Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
"Engineering is approximate physics for profit"
I find it slightly ironic that the very subject that brought this up - construction of rockets, and by extension the original Space Race and flight to the moon - could only possibly define "profit" in a very roundabout and indirect sense, as pertaining to the Saturn era efforts...
Of course Thunderbirds are real! I piloted them myself many times through my trusty Speccy clone...
Huh - turns out Black Hat guy actually uses Transformer Pads! The alt text mistakenly attributes his grip on the laptop's display to his intention to "make us cringe", but Transformer Pads are actually supposed to be held by their "displays" (a complete, heavy tablet) since the lower part only contains the feather-weight keyboard "dock", and the detachable hinge is a bit delicate. Then again this is Black Hat guy we're talking about - Occam looks a bit confused on this... :)
"which part of the state brings in more money to it: Hollywood or Silicon Valley?"
Seriously? Everyone knows there's no money at all in Hollywood - it's a purely non-profit outfit...
Oh, I'm sure it really wasn't anything vitally important to the flight - probably something of no consequence like that fuel gage reported and neatly labelled "out of order" on that plane that would have told the pilot he's going to run out of fuel mid-flight because he's being refuelled in metric instead of imperial (or something like that) and doesn't have enough naphta to stay up there for long enough...
"The remaining 7 hours per day should have been ample time to have some sort of project on the side you could spin into something fancy."
Yes. And given the chance, one of these days heat is going to start passing spontaneously from a colder body to a warmer one, scout's honour! And people will start proactively applying system upgrades on late Friday afternoons instead of going to the pub! And cats and dogs will live in harmony too! And pigs will... oh, get a f##### clue.
In all fairness, it IS utterly infuriating to be told by a major online retailer form a certain islander EU member that "sorry we are no longer shipping to your (also EU member) country". I'm so glad to hear collective guilt is alive and well, half a century after the Germans invented it - dealing with whatever problems they might have had on a customer-by-customer basis is clearly too much trouble and anyway nobody should be forced to serve blacks innit...
Not to question how much money was spent advertising a (rightfully trademark-able) name like "Big Mac", but I'm kinda rolling all over the floor laughing uncontrollably at the "huge" amount of creativity that can go into creating a "specific" burger, namely either one or two layers of cheese, beef and lettuce between two buns - that don't even turn out anything remotely recognizable when served compared to the depicted versions of the allegedly same thing. Mine is the one with the box of "royale with cheese" in the pocket...
"Next to security, error handling is the most neglected part of software development. "
The sentiment is admirable, but as stack trace avoidance advice it is thoroughly useless. Apparently one of the unwritten rules of the Universe is that if you take pains to trap and handle exceptions in all the ten places they can occur, they will only ever happen in the eleventh place that nobody even imagined could generate exceptions...
"Give them a real job"
Aye, they'll be begging to go back to the dickwolves after we break out the barbed wire cat o' nine tails and show them how hard Real Men are supposed to work...
Relax, citizen. Your phone has been in contact with you car's network and knows the airbags have deployed. The emergency services and the police have already been notified. Do not concern yourself with practical matters now, there's no need - detailed video, driver input and instrumentation data of the last minute preceding the crash is already being reviewed by your insurance company. Cars approaching your contorted wreck are automatically warned to avoid you. Based on the slowing pulse detected by your fitness clock/bracelet you're not long for this world, so right now your phone is tactfully inquiring whether you'd like it to call a loved one...
"Hollywood movies messed up everyone's expectations in this regard."
Nonsense. If anything, the historical documents movies have thought us that the only absolutely reliable way to confirm a questionable identity is by kissing. I anxiously await the day when machines get equipped with _all_ the appropriate hardware interfaces for a thoroughly exhaustive identification of that nature - I insist securing my bed to the highest standard...
Okay - what I'd REALLY LIKE TO KNOW is why any attempt to include a link to www.dansdata.com in this post results in either "bad gateway" from cloudflare or "invalid html" from El Reg, whereas even a single letter difference lets the preview perfectly through. Repeatably, any number of times. Should I start listening for these?!? -->
"Actually, I hadn't come across the Swiss Cheese thing until reading this article, and it looks like a useful thing for a number of applications."
Could have been summed up equally effectively in a single sentence, along the lines of "whenever an air crash happens it's almost never the result of a single failure* but rather an unfortunate coincidence of all involved safeguards failing at the same time"...
*yeah okay that crash involving the horizontal stabilizer actuator nut stripping out its threads due to inadequate greasing was pretty much a single point of failure.
No offence, but by the time you crammed all that into a single phone, it's the size of a 3.5" HDD, at the absolute very least. I'm not quite sure why that is better than standalone instruments than can potentially be accessed through a traditional smartphone - as long as you're carrying the "large battery" (=external LiPo power brick) anyway, the difference isn't much; the volume is the same, whether you duct-tape it to the phone or not. Not that I wouldn't like to have all that with me - but if it makes the phone the size of a Fluke portable, I have a problem...
It might be, but if it does end up (moderately) popular in the end, I predict it will be because some out-of-the-left-field but unexpectedly useful / popular modules(s) that you just can't get on typical phones, and not because of the traditional types of modules currently envisioned.
" the guy was sitting next to a TV playing a war film"
Would that really work though given that the address to send the replacement laptop would completely give away the game...? Unless you're sitting next to a TV playing a war film IN a war zone, in which case I'd say you've earned it anyway...
They're stuck in the "lock it behind sturdy vault doors and regulate tightly access to explosives that can be used to build shaped charges that could cut through that (while keeping some of those handy for our use)" mindset.
They know they want and need encryption but since there's no such thing as a shaped charge or a thermal lance against properly hard crypto, they insist they want a copy of the actual key to every single vault door. Or a smaller, regular front door right next to the giant armoured one for their exclusive use - they'll never give anyone the key to that, scout's honour, and definitely nobody else will try to break _that_ down instead of the main one...! (and this post just lit up a bunch of filters somewhere like a Christmas tree...)
I don't see the problem (or much contribution on their part, to be honest): Google Translate already does text-to-text translation between a fair number of languages, and it has an option to download often-used languages for offline use; I have several downloaded on a half-decade old phone and I'm not even noticing it's there. Obviously, one only needs to add voice recognition and text-to-speech to complete the circuit - no idea whether something doing just that already exists or not, but neither technology is exactly stranger to smartphones nor has been for a long, long, long time now. So, while it might sound impressive, I'm certainly underwhelmed by the "achievement"...
Actually, I'd like to do that in an FPGA. But not the CPU (and not the 6502) - but the equivalent of the discrete TTL-based version my old Spectrum clone had for a "ULA"; then hook it up to an honest-to-goodness physical Z80 CPU (that unsuspecting one over there snoozing in my drawer) and some RAM and take it from there... I reckon even a really small FPGA (or a really large CPLD) would suffice for that... :)
Look, that's a stupid way to think about it - do you really want to switch off the Sun for maintenance and start reassembling hydrogen atoms inside it piecemeal...? Instead, we could just steer the whole Earth into a closer orbit - and considering that would be a lower energy orbit in the gravity well of the sun, pocket all the energy liberated in the process! Win-win!
"Why set such a low limit for yourself? How about 1000 percent?"
That's right! Any football team can give 110% but high-tech solar panels can't?!? Science nerds, will you let yourself be humiliated by a bunch of jocks yet again...? Inconceivable! 1000% or bust!!!
"So not 'hibernation,' but 'hypothermia,' apparently. Lovely."
Yes. We need you chilled but conscious so you can feel the cold all throughout the voyage (but much more importantly, so when aliens or future humans board the craft and lean close to your frosty not-quite-cryo-chamber you can scare the hell out of everyone by moving a bit)...
"A lot. Because it's not just walls and pipes."
Okay, I'm game - what else is there...? And no, I'm not suggesting trying to simulate / keep in memory the entirety of the space shuttle down to threads on bolts (although some of the latest space sims do simulate spaceships down to pipework, and to a rather a lot higher level of fidelity than the one that might be needed in a pure industrial application) - just the relevant section you're interested in. Seriously - what. is. so. damn. hard?!?
I still can't quite see all the "hell" that allegedly "broke loose". Nor the headset becoming any less bulkier than the venerable VFX1 - a sizeable box strapped in front of your face is still a box, and a pair of ear-enveloping headphones is still a pair of headphones. It may have gotten lighter, dunno about that. At any rate, at $600 it will never be anything but niche - and before anyone mentions those other "cheaper options", one should consider why most people would want one of these: no, it's not to view 3D 360 panoramas, otherwise the old ViewMaster would still be around. It's to play games, and right now I can only see the Oculus available for that - hence the price problem. Any potential price reductions will have to materialize first before I'll consider their impact - so far, VR gaming is simply not mainstream-level cheap, and I have my doubts about it getting much closer to that goal any time soon.
PS - regarding the "low poly" objection: FFS, what exactly have these people been trialing, the state-of-the-art Wolfenstein 3D engine form 1992?!? How many million tris can you possibly need for a bunch of walls and pipes?!?
"I am a great fan of electric vehicles of all sorts, but I am only too aware of the inherent limitations of batteries."
Nonsense! I have it on good authority we're forging ahead full steam - just last year have I seen at least 2359816 different major battery-related breakthroughs right here on El Reg, all of them on the very brink of being commercially available, ready to revolutionize the storage of electricity. One of them is bound to land in stores any second now! You'll see...!
*sound of crickets*
...verily, any second now...!
Yeah, then what? People should grasp that Open Source and control freaks don't mix. While I do sympathize with the left-pad author, ultimately there's no such concept as "deleting" your open sourced-code as long as anyone at all has a copy (and if nobody does, then you really don't matter at all). Conversely, if Github goes "poof" tomorrow, I'll still have the cloned repo on my desktop machine; I guess I'll just look for a different host or whatever - where's the harm?
It's almost comical how industriously they avoid showing the _front_ of phones with the lens installed - unsurprisingly so since on my phone for instance the strip would fold exactly over the speaker grille. Not to mention that they only show aluminium unibody phones - I'm not so sure the slightly textured back of my Samsung Galaxy would make for a great adherence around the camera.
At any rate, this will likely get used maybe ten times then forgotten at the bottom of a drawer by most people - if you genuinely have a regularly recurring use case, you're much better off with one of those ubiquitous dirt-cheap USB microscopes, even if it isn't particularly high grade: at least those have lenses matched (and fixed) to their cameras, for better or worse. You can even connect one to your smartphone to watch comfortably while you poke around somewhere with the pen cam at the other end of the cable...
" Australia, a US lapdog, is 9977kms away so that would definately need to be hit if the balloon went up."
Yeah but are you sure they'd even notice? It's a place where everything is already trying to kill you - is a radscorpion really that much worse than a normal one...? Now at least they would glow in the dark even without a UV light...
"Hope no one uses Google Maps to target places. They only seem to give one answer to a query for latitude/longitude - even though that may be the "wrong" place. Why can't they give a collection as an answer to indicate ambiguity and allow a chance of a resolution."
You can always use OpenStreetMap instead - if there's a bus station called "Cardiff" it'll list that too somewhere at the bottom... ;)
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