Posts by Charles Manning 3509 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jun 2007
Mythbusters make too many assumptions to be considered science. They "busted" the story about using mirrors to burn a ship because they could not reproduce it (yet MIT did manage to do it).
IIRC, the Mythbusters on shooting vertically used pistol ammo which has a high surface area and poor aerodynamics. A rifle bullet, OTOH, has a nice boat hull shape and bloody good aerodynamics - nothing like a pistol bullet .
There is definitely a symbolic down-side to firing blank ammo at a wedding. Firing blanks == infertility.
Blank ammo also does not cycle an automatic/semi-auto weapon since it does not generate pressure against the bullet to feed the gas chamber.
You could of course use one of those red muzzle plugs but that would make you look like a bit of a wuss. and line you up for innuendo about your dick being blocked.
Nope. It has to be live ammo, fully auto.
Rolling, and unscheduled, blackouts are common in South Africa, as well as theft of power cable (scrap copper) and so any such system will need monster backup generators.
Armed guards would then be needed to guard the fuel, generators and equipment.
Then a second set of guards is needed to protect the fuel from theft by the first set of guards.
Then a small 24 hour hospital will be needed to patch up the guards when they get into gunfights.
The hospital will need security lighting etc to protect the hospital from theft.
Now you have light pollution problems and will need to move.
While you might have an excellent education in chemistry and physics, these only take you so far in the AGW arena.
AGW research is pretty much all based on mathematical models. The most important background for creating and understanding these models is a very good understanding of statistics etc so that you can understand the integrity of the models.
But seeing you claim (through your unwavering faith) that the models are based on sound physics, I have a question for you. Where's the latent heat in these models? Warming is about adding heat, not about changing temperature. Temperature is only a secondary effect.
The UEA models go on and on about temperature. Since they are not modeling heat they need little "tweak factors" to keep their models from falling over. That results in a fragile model that is useless for making predictions.
"working very hard were being continually harrassed by a small number of 'deniers', most probably lobbyists for those for whom decreased CO2 emissions would be a bad thing"
As soon as anyone asks for a bit of proof they get branded as oil lobbyists. Please. That's a pretty lame way of doing "science". Most of the very active "deniers" are just scientists that recalculate and audit the statistical models and point out glaring holes. They do this because they don't want science to be so badly abused.
It was my understanding that even the AGW brigade have dropped the Hockey stick because it is so broken.
"With the surplus gas we had available we wanted to put it to good use in a sustainable and efficient way,"
If they wanted to do that then all they needed to do was run it through a generator and push the leccy back onto the grid - just like they do in hundreds of waste treatment plants world wide.
Here in Christchurch NZ, the waste treatment place generates all its own power for building airconditioning, pumping, lights etc and then still manages to put quite a bit back on the grid. That's nothing exceptional. Many places do the same.
Running a car on the stuff is less sustainable and efficient use of the energy than making leccy, but it sure looks green and clean to those that don't understand numbers. Makes good PR for the Great Unwashed.
The earth surface + computer is revolving the centre of the Earth at approx 300 metres/second.
The Earh moves around the sun at approx 9500km/sec
And the sun is moving through space at ???
So what's the chance of you ever being in the right place to decrypt the data?
This sounds like a very cool way to siphon up DARPA funding without ever being stuck in the position that you can be proved wrong.
If you get in your car on a busy road you're not going to achieve max speed. You need to pick a place/time where there is little traffic.
Try your internet speed at 2 am in the morning when the traffic is light and you might achievefull speed so long as the rest of the neighbourhood are not downloading DVDs.
I regularly get 50% more than advertised speed at off-peak times, but then I don't have a very typical ISP.
Your 30 or 60 mpg car won't achieve that in all conditions (stuck in traffic, going up mountain passes,...) which is why a lot of the mpg tests are actually done with modelling rather than real road driving. Perhaps, as you suggest, ISPs should have to provide numbers based on an agreed set of models.
Blame the surrounding culture.
Pascal was designed for teaching and thus all the pascal material is focused on education, readability and other noble attributes.
C is proud of its hairy-chested association with people who like to write y = **x++;
It is however possible to write easy to read code in C, and I've seen plenty shite Pascal too.
So 10 out of 11 people have no problems and love the sexy new design.
1 out of 11 people has problems. Of those with the problem, most will likely adapt to using the Jobsian Grip or put on the bumper thing and few will actually return the device for a refund.
Sure these problems are foreseeable, but that does not make it the wrong choice. A dropped call is not the end of the universe, particularly when there are workarounds.
It is also foreseeable that people will crash cars and kill themselves with chainsaws (resulting in far worse outcomes than a dropped call). Yet people manage to learn to use these technologies in a reasonably safe way.
The first was around 1995 or so and there have been various others between then and now - all of which have failed.
Tablets were always BillG's pet form factor and he'd show off some new tablety feature at every consumer electronics show.
Remember that Apple makes money from consumer space while MS has only ever made money from Big Corporates. MS tried to push tablets into utility field worker and hospital roles but these all require a long battery life. That's just something x86 is not designed to deliver.
Perhaps she was born in the sticks and likes to live there, but if she wants mod cons she should consider moving.
I bet they won't build an opera house next door because she likes opera. I bet Tescos won't build a shop close by to give her 24x7 shopping. Why should BT have to give her uneconomical broadband?
There are alternatives like satellite. The silly old bat could go to http://www.broadbandwherever.net/
I live and work rurally in New Zealand. I have wireless broadband which gives me 2Mb/s. It costs more than city BB and is slower. I could move in to town and get high speed BB. I could also pay a few 100k to get all the trenching and cabling done to get city BB here. Instead I take the compromise.
500,000,000,000 flies can't be wrong.
Read some Thomas Kuhn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Samuel_Kuhn)
The reason why BMI does not die is the same as why all sorts of theories take so long to die. The theories become part of the establishment. Too many research papers refer to BMI and use it as a metric. To dispense with BMI would mean scrapping a whole lot of PhD theses etc and no researcher wants to do that.
Some is good for well over 10^6 cycles.
Some is only good for 10^4 or less cycles.
There are a lot of other factors. High and low temperatures cause problems too.
The real cheap stuff is designed for typical camera/mp3 player use. In the lifetime of a typical MP3 player you would not be filling the unit more than a hundred times or so.
If you're using the flash for buffering streaming video etc then that's a completely different matter.
Remember that SCO lawyer, Kevin McBride, is Darl's brother. All SCO litigation was basically shoveling money from SCO into the McBride family.
The job isn't done while there is still money to be had.
While Darl might be gone from SCO, the case can still be kept going for a bit longer.
One problem with using any general purpose CPUs is that they are limited to the operations that the CPU provides. There are many algorithms that would work better with custom instructions and likely search falls in that category.
Enter Writable Instruction Set Computing (WISC). WISC allows you to take a core and tack on special purpose instructions to build a CPU that does what you want.
While I expect Google already uses custom FPGA logic etc, WISC takes the integration one step further.
Perhaps that's what they're up to.
Perhaps someone heard "Apple is going to buy an ARM chip maker" and could not tell the difference between that and buying ARM.
But what's in it for Apple? There just does not seem to be any sense in trying to take over the whole ARM industry. Likely many ARM employees would leave and an IP-centric organisation like ARM is really only just the sum of their grey matter.
Some partial ownership perhaps makes sense.
You can't leave it to the functional programming people. Most of them are so seriously lacking in social skills they can barely speak, let alone convince people of the benefits of a language.
These odd-ball languages tend to end up being used by odd-ball people. Most love the idea that their language is close to impossible to use. For a flavour of what I mean, go look at comp.lang.apl.
Amongst all the armchair experts it is good to see someone understands the issue.
The biggest threat to iphone would be if it was commoditised as just a phone with an OS. That would give people an easy migration from one to platform to another. Objecttive C forces people to make a choice.
But they better be careful about branding... If they push both Sidekick-ish and business phones through the same brands then they're going to erode their current position in the business phone market. They really don't need to re-run the Vista Home vs Vista Ultimate fiasco in mobile space.
The younger generation want something fashionable. Unfortunately for MS, they justy don't understand how to create a fashion brand like, say, Apple do. MS phones for the average teen/twenty-something just won't work for the same reason that Zune didn't. Why would anyone link their image to Zune etc when they can buy an iphone/ipod?
If MS do go after the kids then they're cutting off the only area where they have had any semblance of mobile success: Business phones.
It depends what they bought PA for. Did they just want some IP or did they want all the bodies too? Likely Apple only wanted some of the bodies.
PA Semi built a wide range of parts, including military stuff which Apple likely has little interest in. Undoubtedly being part of a business unit not aligned to Apple's future would make you feel rather worried and frustrated. Perhaps the employees that left had nothing to do with producing chips for Apple and left to joiun some other military chip outffit.
Putting Phone in the OS name makes for clumsy statements.
"Foobar phone powered by Microsoft Phone 7".
But they're just polishing a turd. Should have called it ZunePhone and just killed it humanely.
MS phones have only really scored any traction in the corporate world. Their new toy interface is far more geared towards the average user (who would rather have an iphone etc). Microsoft are surely demolishing their own market.
Technically WinCE is not much good for future smartphones. Multi-core phones are on the horizon and WinCE has no multi-core support. Unless MS have found a way to steer around multi-core issues this is going nowhere.
HP and Compaq, once a respectable companies, got Carlified and screwed into a coma. That should have been enough to satisfy a lifetime of destructive urges.
But now she wants to screw up the whole of California. I wonder how she'll do that? Perhaps merge California with Mexico then screw them both up.
Most have a real time clock as well as a high precision clock used to do the satellite tracking. The realtime clock is a crappy thing like what's in your PC/PDA . The tracking clock is more typically a much more accurate TCXO from Rakon or similar.
The TCXO does not have to be calibrated for real time since it is not measuring the range between the satellite and yourself, but is instead measuring the **difference** in the range from you to satellite A and satellite B. That tells you that A is, say, 2507 metres further away than B and A is 457789 metres further than C and so on.. These differences get fed into a bunch of simultaneous equations etc which figure out where everything is.
The TCXO does not have to be atomic accurate since the tracking logic has to handle clock error anyway due to the doppler effect of moving satellites.
Unfortunately the masking tape unsticks and the cardboard gets soggy in the rain, but it looks neat on youtube.
btw: IIRC, Zunes do not run WinCE. Soon after the Zune's release I spoke witha Microsoftie on the WinCE dev team taking the piss out of Zune and he was very keen to distance WinCE from Zune telling me Zune ran other software and not WinCE. Perhaps he could not face the shame and was lying.
Another of those "who cares if the science is made up, the facts are there anyway" arguments.
I agree wholeheartedly that we're probably stomping the planet harder than we should and I agree that pollution is bad, however that does not mean we should just act regardless of good science.
The biggest problem we have is that anything we do plays off one set of potential actions against others. To do that we need solid science.
As an example, consider the retreat of the Mt Kilimanjaro and Mt Kenya glaciers. The AGW folks will have us believe that this is due to Californian Hummer drivers. Those that think it is due to reduced local precipitation will point to localised deforestation and land use changes reducing the water that gets to the top to refresh the glacier. If the latter is true, then the green option might be to send Kenya and Tanzania subsidised kerosene for cooking so that they stop chopping down forests for fire wood.
The point of the science is to help us understand the issues better so that we can make good decisions. To achieve that, we need good impartial science, not the crap we've been served by UEA et al.
Large land masses are relatively easy to predict for because the air is more uniform and stable.
Here in New Zealand the weather is incredibly hard to predict because we have a tall (relative to the rest of the Pacific) mountin range along the spine of the country. Our weather tends to come in from the SW, end on to the mountain range. If it comes from a few degrees to the East then the area I live in gets cold, wet weather (even had light snow in the middle of summer). If the weather approaches a few degrees to the West then the western side cops the rain and we get hot, dry winds (35+C). The tiniest deviation in the approaching weather has a huge difference in outcome.
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