Posts by grumpy feline

You like that E Ink book, huh? How about an E Ink HOUSE

Another year or so to go

Till the patents start running out and we can do something good with this.

Samsung makes investors happy with $1bn share buyback

Desperate times

Share buybacks show they don't know what to do. Oh well.

Forget the climate: Fatties are a much bigger problem - study

It's about tax

McKinsey are about marketing (and arse-covering), and politics is marketing (and arse covering).

So what they are saying is that politicians can make a case for taxing fat people etc, and the anceint voters will nod and agree, irrespective of the underlying facts, with little risk of burned backsides.

Indeed the whole point is that the argument can be won in the face of facts. Such is the devilry on display here. Nice innit?

Horizon finds new potential in the sci-fi staple deepsleep tale

Crap endings

It's my biggest grumpy-old-git bugbear with most sci-fi. Appallingly bad endings. Space opera is almost defined by it.

Cryo-sleep, is A-OK. Has been around since Ichabod Crane.

It doesn't have to be this way. I'm looking forward to "The Martian"'s movie conversion. Should be good. No magic required.

Juniper shrinks its MX monster router onto a USB stick

Great idea, but innovator's dilemma?

This is good, but how will they handle pricing? It must be difficult to price correctly and avoid internal accusations of cannibalising their main products.

Leading like Mad Leo: HP's Whitman rolls out Apotheker's PC plan

one word...

...memristor

They are betting big

Boffins say they've got Lithium batteries the wrong way around

Scientists...pah

Did scientists really assume "that a battery charges fairly uniformly"? Which scientists? I wish to mock such wilful ignorance.

Rubbish WPS config sees WiFi router keys popped in seconds

Wait wait wait....

Dominique Bongard? Really really!? Why am I alone in pointing this out? Possibly the best real name in the Reg evah!

Google's so smart it's discovered SHARKS HAVE TEETH

that would be...

Spectra. Made out of stretched polythene. Still probably not so useful against sharks. Floats nicely though. And I worked for the company that buried the cables off shore using a massive plough which helped avoid the problem. Small world in it.

Boffins spot weirder quantum capers as neutrons take the high road, spin takes the low

Robert's not wrong.

Wave collapsing is an attempt to reintroduce classical thinking. Sorry. It should go away along with the ether and non-relative speed of light.

Mr Long might have been more diplomatic of course.

For those who doubt, check out the delayed choice quantum eraser. Or more directly, Wigner's friend. Both tend, in my opinion, to make the global "wave collapse" idea a bit hard to sustain.

In quantum world it's waves all the way to the bottom. "Particles" are a secondary effect, as is all locality and separation and indeed time (as Mr Bohm and friends tended to bang on about a lot).

The hardware is wav-y and field-y and continuous.

The software is particle-y, localized and discontinuous, but that is a secondary effect which breaks down more and more as you look closer and closer.

For some people that is just too weird. I guess you pick your poison.

Microsoft's new 'Adam' AI trounces Google ... and beats HUMANS

Simulated Annealing

FTW! I presume they are avoiding that term because it would invalidate the slew of dodgy patents that will arise from this.

Faster Macbook Air pops out: What, a NEW Apple thing and ZERO fanfare?

No touch screen...

Meh. My kids already think my iMac is broken.

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

Ignore the windbags

So Lottie and Rohan are all a bit Bong. No surprises. And UK politicians are kicking in a pathetic amount of cash so they can try to catch up. Nothing new there.

If you look at the real stuff, it is all US driven. Code.org is good. Not great, but certainly better than nothing, and has been going for a few years. The idea that schools will teach our kids to code is pretty laughable at this level of investment, but for those of us who don't abdicate education completely to the state, this stuff is gold. So forget Lottie and the laughable year of code, but check out the stuff they are trying to hang onto the coat-tails of. It's really quite good.