* Posts by Chemist

2677 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Mar 2010

Boffins' gravitational wave detection hat trick blows open astronomy

Chemist

Re: how do you measure a change of 1/10,000 of a proton diameter with a laser?

"If the gravity of our moon can cause such distortion visible to the naked eye, how come that is not what we measured?"

It would happen twice a day, every day

NASA charges up 18-prop electric X-plane

Chemist

" but even so 140 hp is one heck of a motor."

I'd imagine it's about high-ish average-ish even in the UK . But more to the point where are they going to get 500 kW of battery power that will get them a reasonable range as well. It's about 5/6 Tesla batteries at ~500kg each for about 1 hrs duration flight ( I know doubtless cruise will be much lower consumption )

Microsoft sinks to new depths with underwater data centre experiment

Chemist

Re: Why put it all below water?

"I might be wrong, but if the servers are in the sea there is no need to pump any water anywhere so they save even more energy."

Question is how much would you save compared with the extra costs of engineering for such an environment, maintenance and upgrading.

I'd have thought installing in the base structure of a wind turbine would be a better bet.

How to build a starship - and why we should start thinking about it now

Chemist

Re: Sad reality

"Without a high efficiency energy source"

It's not just got to be efficient it's got to be as low in mass as possible otherwise a lot of that energy will be used just to accelerate the mass of the power source. This true at 'normal velocities' but esp. true near c.

Chemist

Re: Coms

"I wonder just how feasible (and how protective) the Ice Shield which Arthur C Clarke used in The Songs of Distant Earth would be at these speeds."

I've not read the story, but surely it's even more mass to have to accelerate

Chemist

Re: Hmm...

"The rest of the population died from a telephone virus, as all the telephone sanitisers were in the B Ark."

Ah, yes, I remember now.

Chemist

Re: Hmm...

"It's only the 'B' Arc colonists that survive, mind!"

I think it was only the 'B' Arc colonists that were actually sent

Thanks Douglas

Can't upgrade, won't upgrade: Windows Mobile's user problem

Chemist

Re: Can't downgrade - Won't downgrade

"As a long time fanboy, and don't care who knows it........."

So, every time we see your distinctive username we'll know you are a fanboy ???

Cops hate encryption but the NSA loves it when you use PGP

Chemist

Re: Ah, Traffic Analysis

"It a reasonable guess that heavy users of encryption are doing it for a reason - mostly ill."

Well I use ssh connections when traveling to pass files to/from my server ( just another directory on my file manager via fish://) No evil secrets but encrypted regardless due to ssh.

US rapper slams Earth is Round conspiracy in Twitter marathon

Chemist

Re: Issac Asimov delt with this ...

"one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients."

They almost certainly noticed that ships disappeared over the horizon hull first and reappeared mast first. The Greeks esp. would have noticed that as you climb up a mountain tips of other islands appear and as you climb higher you see more of them . All of these are powerful clues to the inquiring mind.

Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

" Thank you for proving my point that no one really needs it to be Linux."

Apart from a few specialist programs that might well be true - it's just that some of us find it a far superior environment. After all I have to go to the 'trouble' of building my own desktops aand servers and hunting out laptops that are OS free and then installing LInux and it's all still worth it for me.

Most people don't need Windows in that to quote LucreLout below "but then, 99% ish of home users aren't doing serious programming; They aren't even building Android fart apps, they're just browsing the web."

(Not my figures and I don't happen to agree either.)

I repeat - why would you want everyone to use Windows ?? What's it to you ?"

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"You can't understand the very simple fact - is that Linux Desktop is a collection of incompatible libraries, wildly and poorly designed applications that do not follow any UI concepts and do not work with each other"

As I've used Linux since 1996 I don't need anyone to give me a lesson. I use it all the time for everything both professional and personally - I don't find the problems you seem to think exist - all the applications I use cut & paste fine together - partly because I use the same desktop environment and partly because I make sure I use the best applications for my purposes. I had to seriously try to think of an example that didn't work - and all I could think of was an old vector editor I used until a few years ago when I started using Inkscape.

Do you really imagine having worked all my life in a high-powered scientific environment I'd be wasting my time fiddling with something not fit for purpose. I'm perfectly happy using Linux, so are many other people so basically mind your own.

I repeat - why would you want everyone to use Windows ?? What's it to you ?"

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Thanks, you just proved my point that noone in the real world needs Linux on desktop."

Your view of the real world obviously is at odds with mine.

Apart from the scientific angle I use Linux for everything I do. RAW photo development/editing, video editing, PIC programming (MPLAB works perfectly in WINE) and now there is a Linux version anyway, and all the usual stuff - except I don't use cr*p like Facebook (sob !) but e-mail, browsing, Google Earth, LibreOffice, VirtualBox and lots of other stuff.

In fact I can't understand your problem - why would you want everyone to use Windows ?? What's it to you ?

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Anyone non-IT professional who uses Linux desktop does not really need any desktop at all"

What an extraordinary claim. Almost all the people I know personally who use Linux desktops are NOT IT professionals but are scientists & academics. The reasons are complex but the simplest is that a lot of scientific software was written for UNIX and has been ported to Linux. The subsequent ports have been improved, extended and adapted to newer hardware. The other major reason is the availability of compilers/interpreters for a range of languages as a lot of scientific software is written/adapted by scientists for peer consumption.

If you doubt the existence of commercial software of a highly complex nature for Linux can I suggest :

http://www.schrodinger.com/Maestro/gallery

http://www.schrodinger.com/supportedplatforms/

http://www.schrodinger.com/products/

It's even (mostly) available for Windows these days

Chemist

" And what is pretty much the whole comments section about?"

Erh, that'd be replies to Post 1 !

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/2754765

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Which is great - IF YOU KNOW THAT AND KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Which by definition means you're not the people we're talking about."

I hate to point it out to you that that is exactly the point - you don't have to know - why should you !

Chemist

Re: cracks

"This can be achieved simply by keeping a cat ......"

Although you are likely to get long periods of total inactivity interspersed with short burst of frenetic activity ( esp. if you have mice)

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"Have you any personal experience with Linux Mint in the last five years?"

Or indeed other distros - in my case SUSE/OpenSUSE since , oh, ~1998

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

I note that MS shills are really very slow on the uptake

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"As technologists we can, and in some cases do, use Linux on a desktop properly and without significant problems."

As scientists and academics we do use Linux on a desktop properly and without significant problems - and have done for years !

Chemist

Re: Five technologies you shouldn't bother looking out for in 2016

"They'd not have a clue where to find drivers,"

May I break it to you gently - I've not had to look for drivers using Linux for years The distros come with a vast array of drivers and install the relevant ones.

Blighty's Parliament prescribed tablets to cope with future votes

Chemist

Re: Could be entertaining & what could go wrong?

"log in and vote "

There was a film quite a long time ago called "The Rise & Rise of Michael Rimmer" starring Peter Cook in which he works his way from ad man to near-dictator. As part of the plot he offers the public votes on all issues, the Post Office quadruples in size and all voters have to toil over large numbers of ballots. Everyone gets sick of it and votes to let him decide everything !

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael_Rimmer

Microsoft herds biz users to Windows 10 by denying support for Win 7 and 8 on new CPUs

Chemist

Re: The more they push - the harder they will fall

"Does anyone know if the Linux community has started development work on these chipsets?"

AFAIK the latest kernels support Skylake e.g http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-xeon-skylake&num=1

Chemist

Re: Symproms - The more they push - the harder they will fall

"What is the make/model of your laptop?"

Plenty of other questions - What version of OpenSUSE/Ubuntu? Did a live-CD work ? does the memory check show any problems ?

Chemist

Re: The more they push

I mostly agree but "shows any laptop as MS-laptop because you can't buy laptops without windows- licences, MS-tax."

You can - I've got a very nice i7 that I'm writing this on. I would say that you have to look quite hard but I know of at least two outlets in the UK. What you will have to do though is install your distro of choice.

Chemist

Re: The more they push

"The value will still be so near zero so as to make no difference."

And if you really believe that my anonymous 'friend' ( and you almost always are anonymous) why do you spend so much time trying (desperately it seems) to convince everyone else about this ?

Chemist

Re: The more they push - the harder they will fall

"For everyone else, who'd just need a simple browser, email "

I think we can be a little more ambitious than that.

Darktable or RawTherapee for RAW photo development/manipulation

Hugin for panorama creation

Kdenlive for NL video editing

Thunderbird for e-mail

Google Earth

VLC or MPlayer for media

Inkscape for vector drawing

More language compilers/interpreters than you could possibly want

etc.

2015 was the Year of the Linux Phone ... Nah, we're messing with you

Chemist

Re: Year of Linux

" prior to X.org the truth is that it was not even remotely usable."

Strange then that I and my colleagues (200+) were running all sorts of commercial and in-house scientific software on dual Xenon workstations with 3D graphics hardware using RedHat Linux around that time.

Also even in 1996 I was using X at home without serious problems

Chemist

Re: Remind us again...

"Quite. Isn't it about 1.5% or something? Which is somewhat larger than 80's coder thought."

And may I remind everyone almost all those 1.5% have chosen to install Linux. Given that ~80% people don't know/care and that most machines (99% ??) are purchased with Windows installed and many have no option anyway because their company insists on Windows anyway 1.5% is a really large percentage.

No escape: Microsoft injects 'Get Windows 10' nagware into biz PCs

Chemist

"Thanks to UEFI it's very difficult to boot linux these days,"

Er, no it isn't

Chemist

@ Shufflemoomin

"they had no drivers for my Nvidia 970 leaving me with software rendering "

Sorry don't have too much time to go into this at the moment this but there are Linux Nvidia drivers available for the 970 - http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/77844/en-us

What is likely to be the problem is that (I'm not a Mint user) the driver needs to be added after install via probably an additional repository ( certainly that's what I've done with OpenSUSE but I've not needed to install on a system with a Nvidia card for quite a time). I note you've also had problems with NVidia on W10

In general, I'd also suggest trying a few live-CDs just to see which you prefer.

Stephen Hawking reckons he's cracked the black hole paradox

Chemist

Re: Flipping your mind

"If the black hole boils itself away over billions of years at some point there should be a point where the gravity pull of a black hole collapses such that light can escape and therefore you should be able to "see" what's left inside?"

My understanding is that as the black hole shrinks the rate and energy of photon production increases until finally it disappears in a burst of gamma radiation, at which point you can 'see' inside but nothing is there by then.

Eric Schmidt, for one, welcomes our new robot overlords

Chemist

"Google will become the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation."

Interesting - Douglas Adams must have been more prescient than I imagined as he introduced them in ~1978 long before Google was incorporated. (Note NOT before Microsoft was though )

This quote from ~~1984 :

(You know how I hate those smug Sirius Cybernetics salesmen: slick-suited creeps of the cosmos, flogging computer operating systems that crash more often than air cars built on the Friday shift. They have persuaded the Universe that if it doesn’t continually upgrade itself at enormous expense, it has no right to call itself froody. This guy was on a five year mission to seek out and explore strange new worlds, and tell them to ‘share and enjoy’ its over-hyped bloatware.”) - Ford Prefect to Arthur Dent

Confirmed: How to stop Windows 10 forcing itself onto PCs – your essential guide

Chemist

Re: Who owns my computer?

"I tried Linux around 2010 along with the (then) utterly busted 'Open Office.' It was a disaster!"

I'm glad you are now sorted but I can't have everyone assuming that you are typical.

I was using Linux for serious research involving expensive software and state of the art 3D hardware in ~2002 without sig. issues and indeed personally I've been using it at home since the mid-90s - since the late 90s it's been straightforward to install on every bit of hardware I've tried and has given very little trouble apart from temporary problems with e.g some wifi adaptors. This is mostly with SUSE and OpenSUSE. Not used Windows since ~ 2006 at home.

Longing to bin Photoshop? Rock-solid GIMP a major leap forward

Chemist

Re: RAW?

"There is also UFRAW:"

Of course try it but I'd seriously recommend Darktable ( For Mac & Linux)

Ten years in, ultra-high-def gets a standard

Chemist

Maybe there should be a minimum spec.....

for the quality of the content !

The Register's entirely serious New Year's resolutions for 2016

Chemist

"I find it very frustrating to have to keep changing tabs every few minutes."

I find it very frustrating to have to keep changing tabbies every few minutes - shirley

What did we learn today? Microsoft has patented the slider bar

Chemist

Re: Performance...

"The biggest problem with spreadsheets which I've come across is that they are really easy to modify accidentally and very difficult to verify."

So those of us that use them extensively have to develop working practices/ mitigations to ensure that we do stay safe.

If any data transformation becomes a standard requirement I code it in c

Chemist

Re: Performance...

"Spreadsheets are useful for simple stuff but the problem becomes such simple stuff grows without proper design."

Spreadsheets are useful for very complex modeling and calculation - the caveat is that they are not short cuts, require as much thinking as anything else complex and need as much care and checking as is necessary. For example using large sheets to manipulate /calculate large datasets I used to be paranoid and always added large amounts of known good data with known outputs into the set to check. All of this is especially important if macros are used - I try to avoid their use personally.

Chemist

Re: Performance

"I'm beginning to notice a trend: global evaluative statement about oOo/LO but then when engaged with I can never get any detail..."

As someone else mentioned Office is one of MS's cash-cows - they and their 'friends' shall we say will probably do a lot to protect it.

A further note on performance. I used Excel extensively for data manipulation/modeling a few years ago but when I first started using OO I was disappointed with Calc's performance. It was much slower than Excel for the size of dataset I was manipulating. That's all changed - it's now very fast.

Chemist

Re: Performance

"possibly doing egg-sucking tutorial here but is that calling sine with same argument or random/varying argument? LO and Excel can cache results &c."

That's having 400000 sines each dependent on a previous cell's value and then changing the first cell manually but at random. and waiting for the last cell to change.

So as far as I'm concerned if forces 400000 sequential sine calculations and spreadsheet output refresh. I'm sure better benchmarks could be used but for the sort of numbers I use ~~100K rows with calculations ~~ this complex it's plenty fast enough. Anything more complex and I have a number of programs written in c to handle the data.

Mostly retired so I don't need this so much but I do find it all so amusing when people complain about LO's speed.

Chemist

Re: Performance...

"For me, the performance difference is real because the startup time of Libre office is much longer than MS office."

Try it either with the internet connection turned off or load an .xls file - I certainly have this weird problem when traveling (not on my home wifi) where starting LO whilst connected produces a VERY long lag before the sheet is ready. Easy to work round and only applies on first opening of an .ods file.

From memory it seems to be that it goes looking for my networked printer - which at home it finds - as to why ? ?

Chemist

Re: Performance...

"Also 350k spreadsheet loading over wifi from fileserver ~2-3 secs."

That time includes starting LO BTW

Chemist

Re: Performance...

"1 million row Monte Carlo simulation in LO Calc 4.x, re-calculation time around 25 sec, same in MS Excel 2010, around 10 sec (core-duo/3Gb ram) so yes slower on bulk arithmetic I'll grant you."

Can't compare with Excel but 400000 sine calculations here too quick to measure. Also 350k spreadsheet loading over wifi from fileserver ~2-3 secs.

That's on an 8GB i7 OpenSUSE 13.1 LibreCalc 4.1...

Forget anonymity, we can remember you wholesale with machine intel, hackers warned

Chemist

Re: Hmmm.....

"...that one started life as a Fortran programmer..."

May the FORTH be with you

Here – here is that 'hoverboard' you've wanted so much. Look at it. Look. at. it.

Chemist

Re: Oh dear

The ~200kW figure is just the 270HP figure mentioned in the video. However that seems very high. Each of those small fans would need to be 6kW which seems a very high figure for a fan a few inches in diameter.

Chemist

Re: A fun thought experiment on battery capacity.

"it takes roughly 6.25 x 10^18 of these per second to make 1 amp."

The 6.25 x 10^18 is 1 coulomb - to quote, admittedly , Wikipedia ( and I've not had chance to check this )

two negative point charges of −1 C, placed one meter apart, would experience a repulsive force of 9×109 N, a force roughly equal to the weight of 920000 metric tons of mass on the surface of the Earth.

This goes some way towards explaining the problem of banging up too many electrons in close proximity - hence the requirement for balancing positive charges which add to the mass and the volume hence someone's comment about 'the laws of Physics'

Chemist

"You could now easily get, ohh, say fifteen minutes out of the current device, although not on a public road of course."

270HP out of a cigar lighter socket - WOW !! (~~200kW)

'lightweight cable' vs 200kW - WOW !

</cynical>

Chemist

Re: Oh dear

"a very simple device quickly put together with off the shelf parts as a publicity stunt by a small company "

This small Romanian/USA company has kerosene/LOX rockets capable of sub-orbital flight ( so their pub. states) ! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARCA_Space_Corporation)

Microsoft in 2016: Is there any point asking SatNad what's coming?

Chemist

Re: 2016: Microsoft FootGun Release 1.1 [new, improved]

"A failure to do that, the arrogant attitude of "Microsoft Knows Best", will be the end of MS products on all these systems."

No point just talking about it - you need to do it !