Inflight entertainment
When my terminal crashed on a Virgin flight a few years ago, I was treated to a little penguin logo during the reboot - not Win3.11...
142 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2007
Now there was me thinking that interlaced had the same number of lines as progressive, just half the refresh-rate - first cycle draws in the odd-numbered rows, next one the even-numbered rows. Unless I'm missing something...
Oh, and my lappy screen's only about 6mm. True, it has a box connected to it containing the rest of the useful components, but I'll ignore that for the purpose of statistics...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P6M_SeaMaster - I guess it's been done before...
Course, the noise for the human cargo might be a little excessive - but what's to stop designers moving the passengers below the wings with the luggage hold on top? Or even sticking the wings on the top... maybe just too unconventional for the people with the money to risk.
Nice concept - maybe if they turn the power down a little it could go a bit further on a full erm tank of sparks.
Can someone with a little more insight please explain how by adding 28kWh of electricity I can end up with 35kWh in the tank? Maybe it's worth investing in that mini-windmill after all.
Flames, cos of the quarter-tonne of Li-ion battery...
Oh dear. Should I correct:
10 PRINT "hello";
20 GOTO 10
>RUN
hellohellohellohellohello.....
And for the rest, here's the various graphics modes in full:
20k RAM:
Mode 0: 2 colour 640x256 (80x32 chars)
Mode 1: 4 colour 320x256 (40x32 chars)
Mode 2: 16 colour (inc 8 flashing) 160x256 (20x32 chars)
16K RAM:
Mode 3: 2 colour text only 80x25 chars
10K RAM:
Mode 4: 2 colour 320x256 (40x32 chars)
Mode 5: 4 colour 320x256 (20x32 chars)
8K RAM:
Mode 6: 2 colour text only 40x25 chars
1K RAM:
Mode 7: teletext
I didn't get where I am today without knowing how many colours you could use in Mode 1...
"Ford can't make you buy oil and tires from the dealer"
Not sure about Ford, but Audi strongly enforce a specific type of long-life oil which appears only to be sold in their garages...
I guess Apple are proud of their OS, and want to use it to sell the hardware - and don't want to be undermined by someone selling other similar hardware giving a similar system to what Apple are trying to sell. The fact that this guy is selling boxes with OS-X pre-installed means that he's a direct competitor to Apple, whilst being in violation of their very clear software licensing terms.
...I could be paid for work I completed 10 years ago. I have to keep on working, unlike some slackers (Mr Cliff Richard, I'm talking to you, but I suspect you probably don't hang out here) who do a bit of work 50 years ago and then moan when there's a threat of their income from it drying up.
(boffinry goggles activated)
Travelator: no, cos planes don't have powered wheels. It's the air-speed you need to brake, not the ground-speed.
Soft water: also no, actually pretty hard if you fall in from a height. That's why people can die/get crippled whilst jumping/diving badly into water from just a few metres up.
How about smearing the runway with very sticky jam?
TBH - the point about this only being required if a lot of aircraft return all at once fully-laden is important. That won't happen in a war situation, and can be planned against when there's less stress.
Wonder if you could fool these boxes with a rubber mask that matches the face profile on the "biometric" passport?
Comment about cost is a good one though - I'd estimate (using one ISO-standard wet finger) that each of these would cost £183k/year to run, including two annual software upgrades. Does it use Windows?
"The QCA has paid ETS £39.6M to date. Under the cancellation deal, ETS will pay back £24.1M."
Assuming they were paid in advance for the contract, I work that out at about £8M/year. They do one year's "work" and get to keep 2-years worth of the money...
Mind you, compared to some govt contracts this one seems a little on the tiny side...
1. I'd suggest that 250 relates to the number of messages per day, not per year.
2. The hosting service in Yankee land probably rejects SMSs to an international destination, requiring the application to send using a provider local to the recipient instead.
Penguin, to remind me of the summer weather we're not having.
"I am writing to inform you of a fire which has broken out on the premises of..." no, that's too formal.
Jeez, if you don't find it funny, don't watch it. I don't watch Big Brother, but don't bang on about how much a waste of airtime it is.
Nobody mentioned a dangerous Transformers t-shirt yet?
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=define%3Abpm
Nuff said. Wish marketing creatures could do a search like this before they release an identical abbreviation onto the unsuspecting public.
Sorry Reg, started the survey, got bored. Can we have shorter questions and answers next time, with potentially some sarcastic ones thrown in for good measure?
Paris, cos she'd know about rhythm.
Blocking traffic at the borders won't help either. The source of the attack (ie the spamware or whatever) could come from outside, could easily be disguised as normal HTTP traffic - dodgy flash movie, image, PDF, MS-Word macro, whatever - and then sit dormant on badly-patched machines within the country to be attacked, maybe for weeks or months. Then at zero-hour, the attack comes from inside.
If any development work needs to be done to block this type of attack, maybe it should be on outgoing traffic in domestic DSL router/firewalls.
"Most of the admins I've ever dealt with were kind of "difficult". They need to learn to think like the users do and speak the language the users speak, as anyone should do for their customers"
Error: "Re-double the prioritization of the blue sky with synergy" does not compile.
Maybe that's why we have a helldesk - to (mis)translate the request and response between the two sides, and to keep admins away from (l)users. Or maybe they're just there to annoy everyone involved...
Why don't they check that the name on the passport/permitted photo-id actually matches the name on the boarding-pass? Absolutely zero need to throw money at a non-problem. Or ankle-tag (or wrist-tag) everyone that comes into the airport, and remove it at the gate. Or write the flight-number on their forehead in UV-readable ink at check-in.
I think it all comes down to the fact that we're probably the only country on the planet that doesn't check passports on exit.
How about this for an idea... why not have something on all windfarm sites to store the energy they generate if they can't sell it to the grid at that time - they can then release it back when they can sell it?
Something simple, like a big weight on a bit of rope that gets electrically wound up the inside of the hollow turbine mast, and let down again to generate? Like pumped-storage, only with something a little more dense so you don't need as much of it?
We best start melting the ice-caps sharpish then to unlock all that energy, before the sea runs dry.
I like the way the septics manage to take a green fuel (excluding solar-cell manufacture, maintenance and delivery) and convert into another abuser of natural gas... very impressive. Specially since you need additional energy to boil the water first, before you can react it with the methane...!
Dealt with a lot of HP deliveries in my time. Everything small enough comes in the same size box - license certificates in one box, a coax terminator in another box, a scsi terminator in one... three boxes where one could have sufficed but I assume their warehouse can't cope. It's been going on for many years...
Back in '69, the health+safety crowd were still in nappies, and people were willing to take a lot of risks. That sort of behaviour is not permitted these days - there has to be a near-guarantee of getting the astronauts out there and safely back. It wouldn't surprise me if there had been a few unpublished moon-attempts from NASA and CCCP ending very badly that we won't hear anything about for a number of years, if ever.
The other point is about the lack of water for the mission. If they can't fit it in their truck, why not send it on ahead in an unmanned box near the planned site, and then pick it up when they land (and defrost it)?
Depends on whether the files to be updated happen to be in use by the system or user at the time of the install or not. If they are in use, then the actual install will be delayed until the next time the machine is booted up. If they're not in use, they can be installed straight away for your more-instantaneous enjoyment.
Anyway, it'll only take 30 seconds to reboot. Oh, hang on - that's my Win3.11 system...
And I can average about 52mpg from it. It doesn't have a sunroof though, so the £20 one from Maplin would need to sit on the dashboard.
Note also that it has two batteries. One conventional one for the petrol engine, and one 200V NiMH one for powering the motor (which is charged during deceleration instead of just wasting energy in heating the brakes).
The air-con's a bit pants though, can take ten minutes to cool the cockpit on a sunny day - so something that could keep the fan running when it's parked, with or without air-con, could be a benefit.
Oh, and road-tax is £15/year. What is it in your 144mph diesel BMW? Don't forget that diesel has a lot more carbon in it per litre than petrol...
We *do* vote for an EU parliament which is there to spend as much of the 25 nations money as it can do, without the need to pass a financial audit.
The EU commission is there to think up ideas. Technically they are appointed by the democratically-elected national governments. Of course, anything they decide needs to be ratified by all the EU nations. Which, given the state of the constit^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htreaty might be never...
Paris, cos that's in the EU.
"Short of recounting the ballots by hand there is no way of knowing if this had a significant effect on the election,"
So why not give it a shot? This electronic counting was a trial - and surely it would need to be verified? It doesn't have to be on the same frantic scale as an election count where the result needs to be announced quickly - it could take weeks if necessary.
Or are these paid election observers just a bunch of slackers who can't see an easy way to check, so they won't bother?
Well, I guess if they accidentally create a black-hole and suck the entire planet into it, nobody will be left to sue them on their minor inaccuracy.
Oh, and as for no vacuum bubbles in the visible universe - surely if they're a vacuum then they're invisible... so I might have some floating in my cup of erm tea for all I know.
"...airplane's new vehicle configuration..." - gotta love the terminology. Fleshy version: "Mayday, mayday, my wing has been... erm... updated by a ground-launched airborne-vehicle reconfiguration device."
Shouldn't this article be in RotM [tm]?
As if I need to explain the black helicopter...