Posts by Nigel Thomas

Samsung flies flagship phone

What QWERTY keyboard?

The sliding bit looks like a typical phone keypad to me.

My qwerty attachment is in the coat pocket.

Father of Playmobil dies at 79

We need a suitable pictorial memorial ...

... no doubt you can oblige from your extensive collection of Playmobil figures?

Boffin dubs global warming 'irreversible'

Ancestors?

Don't think we can change the weather for our ancestors, mate; maybe for our descendants (long after we and El Reg have gone to meet our environmentally friendly maker)?

Cheers

Orange mobile internet takes a lie down

High speed internet

Well, it's been working for me all day - but at the usual snail's pace (5 bars notwithstanding).

ISS astronauts lose 'alarming' amounts of hipbone strength

Effect of gravity on tennis ball

@anonymous coward: when you let go of the tennis ball, it follows Newton's law - maintaining its straight line velocity in a direction that's tangential to the rotation. As you and your hand describe an arc of the circle , the ball appears to you to be falling - and will eventually hit the floor close to your toe. I haven't done the maths, but I guess the apparent line of fall won't be quite vertical (your hand will describe a slightly larger arc than the ball, so the ball will seem to fall slightly "behind" you (in the sense of rotation). The larger the radius of the space station, the smaller this effect (which I think is associated with the Coriolis effect) will be.

To produce 1g with acceptable low Coriolis effect, the radius of rotation would have to be 224 m (it says here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gravity). And the larger the radius the better for long-term space travellers...

Cheers

Sun to be eclipsed by Red Hat?

Earnings vs Revenues

> Sun revenues were $13.8bn in 2008 while Red Hat's were less than four per cent of this at $0.52bn

Well, Sun's turnover may have been $13bn but it's falling (at annuallised 7% quarter on quarter) and their profits were seriously negative (depending which measure you use). Meanwhile Red Hat is growing revenue and profitable (source for both: Yahoo Finance).

So of course JAVA is falling (down 20% over 3 months) while RHT is rising (up 20% over the last 3 months) - compared to NASDAQ down ~9%. Look at 6 months and RHT is down "only" 35% - comparable to NASDAQ index - while JAVA is down around 65%.

All shows investors are rational - they sell the poorly performing/value destroying and buy the better performing shares.

Regards Nigel

Is the UK.gov IT gravy train heading for the buffers?

Why are there no comments on page 2?

How come the comments are visible from page 1 but not from page 2, eh? Time to fix your fora...

BT to be freed from service obligations

What about Openreach

Surely the whole point of Openreach and the current massively expensive programme of "physical separation" between Openreach, BT Retail, BT Wholesale and BT Global Services is so that Openreach can be the regulated Transco / National Grid / Network Rail equivalent.

Why not just complete the separation of Openreach from the rest into goverment owned, or non-profit public company paid for by charging BT and the others for their use of the last mile? Give the USO to Openreach and leave the rest of BT free to sink or swim.