Posts by Steve Crook 633 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008
There's justification for the Indian space program as it advances their engineering skills and they've been busy launching weather and communications satellites, so useful stuff. Mars mission? I don't know. I'm sure you can justify large parts of it on the same grounds and £45m isn't a lot in the, ahem, cosmic scheme of things, even if you can buy an awful lot of solar stoves and vaccinations with it.
When they're selling launch capacity and and depriving the European space agency of revenue it will all make far more sense.
DAB sets are expensive and don't last long on batteries. I've got a Sony world radio that runs on 4 'AA' cells for about two weeks of fairly intensive FM listening. Is there any DAB radio that can come close to that sort of performance? No, thought not. DAB sets are almost all confined to mains operation because battery life is so poor.
I've been looking at DAB sets for some years and have always been put off by the price and the weight, mainly that of 4 'D'' cells that'll be needed for any sort of mobility.
My current cost estimate for replacing all my radios is in the region of £250 if you include replacing the car radio. I can't buy a single DAB adaptor like I could for the TV, and I have no reason to go and spend this money on radios other than the government forcing me to.
DAB offers me nothing I want, and at considerable expense. That's why I'm opposed.
There was an interview with someone from the BBC talking about DAB. I don't remember who or what program (Feedback?) but at one point they were asked about the technical shortcomings of DAB compared to DAB+, and they replied that, while DAB+ was clearly superior, there would be no switch to DAB+ for the foreseeable future because they didn't want to upset all the people that have invested in DAB sets.
The interviewer managed to completely ignore the open goal.
@Dave 126
But why use the PI to do it?
Don't most school kids have access to or own a laptop or other sort of PC? If you want to try your hand at programming, why not write apps for your smartphone. There's a big market out there and the opportunity to make some money out of your class project. The tools for doing this sort of thing are readily available and free if you've already got a smartphone/tablet, a PC and a USB cable.
I never got the idea that a PI was going to help with teaching programming. Interfacing with other hardware and junior robotics? Possibly... But not straight out programming.
The study does seem to make some fairly remarkable assumptions in extrapolating from samples taken at a couple of sites to the whole Arctic. There's another paper published (Ice core O18 based) that suggests that there have been several periods (pre industrialisation) where there were large shifts in Arctic climate, all from natural causes. So we still have a lot to learn....
This is covered at Judith Curry's site: http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/25/unprecedented-arctic-warming/
The Left like to monster capitalism, it's convenient and allows them to argue that politicians and unelected bureaucrats are far more altruistic and capable than those nasty fat-cats and their equally evil shareholders.
"poor short-term planning". Ha! It's been a lack of any planning and foresight. That's by the last government mostly, who had over a decade to put in place a workable plan to ensure we kept the lights on. They also had more money than they knew what to do with and a generally supportive population. They *still* managed to fuck it up.
If the government start to mess about in the energy market as per the the Labour plan we'll be no better off except in the very short term. Fuel prices might come down, everyone will feel good for a while, and we'll be sticking it to the greedy corporates. After that the money will be leached out of our pockets in some other way. As it always is because governments, particularly socialist governments, spend our money for us because they think they know better than we do.
> Java is... barely changed since the 90's - still comes with awful tools like Eclipse
Not so. Firstly Java has moved on a great deal from the language I was programming in during the 90s, I still prefer it to C#. As for IDEs,..
For Java development I've been using IntelliJ Idea since V2 and it's clearly better than anything else out there. The community edition is free, and if you decide you need the paid for version, the personal license won't break the bank. When I first started using it the community version didn't exist, so I chose to pay for a personal license rather than use Eclipse. It has support for languages other than Java.
If you go the C# route, I'd strongly recommend investing in Intellij Resharper. It makes MSDEV a tolerable environment.
I'm not associated with Intellij in any way, I just think their developer tools are excellent...
Money gets thrown away in waste or corruption in organisation that doesn't have proper controls over what happens to its money. Who knew?
That the waste and corruption was revealed by someone who has just left the den of thieves is not exactly news either. Why is it that they never say ANYTHING publicly while they're in post? Why not try to do something about it first and then resign or get sacked?
Still, it took up space in the the newspaper that would, otherwise, have been filled with bile against immigrants, benefits scroungers, gays, politicians, unions, corporations or 'celebrity gossip'.
There was a time when people used to talk about newspapers like this as only fit to wipe your bum. But I wouldn't want to risk it.
In fairness, you've got to compare it to other shooters at the time, and on that basis I think it holds up well.
I've been hoping that valve would have HL3 be their opener on Steam OS, my main concern is that if it does actually turn up it's never going to satisfy all of the pent up expectation that's been generated over the last 5 or 6 years.
Then again perhaps Newell is messing with our heads. Because he can.
@AC
He means they choose which papers to cite and which to ignore. Those they choose to ignore are usually those that don't tow the party line.
For good reasons of course, when there's a consensus anything that goes against the consensus is most likely to be wrong and therefore not worth consideration. The fact that this artificially reinforces the consensus seems to be lost on them.
It's a form of confirmation bias.
Of course there's a good deal of political interference. Look at the contortions they went through between SPM last draft and release in an effort to obscure the pause.
@nom
What we're arguing about at the moment is the strength of the effect. I think everyone agrees that the changes in TSI are small, but there is growing evidence that the effects of those small changes can be quite large as they appear to have a significant influence on cloud formation.
It's a bit like the effects of CO2, the actual radiative effect of CO2 would only give rise to a 1c change, but feedback may be adding another degree or two. There's a lot more science that needs to be done, contrary to the impression one might have gained from the extremely political AR5 SPM.
Didn't god punish humanity by making us all speak different languages?
You don't suppose this project is going to be like the Nine Billion Names Of God when Google make that last entry in their database and everyone can speak to everyone else...
What impressed me most was the fact that there was so little resistance from the phone that the initial Barrett round went through and the phone stayed upright.
When I was a kid I dug up some 50cal machine gun slugs fired during WW2 at a temporary range. They were unjacketed lead (weighing 35g, 1.25oz) and you wouldn't want anyone to throw one at you let alone have it arrive at several hundred miles an hour. War films were never the same again...
Population will take care of itself if we let it. Development leading to raised standards of living, education and freedom for men and women to use contraception will all contribute to a stabilising and eventually, falling global population. It's worked in lots of places, including many that are supposed to be dominated by a religion that abhors contraception.
All I can remember about IE 5/6 was their shitty and inconsistent support for HTML and CSS and a complete determination to keep them outside the standards the rest of the world was working to. I think the biggest legacy of those versions of IE is the fixed width WEB site...
There's nothing like the BBC going all self congratulatory to make me want to run in the other direction. Dr Who was good once, briefly, many years ago.
In recent years there's been too much sonic screwdriver based deus ex machina for my liking. To the extent that I'd not be surprised to find that the Time Lord was actually based in the screwdriver and was remotely piloting the fleshy holding it....
One of the big issues was the integration of many disparate systems running on different hardware combined with what appeared to be an irresistible urge to gold pate everything.
Instead of incremental change with an overall goal in mind they appeared to have gone for something equivalent for IT Armageddon. With all party agreement any plan could have been carried forward by incoming governments over a decade or more.
I'm not sure that OSS would have helped. Either way, the gubermint would have been completely out of their depth and unable to understand that, once you agree a plan, you have to stick with it, or your contractor is going to make you pay through the nose for any change request.
I remember reading about a school built through the PFI. When complete and inspected, they found that there were no coat hooks in the kids cloakroom. The education authority contacted the contractor and asked them to fit the hooks. The contractor responded with a price for the change. The authority argued that any fool should know that a cloakroom should have coat hooks, and that, even if they weren't in the schedule the company should fit them foc. The company responded that the authority had prepared the plans, and signed them off, and the company had agreed to implement the plan supplied by the authority. The authorities failure to specify hooks was, therefore, the authorities problem.
A hospital I know built a new wing for its eye surgery unit. When the building was complete, they discovered that, because they'd specified a suspended floor, it was impossible to perform the delicate surgery they wanted to because their equipment moved as people walked past the theatres. They had to continue to work in 60 year old buildings with solid floors. Don't suppose anyone resigned over that either...
When Group 4 fucked up the security stuff, they paid back the money they were paid, and paid for the forces personnel to do the work. People from Group 4 resigned and others got no bonus or reduced bonuses.
MPs made a big fuss about it, particularly those from the Labour party.
I'm not holding my breath while waiting to hear that civil servants and MPs who were involved in the procurement and management of this system are going to resign. Because of course taking responsibility isn't part of any politicians or civil servants job any longer.
That the government that shelters him is such a bastion of truth, liberty and all that's decent. Had Chavez been alive I wonder if even he would have had the courage to shelter Snowden...
It must be very dispiriting for him to see that most of the rest of the world has lost interest so quickly. He has risked and apparently lost everything. While I don't entirely agree with his actions, I have to admire his courage and conviction that he was doing the right thing.
I still think I'd rather be Snowden than his Russian equivalent trying to find somewhere to live and waiting for a fatal umbrella or a tasty radioactive coffee, or (to more or less quote) "an icepick that makes his ear burn"
Not the "if you've got nothing to fear" argument. Please. As far as I'm aware you don't have to have a record to be on the computer. Being questioned or suspected of something may be enough for you to have a record.
The RSPCA *aren't* supposed to check on people to see if they're breaking the law any more than I am. They aren't part of the legal/judicial system and have absolutely no powers other than those granted to any individual or organisation in the UK.
Perhaps we should all be required to be interviewed by the RSPCA before we're allowed to own a pet of any sort. Then they could deny access to those they considered to be capable of animal cruelty. /sarc
The quality of code isn't a red herring. Poor quality code is just that, it probably runs slowly, is inclined to break at the first provocation, is difficult to modify and a pig to test.
You wouldn't get an airline pilot to write the flight control software for an Airbus, but you'd be a fool not to have them working as part of the team developing the software as they're the people who will have to use it, and have the domain experience.
I see nothing that tells me climate scientists would make better programmers than airline pilots....
Well, I wasn't asking for comment on climate change, just looking for someone that works on a GCM to tell us a little bit about how they do their testing, porting, release management all the usual stuff that any professional programmer would expect to go with the of developing large/complex software systems.
That would then put the WUWT story into some perspective.
In fact, if someone out there is brave enough, perhaps El Reg might like to give them space for an article...
My initial reaction to the piece at WUWT was scepticism and the thought that WUWT really didn't understand the software they're criticising.
Then I began to wonder just how they manage to test a complex model like this in the first place, how much testing they do and what sort of verification procedures they have. I've worked on distributed real time calc engines receiving multiple inputs and reacting to them in real time. Testing was time consuming and therefore expensive.
After that, I remembered some of the developer comments on the quality of code written by CRU (released as part of climate gate), and wondered just who it was that has been programming many of the GCMs out there. Professional programmers or climate scientists?
Anyone working on these models like to comment?
I used DDWRT installed on an elderly and otherwise unused Buffalo router to create a repeater bridge. It sits behind the TV, extends the range of the wireless network and provides ports for the TV, PVR etc. So far at least, it's been set and forget.
There's a large range of supported routers and if you don't have one in the spares box second hand routers are cheap.
Ultimately though, it changes nothing. We are where we are, our problems and their solutions remain unchanged.
In fact, it takes some of the pressure off. What if we weren't insignificant? What if there were other civilisations utterly dependent on our actions, imagine the concern and worry about making the right decisions. It would be very stressful.
At least we can be certain we can completely fuck things up and the universe will continue, utterly unmoved by our stupidity...
If they're going to do it properly, then they ought to pardon *everyone* that was convicted of the same offence, going back to whenever it was made an offence.
Otherwise, what they're saying is that it was wrong to be homosexual unless you were a war hero, and this 'gesture' just looks like political posturing, which it is...
Apparently, the Bowland is about 10 times thicker than US shale beds. From my limited understanding, this means that it'll be possible to drill horizontally into the beds and frack from a distance. If the guy from Cuadrilla was to be believed, it gas should be extractable from relatively few well heads compared to what's been seen in the US.
It wasn't quite that bleak. The oil revenues made a big difference to our balance of payments and meant that a lot less money was borrowed than might otherwise have been. It's a long time ago now, but I'm old enough to remember, and our economy was every bit as fucked as it is now, probably worse. We needed every bit of cash we could lay our hands on.
Parts of Scotland made a lot of money out of the oil (and are still), and if Mr Salmond is to be believed, the current revenues from the North Sea would be enough to make a significant contribution to the Scottish economy for many years. If the Bowland is exploited, it could provide a lot of jobs for people in the North East and West at a time when they're hard to come by.
Not so much caution. These are more reliable figures than anything Poland was working with.
Poland's problem was that the government jumped the shark and started to set out all sorts of new taxes and levies before exploration had finished. The end result was that almost all of the exploration stopped because the companies all pretty much said 'well, fuck that then' and left. Nothing to stop our own government from doing the same, and I'm sure that the DECC will be doing their very best to ensure shale gas never leaves the ground.
As I understand it, these are the estimates for the middle swathe of the UK, I'm assuming that there's more out there, the BGS have yet to report on it.
If we do exploit this stuff (as we should) I wonder where this leaves Mr Salmond and Scottish independence. AFAIK much of Scotland's post independence economy seemed to be based on supplying electricity from renewables to the UK. If we don't need their wind, where will they sell it.
>> You didn't win Vietnam
I'm Brit. Vietnam was a disaster all round.
The point I probably didn't make clear enough was that the US motivation for doing this sort of spying is not unique to them, that the sort of paranoid thinking it embodies is common among *all* governments. Given a tendency for all those with power to abuse it and the availability of the technology that makes that abuse all to easy, we would be right to be very concerned.
Sent something via encrypted anonymous email? Don't know who sent it and have your laptop taken by the police. Can't hand over the encryption key? That's an offence then.
Just wait, we're not far away from being told that RPVs taking video are an essential part of the security operations of this country, and that they're a more cost effective solution than fixed CCTV, and could make dramatic improvements in crime detection rates and helping protect us from terrorism.
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