Re: The Hilton Angle?
...because the SPB's previous project already was PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space)
Nice try though!
140 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2008
Don't worry - it was utterly awful. I went, perhaps just before it closed.
It was a desolate '90s set of corporate exhibitions and kid-oriented dumbed-down hands-off exhibits - including a closed-off slow bus ride around the perimeter track. Very disappointing after Porthcurno!
It completely mirrored BT's schitzophrenic split. To pay to go in the Goonhilly exhibition we paid someone at one register. This ticket did not cover the tour of Arthur's insides. To get that, we had to shuffle one step to the right, where the same person then had to use a different register to give us a different ticket for a different tour run by a different person.
The Goonhilly tour was all glitz and no content. I suspected it was run by BT Retail. The tour around Arthur was done by an earnest chap in a hi-viz and hat, and was technical and interesting.
Loved mine.
Fit eight backpacks, a kitebuggy, a 5-man tent, three helmets and two people in for a weekend.
It was the proper successor to the original Mini - cubbyholes and intelligent design, and very honest about itself.
It was hilarious fun and great on fuel too. Always thought a tiny turbo would've suited it as a factory upgrade!
"Smart Scopes are part of Canonical's long-term plan to make the Unity Dash as much a web-search interface as application launcher. The goal is to add some 100 different search providers to the Unity Dash, allowing you to search everything from websites like IMDb and DeviantArt to your browser bookmarks, Tomboy notes and more"
So Sherlock from MacOS 8 then?
"A long-standing question for the project has been the reconstruction of the mercury delay lines used by the original. These are problematic for several reasons: the precision engineering required to manufacture them is demanding, the operational, maintenance and durability aspects of mercury delay lines are challenging, especially for a museum rather than laboratory environment, and the cost of buying the mercury is significant. After investigations by Peter Linington into other storage technologies we have decide that the main store will be constructed using nickel delay lines. These were the immediate successor to mercury delay lines, follow similar physical principles, and are known to be reliable and long-lived in operation. That said, the techniques used in constructing them are essentially lost so Peter has mostly recently been investigating these and has been able to demonstrate a first proof of concept prototype.
Given the importance of mercury delay lines in the history of early computers, the project has given itself the objective of, at a minimum, building a small stand-alone demonstration rig showing a mercury delay line in operation. One route to this might be to experimentally refill the surviving short delay line."
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res60.htm#b (Was reading it in the bath last night)
That's nice, but hobbyists seem to like some actual hardware to hold in their hand, which runs out-of-the-box.
Look at the success of the Raspberry Pi - to play around with Linux you could have rented a VM from anywhere, or set up VMware Workstation, but somehow the act of having something real to hold in your hand has sparked a bit of excitement.
Look at the success of the Arduino - before then sure, grab a PIC or a Stamp and code away, learn everything from utter bare-bones, but somehow the act of having something real to old in your hand that runs out of the box with a cross-platform IDE and some good real-world examples seems to have sparked a bit of excitement.
These guys have got their heads around the first idea; if they get the second idea sorted they might well spark another Saturday-afternoon makers' revolution.
This is the best explanation of what the Higgs boson is, why it's different to the Higgs field and why it all matters: