Posts by Chemist

"Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird are just the same...."

and Google Earth, VLC, Skype

"is there a particular reason generic hydro....."

Only that the high capital costs are not being serviced when the generators are off I think

Uh?

"The craft's main special sauce is its hydrogen-powered generator, reportedly based on a fairly normal combustion engine, which supplies power for both propulsion and payload."

Main puzzle to me is how they store the hydrogen. If it's cryogenic, which I assume it has to be, does the boil-off rate match the consumption.

See..

http://opencores.org/

"'on arse most of the day'"

All the more reason to have sufficient exercise if you do have a sedentary job. Even some quite intelligent people think that exercise is merely an aid to loosing weight whereas exercise, reasonable weight and diet are all independent markers for longevity.

Not gone into this in detail but it seems readily available...

http://source.android.com/source/download.html

http://android.git.kernel.org/

"The Android build is routinely tested on recent versions of Ubuntu (6.06 and later),"

One word

....claim !

"an adept, intelligent programmer"

First BASIC I ever had was a 6502 (UK101) with a whopping great bug in the garbage collector. That's how good he was.

"When we can get a solar panel that can literally power an entire car"

I think peak sunlight is only ~1kW/m^2. So I don't think we will ever see that except for exotic, lightweight cars running in a very sunny climate.

"With open source, the barriers to entry are lower."

Nonsense !

"cannonballs"

Probably just pass straight through relatively thin skinned ships. Might be nasty but not terminal.

"how to get Skype to work with webcam on my Linux box"

Funny it works on all 7 of mine ! - and they are all different hardware

"6-8 hours on the command line it takes"

Well I support 7 Linux systems and whilst I agree that they are stable, reliable and require little attention I can't agree with the difficulty of configuration. Using SUSE 11.2 I NEVER use the command line to install/configure and the last machine took 20 mins from start to finish (+ updates )

"..three spatial dimensions.."

Agreed, but I think the real magic is being able to tune the electronic properties merely by tweaking the size of the dots

"Note to self, only replace fuses with the correct values."

I doubt a 2amp fuse would have saved you - something was very wrong. Fuses are just not that sensitive anyway

"the pentane was driven off by heating to be replaced by air diffusing in"

Pentane should diffuse out readily even in closed cell foam

"OS coders will start to create the most nasty viruses"

That's a great way to win hearts and minds FFS !!

I think I'd like to pretend that you didn't say this

Re : Linux processors

"1.57 million cores dedicated to processing calculations, with another 98,304 cores for running the Linux kernel..."

Re : Paradox

A well-run company should return the $40 billion to its shareholders if it thought it had to spend all of it just to survive

"it's just a thought experiment."

It doesn't mean anything -especially in relation to the article and your comments about it

The space traveler example is more commonly called the twins paradox by the way

"society has that much cheap energy"

Energy will never be cheap !

"If mankind continues making progress.......colonising space will be easy"

Oh, really ?

"I can never understand why the idea of saving electricity..."

Agree entirely. In the UK 1 W..year ~~ £1

I too shifted to a dual core atom when they became available for my file/print/misc server

Ah but ..

The follow-on to nothing traveling faster than bad news was that a certain race developed faster-than-light travel in ships powered by bad news but eventually gave up visiting other star systems because they were always unpopular when they arrived.

@Red Bren

With a monumental amount more quality control, Microsoft could eliminate Trend's raison d'être...

There fixed it

"I drove a Tesla to Land's End from London "

How much did the hotels cost on the way ?

"tricks left in his selves."

Christmas is coming - do you mean ELVES ?

Nice..

Asimov reference

Hardware requirements

From OpenSUSE 11.3 (current release)

The following requirements should be met to ensure smooth operation of openSUSE 11.3:

* Processor: Intel: Pentium 1-4, Xeon or newer; AMD: Duron, Athlon, Athlon XP, Athlon MP, Athlon 64, Sempron, Opteron or newer

* Main memory: At least 256 MB; 512 MB recommended

* Hard disk: At least 500 MB for minimal system; 2.5 GB recommended for standard system

* Sound and graphics cards: Supports most modern sound and graphics card

Presumably they are wrong too. Firefox is the default browser and OO is included

But

why does it zap your mind ? - it's just physics

"So why would anyone be surprised "

I'm not surprised you're anonymous !

"we want CHOICE "

Just like our desktops ??

Energy Required. →

True enough about the energy demands but it is truly awesome. To get 1 tonne to 10% light speed takes the equivalent of ~1e11 MW.hrs and the same again to slow down

( or ~~£10 billion at UK electricity prices )

"herding animals via GPS"

If there is a valid patent for "herding animals via GPS" then herding sheep falls under the category of obvious in the strict patent sense.

"it took 5mn to load.."

OpenOffice takes ~ 10 secs to load & load a quite large spreadsheet from a network drive on my system even using an old celeron laptop. So something's wrong

OpenSUSE 11.2 and OO 3.1.1.4

Yes, OO is not quite as good as Office and indeed using v large spreadsheets it's too slow but for most people it's fine