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Comment: Re:WTF? (Score 1) 189

by hattig (#47985231) Attached to: BlackBerry Launches Square-Screened Passport Phone

Meh, BlackBerries lack of support for the Playbook after promising BBOS10 for it and not delivering it says a lot. Additionally the fact that they got the security right means there are no Android hacks for it, so you're stuck with what it has.

I want to like this device for being different, but it's still a BB.

Comment: Re:Lacking developers. (Score 2) 189

by hattig (#47985147) Attached to: BlackBerry Launches Square-Screened Passport Phone

Luckily it can run Android apps, and includes the Amazon App Store for Android Apps on board.

But I don't know how it runs Android games that use the NDK, not the Android runtime...

It's an odd shape, but I've read a couple of things about it that are positive - non-obscured display because the keyboard is also a trackpad for example, natural left/right handed use, solid software...

Comment: Re:Some Perspective is in Order (Score 1) 275

by hattig (#47964379) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer?

You are lucky to be able to cope with 5 hours sleep a night. Or you lose a significant amount of the weekend to catching up on sleep.

IMO work should stay in the office (maybe checking emails on the train to/from work) unless there's an outage that needs dealing with. Maybe once or twice a month it's okay if needs require it.

Doing 55 hours a week regularly is nothing to be proud of - unless maybe you have significant shares in your employer (as a founder, for example). Where do you get the time in all that to do your own hobbies (for a decent amount of time)?

Comment: Re:Not necessary complacent... (Score 1) 275

by hattig (#47963925) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Avoid Becoming a Complacent Software Developer?

Actually according to some studies I read about intellectual jobs (programming being one of them) you can get around 6 hours useful work out of someone each day, and certainly after 8 you are working so ineffectively that you are just creating more work in the future.

If your employer considers 10 hours a day as standard, then they are not an employer that you want to work for. 9 is stretching it (i.e., 9-6 - seems very common these days).

Consider also the commute to and from work - an hour each way? Out of the house for over 12 hours all the time? What's the point of that, where's the time for yourself (after sleep, showers, housework, etc, you might be lucky to get thirty minutes to watch TV). Of course a commute is good for listening to music/news/etc (if you drive) or catching up with Twitter/Facebook/Email/books/etc if you catch a train.

When going for job interviews, make sure you try to do one after hours - see how full the office is at six and seven, for example. That will tell you more about the company than anything the interviewer will tell you.

Also, always do your number twos during work hours. Or wear a nappy during your commute!

Comment: Re:Small-scale, real-time. (Score 1) 502

by hattig (#47612393) Attached to: Why Morgan Stanley Is Betting That Tesla Will Kill Your Power Company

Which is why Solar is working so well in Germany. It doesn't need to be sunny for solar panels to operate well.

The problem is that the grid gets loads of solar power during the day, but peak usage hours are later. There are only so many reservoirs they can pump up mountains with the spare power during the day, and offices that need A/C. Of course hopefully everyone will be charging their electric cars during the day so maybe in the long run it will even out.

Comment: Re:That's not a Exynos SoC (Score 1) 47

by hattig (#47572773) Attached to: Raspberry Pi-Compatible Development Board Released

The article even makes the clear. How the submitter misread that is beyond me.

The advantages of this board: Smaller. eMMC connector. ADC. RTC. Better power management. Small LCD module option ($30 incl. usb hub and ethernet).
Disadvantages: USB/Ethernet on a different board ($20), connectors sold separately ($4).

The RPi B+ resolves the power management issue.

The advantage of being compatible is that the software support for the RPi is actually very good, and there is a massive community.

Comment: Re:When I can play Asteroids on the back of a box. (Score 1) 78

by hattig (#47521179) Attached to: Researchers Print Electronic Memory On Paper

It does seem that they nearly have all the ingredients to make a viable 8-bit computer on a (small) sheet of paper now. I guess an Atari 2600 could fit in a fairly small area with it's 128 bytes of RAM (1 cm^2) and other simple logic. This printed RAM access speed isn't great though - 200us is three orders of magnitude too slow compared to even the memory in those old computers. Hopefully shrinking these RAM dots will also improve speed.

Comment: Re:Who? (Score 1) 245

In addition Inmarsat can surely just also correlate pings from other aircraft with their actual known position to verify their algorithms they have come up with are valid for the MH370 situation where they only have the pings.

I mean, they did do some basic validation like that, right?

In addition I strongly doubt this is the only person to have double checked on the mathematics used, but he's the only one saying its wrong.

Comment: Re:Rewarding the bullies... (Score 5, Insightful) 798

Most likely the bullies are members of the school's football team, hence the protection afforded to them.

So option three, but targeting the Achilles heel tendon or other sport-critical tendon/muscle, is a great option, in my opinion.

Clearly the school has a bullying problem, and a control problem. It's a sick, diseased school run by weak people, and teachers too afraid to do their job to protect students from bullies who are on the school football team. This is something that requires state intervention, I presume the state has school inspection bodies, and the ability to enact punishments? I would suggest a ban in intra-school sporting competition for a couple of years until the school's curriculum has moved back towards education.

Indeed, I think that US school sports is really weirdly venerated. I'd split the two up, schools can have basic sport, but clubs, etc, should be run outside of the school, maybe with loose affiliation, but having no influence on the school's central reason for existence - education.

Comment: Re:Sure, but... (Score 1) 392

by hattig (#46681715) Attached to: How Many People Does It Take To Colonize Another Star System?

Even better, you could probably find a million people willing to pay money to have their DNA stored for use on future colony planets. That could help fund this space programme, a little.

The cost and availability of storage for these genomes isn't really the issue. The automated human-building factories are an issue (synthetic wombs, etc, will probably be a solved issue by the time we can build a 300-year lifespan spacecraft carrying hundreds of people - the surrogate mother issue will probably not be an issue), and the subsequent raising of these children will require real human contact - hence the point of this article which is getting those humans to the end of the journey in a reliable manner (those humans will also monitor and repair the spacecraft during the voyage, even if automated processes are good enough for most problems).


by hattig (#46681675) Attached to: How Many People Does It Take To Colonize Another Star System?

I believe that was meant to be around 80,000 years ago.

That's a pretty serious long-term colonisation programme. I wouldn't want HP building the computers they needed to last through this process.

A large portion of any spaceship is going to be storage for end-of-journey supplies, and fabrication robots (that fabricate bigger fabricators, etc, until you have colony-builders).

Small villages traded with other small villages, they didn't exist in a vacuum. These people will, however many exabytes of media you supply them with to keep themselves occupied. 150 people have a high risk, on a 300 year journey, of being wiped out, or decimated to a level they can't recover from. 500 people is better, 2000 is nearly okay, 10,000 is basically great, 40,000 is excellent. A convoy of ships is better than a single ship (which makes the single giant asteroid spaceship idea a bit less desirable).


by hattig (#46681623) Attached to: How Many People Does It Take To Colonize Another Star System?

Who's going to look after the embryo children if the generational population died out, or are crippled by genetic defects?

That's why you need on-ship genetic variation. The on-ship population needs to survive, year after year, century after century.

Sure, the idea that the ship also hatches embryos en-route in case of gaps is fine, except for the catastrophe case (decimation of the population means the population is too weak or non-existent to even raise the in-ship hatchlings).

It seems that 2000 people is a strong enough population, especially if spread over several different spaceships travelling in convoy (which also helps with the Dunbar's number issue). But 150, or 500, is not enough.

Or you wait long enough until spaceships are fast enough to allow the people who want to populate another planet to be the ones who arrive there and populate it. Advances in cryogenic sleep may allow this.


by hattig (#46681561) Attached to: How Many People Does It Take To Colonize Another Star System?

figure out how to introduce additional genetic diversity once you arrive and establish yourselves.

Keeping to the spirit of the original article (i.e., ignoring embyros and overloading the workload of the colonists to also raise loads of children on the side, rather than just a few children), that could mean staggering the launch of each of the ships, rather than launching together.

By the time the second ship arrives, the crew of the first ship are either all dead (and their roles fall to the second ship), or the first ship has prepared the optimal landing site with all the facilities, cleared the lands for the orchards (which will be mature by the time the second ship arrives) and agricultural needs, and have enough information on living on the new planet to get the new colonisers up to speed rapidly.

Again, human nature is going to be a major problem. A close knit community on the ground, say for 10, or even 20 years, is probably not going to welcome the next spaceship load of humans. But they would like the tools and seeds and animals and facilities they have. There is a strong chance that instead of one large colony, you'd end up with multiple, small, separated colonies. Maybe close enough to trade and therefore amalgamate one day...


by hattig (#46681529) Attached to: How Many People Does It Take To Colonize Another Star System?

And if you don't think that 150 humans (however advanced and brilliant their on-ship education and upbringing is) aren't going to be selfish and decide that they would rather raise their own children than 10,000 "other peoples" children then you've got another thing coming. It's not like anyone is going to be able to punish them for making a decision like this either.

Disregarding that, these 150 people will be spread over a range of ages and capabilities too. So maybe there will be 50 couples capable of raising an additional child every three years, for the rest of their lives. I.e., you can probably hatch up to 20 additional children a year from the 10,000 at most. Which isn't an ideal rate, I would assume that the extra genetic diversity such a small injection provides would be lost. That's if they're not excluded from society as being "others", blah blah human nature, etc. Of course the population would increase rapidly, so the rate of hatching could increase too.

But then you need people to actually build the civilisation on the new planet. Agriculture, Buildings, Defences. I'm sure the initial landing fleet (for humans and end-of-journey world-building supplies) would suffice initially, but even so a sizeable portion of the population is going to be engaged in colonisation, not parenthood.

Maybe 2000 people + 10,000 embryos would work better. Keeping 2000 people entertained on their asteroid based spaceship is going to be fun.
