Posts by snafu

Another technique

There is this deflection technique that consists in having a spaceship travelling alongside the asteroid, so that its minuscule gravitational force pulls the celestial body off its original trajectory enough to avoid Earth. No bombs, no tricky landings, no fighting the asteroid spin, etc.: just having enough mass and advance time to do the trick.

Sculley

"…who is perhaps best known for a 1985 coup in which he ousted Apple cofounder Steve Jobs…"

Er, no: actually, he survived Jobs' attempt at a coup, then relegated him to a corner by his underperformance, and finally let him get out to build NeXT and drive it to the ground while Apple went through a stage of splendor before its decline.

Lucas wanted them to build him some tools for audio and video editing (didn't they sell their tech to Avid later?), film scanning and printing. Once done, their goals didn't align too well, and I believe Lucas needed the cash at the time, so…

Arguably, NeXT and Pixar were the school where Steve Jobs learned to let go his most idiotic business practices and hone his kung-fu. Also, by then the universe finally aligned with his vision: the internet and AV turned computers into true consumer electronics, which is where his instincts excelled.

Jobs was always lying through his teeth

The same guy who disparaged flash memory-based mp3 players, all-in-one computers with their innards inside the screen, and often discarded the old insanely great shiny for the new insanely great shiny despite sometimes being far better.

The Kindle and all the eBook readers around have demonstrated the 7" physical format as perfectly viable, and the UI issues are nonsense. That was Jobs playing FUD against a rival format with a serious portability advantage.

Impossible movie

"Use of Weapons" is a great story… and pretty unfilmable as a standalone movie, sorry. You need a TV miniseries there.

Thunderbolt

Being Thunderbolt mostly an external PCIe bus thing, it will have to rely on bridge chips to be usable, so quite possibly the cheapest ones will be TB-eSATA and TB-USB 2.0/3.0.

(Does eSATA support USB-style drive mount-unmount without rebooting the host? If not so, the winner would be USB 3.0 for cheap external drives)

Douglas Trumbull's Showscan process realized

This VFX guru (2001, Close Encounters, Star Trek, Silent Running, Blade Runner, Brainstorm, etc.) investigated high fps for inmersive cinema, and found that, above a certain framerate, the brain perceived the image as "real". ShowScan was a 70 mm 60 fps process.

Now it can be done digitally and, seemingly, quite affordably. I can't wait!

Flash isn't a factor

…As this is about baseline video in the HTML5 standard. Flash is a plugin HTML5 doesn't care about. H.254 ought to work like a plugin, too.

Will we be able...

...to peek and poke it?

Editing and virtual keyboards

Seeing how Apple's Numbers offers an alternative virtual keyboard layout when entering cell data, I was wondering why those code editing apps don't do the same. Without a numerical upper row, cursor movement keys and a few extra characters around, having to use the .?123 all too often will result in intense expletivity and genocidal impulses.

It already does in normal tasks.

The fragmented Churchs of Nokia, Moto and the like

The funny thing is, i remember all too well how people boasted about their N-this or N-that phones years before and after the iPhone launch. Apple's advantage is having a single product brand name instead of a miriad of names and letters+numbers codenames. It makes for a better monotheism.

For some it was all about digital projection

Interestingly, for some of the pioneers in shooting films with HiDef digital cameras, 3D was really about forcing movie theatres to install digital projection systems.

But then, WebOS is theirs now

Windows wasn't so. And Android is rather me-too (they can PlanB into it anytime if everything else fails, though)

I really want this to work. And, actually, WebOS For Printers is a rather quite nifty idea.

It's all true

That's the Mutants Red Cross.

Surely.

iPads for the elderly, disabled and computer-illiterate

I'd be mightily interested in you people covering the iPad as it applies to the elderly, to people with disabilities and the computer-illiterate. The iPad seems to be right now one of the best devices out there for them. I've ordered one to see if my mum can take advantage of it (she has quite bad eyesight so she cannot read regular books and newspapers' font sizes. Also, she is not computer-knowledgeable at all).

I like this ship

…It's exciting

Try before buying

I need to evaluate the thing to see how it works for people with sight disabilities. How do I do that, then? No Apple Store in Spain yet.

Solving the Fermi Paradox

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3aa.html#fermiparadox

If we ever develop antimatter-based rockets, then:

-We will be abe to build relativistic missiles able to snuff whole biospheres.

-These engines will produce unmistakable radiation signatures.

If we don't happen to civilizationally fritz ourselves, building those engines is mostly a given. For us and for any other technological race out there. So then you have several players, us included, able now or in the future to get the means to exterminate each other. Would we risk it, or would we hit first? Would they risk it, or would they hit us first?

strange design thing

Doesn't that cover panel act as an enormous airbrake?

What about Human Rights?

Shouldn't they supersede any non-compliant national law?

A couple of things

Warp drive doesn't isolate the ship from surrounding space (it isn't really an Alcubierre-type drive but a "grab a wet soap bar and press until it shoots out your grip" drive, with extra apparent mass reduction effects), so the deflector beam must be active while at warp, as the warp bubble is permeable to external matter.

Shields are gravity-based instead of magnetic.

I love nerding.

…it is proven

On2 codecs are already in commercial use, some of them are comparable to h.264 and so on.

Adobe's own take on Apple's Aperture

"Instead, Apple pushed out its own take on Adobe’s Lightroom - Aperture 3"

Wouldn't that be the other way round? Aperture was first to market by a decent margin.

iSoma

Apple's model isn't Orwellian but Huxleyan, actually.

"64bit operation is the default modus operandi"

"…because 64-bit operation is the default modus operandi under Snow Leopard…"

What do you mean by that, exactly? As far as I know, Snow Leopard behaves just like Leopard, supporting 32bit and 64bit apps. Also, for now it defaults to booting in 32bit kernel mode.

Sounds like FUN

Is that picture available in HiRes somewhere? All those guys and gal look like having great fun.

Yes, but…

If it is a true update disc, that's what will happen. But most retail editions of OS X are full installers that don't demand any previous OS install to exist, and the last known "update disc" (Snow Leopard) happened to be a full installer too.

Ant they fall for it… again

Our current Leftoid government is a master at throwing this kind of moral outrage silliness targets to its Rightish opposition, so that it does its usual foaming mouth act and gets both distracted and painted as retrograde. Abortion law reform, euthanasia, etc., now this. Please don't see it as another idiotic act from government: the dosage is too precisely measured. You could argue good reasons behind every initiative of those, but they usually are all too well designed to push the Right's right buttons. It doesn't help that the Right has too many of those, plus its eagerness to froth at the mouth whatever the real level of offense.

Yes, being a Spaniard IS fun these days.

The manual, by the way, is a simple sexuality Q&A guide covering everything from masturbation to peer pressure, A bit disorganized and faux-hip, but nothing to worry about.

Mushroom mushroom

You KNOW what happens if badgers take up residence.

Call Emmerich!

He knows how to sex this up. "Crack in the World" remake, anyone?

Shuttle

Because the shuttle was and is a bad idea: its cargo capability is not that great,its dead weight wings don't contribute lift during ascent, its placement in the stack produces off-axis loads, subjects it to fuel tank pieces impacts and makes emergency separations problematic, uses uncontrollable solid fuel rockets, and above all, has a deadly track record.

Getting a heavy loads launcher is more interesting and flexible, I think.