Posts by Ed 13 121 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2009
I recall the Extended Basic was something of a must, but ate a couple of K of precious RAM. So you were caught between a rock and a hard place as your program wouldn't work in the standard mode, and wouldn't fit in the extended mode!
Parsec is still one of my favourite games.
They had one at the Cambridge Museum of Computing when I was there. I thoroughly recommend the place, they have lots of kit turned on and you can just play with it.
... that as the internet grew it created the infrastructure over which it travelled.
However autonomous vehicles have to cope with an existing infrastructure that has evolved over several hundreds of years, with wide ranges of other users.
You don't need an act of parliament to change a switch or router configuration!
I got as far as the 3mx, and never graduated up to the Series 5. It was one of the nicest portable computers I have ever used.
I debugged and configured many systems with the terminal program alone. Playing the Infocom text adventures on it was a great way of passing the time on long journeys.
The power management was at the core of the OS (EPOC32 - became Symbian), so anything other than a custom build wont get you the 20+hr lifetime off two AA cells. If you don't have that then you have a rechargeable battery pack (phone battery), and Psion tried that with the Revo, but we've not been calling for that to come back have we?
Indeed. The article's argument is from a very narrow perspective and I think misses a few other issues of Basic Income on a population level.
One of this is to consider its effect on publicly funded activities. It achieves a reduction in cost of these activities, as the employees minimum wage requirements are already covered, and the biggest cost of any activity is (almost always) the wage bill.
One of the problems particular to Li-ion cells is that their internal resistance has a negative temperature coefficient.
With other battery technologies, if you short the cell the power dissipated in the cell causes it to warm up, it's apparent resistance then increases so the max current through it drops and it self limits.
Li-ion batteries do the opposite. In a short circuit the cell warms up, so the internal resistance drops, so the current can increase, so it continues to get hotter... (see icon).
"This is an M1, i.e. from ARM's M (for Microcontroller) range."
No, this is Samsung's naming system and not related to ARM's microcontrollers.
ARM have already have an Cortex-M1 core: http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-m/cortex-m1.php
Pop quiz question: Why is there no ARM Cortex-M2?
"The wacky technology entrepreneur also wants heavy-duty trucks and buses run on electricity instead of fossil fuels too..."
I think you'll find they are called electric trains, and the French have got one up to 350mph under test, and several countries have then running in service at over 200mph. It's a really well proven technology that have been in development for around 200 years. You don't need wacky ideas, you just need the commitment to use the technology we have.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think of the Simpsons 'Monorail' episode whenever anyone mentions the Hyperloop project?
Interestingly phrenology caused a delay in the take up of the idea of functional areas of the brain in the early 20th century, as any time anyone suggested it, they were just dismissed as trying to re-introduce phrenology.
However "phrenology heads" do make rather good mantle piece ornaments!
There's another (smaller - only 360MW) pump storage in North Wales at Ffestiniog (http://www.fhc.co.uk/ffestiniog.htm), not far from Dinorwig. It's an older design that uses separate pumps and turbines, rather than the reversible pump/tubines like Dinorwig.
The history of both of these are tied in with the nuclear power stations in the area. Ffestiniog was built to complement the Trawsfynydd station, and Dinorwig to complement the Wylfa station on Anglesey.
I think there's going to be a fundamental problem here.
From the article it seems that the idea is to keep more of the heat in, which is a path that halogen bulbs started down and why they are more efficient than ordinary super-coiled filaments (which are in turn more efficient than coiled filaments - a.k.a. Rough Service bulbs).
The problem is that you have to keep the tungsten at 2700degC which being slightly warmer than I like my room temperate, you have a massive temperature difference to maintain and any thermal insulator is going to struggle with.
...and a significant fraction of the population don't live on the surface of the earth, then most of the race will synchronise their day with the rising and setting of the sun. So keep the leap seconds.
It's the systems we invented that don't quite keep step, so they should be adjusted.
A fantastic machine that was extremely well thought out. The single boot to the word processor (that it was really sold for), or the boot to CP/M that then allowed the use of the excellent Mallard Basic (the manual even had a tribute to the locomotive of the same name in the front!).
There was then the logo language that you could use for turtle style graphics, the GSX graphics package and a bunch more on two system disks.
The inspired use of the spare memory as the M: drive, that then allowed you lo keep the compiler there for a much faster build times.
The fundamental problem is the evolutionary design of systems that takes place. The Uconnect will have been added to an existing design. This has meant that no longer does a hacker have to be physically connected to a car which previously was the mitigation to a lot of these risks.
It's not new for as car system to be hacked via the "information and entertainment" systems. I have heard of specially crafted CDs that when put in the car's CD player will interfere with the car's operation at this sort of level.
I suspect the issue is a problem in the connection between the network the Uconnect is attached to and the ones the engine management and braking systems live on. They should be segregated, but a fault in the design or implementation of this segregation means that they are not and this then allows data from one in to the other.
Something that is also of note in this is that the Uconnect is exposed by a public IP address, which is unusual for cellular system. Although I do know that you can buy SIMs with this feature, it's not common.
The Statfold Barn Railway have one that runs on 2ft gauge rails:
They are all *fabulous* pieces of engineering, including the Concorde and TSR2, but I do get a reality check when I take my kids round Duxford and when walking under the Vulcan there, one of them asks...
"Daddy, what's that big space for?"
"That's where the nuclear bomb goes."
(see icon)
Box Tunnel on the GWR
Have a look in to the conditions under which it was built. IKB was in a hurry, so rather than just starting from both ends, he dropped shafts down from the hill and then started tunnelling along from the bottom of these. As it took some while to get every one up and down the shaft, they would blast the face of the tunnel with the miners cowering at the other end of the tunnel. In excess of one hundred men died in the construction of that tunnel alone.
The GWR itself
Over long and meandering (the Great Way Round)? I would also credit most of the locomotive achievement in the early history of the railway to Daniel Gooch (Locomotive Superintendent at the age of twenty one!) who managed to knock the original locomotives in to a decent level of reliability and usefulness. Brunel was the man who thought an Atmospheric Railway was a good idea!
Don't get me wrong, he was a fantastic civil engineer (and something the size of the Great Eastern more or less qualifies as civil engineering).
"You don’t want to find out that the fire alarm has lost its connection by having it fail to signal the fire brigade."
I am reminded of a story (from 30 years ago) of a factory that had a fire alarm system installed that would automatically phone the local fire station. However the station became a part time one and so one night when there was a fire, it called up the station and the system there replied with an answer phone message that the station was closed and to call the "Emergency Services". This exchange then repeated until the factory was raised to the ground.
I'm always impressed with the Voyager craft. They have done such fantastic work, and produced such useful science.
I do have stuff that's older and still working, but they all require regular TLC. On the other hand they only cost a few tens or hundreds of pounds, rather than the many millions that the voyagers cost.
Also the heat dissipation in thinner air is lower (that's how some vacuum gauges work), so it would have got hotter faster at high altitude.
The problem with a zener is that it'll dissipate heat too in a over voltage situation, and excess heat is not something you want in Vulture 2 at altitude. The Lithium cells can deliver a lot of current in to something if it fails (as your late and lamented servo appears to have discovered).
Are you logging the current consumption from the APM?
But as an avid watcher of Tomorrow's World since the mid-70's, I have to agree with the principle of the article.
A lot of systems are regarded to be safe as they controlled by a Human that can be trained and tested and assessed. There is a vast amount of mistrust of automated systems controlling safety critical operations.
In theory railways ought to an ideal candidate for automation, but only a tiny number (usually urban mass transit systems) are, and only a small number of those are fully automatic without a human involved at all. All rest have an official present in some capacity to deal with failures and emergencies.
"Typesetting is very cheap nowadays"
Cheap != Free.
"..in standard publishing authors get *paid* to give publishers stuff.."
This is supply and demand in action. In science there are many more papers being submitted than being published. However there's only one Ian McEwan to write his books that the publishers know will allow them to ship a lot of copies.
It's an example of the controlled distribution world meeting the internet.
The ACSE make their money from having people subscribe to their journal. A researcher submits their manuscript, without having to pay a fee, and then the society have it peer reviewed, typeset and published (all of which cost them money). It's a valid model and has worked ok for some time, but has a few flaws.
One issue is that if your paper isn't in the journals area of interest it'll be rejected. This means that areas of research go in and out of fashion, so if you're doing good quality science outside those areas, then you can't get your paper published.
Another is that if your paper is a negative result, it'll be rejected. This means that other people are doomed then to keep repeating that bit of research, which is a waste of effort, as they don't know that someone else has looked in to the same idea.
A better model seem to be the Open Access one, such as PLOS ONE, where you pay to submit papers, and then the access to them is free. The fee isn't vast, and is generally factored in to the grant money that you get to do the research. The funding body in turn saves the money from not having to subscribe to yet another journal.
One of my very useful bits of RF analysis kit, made by Hewlett Packard in the days before they were HP, which is before they became Agilent, has a floppy drive as the only viable way to get data off it. So I have a small collection of floppies and USB-Floppy drive (as in Alistair's picture).
"Yesterday I saw Yes at the Royal Albert Hall and I struggled at times to follow the intricacies of Close To The Edge as they were drowned in an overall wall of sound."
That's largely due to the R.A.H. being an acoustically horrible place. It's the wrong shape (round) and too tall. I understand the baffles they have hung from the ceiling have made it less bad, but given the starting point they could barely make it worse!
Indeed.
There are lots of different tool for lots of different jobs. Using the tool in the wrong way or for the wrong job will result in a poor job or failure.
Bjarne Stroustrup did say ""C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off" and adds the footnote that this really applies to all powerful languages.
I have to agree.
The Doppler effect is 0.83ppm (not 830ppm) if the relative velocity is 250m/s.
From the article's link to the Malaysian Ministry of Transport report, there is a nice graph at the bottom of the measured shifts of the different pings. The maximum shift is 250Hz for the last ping. At 1GHz this is 0.25ppm indicating a relative velocity between the satellite and aircraft of 75m/s.
As the satellite isn't quite stationary relative to the earth, the Doppler effect going north would have been slightly different to that measured if it was going south. See the graph, again.
What exactly does this give us that WiFi and/or Bluetooth doesn't, both of which are established technologies, which can be implemented, with antenna, in about the area of a thumbnail?
On the plus side, perhaps someone will want the USB-UWB test gear I have here!
Obligatory xkcd cartoon: http://xkcd.com/927
As Jim 48 said, there's no restriction on home brewing for personal consumption, which is in part the cause of these high alcohol yeasts that have been developed.
https://www.gov.uk/alcohol-duties
You do need a licence to run a still, which is in part a safety precaution as there is a significant risk of you taking the wrong fraction out of the process and giving yourself and your friends methanol poisoning.
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