"Dr Ian McHale, senior lecturer in statistics in the University of Salford"
So, not cleaned up on the fixed-odds footy betting and retired yet then Ian?
Keep working on those models........
9436 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2007
Not sure about that. Too much opportunity for the balls to pick up dirt, bits of chopped grass, dog turds etc and gum up the works.
The reason that mice went optical is that the ball ones used to gum up regularly[1].......and that's on a desktop, not out in a garden.
[1] The first IT hardware fix I ever did was to declag the mouse ball on an early Apple Mac, converting it from an expensive paperweight back into a computer.
I think the problem there was that you didn't tell 'em upfront you were trolling, not so much as an icon on that first post. If that genuinely was posted as a troll, you should congratulate yourself for it going so well!
After that I reckon everyone just assumed you were backpeddalling to the "troll" position after being hung out to dry and went in with the flamethrowers on "reheat". I made the mistake of attempting to justify myself once when one of my trolls touched a nerve. Never again. Better to just shake your head knowingly, take it on the chin and slink away.
I note that my cheesy snipe at the septics (Low-hanging fruit, you have to really.) in that thread did quite well......
I was just there for that day unfortunately. Tuesday is Brussels for me at the moment.
I'm living just outside Maastricht right now. This is one of the best places in the world for beer as, not only is the local stuff good, but you also have the best that BE, DE and the rest of NL have to offer available somewhere locally.
Oh and Guinness of course. I don't think a place qualifies as a city without having at least one bar selling draught Guinness.
Sometimes you have to take the lesser of two weevils.
This is best illustrated by the time I was sat in Pepper's Bar of the Pan Pac and an Aussie chap came in. He'd been flying home standby from Athens and got bounced. Fair do's, he'd been put up in a decent hotel, but.....
Anyhow, after the usual pleasantries the conversation turned to this:
"What's the beer like mate?"
"Well, you have two choices. The local Tiger, which tastes like drain cleaner, or the imported Heineken, which is OK but a bit bloody expensive here."
"Damn. I'm on a budget so it'll have to be the Tiger for me."
"No need, I'm on expenses. I'll get us a jug......."
Tiger's OK in its export incarnation, but the local issue Singaporean stuff is vile.
"Just like any communist country"
Er, no. In a Communist country, all these things would be the property of the state and you'd be able to access anything you needed, in any format, whenever you needed it. What you just described is Fascism.
The fact that most, if not all[1], allegedly communist countries are, or were, actually fascist states with a very unconvincing rebadging job is just very funny.
[1] Actually I can't think of any examples of a genuinely communist state since communism was invented. Quite a few prior to that though. How odd.
“no one has a market advantage right now”
So, that almost universal dominance of the arena by ARM processors isn't a market advantage? Maybe he means that no single manufacturer of ARM chippery has an advantage over the others?
That's a good thing, it's called competition. I know it's an alien concept to Intel, but they should probably have looked it up before wading into this field.
Actually the .60 is perfectly adequate. Any elephant rifle will kill it, if you shoot it in the right place, the secret is to remember to dive to one side after firing to prevent yourself being squished by the dying carcass.
I've been told by someone who used to do it[1] that this is the drill for shooting Rhinocerous. The only place to shoot it is frontally in the head[2], the only way to get that shot is to get it to charge you[3] and it's absobloodylutely essential to dive sideways after firing.
[1] Many decades ago as a farm manager in Rhodesia.
[2] You can shoot it in other places, but all you'll do is piss it off. A lot.
[3] Fortunately quite simple. They'll happily do this without encouragement.
"You have to wonder if the writers here have facebook stock..."
No, but I am forced to wonder if you're an utter n00b around here. You haven't noticed the dripping sarcasm that anything Facebum related gets laced with and the recent "make hay while the sun shines" gleeful reporting of the fallout from Zuckerbitch's IPO then?
It's more a matter of catering to an audience that would appear to be generally of the opinion that Social Networks are aimed fairly and squarely at retarded sheep.....
Curse the rampant foliage at this time of year! It's a jungle out there[1] and that said from my vantage point in the Palm House too.
Overground moves only I'm afraid as I neglected to pack a machete. Willesden Junction.
[1] Although a very well kept and neatly manicured jungle, it has to be said.
The other bitch here is that there are many sites, especially the larger HP shops, who still have a load of PA-RISC kit for many reasons.
Being asked to migrate to x86 when the move to Itanic isn't yet complete could just be the last kick that many of 'em need to get seriously pissed-off with running HP's version of the Red Queen's Race and look long and hard elsewhere for some long-term stability.
Then you'd see some really shitty numbers from HP. Much, if not most, of those Itanic sales are from PA-RISC "upgrades" for their long-suffering enterprise customers.
You're right, they should have ported HP-UX to x86 rather than Itanium. Everything you see going on now is HP desperately trying to avoid being bounced into doing just that with suicidal timing.
I have never understood that attitude.
Is there an international willy-waving trophy for winning in the "my tiny screen has more pixels than your tiny screen" stakes?
This 'ere thing has somethingx800 on its 13" display and I need a fucking magnifying glass to spot the pixels on that.
I have nothing against 1920 x 1080........on a 24" monitor where you can actually see the bloody difference.
"I'm a Finn, actually."
Hardly surprising. An American would never have made the connection between this lot and our "tiny little monarchy". Actual Americans live under the impression that the "world news" they see on the TV is fictional and made in Hollywood.
Ratings are heavily down since the scriptwriters canned their hugely popular villain, the Soviet Union, at the end of series 8. The new bad guy, Islamic terrorism, isn't polling well with Nielsen audiences and it's likely that foreign news won't make the cut for the fall schedules.
Still I fail to see much difference between Win 2000 and 7 apart from the eye candy.
There speaks a man who never tried to install anything other than business software on 2000. XP and 7 I'll grant, but 2000 was a right bloody dog for non-business use. ME was actually better for compatibility, but unusable for a variety of other reasons.
The obvious big plus in 7 over XP is 64-bit support that doesn't b0rk compatibility with most applications.
So, let's get this straight.
1) Nokia promise not to sue using their patents.
2) Nokia flog their patents to a patent troll so they now no longer control them.
3) Patent troll sues Google.
4) Google blame Microsoft?
That one's straight out of the department of tinfoil hats. You could possibly criticise Nokia for not making their earlier promises incumbent on the troll in the terms of the sale, but MS?
I may be working on one primary task (or switching between a handful of them,) but I am skimming the datastream presented by the dynamic information sources looking for anything more important than I am doing at the moment.
Er, surely that's Metro's strong point? Your other data streams are represented in the "live tile" approach. Of course, you'd need Metro versions of the applications presenting those data streams for this to work, but by the time 9 comes out, which is what we'll get in the real world, that should be less of a problem.
Samsung might suggest you stop smoking as a way to get around one of your complaints there.
Ah the same school of thought that came up with holding iPhones in a special grip or fitting 'em with a rubber sock to make 'em get a signal. An inconvenient and unwanted workaround to a core fuckup is not a fix.
My solution to this problem is to ensure that everything sensitive on my smartphone lives in an encrypted container and then to leave the ruddy password off the device. That way I get to use the regular functions by merely dabbing "unlock" and only have to type in a password when accessing data that actually warrants password protection. I've never understood the mentality of someone who's prepared to go through the pwd rigmarole just to make a phone call or look something up on the web.
"The Mail recently overtook the the New York Times as the most read newspaper website in the world...."
O.......M........F.........G..........!
Then again, ISTR that it was the NYT responsible for the "Gordon Brown can't play Obama's DVDs 'cos they're all Region 1" idiocy[1], so maybe it's just that there isn't much to choose between 'em and the Fail has more pics and fewer long words.
[1] 'Cos if my player's multiregion, I'll bet the one in 10 Downing Street is too.