Posts by Poor Coco

Apple to lead fanbois 'Back to the Mac'

Maybe it'll be time...

...that I coughed up to replace 10.4 on my Mini, which has been happily chugging along since 2006....

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud'

Pseudoscience?

While the AGW debate is questionable, it's hardly the worst or most serious pseudoscience out there: just examine the total quackery of the authorities regarding the three WTC collapses on 9/11. Now THAT is total rubbish.

Fannie Mae logic-bomb saboteur convicted

It was even worse than that...

...Some of the houses that were foreclosed on, NEVER EVEN HAD MORTGAGES. They had been purchased with CASH!

PH, because she's as effing clueless as the banks.

Code for open-source Facebook littered with landmines

RoR vs. Django

Question for the scaling-savvy commentards out there:

How, in your opinions, does Django compare with Rails in terms of robustness and scalability?

Yahoo! boffin scores pi's two quadrillionth bit

Pi? Feh.

Any fule kno thet pi is silly.

Use tau = 2*pi, and suddenly polar coordinates look just like Cartesian ones.

http://tauday.com/

PARIS threatened by the bends

A stiffening jig will do the trick

Get basswood (stronger but almost as easy to work as balsa) about 2x10mm and make a reinforcing frame to maintain a planar shape while the tissue dries.

Oh, and non-shrinking dope is a great idea.

Eagles singer wins case against US politico

In the immortal words of Mojo Nixon...

He's a tortured artist

Used to be in the Eagles

Now he whines

Like a wounded beagle

Poet of despair!

Pumped up with hot air!

He's serious, pretentious

And I just don't care

Don Henley must die!

Don't let him get back together

With Glenn Frey!

Don Henley must die!

Turn on the TV

And what did I see?

This bloated hairy thing

Winning a Grammy

Best Rock Vocalist?

Compared to what?

But your pseudo-serious

Crafty Satanic blot

Don Henley must die!

Put a sharp stick in his eye!

Don Henley must die!

Yea yea yea

Quit playin' that crap

You're out of the band

I'm only kidding

Can't you tell?

I love his sensitive music

Idiot poetry, swell

You and your kind

Are killing rock and roll

It's not because you are O—L—D

It's cause you ain't got no soul!

Don't be afraid of fun

Loosen up your ponytail!

Be wild, young, free and dumb

Get your head out of your tail

Don Henley must die!

Don't let him get back together

With Glenn Frey!

Don Henley must die!

Put him in the electric chair

Watch him fry!

Don Henley must die

Don Henley must die

No Eagles reunion

The same goes for you, Sting!

PARIS pumps up a Mk 2 release mechanism

Too high for civilian GPS units

Look at Julianh's post, third from the top:

http://www.gpsinformation.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7506

While GPS in principle can do the trick, the civilian GPS units that will be used are limited to about the altitude PARIS will need... and that would be sketchy.

Besides, as has been noted, this is way more garden-shed and therefore much much cooler.

"The cradle of engineering"?

What the hell are you on about?

The earliest known engineer was Imhotep of Egypt, ca. 2700 BCE. After that, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, Aztec, Mayan and Incan engineering works are well documented; and after the fall of Rome, Abū al-’Iz Ibn Ismā’īl ibn al-Razāz al-Jazarī, an Arab engineer, created a wide variety of devices, many still in use today — including a catchment device used in clocks, and a reciprocating water pump for irrigation purposes.

So, um, *England* the cradle of engineering? Are you on crack?

Russia confirms shiny new cosmodrome

Ah, I get it.

I know what you mean. In 1992 I had a beer with a Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot after he performed at a Canadian airshow. I was glad I did not have to drive after that mess hall party.

Would be interesting to compare...

I just saw Kennedy Space Center last week. (The new Saturn V facility is insanely cool, it includes Kitty Hawk, the Apollo 14 command module.) It would be neat to look at the differences in the Russian approach to a spaceport.

3D films fall flat

The extra ticket price is not all...

I recently saw Toy Story 3D with my son. I was actually impressed with the 3D precisely because it was inconspicuous aside from a few aforementioned "zap!" shots. But it was far more watchable than a 3D film attraction I saw at Disney World, where it was that over-the-top all the time.

So I disagree that 3D is a "novelty" approach. TS3D did it extremely well.

And the ticket price bump was nothing compared to the fact I lost my $350 prescription glasses in the theatre. That wouldn't happen at home!

Zuckerberg: I'm 'quite sure' I own Facebook

Why is it...

...that whenever I see Mark Zuckerberg's face, I hear Serge Gainsbourg singing "Suck Baby Suck"?

Underground tunnel complexes FOUND ON MOON

OK, now we have a moonbase location...

...so we can get a nice long-term habitat there for tritium mining and such. Launching bulk cargo from the moon would be a piece of cake for a Gauss-gun launcher.

However, if you REALLY want to get into large-scale raping of the Solar System's wealth, you need to go to Mars. But how do you get the bulk cargo off? Easy. Same way as on the moon: a Gauss-gun located in the caldera of Olympus Mons, which is damn near in space anyhow. Just set up an automated track up the side of the volcano from the relatively benign lowlands, and Bob's your uncle. (Insofar as that expression can be used at all for large-scale operations on another planet, natch!)

Our Vulture 1 aircraft begins to take shape

Nice work!

She'll be a beauty... you say the structure's 57g so far, what's the electronic payload mass?

These craft can be amazingly light. This spring I built a 4' wingspan free-flight sailplane, whose finished mass was a mere 125g + 50g nose ballast. Her name was Lulu, and she flew like a champ. I use the past tense because I was hard on her, perhaps even slightly sadistic, in the name of aeronautical expertise. Next year's plans include R/C, perhaps an ekranoplan to 'fly' in the soccer fields across the street from my home.

Here's a pint: Cheers to Vulture 1-X!

Boeing's 'Phantom Eye' Ford Fusion powered stratocraft

Look a little closer...

...the wings appear to have engine pods, just out of the frame. I'm guessing the red propeller warning stripes are, um, in line with the props maybe?

And a catapult is an entirely reasonable method of launching a craft of this type. There are UAV examples going all the way back to the V-1... not to mention manned ones such as the first Wright Flyer. So what's your problem?

Now, as far as GHG emissions go, surely it's better to be belching out the carbon in the lower troposphere than higher up. This is for the simple reason that low-altitude emissions have more opportunity to dissolve in precipitation, or to be consumed by plants. (I haven't seen too many trees at 15,000 feet......)

Also, hydrogen fueling does present at least the option of solar or wind water-cracking facilities which are not viable options for hydrocarbon fuels.

Comet-bomb interceptor makes low pass above Atlantic

Well, yeah, but..

"Earth is a great place to pick up orbital velocity," said Tim Larson, the EPOXI project manager from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "This flyby will [get us] up close and personal with comet Hartley 2."

Oh, sure, really handy for you space-boffins and your probes! Send the Earth spiraling into the Sun just to visit a comet. The nerve!

Huge new airships for US Army: designed in Blighty

Well, okay, Mr. Pedant...

...but moving in a circle over a target ain't even close to falling in a circle around the entire planet. We're taking several orders of magnitude difference... for the purposes of this discussion an airship is stationary.

Quick answers

30,000' from sea level. Yes, Afghanistan is high up. Yes, it's a bit less to lob a projectile. But (a) with US ECM tech and (b) given that it'll be unmanned in action, then shooting it down will be difficult; will reveal the AA missile launcher; and will only cost the Americans the cost of the airship, which is probably on a similar magnitude of expense as the AA missile would be to the Taliban (with a much smaller budget), so the shoot-down would be pointless except perhaps as a diversionary tactic.

Reflective skin on an airship?

Bad idea, that: it would cause the sun to reflect off the skin and create a huge heliograph broadcast of the balloon's location.

Much better would be a flat light grey or blue-grey... like the Air Force uses on its cargo planes, for example.

PARIS pops down to QinetiQ

Weather ballons

...are made of metallized Mylar, I believe.

A simpler mechanism idea

The suggestions above to use an altimeter are good, but I have a simpler and probably lighter alternative.

Basically we need the pressure at 20,000m (at 16km it's 0.1 atm) to trigger the release. That implies a 10x expansion... for now I'll imagine the last 4km of pressure change will be consumed by the trigger's mechanical force, to keep things simple.

The problem with the syringe is the small piston area compared with the volume contained therein. Also, the glass syringe is delicate, expensive and fiddly. But if you had a large plunger, say 10cm diameter, the force it exerts will increase by the square of the diameter ratio, so you could get a much larger force to do the work.

Let's suppose you chose a tuna can. Now, obviously an opened tuna tin is lousy at containing pressure, but if the edges were machined smooth it could be a dandy container for a semi-inflated condom (PARIS never leaves home without one, natch). As the rubber expands it will press on the lid; on the lid, perhaps soldered or welded in place, is a single-edged razor blade. The pressure from the lid will push the blade into one or more monofilament fishing lines, which are tensioned and connected to release the plane and what-have-you.

The expansion force from this cylinder should be well above what any syringe can muster, its operation will be basically frictionless and I can't see it weighing as much as a glass syringe. The response of the lid to pressure can be controlled by springs and by the initial volume of air, thereby allowing a pressure response tailored to your needs (another thing PARIS is good at).

The only question to determine is the response to –60°C temperatures found at that elevation. Perhaps latex is not the best choice there, but a latex-free condom may work better. I guess you need to buy a lot of condoms and test them out!

Microsoft picks over Google's Windows exit strategy

If 'virii'=='man':

Then we have exactly described the problem.

Approaching space object 'artificial, not asteroid' says NASA

Bad idea

The reason it's bad: focal distance. The telescopes in space can only focus on extremely distant objects, so a tiny object passing by Earth is unobservable.

X-51 hypersonic scramjet test: Flameout at Mach 5?

You totally missed the point

An external oxidizer droptank would be huge, and the whole point is to get a spacecraft into space WITHOUT dropping large parts of airframe.

Jets kick rockets into the dust for lifting capacity because the oxidizer is ambient and does not require acceleration or carriage on the craft. This is an inherent limitation. You can carry a lot of jet engines and fuel for the volume and mass of an oxidizer tank.

Sharp Aquos LC-46LE821E 46in quad-pixel TV

Yellow in RGB displays

The obvious reason for adding colours, as noted above, is to increase the gamut of colours available. But those changes need not be at the colour extremes; indeed, they can increase the gamut of NEUTRAL colours too.

This seems silly; you get a neutral grey by equal R,G,B signals right? Well, no actually. If you look at a video display that's not been calibrated the "white" will actually be bluish, around 9300K. It is possible to correct for the colour cast by dimming the blue, but that also dims the picture.

The solution is to add yellow light instead. Blue is an additive primary colour and yellow is a subtractive primary colour; chromatically, a reduction in one is equal to an increase in the other. Ok, the thery works but how do you decide how much yellow to add?

My guess is it's made up on the ratios of red+green versus blue. The brighter and more neutral-to-yellow tones will receive appropriate boosts, and then the screen can display wonderful paper-white and natural skin tones.

This shortcoming of RGB is analogous to the shortcomings of its theoretical subtractive sibling CMY colour. If you overprint solid cyan, magenta and yellow inks you don't get black, you get a nasty brown. So software removes some coverage from all three channels and replaces it with a fourth plate, black ink: and there you get CMYK, 4-colour process.

Now, not even 4-colour process is perfect, although it's quite good. There is Pantone Hexachrome, which adds red and green process inks. Some high-quality giclée plotters use CMYK plus pastel C,M,Y inks for best quality in pale tones. And printers can use spot-colour 'bump plates' for super-bright reds, or special finished like varnish, metallic or flourescent inks.

US X-37B robot minishuttle: 'Secret space warplane'?

Airfix? Hornby?

Alert James May at once!

Antarctic boffins obtain prehistoric deep ice core sample

Increasing area ≠ increasing ice

As you point out, the area of Antarctic ice has been increasing recently. That is actually perfectly consistent with melting, in a slightly nonintuitive way. As the ice loses its grip on the continental rocks, the flow rate of glaciers increases. This results in a thinner sheet with greater area but less volume.

This is also the type of change that is very bad news for people in low-lying areas: melting icecaps in the Arctic are floating and, by Archmedes' Principle, will not alter ocean levels when they melt. However, dropping a glacier from a valley into the water *will* displace water and, if this is happening around the entire Antarctic circumference, this could have a significant effect on world ocean levels.

Giant solar-powered aircraft takes to the skies

How does it land?

It looks like the fuselage rests on a dolly for takeoff. How does it touch down without destroying the tail?

Apple to reveal hallowed iPhone 4.0 on Thursday

MySQL and Apache on OS X...

...Apache's there right out of the box. MySQL installation is also a breeze.

For even simpler installations, or to have multiple installs with different configurations, MAMP kicks ass.

Privacy service knocked offline by 'no bullsh*t' registrar

Hmmm....

'Not even those that bill themselves as "no bullshit."'

Or those that "do no evil."

Apple files 'in your face' iPhone patent

Wow!

...and I thought I'd seen the worst yesterday, when I saw some dude driving while using BOTH hands to drive his QWERTY mobile phone.... and leaving no hands, as well as no attention, for the task of controlling his vehicle.

Now these idiots can have 100% of their field of view obstructed by their fecking iPhones. Thanks to a screen, which, as pointed out above, will be 100% unuseable because it's out of focus*. Oh well, at least the glassestards will be easy to spot, thanks to the notch they have sawn into their noses.

* Unless the moron in question has superhuman ocular accommodation, in which case they'll just have a blinding migraine.

Novell (not SCO) owns UNIX, says jury

Ah, memories...

I was visiting Salt Lake City at the beginning of 2007. The Tribune had an article highlighting the most and least profitable Utah businesses. The worst of the worst? SCO, natch.

Never underestimate the human capacity for stupidity. SCO's insistence at beating this thoroughly dead equine is a marvelous example of human stupidity at its nadir.

Are you a 'supertasker'? Probably not

Hmmmm...

If one particularly gifted individual was both a supertasker and a supertaster, then they could drive, talk on a phone and taste waaaaaaaay too much of the food they're eating, ALL AT ONCE.

'Switch to Century Gothic to save the planet'

“Letter Spacing” ≠ readability

The “spacing of the letters”, i.e. the overall tracking of the typeface, has a fairly minor effect on the readability of said face. Using a proper typographically-sensitive application like a page layout package, you can adjust the tracking over a wide range and until the glyphs are actually colliding or becoming so separated that they don't read as a unified whole, the difference in readability is very slight. Besides, you get a greater variation in overall tracking when you use full-justified text vs. left-justified/rag-right alignment than you would switching between two similar faces such as Arial vs. Helvetica. Long story short*, the effect of character spacing on readability is small compared to the design of the typefaces themselves.

And that's where, as others have pointed out, Arial earns a monumental fail. Its glyphs are really bush-league compared to the craftsmanship of Helvetica. Its ubiquity is a rematch of VHS-vs.-Beta; the crappier one won despite a four-decade lead by the better typeface. Who wants to put MS on trial for crimes against typography?

Now, in terms of saving ink, approaches like EcoFont are a silly idea. With the resolution of modern inkjet and laser printers, simply having a printer driver that substitutes a 90% screen on type will reduce ink usage for any typeface without a loss of readability (except in really tiny type). My 11-year-old HP LaserJet 6MP has been able to do this from the get-go... and I can also get ten reams printed from a single cartridge most of the time. Try THAT on an inkjet: you'll have about nine blank reams at the end, or you'll have paid five times as much in consumables.

So, if your goal is economy, buy a laser printer. Use the eco-printing mode when the purpose is documentation rather than perfect appearance. And don't print unless you have to.

* I know, too late now.

How 'bout a bit of education?

Serif fonts are an excellent choice for long passages of text, provided they are rendered in sufficient resolution to render the details properly. The "curly shit" provides greater definition and significantly improves readability. There's a reason why the first commercial sans-serif font was called Grotesque.

That said, Times New Roman is as bad a knockoff of real Times Roman as Arial is of Helvetica. Use quality typefaces, you'll get better results.

And on the off chance that you actually decide to seek some education (unlikely I know), then read the first half of Eric Gill's brilliant "Essay on Typography". He explains the logic and history of typeface design from the point of view of a master.

Don't bother with the latter half of the book — he gets carried away, and actually states that you cannot consider yourself a typographer until you have not only designed your own type by cutting metal movable-type characters, but you also have to actually grind your own pigments. So, yah, while Gill unquestionably understands type, he's also a bit of a nut case. :-)

Corduroy cuffed, banged up for teaching while drunk

There are better examples

of non-criminal activity resulting in criminal or quasi-criminal sanctions. Take domestic violence: basically all a woman* has to do is say she's afraid of her husband, and in many jurisdictions he's as good as convicted. Except he won't have the benefit of a trial, or any other legal protections that bona fide criminals get.

* If a man, on the other hand, is abused by his wife, then HE will take the fall. It happened to me, and to countless other legions of innocent men. That's because "everyone knows that never ever happens", and no amount of research or statistics seems likely to change that. Situations like this and other examples of blatant sexism may have something to do with the reason male suicide rates vary from 2x to over an order of magnitude greater than female suicide rates.

Getting drunk the night before has no effect on exam results

Well, that may be...

...but for *engineering* students like me the bar is the best place to practice for the realities of the workplace! As a friend of mine who's a retired engineer said when I told him I was starting civil engineering studies, "you're going to need a new liver!"

Heathrow security man cops perv scanner eyeful

Hear hear!

As the victim of an attempted homicide in the hands of my ex-wife in front of our three-year-old daughter, which was followed up by ten years (and counting) of the crime being ignored by the police and courts because it was perpetrated by a female, which of course "everyone knows never happens", I applaud your principled stand.

She wasn't traumatized, she was annoyed. Believe me, I understand the difference.

Facebook stands up to UK.gov's cyberbullying

Um, no.

"Maybe the only way is to have a friend who you trust to act as a teenage of the opposite sex and get them to chat with the child in question. They will then find out they cannot trust anyone on the Internet and it's better to join the local sports club instead. :)"

...or, they could have your friend busted for being a paedo.

Microsoft confirms IE9 will shun Windows XP

OSX 10.0 ≠ XP

There are some major flaws in that argument. OSX 10.0 was the first BSD-based Mac OS ever, and for a lot of users it wasn't there yet. XP, in contrast, was the most popular Windows NT family member, where the line arguably reached its peak (although personally I preferred Windows 2000 in many ways).

I never used OS X much before 10.3, and I have used Macs since 1984 and Linux since 1999. I also have a bit of experience with OpenBSD, AIX and Solaris, so Unix hasn't scared me off in a long time.

The base of OS X is strong and mature. The higher-level and higher-tech stuff on top are less so, and so they are a source of trouble. But this is much worse in Windows, which grew for so long without a formal architecture that it's profoundly messed up on a lot of levels. I honestly don't think there is one person that really understands Windows. This of course is pure speculation, but I don't think it's an unfounded statement.

Now, as far as Apple "leaving users behind", on my Mac Mini at home I am still running 10.4, and there is in fact a great deal of software that runs perfectly well. Not 100%, but pretty good for a system installed in 2006 and used every day.

Happy St. Pat's. Cheers!

'The LHC will implode the Moon or PUT OUT THE SUN'

Black hole gravity gradients

The singularity is effectively a point, but that's not the important criterion. The event horizon is; that is the point at which the escape velocity reaches the speed of light. A massive black hole has a large event horizon while a tiny one has a very small one, but every event horizon has a definite and finite size.

As the radius of the event horizon drops, the gradient of the gravitational field gets steeper. That in fact is what drives Hawking radiation and the enormous energy output of a microscopic black hole. It's also why a supermassive black hole will last for trillions of years while a microscopic one vanishes in a tiny puff of logic and a flash of gamma radiation.

Android - the winning formula for tablets and netbooks?

An acronym suggestion...

Your "Magical and Revolutionary Device" description for the iPad works really well in Franglais:

"Magique Et Révolutionnaire DEvice" = MERDE

— From a 25-year Mac user

Anti-binge drinking ads add to binge drinking

The real effect of that ad....

...ish to show the hideoush grammatical mishtakesh you make when you shloshed, like usheing "who" inshtead of "whom". Fucking Shashatchewan bashtardsh!

Plan for top-level pornography domain gets reprieve

The domain name landscape's changed

...in the past few years, now anyone can stump up $50K or whatever it is and get their own custom TLD. So why doesn't someone simply register the XXX. TLD and then sell subdomains?

Seems like a real no-brainer to me.

Apple strips top shelf, leaves corporate smut in place

Cults...

...I think you were confusing Apple with Raelianism.

I think that Rael guy might have been on to something. At least it's more fun than Appliantology!

Sony seeks 'universal console controller' patent

Another problem....

...How are you going to plug that in? Will it have 35 connectors for all the interfaces? That'll be larger than a lot fo game consoles right there... Hell, the PS2's controller jack ain't exactly sub-mini, kwim?

iPad pitch to the Wall Street Journal laid bare

Oh, FFS.

Apple didn't drop floppies because "Mac users couldn't use them"; they dropped them because floppies have tiny capacity and they are spectacularly fail-prone.

In fact, they are so bad that, at the pre-press shop I worked at in 1994, we set up a dial-up First Class BBS so (a) a client whose floppy had cratered wouldn't have to drive (or courier) a replacement disk across town and (b) they wouldn't need to send one in the first place for small jobs. The BBS was not a small expense for us (we needed another phone line, and it used up a machine on our network) but floppies were such a PITA that it was worthwhile to us, purely in terms of reduced aggravation on our end.

And I'm not even mentioning the time (in 2001, at another pre-press joint) I tried to set up Linux on an Apple Network Server 700 machine, a large part of which *had* to be done using floppies, because my boss was convinced that Linux (as opposed to AIX, which was already on there!) would magically make it run fast. I spent two months of graveyard shifts fighting with it futilely... that was a Very Long Period Of Floppy Disk Hell. I never succeeded --- and, frankly, I doubt you would either. Even if you are a non-Mac-kind-of-'tard.

Lost Nazi nuke-project uranium found in Dutch scrapyard

Do you sympathize with...

...those who object to the destruction of Nagasaki? Given that the Americans had proven their atomic capability days before, and they just wanted to show the Soviets their new toy? Or do you figure the nuking of a second city is no biggie?

Dumbass.

U-234?

Good think it wasn't U-235, or it'd have blown up!