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Posts by Phil O'Sophical
7402 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
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Yes, yes, the Olympics are near. But what'll happen to its IT afterwards?
Up the ZIL LANE to the Beach Volleyball changing rooms with BONG!
BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel
Russians in audacious stratobeer mission
Readers fret over LOHAN's chilly bits
Friday 20th July 2012 11:07 GMT 
Re: I apologise for butting in
> return motors on the Lunar Lander were designed to avoid the need for anything that could go wrong.
IIRC the big downside of those motors was they once started they were damaged, so they couldn't be tested pre-flight and then cleaned/refueled. If they didn't fire first time, RIP Armstrong & Aldrin. Scary.
Also, if Lester & co. don't want to use hydrogen in the ballon I doubt they'll be keen on using hydrazine in the rocket engines...
BT bags MASSIVE £425m broadband rollout deal in Wales
New lightest-ever material: Ideal power for electric car
Humanity increasingly sitting on collective arse
Thursday 19th July 2012 19:00 GMT
Re: wrong approach
Yes, I've been to Cambridge a few times, and I agree about the traffic, but it's exactly the situation where a good alternative would be used because it was better. No need to make the driving intentionally more difficult just tto create a need.
Which French towns are you thinking of? I've seen that in tiny mediaeval villages, never in towns with the possible exception of Megeve.
Thursday 19th July 2012 08:09 GMT
wrong approach
Looking at the solution as being "*discourage* car usage" is completely backwards. The solution is to *encourage* the use of other forms of transport, by making them work properly, so that people change voluntarily. In places where that doesn't make economic sense (rural areas) there is no point in punishing car drivers just because you can, so car use should be made easy and efficient to avoid jams and pollution.
Round where I live there's a huge anti-car effort, reducing roads to one lane and creating bus lanes, in an attempt to force people to use the bus. The bus service is only convenient for people who live and work entirely within the city, so those of us who can't use it have to sit in ever bigger traffic jams surrounded by fumes, while acres of red tarmac lie empty for most of the day. I can usually drive to work in 30 minutes, to go by public transport takes three buses and 2 hours, and I can't get home that way.
No wonder town centres are dying, with out-of-town shops and the Internet picking up the business. Nobody round here goes into town unless they really have to.
iPhone 5 to be skinniest Apple yet SHOCK
Yahoo! Poaches! New! CEO! From! Google!
Tuesday 17th July 2012 07:53 GMT
Re: Goo Gone Bad
She's a multi-millionaire and certainly doesn't need to work, so why shouldn't she take a break and have a go at raising the dead? It's probably more fun than just doing the same-old same-old at Google. If she succeeds it'll be one in the eye for Larry&Sergey, and if she fails it'll be blamed on Yahoo! anyway. Either way she'll still be marketable in a year or two, whatever happens.
UK tech biz grinding to halt as Reg space programme sucks in talent
Build a bonkers hi-fi
Move over Raspberry Pi, give kids a Radio Ham Pi - minister
Thursday 12th July 2012 17:27 GMT
Re: Not as good idea as it sounds...
Writing a program is just joining the dots with some punctuation. You wouldn't expect even a gifted 8 year old to design the computer where the program runs. Why is writing and debugging a program using discrete software elements any different from assembling a crystal radio from presupplied hardware elements?
New electronic labels squeal to spare you from food poisoning
Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now
Wednesday 11th July 2012 08:16 GMT
Re: "Did I get this right?"
No.
To summarize. Don't make life-changing knee-jerk decisions based on wild assumptions from a model where you clearly don't have enough information to get even close to the real world.
Needn't stop you from taking a coherent, reasoned course of action to safeguard scarce resources while improving the model, of course. Going "chicken little" won't help, and may make things worse in the long term. Unfortunately politicians and media pundits (an increasingly blurred distinction) get more instant publicity from being Chicken Little than from being calm and rational (my inability to immediately think of a suitable character name for the calm person is telling. Br'er Terrapin, perhaps?).
Tuesday 10th July 2012 13:00 GMT
"You can predict that the water will boil. "
You can? That will depend on the size and shape of the pan and the kitchen, the amount of heat from the stove, and the initial temperature and quantity of water. It might evaporate before boiling, it might reach equilibrium, it might even cool down. You need a lot more information about the initial conditions before making any sort of predictions...
Tuesday 10th July 2012 12:24 GMT
So it still boils down to "we don't really know yet", which is what many people have been saying for years.
Of course we do still need to make an effort to safegaurd supplies of finite resources like oil and coal, which have other uses than simply burning them for heat. Would it be too much to ask that governments* try some joined-up energy thinking, instead of isolated knee-jerk reactions on CO2 or whatever the evil-of-the-week is today?
*and supposely competent government advisors, like the IET, IEEE, etc.
50 years in SPAAAAACE: Telstar celebrates half-century since launch
Tuesday 10th July 2012 12:50 GMT 
If you're on holiday in Brittany (near Perros-Guirec) it's worth taking an afternoon to visit the old France Telecom site where the Telstar work was done. It's no longer operational as a working radio site, but parts are being converted into a museum: http://www.cite-telecoms.com/en/accueil-cite-des-Telecoms (somewhat Franglais, it's better if you can read the French pages). They have the original huge horn antenna inside the radome, where they do a sound & light show several times a day. Lots of other interesting exhibits as well.
Facebook shuts down face recognition APIs after all
Microsoft sets October date for Windows 8 release
British Gas bets you'll pay £150 for heating remote control
Monday 9th July 2012 14:05 GMT
Beware
I saw an interesting system like this in a local DIY store. Interesting until I looked at how it actually works, that is.
With the DIY-store system you don't connect to your home-heating controller, you connect to a central website, and all your changes are made there. The home "hub" simply polls that site for updates. If the company ever shuts down the website, or you stop subscribing to it, you're screwed. Reminiscent of the various internet "radio" systems where everything has to be done via the supplier's central server. There's no server inside the 'hub' that you can connect directly to.
What's the bet that the BGas system is the same?
Texas Higgs hunters mourn the particle that got away
Friday 6th July 2012 07:29 GMT
Re: Is it just me
You can never know what you're going to discover until you do these experiments, so it's impossible to say whether they were worthwhile or not until afterwards.
What if the result of some huge, expensive, scientific experiment is the accidental discovery of a cure for Alzheimer's disease? Or a new source of clean energy? We must, always, continue to do this sort of science, just so that we can keep learning. That is never wasted.
California clears way for Steve Jobs' 'private Apple spaceship'
'Apple is corrupting App Store downloads', warn angry devs
Thursday 5th July 2012 15:41 GMT
Re: corrupted downloads
"it was the signing key that was broken."
Then why did the phone try and launch the app? For that matter, why did it even install the app? The article says that "many of them are failing the instant they're launched," which suggests that download and install went without errors. Since there clearly *was* an error, in download or key, it should have been detected.
Rifle-waving Yank's premature detonation ruins city's big bang
Disappearing space dust belt baffles boffins
iPhone spontaneously combusts on CCTV
Wednesday 4th July 2012 19:40 GMT
Re: Really, really bad combination.
> Personally, I'd prefer to stick with certain classes of dry powder for putting out metal fires...
To quote from the PDF referenced above:
---
5. Fire Fighting Measures
CO extinguishers, halon or copious quantities of water or water-based foam can be used to cool down
burning Li- ion cells and batteries.
Do not use for this purpose sand, dry powder or soda ash, graphite powder or fire blankets.
---
You may do as you please, I'll stick to what the instructions say.
Who runs UK? 'Tories, Lib Dems and Google' says Labour
Sozzled Americans nagged by talking urinal cake
The Grundy NewBrain is 30
Monday 2nd July 2012 11:23 GMT
Keyboard?
Given the described history of UK then Holland, I'm curious where the model on Page 1 was destined. It seems to have a French AZERTY keyboard.
Speaking of keyboards, I think people sometimes underestimate the effect they had. I know that for many of my friends one of the major deciding factors for going the BBC Micro route was that it had a "proper" keyboard, not a chiclet-style one.
Amazon cloud knocked out by violent storms in Virginia
Sunday 1st July 2012 10:57 GMT
Monstrous UPS?
Flywheel UPS works well for that. The local synchrotron facility has over 1MW of standby generators, with flywheel UPS between them and the grid. When grid power fails the flywheels power the generators for the 10 seconds or so it takes the diesels to fire up and take up the load.
Alternatively go the telco route, with a small battery/UPS in each rack.
Capita ITS asks to-be-axed staffers to pose for marketing pic
Apple patent may foretell an end to iPhone autocorrect Tourette's
Microsoft's offices gutted in Athens arson attack
No need to comply with data laws if it's too difficult - EU ministers
Crypto boffins: RSA tokens can be cracked in 13 MINUTES
NASA counts down to nuclear tank invasion of Mars
US East, West Coasts face fast-rising sea levels
Lithe British youngsters prioritise fun over privacy and security
Tuesday 26th June 2012 08:34 GMT
security only matters when you have something to secure
Silver surfers are more likely to have possesions that they value, and don't want to lose. They could be material (savings, investments) or not (credit reputation). "Gen Y" is more likely to be worried over student debts (who would steal those?), and won't have had time to build a reputation, so they probably think they have less to lose.
They'll learn, later.
Huawei Ascend G300 budget Android
Earth bathed in high-energy radiation from colossal mystery blast
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