Posts by David Given 433 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Aug 2008
Many years ago I had a 1GB spinning disk PCMCIA type II hard drive (for installation on an iPaq --- remember them?). That was 5mm thick. So this has already been solved.
OTOH, the drive was thin and flimsy and lasted for about six months before failing, and then they seemed to have withdrawn from the market, so I suspect it wasn't solved very well...
Here's a 5GB model on Amazon (discontinued), if you want a picture: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-Type-PCMCIA-Hard-Disk/dp/B00005U5RJ
I have an NC200. Lovely, lovely bit of kit. Fantastically clear mono screen, a full size, full travel and extremely comfortable keyboard, and 10 hours on battery. (Admittedly, it did run on 5 C cells.) The screen was 80x16 and pixel addressable so it was easily big enough for real work, it had a 720kB 3.5" floppy drive and used standard DOS format floppies, and the internal storage was enough to get reasonable documents on.
The OS was pretty nasty, with a word processor that was limited to in-memory documents only, which on a 64kB address space Z80 wasn't much. But it did come with a kick-ass version of BBC Basic for the Z80, including integrated Z80 assembler...
Is Postscript support really an issue these days? Don't all sensible operating systems automatically render Postscript to whatever wacky format the printer supports behind the scenes?
I bought a Konica Minolta PP1400W several years ago for 50 UKP. It's cheap, not very fast, but works beautifully --- I've never had to replace the toner cartridge (I think I'm only on my second ream of paper). I plugged it into my Ubuntu system, it was autodetected and Just Worked. I *think* it's PCL, but given that I can print PDF, Postscript, plain text, etc, all with lpr, is it really important?
I've got a few. They're nice bits of kit, actually, and if the firmware is replaced make extremely pleasant answerphone/VOIP boxes. They're even well supported by Linux these days, although the eMailer hacking community (see http://inputplus.co.uk/ralph/emailer/) has largely died.
Incidentally, using the stock firmware, if the machine is unable to contact the 0800 number from which it gets its advertisements, it will gradually grind to a halt and stop working. Hopefully that's still running.
In order to do deduplication they have to know what your data is --- obviously; they need to be able to match the hashes of a block from one user against a block from another user. And, naturally, since they're only storing one instance of the block, that block must be accessible by both users. The only way I can conceive of this working in an encrypted environment is if all users have the same encryption key... which rather defeats the purpose of encryption.
Or am I missing something?
Partially blocking the nozzle of a rocket doesn't just sound like a recipe for disaster, it sounds like getting disaster delivered wholesale by the lead manufacturer of disasters and then getting it installed by top-of-the-line disaster creation experts... I like the idea of the 10m column for a hypobaric chamber, though; simple, effective and less likely to explode in your face.
Might it be possible to avoid the temperature problem by just insulating the engine? A couple of shaped expanded polystyrene blocks either side of the engine, split down the middle so they fall away when the engine fires... would that keep the heat in for long enough?
I tried Unity for nearly five minutes when it came out on Natty, before discovering that it's utterly hostile to focus-follows-mouse, which I've been using for over 15 years now. At which point I gave up and never looked at it again.
Does Oneiric support focus-follows-mouse at all (although I can't imagine how with the disconnected menu bars)?
...I spent a highly enjoyable weekend there in my youth. Lots of fun. The main high points were:
- Seeing a deeply impressive hybrid nitrous-oxide-and-perspex job take off.
- Someone launching a home-made five-stager; we lost sight of it after the third stage, at which point it was already curving over for a trajectory towards the nearby RAF base.
- Getting the range safety officer drunk and trying out experimental (and highly illegal) solid fuel rocket mixes.
- Building rockets out of baguettes (they fly quite well). The recovery mechanism was a tomato duct-taped to the top.
I bought a bunch of half-As and built a few badly-made waverider rockets, which mostly failed to do anything interesting. Alas, I expect the event is better regulated and much safer these days.
Unfortunately one of the problems with the ISS is that human spaceflight technology is, right now, pretty much el sucko. Manned vehicles have just enough delta-V to reach a limited set of very low orbits. One of the reasons the ISS was built in such a low orbit was because it had to be reachable.
So while it's possible to boost its orbit --- it'd be expensive, but doable, involving a custom-built thruster module that gets launched on a heavylifter of some description, installed via spacewalks, and then very very slowly boosted over a period of years --- lift it more than a trivial amount and the ISS suddenly becomes useless as nobody can get to it any more.
My personal opinion is that the ISS is a fabulous, amazing structure and ditching it in the sea would be a travesty. I *do* think that such a thruster module should be built and installed. This would give the ISS the ability to do its own stationkeeping without having to rely on visiting tugs; and would also open up the possibility of, if the station *has* to be decommissioned, doing so by lifting it into a parking orbit rather than destroying it. After all, one day someone's going to want it as a museum.
A few weeks ago I managed to get a port of the venerable Jasper Spectrum emulator working on the Kindle, and naturally, this was one of the games I had to try. I actually managed to complete the first level, but, as you might expect, it wasn't really a success. _The Hobbit_ worked rather better...
Back in the Froyo days, a cow orker got fed up with his HTC Desire and replaced the ROM with a generic non-Sense one. He got 30% more battery life, and more free space due to not having any shovelware on it.
Cyanogen has a Gingerbread mod that supports the HTC Desire. See here: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/devices/htc-desire-gsm
...is *not* supported.
Which is a total deal-breaker for me. It's simply the most useful and productive feature that X has that other environments don't. Even OSX has a limited focus-follows-mouse mode (which applies to Terminal windows only), which should tell you how useful it is.
If it doesn't do focus-follows-mouse, there's simply no point me even looking further at it.
...a few years ago CGSociety did a competition to produce full film trailers for a non-existent movie adaptation of Eon. And they hauled in Greg Bear to do the judging. You can watch them here:
http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3987&page=2
They look pretty decent but, of course, are not how I would have done it.
The iconic blade from the uber-geek-fest World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King? (No, I still haven't managed to kill him yet. Dammit.)
And if you can't afford the $429 metal replica: http://www.epicweapons.com/products/frostmourne.php
...then there's always the inflatable version! http://i712.photobucket.com/albums/ww130/Missojai/Frostmourne.jpg
I have an OT-808, the flipphone variant of the OT-800; it cost me 35 quid off Ebay unlocked, and is actually a pretty nice device. Closed, it's tiny, about five centimetres square, although it does have a shiny pink exterior (apparently it was explicitly designed to look like a powder compact). It fits in my pocket beautifully. The UI is surprisingly configurable with both a widget-based home screen and much simpler traditional one.
There's a decent selection of functionality, although mostly farmed out to bundled J2ME apps for stuff like Twitter (which I haven't tried using yet). The email app is native but it won't talk to my Dovecot IMAP server. There's a reasonable calendar app, which allegedly syncs to a remote server, but there's no documentation anywhere on what the protocol is. The J2ME engine is IBM's and is relatively decent but a lot of apps (including MidpSSH, alas) get confused by the full keyboard, as they expect a phone keypad instead.
Bluetooth BROWSE is *not* supported, so the only way of getting files onto and off the thing is via Bluetooth PUSH or mass storage --- you can't access the file system remotely.
One irritating design flaw is that there's an exterior button that starts the music player that you can't disable, so I have on occasion stuffed the phone into my pocket and had it started playing. Still, better than my old phone, a crappy Motorola PEBL which had exterior buttons that would randomly reprogram the ring tone every time I pocketed it (including to silent!).
Disturbingly, when I received it, the internal memory was full of pictures of Richard Hammond.
The main thing you need to do to a computer when you take it into space is rejig all the ventilation. Most computers these days rely heavily on convection to take hot air away from the machine --- even a tiny amount makes a huge difference. In free fall there isn't any convection, and the hot air will just build up inside the computer getting hotter and hotter. Also, of course, you need a specialist power supply (no mains on the ISS).
Here's an old but interesting article on the space station computer systems: http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=213
Alien. Because, duh.
Sheevaplugs aren't that slow. I benchmarked one with nbench as about equivalent to an AMD Athlon running at 1GHz (integer only; there is no FPU). Figures here: http://www.cowlark.com/2009-04-15-sheevaplug/
I run my personal website off one. Last year I got reddit'd, and got a traffic spike: on average about 50 hits per minute for a day (unfortunately I don't keep enough logs to know what the peak traffic was). I use lighttpd and the winstone servlet container; even using the crappy OpenJDK interpreted Java engine, it ran without a wobble.
I wouldn't want to run PHP or apache on one, but for certain classes of problem and the right setup they really shine.
I use a Sheevaplug, too; it's plugged into a home-made SSD built of four 16GB USB keys (achieving about 20-30MB/s). I run Debian, which works beautifully, and use lighttpd rather than apache and postfix rather than sendmail. It's great.
There are a few minor issues: the USB chipset is a bit dodgy, meaning that I'd get occasional I/O errors on some combinations of hardware; the uboot USB support is very poor, meaning that I had to apply the scary uboot upgrade patch to boot from SD card instead; and it is *extremely* limited on ports. I have far too much stuff hanging off the single USB port.
I'm thinking of upgrading to a GuruPlug Server (twin 100 megabit ethernet, more USB ports, and eSATA! I could finally use a real SSD!), but there appear to be heat dissipation issues with it, so I'm leaving it be for a while until they get that sorted out.
What are they *on*? For an ostensibly portable device, wouldn't it make far more sense to use batteries that you can, you know, actually buy in shops? That way if I'm on holiday and it starts to go flat I can plonk a couple of cheap AAs in it and continue to use the radio, rather than having to buy a 17 quid battery by mail order *in advance*. It's a totally bizarre design decision.
Also, I believe that's a micro USB socket, not a mini.
Awesome stuff, and to hell with anyone who says otherwise --- I wish *I* was doing something this interesting.
But now that the concept has been proven, it's time for the *real* mission!
I do have one suggestion: if you put a big tail fin on the main payload box, the balloon won't rotate as much, which leads to much better pictures.
The guy in the background, in the blue jacket --- I'd recognise that shadow over the upper face anywhere. It's ex-Emperor Palpatine! The whole PARIS project is a front for a Sith plot to take over the world! Once released, Vulture One will cruise at hypersonic velocities through the upper atmosphere releasing paper-based midichlorian nanotechnology that will corrupt our precious bodily fluids. Soon, people everywhere will be compelled by the power of the Force to vote Tea Party, so recreating the Empire and restoring Palpatine to power!
It's so obvious in hindsight. What else could PARIS stand for but Palpatine's Attempt to Restore the Influence of the Sith?
Because Linux can only dynamically load executables and libraries out of the real filesystem, not from zipfiles. Therefore the library has to be copied out of the apk (which is just a renamed zipfile) into the filesystem before it can be used. But the apk can't be modified, so you end up with a compressed copy there as well.
The solution to this is to use something like FUSE to allow the zipfile to be mounted as a real filesystem, but that makes life much more complicated (and slower) and as it would only really be useful for this particular case they've decided not to do it.
If that very dodgy-looking version number is even slightly accurate, that's about donut and a half. (The screen shot certainly shows donut.) It also doesn't say whether the screen is capacitative or resistive, which means it's most likely resistive.
I suspect that the only thing this tablet has going for it is the price. OTOH, it is a very good price... that's 85 quid *including* VAT, mind.
I wonder if it's upgradable to froyo?
Because the motors don't draw the full 290kW all the time.
In this mode you're using the battery as a booster to provide extra power in short bursts --- i.e., when you put your foot down. When you lift your foot again, the load drops and the battery recharges. This means that you can use a much smaller engine than you'd normally need, as you only need to generate average power, not peak power. Plus you get efficiency benefits, as since the engine's not connected directly to the wheels you're not crippling it by forcing it to run at a range of revs: the engine gets to run at the speed it wants to run at, regardless of how fast the car's moving.
The point of all this is that you end up with a car that behaves like an electric car, with the simplified transmission and awesome torque that you get with such things, but with the range of a fuel-based car. It's something I've been waiting for for ages.
I'm not that keen on Thunderbird, using it merely because it's the least-bad cross-platform IMAP MUA around, so I gave Claws a try. I really wanted to like it but I couldn't --- it's just too slow. Deleting mail off a remote IMAP server would take ten to fifteen seconds *per message*. I could set it to defer changes until later, which is a very nice feature, but now when I change folders it takes fifteen to twenty seconds to commit the changes while I'm sitting there twiddling my thumbs. Thunderbird may have its faults, but at least it knows that slow IMAP operations should happen in the background while the user gets on with something useful.
Plus, it crashed on me several times.
So I'm still looking for a good cross-platform IMAP email client. Any suggestions?
According to WHO, the suicide rate in China is ~25 / 100000 / year (http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/suiciderates/en; data is quite old, but I wouldn't expect the rates to change *that* much). So in a facility of 300000 we'd expect about 75 suicides a year.
So what we're seeing is, of course, tragic --- but is it actually out of the ordinary?
It's not actually a very good language. The syntax looked like it grew rather than was designed. For example, there are about five different, incompatible, types of pointer. There's two, incompatible, ways of constructing objects. There's no support for generics. There's no support for exceptions. The type system doesn't support const correctness. Interfaces, while neat, are used inconsistently --- why are len() and cap() global functions occupying valuable namespace rather than methods on a Collection interface? And the syntax is a mangled mess, full of special-cases and obscure constructions formed by gluing expressions together.
There's some good stuff in Go --- I can forgive it a lot for having real closures, and its interface support is very intriguing --- but it's very telling that in the initial publicity video, the only killer feature they could think of is that it *compiles quickly*.
This makes me gnash my teeth in frustration, because if they'd read the literature before doing the design Go could have been so, so much more...
Erm... digital signatures on email have been around, like, forever. Either MIME/S if you want to be corporate and spend money, or GPG if you're a normal person. By signing the content and not the route the whole issue of untrusted delivery just goes away. There's a bit of a problem with support --- the corporatish clients tend to support MIME/S and not GPG, the open source clients tend to support GPG and not MIME/S --- but it pretty much *just works*.
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