Posts by Stanislav

Underground tunnel complexes FOUND ON MOON

No, no, no!

Oh, this is too much. I can no longer sit idly by while people perpetuate this myth that the Clangers live on the Moon.

Listen to Postgate's opening remarks to practically any episode (DVD available from all good online retailers) and it is quite clear that the Clangers' planet is far away, hanging amidst the infinite void, silent and serene, all alone in the inky blackness of space.

So pack it in, do you hear? End this foolishness! There are NO CLANGERS ON THE MOON.

By gum. Is it Friday already?

Twitter on a ZX Spectrum

Archimedes are always under-represented at fairs

I have no hard evidence to back this up, but could it be because quite a few RISC OS-based machines might still be in use?

After an initial flirtation with a ZX80 we became an Acorn-obsessed family, finally owning between us an Atom, a BBC model B, two BBC Master 128s, two Archimedes A3000s, an Archimedes A410/1, a RISC PC600 and a RISC PC700.

Of that little collection, the A410/1 and one of the RISC PCs are still in regular use, which when you consider the RPC is about thirteen years old and the A410/1 is damn nearly twenty years old, is pretty remarkable.

RISC OS is still a going concern too, of course.

Drinking coffee offers no real benefit, say eggheads

... and therein lies the problem

"The team asked 379 adults ... to give up caffeine for 16 hours"

... which naturally gave the non-bean-lievers an advantage right from the start.

We who are wise in the ways of espresso are well acquainted with its life-enhancing properties. However, we also accept that they come at a price: the constant need for a refill. Laying off for 16 hours is just not playing fair.

Guy Kewney, pioneer, guru, friend - RIP

Heavy heart

Never met him, never knew him, but I've been reading his stuff for nearly thirty years.

I feel like I just lost an old friend, although this can be as nothing to those who could genuinely call GK their friend.

Nuclear synthi-jetfuel plants wanted for US Afghan bases

"always seeking to achieve regime change in the state of the art"

Excellent. You, sir, are a poet.

Did you know it?

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

Change your masthead's colour...

... not that big of a deal.

Obama scraps Constellation moon mission

Best way forward

Let's just hope NASA gets a kick up the backside and spends the new money on space research rather than administration.

Constellation would have been a gross waste of time. Apollo, despite being an utter triumph in many important ways, was essentially a dead end. The objective was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. Well, they did that. Brilliantly. And learned a lot about spaceflight along the way. But then they retreated to low Earth orbit with the Shuttle at a time when simply getting stuff into space cheaply & reliably was a major objective. Well, now there are a number of ways of getting stuff into space and I would guess that the Shuttle is one of the more expensive ones. NASA needs a new objective. Doing Apollo again (but bigger) with Constellation should never have been it.

Thanks to the ISS, NASA now has extensive experience of assembling very large structures in orbit. It might make sense to build on that knowledge and see if it's feasible to assemble an interplanetary craft up there. Far fetched, possibly, but that's the sort of ambition they should have. Let the commercial sector do the ferrying to orbit. You just don't need government money to do that any more.