* Posts by Craig Powell

5 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Sep 2007

Miracle airship tech sustained by DARPA pork trickle

Craig Powell
Alert

Re: Facts By Dave

"There is no way that you can recover a weight of water from the exhaust gas of an engine, that will balance out the weight of fuel consumed, unless you are burning a fuel that contains way more Hydrogen than Carbon, and/or is lighter than air in itself."

This rather depends on what you consider "way more hydrogen than carbon". Methane is one extreme, and burning 16 grams of methane gets you 36 grams of water. Oils and fats are essentially (CH_2)_n, and get you 18 grams of water for every 14 grams of lipid. But I suppose by atoms they still have more hydrogen than carbon. Burning benzene will only get you 54 grams of water for every 78 of fuel, so /technically/ I suppose you're correct, but pretty much any fuel that's not coal will contain more hydrogen than carbon anyway.

Apple tops customer satisfaction poll as rivals' ratings slide

Craig Powell
Linux

Re: Not Surprising

Does this argument presume that people who buy Windows machines tend to be the sort of people who /don't/ want to buy Windows stuff? And that it's therefore no surprise that these people are generally unhappy with their purchases?

I think you overestimate the duration of the 'ooh, sparkly' post-purchase honeymoon period as well. It's all very well having a nice new piece of equipment, but unless these surveys were quite soon after purchase, there's plenty of time for that effect to rub off. Unless, of course, people stay happy because the computer works for them. Whether apple computers are any better than Windows machines or not, it seems extremely shallow to assume the users are all deluded.

Spaniards show off touchscreen moto-computer tech

Craig Powell
Go

The alternative demo

"Yes, we know it looks exactly like a Ford Focus. But really, we've replaced the entire computer system with something much better. As a driver you can't tell? Well, that was kind of the point..."

Focussing attention on the touchscreen as a bad idea seems like it might be distracting from the better idea that regardless of the interface, this might be a sensible system. What if to get the touchscreen controls one had to stop and plug in a computer, but otherwise the various knobs and dials were used as computer inputs. Then again, that probably wouldn't be newsworthy...

Jeremy Clarkson tilts at windmills

Craig Powell
Go

Equal distances

To be fair, if you did drive equal distances above and below the speed limit by the same amount, you wouldn't actually do *more* than the legal average speed. Apply that to "120mph for one mile then pull over and stop for one mile" and you're in trouble, though.

Hint of next PS3 spied on web

Craig Powell

Absense of Blu-ray

"Some folk have speculated that Sony might be about to drop the Blu-ray Disc drive from the low-end product, which could have a big impact on pricing. But that seems unlikely given Sony's keenness to use the console to drive take-up of the next-gen video disc format."

Plus, you wouldn't be able to play any games on the machine, what with them being on blu-ray discs too.