Re: Well at least it's almost science
typical school science fair projects
Next week: A baking soda volcano.........IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!!11!!
9433 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
>> And as for the PS3 bread bin...
You also have to factor in here that Sony, from the off, quite deliberately marketed the PS3 as an all-round entertainment device rather than "just" a games console.
Which makes having a design that stacks into a cabinet with your A/V amp, VCR, etc. in the same way that square pegs fit round holes even more daft.
I suppose that's what you get for letting designers loose on something while forgetting to include "practicality" on the requirements list.
I'm sure I remember hearing that another Cray feature was that they'd provide it with the panels and seating in any colour that you wanted.
There was a possibly apocryphal story circulating at the time that some university professor ordered one in "nipple pink". When Cray asked exactly what colour that was, they got a polaroid of the bloke's girlfriend's tit by return, with the appropriate section circled and a helpful arrow pointing at it and labelled "this colour"[1].
[1] Or rather "color". It was a Yank story.
If you stick up an antenna, receives a Fox signal and view that on your telly, Fox are OK with that. Yes?
If someone else sticks up an antenna and you view the signal from that on your telly, Fox have a problem. Yes?
So, if you get someone else to stick up your own antenna, is that OK? What if that antenna isn't on your property (e.g. on the communal roof of a block of flats)?
How long does the piece of wire between your telly and the antenna have to be and how many people have to be involved in putting up the antenna to piss off Fox? Is the fact that the wire is or is not contiguous throughout the signal path an issue? What about one piece of wire with a signal booster in it?
Next point. Apparently the fact that whoever's doing this is providing one antenna per telly is the bit that makes it OK. So, what about communal antennas (i.e. that same block of flats with one aerial on the top and the signal piped into all the flats)? Is that now not legal?
Maybe I'm just missing the point completely and trying to find logic in rabid arsehattery?
Much as I hate to defend the screamsheet of the champagne socialists, I believe that you are being slightly unfair to the Graun there.
IIRC, the Grauniad is owned by the Scott Trust and the trustees are obliged by the charter to devote every possible penny to promoting independant journalism. Under those terms, they would actually be failing in their duties if the trust were to pay any more tax than it absolutely had to. Here you need to blame the government. The obvious answer is "principle of payment" legislation (which basically says "there may well be loopholes in the tax legislation, but if it ain't a specific exemption that you are entitled to, that's evasion"). The problem here is that this would piss off a lot of very important people such as, by sheer coincidence, most of the "Hacked Off" mob and Murdoch / News International. There's probably a moral in there somewhere........
If you really want to target a paper with that particular gripe, try the Waily Fail. They continually bleat on about people and companies not paying tax. They are owned by Lord Rothermere who is, er, non-domiciled for tax purposes. As far as I am aware, Rothermere is not under any legally binding onus to minimise his own tax liabilities.
And which also suggests that all those pictures of Claudia Schiffer in alt.binaries.pictures.erotica contained encrypted text files detailing a lot of nazi-linked information the West German government would have preferred wasn't public.
Oh come on! Everyone knows that rumour was started by some blokes in the CIA to give themselves an excuse to download the lot and study them very carefully, while getting paid to do it.
I agree with the article that if/when a news App becomes a pleasure to use and better uses the pad media than the HTML browser version....
Given the tendancy of "app" developers to regard pinch to zoom[1], as implemented in browsers, as the work of Satan and not to be trucked with, I reckon you're on a hiding to nothing there. Especially with text-heavy content, which is where the ability to resize is crucial. They may think that their chosen text size and layout is perfect and that nobody would ever want to change it, but they're almost invariably wrong.
I've found that there are perishingly few web operations where the "app" experience is better then visiting their page[2]. I have reserved a special circle of hell for those who direct you to / automagically fire their app when a mobile browser is detected.
I tend to find that a bookmark pinned to the screen shits from a great height on most apps for usability.
[1] Or indeed any method of resizing the content.
[2] Likewise, thank fuck for "Request desktop version" in the Android browser and a plague upon the houses of those sites that override it!
When it comes to tape storage, there is a bit of a snag here. You may well know that, of that backup, only a few files and databases are actually needed long-term, but short of unravelling the tape and snipping out the unwanted bits, there's not a lot you can do.
Usually cheaper to store the whole lot than it is to pull 'em all in and then tie up a load of lads and hardware in restoring 'em somewhere and resaving the "required long-term" bits.
...the fitting of winter tyres by law on every vehicle and the mandatory carrying of snow chains as is the norm in most of Europe.
Er, you can count the number of European countries where it's mandatory to fit winter tyres on the fingers of one hand........and have enough fingers left over to count those where it's mandatory to carry snow chains.
"....mines in other countries have all shut down due to difficulty complying with environmental regulations."
Which normally wouldn't be a problem, it just adds to cost. The killer here was that China glutted the market, forcing prices down and driving everyone else out of business. Then, once they had the monopoly, they put in the export restrictions.
The Chinese deposits are rather "dirtier" than most, due to the high Thorium content.
That's exactly it. It's reported elsewhere that, while the stuff's a long way down under the water, the deposits are a mere few metres below the sea bed, so a compressed air lift is all that's required to extract them.
Bonus #1: The deposits are ridiculously high in the heavier end of the rare earth pantheon, which is where China's held all the cards until now.
Bonus #2: There does not appear to be the high Thorium content that characterises the Chinese deposits, making them far easier to refine as they won't have to worry about the whole lot being radioactive, like the Chinese mines are.
Except that Bitcoin lacks the hugely important ability to transfer funds directly to and from your bank account, which is where 99.9999999999999999999999999999999% of the world's online purchasers have their funds for buying things online.
In order for that to be possible it would have to lose the secrecy and start to play nice with the world's central banks.
I'd have thought that with both nVidia and AMD going at it hammer and tongs to get out 64-bit ARM chips, probably with integrated GPU compute cores in there too at some point, they have every right to be hugely optimistic here. Even more so as world + dog is looking hard at performance-per-watt.
If anything, I reckon that ARM are underplaying their hand and that it's Intel's share price that should be having an attack of the collywobbles.
The problem with that approach is that there probably always is enough memory to do it.
The real issue is invariably that effing great chunks of it are paged on a heavily fragmented disk in a pagefile that's scattered over its surface like shotgun pellets in a burglar's arse.
Windows rule #1. If it's swapping in regular use, add memory. (Actually this rule applies to any OS that offers disk paging of memory).
Windows rule #2. If it dies like a piggin' dog while swapping, turn off paging altogether, defrag and turn paging back on when there's a contiguous space large enough to hold the pagefile. Which is where the OS will then duly and gleefully put it. (Power users may wish to just get their paws on a defrag utilty that actually bloody works to replace the abomination supplied as standard and run its offline defrag function to achieve the same effect).
Something else occurred to me after writing that: A very light smear of low-temperature grease on those contact patches prior to sticking the magnets on, if you please.
That should prevent any condensation interfering with contact and also potentially freezing the things into place and providing rather more "pull to disconnect" than planned.
......follow these rules.
If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm - simultaneously
Do not waste time blocking your ears.
Do not waste time seeking a soundproof shelter.
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible
Which is having exactly the effect I expected it to: Sales of cigarette cases are waaaaay up and you can now get 'em in a bewildering array of shapes, sizes and colours to fit a comprehensive range of sizes and numbers of fags.
I've been after a sensibly sized case that holds twenty king size for many years. Thanks Simon!
"Space blankets work by reflecting thermal emission..."
You mean like reflecting the thermal emissions of the heater layer back in toward the motor where they're wanted rather than letting them warm up the shrinkwrap? That may be why it produces the improvement seen in testing.
True, Samsung managed to bork their implementation of the S3's expandable storage up by inexplicably mounting the internal storage space as "sdcard"
That seems to be the standard way of things with Android when it's gifted with copious amounts of internal storage. I reckon it's 'cos too many things save to "sdcard" by preference and they want to force it onto internal when it's not limited.
As a manufacturer-friendly side effect, it bumps up the AnTuTu score significantly too. Internal storage is rather faster than even a class 10 card in a slot and unless you specifically tell it otherwise, AnTuTu benchmarks /sdcard for its card I/O tests......
For that I prefer to think of Philip Jose Farmer's "World of Tiers" series. The title of the first, "Maker of Universes", rather gives the game away.
In that case, it wouldn't hit a wall and go <tink>, it would hit the surrounding field that provides the impression of squillions of lightyears of shit, all packed into a few metres and be vapourised. We've still got a bit of a wait though, that was a light-year or so out IIRC.
...Skype as an unsecured P2P network...
The routing may be all over the place, but as the stream is encrypted, why does that matter?
Presumably, in your world, the NSA have that massive bounty on offer for a route into Skype just for a laugh. In the real world, if they are stuffed for cracking it, that's as good as (if not better than) any other solution.