* Posts by Chemist

2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010

Linux in 2013: 'Freakishly awesome' – and who needs a fork?

Chemist

Re: And yet, and yet ...

"Have you seen how big RTFs can get when you start including pictures?"

Have you seen how big anything can get when you start including pictures? - fixed.

What's different about rtf+pics and Word documents+pics ?

Survey: FOSS biz fans aching for 'enterprise-class' support

Chemist

Re: LO instead of MS Office...

"https://bugs.freedesktop.org"

If the document in question is the 38 page one ( in Dutch ?) I find that in LO 3.6 running under OpenSUSE 12.3 -32 bit. the document occupies 24MB more than an empty document on initial loading. Scrolling this increases memory use to ~50MB but then this stabilizes and on further scrolling the memory use varies in the range 30 -50 MB. Scrolling a lot uses ~75% cpu but that's on an old 1.6 GHz Celeron laptop with 1GB memory.

I don't know if this is a 64-bit version issue - I'll try when I'm back home - but I can't reproduce on this laptop.

Chemist

Re: The FOSS bubble @Chemist

Hello AC - what do you think ?

The Vogon & RICHTO often post as AC judging by their syntax, bad grammar and general ranting - who, indeed, are you ?

Chemist

Re: The FOSS bubble

AC gives advice - why would anyone listen ?

BlackBerry slams Z10 returns report as 'false and misleading'

Chemist

Re: Ahh BB10 Finally

"nb - did you know Windows Phone is now outselling Blackberry by almost 6:1 in the US? (07% market share versus 4.1%)"

Ah, that would explain this graph then, no wait

http://regmedia.co.uk/2013/04/05/us_smartphone_market_share_os.jpg

The gloves are on: Nokia emits super-sensitive £99 Windows Phone

Chemist

Re: "The Lumia 620 has been well-received, and deservedly so"

"Yep - by miles: http://blog.laptopmag.com/windows-phone-sales-see-global-gains-while-blackberry-falters"

The main thing that table seems to show is how badly both Blackberry AND MS are doing

Space elevators, vacuum chutes: What next for big rocket tech?

Chemist

Re: Fuels

Definitely ethanol/water/LOX. As stated above peroxide (+ permanganate) to generate steam for the pumps

Shaky liftoff for Sputnik: Dell's Linux lappie runs its own cloud, ish

Chemist

Re: What a surprise! Linux is STILL not ready for the desktop!

"sorry, I mean a driver for each linux fragment of 1%"

AFAIK the drivers are the same for all distros and are distributed with the kernel

Chemist

What a surprise! Linux is STILL not ready for the desktop!

"- and which brand of laptop is that?"

Well mine are a Lenovo 3000 N100 and an Asus 901 and yes everything works every time

German boffins aim to burn natural gas - WITHOUT CO2 emissions

Chemist

Re: I've forgotten how to do the calculations...

@JeffyPooh

AFAIK ( I'm traveling and don't have access to my usual references)

C +2H2 > CH4 is exothermic by ~~75kJ/mol so at NTP it need energy to split. At 1000C it looks as though the equilibrium allows at least some hydrogen and carbon to exist and be separable. There will be some entropic gain going to hydrogen and carbon so that may compensate somewhat.

Bank card-slurp nasty 'infects tills, ATMs', corrupt staff fingered

Chemist

Re: I wouldn't mind so much

"I wouldn't mind so much if they were stealing from big faceless corporations rather than innocent members of the public."

I think you actually meant "I wouldn't mind so much if they were stealing from innocent members of the public by causing big faceless corporations to pass on the costs of fraud".

Model S selling better than expected, says Tesla

Chemist

Re: Leccy? No!!

"Is Reuters lying?"

Someone is ! Just because Germany may have produced 50% of it's requirement on one light load day on a sunny day in May does not mean that 50% of German electricity is produced by solar.

Reuters was reporting not understanding. Germany produces most of it's electricity from coal & gas. The most generous estimates of all renewables is ~20%

Compiled by Prof. Bruno Burger, Fraunhofer ISE

August 30, 2012

PV plants produced 19.5 TWh electricity in 2011. This is an increase of 65% compared to 2010. The share of solar energy of the gross power generation was 3.2%. In 2011 PV produced more energy than hydro power for the first time. Wind turbines produced 46.5 TWh in 2011 and increased their production by 23% compared to 2010. The share of wind energy of the gross power generation was 7.6%. Wind energy is the strongest renewable energy source in Germany.

Chemist

Re: Leccy? No!!

"Germany now produces more than half of it electricity from solar alone "

Nonsense !

"Solar already rivals existing hydro in Germany and solar PV's contribution is increasing dramatically. In 2011 it supplied 3% of total generation in Germany and is expected to reach 4% or more of total generation in 2012."

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2012/10/german-coal-fired-generation-of-electricity-falls-while-renewable-generation-rises

Reg man goes time travelling at iconic observatory

Chemist

Re: Is there a physicist in the house?

"pretend you have a dish a couple of hundred kilometres across"

That's for angular resolution, but it has a small collecting area so weak signal. The SKA has that and much more AND an actual collecting area of 1 square kilometre.

That's a very rough summary of my knowledge but then I'm a chemist ( Einstein said that the trouble with chemistry was that it was too difficult for chemists"

No, really: Austrians develop hi-tech jewellery made out of concrete

Chemist

Re: @Chemist (was: Build one out of)

Well I see what you mean !

By the way has anyone read the book " Pyke : The Unknown Genius" or some similar title

Chemist

Re: Build one out of

" Build one out of pykrete. " - that's COOL !

Microsoft, Adobe, wilt during Australian price gouge grilling

Chemist

Re: Gouging

"Do you honestly think if you told them to feck off .."

They might think you have some backbone, are prepared to be different and adaptable

Victoria and Albert museum in narrow escape from Napalm Death

Chemist

Re: Sublime

"Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.

Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason.

Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties.

This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and his Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space- time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent. "

Thanks Douglas

Cyberspies send ZOMBIES to steal DRUGS from medical research firms

Chemist

Re: Why sell a cure for baldness when I can sell you a pill that stops your hair falling out as long

"A product that actually cures your condition (so you don't need to keep buying it) is actually a failure "

It must be nice to be so far removed from detailed knowledge of medical conditions to be able comfortably believe that.

There are really only two classes of condition. Acute - usually infections by viruses, bacteria and fungi. Viruses are hard but some short course treatments are available for some. Bacteria and fungi can be tackled by short courses although the nature of the organism or location of the infection can often require longer treatments esp. some fungal infections due to the difficulty of achieving therapeutic levels in, for example nails.

Some cancers can also be treated as acute problems depending on the mechanism being attacked.

Chronic conditions are very common, a product of life-style, genetics and environment. Reversing the disease in these conditions is MUCH less likely. A good example would be osteoarthritis where the damage to the joint may never be reparable. Here the aim of treatment may be to slow down the degeneration and ease pain. Ultimately large joints are best treated by replacements. Other chronic conditions like maturity onset diabetes again can't be simply reversed by drug treatment and in any case may require large scale changes to diet & exercise .

Ultimately many of the diseases may be tackled by vaccinations, gene therapy, stem-cell therapy, antibodies and life-style changes - these are still in many cases unknowns and potentially expensive unknowns.

By the way the current worries about antibiotic resistance are partly the result of the cost research combined with the limited returns due to the short treatment courses. The manufacturing costs of new, effective antibiotics can be enormous. I heard of one where the manufactured cost of the drug - which was enormous due to the length of the synthesis - was itself dwarfed by the cost of getting the lyophilised drug into a sterile sealed glass phial.

Reg live natter with GNOME superstar Miguel de Icaza

Chemist

Re: Respect for the man, but didn't use his products

"I stayed with SUSE & openSUSE over the years and their default KDE desktops"

Ditto. Only time I used Gnome extensively was at work with RedHat.

SCADA honeypots attract swarm of international hackers

Chemist

Re: This just in

"Interesting as I don' see that at all. I specifically moved the port to get rid of all the stupid login scans in the log..."

Same here. Although I see attempts all the time on standard port I've never seen ANY on my (very non-standard port). Mind of course it's just one of the mitigation measures and I certainly wouldn't rely on it alone.

Researcher sets up illegal 420,000 node botnet for IPv4 internet map

Chemist

Re: Give the researcher a medal!

"Most routers I've come across only provide a ssh login on the internal interface."

Eh ?

How would you get in from outside then. I have mine set-up to port forward ssh to an internal server for the purposes of remote access and reverse proxy use. Nothing wrong with ssh as long as it's up-to-date and has sufficient security - the real problem is exposing telnet or web interfaces to the outside by default with weak usernames/passwords

Chemist

Re: Linux

" 99% of Windows exploits require user interaction, whereas 99% of Linux exploits don't."

HaHaHa!

By the way you've SO missed the point. These are devices configured badly with open telnet ports and bad defaults. The chances ANY of them run Windows seems vanishingly small.

Sysadmins: Let's perch on Microsoft Santa's lap, show him our wish list

Chemist

"Imagine if there was no Microsoft"

I'd just settle for several competing vendors so that 'lock-in' didn't happen. Funny how 'everyone' ( by which I actually mean WP supporters) insist that the mobile phone market needs several competing companies

Drilling into 3D printing: Gimmick, revolution or spooks' nightmare?

Chemist

Re: Part of the process

"But can't a 3D printer make a copy of the object to be cast in iron"

Don't see why not - the only complication is scaling the pattern to allow for the shrinkage of different metals in casting. These patterns used to be made in wood and various non-standard rulers were used to get the correct size for the finished product AFAIK

OpenSUSE 12.3: Proof not all Linux PCs are Um Bongo-grade bonkers

Chemist

Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

@the J to the C; The Vogon

I think you'd be better rushing over to some of the other forums where MS is under direct attack !

Chemist

Re: KDE submenus still don't work

"Never noticed this problem on any of them."

Thanks for reminding me about VNC - I've just opened a session to my dual-core Atom fileserver and even though this can be a little laggy depending on what else is going on the KDE menus are fine.

(For anyone complaining that I have a desktop on a fileserver the machine actually has many functions some of which are better with a GUI)

Chemist

Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

"However there is no compelling reason for the average Joe Public to switch "

There is no likelihood 'Joe Public' as you call them will switch anymore than if all PCs came with Linux installed and people had to choose to switch to Windows.

1% market share, whatever that means, is a great percentage when people have to CHOOSE to change.

Given how disparaging you are about Linux I'm amazed you feel the need to bang on about it as though it threatens you in some way.

Chemist

Re: KDE submenus still don't work

"Ah I see. "Works for me, thus the other poster must be a liar (despite their supplying evidence)""

Not calling anyone a liar, I can only report what I find, no menu problems on 6 different machines with various OpenSUSEs/KDEs. After many years of using KDE I've never seen this problem

How about other KDE users ?

Chemist

Re: KDE submenus still don't work

""Works for me, thus the other poster must be a liar "

It does work for me, further on reading the bug-reports I can't see what they are talking about.

Click on a menu, menu drops down, slide down to a sub-menu item, sub-menu opens, slide across, ditto if there are any further sub-sub menus. No lag, no problems.

Of course replying to a group of individual ACs isn't the easiest - or are they all one person, and why the need for AC - it's not a confidential topic.Or have you reason to think that you might not get a warm welcome.

Chemist

Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

"you look at any tutorial (assuming you network card actually works) you'll see the CLI"

Are you sure ? That's a rhetorical question actually as I know that you are not.

Try http://linux.about.com/od/linux101/a/desktop14.htm

Chemist

Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

"want to share a folder?"

As it happens although I don't normally need Samba being all Linux so use NFS , my wife needed access to the fileserver for her Nexus 7 and Android phone. As the filemanager we'd installed on the Androids needed Samba I set it up on the fileserver. It took a handful of clicks. on the YAST GUI to get it working.

Chemist

Re: KDE submenus still don't work

"Then you clearly do not use KDE"

I use KDE all day, every day. I'm writing this on it now. Menus are all fine

Chemist

Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

"It was good to see the troll being totally ignored"

It was but as you see I answered almost certainly the same one below. The reason is simple, experienced users of Linux know he's a troll, interested onlookers might actually believe some of the garbage spouted.

Chemist

Re: Eh? Wifi?

You might have run foul of this problem :

http://lizards.opensuse.org/2013/03/13/one-that-got-away-12-3-networking/

Chemist

Re: Upgraded. Hoping my NVidia card would still work..

"The truth is that every OEM and service (e.g. Netflix, AMD, Broadcom...) supports Windows, almost none support Linux.

Broadcom : http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

Intel : http://www.intel.com/support/wireless/sb/cs-006408.htm

AMD : http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/linux/Pages/radeon_linux.aspx

NVIDIA : http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Even your beloved Microsoft is contributing to the kernel.

Chemist

Re: KDE submenus still don't work

"KDE submenus still don't work "

Nonsense, absolute nonsense. Never seen anything like that and IF I had it would be fixed rapidly.

Chemist

Re: Linux as a desktop is a failure, its time to move on

"Stuff Just Works."

Agree entirely. I've used SUSE & OpenSUSE for years at home, certainly since SUSE 5.0, and I've used RH at work again for years.

Installation on a wide variety of hardware has generally been trouble free even years ago and these days I'd no more expect to have a problem than I would expect to compile the kernel or use the CLI for installation. (I notice one of the usual troublemakers is spreading that FUD at the moment and in doing so is displaying the depths of his ignorance)

OpenSUSE is my only desktop these days and I also use it on my file/odds&sods/proxy server. 3 machines of 6 have wireless networking which never gives a problem ( and I travel a lot with a laptop or netbook and connect to all manner of access points ). I have a NVidia accelerated graphics card on one machine that I do 1080p/50 video editing on, scanner/printer and laser printer, webcam, RAW photo processing.

Chemist

"called a folder view."

Yes, I tend to have several on my desktop, regularly used program links in one and regularly used documents and network directories in another

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

Chemist

Re: connected to a drain plug of salt that has been frozen solid

"Although the idea of disolving stuff in molten salt is quite enthralling."

It's common in many industrial processes already e.g. aluminium production. Note that the article should say a salt not salt which many might take to be sodium chloride.

Ten pi-fect projects for your new Raspberry Pi

Chemist

Re: How is that "netbook" running Windows?

That's, in fact, why I asked my question above as I couldn't see anything running Windows.

Chemist

Re: How is that "netbook" running Windows?

What netbook ?

Boffins build robo-CHIMP for DARPA challenge

Chemist

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

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

Both

""Humans provide high-level control, while the robot provides low-level reflexes and self-protective behaviors. This enables CHIMP to be highly capable without the complexity associated with a fully autonomous robot.""

Enormo-display Apple iPhone prototype surfaces

Chemist

Re: RS232 is still relevant

"RS232 is still relevant "

Almost everything I do with PIC microcontrollers has a 232 interface along the lines of :

PIC-232----232/USB convertor ---- Linux daemon---client programs.

For quick look sees I find it a lot easier than PIC-USB

New UK cyber-champ: Chemist's winning formula cracks 'F1 race hack'

Chemist

Re: What does it say?

"when the winner of their most elaborate competition is an untrained chemist?"

Now security I will accept is rather a specialist area.

On the other hand some of the best programmers I've ever met in industry and academia have not been IT specialists. Many have been originally scientists, who writing for their own needs at first, as scientists often need to, have found a niche and moved full-time into scientific programming. Others whilst not getting their hands 'dirty' writing code have generated some wonderful novel algorithms to apply to complex scientific problems.

World's 'smallest' mobe unveiled in Japan

Chemist

Re: The terrible word 'phablet'

"Tablerone"

Never used a triangular screen but at least it gets around Apple's so-called patents. Mind the Swiss'll be after you.

Microsoft preps UPDATE EVERYTHING patch batch

Chemist

Re: Silverlight is widely used as an alternative to Flash @Irongut

"I'm going to go for arginine and proline."

Don't know who your post was directed to. If it was me and you're suggesting that arginine and proline are rare then think again. Arginine is very common, being one of those amino acids found on the surface of proteins and is also the source of the vasodilator nitric oxide that we all depend on, proline is also common especially in collagen where it is post-translationally modified to hydroxy-proline and seems necessary to generate the triple helix form of collagen.

On the other hand if you didn't mean me have a good weekend.

Chemist

Re: Silverlight is widely used as an alternative to Flash @Irongut

"A lot of people could say they couldn't name 2 amino acids."

That's a very strange way of stating the bl**ding obvious. Most people can't know most things, given the size & complexity of the universe .

Now I can name all the amino acids and indeed some rather rare variants - but I don't know many sites that use Silverlight