Re: someone who has more ambition than technical nous
I used to think "nous" was Scouse, but actually it's Classical Greek!
Posts by Spoobistle
126 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2011
New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong
Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing
Friday 13th January 2023 16:53 GMT
Network limited PCs
> Part of its design is that it should be useful to people who have only intermittent or limited internet access, and that the computer is still useful when offline.
This could be a selling point for PCs that you can't/don't want to network continuously. All the other distributions I'm familiar with assume an internet connection will be available for updates. While most can be *installed* off a downloaded ISO or similar, updating an "air gapped" PC is basically limited to reinstalling the whole lot. (I know there has been some effort to get round this but it does not seem to have got too far.)
> Updates are handled by the Red Hat-developed OStree tool.
I'm not familiar with this, it would be nice to know more.
Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name
Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops
Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back
Friday 25th November 2022 18:30 GMT
> Just asking, how could someone be 'meaningfully' impacted if twatter,failbook and their ilk would collapse?
You might fall off your chair laughing, and crack your head on something. Or you might become distressed at the sight of all those media regurgitators (looking at you BBC) scratching around for flingable crap.
Orion snaps 'selfie' with the Moon as it prepares for distant retrograde orbit
JWST snaps first chemical profile of an exoplanet atmosphere
Wednesday 23rd November 2022 12:09 GMT 
exacting precision
> As light hits various elements, they reflect different wavelengths,
No, as the light passes *through* the atmosphere, various elements and (mostly) molecules *absorb* different wavelengths.
This creates a transmission spectrum as explained in the NASA article. The observations can only be made when the exoplanet is passing in front of the star. Reflection would require the exoplanet to be behind or lateral to the star, and isolating the planet's effect is impractical in that situation. I suppose fluorescence or phosphorescence might conceivably be usable but I don't know if JWST could do that.
India follows EU's example in requiring USB-C charging for smart devices
NFT vending machine appears in London
Xiaomi reveals bonkers phone with bolted-on Leica lens that will make you look like a dork
Nvidia RTX 4090: So hot they're melting power cables
Wednesday 26th October 2022 11:02 GMT
Re: Tea kettle cord
If you look closely at your tea kettle cord, you should find various national approval body markings (DIN, BSI, UL...) showing that it won't set your house on fire, at least in normal use. I wonder how long before insurance companies start looking at this and requiring the same sort of certification for high power PC accessories?
Obvious icon!
India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM
How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling
Water pipes hold flood of untapped electricity potential
DeepMind uses matrix math to automate discovery of better matrix math techniques
Friday 7th October 2022 10:53 GMT
Re: AlphaFold
Even if AlphaFold were a silver bullet, expecting new drugs this soon would be a bit premature - there's a lot more work than the protein structure. However AlphaFold is becoming a productive tool for structural biologists - a structure prediction having an indication of confidence is helpful in tailoring the wet lab experiments towards avenues likely to succeed. As with many things, ignore the hype and find out what it can realistically do.
UK politico proposes site for prototype nuclear fusion plant
To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden
Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board
NASA wants a hundredfold upgrade for space computers
Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols closes hailing frequencies
DARPA seeks portable muon-making machine to see through almost anything
Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?
Behold: The first images snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope
IBM wins National Savings & Investment bank tech and ops deal
Misguided call for a 7-Zip boycott brings attention to FOSS archiving tools
RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well
Bill Gates says NFTs '100% based on greater fool theory' amid crypto cataclysm
Thursday 16th June 2022 16:42 GMT
A pipe-smoker comments...
"From now on, the Bitcoin in the real world is worth 30% or so less in terms of other currencies. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Bitcoin here in Cyberspace, in your Wallet or USB stick or Cloud storage, has been devalued."
- with apologies to Harold Wilson, who would doubtless have sported a flat cap.
Lithium production needs investment to keep pace with battery demand
Tuesday 17th May 2022 12:46 GMT
Re: Sod electric cars
There is sodium battery technology but it's hardly domestic yet. Lithium is safety marginal enough (fires etc) and sodium is much more reactive. It can be managed, it was used as a coolant in some nuclear reactors but I wouldn't fancy 100 kg or so in my basement. I don't know if anyone is working on magnesium, that's much more available than lithium but I guess the chemistry's not so good.
Chlorine can be used for all sorts of industrial processes, notably bleaching, but seems to be considered green only in colour these days!
The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs
Tuesday 17th May 2022 10:45 GMT
Re: Not that unreasonable
It was even worse than that - there was a time when I had to use Windows, Mac, RiscOS and Unix (Irix I think) sometimes all in the same day. "Middle button for menu or right button...? dohh wrong again". Like different makes of car having different steering wheel/pedals/stick arrangement! I wonder if there is scope for some sort of abstraction whereby WMs could have different "skins" for users with different tastes?
Arm CPU ran on electricity generated by algae for over six months
Microsoft exposes glue-free guts of the Surface Laptop Studio
Tomorrow Water thinks we should colocate datacenters and sewage plants
Monday 4th April 2022 12:24 GMT
Legionella
You're missing a comment made above, that warm water in pipes breeds legionella, so you'd have a whole lot of extra safety work to do.
Not that district heating type systems are a bad idea, they seem to be quite frequent outside the UK. Perhaps the problem here is that you want such a system to work for 30 to 50 years, and many UK industrial concerns just aren't going to last that long!
RISC-V takes steps to minimize fragmentation
Man arrested, accused of trying to track woman using Apple Watch attached to car
Wednesday 30th March 2022 13:47 GMT
Re: Nitpick...
OP's formula was wrong - it should be a = r.w^2 i.e. proportional to radius and to square of angular velocity. Back of my envelope says about 8000 m.s^-2 or 800g.
If memory serves those button temperature loggers can stand about 600g easily enough, so an electronic watch might be ok. Might depend on orientation of quartz resonators.
GParted 1.4: New version of live partition-manipulation tool
Intel updates ATX PSU specs, eyes PCIe 5.0 horizon
Ukraine invasion may hit chip supply chain – analysts
Friday 25th February 2022 11:59 GMT
Re: This stinks a bit..
There may be a connection with the fact that Ukraine is also a producer of titanium. This requires inert gases for processing, for which argon is employed, but neon would be a valuable byproduct from the air distillation plants. This all uses lots of electricity, and we know where that came from in Ukraine...
Free AI protein software packages nearly predicted structure of the Omicron coronavirus variant correctly
Tuesday 11th January 2022 14:12 GMT
Re: Nice to see AI working
Quite so, but AI has had some notorious slip ups where small changes in the input data results in large changes in the predictions. It would have been a huge surprise if the omicron spike protein structure had been significantly different from the previous variants, and a bad AI prediction would have been a definite egg-on-face moment for the technique.
AI has great potential for use as a pre-screen if its predictions correlate reliably with experimental data, so that experimental resources, always too scarce, can be concentrated on good candidates but the hard work is ahead on establishing quality and reliability measures for the predictions.
Ceefax replica goes TITSUP* as folk pine for simpler times
Thursday 6th January 2022 14:47 GMT
became more interactive and users could opt to view it
It was always interactive - just that your TV had to have a text decoder to display it, and that didn't come as standard till the late seventies or so. I think the rolling pages were mainly intended as a more entertaining replacement for the test card in the wee small hours.
Thursday 6th January 2022 14:37 GMT
red button
Hear hear!
I don't know how the red button pages are created but judging by the number of duplicate stories on the regional pages, and the frequent truncations where you get just the first teaser paragraph of some overambitious BBC blogger's output, I can only assume it is a script of no great complexity. IIRC the claim was they would save £39M by dumping the service, but I can't see where that much is going!
It's a pity, as I think the red button data pages could be really helpful to people with no internet access. The BBC missed a trick not having some COVID information pages for example, instead of share prices.
Newly discovered millipede earns its name by being the first to walk on one thousand legs
Think that spreadsheet in your company's accounts dept is old? 70 years ago, LEO ran the first business app
Tuesday 30th November 2021 13:07 GMT
Re: very little hardware remains
I don't know about LEO 1, but I recall having some LEO 3 circuit boards as part of a surplus "bargain parcel" bought from one of the advertisers in the back of Practical Electronics (possibly Greenweld) in the 1970s. Lots of GET102 transistors, germanium diodes etc for the industrious schoolboy to ruin with a hot soldering iron!
LoRa to the Moon and back: Messages bounced off lunar surface using off-the-shelf hardware
New study demonstrates iodine as satellite propellant... in space
It's fake ooze, don't fall for fake ooze: Alien fossils found on Mars might just be simple chemistry, uni pair warn
Thursday 18th November 2021 13:02 GMT
Re: Glad to see this research
Hear hear! Occam's razor is all too often left in the drawer when there's a chance to get your name in lights. (Cf the recent "discovery" of phosphine on Venus.)
As the authors imply, some form of abiotic self-organisation is a necessary precursor to life, but as we don't know what the path was on Earth let alone how many such paths might exist in general, there's going to be a lot of debate yet. For example it might be that life never quite got there on Mars, but left behind the dead ends of the process for us to find...
Incidentally, ideas about mineral structures being analogous or precursory to life aren't new. I used to have a little book by someone called LeDuc (can't find it now) from about 1916, who mixed various salt solutions in controlled ways to generate precipitates he considered to resemble fungi and other cells.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
