Posts by David Hamilton

I'll build a Hyperloop railgun tube-way in Texas, Elon Musk vows

Not a new idea but enough to get an argument going

Way back when Digital Equipment Company existed, I was lucky enough to be teamed up with a fantastic crazy engineer called Tom Stockebrand, He designed the Dec Tape drive for the PDP-8 !

With a $2000 grant from MIT we built a 1km vacuum tube in the desert in New Mexico and sent an array of objects down the tube at high speed and managed to reach twice the speed of sound.

The idea was to prove that high speed travel by rail could compete with air travel if the speed was fast enough and the train was long enough as trains have a difficulty with bandwidth in competing with air travel.

The working model was demonstrated at the reform club in London in mid 1985.

Our sponsor Professor Frank Davidson of MIT was commissioned to advise UK and French governments to invest in Macro Engineer or Big is Beautiful engineering.

In those days we debated sending trains from New York to LA in 21 minutes. We would accelerate at 4G for 12.5 minutes half way across the USA (underground in a vacuum tube suspended by magnetic levitation ) - the concept got to designing 4G chairs to allow aged persons to sit in a seat and withstand 4G for such a time!)

Of course the channel tunnel ended up going a lot slower.

Nevertheless why not build a tube connecting the two cities - the distance is almost 350 miles and to do it 30 minutes would require an average speed of 700mph. Now wheres that slide rule?

India’s outsourcers battle for customers in a cloudy universe

Business is a one way street with India and its time we said enough is enough

Ever tried to get a business visa to go to India? Only get one for max 6 months? Yes this is India, paperwork spilling out of the ears of corrupt politicians, power outages in major cities at least 3 hours a day , "sorry I not understanding" a constant problem - yet India is a Nuclear Power, they get together with other "Brics" countries for a jamboree with democracies in deep embrace with the likes of China and Russia. Yes China, that's the country that sent a trade delegation to India to learn about its high tech sector and stole or the details, and Russia the country that sends nuclear parcels to citizens in our homeland.

Forgive me for being a cynic but our wide boy cameron goes over to do a trade delegation! Why not tell them that unless you play fair and give us the same opportunities to do business in your country then stay out of ours because we have people living on the bread line just like in India but in India its warm in most places and you can live in a tin hut. In Europe you need planning permission for a tin hut and health and safety.

Also explain this, how come you can trash 750 people at Thames Water and replace them with 2500 Indians living in 8 to a house in Slough ? Someone let them do it?

No , let's have trade but let's have fair trade and not the type where we get all emotional about treatment of poor people, i mean lets have India let out supermarkets in and give our visa's that mean we don't have our passports in there greasy mitts for 4 weeks every year.

You are so right, in-comprehensive call centres, job hopping for 30% pay increase, salaries climbing out of the roof , why bother.

Court wonk tweets Apple's IPAD appeal showdown with Proview

From the land of fake copies ..

Why not restrict all the fake iPads , iPhones, iPods , ... Apple should sue the Chinese Government ( if you want to call it that)

Secret high-security Chinese shipments point to iPad 3 exports

Shipping IPads - Slab Transit Monitor

Aplple has to had to place its own staff to watch over transfers of iPad 3 pallet loads.

A couple of pallet loads of IPad 3's breezed thru a well known euro hub two weeks ago.

Apole considered that the threat of theff by anyone without an Apple badge was so high that the load was accompanied by its own staff to guard the precious fondle slabs

.... A new job is born ... Slab Transit Monitor

Official: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5bn

Isn't it great Microsoft owns my phone calls NOT

What a shame, Skype had credibility, it wasn't owned by any vendor so we trusted it. Now it is owned by Microsoft should we trust it?

There is no point in buying this app unless you want to do something with it, the revenue model makes no money of any significance. The only point of buying it would be to (a) stop someone else buying it and (b) change it, incorporate it into your ecosystem. Oh god but what is MS's ecosystem?

Dare i say its more open than Apple's? That Balmer doesn't vet the billions of apps available to download on a windows platform from anywhere and that windows doesn't have a bloody app store icon on its task bar (on no that would be anti trust violating wouldn't it?) .. and skype was just one of those apps that got downloaded and worked in spite of Microsoft and Apple, now it will be one of those Microsoft Apps that works because of Microsoft and we all know what that means , Skype will be Voice Live, it will mingle with Office Live, it will get bloated like an overfed kid .

What i loved about Skype was it was totally open, It was its own ecosystem but one that just did the job, even with the most recent meltdown the open frank disclosure of the issue was a breath of fresh air.

So here comes Windows Validation Tool, Silverlight plugin for Mac, use your windows dead account oops live account to login , no thanks,

$8billion of madness but i suppose they know what they are doing right?http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/graphics/icons/comment/pirate_32.png