Posts by Gavin King

Yahoo! makes Brit teen app maker VERY RICH with Summly buy

It's "Your Holiness", if we're going to be all formal.

Although I'd have thought he'd be too busy settling in to his new digs to be here.

Oi, Microsoft, where's my effin' toolbar gone?

Re: Other problem with the browser

I wonder if this is also a result of touch-screens; with a keyboard you (almost always) have buttons to press. With a touch screen there are no actual buttons and so it is not expected that there will be actual motion.

I speak a little in igonrance, not having much chance to play with touch screens recently, except on the photocopier at work which is not quite the same thing.

But yes, it would be nice if people would stick to a consistent use of language for these things.

'Quantum fridge' gets close to absolute zero

Re: Operating conditions?

I would have though that this would be in a very high vacuum, which is perhaps cooled by a liquid helium device: I know the one that I've played with in the past gets quite easily to ~2.7 K with no trouble, and can be lower if you're both lucky and careful.

As it turns out, reading the paper itself, it is an Adiabatic Demagnetisation Refrigerator (ADR) that gets it from ~300K to ~300 mK. This is actually quite a cool method (excuse the pun), especially for one who has a bit of a background with cryogenic stuff. I won't bore you with the details, but NASA have a basic primer here:

http://cryo.gsfc.nasa.gov/introduction/ADR_intro/ADR_intro.html

and something a bit more technical here:

http://cryo.gsfc.nasa.gov/ADR/ADR_primer/ADR_primer.html

which, though a bit space orientated, show the general idea nicely.

The more interesting part I found was, that to disconnect the ADR once it got to 300 mK, they used what is essentially a piece of brass on a rope. I'd have though it would be far more complicated than that.

The supercomputers LIED: UK rainfall is rising, but won't drown our phones

Re: Jam Jars in the sea?

That's easy; they put it on the bottom and measure how deep the water is!

Reg readers brew up the ultimate cuppa

Re: 3-4min

In this antipodian part of the world, the only ones seem to be Dilmah brand, made of plastic, and are fine until you move them, when the string pulls a hole in the bag, or the vertices rip, filling the cup with leaves (or what passes for tea leaves in a bag).

It wouldn't be so bad, if only they didn't cost upwards of $2 for the cup.

Banged-up Brit hacker hacks into his OWN PRISON'S 'MAINFRAME'

Re: I always thought a prison mainframe

I suppose that explains why they're called "racks".

Keyboard, you're not my type

Funny your old man would say that; I learnt to type on a typewriter, but the only residue from that, that I notice, is a preference for the keyboard to be at quite a steep angle.

A do know that my old Imperial 66 typewriter had a couple of pressure settings on the keys: there was a lever that adjusted the tension on the return spring for the keys. It was never as light-touch as something like a laptop keyoard, but it was quite close. The biggest problem seems to be that as you make the spring looser (the keys "softer") the maximum typing speed would go down, as the type didn't come away from the paper quite as fast. This made a trade-off between speed and strength. I almost always went for the soft, since my typing wasn't (as still isn't) very fast at all.

Still, I must agree that the tactile feedback is essential, especially if transcribing something, It is nice to know from touch that the letters are in fact there. This is something that bothers me about the preponderance of flat laptop-style keypads: they don't seem to have enough travel, and the mechanisms don't have a decided "on-off" point; that is, they almost seem to vary a little as one is typing so that what is a sufficient pressure with one key-press is not for another.

You know, I think I'm going to dig out the old typewriter and have a play with it now. Lets see if I can upset the neighbours with the racket of flying metal!

World+Dog don't care about climate change, never have done

Re: Well reported.....

I have often thought along these lines, that the actuary types will do a better job of analysing the effects on the environments, simply because they have no agenda other than keeping the insurance company profitable.

Colombian boffins reconstruct flight path of Russian meteor

Re: Bah!

Perhaps it was just a gentle reminder smite: "Hey, you guys, I'm still around, and you'd better behave."

A bit like letting the cat know that you're looking before she jumps on the bench.

Microsoft finally ships Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7

Re: Does it download Chrome any faster?

This is not so!

It's Belarus for Opera, isn't it?

Micron glues DDR4 RAM to flash, animates the 256GB franken-DIMM

Re: Thanks for the memories: 264 byte

"Erh, I think you mean 2^64"

The extra one's to make up for the missing one: now there are on average two circumflexes where there ought to be two circumflexes.

Tesla vs Media again as Model S craps out on journo - on the highway

Re: in much of the world, electric cars would be powered by fossil fuels

"And, strictly speaking, nuclear power is not renewable either."

In the strictest sense, nothing is renewable or sustainable: eventually the Laws of Thermodynamics tend to catch with anything that is done in this universe. Really it is just a matter of determining what the best wasteful method is. And perhaps that is fossil fuels, perhaps it is electric, perhaps it is merely settling for not transporting stuffs halfway around the world without good reason and not travelling hundreds of kilometres a day just to get to work.

The business mullet: Cool or tool?

Re: trousers are more comfy anyway

Even properly fitting cotton trousers can be more comfortable than jeans. This can be in many ways: they are cooler, they can flex more readily, if you get caught in the rain they will dry in a reasonable amount of time.

Boffins find RAT-SIZED bug-muncher links man to beast

Re: It's worse that that.....

Goodness me --- watch your language! Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?

Ten 3D printers for this year's modellers

Re: "it begs the question of what you might print if you take it on a plane as hand-baggage"

I suppose that it is a thought: my initial impression was "I wonder if the law considers that?".

I know certainly you are not allowed to board the aircraft with a "weapon" --- as I found out when my safety razor had to be put in the hold recently --- but what about weapons that are made in flight?

I'm not a lawyer, but it strikes me as something that would not have been considered by those making the laws. Is there a process for this?

Not that it would seem to change much about the rubber glove, but it is vaguely interesting as a thought experiment.

Anyhow, I'd settle to have a decent cup and plate printed: the cardboard garbage that I've been exposed to recently is appalling.

Facebook finds new way to wring hundreds from users

Re: On an unrelated note

The people around here are a bit of an objectionizing bunch, aren't they?

Space Shuttle Columbia disaster remembered 10 years on

Re: Degrees F…

Yeah! This is science-y stuff. It should be Rankine.

On a practical note, by the time you get to a thousand degrees on almost any scale, it doesn't really matter: I certainly just read it a "bloody hot".

You thought watching cat videos was harmless fun? Think AGAIN

Re: Indeed

And the sheep: surely you know that documentary "Black Sheep"!

Germany's RTL pulls free-to-air channels off terrestrial TV

Re: Satellite or Cable?

I suspect that what Mage is getting at is that it is a sight easier to get to a terrestrial transmitter in case of breakage than it is to get to a satellite.

Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows

"...to using Linux desktops"

One could argue that he's got a plug loose, perhaps?

Global mercury ban to hit electronics, plastics, power prices

Re: "Mercury-rich devices like thermometers and blood pressure meters..."

I'm not sure, but I know that when my father's wife was doing her first-aid for the ambulance service, she was sent home with one to practice with. This may have just been because the fancy new one was left in the ambulance.

New transistor tech could beat silicon and save Moore's Law

Re: Editor: Transistor symbol is wrong....

At the risk of extreme pedantry: should it be a JFET, or a MOSFET?

Re: "Sand is not silicon"

Mind you, "InGAs Valley" isn't too bad.

Australian Police say don't use Apple's iOS 6 Maps

Re: Australia?

To be honest, I think that dragons would be on the less-likely-to-kill end of the scale of things in Australia.

Register readers mostly too ashamed to cop to hideous hoard horrors

Re: You know you have a problem when...

That's not too far at all: it sounds about right to me!

i mean, capacitors are expensive things, and sometimes you need a piece of metal of just the size of a backplane support.

Man who put the manhood into the Speaking Clock dies

Re: "He never married"

I wondered the same. I didn't think that anyone said things like that anymore --- I mean, it's almost dignified, for goodness sake!

Light ties itself in knots - spontaneously

Re: Explaination: Simple

And smoke. Must remember the smoke.

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

Re: I quite literally now have something (to do) for the weekend...

Never mind the school, try a University: as an undergrad we were told that we couldn't do one of the experiments as there was no way to get data off of the oscilloscope. The department ended up managing to find dinky 512MB ones, but they cost the earth, and god only knows if they're still available.

And it was only a few weeks ago I found myself having to clear a 1GB drive tthat once held manuals and drivers to do very much the same: anything larger ---even if partitioned/formatted smaller would be "too large" and not work in the scope.

And these aren't even very old machines, at least by lab scope standards: not even ten years old.

Mind you, don't get me started about hoarding old stuffs. The other scope has only HP-IB and a floppy disk drive. To use the floppy disks, I ended up bring in the USB floppy drive from home, that everyone called me mad for getting and then keeping. Right up to the point where my supervisor had to use it to get drivers off of a floppy disk for a rather expensive bit of kit that escapes me right now.

Re: Hoarding?? Never!!

The more important question is whether or not it's an off-site back-up if the site (and everything to do with it) has ceased to exist.

Scottish brainiacs erect wee super-antenna

Re: "Those cogs wouldn't turn, there's an odd number so they'd lock together an awful sound"

I think it refers to the gears on the face of the 2 pound coin. Why it's on the picture is an entirely different matter. It could be that there is some Scottish academic that is still miffed with the mechanical impossibility of the design on it, but I'm not sure that would explain the interesting grammar (interesting because of the lack of it, mostly).

Whatever happened to amanfromMars, anyhow? Haven't seen him around these parts for some time.

"Beamforming on the other hand is of course ancient."

Ah -- so that's what Stonehenge is all about!

Now Space Station forced to DODGE flying Japanese junk

Re: Not obvious...

If it were all neat and tidy, it wouldn't need cleaning at all!

Pastafarians: Get your noodly appendages off that Facebook suspect

Re: a traditional dish involving ground beef,

I was under the impression that it was referring to some steak that had been dropped on the floor.

I then tried to read the police report to find if it had any details, but it was all Greek to me.

Happy birthday, Compact Disc

Re: Track information

I too was about to say that I'd only ever seen it on Sony equipment, and have only ever seen it on one disc, which I think was Sony, too.

My car radio still has it, too, not that it gets used very often. For fear of damaging the discs most of the originals were copied onto blanks, which then had the CD-TEXT data put on as well. I always wondered why it wasn't taken up by more players and record companies, and still have no good reason other than that, by the time it was getting popular, "soft" music came along and did away completely with the disc anyhow.

WTF is... NFC

Re: "Apple folk can already use AirPlay to stream pictures and video to their Apple TV boxes."

Just as a thought, I wonder if the receiver could be built into the remote: so that one only had to tap the remote for all of the negotiation business to occur.

Don't have to leave the sofa, and don't have to fiddle with menus and the like.

Angry Sunfish in piscene boss battles

Me Too.

I was secretly hoping for a story of some sunfish sick of being poked and prodded turning on the scientists doing the poking and prodding, with hilarious/disastrous results.

Perhaps it's the Friday afternoon kicking in --- time for one of these (<--) to fix it.

The asymmetry implicit in Internet data retention

Re: Pot, Kettle, Black alert

Perhaps, but to me (as a New Zealander) I find that Australia has a very "American" streak through it; I don't presume to say whether this is good or bad, merely that there are several cultural and linguistic traits that the two have in common.

Apple blacklisted by Chinese consumer watchdog

Re: Surprised?

More interestingly, I remember the (diesel) ute went in for a service. When the invoice arrived, it clearly said "spark plugs inspected and changed", or something equivalent.

I don't think we were charged for them, but the Service manager had a bit of a splutter trying to explain it when he was asked.

Korean telly factory power cut costs Samsung $30,000+ per second

Re: Hydroflouric

I know I really shouldn't, but:

Wet flour is a sticky horrible mess to clean up, isn't it?

Western consumption helping to kill off species

Re: They also serve who only sit and spin...

"Couldn't I just have another couple of coffees?"

I imagine that it would have to be a different stuff for a different species: maybe a cup of tea, or some of that fancy imported chocolate that costs a small fortune, but tastes so very good.

Actually, I wonder if it would be possible to pick your diet (or use of material) to specifically kill off a particular species? And what would the implications of that be?

Smart meters are 'massive surveillance' tech - privacy supremo

Re: Detecting what you're watching

Natural like a CRT: gotta love the natural electrons hitting the natural phosphors on the natural, green (naturally?) glass envelope.

Space shuttle Enterprise makes final voyage – to New York

Re: I saw it flying!

Surely not. It must have been something else. You boys do tell the strangest of tales.

Molyneux chisels away at social experiment

Re: By a strange co-incidence...

So what's your address? And will you take a personal cheque?

Queen unveils draft internet super-snoop bill - with clauses

Re: Wedges, anybody?

I thought you were talking about the foodstuff, and now I'm hungry for some crispy deep-fried goodness.

Now, where's the nearest fish'n'chip shop that's open first thing in the morning?

Moore's Law has ten years to run, predicts physicist

Re: Moore's Misnomer

Strictly speaking the Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't a law either, but it still seems to hold.

And don't talk about enough math.

Biennial boner blights Beemer biker

Re: Inevitable knob gag.

"All rise for the judge."

Biologists create synthetic DNA capable of EVOLUTION

Re: @Filippo

Traditionally, the scaffold is timber, although these days I think steel is occasionally used.

OAP sues Apple for $1m after walking into store's glass door

I can imagine...

That she was in a bit of pane after this.

Space probe in orbit above Mercury sees signs of polar ice

By Jove...

Mercurial in temperament? I thought that planetology boffins were somewhat saturnine by nature.