Posts by Ru

Re: Backronyms

You may find that SPB is mostly about the Increasingly Rambling Obtuse Neologisms, Y'know?

Desktop vs Tablet

Windows 8 on the desktop is quite different from Windows 8 on, say ARM devices. The latter will not have the schizophrenic UI that the last Reg article on win8 complained about; they will be solely Metro/WinRT devices. This article is about tablets, and the last thing they need is the old-style mouse'n'keyboard driven Windows UI; Metro is a perfectly good fit for them.

I don't know about Windows 8 on x86 tablets, mind you.

What this mostly shows is that the ability of MS to do sensible product naming and branding is as poor as ever.

Re: Wait a minute...

It has been done before: cow clicker.

Anyway, of course the box will open; Molyneux always wants to share his Vision with the rest of the world, regardless of whether it is particularly interesting or not.

Re: Not impressed

The 45mpg of the Ampera is indeed a bit disappointing. By the sounds of things, they've tried to be a bit too clever with the drive train (its a bit Prius-esque, and that's not brilliant, efficiency wise), which in turn means that they couldn't manage a purely electric drive system with a fuel-driven generator keeping it topped up.

It isn't at all clear to me why they chose petrol instead of diesel, too. Maybe its a sporty car image thing, or maybe they don't like diesel cars over the atlantic? Oh well, maybe the next model will be better.

But as for you '100 miles on battery' thing... it is possible that a purely electric drive train with a combustion engine generator could be more efficient than a plain old combustion. Roll on a commercial Bladon turbine driven IEP, eh?

Re: 10mW/mm^2?

Sure, that sort of intensity wouldn't do an organic retina much good but, y'know, it isn't projecting on to one of those. The non-light sensitive bits of your eye are made of sterner stuff that the retina, too.

There are plenty of other bits of the eye that can be damaged, and it would be a bit crap for a device that is intended to replace your sight to become useless after a couple of weeks because it gave you cataracts.

Re: How localised coverage?

Is it not a matter of them using conventional orbits, but having a fairly sparse constellation? Presumably any given point on the Earth's surface can see these satellites at one time or another, but only certain bits of the planet can actually guarantee sufficient coverage for a positioning system to work?

This makes more sense if the Beidou-1 satellites are involved too, given that they are in geostationary orbits.

Re: "I thought that all 'jet' engines had supersonic airflow in the combustion chamber"

There's supersonic flow out of the chamber, but with the exception of scramjets there's no supersonic flow into it. The output of the compression stage of a turbojet or ramjet or whatever is high pressure subsonic air. Its that high pressure that stops any sort of blowback.

Re: "assuming Linux ever supports touch in a usable fashion"

I hear that "Android" linux distro supports touch reasonably well these days.

Re: recycle

If we assume the cost of building, launching and running your average new sattelite is going to be in the same ballpark as building, launching and running a repair and refuel spacecraft (which is a generous assumption) there are still two big arguments against it:

1. Trying to dock with a defunct sattelite risks both the sattelite and the repair craft, and an accident produces huge clouds of debris which will endanger other spacecraft for many years to come.

2. A new sattelite is likely to use significantly fancier technology than its n-year old predecessor, and will therefore be rather more useful.

With that sort of risk/reward tradeoff, I don't see anyone running repair missions any time soon, not until we've managed another generation or two of ever cheaper launch vehicles at the very least.

Re: dum dum dum

What makes you think that there won't be trials of autonomous security systems?

"Here we demonstrate the 'three bears' automatic intruder control system. As you can see, without resort to human control, it can terminate an interloper without spilling any blood, and move the body several miles out of town and bury it leaving minimally distrubed soil. Next up, the 'white wash' forensic-grade cleaning robot..."

Re: "rather than just pushing ONLY DC"

If your car accepts standard AC, you can charge it anywhere regardless of the availability of charging equipment. You could just nail a suitable plug onto the end of a standard domestic power lead or industrial 3phase outlet... this is pretty much how basic home charging is done on most e-vehicles anyway.

Making the charger optional makes life easier for everyone, except the sorts of people who get angry about power sockets.

Good point

Perhaps some kind soul should suggest to the engineers of the security question system that they don't allow freeform responses and instead allow the user to choose one of a number of possible answers.

This makes it much harder for them to forget, or to accidentally enter something that isn't a colour for their favourite colour and best of all reduces the attack surface of the security question handling service by removing the need to handle naked user supplied text!

Sounds like a win-win to me.

"everybody else along the tissue/organ supply chain rakes in the big bucks"

To be fair, you can't just scoop the spare vitals out of a cooling body, bung em in a jiffy bag and mail them to hopeful soul on dialysis or whatever. There's a fair number of highly trained folk involved and a decent amount of very specialised equipment to boot.

I presume you are talking about the US medical system. This is what you get when you're so deathly afraid of 'socialism' and the government taxing you and spending money on your fellow citizens.

Re: "fewer plausible excuses"

That has never stopped any MP. They will only consider the advice of their advisors when it matches what they think needs to be done in order to be re-elected.

It hasn't stopped any unelected civil servants either, who will either ignore the advice of advisors that goes against their current plans, or will simply search for advisors who share their worldview and appoint them to suitable QUANGOs.

Does the average daily mail reader care what a techy has to say? Evidence would suggest not. So appointing such people to positions of responsibility will either never happen, or be a meaningless gesture to the rest of us.

Re: "I don't care..."

Gosh, well aren't you a brave anonymous coward.

I note there is nothing of interest in the history you posted, assuming it is true. Perhaps you'd be less keen to share anything about a history of mental illness, or surgery following an unfortunate intimate vacuum cleaner accident, or perhaps the results of a blood test that came back positive for something communicable and unpleasant?

The article, if you bothered to read it, involved a psychological evaluation which presumably falls into the category of things you might not want the world to know.

If you cannot comprehend why someone might be unhappy at personal, private information being released into the wild by an organisation they have to trust, perhaps you should not comment on articles about such?

Re: "I disagree that the man did not want to gain anything"

I'd put my grammar nazi hat on, but I'll let the use of "preclude" slide for now.

One might download a copy of some code in order to study it for further vulnerabilities. One cannot do that with a list of credit card numbers; they are readily useable for fraud but have no other particular use outside of purchases by their legitimate owner. That doesn't preclude (note usage) a 'good intentions' defence however... given the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing, so long as you don't have a whole load of searches from your IP address for things like 'selling credit card numbers' or 'credit card fraud for dummies' you might well find that you are merely punished for computer misuse.

"The sentance may well have been disproportionate in the original case but the guy chose to take the risk, got burned and now has a criminal record because of it."

Sentance, you say? Are you the OP? Any, I'm not disputing that he committed a crime and I don't object to him being punished for it. Presumably the number of downvotes suggests that the there are a handful of commentards who cannot read or comprehend this, despite me saying it 3 times so far.

Original sentence (note spelling) was a bit harsh. We agree on that. New sentence a bit more sensible. We agree on that. In fact, it doesn't matter even if we disagreed, because the Judge clearly feels the same way as I do about the issue. What Mr. Mangham could have done with the code, and how Facebook felt about the whole issue is quite irrelevant.

What else could release that much energy in one go?

I assume also that any demolition project that will generate shockwaves of equal or greater magntitude will be refused permission. Any heavy goods vehicle that crashes will result in the immediate and permanant ban of anything larger than long wheel base vans within a 200 mile radius of the incident.

And don't get me started on fireworks. The lifeboat station near where I grew up used this utterly irresponsible devices called 'maroons' to alert staff, and those things could easily generate a bang that might rattle single glazing nearby... I'm assuming in future that the RNLI will be severely reprimanded, and refused leave to do anything other than have a guy stand outside the lifeboat station and shout 'guys? time to go!'.

Formally public?

But informally, just a gentlemanly agreement and a promise of cash in hand, I presume?

Re: Outstanding

I sincerely hope that the UK doesn't get into the retrospective law enforcement game.

We already have laws and regulations in place to extract money from Vodaphone, but dear old Dave saw to it that we did not. The Indians did not, and decided that they'd just change the rules to suit their needs.

Re: avant garde design; zero usefulness.

Well, given Starck's experience in rendering a useful everyday object pretty but quite unusable, I'd say you should all expect some sort of shiny mobile communications device which when picked up with a bare hand loses all signal reception because you've shorted the antenna to ground.

Re: DOES ANBODY UNDERSTAND THIS

If you can't resist troll feeding, please at least concentrate on funny trolls. This guy is just dull.