* Posts by melt

140 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2008

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LOHAN's final test flight moniker: The people must decide

melt

Re: The Hilton Angle?

...because the SPB's previous project already was PARIS (Paper Aircraft Released Into Space)

Nice try though!

Ten Mac freeware apps for your new Apple baby

melt

Re: MSPaint equivalent?

Seashore - http://seashore.sourceforge.net

Suffering satellites! Goonhilly's ARTHUR REBORN for SPAAAACE

melt

Re: Portcurno Telegraph Museum

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.

NASA revisits Europa with modern image-processing software

melt

Wow, those images are GORGEOUS!

Mystery Russian satellite: orbital weapon? Sat gobbler? What?

melt

Re: take a look

Project Echo!

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/about/project-echo_prt.htm

The Toyota Aygo is PARKtastic ... but it is very much a City slicker

melt

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!

melt

Re: Wonderful little cars

Odd. I had a '55 that was over 120,000 on the original clutch.

Perhaps yours was more of a seating issue - the lack of footrest did mean that it was very easy to ride the clutch...

Holy cow! Fasthosts outage blamed on DDoS hack attack AND Windows 2003 vuln

melt

Re: What happened to cheap and cheerful?

Quite a few small business owners ask for Windows hosting - it used to be because of Frontpage. I guess Fasthosts are just responding to that gap in the market. They have Linux shared hosting too.

You like jumping out of planes? Try the new GoPro 4. Short walks? There's a Hero instead

melt

Re: Windows control app support still missing?

It's a REMOTE CONTROL app. The camera records to its own internal SD card.

Vulture 2 spaceplane brain surgery begins with remote incision

melt

Re: Wouldn't it make more sense...

Yes, but it doesn't really help testing the pitot tubes... assuming they're using them!

Pi palaver perplexes LOHAN Pixhawk pair

melt

Re: the fruity minicomputer...

I've been playing with Dave's code. It looks like he eventually abandoned it because of how utterly slow it was when it had to call out to external memory.

Scared yet, web devs? Google smears malware warnings over PHP.net

melt
Pirate

Looks like it's deeper than just comment spam too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604251

Boffins, Tunnel Tigers and Scotland's world-first power mountain

melt

Re: Been there...

Had much the same experience at Dinorwic.

One has to understand that when it comes to a power station, you want daily life to be quiet - if things at a power station are a bit exciting then you probably don't want to be there!

Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!

melt

Re: VAX 11/725 and 11/730

It's *always* the cleaners. I sometimes think they do it on purpose.

melt

Re: That sounds like a BA23 enclosure

Nope, that's the BA123.

Oh god.

Ubuntu 13.04: No privacy controls as promised, but hey - photo search!

melt

"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?

The DIY spy-in-the-sky: From kites to octocopters

melt

"the best camera is the one that's with you".

Reg readers scuffle over the ultimate cuppa

melt
Thumb Up

Re: I can't believe nobody has mentioned

When I visited Sheffield at the weekends I would often traipse back down south on a Monday morning with 2L of Yorkshire tapwater in my bag!

Lotus 1-2-3 rebooted: My trip back to the old (named) range

melt
Big Brother

Re: It's called a slash

No, it's actually called a "solidus"!

Bletchley Park boffins start trailblazer EDSAC computer rebuild

melt
Happy

Re: Delay lines

"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)

melt
FAIL

Re: Video games

Whoops; i've just realised that Draughts was for the Ferranti Mark I, not the Baby. Carry on!

melt

Re: Video games

The draughts game for the Manchester Baby had a graphical output on one of the CRTs; beating EDSAC by at least a year.

See the latest edition of Resurrection: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res60.htm#f :D

Lenovo, EA, Intel unite to DESTROY our childhood memories

melt
Go

Re: +1 for analogue

If you think Monopoly is a colossal faff you haven't played a real board game...

http://gamesbyjohnny.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/through-the-ages/

Ten... tech stocking stuffers

melt
Meh

Yikes!

"Stocking fillers" are usually cheap!

Boffins biff over ‘twisted radio’

melt
WTF?

Circular

Is this not just circular polarisation?

AWS flicks switch for S3-to-Glacier migration

melt

"Data resident in S3, by contrast, is accessible in real time."

Define "real time"?

iPad Mini's quite a handful

melt
Linux

Re: Anyway

Your mum.

Nationwide to perform IT equivalent of 'replacing jet engine mid-flight'

melt

Re: Mainframes are actually brilliant online transactional platforms

Yeah, no university student is going to come out with any experience of middleware other than picking their (in my experience incorrect) timetable up off the University's student intranet...

Ailing Comet at last prayers: Cawing of accountants and VCs fills air

melt
FAIL

Re: Not how it's done.

The point of the high street is that it satisfies an instant need. If I was willing to wait a few weeks for a delivery I would've ordered something from the internet!

Dr No, Thunderball, Casino Royale? Vote now for the best Bond film

melt

I really want to like the Daniel Craig films

...but Casino Royale was an hour-long poker game when I don't understand poker, and Quantum of Solace's plot was [spoiler alert] some guys trying to set up a utilities monopoly in Bolivia. [/spoiler alert] Exciting stuff.

Lenovo IdeaPad U410 14in Ultrabook review

melt
Pint

Re: Lenovo, read! Re:1440x900

No, the answer is it would end up looking like an Alienware laptop.

A swift two-finger scroll to you!

Windows 8 versions will confuse the punters, say OEMs

melt

Admittedly

...it makes more sense than the truth.

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

melt

I have a roomfull of VAXen; I will beat you all.

This supercomputing board can be yours for $99. Here's how

melt

Re: Erm, why don't I just buy a GPU?

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.

$3500 will get 13.3in Mac tablet in your mitts

melt

It looks like a fairly involved build. How much is your time worth?

Virgin Media STILL working on fix for SuperHub corrupt downloads glitch

melt
Thumb Up

Plug the Superhub into a clockwork mains timer and set it to turn the power off for one 'period' at 4AM (about 15 mins on mine).

Problem solved!

Boffins receive quantum key from moving plane

melt

Re: Meh

Gah. Guess what i'll be whistling for the next few hours.

Teflon slips smoothly over LOHAN's mighty rod

melt
Thumb Up

Top shedding on the lumps of ice problem!

HP gears down NonStops for midrange, emerging markets

melt

Meh

It's no VAX.

The Higgs boson search continues ... into ANOTHER dimension

melt
Holmes

This is the best explanation of what the Higgs boson is, why it's different to the Higgs field and why it all matters:

The Higgs Boson, Part I

The Higgs Boson, Part II: What is Mass?

Move over Raspberry Pi, give kids a Radio Ham Pi - minister

melt

Re: Pieminister?

Surprisingly difficult to receive outside of the South :(

You can break EU cookie rules ... if your site breaks without cookies

melt
Stop

Re: idiots

No, *you* are not exempt, it is only *that* *cookie* which is exempt.

Just because your site needs a preferences cookie or an authentication cookie for it to fundamentally work does not mean that you get a blanket exemption to set Google Analytics or ShareThis cookies, for example.

Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'

melt

Re: Techies and geeks

Bit more difficult with my mother's. Would need to set up some kind of coal feed auger...

Pilots asking not to fly F-22 after oxygen problems

melt
Pint

Re: F-22 and Annoxia / Hypoxia

That's genius!

MIT's mind-reading Mosh pits itself against SSH daemons

melt

er, great, I guess

...but isn't this a network-layer problem, not an application-layer one?

LOHAN lifts lid on revised mission summary

melt

Re: Why He?

Most of the team smoke like chimneys.

The Register channels jobs into jobs channel

melt

I like his articles.

Game CEO steps down

melt

Re: I liked GAME and..

CEX.

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