Posts by DrBobK

French Google fund to pay for 1 million print run of Charlie Hebdo next week

Good for you

Well done El Reg for printing the covers!

The future looks bright: Prepare to be dazzled by HDR telly tech

Re: Brightness is not all there is

I looked at the uhd roadmap graphic more closely and it has some answers. Phase 2 looked as if it was limited to 10 bits per channel (but 12 bit distribution?) Phase 3 looked as if it could use 10, 12 or 14-bit. Both phase 2 and phase 3 use a BT.2020 colour space, which fills much more of the human colour gamut than the current standard but still misses a chunk that could probably only be reproduced by using more than three colour channels. From a vision research perspective the 10-bit limitation in phase 2 is a pity but the Phase 3 specification looks very impressive indeed.

Brightness is not all there is

How many bits per colour channel?

How many colour channels (or what coverage of the human colour gamut)?

WHITE HOUSE network DOWN: Nation-sponsored attack likely

Old hackers.

I misread that as 'NIXON sponsored attack likely'. Showing my age, but an interesting mental association with a bygone species of White House hacker!

Ferraris, Zondas and ... er, a bike with a 500hp V10 under the saddle

Re: I don't know much about big engines

I used to have a BMW R90S. The longitudinal crank is no problem at all unless you get moderately serious air in which case you can feel the bike twist a little in flight. That is a 1970s bike with about 70hp - vastly more than a Sunbeam. BM, of course, still make boxers with longitudinal cranks. The HP2 Sport puts out about 130hp (see also Moto-Guzzi, especially MGS-01). I do agree, however, that the V10 thing looked awful, was a ridiculous bike and would probably burn you.

Cutting cancer rates: Data, models and a happy ending?

Excellent

Another thank you for a genuinely interesting article.

Would it be bad if the Amazon rainforest was all farms? Well it was, once

rainforest obscured by clouds

My immediate thought was that a 'rainforest' was some kind of new cloud thing operated by Bezos & Co and that it was a step beyond old-fashioned server farms (render farms, whatever...)

What a whopper, LG: Feast your eyes on this 77-inch bendy TV

Off-axis OK, what about from below?

We used to have a CRT telly sitting on top of the fridge in the kitchen. When we replaced it with a small LED one all you could see looking upwards to the new telly was a yellowish blur. I'm not proposing balancing a 55" curved monster on top of the fridge - but, for future reference, do OLED panels look OK from low viewing angles?

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

Re: I am sticking with Sennheiser and Walkman

Both Senn HD-25 and HD-26 Pro seem great headphone for portable gear. Reasonably indestructible, replaceable parts if you do manage to break anything. Ugly as sin. No audiophile gibberish that I know of.

Apple-aligned firm opens sapphire glass factory. iPhone 6 rumours, DEPLOY

Re: Only as good as the weakest link

Just got the non-replaceable battery of my iPhone 3GS replaced for £25 (including mailing it back to me). Replaced the battery of my daughter's 3GS over a year ago (even cheaper but involved me doing the fiddling about with tiny things) and it is still doing fine.

'Leaked' iPhone 6 pics will make cool fanbois WEEP - it's a PHABLET

Re: I don't care what it looks like

I have a vague recollection that at least one oldish iphone or ipod was rated relatively highly by the people on HeadFi (headphone audiophile obsessives). Not newer ones though. I have a FiiO portable headphone amp/DAC thing which I often attach to an iPhone 3GS - the difference between lossless and AAC is very noticeable through the headphone amp but close to undetectable using the phone output (with Sennheiser HD25 headphones).

Ubuntu desktop is so 2013... All hail 2014 Ubuntu mobile

Why?

I'm not sure why I'd want to run Blender, Luxrender or my own, personal, build of Luxrender (for doing vision science, different colour spaces etc.) on my phone. I understand why I run them on the machines I have that run Linux (can program, build stuff and so on). I understand why the machine I do my email, writing and stuff like that runs Windows XP - it still does the job. My phone is from Apple from a long time ago (3GS) - still just works. Linux on a phone for Linux sake is silly unless it is better specifically for being for a phone - which I doubt.

BT Tower is just a relic? Wrong: It relays 18,000hrs of telly daily

I used to live directly across the road from it when I was a student (Ramsey Hall, UCL). Made finding your way home very easy!

Brit adventurer all set to assault ex-Reg haunt Rockall

Rockall Times

Bring back the Rockall Times.

Victoria and Albert museum in narrow escape from Napalm Death

Re: Sublime

Music? I thought the bloke at the font made a croaking scream and the other blokes hit things (some of which may be guitars) hard for about 10 seconds and then they stopped and then they did it again and so on. I agree about the name though.

Apple threatens to ruin peace worldwide with voice-controlled iMacs

NeXT Cube

I had a colleague with a NeXT Cube that had voice control many years ago. We were forever popping into his office and shouting arr em minus arr eff slash star. It never worked (and not because it needed a --no-preserve-root flag - too long ago for that I think).

Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Haggis pakora v huevos rancheros

Re: Huevos Rancheros... Wha??

Agree more or less - whenever I've been in the southwest its always been tortillas, eggs, beans, chile. The options seem to be kinds of chile, kinds of beans, kinds of eggs, kinds of tortilla, something salad-like (optional), rice (optional), other stuff (optional). I can't imagine it without beans.

Ten... celeb headphones

Re: Am I the only one..

...or, for somewhat more money - Sennheiser HD-25 - apparently indestructible, comfortable, fabulous sound, and most definitely head-fi approved....

Los Alamos fires BLOODY BIG MAGNET

Re: Triple? Why not likely.

No. I've seen 7T for humans and know people who worked with it regularly in Western Ontario (it is now being replaced). There are 9.4T systems scanning humans (their brains, not just their fingers) in Chicago, Minnesota, Julich, and Tubingen. If you want a reference read Duyn, J.H., The future of ultra-high field MRI and fMRI for study of the human brain, NeuroImage (2011), doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.10.065. You can, of course also get small-bore systems for imaging hands and hand-sized things at 7T and 9T - maybe these are what you are familiar with?

I agree entirely that the ratio between the fields in the interesting thing and human imaging systems is well out - I was just pointing out that there are plenty of 3T run of the mill turnkey systems from Siemens and the like out there.

Re: Triple? Why not likely.

3T isn't at all out of the ordinary for clinical MRI these days (my department got one last year). There are MRI machines used in research with human subjects up to 9.4T in regular operation, although a recent paper suggested that going beyond 14T isn't likely to be practical.

Hands on with the Apple iPad 3

Re: eye strain

Does the new iPad fit in the pocket of a ski-jacket?

Official: File-sharing is a religion... in Sweden

Agree

I thought the rotten things had stopped, but no - they even drift this page down and up uncontrollably as I'm writing this comment. Grrrrrrrr....

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 13.3in Core i5 notebook

X220

I'd be interested in having some comparison with an X220.

Lenovo chief says netbook's day is done

Work

Right now I'm sitting in a room with one other person. We are working, independently, on the same exercise. I'm clattering away on my Thinkpad X60 (not the tablet version, also a mere 115 notes from fleabay), she is prodding her ipad letter by letter. Also I can crunch some numbers with Matlab and R when I need to.

CATS to be saved by BLASPHEMERS after the RAPTURE

Looting

Bad facebook people are also organising Post Rapture Looting...