Posts by paulc

Oblig: Spirit of the Age

"Your android replica is playing up again, it's no joke

When she comes she moans another's name

But that's the spirit of the age,"

Lyrics from Hawkwind's "Spirit of the Age"

Another golden oldie is

One Must Fall...

a fighting game with robots...

Yet again... bribing the punters to get sales...

wondered why the sales figures were so high... they were giving them away in effect... this is so typical of Microsoft (and their satraps) these days... the product sucks so much that they have to fudge the sales figures by giving them away...

Just put this lat long into googlemaps

53.129628,-2.253238

as the original link provided has vamooshed...

iPad Hungry Hippos?

there's precedent for such a thing...

http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=2341&e=product&pcat=bulnl&pid=64176

http://www.amazon.com/Fisher-Price-Laugh-Learn-Apptivity-Case/dp/B004UU9W78

The real fun comes...

when you collapse the field... the current generated by the collapsing field must be immense...

Paradigm shift???

More Like Microsoft NOT learning from the fun their shills were having poking fun at Linux users disgusted with changes to Ubuntu... bit of a Schadenfreude moment... and Windows users have no real way round it unlike Linux users...

Is this the final straw?

Waiting for the "Tommy" moment... when everybody finally has enough and walks off singing "we're not gonna take it"...

so confused...

Silly scaremongering headlines... anyone would think it was acidic in nature and thus attacking stuff

at 8.1, it's nature is basic, not acidic, so moving from 8.2 to 8.1 means it's becoming more neutral, as pure water is defined as neutral at a pH of 7.0

Right you warmists... here's one I prepared earlier...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/07/in-china-there-are-no-hockey-sticks/

Try and argue against that evidence...

It's long term cycles that add and subtract to give the overall global temperature... and we're about to go into a cooling phase...

If you look at the evidence... you'll find that there have been periods in the past few thousand years where it has been WARMER than it currently is... and it's always amusing when the warmists keep trotting out the hottest year for xxx years when you look back just before that xxx date, it was hotter and we were most certainly NOT chucking CO2 into the atmosphere at any perceptible rate at all...

What lost the warmists their argument for me was when they started labelling everybody that didn't believe them as "denialists"... a nasty label deliberately intended to bring to mind the holocaust denialists...

Untried HUD and LTS!!!

I hate it when Ubuntu stick bleeding edge into an LTS release... HUD should not, in my opinion, be allowed anywhere near the LTS release until it has been polished and the rough edges and other bugs and gotchas have been removed by at least two normal 6 monthly releases...

ISTR they stuffed up with a previous LTS by changing fundamental items in the final few weeks

moving constitutes deletion...

from the original hard disk... the file is marked as having been deleted...

Cloud Backup is fatally flawed

not only by bandwidth concerns, but by the fact that some tw@t in the USA could have your cloud provider taken out by claiming there's some pirated content being hosted by them and the entire server farm gets nuked off the internet by having their domain seized... Not to mention the fact that your data is going over the wires and being processed somewhere out of your control in probable violation of data protection laws...

Chargers and their plugs...

Are a real problem... UK plugs are just too bulky and awkward...

First Principles...

They forgot them... if in doubt, fly the plane by pitch and power... ie. set the nose at the correct angle and then set the power so that the aircraft altitude remains steady.

Categories?

Southern Comfort is a liqueur and as far as I'm concerned, I can't see why it is necessary to segregate Irish Whiskey from Scotch Whisky for the purpose of making cocktails as you're going to mix other stuff with them anyway... Now classifying Rye and Bourbon as separate types does make sense as the taste is different...

Bit confused here...

Why can't the device start the generator itself and tell you it's done so...

So I'll stick with my Arnova 2 G2 then...

That I got in HMV on sale for just £120 (still there if you're quick). At least it's got a microSD slot and I can stick what I want on it and they'll play...

Sadly I'm stuck at the moment with just the Appslib and haven't got the proper Android market, but my iPad owning daughter was most miffed when she found I had angry birds on it for free (crappy ads in between levels, but because of a programming error, the ads only partially show).

e-cash MUST be anonymous

so that people can have confidence that their payments cannot be linked to sales... sadly, due to the incessant "War on Terror", this will never be allowed... the days of the implanted chip in the forehead or right hand are fast approaching...

Messing with key combos (Alt F4) and illegal bundling didn't help either...

Microsoft sneakily changed things so that the key combination Alt F4 would exit the current program... in Wordperfect, that same key combo was a common thing many people used to Block Text prior to copying or doing something to it... so people who had got Wordperfect key combos ingrained were suddenly finding the program closing and losing their work when using the Windows 95 version.

Microsoft also bundled free copies of MS Word for windows with PCs sold with Win 95 into businesses so they were less likely to purchase Wordperfect for Win 95 when the PC already had MS Word on it.

"While WordPerfect retained a majority of the retail shelf sales of word processors, Microsoft gained market share by including Word for Windows in its Windows product on new PCs. Microsoft gave discounts for Windows to OEMs who included Word on their PCs. When new PC buyers found Word installed on their new PC, Word began to dominate market share of desktop word processing."

See wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect

tell them to naff off

it should be a _mapme or _yesmap extension, not a _nomap one...

None-Lethally???

I noticed there were no dummy pilots on those remote controlled ultra-lights... To be a proper demo, they should have had instrumented crash test dummies strapped in to the seats so that the damage to the pilot could be properly assessed...

LXDE review please :)

as you've given XFCE the runaround, please give LXDE the same treatment.

design for recycling

will only happen when it's mandated by laws and strict penalties... sadly, corporations always take the cheap way out and have to be forced into something...

This e-waste time bomb has been ticking for decades... corporations have skipped around most of the irksome requirements by outsourcing as much as possible to countries which effectively do not give a fig about their environment or people as long as they're undercutting everybody else in getting the business... things will only clean up when the EU and US authorities start mandating that all electronic goods sold into the EU are manufactured and also recycled under the same environmental standards and employee health standards as those made in the EU and US... and enforce it and crack down hard on corporations that fail to keep their sub-contractors in line...

14 years ago, I did a final assignment for my honours degree on design for recycling and design for dissassembly (which is needed to keep things cheap to get access to components)

It IS possible to recycle electronics cleanly with minimum environmental impact, BUT it costs money which is the problem as the end-of-life side of the product is seen as as loss center on the balance sheet... IF they did it properly, it would be a plus item as they would be able to take in other company's waste for a profit...

The way to do it with difficult items like televisions is to actually shred and burn the entire item and scrub the flue gasses clean while condensing off the valuable metals. The heat from the burning can be used to power the flue gas scrubbers and the rest of the plant.

14 years later, and things are still as bad with the recycling being "exported" to third world countries.

Sadly, incineration has gained a bad rep in this country and it will be difficult to start up recycling plants that do this incineration...

Oklahoma

there was a magnitude 5.6 earthquake in Oklahoma this weekend... an American state not normally associated with earthquakes... the stand out feature, fracking is taking place in Oklahoma near the epicenter...

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/06/us/oklahoma-earthquake/?hpt=us_c2

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/us/oklahoma-earthquake-sets-a-record.html

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/see-the-moment-the-oklahoma-earthquake-hit-including-espn-reporters-reaction/

Patent license poisoned chalice conditions

I was under the impression that most patents were licensed under conditions where if you subsequently sued someone you were licensing a patent from, then there was a clause in the license which allowed them to void your license and left you open to being counter sued

anyway, I'm still waiting for Gotterdammerung... the final all out patent war... and it really erks me when Microsoft fight trolls by attacking the individual patent itself instead of arguing that software itself is not patentable...

Whut???

"The group were having to run a 12 volt supply, convert it to 150 AC and then back down to five volts for phones and the portable radios used to maintain emergency contact." ==========================

unfscking believable...

I have a little plug in device that plugs into the cigar socket of my car that provides a nice 5 Volt supply with adaptors for all my gadgets that run off it.

I run my boat lighting and radio and my laptop etc. off 12 Volt DC using multi outlets that you get in Halfrauds or Maplins etc.. Have a solar panel that trickle charges the large "Leisure" type battery during the week...

These city idiots should have been speaking to campers and caravaners who use 12 volt supplies when camping up at sites that don't have mains hookup.