are a bigger deviation from the ideal than a few balsa and/or basswood spars? Finally, to keep the weight to a minimum, experiment with muscle wires rather than electromechanical servos.

Basswood/balsa composite, by the way, would be a far better choice than balsa alone. Using built-up members with balsa in tension and basswood in compression, and your strength-to-weight ratio should double at least. Use cyanoacralyte superglue for lightweight joins, and saturation with a thinned white or carpenter's glue where stresses are concentrated.

In keeping with the 'paper airplane' theme, the skin of the plane could easily be doped tissue-paper.

Clean air.....?

New York City is the only place I have visited (and I have traveled a bit) which I could smell INSIDE THE PLANE BEFORE IT LANDED. Not even Los Angeles was that stinky.....

Still, this is a dog of an idea. If the City is that hell-bent on e-waste recycling they should institute their own damn program.... and pay for it. If they want to tack a surcharge onto electronics sold in the state (thereby driving people to purchase in New Jersey) to cover the cost, so be it.............

I have a suggestion

Flush the new logo down the water loo. Those smelly high-tech waterless urinals won't do the job.