Posts by Mike Bell

iOS 5 'crashes more apps' than Android

Not 100% Convinced

My experience of iOS 5, for what it's worth, is that it's pretty damned stable (for me). With a notable exception of BBC iPlayer, which would crash on start-up on about 25% of occasions. That particular app was updated recently and the release notes acknowledge that it includes a fix for crash-on-startup. I wonder how many millions of recorded crashes were accounted for by this one hugely popular app?

My experience of Android, for what it's worth, is that it's also pretty damned stable. Unless you are one of the mindless numpties who gets clever and thinks it's a good idea to install a Task Killer on the device. In which case you don't understand how Android works, and you are simply begging for your device to crap out on you.

I am a little intrigued by the stats in the article, though. The trend seems to imply that it won't be very long before every app launch results in a crash (look at the way the graph is headed), and all that Android is doing is better keeping pace with iOS in this regard. Such convergence looks a little suspicious to me.

SpaceShipOne man, Nobel boffins: Don't panic on global warming

The Mice are Furious

If you think you are so clever and know everything, just reflect on that for a moment.

Met Office cuts off Linux users with new weather widgets

Re: Super Norwegian Forecasting

Here's my Norwegian forecast:

Cold. Wet.

Plan hatched to view Milky Way's black hole heart

Re Far Side of the Moon

Not such a great place for an optical telescope, due to large temperature fluctuations. There are, however, certain polar craters on the Moon that are in permanent darkness–and thus very cold stable conditions– which makes for good seeing.

As for radio astronomy, aren't the receivers largely unaffected by solar radiation? If so, I guess you could place one wherever you like on the Moon to give you extremely long baseline interferometry.

Windows 8 fondleslabs: Microsoft tip-toes through PC-makers' disaster

Patch Tuesdays

Will those tablets have a "Patch Tuesday" every month?

I can really see the World+Dog looking forward to that.

Using virtual particles to get real random numbers

Determinism

“While the evolution of a quantum function is deterministic, the outcome of a particular measurement on a state is not”.

This apparent contradiction of determinism and randomness is something that threw me for some time until I had a brain-bash with Wikipedia a while ago.

In layman's terms: things happen randomly in quantum physics, but the *chance* of something happening is very well defined and predictable.

For example, if you look at an individual uranium atom, you're stuffed when it comes to predicting when it might spontaneously split into pieces. But if you watch loads of them, the decay rates are very repeatable and the boffins can even work out what it should be on average. That's why you can confidently say that a particular radioactive element has a given half-life.

As to what is "truly" random, I have to confess that it's something that bothers me quite a bit. It bothered Einstein, too, so I guess I'm in good company. To accept that something is truly random, you must concede that an effect has no cause. If God really is playing with dice, on what stage is it actually being played? Questions like that hurt my head.

What should a sci-fi spaceship REALLY look like?

Alien Derelict

I liked the Derelict spacecraft in "Alien", which pays little attention to any preconceived notion as to what a spacecraft should look like. More like a bunch of fossil bones than a ship.

NB, Boba Fett's ship had good reason to be "suspiciously smooth" - it travels in atmosphere as well as deep space.

Not so fast: Italian boffins say neutrinos not faster than light

Lorentz

The Lorentz Transformation, 1/SQRT(1 - v*v/c*c) is what makes it tricky to get objects with mass near the speed of light. Plug v=c into that formula and you get 1 divided by zero, which throws a real spanner in the works. Infinite energy required to get there etc.

However, if v > c, you are faced with the square root of a negative number; what mathematicians call an imaginary number.

The thing is, imaginary numbers - despite their name - abound in quantum mechanics. Most of quantum physics wouldn't work unless imaginary numbers had real relevance.

Maybe that has something to do with it. I don't know.

Microsoft seeks patent on employee spy system

Think of the children...

...growing up in this shitty world where a corporation simply owns your ass.

People who dream up ideas like this are sociopaths.

Too rude for the road: DVLA hot list of banned numberplates

Bah! Prudes!

I saw a car mincing around our town (inasmuch as a car can be said to mince) and it was sporting the number plate "SIR NO".

Well, it made me laugh. I just hope it wasn't a wayward headmaster driving that vehicle. Anyway, I felt no inclination to write in to the Daily Mail. We are supposed to be eccentric Brits, after all.

Apple's iPad not so shiny once you get it home

"They don't have a 3G model so they can only use it with Wi-Fi"

I have my WiFi-only model tethered to my HTC phone so I can use the internet when I'm out and about.

Last thing I want is another SIM and a network contract just for an iPad.

Is the electromagnetic constant a constant?

What's it all about?

If you want to make a physicist twitch, ask him *why* 1 over alpha has the value 137.035999...

It's a dimensionless number cooked up by God, The Universe, or whatever you call it.

And whereas numbers like e and PI are readily calculable, no mathematician has ever found a way of creating alpha by deduction.

If I were God, I'd perhaps consider making a multitude of universes with a multitude of alphas along an alpha dimension. Or something like that. Then it wouldn't hurt my head if someone happened to find one somewhere that had the value that we see and started moaning that he couldn't work it out.

Official: Kindles get heavier as you add e-books

Don't Panic

If that kind of thing worries you, for God's sake don't take it outdoors: the radiation pressure from the sun will make it weight about 30 nanograms more. That's the equivalent weight of about 30 billion e-books.

Blue Coat owns up to Syrian Web-blocking

Thanks, Bluecoat

I had some fun & games with Bluecoat myself.

We found that some people in Europe were being routed through their devices to our dynamic websites. And their dumb boxes were substituting query string parameters with invalid character sequences (doubly URL-encoded ampersands, for example). Net result: broken websites. I'd have probably been stuffed if they hadn't given themselves away by injecting their name into the request headers.

I thought I'd be helpful and point out to them that their boxes were making schoolboy mistakes but it didn't get me very far. In the end I implemented an inconvenient workaround for their interference in my own code.

A lovely waste of my time all round.

iOS update woes prompt gnashing of teeth for Apple fans

Took a While

The download took about 2 hours for me. I could see that for much of the time it was poodling along at a little over 1Mb/s, but there were periods when Apple's severs were clearly suffering, as the the network utilization trace often throttled back to 0.1Mbps for prolonged periods, occasionally ramping up to 1Mb/s to keep my interest.

After the download iTunes presented me with unknown error 3200, which is a very poor message to show to an end user. I'd get the sack if I showed an error like that in one of my applications!

When things got a little quieter, the update did run smoothly. All my apps were gone, but they were available as "purchased" items in the iCloud, and it was a simple matter to re-install them from there.

One hopes that future updates will be a lot smoother, since that can all happen from now on without the cooperation of a PC.

Billion dollar telescope snaps galactic head-on

Re: Mess

It might look messy from here, but stars are normally so far apart that the chances of there being individual stellar collisions is exceedingly small. The merging of galaxies per se would present no real threat to life. It's your run-of-the mill local supernovae and gamma ray bursts that you've got to worry about: if you're too close to one of those babies, you're going to get frazzled by a shell of radiation as little as ten light seconds thick but enormously more energetic than a typical solar output.

US rocketeer thunders to 121,000ft

Awesome!

Kudos to those guys.

New iPhone offered for sale via unauthorised outlets

@Northern Fop

Actually, it's not just a phone.

My son, for example, can use it to play his dodgy music videos wirelessly on my home cinema.

Mars trips could blind astronauts

OK, you doubters

Two craft tethered by a 100m cable:

a = v*v/r

For a reasonable amount of artificial gravity (say 0.5g), v would be about 15.7m/s, which would give you a rotation of once about every 20 seconds.

I don't think that would make anyone space sick if you happened to be looking out of a window. And if you needed to kill the rotation to do any fancy manoeuvres, it's only like going from 35mph to 0mph. Easily achievable with modest attitude thrusters.

Simples!

Send two craft tethered to each other by a long cable. Put the show into a gentle spin and - voila - instant artificial gravity in both.

Why do these traders get billions to play with, unchecked?

Please Help

Nice article.

I confess to being a bit of a nitwit when it comes to economics, and I can't get my head round the following:

With all these hot-shot traders moving stuff around at breakneck speed, and making a handsome living at it, surely for every top dog killing there's a numpty who's made a loss? If so, where are all the fallen?

Nigerians panic over killer calls

I'm sure I saw a Vincent Price movie donkey's years ago, where someone picked up a phone and received a high-speed bolt through the inner ear (fatal).

Microsoft inks new patent pacts over Android...and Chrome

@Ink

Actually, ink is also a verb. You can loosen your collar now.

Apple ejects FT app from iTunes

@Reasnoble

Much though I enjoy my iPad and the convenience that iTunes gives me, taking 30% for doing diddly-squat sounds pretty greedy to me. If you want figures, I'd guess that most people wouldn't think about grumbling too much if it was something more like 5%.

NHS diabetic gizmo will text for help if wearer is in danger

I want one

I'm a diabetic myself and I nearly killed myself at the weekend. Got pissed and took the wrong kind of insulin by accident (triple the usual dose for that kind). Not pleasant. There's a good chance I wouldn't be writing this now if the Missus hadn't come downstairs to find me.

I'm all for a gadget that would save idiots like me from themselves.

Room-temperature brown dwarf spied just 9 light-years off

Oh Be A Fine Girl...

And there was I thinking all this time that it was "Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss My Ringpiece Now, Slapper!".

Then again, I've been keeping some odd company in Essex.

Viewers with a strong constitution may care to Google the meaning of "Dagenham Handshake" (NSFW).

BBC explains 'All your Twitter pics are belong to us' gaffe

Otrageous Grammar!

Pedant Alert:

It should, of course, read "All your Twitter pic are belong to us".

Google told to delete people from search results

"a profound chilling effect"

Of course, Google, Facebook, Apple et al would know nothing about that sort of thing!

First snap of giant asteroid Vesta from orbiting probe

@Fuzzy

The resolution of the camera is actually not too brilliant (1024 x 1024). But I imagine those sneaky boffins know what they are up to. Things should get quite a lot sharper when the spacecraft gets much nearer to Vesta. And since it will be in orbit for quite a while, who knows, they may be able to artificially increase the resolution from multiple passes.

http://www6.cet.edu/dawn/multimedia/docs/camera.pdf

@Clangers

Don't give up hope. According to the Dawn mission website, each pixel in that image corresponds to 0.88 miles. Dustbin lids are quite a bit smaller than that.

Vesta flashes charms to approaching Dawn

If Major Clanger and the Soup Dragon fail to make an appearance, I will feel sorely cheated.

Google "The Clangers" if you are a completely mystified non-Brit unaware of the truth about life beyond Earth.

Microsoft bags two more Android patent deals

@Goat Jam

Steady, now! Remember, you're likely to get arrested in the UK for making daft threats!

600 tonne asteroid in low pass above Falkland Islands - TONIGHT

@Bumpy Cat

The mass will be estimated from the estimated volume and density. Which, of course, are both estimates.

Travelodge still doesn't know who hacked it

e-mails are like postcards

Something to bear in mind is that when Travelodge or anyone else sends out a batch of e-mails, they are probably reliant on a whole bunch of intermediate servers that sit between them and the end user. The internet being what it is.

This being the case, any compromised server along the route could potentially have access to any of those e-mail addresses and the names of recipients.

Venice not in major peril after all - new research

"tideless Mediterranean"

http://www.veniceonline.it/HighTides/HighTides.asp

Blu-ray sales to overtake DVD... next year

HD for Me

I'm the lucky owner of a 50" Kuro display and HD video looks awesome on it. I don't actually have perfect vision but the difference between SD and HD is immediately obvious to me. Easily worth the few quid extra that they charge for a Blu-Ray. I sometimes wonder if people who diss HD are plain blind or using rubbish equipment.

I'll be glad to see the end of discs, though, because apart from anything else my movie collection is something like 600-strong and takes up a lot of space. One day, future generations will look back at posts like this and have a good laugh at hardware delivering a paltry 25GB from a spinning piece of aluminized plastic!

Apple ousts Google in brand value

Brandz 2011

If they think they are being cool by substituting the perfectly good letter 's' with a cutesy 'z', then they are sadly mistaken.

Dear Facebook: your privacy sucks

@https numpties

There is an option in Facebook under Account | Account Settings | Account Security to specify your preference that the site uses https when possible.

Arcam FMJ AVR400 AV receiver

@spl23

That's a matter of opinion. I've owned two Arcam AV receivers. They sounded good, but not nearly as good as my current Sony AV receiver.

So, what's the best sci-fi film never made?

Neuromancer

Winner of the sci-fi triple crown that would make a terrific movie if it wasn't dumbed down.

I gather there's a version in production that has little to do with William Gibson's fantastic novel.

There's a memorable scene in the book where the main character is being stalked by an A.I. (virtually). As he walks by a bank of phone booths in a public space, each one rings once in turn. Chilling stuff that could translate well into film.

No stranger to the moleskin trouser

C++ is for babies.

Assembler, that's what you want. Or microcode if you're the kind of person who likes wearing barbed-wire under your shirt. And while we're at it, every single line of SQL should be composed by hand and brought to life by a stored procedure.

Just look at what happened with HAL in 2001 if you want an example of how you can be really let down by high-level languages!

</sarcasm>

Oxfordshire cops switch speed cameras back on

Speed Kills. And so do cameras.

For those of you who haven't seen this BBC report, it makes hilarious viewing on a Friday afternoon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJLlH6GgmfU

Once upon a time it was on the BBC news website, but they sheepishly pulled it when it was pointed out to them that they were filming a menace to society on the road (said menace being a mobile camera operator). Further, they refused requests to re-upload the video... so some kind soul put it on YouTube, much to their annoyance. Ah, the power of the internet.

Focus on what happens at about 2 minutes in. It's a bloody miracle nobody was killed during the filming of that report.

Microsoft says 'sorry' after Japan quake marketing gaffe

If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, do marketing

You don't need to be terribly bright to be in marketing, do you?

I got an e-mail from a large corporation at the weekend, addressed to me by name and titled "Make her day special...". It was a tout to buy a personalised Mother's Day gift. Let her know how great she is, treat her etc. etc.

All of which will prove to be a little tricky given the simple and plain fact that she is dead.

Fortunately for me, I was not recently bereaved, but I imagine there will be plenty of recipients of this e-mail who are.

Hollywood eyes Blade Runner replicants

I could do it

I could make a great prequel and sequel with a couple of hundred million dollars.

Reason: The Blade Runner universe offers vast possibilities and doesn't need to be restricted to the plot of an ex-cop running around after some robots.

Off-world colonies; attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; the demise of virtually all animal life on Earth; the ascendancy of AI; the politics of a crumbling planetary society.

There's plenty of scope to make some great films there.

Of course it will never go that way because virtually everything's dumbed down and risk-averse these days. Which is a great pity. If things had always been that way, Blade Runner would never have been made at all.

Apple 'outstrips' all brands at box office

Bits Missing

If Apple's logo wasn't a mouldy old piece of half-eaten fruit, I might consider buying some of their stuff.

Microsoft don't fare much better. The first letter "O" in their logo is somewhat the worse for wear after having suffered an encounter with a ticket inspector.

Oh, the terrible irony of it all.

One third of Russians say Sun revolves round Earth

Hell's Bells!

Just don't poll the US!

Unions and small biz doubt Osborne's bank promises

@ted frater

The problem is that the banks will *always* be spending your money and not theirs.

With the active collusion of governments all around the world, banks exist by lending overwhelmingly more money than they own (or hold on deposit) to borrowers. That in itself would not be so bad, but the government makes up the enormous difference by effectively printing the money that's conjured into existence every time a loan is created. Not in times of crisis, but on a day by day basis.

The whole financial world is one big con. The closer you are to the money, the more of it you can trouser. And if Joe Public really understood what was going on, they'd have the bankers lined up in stocks.

Google "Fractional Reserve System". It's the biggest stitch-up in history.

Apple under threat from ... Windows tablets

Can't see it in the long run, myself

I suspect that for an awful lot of "tablet" users, they just need a simple way of web browsing, watching videos, and sending e-mail. You sure as hell don't need a Windows machine to do that, with its inevitable proprietary client-side apps.

One eye on Google here...

Google does fractals in HTML5

A trifle dull

There are some much neater Google Labs "experiments" here (especially the Body explorer IMHO):

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl/?f=webgl

Latest version of Chrome might be required. Can't say for sure.

Hubble squints at most distant galaxy

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....

If we were there, looking back at us, we'd look pretty much the same.

Of course, there are certain problems concerning here, there, now and then when you're talking about the edge of the observable universe. But it's a nice prelude to getting rat-arsed in the pub tonight.