Re: It's an improvement......
They STILL run those gecko ads.
Posts by Marshalltown
744 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Sep 2011
US insurer punts 'bestiality' to wide-eyed kiddies, gasp 'mums'
Microsoft: Office 2013 license is for just one PC, FOREVER
Thursday 21st February 2013 09:44 GMT
You have got to be jesting
In the US many small businesses do business with city, county, state or federal agencies who _require_ documents in MS defined formats. These agencies want to be able to review, mark up, and return such documents for finalization. Attempting to change horses in midstream can be astonishingly expensive. MS has worked to distance itself from older interface types and the younger office help don't know anything else. The owners ... who knows what they think? My boss wants "something in a box." Never understood it, but that's the response when I mention switching. The one point where we continue to disagree is that I will not do statistics with Excel - or any spreadsheet for that matter. R is the tool of choice. Pointing out that R is used world-wide by governments and companies, simply gets a glassy, "but it's off the internet. What about viruses?"
When I work at home, I usually use LO, but heavily formatted Word docs frequently mutate into catastrophic states, so I retain a functional copy of Office one a Windows machine that's rarely booted.
Chip daddy Mead: 'A bunch of big egos' are strangling science
Thursday 21st February 2013 09:18 GMT
Re: Unfortunately
Most important scientific progress comes from "crank-like" obsession. The problem is not to let the "successful" cranks dictate what can or cannot be researched. The present status of scientific exploration is bounded by funding and funding is doled out by cliques, who, not entirely unreasonably, make a quasi-informed attempt to evaluate the product potential of a given research proposal. Money goes to apparent potentially productive proposals.
Effectively, Dr. Mead's observation is that we are living with some useful facts that may be bound together with little but "just-so" stories. There are numerous areas where there are known empirical observations that seem to conflict with one aspect or another of some element of pre-existing theory. Unless the observations are so widely known and unequivocal - e.g. galactic rotational energy discrepancies, the observations are simply ignored - like continential drift was until observations accumulated that were so strongly supported and so wide spread that it was clear geological theory had to change.
These days attempting to openly get funding to improve, replicate, verify, or otherwise test an observation that appears to seriously conflict with existing theory can cause denial of access to instruments, funding, and to be classed as a "crank." It is no longer axiomatic that observation trumps theory, especially if theory has been implemented as mathematical models developed with expensive time on expensive equipment. It simply isn't socially acceptable to say, "well the model was wrong. We just blew $200,000,000," or something similar. It would arm religiously crackpots with annecdotes, p*%$ the funding community and generally embarass one and one's co-workers.
We're not making this up: Apple trademarks the SHOP
'Gaia' Lovelock: Wind turbines 'may become like Easter Island statues'
I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square
Thursday 31st January 2013 23:12 GMT
Paradox
Borland pretty well ruined Paradox, and dBASE IV as well. But, the lack of backward compatibility was something Microsoft did with Access as well. I recall being pretty well stuck in Israel and screaming at an MS support person when they said, "oh, you can't do that any more." I wanted to carry over unchanged values between records. Turned out you really can do it, but, it was no longer a trivial bit of code. In the first iteration or two the process was as simple as it was in dBASE. But with the third(? - around 2000) iteration the company decided to "help" all MS users by switching over to VB without fully implementing the capabilities of the system it was replacing. Paradox was and still is in many ways vastly superior, and for coding and quick apps, the dBASE-based languages (dBASE, Foxpro, Quicksilver, ..., were all way better).
Greenland ice did not melt in baking +8°C era 120k years ago
Thursday 24th January 2013 19:00 GMT
Re: I don't expect this to change anything
Read that again. That passage is CYA language from a scientist who doesn't want to walk the plank on his grants by fully contradicting the current faddishness. In fact, while "studies" have shown one thing, other studies have shown the precise opposite. Last fall another study of satellite data concluded that in fact, while Greenland's ice seems to have thinned around the edges, it also appeared to be gaining elevation along the crest. So in fact we know precisely what we knew before the studies were undertaken, which is precious little.
As for what the Eemian interstadial tells us, it is that no ecological catastrophe ensued from warmer temperatures. It also tells us that the present, regardless of which the thermometer is moving, not "unprecedented" in any sense. In fact, if you plot Holocene temperatures since the peak temperatures - about 8 kya - the trend is downward, which suggests that this interstadial will never see an Eemian-like climate.
Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows
Hyperspeed travel looks wrong: Leicester students
Tuesday 15th January 2013 23:10 GMT
Re: That blooper always annoyed me...
You plainly either didn't read the text accurately or the authors lied. The parsec, which does stand for "parallax second" is a standard unit of distance in astronomy equivalent 3.26 light years roughly. A bit of research indicates that it has been in use since 1913.
Tuesday 15th January 2013 22:59 GMT
Do you know ...
how the Millenium Falcon was powered and propelled? No? Then it wasn't important. In fact, are those actually clear ports on the MF or are they repeater screens? If the latter then how would you know what they would show? I would agree that a "starbow" would be a cool effect, but seriously.
Long-delayed Fedora Linux 18 arrives at last
Inside the new climate row as Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming
Monday 14th January 2013 23:29 GMT
Re: Chet Mannly
DO you know what the change in marine pH was? Because, if you don't, you should probably look up some useful terms like "buffering," "acid" vs. "alkaline," find out about neutral pH, etc. The only legitimate fact is one you missed. The warmer water is the less gas it can hold in solution. That includes - wait for it - oxygen. Any change in sea life is far more likely to be due to lower oxygenation, not acidification - the oceans are alkaline and will stay that way for the foreseeable future.
Monday 14th January 2013 23:29 GMT
Re: The meme that there has been no warming in 16 years is false
That is a hypothesis rather than a fact. What is a fact is that Kevin Trenberth has complained about the "missing" energy. Since it _assumed_ that it has not yet left building, the obvious conclusion is that the oceans have it, though Trenberth actually said the data had to be wrong. Right now, globally the oceans are cooler than they have been for a considerable while. For example see this: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2013/anomnight.1.14.2013.gif. Over half the marine surface shows a cool anomaly.
Monday 14th January 2013 23:21 GMT
What "extreme" weather?
It isn't a matter of ignoring it. Whether you perceive extreme weather is a function 1) age, 2) memory quality, 3) where you were or are being raised. Age means that if you are as old as I am, and your memory works at least as well as mine, then you remember of wetter, hotter, colder, and drier weather, unless Alzheimers is setting in. The present doesn't stand out over 60 years in any way. If you were raised in an urban setting your perceptions are biased by that as well. Cities exist to shelter people from the slings and arrows of nature in the raw. It is also worth remembering that if you "have to adjust" data, before using it, what you really need is either better data or a better theory that doesn't demand adjustment.
If you really worship the words of "authority" and "expert" opinion, you want remember that neither of those words has any scientific merit whatsoever. An authority in science is someone who publishes a lot. That just makes them wordy, not necessarily reliable or believable. An "expert" is someone a lawyer wants on his side. Dueling "experts" are not employed for nothing in jury trials. "Experts" don't necessarily agree, so it is more than likely that for every expert you trust, there is another expert with a contrary opinion that someone else trusts just as much. Government agencies have lawyers who actually train scientists in how to be "expert witnesses." Essential points in the training including picking the stance you mostly prefer and treating that view like you are absolutely convinced that it is the only true reality. Don't qualify anything - qualifications "open the door."
For a really apposite example from climate science, read the comparatively sane discussions between the "team" members in Climate Gate 1 and 2 emails that recognize problems, issues and express the concern that skeptics may have legitimate issues. Compare that with the profound certainty expressed by the team in public. My personal view is that agency lawyers "trained" the "team" members on how to talk to the media and the public.
Monday 14th January 2013 23:21 GMT
Re: Not the Met Office's fault.
Blindingly obvious move is to run trenches or berms across fields to increase drainage rates. In arid lands this is done to concentrate run off on field areas in wadis - the Negev is a good example where migratory Bedouin farmers and herdsmen have practiced this for centuries. In regions that are better watered, the same methods is sometimes employed to limit and collect sheet run off and direct it to channels more quickly. That reduces erosion on sloping fields that are already ploughed. Once saturated the entire slope might move, which would be bad. The strawberry growing areas around Watsonville in California are occasionally designed this way if there are serious sloped to deal with. Much of the area is short on clay and has an unfortunate vulnerability to gravity when wet.
'Red October' has been spying on WORLD LEADERS for 5 years - researchers
'Facebook is completely undreamt of even by the worst spying nation'
Friday 7th December 2012 21:17 GMT
sideways
I've a small digital microscope that is fine except for one truly aggravating quality. The image capture software operates the mouse sideways, moving the mouse horizontally moves the cursor vertically and of course vice versa. Imaging is fine, facilities for measuring are great. The requirement to lie down on your right side to make sense of the mouse movements is just strange. Never seen anything like it.
Einstein almost tagged dark energy in the early 1920s
Wednesday 5th December 2012 23:18 GMT
Hubble
Hubble called for revisiting the entire issue of "universal expansion" in 1948. He didn't like the idea and was dubious about the actual accuracy of the means used to estimate intergalactic distances. If the candles aren't quite as standard as one might wish, error creeps in. That in turn brought the correlation between red shift and any putative cosmic expansion into question. By then Gamow had grabbed to loaf and stuffed it with raisins making a homely metaphor that even English majors could feel they understood.
Dawn of the X-Men? MUTANTS swarm AMONG US, say geneticists
Boffin claims Bigfoot DNA reveals BESTIAL BONKING
Wednesday 28th November 2012 05:44 GMT
Re: I can't believe I'm commenting on this....
The actual press release indicates that both Neanderthal and Denisovans are ruled out. That still leaves "hobbits" - the little guys from Indonesia, who were around 15 kya, and potentially others as well. Of course, if you want to consider the universe only 6,000 years old, you also have to conclude that whoever did the work was not only a really able forger, but a practical joker, since Slartybartfast or whoever did it, built the universe to appear at least 14 billion years old, and included the duckbilled platypus.
Heroic Register reader battles EXPLODING COMPUTER
Monday 26th November 2012 07:45 GMT 
Smoke and electronics
Hmmm, I recall an associate attempting to convince our boss that since the smoked had escaped from said boss's computer that the electronics would no longer function. We assured him that electronics ran on smoke and that once the smoke had escaped, it was nearly impossible to to put back. In this case it was a harddrive whose onctroller board suddenly emitted a "snap" and a puff of smoke. From what we could tell, the only unbacked-up data was his stash of scanned pr0n. Everything else was backed up daily, weekly and monthly. He was in deeo denial for a bit, then acquired his own personal scanner.
BOFH: The Great Patch Mismatch
IBM insider: How I caught my wife while bug-hunting on OS/2
Friday 23rd November 2012 22:47 GMT
Re: Really?
Yes, really. Are you too young to remember? Turn it on, head off to get cup of coffee because the boot took so long, return, and BSOD stares back. OS/2 on the other hand was quite capable of reversing a problem configuration nearly automatically. You booted following an installation and something was haywire and required a reboot, the OS would stop and provide a list of prior configurations and you could step back through them until one worked. Even now Windoze doesn't not recover this easily.
Ten Linux apps you must install
Wednesday 21st November 2012 08:36 GMT
Re: Normal people don't use Linux
"I've just wasted several days trying different versions of Ubuntu and Mint on a new netbook."
Hmm, after several days trying at least two different distros, against - how long was it you said you've been using Windows? Oh, you didn't. You know what they say, practice makes perfect. The difference in useability between Linux and Windows is centered almost solely in cost. Windows costs money, since MS has more or less forced most computer uses to learn their products. Linux costs the time it takes to learn to use it. It s true any OS. I've never like Mac's OS's either. They were saddled with the adjective "intuitive" by folks who never learned what the word means. There are no "intuitive" OS's or interfaces, just people who do or do not want to make the effort to learn.
BOFH: Hasta la Vista... luser
Saturday 17th November 2012 01:47 GMT
Ah - the good old days
I recall a hysterical scream from the office manager one morning. Went running out to discover the owner had carelessly left her computer up, software loaded, and a magazine in the scanner. Apparently he had been scanning pr0n to "share." The OM was extremely fundamentalist - whack job actually, who expected the world to end that year (mid-'90s) - but she grabbed the owner by his nose (really) when he came in and explained the carelessness that had so upset her that if something like it ever happened again, she expected she would own the complany. Two days later I booted up, and lo and behold, my graphic program also launched! What was this I saw????? What IS that she's - well - not wearing. So, that evening upon leaving, I left my careffully dismantled chair in apparent useable shape right where it belonged. Next day, peices on the floor and astonishingly, the owner is out because he suffered a back injury working in his yard. Heh, heh, heh. It was a crappy chair anyway. I even got a new one out of it.
Galapagos islands bombed with 22 tonnes of Blue Death Cornflakes
Friday 16th November 2012 20:02 GMT
Curious as to what variety of rat they are
Rats have been a problem in the Pacific for a long time, predating European guano miners in fact. The asian rat followed along with the first Polynesian immigrants. The evidence that rats killed the palm forests on Easter Island is pretty good, though discussions on the reduction of bird numbers seems to turn to humans more than rats.
SECRET 28 'scientific experts' who Greened the BBC - Revealed!
Wednesday 14th November 2012 09:10 GMT
AGW? Really, we need it
Plant productivity essentially stops at CO2 concentrations of about 140 ppm, We are presently at about twice that. Notably, the *only* other time in the last 500 MY that armospheric CO2 has been nearly this low was about 300 MYA at the Carboniferous-Permian boundary. The remainder of the planet's history has seen CO2 levels much higher, and based upon the fossil evidence, much more biologically productive. In any case halving atmospheric CO2 would be "a bad idea," very bad, especially if it is keeping us out of another ice age. Dubious, but Arrhenius suggested it. Now, companies like Monsanto and Dupont that sell fertilizer and that produce GMOs might not be concerned. They may see market opportunities. Possibly they can produce fertizers that can help plants regardless, and patented GMOs that will tolerate low CO2. But, do you really like that idea? AGW may be a good a bad theory - personal bet is bad - but regardless, reducing CO2 right now would be sociologically, economically, and militarily speaking a really poor idea. Lower crop productivity will drive increased famine, increasing immigration and warfare, and benefiting very few. Likewise, supposing that CO2 is actually the magical molecule that AGW theory makes it out to be, cooling the planet has the same effect. Habitable zones move south. Canada invades the US, Scotland invades Britain, Russia invades Turkey. Chaos all around. It quite literally doesn't matter whether AGW is real or if the warming we see is natural. Stopping it is not a good idea.
Habitable HEAVY GRAVITY WORLD found just 42 light-years away
Patent troll sues just about the whole tech biz over 4 years
Apple engineers 'pay no attention to anyone's patents', court told
Wednesday 7th November 2012 19:59 GMT
Re: If they do not, then they are negligent
Written like a patent lawyer, or someone who thinks their ideas are unique and important because they occurred in close physical association with their personal cerumen. The fact is, not chasing down someone-else's delusions of intellectual grandeur on file at the patent office bolsters the legal argument that the solution was obvious. That can then be hauled out when some troll tries to pirate the work based upon the obscure language of a patent.
Gamma ray telescope uses 'blazars' to map GLOWING COSMIC FOG
Dry martini, shaken not stirred: Cracking the physics of Bond's martini
BOFH: Uninterruptible patsy supply
Tuesday 30th October 2012 21:26 GMT
Re: Eat your own dog food
Heh. Many moons ago - the '90s actually - I and my wingman were told to build some servers, since it was cheaper than buying them. We went shopping and came back with all the parts, highest quality we could grab within the budget set. The owner nearly fainted though when he saw the cases we got. He insisted we wait while he dashed off to trade in the cases for far less expensive stamped pieces that were vaguely prismatic in form and which lacked right angles in any plane at any corner. The covers were also oddly non-Euclidian. Tightening down a cover caused the MB to torc, popping out cards and memory like a Las Vegas slot machine hitting a jackpot. Just sliding the cover on was OK, but of course left the innards exposed the inside to a fair bit of rapid cruft accumulation. The boss liked to bring in his Golden Retriever to work. The cases lasted until shedding season led to a strong odor of burning hair.
When asked what the hell WE did, we simply explained that 1) those cheap cases could not be properly closed up without causing equipment failure, so the covers didn't serve much purpose except to keep errant paper planes from shorting something critical, and 2) the hair that had caught fire and ruined the video card was not off OUR dog. Sadly, we had to rebuild everything.
LARGEST BELCH EVER SEEN devastates gassy GIANT Saturn
While sea ice grows, Antarctica sheds land ice
Wednesday 24th October 2012 20:16 GMT
Melting???
According to this, on the continent proper, only the Antarctic Penninsula sees weather that reaching temperatures above freezing. Some islands close to the continent do see "warm" temperatures annually. The point is, if the temperature never gets above freezing, then that ice is not melting. It is subliming, and if there is a loss of mass, the annual precipitation has declined enough that the loss from sublimation is not compensated for by precipitation. This the same reason the ice fields on Kilimanjaro have declined. Drier air over the continent is far more likely to be due to cooler air then to warmer air.
US climate-change skeptics losing support
Tuesday 23rd October 2012 18:43 GMT
Re: Considering the Lewandowsky scandal ...
If you hark back to Sir Francis Bacon, the entire point of the scientific method is to separate opinion and expectations from results. Ideally, the investigator performs the experiment without manhandling the datat and then forms or revises opiinons based upon results. However, picking data sets that match one's expectations, or "adjusting" data to reflect what it ought to, violates that intended separation.
The problem in "climate science" lies not only in models that can neither forecast nor hind cast accurately, but in the fact that organizations like GISS and CRU "adjust" the raw measurement data beyond recognition. GISS has been consistently adjusting pre-WWII data with neither explanation nor justifications offered. Worse, the adjustments lower historical temperatures, while they elevate modern measurements. The single biggest change seems to be linked to TOBS (time of observation), but that adjustment if valid should apply even more to historical data than to the present, where observations are largely automated. The apparent sign of the adjustment in short appears to be reversed. It would interesting to subtract the trend in adjustment, from the purported trend in global temperature just to see the sign of the residual if there is one.
Monday 22nd October 2012 07:39 GMT
That 97% figure
It is not clear in the article and there might be another "97%" figure floating about cyberspace. However, the original "97%" was a sad day in social science, quite like more recent Australian university fun. The initial "survey" by Doran and Zimmerman in 2009 had over 10,000 surveys sent out. Over 3,000 response were returned. However, the survey author apparently did not like the majority of the responders for some reason and "refined" the sample until he/she had 77 "actively publishing climate research." Of those 77 considered to be active "climate scientists" 75 considered anthropic influences to be an important element in the behaviour of the climate during the last half century. Thus 75/77 * 100 = 97.4%. If I recall correctly, and I may not, this broke shortly before the Climategate fun, which pretty much swamped the available band width.
Worse though, the specification of "actively publising" highlighted a point that appeared later in the Climategate battle. The emails show that the active AGW theorists were actively working at preventing opposing views from being published. This included threatening to take "important" papers to more friendly (to the A in AGW) venues if certain author's papers were published. At the same time the "friendly" reviews that allies received have occasionally been so bad that papers have been withdrawn for appallingly bad work. Just this summer Gergis et al was withdrawn. It purported to discuss warming in Australian climate where it was shown that really poor - or very biased - data selection had a strong influence on teh result. The biases were so blatant that the paper was permanently withdrawn.
US patent office prepares to kill off Apple's bounce-back patent
Tuesday 23rd October 2012 18:21 GMT
Banning...
... and invalidating software patents would definitely be a start. Eliminating patents altogether might not hurt either. Treat what you would once have patented as a trade secret. That would allow anyone trying to decide what hardware to buy or software to use to decide strictly by cost and features, which would be a real shot in the arm for the industry. Competition would increase rather than waster time and treasure battling over patents. More importantly, it would require patent trolls to get a real job.
Curiosity scoops up SHINY BITS from the RED SANDS of MARS!
Friday 19th October 2012 22:36 GMT
Quartz and ...
The "bright" piece looks like a bit of white quartz. What I find very interesting is the soil itself. The fine gravel or coarse sand appears rounded - well rounded in fact. Here on the Blue Planet that means water transport. Also, notice that the very fine sand adheres together in small clusters of grains and that a lot of the rounded pea gravel has coatings of fine sand that are more than one grain thick. That looks remarkably like slightly damp, very fine sand. The problem is NASA didn't include a scale.
Pints all round as Register Special Projects hacks hack off feet
Wednesday 17th October 2012 16:42 GMT
Re: four by two?
On an archaeological project in Israel, we needed wood to build screens (sifters to you Brits) and discovered that "1X4"s and "2X4"s (in the US the smaller number is listed first) were actually full sized rather than nominal. Here in the US the cross section of a "nominal" 2X4 is slightly less than two-thirds of the area of a fully dimensioned piece. Our Israeli screens actually were deeper than the equivalent US version built from "nominal" lumber. We had to sand the wood since it was all rough sawn, but that doesn't make that much of a change in dimension.
The "explanation" usually given for the undersized lumber is that smoothing lumber to S4S requires removing 1/2 an inch in width and 1/4 inch in thickness. Humbug, I think. The parent "rough-sawn" pieces were under-sized to begin with.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
