* Posts by Armando 123

1116 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2011

Virginia ponders tax breaks for (dead) human space flights

Armando 123

But as they come back down, the angular momentum is still preserved so the earth has to speed back up again.

Android malware victims offered free WinPhones by MS

Armando 123

'Haven't they suffered enough?'

Rats, beat me to it.

Royalty-free web vid spec sets sail with Apple's help

Armando 123

I dunno, Apple protects their patents vigorously but they've been pretty good partners on a lot of open source projects: cups, darwin, gcc/g++, etc etc etc.

Apple has been pushing H.264 for at least five years now. I recall a Keynote where Jobs showed its scaling abilities and it was phenomenal.

Cambridge puts Isaac Newton's notes online

Armando 123

Fieldmouse or dormouse? I can't tell from the specs ... which are probably mouse droppings. [brushes them into trash]

Armando 123
Devil

Latin!

I kant reed latin! I want it lolspeek. Ngkh! #teenagericonneeded

Seriously, this is great news. And I hope I get some time over the holidays to look through this.

FOI request turns up Carrier IQ surprise

Armando 123
Devil

Uh, yeah. Saki put it best: Sometimes a little inaccuracy saves a ton of explanation.

No married man disagrees with that.

Greenland 'lurched upward' in 2010 as 100bn tons of ice melted

Armando 123

A warmer Greenland means a return of Vikings. Ah, good times! Raping, pillaging, looting, paganism, three day mead benders, enslaving others, killing religious zealots, ... or was that when I played football at the University of Miami? My memory is pretty hazy.

Armando 123
Devil

A factor of 1000? Close enough for government work, then. As a former professor once said, "We're looking for an order of magnitude in the log."

Durban failed: Relax, everyone

Armando 123
FAIL

Here we go

"conference attendees have simply agreed to carry on attending climate conferences"

And that is the alpha and omega of it.

Armando 123

Yes, the point was that load of of wankers still having a job and getting another taxpayer-funded junket to a remote place so they can tell us to quit generating carbon. #callmecynical

RIM execs chewed through restraints after in-flight fracas

Armando 123

This is still better behavior

than the senior executive who dropped a load on the food cart back in 1996

Malicious apps infiltrate Google's Android Market

Armando 123

Does anyone else remember

in the early days of Apple's app store, Apple pulled an app from the market and disabled it? There was much hue and cry about Apple overstepping their bounds, but Apple said the mechanism was put in place originally with the idea of stopping malicious code that made it through. It made sense then, and it does now, as well. I wonder if the diverse Android marketplace might have just shown a flaw. (Not that I'm saying Apple's approach is perfect, of course.)

North America makes entry into dino fatty league

Armando 123

Hm

Sauropods have never been entirely cool the way T. Rex or triceratops are, but when you start looking at them from an engineering perspective, they are fascinating. How did they have enough blood pressure to get blood to those tiny brains? How can they possibly process enough food for those massive bodies? How can those necks be that strong yet light enough to hold the head up?

I would love to see a (nearly) complete skeleton on one

Android, BlackBerry phone owners favour Apple tablet

Armando 123

No surprise

A lot of frustration with the iPhone has come from using AT&T exclusively until recently. That has changed, of course, but contracts don't end overnight.

However, most of the Android phones are lower end phones. They were smartphones whose great feature was "lower price". If the Android tablets cost the same as an iPad, the Android tablet is missing the one feature (price) that induced a lot of people to buy the Android phones.

Dell pulls Streak 7 from US online store

Armando 123

PC makers

Keep in mind that the PC makers are in a volume business. They can pump out more widgets, and pump out each one cheaply, quicker than anyone else. Part of that is that they use cheaper components.

Now, they are trying to get into the tablet market. They can't get access to the most popular OS, as they do in the PC arena. Android and Windows 7 are available but don't seem to be popular in the tablet market. (And while the market may be wrong, the market is still what you sell to.) Likewise, there aren't big corporate contracts for tablets like there are for PCs. So the market is very, very different, and if they can't get something to sell quickly enough in sufficient volume, they aren't set up to make money. It's only companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who don't have the overhead and can deliver consumer content a la Apple with the iPad. So don't be surprised if the Old Skool PC and Phone makers leave the tablet market or flounder a lot.

Eyes on stalks: ancient predator a real monster

Armando 123

Australia is probably the continent that wants to kill humans more.

Bumblebee boffins rediscover long-vanished species

Armando 123

This is good news.

One of our neighbors has hives, but the doctor says they'll clear up soon. (But seriously, folks, ...)

No, he keeps bees and we've asked him about which plants to encourage, discourage, etc etc. Since they tend to keep the wasps and hornets away and encourage our black cheery and sweet crabapple trees to fruit, it's a win-win-win.

El Reg's life of Steve Jobs - now available on Kindle

Armando 123

How about "The Erotic Genius of Steve Ballmer"?

Headmaster freezes schoolkids for Gaia

Armando 123

Three cheers for wood stoves

We have one and burn only 'scrap' wood - fallen limbs, dead trees - and that one that we had someone cut down because it was leaning WAY too far towards the house. It's a nice, dry heat and the furnace doesn't kick on. If it does, it pulls in the heat through a cold-air return and pumps it all through the house. Give me a roaring fire, an unending glass of Guinness, and a day of NFL football, and I am one happy ape.

Armando 123

@despicable me

[STANDING OVATION]

US military pays SETI to check Kepler-22b for aliens

Armando 123

You mean, like the way we annihilated ourselves via nuclear war near the year 2000, as predicted by Paul Ehrlich?

Solar winds are blowing away the Moon's topsoil - NASA

Armando 123
Devil

Oh, they will. It's all the fault of robber baron capitalists or straight white male taxpayers or something.

Secrets of the asteroid belt: Vesta actually more like a planet

Armando 123
Devil

Why an asteroid and not a planet

I thought this was agreed upon: Jupiter's massive tidal forces cleared out/swept up/disturbed much of the material in the asteroid belt and kept really large objects from forming.

Or was this too clean and neat and simple for funding purposes?

Microsoft's futurologists virtualise the poor

Armando 123
Coat

And this is different from today ... how?

You'll notice there aren't a lot of the poor masses portrayed on tv, unless the middle-class-income news people need to make you feel bad about your own success.

US Senator demands answers from Carrier IQ

Armando 123
Coat

Calling you out

"former late-night funnyman Al Franken"

When the blazes was Franken funny? Seriously, I remember watching SNL a lot back when he was a regular writer, and I can't say laughs could ever be attributed to him, Al Franken.

Mine's the one with the Best of Garrett Morris dvd in the pocket.

Globe slowly warming, insists 'Hansen's Bulldog'

Armando 123

I blame Al Gore! (Hey, kick 'em when they're down, I say.)

NASA probe now closer than ANY OTHER spacecraft to Pluto

Armando 123

I bet you spent the 90s forcefully telling people how funny Whoopi Goldberg is.

Armando 123

It will still be hotter than the Colts' offense this year ...

Voyager probe reaches edge of Solar System's 'bubble'

Armando 123
Pint

@James Micallef

It's largely marketing; there is a logic to it, but it's a bit tricky. One probe was launched to reach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The other probe was launched to reach Jupiter and Saturn and focus on Titan as it went by Saturn, and preferably to get there first.

Titan was a tantalizing world at the time (still is). It was known to have an atmosphere of methane and be larger than Mercury and the Galilean satellites and was speculated as a place where some form of life might conceivably have formed. In fact, Titan was considered important enough that, if something happened to the probe that was to fly close by it, the second one would sacrifice the trips to Uranus and Neptune for a good look at Titan.

Because of this and the alignment of the planets, the craft going to all four planets had to launch first to arrive at the right time on the right trajectory to reach all four. I think I read once that, to reach Uranus and Neptune, the margin for error at Saturn was very very small, the equivalent of sinking a 900 ft putt without rimming the cup. However, it would also arrive at Jupiter AFTER the Jupiter-Saturn-Titan probe, partly from the math and partly to know which trajectory to take (Uranus-Neptune or Titan). Since the later launching probe was arriving at Jupiter first, it was called 1.

Beer, because my brain hurts

'I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes'

Armando 123

Peaceful life? I live half a mile from a member of the Indiana Pacers and there's a Penn State alum one block over. I've quickly turned out house into a compound.

Armando 123
Devil

The UN is seen as a symbol for security and trust for many millions of people around the world.

Name three who understand basic logic.

Happy birthday, Apple QuickTime

Armando 123

Apparently MS did. As part of their settlement with Apple, they wanted Apple to "kill the baby", ie Quicktime, so MS would effectively kill off competition in desktop mulitmedia. Apple held firm.

This was part of what Apple said under oath during MS' anti-trust suit.

Armando 123
WTF?

Why the hate?

I get that Quicktime isn't perfect, but it effectively brought real multimedia to personal computers. Look back at the specs of the computers it first ran on and tell me that what it did wasn't impressive. Like C++, it had its flaws and was kinda clunky (especially at first) but it paved the way for everything else.

UK lays carbon plan before Earth Goddess

Armando 123

If Shakespeare were alive, he'd be kicking at the lid. But the first thing he'd write is "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. And politicians. And celebrities."

Facebook disses Effin Irishwoman

Armando 123
Devil

I wonder

if they will let you select Sugar Tit, South Carolina.

Antarctic ice formed at CO2 levels much higher than today's

Armando 123
Coat

Bothered me

I thought Professor Huber T. Farnsworth was a Groucho Marx character from one of the Marx Brothers' later movies.

iPhone 4S owners love Siri, hate the battery life

Armando 123

While driving

My wife has a 4S and uses it thus. WAY safer and WAY more convenient, particularly when she has to drive to a not-good neighborhood. (She's in the real estate industry.)

Malcolm Gladwell, tipping points and Climategate

Armando 123
Pint

I blame the Danes

Severn Darden did this while working in the comedy troupe that became Second City back in the 50s. He told Elaine May that he wanted to offend a group that had never been offended before and chose the Danes, because what was there to object to about the Danes?

So every show, he would take at least one time to spout off about the horrid, nasty, evil, dastardly Danes ... particularly as his character Professer Walter von der Vogelweider.

At one point, the Danish consul in Chicago wrote a letter asking what had happened to make him feel that way and if he could help Darden in any way.

So blame the Danes, you might get the autograph of an ambassador.

Armando 123

Quite right

"but one thing's for certain, the planet won't care and will continue to be here for an exceptionally long period of time way after we've died out."

Anyone who's seen a tornado will agree with that. We just don't matter and the planet/sun/universe doesn't care one way or the other. Then again, there seems to be a teenager-like egocentrism among the ecomentalists that means they don't get this and they don't get that they don't get this.

Armando 123

Not really, that's the instinct of the political classes. Scratch a politician and you'll find a dictator.

Hollywood siren invented key phone tech TRUE

Armando 123

"Or was Hedy a rare exception? "

She (in terms of mental accuity) would have been a rare exception even if she were a man.

Apple: Siri isn't anti-abortion

Armando 123
Coat

Perhaps

They might change Siri's software to something that always offends someone on the extreme left and/or extreme right, where applicable. Imagine asking for Daycare Centers and getting the local Penn State Alumni headquarters ...

Christmas gamma burst stupendo-explosion DEATHMATCH

Armando 123

Burst source

"What unfeasible cosmic violence - could possibly have generated so vast an outpouring of energy"

An alien race's equivalent to a female was scorned? Just sayin' ...

Nokia is past its best-by date, warns analyst

Armando 123
Coat

This just in

Micheal Dell, when asked, said that if he were made CEO of Nokia, he'd shut it down and pay the money to the shareholders.

Mine's the one with the System 7 floppies in the pocket.

James Bond savages the Kardashians

Armando 123

Uh

You do realize that Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity, Survivor, etc, were British creations that were shipped over here and started this whole mess?

UK Met Office: World temperature back down to 1997 level

Armando 123

I know that correlation and causation are not the same thing. I know it's complex, but there is a pretty tight correlation in longterm and short term solar changes, there is data supporting this over hundreds of years, and we have other planets following similar but obviously not identical patterns to the earth. In addition, CERN researchers have worked out a possible explanation for the correlation with a certain amount of evidence to back it up.

If I leap, it's certainly far less of a leap than others who are are gobbling up taxpayer money in poor if not dishonest science.

Armando 123
Windows

It's the sun, folks

We're just coming out of a VERY quiet solar period, in which global warming stalled and reversed. In other words, we're seeing a smaller version of what happened during the Maunder Minimum.

At the same time, temperatures of Mars, Saturn, Jupiter's moons, and Uranus all increased up to about 2000 and have dropped a bit since. (Jupiter can't be used in this as it's still emitting IR radiation, as it's still compressing from its formation.)

But then, I only have a Master's in radiative transfer theory, I obviously don't know as much about this as the average ecomentalist.

NASA wants space washing machine for ISS, Mars bases

Armando 123

"So they'll get their undies washed in recycled pee? lovely"

Sounds like the laundry service I used once in Alabama ...

Armando 123

I don't know what world you live in, but here in Middle America, the lads do their own cooking and cleaning and laundry. If you don't, you'll never attract a woman, because they eat out, hire maids, and take clothes to the cleaners. (No wonder single men are more likely to afford a house downpayment sooner.)

True story: a while back, the elder lad came home from school and told my wife that he needed to bring in baked goods to school the next day. (He wasn't slacking to let us know, the unfireable teacher did that.) She nodded towards me and said "Ask your step-father." So the lad and I made them. When he complained, I told him "The way to a woman's heart is through your wallet. We're not wealthy, so your best shot at a girlfriend is food."

Two years on, he's in junior high and boy, does he remember that lesson now.

How digital audio ate itself ... and the music biz

Armando 123

My feeling is "if it was good enough for T-Bone Walker, it should be good enough for me".

Of course, I can't play like T-Bone Walker, but hell, who can?

[Does El Reg have a Fogy icon somewhere?]