Posts by Matthew Smith

Motorola bounds out the G8 with a harder, better, faster smartphone for the thrifty

I've had a G8 Plus since last year and I'm very happy with it. No bloatware, excellent battery, ample fast enough for my none-gaming needs. Its a bit odd that the vanilla G8 is being released now, with both a bigger screen and yet lower resolution. Otherwise the vanilla options seems mostly the same as the Plus.

After 16 years of hype, graphene finally delivers on its promise – with a cosmetic face mask

Manchester Graphene building is awesome

It cost £35 million of the research grant. The roof is a nature garden with 21 (TWENTY ONE!) different types of grass on it.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's a flying solar panel: BAE Systems' satellite alternative makes maiden flight in Oz

70,000 ft is seriously high. Commercial traffic normally flies at around 40,000 ft. The Russian BUK, like the one used in Ukraine to shoot down the Malaysia Airlines jet, can just reach 80,000 ft.

And if you're fighting another army of shepherds/cavemen, then an AK-47 bullet is doing well to reach 400 ft. So yeah, its safe.

It's a Bing thing: Microsoft drops plans to shove unloved search engine down throats of unsuspecting enterprises

Re: Questions II?

The real question is what the hell is Flop?

Ever wondered how Google-less Android might look? Step right this Huawei: Mate 30 Pro arrives on British shores

Meanwhile in China..

..the government has released an app that tells you if you have been into contact with someone who has the corona virus. Because it knows exactly where all its citizens have been and who has been speaking to who. Do you really want a Huawei phone?

Pentagon's $10bn JEDI decision 'risky for the country and democracy,' says AWS CEO Jassy

Respect Babylon 5

Stop using B5 to prolong your lame joke and give it the respect it deserves. Use an image of Lexx instead.

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

Re: Power required

Internal combustion engines are horribly inefficient. It would still make more sense to pour all the petrol into a handful of power stations, burn it to generate heat like a good old coal station, and use the electricity to power electric cars. Theres not going to be a problem supplying the energy for cars. Also, if you wanted to, you could also capture the CO2 much easily.

Like the Death Star on Endor, JEDI created a ton of fallout and stormy weather in cloud market

Whoosh.

Get the hell out of my galaxy

Every dog has its day – and this one belongs to Boston Dynamic's four-legged good boy Spot

That already outperforms my labrador.

Hinkley Point nuclear power station will be late and £2bn over budget

Rolls Royce SMR

This makes the £18 million grant to Rolls Royce to research SMRs seem really trivial.

Monster magnet in my pocket: Boffins' gizmo packs 45.5-tesla punch and weighs just 390g

Fusion

The magnets in Iter are rater at 12 tesla and operate at 4K. So these are a good deal more powerful, if somewhat smaller.

10 PRINT Memorial in New Hampshire marks the birthplace of BASIC

Re: Those were the days

Hooray for the Sam. Coming from the Spectrum, the extended basic commands like Scroll and Renum were like sorcery. And the manual by Mel Croucher was a genuine joy to read.

Node.js version 12 is now out: Let's pop the hood and see what's inside this JS runtime

The last time I used Javascript, it was to animate snowflakes falling across a website. The div elements moving across the screen was cutting edge and awesome in its time. JS would seem to have come a long way since then.

Brit prisoners to be kept on the straight and narrow with JavaScript and CSS

What could go wrong?

Cue a murderous riot with one gang screaming 'React!' and the other bellowing 'Angular!'.

Wouldn't happen with Python.

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Re: Not Just a Store

That would be just like the good old days, when you'd walk up to the Spectrums on display in WH Smiths, quickly bash out "10 Print 'Poo ';20 Goto 10" and then walk out of the LIKE A BOSS. I miss oppotunities like that these days.

The Large Hadron Collider is small beer. Give us billions more for bigger kit, say boffins

I see oppotunity

Cern wants $5.3bn to dig a 100 km long tunnel, and Trump wants $5.7bn to build a 3,145km wall. Can they somehow be combined?

Chinese biz baron wants to shove his artificial moon where the sun doesn't shine – literally

Sums

The moon is 384K km away. For the mirror to be in position every night, all night, it would have to be in geostationary orbit at 36K km away. So it would have to be about 1 tenth the width to the moon to appear the same size, so about 350 km in diamter. Now happily the moon isn't very shiny, about 12% of light gets reflected. So our mirror, to reflect the same amount of light assuming 100% reflective, would only have to be about an 8th in surface are. That still makes a mirror about 120 km across. The extremely delayed James Webb telescope has a mirror of 6.5m diameter.

That only really reaches maximum brightness when most of the sunward side of the mirror is visible. Generally it would appear in the sky as a bright ellipse (Or not at all) unless it was set to rotate.

.NET Core 2.1 – huh, yeah – what is it good for? Bing, apparently

"Bing handles thousands of search requests every second "

Wow, Bing is more popular than I thought it was.

Wasted worker wasps wanna know – oi! – who are you looking at?

Because... they can fly?

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a giant alien space cigar? Whatever it is, boffins are baffled

Please be full of sexy naked space vampires. Please. Please.

Shared, not stirred: GCHQ chief says Europe needs British spies

Pooh to intelligence sharing

I'd rather have cheaper beer at 'Spoons.

Super Cali upstart's new rocket test approaches, even though the size of it won't launch a Tesla motor

Re: Headline

Super Cali's new ballistic exam time now approaches?

If you must. Probably better you don't.

Let's go to Mars, dude: Euro space parachute passes maiden test

Not quite 100% landing failure

The Beagle 2 vanished. The ESA postmortem report damned the project, especially the smaller parachute and crashbags approach to landing.

Many years later, it would appear that the Beagle 2 landed intact, but for whatever reason the solar panels didn't properly deploy. So yes, that landed fine.

Pasties in SPAAAAACE: Cornwall hopes for slice of £50m spaceport cash

"delicious, meat-filled pasties"

Actually a Cornish pasty should only be a third meat with the rest potato, onion and other cheap filler.

You might be promised a meat filled pasty, but thats not at all what you'll get. A bit like what the good people of Cornwall will discover when they find what their Brexit vote really means.

Indiegogo to ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm: End of May... or we call the debt collector

Overdue?

The Spectrum was late in satisfying early orders too. No big problem.

Though I am dreading the QL+ sequel.

Google takes $1.1bn chomp out of HTC, smacks lips, burps

I loved my HTC Desire

The first decent android phone that was a viable alternative to an IPhone. I loved it dearly. Just a shame that HTC couldn't continue the success.

RIP Ursula K Le Guin: The wizard of Earthsea

A good read?!

She is so much more than a good read. Kind, wise, fierce, mind-expanding. A feminist author for none-feminists even. She may have gone to the dry lands but she will not remain nameless.

Brazil says it has bagged Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean for £84m

Whats in a name

I can remember when Ocean was commissioned, the first ship in a while not to be named after a city. There were several letters in The Telegraph along the lines of 'We used to call our ships Victory and Murderer and WarBastard. Why is this HMS Ocean? What next, HMS Badger?'. I'm not sure what Ocean is going to be replaced with. Probable one of the two aircraft carriers with no aircraft to fly.

Virgin Hyperloop pulls up the biggest chair for Branson, bags $50m, new speed record

Re: So, when is he going to build Space Cannon One?

Escape velocity from the earths surface is 11.18 km/s, ignoring atmospheric drag. This hyperloop so far has managed 0.1 km/s. A full scale hyperloop is designed to achieve 0.3 km/s maxed out. So yes, sadly theres some scaling needed.

Scotland, now is your time… to launch Brexit Britain into SPAAAACE!

Already exists

There is already a facility at Faslane that is quite capable of launching objects into space. For some reason Holyrood keeps trying to shut it down.

Military test centre for frikkin' laser cannon opens in Hampshire

Black paint?

White, surely, if you want to emit absorbed energy.

Why Boston Dynamics' backflipping borg shouldn't scare you

I'm scared

Rather than a prat fall, I can see that last dive being an effective Finish Him! move.

Official: Perl the most hated programming language, say devs

Easily javascript

alert(0.1+0.2)

Jaysus.

Even more warship cuts floated for the Royal Navy

Re: But...

Yes. The US was a great help. The harriers fired the latest sidewinders (It was the sidewinders that made the air cover so deadly to the argies, not the venerable but slow harriers) and the fleet was powered by US supplied oil.

Now the french engineers working to keep the exocets available, thats another story.

UK's NHS to pilot 'Airbnb'-style care service in homeowners' spare rooms

I agree. Its worth giving it a go. I've got a couple of aunties that took early retirement after working in the NHS. If they took in two patients each then they'd get a living wage, two beds in hospitals would be unblocked, and the patients would have company while they recuperated in much better condition than being left on their own all day at home. The only misgiving is how much experience the host needs. No experience at all is asking for trouble.

Tell the public how much our tram tickets cost? Are you mad?

Eh?

Eh? Al the prices are clearly there on the Transport For Greater Manchester website, (tgfm.com). Or is the article really about the coming increase in prices? Thats not what the headline says.

1,000 jobs on the line at BAE Systems' Lancashire plants – reports

How to solve Brexit.

We might be able to sell abroad as easily, but theres 2000 skilled hands to work in the fields of the Lancashire agricultural industry.

Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck

Dyson, the champion of Brexit

Mr Dyson was a foremost champion for Brexit, so I look forward to all the production being brought back from Malaysia to the new, confident, dynamic, unchained UK.

Compsci grads get the fattest pay cheques six months after uni – report

Oh rly?

https://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/it-jobs?keywords=graduate

I can only see salary ranges from 20-30K (Still a good salary) and that includes London.

Kebab and pizza shop owner jailed for hiding £179k from the taxman

Re: Sub heading should read

Its all about the dough.

Giant frikkin' British laser turret to start zapping stuff next year

Bindun

The Royal Navy had laser weapons in the Falklands conflict. They did their job to harass the Argentine pilots. They pulled a blinder, you might say.

Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84

TANJ

One less glorious Sad Puppy in the world.

US Navy suffers third ship collision this year

Well if the US ships want the Chinese to keep out of the way

They are going about it the right way.

At last! Vivaldi lets you kill looping GIFs

The website address is actually https://vivaldi.com/. The link on the page is for the forum.

Putting AI to work in finance? Think algorithms, ethics first

AI, banking and ethics.

I can see where this one is going. The next time that there is a banking crash so that people lose their jobs and homes, the bankers will be able to point to their computers and claim "Hey, look, it wasn't us! This naughty AI did it. I deserve my bonus for switching the machine off. It would all have been so much worse if I hadn't.".

ZX Spectrum reboot firm slapped with £52k court costs repayment order

Sigh. Back in the day it was 'My Speccy is better than your Commodore'. And we'd show them our Manic Miner. And they'd show us their Last Ninja. And everyone would go home happily, peacefully, thinking they'd won. All this nasty stuff is a stain on the memory of the Spectrum.

Softbank tears off chunk of ARM, feeds it to hungry Saudis

Saudi Arabia chopped off a quarter of ARM

Thats what they do to thieves.

Success in the bedroom breeds success in the boardroom – research

Re: further research required.

She says that sounds about right.

Nokia's 3310 revival – what's NEXT? Vote now

Power leads

Its not just which device you want bringing back, but which power lead to go with it. I remember the days of having Nokia, Philips and Motorola charges under my desk, all incompatible. Now its just a minor annoyance when I find a mini USB device rather than a micro.

See, those EU dictats were good for some things. I bet Farage still covets his Nokia charger.

GRAPHENE: £120m down, UK.gov finds it's still a long way from commercial potential

What a complete waste

We could have bought an entire F35 for that.