* Posts by Tim99

2002 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2008

Internet-of-stuff startup dumps NoSQL for ... SQL?

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

@Stephan 6

Surely serving a 1,000 customers can be done even with a simple microsoft access database file ;-)

After having written production MS Access based stuff, it always surprised me how easily it could be migrated to SQL Server, so 1000 customers is a trivial "proof of concept".

But if you want fast, scalable fancy web-based stuff, how about SQLite with CGI/FastCGI? ;-) That will migrate easily to Postgres IF you ever get more customers...

Microsoft crows about 149k-seat Office 365 deal that costs it MILLIONS

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Re: Those prices?

"Large customers get a better deal."

A very long time ago when a DOS based WP programme cost nearly £400 retail, we paid £500,000 up front and then £7 for each user for a keyboard template - It worked out at ~£20 per user. The only ongoing costs were for manuals and installation media, and upgrades at a similar price.

A few years later we went with MS Office. The cost on a VWA was discounted by less than 30%, so MS have always been good at negotiating...

Report mash-up: Apple to sell 65 million $269 iWatches in first year

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Not for me.

I have one of the early generation clockwork thingies on a leather strap on my wrist.

If I manually synchronize the analogue time display indicators with an NTP client, and remember to wind the the clockwork device up every day; it displays the time on its "easy to read" metal/quartz/enamel and radium display.

Chrome makes new password grab in version 34

Tim99 Silver badge
Joke

Re: @article author: reading comprehension FAIL

@zooooooom

"So Google, and apparently you, think that it is OK to break W3C HTML5?"

Fuck yeah. Its a mark up language, not a contract.

So, you would be a systems/hardware person then?

Tim99 Silver badge
Stop

Re: @article author: reading comprehension FAIL

@G2

This change affects only when a web SITE specifies the parameter autocomplete=off on a password input field, the browser will ignore that and instead will use the USER's preference instead of the SITE's preference: if the user has the password manager enabled then it will use that for autocomplete. If the user has disabled the password manager then it stays disabled.

So Google, and apparently you, think that it is OK to break W3C HTML5?

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Beyond parody

Google "Don't be evil" indeed.

Avere SPEC benchmark shows cloud's just as fast as on-premise

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Thumb Down

What'll the speed be when your provider has you by the throat...

..after you have disassembled your internal IT and moved all of your files into the cloud?

The Punch and Judy show is LIVE NOW cancelled

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Cancelled due to wind?

Too many kebabs last night lads?

Or possibly because the universe had noticed that Paul had been taken over by the shade of Jimmy Savile.

One Win 8 to rule them all: Microsoft talks up 'universal apps' for PCs, slabs and mobes

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: A drop in the bucket

A drop can vary in size by about an order of magnitude, but a standard laboratory drop is 0.05 mL, so you get 20 of them in a mL or 20,000 in a litre. Assuming that you have a standard old imperial 2 gallon bucket (~9 L) that would be one part in ~180,000 or ~5.5 parts in a million....

SQL giant Oracle plans NoSQL standards body – top Reg sources

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

From experience

...(developing with Oracle since V4) I can tell you ... It's a trap!

How Microsoft can keep Win XP alive – and WHY: A real-world example

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Thumb Down

Re: Irrelevant Here.

@LDS

I acknowledge that I am a recalcitrant old fart, but I am still occasionally using a Nokia from then Wikipedia: Nokia 8210. It makes and receives phone calls and texts. Sometimes I use my "new" Nokia 11 series that is "only" 10 years old.

Microsoft: Hey, small biz devs – Windows Store apps are for you, too

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Been somewhere similar, done something similar

As a "nearly as old as dirt" retired developer who has actually written small biz Windows apps, my immediate reaction was: "What could possibly go wrong", followed by the thought "How likely is this to go tits-up in a small biz production environment", leading to the conclusion: "Customers are not going to like this".

El Reg's Deep Outback XP upgrade almost foiled by KILLER ARACHNIDS

Tim99 Silver badge
Devil

Redbacks

Redbacks are normally found near their characteristic webs (untidy networked strands) in dark places near the floor.

Last year I was standing up to relocate a network switch when something hit me in the face - I stepped back and saw it was a very large female redback hanging from the ceiling on a 4ft gossamer about 4ft from the wall. When my heart-rate had returned to normal and a can of flyspray later...

Chinese patent app tries to own Wine on ARM

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: This is an elaborate April fool's joke, isn't it?

@AC

Take a down vote for deliberately conflating a design patent with a software patent.

If the USAian patent people had used the superior UK name of "Registered Design" instead of design patent the whole rounded corners meme might not have happened, and most of us would have been aware that the Apple/Samsung thing was initially about "trade dress" - Wikipedia Link.

iiNet CEO Michael Malone resigns

Tim99 Silver badge

Tech CEO

It was good to have a CEO who actually knew what the company did.

In the early days I was trying to set up Exchange on a MS Small Business Server for a customer on a Saturday morning. It needed to connect to iinet's mail server using multiple dial-up lines. After wading through the unhelpful MS documentation and studying iinet's recommended server settings I still could not get it to work. I phoned iinet tech support. A pleasant young man said that he did not have the information immediately to hand as he thought that we were the first people in Western Australia to do this, and could he phone me back in a few minutes? It was Michael Malone. He phoned back a few minutes later and ran me through many settings (not those in the MS documentation) and 30 minutes later everything worked. I told him that I would be on site for another couple of hours setting up client workstations and he phoned back an hour or so later to check that everything was OK.

He might not have been the bean-counter/spreadsheet-jockey business background Suit that some people expect from the CEO of a large company, but he did know how his products worked and how to treat a customer.

Turnbull to add speed test app to MyBroadband web site

Tim99 Silver badge

Speedtest for Oz

I find this one works well for the NBN: Link to my result with OOKLA here

Blighty goes retro with 12-sided pound coin

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Reduce future costs and abdicate at the same time.

I know that I have spent old George VI 3d coins Wikipedia image.

Unless you meant to post with the "I'll get my coat" icon. >>====>

Tim99 Silver badge
Headmaster

Children...

I'm pretty sure that my pocket money was given to me as a thruppenny bit.

WOW! Google invents the DIGITAL WATCH: What a time to be alive

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Aaaaaand...

I'm guessing they're all over 45?

You might be right.

My watch (a Longines "Professional") was bought by my father in 1942. It has hour, minute, and a sweep-second hands. It does what I want a watch to do - I wind it up and it works...

Windows hits the skids, Mac OS X on the rise

Tim99 Silver badge
Meh

Re: Perhaps missing the point?

@Richard Plinston

"...Thus the statistics are heavily skewed to unsophisticated users, ie typical Widows users (and Mac).

Er, I run Ghostery, Privoxy, a customized hosts file, and a couple of other goodies. Obviously, I am an unsophisticated user as I run them on a Mac...

Five unbelievable headlines that claim Tim Berners-Lee 'INVENTED the INTERNET'

Tim99 Silver badge
Windows

Oh dear

A lot of the people that I know believe that the Internet is the big blue E on the screen thingy...

Bill Gates is BACK... as CHIEF RICH human of PLANET EARTH

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: @NormDP

@westlake

Yep. I would also have made money (and did) from most of the commercial OSs (or even later FLOSS stuff) that were available.

As I was around at the time, I am pretty sure that the cheap commodity PCs originally designed to run CP/M would have done the job without QDOS/MS/PC-DOS if IBM had inegotiated a $30 licence with Digital Research. Cheap commodity PCs were going to happen anyway courtesy of Dr. Moore et al.

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

@NormDP

Perhaps not, but it probably cost you plenty. MS charge like a rentier service supplier. You never own it.

"I had lunch with our MS Rep (No, I am not Mike Cox), over coffee we gave him a bad time about Windows 286 and some of the 2-steps-forward-one-step-back "upgrades" to MS-DOS. Someone around the table asked what MS slogan was. The Rep was baffled. We said, you know, like DEC's is "Honesty and respect for customers and employees"; or IBM's "Think". He blurted out "Bill said $100 a year from everybody, for ever". Laughter all around the table ". (Trying hard for up-votes by linking to my own post).

So in my case, my personal (not business) spend is: (20 years x 2-4 PCs x$100) $4,000 - $8,000. MS's margin used to be >85% so roughly $3,000 to $7,000. Bill currently still owns "only" 6.4% of the stock compared to perhaps 2x3 times that amount in the early days, so to be generous - He only got about $500 of my money. Admittedly because I was the majority shareholder and chief techy type for a company that wrote software that could run on a Windows stack I made rather a lot more money than I gave to Bill...

Linux-friendly Munich: Ja, we'll take open source collab cloud

Tim99 Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: @PyLETS

@Tom Welsh

"Just as DEC cut its own throat 30 years ago by restricting the market for its excellent software to its own hardware platforms. It's the nature of the beast".

I was part of a largish team that implemented DEC's ALL-IN-1 in the research and engineering divisions of a very large nationalised industry. At the time the product was truly excellent on VMS, PDPs, DECmates - Even the "Professional" POS stuff was almost OK.

Now comes the bit that it is relevant. Even though we had a lot of DEC kit we stayed well away from the semi-proprietary Rainbow as we were putting in IBM ATs and PC Clones everywhere running DOS. Most of this was held together with DECnet and Novell. So it was necessary to run ALL-IN-1 under DOS. DEC's PC ALL-IN-1 DOS product was poorly implemented. It crashed, sometimes you could only get it to work if you booted from a vanilla DOS floppy as it did not seem to like networking software or Expanded/Extended memory drivers.

We eventually pulled all of this and, at vast expense, eventually replaced the WP side with WP5x; e-mail/messaging happened through generic clients; terminal emulation went to another vendor; and most of the rest, like time management, we did ourselves.

A real shame, this was years ahead in a corporate environment, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if DEC had made DECnet free and spent more efforts on generic PC client-server products. It might have slowed or stopped the rise of MS into networking and servers - MS products at the time were not up to scratch (PC/LAN Manager), and they could well have killed the relatively poor NT3x Server line that came later.

Yep, Microsoft seem to be flailing around while their core business degrades, just like DEC did...

Qantas' biggest problems are … Apple, Samsung and Google?

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: @-tim

"Economy is more money per square meter and kg of seats. All those people in the back are paying more than their fair share and it is time to end the heavy first class discounts."

Probably not. See link here

...Though first class represents less than 5 percent of all seats flown on long-haul routes, and business class accounts for 15 percent, those seats combined to generate 40 to 50 percent of airlines’ revenue, according to Peter Morris, the chief economist at Ascend, an aviation consulting firm...

A rough rule is that Business Class is about 4 times the cost of Economy, and takes up about twice the space. First Class, which I no longer use, is about 7 times the cost of Economy and uses about 4 times the space. The relative mass of the seats and other goodies is less than this ratio. The cabin-crew ratio would however be more favorable to the pointy-end people. A better case might be made that Business Class subsidizes everybody else on long distance routes?

As an aside, when I was working, I was the main shareholder in the company, so how I spent the money on travel tended to be literally, and figuratively, my business.

Tim99 Silver badge
Facepalm

@Big-nosed Pengie, @Winkypop

I've flown Emirates a few times from Oz to Europe and back. The stopover in Dubai is a PITA, though the view on departure can be pretty amazing...

Oh - and the prices were less than those of Qantas.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

QANTAS will soon stop all international flights from Perth.

So the decision is clear.

Emirates all the way. They are superior anyway...

As a bloated plutocrat (retired) who flies from Perth to Europe, I have travelled in the pointy end on both. I have just booked for two of us to travel to the UK to enjoy a cool, wet, summer (as opposed to a cool, wet, Perth winter). Originally Qantas went through Singapore, a longer flight, but a pleasant stop-over. Now that they both go through Dubai (not that pleasant) there is little difference, other than cost and service:-

Qantas - Food OK; staff friendly; service is so, so.

Emirates - Food OK, particularly if you like it spicy, service good; staff a bit reserved.

I am not that bothered about the in-flight entertainment. I take a book/iPad and go to sleep. The seat/beds are better on Qantas, but not enough to make much difference.

A hint to Qantas: The pointy end people pay 4 times the cost of cattle-class. The cost of Qantas (on a special deal) was $60 less than a similar deal with Emirates. Emirates always arrange for a chauffeur-driven limo to and from the airport, and will chauffeur you up to 100 miles to and from your destination airport - This would cost them less than $100 x 4 - If I am paying you $16,000 for two people, I WANT this. Yes I know that I could (and have) arranged this myself, but with this concept called "service", I should not have to...

Tab for Xmas, Mr Consumer? Yes please. And Mr Busin... NOPE

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Which disties?!

The majority of businesses are still a sit down in an office environment doing lots of mundane grunt work.

Yes, this is what happens now. In the near future (before 2020) big business will destroy at least 40% of these jobs with restructuring and automation. The outlook for these workers in SMBs is, perhaps, even worse. The little pool of admin/clerical & financial support workers seem to be going even more quickly as these business owner/directors restructure to use smartphones, "Cloud Services" (I hate that term), and the nice lady "who does" (1 or 2 days a week part-time).

A supporting anecdote: My financial advisor has just come back from the USA, where he met two different individuals who both run "personal" financial advice and superannuation businesses; one of them had 300+ Client's and was dealing with them all himself with a single PA. The other had 1000+ clients that were serviced by himself, another advisor and two part time admin people, this business owner was looking to cut down his costs...

Help! Apple has snaffled the WHOLE WORLD'S supply of sapphire glass

Tim99 Silver badge
Trollface

Re: I dont think its a question of choice.

... they will still have the fanbois but not the hoi-poloi who would be running around running enterprise level software in their palms ...

Sorry Tom, although it does seem that Android has more traction with hoi-poloi fondle users, iOS (which comes from *NIX/BSD/Darwin/NeXT roots) seems to be more likely to be used in more enterprise level software than Android or Canonical. If you want to feel depressed, try Googling "Google Android vs Apple in the enterprise".

Non-fondle serious back-end Linux based stuff is often Red Hat/CentOS, or even pure Debian, Canonical's Ubuntu might be more friendly for CLI-phobic newbies.

Disclosure - I several horses in this race. Debian and OS X for keyboard stuff and an iPad Air for fondling. My mobile, a very ancient monochrome Nokia that only does phone calls and SMS, has a battery that lasts about a week...

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Sapphire Glass isn't...

Transparent aluminium!!!

Look, we're spelling sulphur sulfur now, the least you could do is reciprocate ;)

OK, what follows is nearly interesting. IUPAC (International Union of Pure And Applied Chemistry) decrees that the correct spellings are aluminium and sulfur. USAians are generally allowed, but not encouraged, to use the correct aluminium.

Sulphur is sulfur as it comes from a Latin root rather than Greek, and early UK spellings used the "f". It was turned into the pseudo-posh "ph" later. There is a heated thread about it on The Royal Society of Chemistry website - Link: rsc.org

The definitive IUPAC periodic table is here: PDF file.

Apple Mac Pro: It's a death star, not a nappy bin, OK?

Tim99 Silver badge
FAIL

@AC - 2107967

If it goes wrong will I have to take it to the Apple store and wait in line with the consumer users, or will Apple send someone to my place of work and fix/swap out the same day? I think I know which the answer is, so I don't think it really justifies its "pro" moniker, it's just another workstation...

I have not tried Apple support for a "pro" machine recently, but last year when my iMac had a problem with a half row of stuck pixels, I phoned Apple Support on a Monday morning. A nice man came to my home office on Tuesday at lunchtime and replaced the screen. I don't remember having that level of support from Dell or HP (Except for when we had a 4 hour contract, which was a damned sight more expensive than AppleCare).

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

@h4rm0ny

Good comment.

I got into computing via a back door, writing programmes for use by myself and colleagues in one of the fundamental sciences in the 1970s. I am retired now but I still mentor people and assess them for technical competence for a national accreditation body.

My (generally middle aged or older) colleagues and I have noted over the last fifteen years or so that the education system has failed our younger colleagues in one important respect - The (usually highly intelligent) people that we see are unable to put the subjects that they have learnt to practical use. In many cases, younger professionals are unable to function without direct supervision or instruction, and that any initiative that they might show is discouraged by their management (who generally have little practical experience themselves). I believe that this is because schools, colleges, and universities now train people to pass exams and not to think . Someone who has been taught to think can solve problems, someone who was trained to pass an exam may well be lost when they have to go outside their syllabus.

Even if we thought that this style of "education" was the best option, I have personal experience of students who were unable to pass the exam being "helped" because they had spent a lot of money to be on the course. The powers-that-be do not want their course to be thought difficult because few students will want to apply. Fewer students means that there is less money available to the department, and its power and importance in the institution is therefore reduced.

This might be the ravings of an old fart, but I am seriously worried about the competency of many of the people in the professions who will be running everything as I continue the gentle decline into senility.

iTunes radio tunes in to Australia for first launch beyond USA

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Re: I buy those old-fangled CD things.

John, by-and-large you would be right, but not in my case.

An advantage of living in our retirement village is that our unit has an NBN connection: 50+Mbps down and 20+Mbps up, with unlimited downloads. I have lots of CDs too, but internet radio is what we generally use (Tin roof, so crap radio reception and we don't want to pay for an external aerial). So far, the couple of iTunes channels that we have tried today have been OK...

Woz he talking about? Apple co-founder wants iPhones to run Android

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: I know people who'd buy an android iPhone

@Azzy

I was going to stay out of the "My Android phone is better than the rubbish iPhondle thing that fanbois use" debate (I use a 14 year old Nokia), but your comment:

Within my circles of friends, I don't have trouble finding someone who prefers the design of the iPhone (even with the small screen and second rate hardware specs)...
- Could be seen as ironic, uninformed, or taking the piss.

There aren't many 64-bit Android phones now, but they will obviously be superior to the current second-rate 64-bit iPhones really soon: phonearena.com.

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Wrong Company?

@cs94njw

Well.. they could follow Microsoft mentality.

Embrace and extend. Take Android, fork it, add usability, and slowly make it incompatible with other Android devices...

It seems that was what Samsung was doing. Maybe they will fall back into line after Google got rid of Motorola: digital trends.com, but It would be foolish of them to drop plan B: kdramastars.com

We really need a Google icon, unless this one will do for now? >>-------->

Bill Gates to pull a Steve Jobs and SAVE MICROSOFT – report

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: The huge difference...

@Shultz

I think that BG may use the odd expletive. He was famous for berating staff with "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard!"

Although that might not go too well with the new kinder image of Bill Gates that his philanthropy seems to have bought.

National Broadband Network (NBN)

Tim99 Silver badge
Happy

Home NBN

I live in a retirement village. We have the NBN. Currently it is not as fast as advertised as we "only" get about 52 Mbps download and 18 Mbps up. It seems that we will get the theoretical 100Mbps when our contractor upgrades their "temporary" equipment.

Still very fast (and extremely reliable) compared to the iinet ADSL2+ connection at our previous house. It was about 450m from the exchange, we got ~11Mbps down and 1Mbps up.

The wiring in the house is Cat 5e going to a 4-port 100M router in a cabinet in the garage. Wireless is served through two Airport Express units (also connected to HiFi and set of speakers). All is good, with ping times in the order of 16ms to the provider's DNS through a wired connection, which goes up by 1.4ms for wireless.

CEO Marissa Mayer puts on brave face as Yahoo! shows another loss

Tim99 Silver badge
Alert

New logo

So the "whimsical, yet sophisticated." new exclamation logo hasn't immediately created BEELLIONS of dollars of new profits.

I am surprised. See relevant ICON >------->>

Stephen Fry rewrites computer history again: This time it's serious

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

Re: Erm, no

@handle

Erm, yes. I am even older than Fry, and went to a British school where people cared about that sort of thing. We used the OED - A successor of which still allows "licence" as a verb - Oxforddictionaries.com

Note that in British English licence is the correct spelling for the noun, and is also an acceptable variant spelling of the verb. In US English both noun and verb are spelled license.

Pure snobbery of course (like Fry?). We also used spellings liike unionized, so that people could be confused by the chemical or political usage...

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: he sort of reminds me of a polished Boris

El Reg, and Fry are British - Licence is spelled correctly for the UK and many of the former Colonies. IBM and Microsoft are USAian, they would spell it license...

Office 365 Microsoft's fastest growing business, ever - Microsoft

Tim99 Silver badge

"...and how many of them have a thousand users, and how many have three?"<br>

Microsoft's reseller documentation states that the average Office 365 deal size is 141 seats....

So, accepting Microsoft's estimation of 750million users (up from 500 million) - At this rate, it will take them over 14 years to get everyone to "upgrade"?

Tim99 Silver badge

Reply IconIt's 1,000 customers (companies) a day you retard...

...and how many of them have a thousand users, and how many have three?

THOUSANDS of UK.gov Win XP PCs to face April hacker storm... including boxes at TAXMAN, NHS

Tim99 Silver badge

@websey

Or we could maybe for once get someone in public office who knows what the fuck they are going on about.

In my experience in the public service if, by some mischance, a senior administrator type was placed in a position in which he had significant expertise he was quickly promoted out of the way...

NSA refuses to deny spying on members of Congress

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: It’s different when it’s happening to you.

@John 98 @Irony Deficient

As you are aware, the "power tends to corrupt" quote is from a letter from Acton to Mandell Creighton:-

...I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it...

We now think of this as being about political power, and it is, but originally it was about Papal Infallibility (which needless to say, Acton was against) and the first Vatican Council. The bit I always remember is "Great men are almost always bad men".

CryptoLocker creeps lure victims with fake Adobe, Microsoft activation codes

Tim99 Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Bastards....

You do know that the NSA et al rely on the fact that it is a mess out there to keep a lower profile and hide in the rivers of crap to carry out their sacred work on keeping the free world 'safe'?

HP: This Xmas, get the SACK... and not the one filled with presents

Tim99 Silver badge
Coat

I used to like HP

Quite a while ago I found that HP had decent management, competitive products, good support and were generally pleasant to del with.

Then they took many of the bits that I liked and put them into Agilent...

Wait, that's no moon 21.5-inch monitor, it's an all-in-one LG Chromebase PC

Tim99 Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: It's not the concept, it's the vendor ...

[...LG - an unethical company...]

Unethical compared to whom? I don't recall too many IT companies that I, as a customer, thought were even vaguely ethical since the days of DEC.

Excise Xmas prezzie indecision MISERY with El Reg’s gift guide²

Tim99 Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Nest Protect

@Great Bu

Er, no.

I used to analyze combustion products from furnishings in test rooms. The heat from combustion quickly causes strong convection from the source up to the ceiling, but the ambient atmosphere mixes quickly with the combustion products as they rise. You are correct in that leaving the room by crawling along the floor is the best way to escape, but this is because the fire is usually in furniture etc. which is above the floor - The convection current usually sinks to near the source. You are usually killed by suffocation or poisoning, but scalding of the interior of the windpipe and lungs can also occur, so the relatively cooler atmosphere would help you.

As an aside, before the change in legislation, I have seen people who had been killed by smoldering foam furniture caused by a dropped cigarette. They had invariably been dozing and had been overcome by combustion products before the fire took hold. Sometimes people would ask why the victim had not been awakened by the fire, we explained that they were probably dead, or deeply unconscious before any flames were visible. In my house (designed for retirees) we have infrared fire detectors, as well as the normal ionization type smoke detectors.

As you say, the density of CO2 drops at higher temperature, so at ~300C it is roughly half of its density at room temperature. The density drop is similar for N2 at -300C, which is as you know, is ~80% of the original air. The drop in relative concentration of O2 as it is consumed by combustion would reduce the density of the atmosphere (at any temperature) by only 3%. In the unlikely event of all the O2 reacting to form CO2 the density of the atmosphere would increase by roughly 17%, if only CO was formed the density would decrease by roughly 3%. However all of these numbers are very approximate and vary considerably depending on the fuel, rate of reaction, draught from outside the room, and the temperature at the reaction front.

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Nest Protect

Air has a vapour density of ~14.4. Carbon monoxide has a vapour density of 14, so they are roughly the same. Carbon monoxide in a fire will quickly disperse to all parts of a room including near to the ceiling. I think you meant carbon dioxide which will tend pool on the floor, it has a vapour density of 22.

Gases produced by burning household furnishings can be very poisonous and usually contain hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Typically people who are killed in household fires are poisoned/suffocated by the toxic materials in smoke - You will generally only have a few minutes to escape.

The vapour density of a gas is ~its molecular weight divided by 2.

Yes, you ARE a member of a global technology elite

Tim99 Silver badge

Re: Now consider...

@AC 08:06

Sturgeon's Revelation applies: 90% of everything is crap.

MPs: Ancient UK Border Force systems let gangsters into country

Tim99 Silver badge

NZ

I expect that it is just a coincidence that NZ is one of the least corrupt countries?

Link transparency.org