Posts by John H Woods 3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
"The problems start when you are trying to do something that hasn't been done yet anywhere in the world."
Yes, but unless you are at the cutting edge of some research programme the key warning sign is that you are considering doing something that hasn't been done before. Quite often - not always, I grant you - it's an indication that you might be about to do it wrong.
Your point is correct that it would be just as mad to build that solar panel as to cover the world in windmills.
Nuclear power is safe. In the Fukushima "Nuclear Disaster", approximately 0 people died despite a catalogue of misadventures and failures at fairly old nuclear plants which had been subjected to an *enormous* environmental event - an earthquake and tsunami which killed 25,000 people.
As a result, I have started to ignore, or at least question, anyone who suffixes the words "Nuclear Disaster" to "Fukushima" because I consider it to be an empty phrase. Although I'm not sure "bleeding heart liberal hippie" is a very meaningful phrase, either - it certainly doesn't apply to many of the liberals I have ever met.
Let us rise above the stupid point scoring and ad hominem attacks of our political 'leaders', and actually use hard fscking science and actual fscking facts. Now excuse me whilst I return to my (ever sceptical) reading of the Guardian, albeit sans elbow patches.
I also fell for it as a gullible and lonely teen in when an attractive girl offered me tea, biscuits and a free personality test. However, on reading through the exhaustive list of questions I realized I couldn't be bothered and had another idea. My prize possession was an early Playboy-branded Casio watch my Dad had bought, with a bunch of unnecessary functions, including a random number generator, which suddenly found a use.
When they told me the results and started to draw conclusions, I told them what I had filled in all the questions randomly so their methodology must be totally flawed. They became rather aggressive, and two goons were summoned to "deal" with me, and it got rather horrible rather quickly. Fortunately for me I had already learned to handle myself in Middlesbrough (where the posh "Officer's Boy" accent didn't go down too well in the early 1980s) so said aggression rather backfired upon them. The copper outside who hoovered me up merely enquired as to whether my knuckles were ok and said, "Stay away from that lot, sonny, they are utter scumbags" before resuming his duties.
I agree with GregC - I get around 4-6 MB/s down and a quarter of that up nearly everywhere round here (rural Warwickshire) minus a few holes. In fact, 3's data service is better than their voice in my experience - quite often I've dropped a call to resume it on Skype!
"Stop giving planning permission to the large out-of-town centres."
... with free parking. Often the town centres not only have expensive parking but extremely short maximum stays, which ensures you can't spend too much time in the local shops. Because you will avoid spending money in the retail parks owned by the friends of local government.
3D benchmarks would have been a better choice for this purpose.
The A10 can be seriously pushed: my sons got theirs running at 4.6GHz (rather than 3.8 with 4.2 turbo) with the iGPU at 1.2GHz (rather than 800MHz) and our RAM is running at 2.4GHz rather than 800MHz, doubling the stock 3D benchmarks.
PS: With air-cooling and only a tiny voltage increase, this isn't some impractical LN2 system (in which the A10 has hit nearly 8GHz!)
... and that's why PC pro discussion threads are so boring. There are plenty of proper discussions here, just not attached to articles like this --- why would there be? There is really nothing to discuss here apart from to take pot shots at Apple and make amusing comments about cavemen and rocks. It's entirely up to you whether to read any given story and, even if you do, whether you proceed to the comments.
Our impression that we can see everything in front of us all at once is a trick played on us by our brain, as demonstrated by the admirably-titled "Gorillas in our midst". The trick will be to work out what we are really looking at in any given fraction of a second and render thoroughly in that +/-2 degrees or so; less precision from there to +/-10; and beyond that everything else can remain rather fuzzy and we'd never know.
I don't understand the idea that the Linux community is hostile. A bit of gentle taking-the-piss when you ask a stupid noob question is a very small price to pay for free support! And most of the time I haven't even got that, just people earnestly trying to help - and it's always amazed me how much total strangers will go out of their way to help you. (*Looks at PS/2 lead Dvorak/Qwerty switcher custom made for me at cost ($5) by some South Korean I've never met*).
... a megaton of energy is a fairly well-established amount of about 4.2PJ, as it refers to the energetic content ---- by combustion, rather than antimatter annihilation --- of a million tons of TNT.
So just under 6 PJ/day or about 70GW. (1 GW is very roughly the output of a decent size power station.)
I've always wondered why devices don't include capacitors that can power them down sensibly in the few seconds after power failure. We were always warned about suddenly depowering HDDs, but I never understood why they couldn't contain a component holding enough charge to flush the cache and park the head. And in this case, a small capacitor on the mainboard, or in the RAM module, could zero the volatile memory in a few seconds.
My ideal TV would copy 5.1 sound systems, where you plug in a microphone and they can make a passable effort at self-calibration. Why can't TVs do this? Most people i know are watching their TVs with colour and contrast completely out of whack.
How about a very rapid power saving mode that goes off when there is no one in the room and comes back on again when you come in? Audio muting optional.
How about non-sucky picture-in-picture controls? Or digital logo removal processing?
There's a lot of smart things TVs could do, but smart TVs don't seem to do any of them.
... its is not an exception to the rule. "Its" doesn't have an apostrophe for the same reason that "yours", "hers" and "ours" don't: they are possessive pronouns. The easy way to remember this is to remember how you would spell "his" -- an apostrophe would obviously be incorrect.
An even easier rule is to never to put an apostrophe in unless you are absolutely sure one is required - its quite possible to pass off an unintended omission as a stylistic choice, whereas the spurious apostrophe cannot be so justified.
... inside was the standard anti-static warning on a Sun label. Underneath was a further label, in neat handwriting, attached, I presume, by a previous tech. It posed the following riddle.
Before, dear user, you hoover this horrible dusty mess, answer me this question:
What's the difference between a Vacuum Cleaner and a Van de Graaf generator?
I bought my two boys parts for a budget games PC (AMD K-5 based) and we overclocked it to half way decent 3Dmark score. What I didn't realise was how much more expensive the games are. Because, thanks to Steam, I appear to have to buy two copies of every game now.
Unless I'm wrong, in which case I would be very much obliged if someone could put me right.
Repeating it might not be enough. You probably need to address the points that (a) this article indicates that liquid isn't that important and (b) there may be enough liquid on the moon for what we need to do anyway.
I do like your idea of a CNC router, but I think 3D printing will also be useful, and I'm not sure why you seem to be so annoyed by it. Of course there's hype, but behind most hype there is at least something worth talking about.
Actually, it became Quantrix. Download a 30 day eval copy and blow your mind, just by following the really good intro doc that comes with it. THIS is how spreadsheets should be, tables with sensible column names like Item, ItemPrice, Quantity and Subtotal, and rules like Subtotal = Quantity * ItemPrice, Total = Sum(Subtotal).
I'm not sad Excel beat 1-2-3. But Improv should have at least made people aware that there is a better way than 'stretching' elementwise formulae over ranges.
Honestly, if you have 10 mins, and you like this sort of thing, check out Quantrix.com. Unfortunately I could never persuade my company to buy it.
"while i wouldn't buy another sammy TV after the last one died at 14 months old.."
Did you ask them to fix it? When my 8+ year LCD packed in before Xmas, I phoned Samsung - just for advice on how repairable it was. They asked me for the S/N and when I told them they said they had had an issue with bad caps on some PSUs on that model. Long story short, free engineer visit and, shortly afterwards it was repaired for free.
Agree 110% about Google Docs.
In what other word processor would it be acceptable for the *pagination* in the print out (downloaded PDF) to differ significantly from what was displayed when you were editing? I don't care whether the fonts look that similar, but for the pages to be different is totally unforgivable.
I agree with you, but this is less true with properly OO languages, where differences in syntax hide a much bigger underlying similarity in function. Look at Smalltalk - in one sense (class libraries) it is absolutely enormous but in another (syntax) it is minute - it doesn't case statements, if-then-else or loops.
The only thing wrong with Smalltalk bytecode is that it was not secure, and that was, if I recall, one of the underlying principles of Java bytecode design (not that it worked completely). A standard bytecode into which a bunch of different OO languages could be safely compiled would be a wonderful thing.
You can 'allegedly' use the upgrade as a full licence
Strategy 1)
a) Download Win8 prerelease beta from some torrent site
b) Use upgrade on that
Strategy 2) - more Lulz
a) delete your disk partitions and install your upgrade
b) now you have a copy of Win 8 that won't activate
--- with the stern message that your licence was only for upgrade purposes
c) now upgrade that inactive install with the same upgrade
This has got to be the worst graph I have seen for a while, will add to my collection of 'how not to present information'. The raw table with the sales figures would have been vastly better, and whenever raw data is easier to interpret than a given visualization, the visualization is a total waste of time.
"Crunched the figures" -- yes, virtually to oblivion. Publish the figures, and a dozen commentards will provide you with better graphs.
... it should not be possible for a single engineer to wreak this kind of havoc: systems like this should be resistant even to deliberate malice. Your engineer could be tired, inexperienced or unwell. But they could also be a saboteur working for a competitor, an employee with a grudge, a criminal who is going to hold your system to ransom or even an out-and-out terrorist.
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