Posts by Stoneshop

Beautiful balloon burst caught on camera

Re: You know.... an idle thought occured...

Mmmmno.

Lift is generated through the displacement of the ambient air; more specifically, the weight of the displaced volume. As the balloon rises, the outside pressure drops, and with it, the weight per unit volume of the outside air. So the balloon needs to displace a bigger volume to keep positive buoyancy. And as long as the balloon is capable of expanding (pressure difference between inside and outside, versus 'stretchiness' of the balloon skin) it will keep rising.

If you start venting pressure to keep the balloon from bursting, you will simply not reach maximum volume, so no maximum displaced ambient air, so no maximum height.

Re: Is that the 'globe' of helium that remains for a few frames?

rapidly decompressed

There is not that much pressure difference between the inside of the balloon and the outside, and seeing the way the balloon disintegrates, there's also little disturbance of the enclosed volume.

EBAY... You keep using that word 'ENCRYPTION' – it does not mean what you think it means

ZModem

Ah, you still haven't learned to write relevant and coherent comments.

Kindly fornicate off and decease.

Scoff ye not: Chap carves crunchy carrot-copter

you may have time to eat most of the evidence before the cuffs go on

That's why you use a frozen lamb chop to bash someone's skull in.

Achtung! Use maths to smash the German tank problem – and your rival

Re: Danger!

The crux of the article is that you can often extrapolate, fill-in-the-gaps, connect-the-dots, the data you actually want/need from other data someone has intentionally made public, or has exposed as part of a business flow (like the engine serial numbers). It is not about extracting that information straight from the source; URL manipulation would be akin to sending in a spy to take a peek at the weekly internal production reports from the tank factories. Sure, you can do that, but you risk your spy getting shot or your data sniffing being caught. Using maths and statistics on legally available incomplete data doesn't carry the risk of being hauled before the beak.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot becoming mere pimple

Re: just saying

It's not?

Ryobi Grinder Girl

Just one example.

Adobe blames 'maintenance failure' for 27-hour outage

Richard Stevens doesn't use Adobe

http://dieselsweeties.com/archive/3557

Autodesk to release 'open' 3D printer

Re: That 3D printer...

So, you could print your very personalised cup first, then it pours coffee into it? I can see the hipster coffee bars falling over themselves to get their hands on such a device.

Philips lobs patent sueball at Nintendo in US: Seeks to BAN Wii U

Wrong country

However, the whole patent reeks of a throw spaghetti at the wall

Not spaghetti, slices of soft cheese.

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

@Def Re: I am sticking with Sennheiser and Walkman

You need to learn the difference between headphones and earphones.

Re: A fool and his money are easily parted.

Is a high confimation bias value better or worse, and what are the correct units of measurement ?

Depends on the media you're using; ideally the equipment should have a confirmation bias selector for vinyl, open-reel and cassette tape, DAT, DCC, (SA)CD, MiniDisc, DVD-audio and Blu-Ray Audio. If you find one that has shellac and 8-track cartridge settings too you can infer it's a well-researched design and worth selling your soul, your firstborn and the better part of your worldly possessions for.

As for the unit of measurement, El Reg's Standards Soviet is said to be working on one. Rumours say they're as yet undecided between 'Chord' and 'Steward'.

Re: paper cone piston

But with audio, there is this third group:

'the deaf twats'

Bluff Your Way in Hi-fi differentiated between five or six categories, but my copy is at home still packed in a box after a move, so I can't be more specific.

Re: @Fihart re snakeoil

"The whole point of any piece of hi-fi – even a lowly interconnect cable – is surely to move the listener closer to the music he is, one hopes, enjoying, and to facilitate even greater enjoyment."

Ah, so my motorcycle is a piece of hi-fi gear, as it moves me closer to the music I will be enjoying at a live concert. Similarly, my boots, as I walk across the venue to the place I consider the optimum listening point.

Coat, to prevent my enjoyment being dampe(ne)d by rain.

Re: It's not about the music.

I knew an electronics engineer who carefully designed & built himself a stereo amplifier with 2 controls - an on/off switch & a volume pot, run through two equally crafted speaker enclosures

He probably had just the one source he wanted to listen to. My version also has two input selectors (one for the main amp, one for the tape recording source), and an MC/MM preamp with RIAA correction.

Re: Delicately put

What happens with "Directional" speaker cables if you wire them *the wrong way round* ??

Same as when you play a recording backwards: satanic mind corruption. Only more subtle, as the song's words still appear to be sung forwards.

Re: I am sticking with Sennheiser and Walkman

That was a joke, right?

Sennheiser has good kit; back in the day their HD424 was THE headphone in that class. And they even have some astonishing kit, like their electrostatics. But that doesn't mean that everything by them is excellent, or even great. Same with AKG, Koss, you name it, basically every manufacturer that has a broad range of products. And especially with headphones, like speakers, specs don't even start to tell you how a specific model will sound; your ears and brain come into play there too.

@Mage Re: Yup

I once tested my Tandberg TD3600XD open-reel recorder, the standard four-track model, with various semi-professional grade tapes (Maxell, TDK, BASF and Agfa) at 7.5 ips, no Dolby obviously, and after azimuth adjustment and bias calibration got at least 19.4kHz at -3dB, and in one case 20.9kHz.

Rebuilding the record and playback amps didn't appreciably improve frequency response, but S/N and distortion figures did.

15kHz max from 15 ips is downright shitty.

Re: A fool and his money are easily parted.

I can tell - it's a spoof. But I did have to read a good few paragraphs.

If you can't tell from the first few lines, just hit their home page. If you still can't, your irony detector is terminally fubar.

Boffins say hot air makes Antarctica colder

Re: there's a lot....

What about 1956?

Surely you mean 1953? Because that was the flood that set off the Deltawerken construction. Parts of which have been improved since, and there have been additions.

In 1993 and 1995 we've had what you mention, flooding due to extreme runoff from upriver. We're busy allowing for more of such events.

Quick Q: How many FLOPPIES do I need for 16 MILLION image files?

Re: 16-page document I was working on last night won’t fit onto a floppy

I recently came across a box of 10 floppies that contained:

- a TP install disk

- one with some TP libraries and tools

- 6 subsequent versions of a multiuser, networked CD library program I wrote, each version its own disk, full source code and all

- two disks with the entire library database, zipped. 40..50k records at that time.

Provided they're readable, I can get the lot running again, including writing and compiling new code.

Robins' inbuilt navigators pecked to bits by AM radio

several unidentified migratory species

Do any of them carry coconuts?

Frequency tuning

Maybe they'll grow a tuned circuit and a detector so that they can listen to the shipping forecast, and determine whether they have tailwind when flying.

Amazon granted patent for taking photos against a white background – seriously

As an aside, I would add that the verbal abuse directed at "patent trolls" is completely misplaced. They are the one recourse to justice for little guys against 800 pound gorillas.

Patent trolls are those entities that hoover up patents solely for the sake of litigation. No physical product incorporating one of their patents ever leaves their premises. They don't help you, as a small-scale patent owner, assert your rights against that 800 pound gorilla; perhaps you meant patent lawyers?

As to this particular patent, as a serious photographer I find it quite useful, surprisingly. It solves a problem I have been grappling with for some time. It is not about taking a picture against a white background. It is about configuring the stage and lighting so that the object appears to be completely suspended in space by making the platform indistinguishable from the background. I will be building this capability into my studio quite soon.

Solving that problem is obvious to anyone skilled in the art.

Look out, sysadmins - HOT FOREIGN SPIES are targeting you

Re: Well if it involves...

I totally wouldn't mind that barista at the train station who was interested in what kind of job I had, to try and extract some more info from me.

An acceptable alternative would be a svelte SE Asian. Either to be accompanied by a worthwhile amount of moolah, of course.

Behold! World's smallest 3D-printer pen Lix artists into shape – literally

Re: Bah! Old news

Is that you, Jake?

Oh wait, no. Jake would have been doing it with the hotglue gun HE BUILT HIMSELF, yaddayadda.

Re: am i the only one...

Yes. If you have a robot arm, you can do way better than a dinky little pen running off a rechargeable battery. Depending on the size of the arm, you could fit at least one, and possibly several, extruder heads as used in your average 3D-printer. A wired power source means more power available to the extruder(s), and for an unlimited time, meaning a higher feed rate and filled-out parts instead of something resembling shaped chicken wire.

Please work for nothing, Mr Dabbs. What can you lose?

Re: Returning a favour would be nice

To make matters worse, you find yourself being responsible for a lifetime warranty as soon as you do the slightest thing

I had someone who invariably notified me of problems only well after they had already escalated past "unworkable" instead of "hey, it's getting sluggish". No spyware or viruses, just disk full errors ("I can't save any document I write"), keeping every frigging mail since day 1, and all in their inbox, irritatingly stupid stuff like that. Which were generally easy but time-consuming to fix.

Eventually I stopped caring, and started ignoring their mail.

French software developers are all beautiful women

Re: What's with the bizarre self censorship?

The mind b*ggles.

There's really no need to obfuscate the name of a fictional WW1 fighter pilot or a seventies pop group in this eminent forum, you know.

Today's bugs have BRANDS? Be still my bleeding heart [logo]

Re: @ AndrueC

Every time he looks under the hood of his own servers

Doubt it. Those would be full of decatrons and mercury delay lines, leaving no room for either Kernighan or Ritchie, let alone both of them together.

Top tip, power users – upgrading Ubuntu may knacker your Linux PC

Re: Nah,

There are at least 4 commentards here that don't understand sarcasm. Here, have an upvote (and a cool one)

Power users

However, our reader remarked the only reason more people haven't reported this bug is that most have been locked out their systems all week.

These are not the power users you are looking for.

Oracle accused of breaking US competition law over Solaris support

Although I do understand why companies would not want third party support for quality control reasons. When everything goes wrong, which it might, they go back to the manufacturer and try to get support even though they haven't paid for it.

In which case the manufacturer will either refuse support, or invoice the customer. During my time as a FS tech, I've had calls (handful each year) where the customer had a 3rd-party service contract on some piece of kit, and there was a problem they couldn't fix. They would have already done the "please come, we'll pay" song and dance with contract management (the ones responsible for finances in those matters, even though the customer might not have a contract with us in the first place), and I had to verify that they had done so, plus then get a signature on the time/materials sheet. But apart from that, it was no big deal, and not at all unusual. Same with software.

Asteroids as powerful as NUCLEAR BOMBS strike Earth TWICE YEARLY

Re: The odds are not too shabby

@VeganVegan

You're calculating the chance of a direct strike on some metropolitan area by (incorrectly, as already pointed out) dividing metro area by earth surface area, but:

a) anything Tunguska-sized that hits even several tens of km's outside such an area would only be slightly less disastrous.

b) if something that size would hit the North Sea roughly at the Dogger Bank, or the Bay of Bengal a couple of 100km out from any coast, or the not-very-metropolitan island of La Palma, I figure that quite a few people in London, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Dhaka and Calcutta, and New York respectively, would need to get out their wellies.

UK bank heist-by-KVM gang sent down for 24 years after nicking £1.2m

They're smart cards, not swipe cards

KVM devices, which can cost as little as £10, allow multiple computers to share the same keyboard, mouse, monitor and more;

Having the bank employee's mouse and keyboard connected to the crim's device won't achieve much, except maybe capturing the screen unlock password. But what they actually must have used is something that could duplicate keyboard, mouse and screen and send it out over the 3G dongle. That's not a simple UKP10 KVM switch.

The bank I bank with that still has brick and mortar presence uses keyboards that need a smartcard to unlock the computer, and every employee I've seen removes the card when they move away from the computer. Connecting a KVM thingie the computer won't see the smartcard if they've taken over the machine remotely. Can probably be bypassed too given dedicated hardware, but it's another hurdle.

Apple patents Wi-Fi access point location lookup

Height

Say there is router on floor below you and you are standing right above it and other is at other side?

Access points tend to radiate horizontally; if you're right over (or under) one on another floor, it will be detected as 'very weak', if at all. Even more so when the floor is reinforced concrete

Tooled-up Ryobi girl takes nine-inch grinder to Asus beach babe

Re: Fake

I understand you may need to cut out corners and such.

Indeed. Or make blocks lower.

(I am NOT cutting corners. I intend to live in this house for the next 30 years)

BTW, I was using 'workmate' as a generic term for 'thing you put the stuff you're working on'. Mine is indeed made by B&D, the one in the ad clearly isn't, and doesn't appear to have a vice function.

Re: Fake

One thing does puzzle me though. If you do use a workmate then why do you bother with all that 80% faffing about business and not just cut over the gap that opens in the middle of it.

That was about cutting a patio tile using an angle grinder. It also depends on whether you have a square tile or a non-square rectangular one, and along which dimension you need to cut it.

I usually (but not always) have to cut those Xella blocks so that they get shorter. In most of those cases, if you put the block across the workmate's gap, then at the end of the cut at least one of the remaining parts would have its center of gravity outside the work surface and fall to the ground, if you didn't clamp it. So instead I tend to put a couple of leftovers on the workmate, then the block to be cut on top of them, upright. Works Just FIne

Re: Fake

I've never seen anyone cut a paving slab on a workbench

Apparently you've never seen anyone cutting paving slabs who values their back.

I've been cutting quite a number of Xella blocks (60x40x10) recently, using a Bosch alligator saw (roughly the same weight as that Ryobi angle grinder). Putting the blocks on a workmate makes it way easier to cut them, as bending over deep you need to keep yourself balanced as well as holding the saw/grinder/whatever, and you're unnecessarily tensing your back and thigh muscles.

Re: Fake

Tense muscles? You're doing it wrong.

You just have to hold the grinder and let it eat its way through the slab. No pulling other than to keep the disc engaged. And once the cut is 80% done you reposition the slab so that it's overhanging the workmate edge facing you, so that when you cut through the last bit both parts are supported; optionally you lay another tile on the one you're cutting (no need for that at the point in the picture, the largest part is on the table, and the tile is heavy enough that it won't easily shift from the force exerted by the cutter)

So, just how do you say 'the mutt's nuts' in French?

Re: But why are we translating it literally?

Is it by analogy with the "bee's knees"? Which doesn't make literal sense either.

If you go from "bee's knees" via "wasp's nipples" to "the entire set of erogenous zones of every major flying insect of the Western world." it's clear that either of this descriptions is of something desirable.

Sleuths find nosy NORKS drones on the Chinternet

Re: The 1950s want their values back

First, rice rockets are not just any Japanese car (or motorcycle), but souped-up ones. And if you knew anything about the type of people who engage in said souping-up, they have derogatory nicknames for any brand or class of vehicle not their own.

Second, if anything, the article is pissing on the Norks' use of technology bought (or borrowed, or traded, or stolen) from their somewhat friendly neighbour, and bungling it.

95 floors in 43 SECONDS: Hitachi's new ultra-high-speed lift

Re: Modern elevators are strange and complex entities

And once they start sulking in the basement, all those C*O's working on the umpteenhundredth floor will have to take the stairs.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities

"Hitachi will continue working to develop elevators offering various forms of added value

So, defocused temporal perception?

Leaked photos may indicate slimmer next-generation iPad

Surface

or are they just offended by my dropping tech onto a hard surface?

You didn't drop it under a bus.

NASA finds first Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone around star

Re: general ignorance question

It would collect photons from a disc the same radius as the Moons orbit

Err, no. It would still collect photons only from a disc the size of its primary lens/mirror. It would collect them from a different location over time, but that only helps to offer a kind of stereoscopic view (allowing distance calculations) for objects that are rather close (up to maybe a couple thousand AU, 0.1 ly, I gather from an acquaintance who's into astronomy). It does little to improve imaging more distant objects, apart from what can be achieved by combining several images anyway.

Or would it be out of focus due to the Earth/Moon's orbit around the Sun?

Distance to Kepler would be 500 lightyears plus or minus 1 AU. or 3.38e+19 linguine plus or minus 1e+12 linguine. That is, if Kepler 186 lies more or less in the plane of Earth's rotation around Sol. As you see, the distance variation is negligible

MIT boffins moot tsunami-proof floating nuke power plants

Re: OK, but how do you get the power back to land?

A long-solved problem.

http://new.abb.com/systems/hvdc/references/norned

Heartbleed vuln under ACTIVE ATTACK as hackers map soft spots

Re: How the Heartbleed bug works ..

That MMU would have to be programmed with the information that buffer_X is of size buffer_X_size and is to be accessed by pointer_X only while staying within those bounds. Which are extra steps to be performed by every memory allocation and deallocation routine, which people will then want to bypass for speed reasons (if the functionality is available in the first place, which in ALL hardware to date it isn't). That MMU should also take care of zeroing memory on allocation and deallocation.

In short, it's not going to fly.

Firefox biz Mozilla makes Beard new interim chief executive

Re: Oh, and I was so hoping...

it was going to be Frank Beard from ZZ Top.

But at least, like Frank, he hasn't got one.

Want a free Bosch steam iron? You'll have to TALK TO THE DEAD

This raises the question

whether ouija-boards also come in dishwasher-safe variants (or even washing machine safe)