Posts by mike 32

Boffins triple battery life with metal foam

Is there a drop in charge time?

...because that'd remove the need to plan overnigt stops on a (long) journey .

So, how many rhinos does a tram weigh?

Those are

crap rhinos.

New Cassini pics of Saturnian 'Ice Queen' Helene

We live in an awesome age

when we get to see the heavens like this. Hauntingly beautiful (along with that walnut-moon, whose name escapes me currently). Oh, to be able to explore it personally!

Saab fingers BAE over South African fighter deal

We (SA) probably should have...

but I doubt any US companies would pony up the required cash to the politically-connected pigs in the trough that is the SA Arms deal.

Reg hack applauds asinine augmentation

It's this that keeps me coming back...

In addition to good IT journalism, we're kept up to date with writers' farm exploits. Great way to maintain a community!

I'm stuck for (smart) names, so will suggest

Barry (my brother) or

Bronwyn (my wife).

I probably won't tell them if they end up the winner.

Ooh, ooh, I know, Bliksem! An errant donkey locally would hear that name daily around here.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bliksem

Fourth Euro star truck christened Albert Einstein

What's that brown blob...

on the right side of the picture of the trucks in space? Just above the one solar panel(?). Doesn't look like the moon, or anything else I recognise...

Anyone else noticed it?

Go Daddy CEO under fire for 'elephant snuff film'

Elephants in Mugabeland

Living in South Africa, I got to visit Mugabeland in 2005. In Hwange National Park, we saw elephants - huge amounts. Seeing them after a while got pretty damn boring, actually.

They are incredibly destructive, and the vegetation for mile upon mile was limited to stripped and broken tress, as they moved through the areas feeding. As I understand it, the balance of animals was way out, with little control of elephant populations and poaching of anything smaller being rampant.

In areas where people live (hopefully outside any recognised parks) rogue elephants must be immensely troublesome. Control of the populations (including culling) is necessary, but I disagree with renting out the opportunity to commercial hunters. There's no indication his shooting was sanctioned by any authorities with both the animal and the villagers best interests in mind, but lets hope it was. Unfortunately, money talks there, and you can hunt almost anything you want. PETA normally have the wrong end of the stick, but posting such a video was stupid on his part, undoubtedly.

Jesus Phone brings the DEAD back to LIFE

iPhail.

Piss-poor doctors by the sound of it, losing MIs like that.

My wife is a casualty doctor (although not an Emergeny Medicine specialist, as it seems to indicate these doctors were) and I can assure you, an iPhone app would be more hindrance than help.

She has to KNOW the various drugs and doses, and I'm pretty sure her success rate is better than either of those groups. Which includes an MI that would have killed if the guy hadn't been in a casualty bed already.

Marketing for apple at it's worst. Such an app should be on any smart phone, available to GPs and others suitably qualified.

Frenchies, Germans wave fat pipes at embarrassed Brits

They clearly didn't count South Africa...

because we barely have *fast* broadband.

Copper prices push cable thefts to new high

Woohoo!

So this is a problem in first world countries too?

My third-world, SWC-hosting country is clearly in good company :-)

We've had people killed here often, trying to get the powered overhead lines for the trains, and high-tension cables. The poor firemen have to come remove the charred bodies every once in a while.

South African police hunt Twittering speedcam spy

Some corrections...

The limit on highways here is 120km/h, in general. That's the speed that trucks and larger, slower vehicles maintain. If you drive a German sedan, then during the holiday season it's not unknown to average 150km/h, while leapfrogging all the slower traffic.

Also, I've seen traffic cameras hidden behind advertising boards on lampposts, with a hole cut in the board for the lens to pop out, as well as one hidden in a wheelie bin. They're crafty buggers, here...

PigSpotter is big news here, and I reckon good on him. There's nothing illegal in telling others where traps are. Ethically dubious maybe, but certainly not illegal.

Danish rocketeers poised to reach for the skies

No biological agents?

Surely a passenger counts?

Twitpic pulls 50 Cent bum burger snap

As a Capetonian...

You really have to be in the wrong place, at the VERY wrong time to get shot here. Get into an argument with the wrong person of course and a doctor will spend hours sewing you back together after being worked over with a broken bottle, but shot? Not likely.

I used to hear (mid 90's) gunshots in Pretoria fairly often, but never in Cape Town...

People have no bloody idea about saving energy

former validation engineer

I think the problem is that you used a magnetic wheel meter - I'm pretty sure getting an accurate indication of energy flow is very difficult with that.

A new electronic meter, with a little LED indicating the power used would give much more accurate results. I know in test modes they can pulse up to 32 times per Wh. What is an issue for doing this kind of test at very low power levels (as per your test) is that electronic meters often aren't calibrated for such low powers, plus the fact they legally treat anything under a set threshold as noise (3W or something like that).

Turkish groom accidentally sprays wedding guests with bullets

Not quite returning to earth, but...

I was supposed to be providing wildfire suppression control one Guy Fawkes night, with the assembled masses of the Cape Flats (it turned into a first-aid evening for us).

After watching people holding roman candles, standing in and amongst exploding fireworks (including small kids), holding catherine wheels (the spinning ones?) in their hands, etc, the evening reached it's climax when some dude shot his cousin in the chest from a few feet with a rocket. No major penetration/death, but serious burns and one very shaky person eventually carted off to hospital.

Image recognition – defense against a Lampard replay?

And radar?

There's a South African company who do RADAR systems for this, in particular baseball and golf. Locally, the ball-flight prediction devices in golf shops used to show your range, spin, accuracy and lack thereof with a particular club use radar to pick up the ball as well as (I believe) the spin - something required to predict patch deviations 100m down the flight path. All that happens over about 3 meters, as you whack the ball harmlessly into a net.

The system is nigh real-time (in baseball, it'll pop up a graphic (on tv) showing where the ball will land, before the ball gets there), so stoppages are unlikely.

And if players were to wear unique reflectors, all your offside rulings are taken care of as well.

Regent Street blocked by iPad fanboi swarm

I second this suggestion!

...and propose it be added to the official reg lexicon of collective nouns!

Shuttleworth heir opens up on Ubuntu biz

You're forgetting...

that many institutions such as universities will host their own local repositories for ubuntu (and many other flavours). Thus a single download of the update may spawn a few hundred downloads locally, all totally invisible to Canonical.

This may not be the case everywhere, but it certainly was the way things worked at Shuttleworths' alma mater, where many in the CS and EE departments were/are avid Ubuntu users. With the bandwidth available in SA, universities simply couldn't afford to allow everyone to update from Canonicals' repositories.

Coincidentally, I've heard the situation has gotten much better at such tertiary institutions - right after I left :-(