Posts by itzman

Limits to Growth is a pile of steaming doggy-doo based on total cobblers

So tim, do you believe that there are no limits to growth at all?

As the oak tree said to the sapling...

Chelyabinsk-sized SURPRISE asteroid to skim Earth, satnav birds

....And the orbit may also be altered so that its further away in future

I think statistically that is probably far more likley.

Years ago some of us in a drunken evening coded up an iterative solutin to the N body problem - a program we called 'orbits' in which more or less random planets and suns were arranged in random places at random velocities.

The only ones that were stable for more than a few orbits comprised a large mass and some smaller ones. Even those had a tendency to catapult any other masses out of the ecliptic plane into outer space.

In a remarkably few cycles those in a plane would settle into harmonically related orbits.

Our conclusion was that the solar system was they way it was because anything else is unstable.

And will either converge towards a solar system type layout or fly apart.

Stuff on deep elliptical orbits around the sun is very prone to have its path altered to go nearer the sun: That can throw it out of orbit altogether.

Power station fault cuts electricity, water and internet in Cairo

Re: I for one welcome a bit of UK disruption

To have the electronic armour of stimuli removed for a few minutes..and then you die.

Re: Please note

There's about 3-4 days in the reservoir tanks before it runs out, if you all take a group crap.

Re: UK too this winter

Ah Bored games. Aptly named..

Re: UK too this winter

yep.

I remember firing up the petrol then the diesel gennies too.

We did discover that a 100BHP Cortina engine didn't like 100bhp for more than 7 hours before it blew its big ends.

Sounds just like the UK then.

Re: Water

Back ORIFICE please.

And that was only 4 hours.

Imagine no water, electricity, no way to pump fuel into anything, no way to keep warm in the middle of a N European winter. 4 days and you are probably near death.

The half life of a city without power is probably a week.

And that's coming along nicely now. Thanks to insanity rules, OK? in the electricity politics of Europe.

iCloud fiasco: 100 FAMOUS WOMEN exposed NUDE online

Re: Assailant?

"who had the gaul to attack"

Isn't that some kind of racial slur on France?

BBC: We're going to slip CODING into kids' TV

Teaching children *how* to think...

...instead of what to think, would be a huge leap.

Never mind the coding...

'I think photographers get TOO MUCH copyright for their work'

Bemused as to why...

anyone would think calling Linux boring because it just works means you aren't a fan?

I love Linux precisely because it works, and goes on working.

If you think 3D printing is just firing blanks, just you wait

Re: Digital photography and inkjets...

Once, I had a manual SLR.

It had a ground glass focussing screen with a split image. One control and my focus was OK.

Now I have a DLSR, which can select from - using 3 independent controls - over 60 different ways to focus the shot.

Frankly if my eyes weren't shot I'd still be using manual focus.

Its like a microwave oven with 30 buttons to press, none of which actually result in power being applied to the magnetron.

I am sticking to my £45 one that says 'power level' and 'time'

Re: PROGRESS!

I actually did the sums.

On color lasers. They turn out to be excellent PROOF printers 'this is what the thing will look like sire, once printed' and cost effective in the sub 100 or thereabouts print runs. And even a bit higher once you factor in the cost of liasing with the printshop and collecting the results.

As far as photos go., nope, we take those to the color photo lab and get them done on proper photographic paper, if a 'hang on the wall' print is what we want.

Color inkjets should be banned on humanitarian grounds, as being a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

Even my old massive A1 inkjet which cost a fortune would still block and clog if it wasnt used on every color at least once a week.

Ah, wait till you have a computer controlled CMYK micro spraygun..

that will take care of the camouflage ...

(Paris added because think of the applications to body painting).

Re: "...3D printing is an over-hyped, steaming pile of crap."

Well yes.

a really decent advance in precision machinery useful for production and with a great deal of development potential has been marketed as a panacea and thousands of pieces of utter junk have been used to make things that don't actually really work.

I do think that in the end it will be used a lot though.

And for structural stuff. Imagine chopped carbon fibre and resin going down, and setting..

and maybe the result IS porous with some materials. That in itself ins no bad thing. Porosity makes for light weight and high stiffness.

Totally agree that right now, it ain't worth it. BUT give it time.

Linux turns 23 and Linus Torvalds celebrates as only he can

Re: I wish there was a Linus of the Desktop-userland

"something which would actually be a no-brainer for Dell and the other companies to offer as the default operating system for ordinary people like my mum,"

Linux Mint.

Out of the box easier than XP.

Designed for noobs who just want a pleasant interface that works in expected ways.

Used by professionals who want a computer that just works, because they have better things to do than installing linux..

Re: 23 Years

I think there are two things to say,

1/. The consumer desktop is a thing of the past anyway

and

2/. The mere fact that it was free meant there was never any drive to push it onto people.

I think the professional workstation is where it will end up as a user oriented device. What is needed is a quantum leap in thinking to make it possible to load paid for software on it that is copy protected.

Although I have to say I am down to only 3 programs that I occasionally use that demand a commercial OS to run on. But by bit the freeware is emulating the functionality (and some of the bloat) of the things that made us all buy PCs and Macs in the first place..

There never was a year of Unix, nor a year of linux, but both advanced steadily until apart from the consumer and commercial workstation, they simply outnumbered everything else.

The point being if you need an OS Linux is pretty much always the best thing around if you are building a custom artefact. And pretty good if you are not.,

Boffins attempt to prove the universe is just a hologram

are there sharks involved?

Only if you think there are.

Re: It's just mathematical equivalency

Yes.

Once you arrive at the conclusion that the 'real' world is still not 'what's really there' all sorts of problems disappear or transform into trivial ones.

Many things you thought were in the 'real world' become mere artefacts of the way you assemble the perception machine.

Yeah, god exists, but he's just a bit of crap human firmware..

AMD unveils 'single purpose' graphics card for PC gamers and NO ONE else

What I want to know is...

...Glancing at the telltale on my status bar sitting at 64C with just a static desktop running, is:

"Will the fan in this card last longer than 1 day past the guarantee period' ?

GitHub.io killed the distro star: Why are people so bored with the top Linux makers?

Why would I need to look at new distros?

The one I have works alarmingly well, and its Mint 14., Now sadly its off maintenance and I will have to upgrade, but I am dreading it as it will be two days to get Mint 17 or whatever the latest is installed and tweaked to how I want it ...

Frankly I have better thins to do with a computer than install linux on it. I just want one that works that I can set up to run the way I want it.

I found it. End of story.

Linux Foundation says many Linux admins and engineers are certifiable

I am not sure if the author is american

..or whether he is having his little joke.

'certifiable' has a certain nuance in the UK...;-)

Something's phishy: More holiday scam spam flung at real hotel customers

Re: This is common

Absolutely.

I ordered two cans of spray lacquer to finish some woodwork and was deluged with 'relkated products' spam from unrelated companies for weeks.

I think the actual online billing systems are often third party and these represent a place where spammable addresses and product interest are linked up.

I have two lines of defense: One is of course disposable email addresses - which I ought to make more use of. August2014@mydomain is probably usable enough for a month.

The other is to build a blacklist of the actual envelope sender addresses. Although some companies are registering hundreds of domains a day on a 'use once throwaway' type basis many of them actually re-use the same ones. And furthermore collect bounces to delete them from their purloined lists.

Since I started doing this, things have got a lot better on my own mail server.

Think crypto hides you from spooks on Facebook? THINK AGAIN

Re: German Tank Problem

Well yes and no.

In the broadest sense it it is - getting a specific solution from meta-data rather than data.

But traffic frequency analysis is not the same as counting gearbox serial numbers.

Old news..

Traffic analysis has been used since at least WW1.And was highly used in WW2

a sudden increase in encrypted traffic? the bastards are planning something, oh its on that frequency, that's command Berlin talking to Rommel.. etc

The only way to subvert it is to send random length data packets from random addresses irrespective of whether there is anything to be said

Munich considers dumping Linux for ... GULP ... Windows!

te real issue is...

...that a MS set of tools is something people spend years learning how to use, and then are lost if they dont have.

Outlook may be fantastic at doing X, but is X actually the best way to solve problem Y?

Groupware by email is not really the best way to solve groupware problems.

Microsoft: Just what the world needs – a $25 Nokia dumbphone

Just what I want

A reliable phone that is just - a phone..

Ancient pager tech SMS: It works, it's fab, but wow, get a load of that incoming SPAM

Re: Can you turn it off?

The answer is not to have a mobile phone at all. Just carry a computer device that doesnt do voice at all, or only VOIP, if such exists.

ANU boffins demo 'tractor beam' in water

Re: So, the Empire starts in Australia

In principle it is that simple.

In practice things like the weight of the rope and issues with moving weights up and down it and its strength come into play.

F1? No, it's Formula E as electric racing cars hit the track

Re: Battery Times

Sadly electric motors and batteries are all up on the 90% plus efficiency range.

What is missing is a high energy density battery, and those are already approaching the limits of lithium, and lithium is, in the periodic table, the best element there is.

Even lithium air, where at least some of the weight is in the atmosphere to begin with, is only just able to match a tank of hydrocarbon fuel.

And the technology is massively difficult to deploy.

Storing electrical energy efficiently and without a weight penalty is a huge problem which if we could crack it, would transform a lot of things.

Aircraft for example, only fly because of the energy density of hydrocarbon fuel...

Drag racing?

Of course drag racing is a totally useless sport.

So is synchronised swimming and running a marathon when you could take the bus...

As for football - well surely the goalkeepers and the whole opposing team could help the ball into their own net to get the game over quickly so they could get on with doing something a bit more useful?

super scalextric?

Who will kill power companies? TESLA, says Morgan Stanley

Lets price up a car battery

MM. 12v. 80Ah. Cost. $100

So that's $100/kwh.

So why have these 'car batteries' not already disrupted the grid economics?

I went into all this is some detail years ago. The economics still dont make sense.

Windows 8 market share stalls, XP at record low

If I were Microsoft...

I'd develop a shim to run windows apps on Linux. Wine done proper.

And sell it.

Facebook goes down, people dial 911

Re: Wait... what?

No, its 2014, the age of idiocracy and soshul meejah

PEAK LANDFILL: Why tablet gloom is good news for Windows users

What manner of beasts are these?

Frankly apart from reading in bed All I uses is a desktop machine that doesn't run Windows more than once or twice a month.

I dont want or need a slab, laptop smart phone or whatever. Friends come and show me all the wonderful things they can do. None of them are things I actually want to do.

Consumer hardware is reaching its limits ; I guess thats what the 'internet of things' is being invented. To sell more chips.

I cant get through to the inlaws. They have DECT phones and they are never where they left the handsets.

Visiting is a nightmare. The lights have no switches but hand held thingummies that are again left in random places.

My wonderful DSLR has replaced one focussing ring and a split screen focussing aid with three controls with a total of 54 different possible 'automatic' focus options.

Is this progress?

Thirteen Astonishing True Facts You Never Knew About SCREWS

Pity the reg got it the wrong way round

A threaded shaft with a part plain shank is a bolt, the screw is fully threaded all the way to the head..

which makes a nonsense of a woodscrew of course.

Re: What I would like to know is....

You have a wife?

Asteroid's DINO KILLING SPREE just bad luck – boffins

Re: Sisk

It occurs to me you haven't a clue.

Re: Avian dinosaurs and mammals

Well we could always eat our Greens.

A touch bitter, but soft in the head ...

Re: If only they'd let Jesus into their hearts

JC still existed before he was born though, it's an important aspect of the orthodox trinity.

Mm. Are you sure. And for what values of 'existed'

BEST BATTERY EVER: All lithium, all the time, plus a dash of carbon nano-stuff

Vehicle range

You need around 100KWh for s decent car motive battery

I cant quite make the numbers add up, but at 3.8Ah per gram., that's (at a cell voltage of 3.7v) around 10Wh per gram or 10kWh per kg.

That is so far from actual battery weights that I simply don't believe it.

Wiki suggest lithium is less than 0.5Wh per gram

UK.gov's Open Source switch WON'T get rid of Microsoft, y'know

Re: It's not Open Source it's an open standard

WEll what I do personally and what I suspect is happening in any company that values its data, is that as the kit changes, the old archive data gets pushed onto the new technology.

My email that goes back 15 years that started life on a 50Myte hard drive in windows 95, now lives on a 500GByte hard drive on a Linux server.. Well two of them in fact in case one breaks.

Auntie remains MYSTIFIED by that weekend BBC iPlayer and website outage

Re: iPlayer

Hard to make it seem less than it already is..

Climate: 'An excuse for tax hikes', scientists 'don't know what they're talking about'

Re: when

Well you obviously haven't looked at carbon footprint versus environmental tax graphs.

You would struggle to find any correlation at all.

So whither Microsoft? If Nadella knows, he is keeping it well hidden

Only Office is left

...more or less uncontested.

The OS is rubbish on GP desktops..most people there have gone BYOD anyway.

The OS is rubbish as industrial strength server. Most people have gone Linux.

All MS have left is the special purpose workstation. And the de facto office suite.

The only change is either hardware minority share or a licensed model for Office.

The Sun took a day off last week and made NO sunspots

Re: Is the sun growing up ?

ClearASol ???

Re: It's the beginning of the next Maunder Minimum.

Yet the planet continues to heat up?

Its called 'summer'

Of course in Antarctica the planet continues to cool, and on average its actually gone nowhere for the last 18 years.

BBC goes offline in MASSIVE COCKUP: Stephen Fry partly muzzled

Thats how long it took to...

..remove all the 'skeptical' views on climate change...