* Posts by HMB

638 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Oct 2010

Page:

Bill Gates discusses nuclear development deal with China

HMB

Mass Media

Yeah I'm afraid you might be right, but if the tech works it's going to give China an economic boost like we haven't seen. It's not like China needed any help to overtake us anyhow.

So maybe when China is a more developed nation than the US or the UK, when it's richer and it's people live happier, longer lives than us, maybe then our mass media will be angrily asking why we didn't invest in this earlier?

You could make jokes about the China Syndrome here, but it satirised itself brilliantly enough convincing anti nuclear campaigners that nuclear waste has potent anti gravity qualities.

HMB
Holmes

I hope the talks go ahead. I hope the idea get's properly tried too.

One day Nuclear Companies told us they'd produce electricity too cheap to meter. People laugh and say that never happened. Well just maybe, they've just not managed to do it yet.

I've talked to Doctors from the UK national lab and I know that Thorium and LFTR reactors are a long way off, so maybe this idea could be the next best thing.

China has to be the most willing and able to engage in this sort of venture. What will be the fruit of it's investment if they pull it off? Will we be paying China royalties for energy generation?

Mozambique menaced by flesh-eating bananas

HMB

If I'm an ivory poacher, then it's my living, without it I'm lost. If I want a banana and hear about that, well it's not hard to eat other fruit instead.

Attention, mallrats: Google maps floor plans for Android users

HMB

With the latest phones having GLOSNASS support in addition to GPS, positioning fixes indoors are only going to get easier.I get 6 satellites indoors at the moment on my Nexus One.

Just wait for Galileo!

Mint Linux freshens up web searches

HMB

Jimmy Needs Money

So when is this new search engine going to start begging for my money?

Apple killer app Siri struggles with Indian regional accents

HMB
FAIL

You mustn't have actually used Siri then.

I've talked to people in London, Manchester, Birmingham & Leeds and I'm continually told I don't seem to have much of an accent and that I am well spoken.

Siri understands me around 85% of the time for simple things and around 25% of the time for more complex queries. Android ICS doesn't do much better either.

Here's Windows 7 having a try:

"Speech recognition still has a very long way to go before you can be used in everyday scenarios of liability."

I said:

"Speech recognition still has a very long way to go before it can be used in everyday scenarios with reliability."

That was in a quiet room with the mic pointed at me but about 30cm away.

Even 99% accurate voice recognition would occasionally drop you in the "She is". (Censored by Windows 7)

HMB

If you have to justify why you're using a Paris Hilton picture, perhaps you need to think if you should be using a Paris Hilton picture.

Chancellor to raid pensions, Whitehall to revamp UK broadband

HMB

Truth About Thorium

LFTRs and Thorium are a very exciting technology, but the 'Internet truth' about them doesn't tally with the real world:

1) Uranium 233 is not resistant to proliferation, it's actually a superb bomb making material. Proliferation issues with Thorium tech are severe. I know this from talking to a Professor from the UK national labs for real at a seminar. He loved Thorium too, but said this idea that hard gamma emissions would make it useless was simply not the case.

2) The paperwork and approval for anything new for nuclear is so mind bogglingly vast that any nuclear research moves at a snails pace. Expect countries that aren't plagued by this problem to rip past us in nuclear technology (e.g. China).

Sad, but true. Considering China is already into serious Thorium research, if Thorium pans out as the wonder energy source, then we may all need to learn Chinese. It will give "The China Syndrome" a whole new meaning!

Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android smartphone

HMB

28Gb of music on my Nexus One doesn't go into 16Gb

One thing I love is listening to loads of music in my car over bluetooth audio. My car's head unit has seek controls that work over bluetooth for the next and previous song. So I load up loads of music on my old Nexus One with a 32Gb Micro SD card. My phone sits in my pocket and they connect completely automatically.

What do you mean I have to drop this bit of functionality to get the latest upgrade?

Streaming music on demand as I need it while driving? No, I want my music to play 100% of the time, not 90% of the time (I often stream podcasts live and it's never completely reliable, but much better with 3 than it was with Vodafone).

Will Mars rover Curiosity be the last of its nuclear kind?

HMB

If the probes were more energy efficient surely they could use wind power to generate all the electricity they needed? You know, like on earth.

Radiation TERROR on Scottish beach! Except it's quite safe

HMB

Millions of tonnes of coal vs less than a tonne of lumonous paint. Here, I'll give you a pound, you give me a million pounds, there's no difference.

Shielded particles on a cockpit display, fair enough, good point.

When considering inhaling freshly vapourised uranium from a high energy impact, it's the impact that aerosols it. I don't care about the radiological effects of uranium dust, I care about it's heavy metal chemical toxicity. I don't think there's much point in just saying that radium particles would be too heavy to be airborne, I think it needs scientific testing. I would personally however, expect the dust to settle or be blown away fairly quickly in an outside environment.

UK nuclear: Walking into darkness with eyes screwed shut

HMB

Decommissioning and waste handling are actually negligible costs of nuclear power IF nuclear companies are forced to pay for them right away. The money then sits gaining compound interest for 30-40 years plus and is plenty to handle the decommissioning.

This does require responsible attitudes and foresight, so I guess that means law and regulation around it.

HMB

While I would be inclined to agree with a lot of what you've put there to one degree or another, stating that once in a millennium accidents are happening once a decade is nonsense.

We've had 2 nuclear power accidents in 60 years that have made entering the radioactive zones around them "a bit risky".

The Soviets didn't let safety concerns get in the way of a reactor design that could be refuelled online and run off uranium without having to bother with enrichment.

The Japanese made the tragic mistake of underestimating how high a tidal wave could be.

I think the Fukushima incident is a valid concern, everyone thought it would be safe and while it hasn't caused any deaths and most likely never will, it has caused disruption on the land. As fir Chernobyl, it's simply not representative of a safe approach to Nuclear. The UK's CEGB assessed the RBMK reactor design in the 80s and found it dangerous. I'm pro Nuclear, but I don't think we should start building inherently unsafe reactors.

Jobs mulled building own mobile network for iPhones

HMB
WTF?

Only asses bitch about people down voting them. Some people didn't like what you said, deal with it.

Sony HMZ-T1 3D head mounted display

HMB

If that's so then it will just be anyone with an astigmatism that can't use these then.

Enormous orbiting solar raygun power plants touted

HMB
Black Helicopters

Solar Radiation

Solar Radiation. NOT SAFE IN ANY AMOUNT.

The sun should be banned.

(UV from solar radiation is ionizing, just like gamma rays, hence sun - skin cancer link)

Cheap gas is a 'crisis' for Greens, but not for us

HMB

No Gas, No Wind

If you don't want to burn up that gas for electricity, and I do sympathise with your reasoning, you'll have to make sure the Wind Turbines get scrapped or someone invents a way of storing mind boggling amounts of energy.

Gas driven electricity production keeps the lights on when the wind doesn't blow.

Let's also keep in mind that gas is only useful for heating and cooking. A well insulated home has a much greater need of electricity.

Also many homes aren't connected to the gas network, alarming numbers of trendy new apartment buildings too.

Spanish firm brings 20MW solar ‘ranch’ online in Arizona

HMB

No one ever called the sun green. When studied it's usually called "oh my god my eyes, my eyes!! I can't see anything any more ohhh... my eyes!!!"

Shall we just go with white?

Mozilla updates to Firefox 8, disables add-ons

HMB

Firefox still has advantages over Chrome

Firefox isn't my first browser choice, but it is sleeker than it used to be, has stunning GPU acceleration in Windows (far better than Chrome's) and aside from them being totally stuck up about H.264 (it would have been easy to use any OS' built in codec to bypass the fees), yes aside from that I still see good things.

3D CSS transforms is in the nightlies and on it's way.

Only Samsung will challenge Apple's iPad in 2012

HMB

No accounting for the Kindle Fire?

I would have expected it to have a mention.

HP offers devs £130 32GB TouchPad tablets

HMB

Yeah, good luck with that.

As an app developer I wouldn't bother developing for a marginal platform that looks like it might go extinct, not when iOS and Android give me most of the market for the least effort.

Damn, I even have a touchpad myself!! Lovely device, shame the browser lacks features like remembering site passwords and has some HTML5 issues (older webkit branch?).

I am sorry to tell you, but I'm waiting excitedly for Cyanogen mod to port Android Ice Cream Sandwich to my Touchpad. I'm expecting that be Feb 2012 from what I've read on forums.

Samsung offers Galaxy Nexus pre-orders through Phones4U

HMB

Who pre-orders a phone without seeing it in person? Possibly the same people who buy a used car without test driving it?

I still have no idea if it has a Micro SD card slot, before anyone kindly tells me one way or another I should add that I've seen claims in both directions.

I did think about an S2, but I like the idea of moving the buttons onto the screen for a bigger screen without making the phone bigger.

Back to waiting till the second half of this month.

Greens threaten to sue over solar power cash slash

HMB

It saddens me so much to see so many people thinking they have a right to government cash. That's the problem though isn't it? It's not our tax money it's "government cash", like the government has some of it's own.

I know I'm only a small representative of total tax, but if Greenpeace wants to take money off me I know where they can shove it.

It's a very sad situation considering Greenpeace's past achievements.

Nokia CEO talks up Windows 8 tablet 'opportunity'

HMB

Supercharging

Well Damn! I'm going to supercharge my software by increasing the size of the codebase by 50x!!

Woohoo!!

Toshiba prices up Portégé Ultrabook

HMB

iPhone 4S (I genuinely like this phone)

16Gb - £499

32Gb - £599

64Gb - £699

Now since everything else is constant between these models we can say that you're paying £200 for 48Gb of Flash memory.

Hey Sean....

I've got some killer USB sticks for you at a very reasonable price.

iPad 3 to debut Q3 2012 as iPad 4

HMB

You saw an article about an Apple rumor, clicked the article, went to the bottom, clicked the comments, then commented.

Perhaps you care, but you have a problem admitting it? :)

Shale gas operations triggered Blackpool tremors

HMB

If you were of the persuasion to have a boyfriend, you may find that a lubricant would be important. After washing it away down the drain into the waste water supply, would you then have a problem drinking a glass of tap water?

Apple plans big solar farm to clean dirty datacenter

HMB

Greenwash

Your point?

I thought all renewable energy except for hydro was about pointless token gestures. That is until we find a way of storing energy with an energy density only found in nuclear physics or develop superconducting intercontinental power grids at affordable cost.

It's a shame we can't just use nuclear, but keeping energy flowing at reasonable cost isn't worth it if it gives the ignorant heeby jeebies. I mean who wants the heeby jeebies? I don't!

Bless 'em.

Another reason to jail-break your iPhone 4: You can get Siri

HMB

Don't worry. I had the same experience on Nexus One

My Nexus One (with built in voice recognition as input) occasionally makes just one mistake, but often makes far more when I try to dictate a text message. I find voice recognition surprisingly crap at the moment. I'd love to see it working, I really would, but honestly I think we need some sort of breakthrough tech as currently, it really doesn't cut the mustard, and slapping an apple logo onto that doesn't seem to distort reality enough to make it work either.

Desperate RIM in 'buy two PlayBooks, get one free' offer

HMB

Playbook, You're Fired

With the 7" Amazon Kindle at £160 (convert USD price to GBP then add 20% VAT). Knocking £150 off doesn't make an enticing offer.

Dual booting to Android would probably get these moving, but that would be akin to RIM announcing failure... again.

Maybe RIM should unofficially and silently sponsor Cyanogen Mod. There you go RIM, I just thought of a strategy for you.

Boeing 787 Dreamliner makes first commercial flight

HMB

3 Years Late

Those passengers are going to smell bad after 3 years.

Google Maps API now costs $4 per 1,000 requests

HMB

Guess you didn't read the article properly. You get a free allowance (25,000 or 2,500 depending if you visually customised it) and then you're expected to pay $4 per 1000 users.

If you're a small business I doubt you'll go over your free allowance. If you are going over 25,000 lookups a day, don't pretend you're a small business.

HMB

I called Stallman on the hotline. He says it's time to ditch android and program the CPU registers of the phone manually.

To quote someone else...

"Not that big of a deal"

Mozilla delivers Binged-up Firefox browser

HMB

For those who love Microsoft and Firefox

I'm waiting for people to jump on that!

What next? Perhaps Samsung could work with Apple on porting iTunes to Android.

Windows XP and iPod: A tale of two birthdays

HMB

Hmmm... We'll See

The article and your post seem to have unwavering confidence that Windows 8 will succeed, but it's not impossible for it to flop.

I've got fed up of vertical touchsceens and Apple's study into their viability concluded people don't like them. So we're left with a touch interface on a computer to be used with a mouse. Do people really want that?

I love the idea of Windows 8 on tablets, I really do, but will people buy them instead of iPads? It's a tough act to follow. What do they say about these things? To break into an established market, offer people a huge improvement or the same thing at half the price. Is Windows 8 really going to be able to do that?

Windows 8 definitely successful? I don't want to see MS stung, they're taking brave ballsy decisions, but definitely?

Don't bet your house on it. Windows 7 could be the new XP after all.

Devs still frozen out of Android ice cream source

HMB

Market Share

You do know that Android is the most popular smartphone OS right? Just checking.

When people vote with their feet and their buying power, Android wins.

I own a Nexus One and I have been seriously looking at iOS, ICS & Mango as an upgrade. Android isn't perfect, but at least my alarm clock has always worked.

Now's probably one of the most exciting times in the mobile industry because of the competition not in spite of it.

Web czar: 'Drag your nan online'

HMB

Done!

I already got my Gran on-line.

She was impressed with it and thinks it's wonderful, but with not being able to see a practical use for her she's unwilling to spend the money on it.

When I visit her I show her things on my Touchpad, so who knows, she may change her mind, but not any time soon I don't think.

Stanford boffins create skinnier ‘skin’

HMB

Very Cool... But..

It's fantastic that this is developed, but not as impressive as the skin I have which can easily make out a 0.5g micro sd card on it and detect things even smaller and lighter.

Firm pinch not required.

I think I'll pass on the elephant though.

Updating to Windows Phone 7.5

HMB

If you spot a linux user using their own Windows Phone mobile you're automatically granted 3 wishes.

Don't get sucked in though, they're rarer than leprechauns.

UK shamed in high-speed broadband study

HMB

Re: Network upgrades

Bloody well said!

I have a supposed 8Mbps connection with a "friendly Yorkshire based broadband company" which operates in London and is owned by BT (they weren't when I signed up). I'd jump ship but in a rural area there is no real choice.

My 8Mbps connection can't manage the 1.5Mbps low def iPlayer service at 9pm even when I'm still within my bandwidth "allowance".

It doesn't matter what peak rates you get from an HTTP server if your ISP interferes with perfectly legitimate services well within what your product should provide and neuter them.

HMB

640K of RAM, I mean 1Mbps of Internet should be enough

I don't imagine you use iPlayer for watching video, or HD youtube. One wonders if you bother keeping your Windows computers up to date or updates for things like Ubuntu.

It seems you're not a fan of online hard disk backup services, quality video conferencing or buying music & video online.

In my work I upload files to remote servers, I use remote desktop across the Internet and I happen to want to be able to do one thing that might use bandwidth (say downloading the latest Ubuntu iso) without it slowing down other users.

I would agree with you that basic web surfing is acceptable in 1Mbps, but don't you aspire to any technological innovation and progress at all?

Leaked Nokia WinMobes ready for midrange scrum

HMB

Hardly Inspirational.

The Porsche 911 sells the boxster. High end design makes a brand desirable and makes people go for the mid range options.

If you come in at the mid range and lack those high end features, what happens to your brand image and desirability?

I was more tempted by Apple than ever before this year, Android 4, Revenge of the Ice Cream Sandwich has me excited and I was so looking forward to hardware accelerated browsing and voice recognition in WinPho 7.5...

This has dampened my enthusiasm for Windows Phone 7.5. I wanted to see stuff that made me go wow, and all I got was a lousy "hmmmm....".

Retailer intros cut-price 10in Android tablet

HMB
Alert

Screen Quality

My concern for a tablet is going to be screen quality.

No mention of IPS here. My touchpad screen is very good, my laptop screen is dire in black level and black uniformity compared to the touchpad, let alone viewing angles. I wouldn't want a laptop quality LCD in a tablet. To be honest a laptop quality screen in a laptop is kind of sucky.

Samsung Android 4.0 smartphone priced for Blighty

HMB

re: hmmmm...

Well I suppose when you distort it like that it does sound that way.

Lock screen.. Don't know who got there first. Probably jailbreakers, not Apple.

Android had the ability to do folders before iOS, it just looked worse.

Android multi tasked before iOS, it just ate more battery.

Android has had voice input since the Nexus One. They've improved it beyond Apple's Siri as Siri appears to send off the the cloud, something that didn't work well on the Nexus One and I don't see working well on the 4S. Sending a few Kb of recorded speech over GPRS can be painful.

Samsung, Google whip out Android 4.0 Nexus

HMB
FAIL

Talk first, check facts later

You've obviously not seen the side by side photos with the iPhone 4S and Nexus One then. Neither it seems, have you paid attention to the fact the screen is a lot more edge to edge with any extra buttons put onto the main screen area.

It's really not that much bigger:

http://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/2011-10/samsung-galaxy-nexus-mobile-phone-review/viewgallery#!image-number=10

Apple iOS 5.0 downloads drive all-time UK net traffic high

HMB
Flame

BT: Spare Capacity

BT's idea of spare back haul capacity is the difference between totally rammed and most people asleep with their computers off.

At 9pm on a rural exchange I can't watch iPlayer without BT throttling me down to the lowest quality iPlayer stream (I have an 8Mbps ADSL sync rate to the exchange a few hundred meters away). No, I wasn't over my usage allowance either.

Bastard Telecom.

HP pushes out OS update for 'defunct' tablet

HMB

Defunct Tablet?

Mine not only works well, I'm looking forward to putting Android on there via the lovely people at Cyanogen Mod.

It'd be nice to think WebOS will keep going, but doesn't seem realistic to me.

Sixth of Britain's cellphones have traces of poo on them

HMB

So When's the Excessive Hygeine Story coming?

You know, the story that we are all far too hygienic and that's why serious allergies and auto immune diseases are on the rise?

Also, how do you know that when I wash my hands, pulling the handle on the door doesn't re contaminate my hands with e.coli from the last dirty person?

Uh...

Energy minister gives grudging nuke endorsement

HMB
Alert

Wind Power Rules

But we want higher energy bills, increasing fuel poverty, freezing elderly folk and the like! We can only do this with massively subsidised renewables that produce expensive power and cost money even when we have to turn them off:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/8770937/Wind-farm-paid-1.2-million-to-produce-no-electricity.html

It's about time the government ignored sensible, practical and real alternatives. It's not like we have a debt problem to worry about because printing money, I mean... quantitative easing should completely solve the problem.

(On a genuine note, I have nothing in principle against wind power when it can compete fairly against other forms of power generation. At the moment not only is it too expensive when it works, it often doesn't work because we simply don't have the tech to store that much energy for later usage)

Think 2014 if you're waiting for 4G in the UK

HMB

Astonished at Attitude

I'm just quite amazed anyone reading the register would have this attitude. As more people use wireless data, your apparently quick speeds on HSDPA will get slower and slower. Trends indicate continually rising data requirements and mobile latency is still an issue. Latency on LTE in trials has been comparable with fixed line internet and as such could have serious positive impact on services.

LTE is only going to make mobile internet an even more viable proposition to those who have been shunned by the BT monster when it decides who does and who doesn't get it's services.

Why do we want to make anything better?

Dear lord.

Page: