Posts by Steve Crook

Re: Soon...

"Come on. You can do this. Try really hard. Fight it. You can form your own opinions if you really really try."

It is actually possible to be suspicious of the motivations of the Chinese without being remote controlled by the US...

The Chinese have always taken an admirably long term view of things and are, generally, more inclined to tunnel under walls than engage in frontal assaults. Unlike the US. But they'll still do anything and everything to protect their interests, just the same way the UK did when it had clout. It's why they're making islands and putting military bases on them...

Can't help remember what the 'friends of China' said when there was opposition to China hosting the Olympics. 'It'll be a boost towards sorting out human rights issues and help make China more open'. Hows that working out guys? Thought so...

Re: @Douglas Lowe It's true!

"It's called "science" - you know"

No it isn't. It's called engineering.

Re: Just underscores that the UK does not have freedom of speech

Yup, I bet Trump and his supporters are really worried and monitoring the growth of the petition in the UK because of all the damage it's going to do to his campaign in the US. Not.

For those that voted in the petition, have you not been paying attention? This is what Trump wants, the more he appears to have upset SJW's, the more he appeals to his core audience who already feel ignored and alienated in their own country and the more chance there is of him getting the nomination.

Before everyone cheers thinking this'll mean 4 years of Hillary, it very probably will, but there's many a slip between cup and lip...

Re: Well holy crap...

For those who want to know there's this:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN300321

Which is a description (and an almost apology) for the problem, along with a detailed instructions on how to get rid of the offending items.

Re: Escape from Lemming Mode

"Under new, non-suicidal management, perhaps we will see a Thunderbird renaisance"

LibreMail?

Re: Tin foil

You think they haven't thought of that? The tin foil thing is a bluff, people think they're safe, but they aren't. In fact, the recorders have been miniaturised and distributed as dust across the whole world. Whenever the government want information they just send in people with vacuum cleaners. They got the idea from a series of short stories by Bob Shaw...

You think all this talk of drones is true? They just send a signal to the transmitters in a specific area and they detonate. It looks like a missile explosion, but it isn't. The drones are just a convenient cover.

Re: Wireless is about mobility not connectivity

Raspi2 if you're going to buy one.

I have one, working with a Harmony remote via the Flirc R/C receiver and they all co-operate together with Kodi. The Harmony config program has a built in for the Flirc. Only thing that doesn't work out of the box is page up/page down, but you can fix those with a bit of reconfig of the Harmony and Kodi.

Re: Why use pure hydrogen?

The problem with any form of transportation based on electricity is that it requires... electricity. Which has to be generated. There's a lot of energy in a tank of petrol, and the numbers get quite scary if you assume that 25% of domestic motoring is done by Nissan Leaf drivers. Big implications for generating infrastructure, and we're having enough trouble generating the power we need now...

The big advantage of fuel cells is that you don't have to dig up the entire country to lay cables for EV charging points and see all the front gardens in the UK paved over by car owners installing charging points (~40% of domestic cars have no off street parking).

Re: Codecs?

It would be interesting to know. Last time I looked at this (while I was ripping some of my Blurays) there wasn't much, if any, hardware support for h265(HEVC). Remember reading an El Reg article (I think) that there was some kerfuffle about adopting a common, open and freely licensed codec for UHD content and that world plus dog were actually looking at Google's offering or but mostly anything that wasn't h265.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/01/alliance_for_open_media/

"the hazards of neutron embrittlement."

Would that explain the pain in my right hip?

Re: Are you ready? Probably not.

Fell back over my comment and I was completely wrong about the mess Win10 would generate. Good job no-one cares one way or the other what I think. Life as a commentard is good!

Re: Just thinking...

Ahhhh, those were the days. FWIW I'm 59, and can remember Hartnell (just) and I most certainly did spend a lot of time peering out from behind furniture.

Re: About Time

A common mistake. The SIZE of the framework is irrelevant for many applications because there's plenty of CPU, ram, disk and network capacity. What's important is time to market, feature set, responsiveness to change requests, resilience, and the degree to which you want to piss off your users with bugs.

If you create a three page site outside a framework and then get change requests, a page here, a page there, never so much it's ever worth rewriting in a framework, eventually you end up with a mess.

Of course if you want to spend your time writing code that others have already written, debugged and actively support, you can. I always thought life was too short...

Re: There's an interesting point about those industries being crap

You are right. But also wrong. The main problem with publicly owned anything is that politicians find it impossible to keep their hands off and leave the business to people who might know how to run it. Inevitably, publicly owned bodies become mired in one glory project or another, or as a sink for cash to bolster employment in some far flung part of the realm.

Look at the NHS. Root and branch reform follows root and branch reform. They still don't have a working, fully integrated IT system. Not saying NHS should be privatised, but we do pay a price for having the government feel they've a perfect right to dick around with it whenever they feel like it...

As with the NHS, so with other nationalised industries. Not saying it couldn't be done properly, just that it's not likely. Because politicians.

As for the call centre, you mean there are worse than the one run by HMRC?

Re: Google is taking the lead on revitalising the patching pipeline for the Android ecosystem

I'm not sure that Google are entirely the problem. Manufacturers and their Android skins mean that there's always going to be inertia in getting ports to earlier versions. Then there's OnePlus, Cyanogen and others who have their own versions of Android.

Finally, there's the replacement cycle. With phones on 2 year contracts there's little incentive to fix problems when manufacturers know that the phone is going to be replaced with something else relatively soon. If there's little incentive to fix a relatively new phone, there's none to fix something that's second hand.

It's a mess.

Re: Who's responsible?

Yes, possibly. But someone needs it in their employment contract that they're personally *liable* and that disciplinary action *will* be taken meaning fines, loss of bonus or worse. More of senior management need to be roped in, as it's a company wide thing.

Of course the local government situation is made more complex because so much of the IT is outsourced. But I see no reason why they should be held to a lower standard.

Re: "inhibition of alcohol absorption"

Yes, I'm going to remove their puneal glands.

Re: Why's this a story?

Because they're being sold to us on their ability to REDUCE CARBON EMISSIONS. If they're only providing 1% of TOTAL ENERGY USE then they're contributing ALMOST NOTHING to reducing carbon emissions at FUCKING ENORMOUS EXPENSE too.

It also illustrates why meeting climate change act requirements is going to be such a massive task. So big in fact that it may require the UK to stop using gas for domestic heating and cooking.

I know the greenies hate Lomborg and Pielke Jnr, but they're realistic about the scale of the problems caused by decarbonisation and our inability to be able to meet all those wonderful political targets.

Re: Gravy?

Yup. How American. Biscuits and Gravy. Things that aren't biscuits covered with something that isn't gravy...

Lost the older versions...

But the dog didn't eat them. What's shameful is that the NOAA make the adjustments, publish the new data and don't archive the older version. I suppose the argument is that there's no need as the current version is always the best.

Just as well that someone has been archiving since 2010. You see that scale of adjustments pretty much overwhelms any instrumental warming.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/07/09/noaancei-temperature-anomaly-adjustments-since-2010-pray-they-dont-alter-it-any-further/

I don't consider they're necessarily wrong in their adjustments, but when they're having this much effect on the temperature record it's difficult not to wonder the why's and wherefore's.

The *really* amusing thing is that the campaigns for Foxconn to raise the wages of its Chinese workers may actually have had an effect. But not the one the rich westerners pushing for those pay rises might have had in mind.

What's incredible is that it's so easy to set up the fab plant, get the raw materials shipped, do the recruitment and training and everything else required to set up manufacturing on this scale. If it can be done so swiftly, imagine just how quickly the city of London could disappear if someone presented the global firms there with a better environment. Ouch.

Re: So this has just happened suddenly?

Combination of the two. The problem is that the WAIS has become the southern hemisphere poster child for the effects of climate change. To hear that the melting may not (in total or in part) be due to the climate change upsets the purists as it's not 'on message'. An inconvenient truth one might say.

The melting has been going on for a long long time. The problem is that we only started looking in the last, what, 50 years? So is it normal, cyclical or a real problem? Dunno.

It could be that the combination of warming from climate change *and* geothermal is enough to cause a problem. But we're some way from being able to determine if that's the case. Big IMO.