Posts by JeffyPooh

Utterly useless graph...

Anyway, I *still* have several Tandy Colour Computers and all sorts of accessories. The collection must be worth a small fortune, ...or perhaps $10.

I also have a Sinclair ZX kicking around somewhere.

3=1, etc.

Apple's map flap is shocking only to those that are deaf, dumb and blind. The quality of their code has been *obviously* suspect for years; map flap is just the latest example. They need to clean ranks in their coding department.

The MS Metro fiasco is far far far worse. It signals an inflection point for Microsoft. When *all* Win 8 products flop in the marketplace, it'll be obvious where they're headed.

Prediction...

The screen will be lower resolution than expected. It'll also lack GPS.

"My photos are on my own site..."

QotW: "My photos are on my own site where I can control their use - and that's where they stay."

LOL. What's the URL? Is your own site on the Interweb?

Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity

Most likely the Manglement Team simply forgot to review the proposed Ts&Cs from the point of view of the users. They essentially decided to perform this key step in public, with predictable results. It's exactly what would be expected when there's a one-sided, one-party approach to the "agreement" (sic) combined with a failure to install an intelligent review process.

Legal Dept. .NE. User Relations Dept.

Not smart. Lack of common sense.

Near IR is the 95% solution

Using 'The Art of War' for guidance*, play some *invisible to humans* / visible to cameras Near IR laser beams across the screen.

* use tactics such as:

Wait for the action climax of the film, then ruin it for the cameras

Or, using higher brightness fiddle with the cams' autoexposure time constant

Write anti-piracy messages on the screen

Saturate the market with inexpensive Near IR filters that don't quite work properly

By the way, such camcording is sometimes done *by staff*.

Myself? I just capture the new release 4K digital files sent by satellite to the digital theatres in Ireland and elsewhere (Kidding!!!! ...maybe...).

Airports in Developing Countries

It's nearly universal for every fast food joint facing the terminal waiting area to provide free wifi. Show Available Networks leads to an endless list.

YMMV.

Spike aviation fuel with iron compounds

They fly over the oceans, etc. etc. etc.

By the way, anyone else notice the Iridium + ADS-B thingy that's coming? They plan to save many billions of dollars of aviation fuel over the first 12 years by simply knowing where the airplanes are mid-ocean. Yay!

Is this the same guy that *just* had an argument with Paul Allen?

Kurzweil has a public argument with Paul Allen, and then a few days later he's hired by Google.

Hey Paul Allen! You're wrong. Wrong wrong wrong!!! ... .:waiting for job offer:.

How many years until phone hardware becomes a commodity?

My point will perhaps become more obvious when people start porting cracked versions of phone OSes between hardware platforms. Boot up a Samsung with iOS, or maybe port BB10 into a generic hardware platform (as may have happened here - LOL).

"15 feet of car" (Clarkson on a particularly boring BWM 3-series) will become "4.3 inches of phone".

The most important question?

Where's that sweet-young-thing 'Sam' (a girl), his 20-year-old squeeze?

Enquiring minds want to know!!!

XM Satellite radio PSUs are actually musical

They don't simply whistle, they actually step through several audio frequencies in an endlessly repeating pattern. It's not an isolated case, I have several (from circa 2008-2009) and they *all* do it.

"Ronald E. Evans was the unlucky astronaut left to orbit the moon in the [CM]."

He was unlucky to have died at age 56. But It's a horrible and nasty thing to state that the CM pilots were "unlucky" because they didn't walk on the Moon. They went to the fricken' Moon !!! How cool is that?

24 visited the Moon (three of them twice), but 12 walked upon it. All were damn lucky to have had the opportunity.

The astronauts that never left the ground might be fairly described as "unlucky"; but even that is a stretch because their job was still cooler than yours or mine.

Two problems...

1) "Mildura" .NE. "Rural City of Mildura"

2) A point .NE. an extended area

Start with these two dumb errors, then anything is possible.

Note that the 2nd one is a common error with almost all mapping databases.

"2020AD"

Yes. It's all perfectly true. Absolutely spot on.

By the way, there's just one small typo. You spelled "2043AD" incorrectly.

(i)OS unification

Ever since the invention of the IF-THEN-ELSE statement (and given that storage is cheap), it's perfectly straightforward to follow the "Unified Driver Architecture" example and create one unified (i)OS that reacts to its run-time hardware environment. For example, once the OS has booted to a state of awareness of the hardware, it can pick and choose which modules to load. Modules common to all platforms provide significant advantages both in terms of compatibility and in terms of long term maintenance. Plus you have one team to house and feed. This type of UDA approach isn't new (Nvidia) and should be implemented for cross platform OS merging - unless formally proven to be not feasible (in such cases fire those involved in the white paper and do it anyway).

Does it have a Composite Video input?

Probably unwatchable.

Laws of Physics breaking down, etc.

The minimum size was exactly one Planck distance larger than the size where the ultimate Laws of Physics break down. It bounced off the limits of those laws.

Just like "Nature abhors a vacuum", She also almost-magically avoids discontinuities. In 13.77 billion years, Nature has 'divided by zero' exactly zero times. In years-per-discontinuity, that's a rate of...

Christmas Day 1994 did not exist and nobody even noticed

Once upon a time (Cristmas Eve 1994), I was sitting on a JAL flight (Chicago to Narita). As I take an interest in such things, I was plotting our approximate location based on dead reckoning (the days before GPS maps were available on the Inflight Entertainment System). To a first approximation, we crossed the International Date Line shortly after 0000 local time. In other words, it was 24, 25, 26 December 1994 in fairly quick succession.

Christmas Day 1994 was only minutes in duration for us.

Based on the complete and utter non-reaction of the dozing crew and snoozing passengers, I don't think anyone else even noticed that it was Christmas Day, let alone that our 25 December 1994 lasted mere minutes in local time.

PS: Very cute Flight Attendants on JAL.

CBC: "Greenland glacier melting 5 times faster than in 1990s"

"Groundbreaking study 'clearest evidence yet of polar ice sheet losses' and rising sea levels"

"...The study shows Greenland's ice sheets are melting at a rate five times faster than they were in 1990s. In contrast, Antarctica is more or less stable..."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2012/11/29/pol-ice-sheets-melting-greenland.html

NEST Thermostat webpage - OMG!

The NEST webpage (saving-energy, auto-schedule) shows the temperature of a house plunging from 72F to 57F between 8am and 9am. A fifteen degree drop in an hour!!! OMG!!!

Hey - if you want to save energy, how about putting some insulation in those walls. Maybe close the front door during the depths of winter. Geesh...

The more energy efficient your house (well insulated, larger thermal mass, solar gain), the less you'll be able to run the temperature up and down to save money. Also, the concept of heating zones becomes less effective if your house is very well insulated - it *starts* to become one big zone.

It's still worth doing, but it's perhaps not the first hing to do.

The answer may be in the Data Plans

Here at work, there are more Android phones than iPhones. But the iPhone people tend to have mobile network plans (subscriptions) that include significant monthly data allowance, either 1GB or (in my case) 6GB per month. The Android people here at work are cheap and thrifty and almost universally have cheap-as-chips 'Pay-As-You-Go' type plans and have data allowances on the order of 10MB or 100MB per month.

So the next question is why Android people have smaller data plans than iPhone people. I think it's because thrifty people are repulsed by "expensive" iPhones (thus are forced to Android), and are shocked to their core by they-really-are-fricken-expensive generous GB-class data plans.

Homework: Plot the Android/iPhone ratio as a one-dimensional function from London to Edinburgh. Just sayin'.

"Apple's aura of perfection..."

What? I've had an iPhone since Day 2 of the 3GS generation, now up to 4S, and I've noticed it-must-be hundreds of bugs in the Apple iOS and Apple's own apps. They NEVER gave me the impression of perfection. Even now I could easily fill out a half dozen bug reports... ...is there an on-line form?

Big rail-gun to fling raw alumin(i)um slugs into LEO

Just fire aluminum/aluminium slugs into a more-or-less common orbit by means of a big rail gun powered by energy stored up during the off-peak hours. Result is vast quantities of a very useful metal in orbit at very low cost. It'll need a wee feisty shuttle craft to gather them up and keep them organized in a big net. Machining the raw metal into comfortable space ships is not included. That's a common next step for any metal-to-LEO approach.

Metal to orbit - problem solved.

PS: Don't forget to clear out the air traffic...

25% margin, is that all?

Considering that's 25% margin, presumably, from manufacturing oftentimes all the way to retail, not exactly overpriced. What's Samsung's margin? 24.9%?

I'm looking for the "RIM JOBS ARE SAFE" funny comments section...

As above.

Same sort of approach works in the Apple Stores too...

Start to raise your voice and all of a sudden several "Geniuses" (sic) will descend from the ceiling to make everything better.

What was "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do." suddenly becomes vastly more accommodating.

"...metre ...light in vacuum... ...of 1/299 792 458 of a second."

And...

One second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium [cesium] 133 atom."

So they *haven't* properly defined the meter, because the definition parses to: "The length that light travels in a vacuum during 30.663318988498369762190615215544 transitions of the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom."

They could measure the 30. , and they could estimate the fraction 0.66, but the 0.003318988498369762190615215544 cannot be measured directly.

The meter is thus a secondary constant. Speed of light is fundamental.

SI needs a reboot.