* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

Windows 8.1: Read this BEFORE updating - especially you, IT admins

Stevie

Re: Linux is great...but just isn't user friendly enough for the average user

"But this situation is EXACTLY the same with windows too (and also to a degree also applies to Macs as well)."

No it isn't. One must know what one is doing and make effort to obtain a new PC with Linux fitted, configured and working out of the box. Neither of the two other examples you cite has that problem because as everyone knows, computers come in two types: Windows computers and Apple computers.

The only situation where that is popularly known to be untrue is the Raspberry Pi, which cannot be said to be a fun OOTB experience as a user-interface to the web due to the fact that it was never intended to be.

Stevie

Bah!

So the safe upgrade path would seem to be:

a) Clone drive and put clone in the media safe (aka Desk Drawer)

2) Download illegal copy of Windows 8.1 over teh torrints

^) Install Windows 8.1 and discover all apps left and gone away.

~) Swap 8.1 disk for clone and continue to gnash teeth while using WIndows 8.

Stevie

Bah!

When Sun deployed "LiveUpdate" it did the same thing but allowed you to roll back to the previous OS in the event of an Up-Balls Call because it installed the new OS in a clean partition. What a shame that with all the cruftiness MS couldn't have developed an upgrade path of similar awesomeness in the last decade or so. After all, they knew it could be done 'cos someone had already done it. That's the hard part.

Naturally you'd need an "opt out" (or maybe an opt-in) mechanism for those with teenytiny discs.

Of course, all the people who are in the sharp angle where the scissor blades meet already deal with this by various virtualization strategies.

Looks like Linux has yet another opportunity to seize the minds of the masses.

Last living NEANDERTHALS discovered in JERSEY – boffins

Stevie

Re: personally, I don't see anything wrong with that

Stinkin' Neanderthal lover!

Stevie

Bah!

"...understand when Neanderthal populations disappeared form the region"

About ten years after it was discovered that they taste delicious with chips would be my guess.

Volvo: Need a new car battery? Replace the doors and roof

Stevie

Bah!

All this concern about shorts and fires and bolts of lightning coursing through the passengers after an accident is misplaced.

The real concern should be for how stupidly uncool it will be to drive around in a car in which everyone's hair stands on end and that every time the sun comes out gets pieces of roadside trash sticking to it.

The only place for a capacitor in a car is across the points to stop the ignition interfering with the radio and the cassette player.

As for door dings: Trusty old Gunson will rapidly deploy the Door Battery Undigerizer to a Halfords near you as soon as this daft idea comes to market. Simply clamp to the door, apply the special paste to the split in the battery (avoid touching with bare fingers) and work the ratchet handle to remove the ding and restore battery life. All you need to add is one deep-reach socket with a large enough hole to clear the tool's integral screwdriver bit. Good luck sourcing that.

US red-tape will drain boffins' brains into China, says crypto-guru Shamir

Stevie

Re: Grand Cayman on the other hand

Um, you are not a fan of geography, then? Maryland sits athwart (ow!) The Chesapeake Bay, which in turn is glued to the Atlantic Ocean.

The crab is plentiful and fresh. Indeed, during my stay there the problem was in finding food *without* some sort of crabby content. Even the crisps were crab flavored (and that is the only instance I can think of that involved in-crab-season fake crabbery).

Restaurants are brimming with fresh crab. Boats ride the waves full of crab. The whole situation is in danger of backing into a sketch about highwaymen who provide an over abundance of not Lupins but crab.

Interestingly off-topic: The bay is one place where an Englishman can be left totally gobsmacked should he run into an islander. The islanders speak with Norfolk (as in Naarch) accents. Heya gorra loight, boy?

Amateur image-wrangler reveals stitched snap of Saturn's splendour

Stevie

Bah!

Well done that man.

Reg reader's nipper takes felt pens to Vulture 2

Stevie

Re: crime that this superb artwork wouldn't be on LOHAN!

I have to admit you make a compelling argument there. I will happily stipulate that paint is indeed not detrimental to the mission profile if and only if the distinctive livery depicted in the article is used, preferably applied by the originating artist.

Otherwise I stand by my whining.

Stevie

Re: visibility is the issue here

Eh? I thought the spaceplane was fitted with SOA GPS findability. Seeing the thing in flight is a pipe dream no matter what color you paint it.

Stevie

Bah!

And here we see human tech in action, complete with the "baby out with the bathwater" approach to everything.

40 years ago it was shown very effectively that a nice paint job was not worth the weight penalties incurred in proper spaceships.

Spray away, idiots, and shave another few hundred feet off the ceiling of LOHAN with every swipe of the can.

Tape rocks for storage - if you don't need to, um, access your data

Stevie

Bah!

Depends on how you use the tape. Tape in streaming mode is pretty hard to beat as there is no latency.

Is it the right time to question the utility of backing up the twaddle people exchange on Twitface without regard to worth? How many "Me 2"s are you willing to spend hours pulling back from the great crash in the sky before admitting that it is a waste of valuable electricity?

Facebook TEENS EXPOSED to entire WORLD

Stevie

I am no fan of Amazon

I *am* a fan of Amazon , but even after a two year plus relationship their targeted ads suck balls and represent nothing I'm interested in buying because (draws deep breath):

DATA ISN'T INFORMATION.

Azathoth on a bike, I knew this in the 1970s. It is so monumentally depressing to have to wait in the expectation of some "new" whitepaper citing "cutting edge" research stating that to the general open mouthed admiration of the New Kids On The Block.

Stevie

Parents need to discuss things with their kids

No kids of your own, right?

Behold, the MONSTER-CLAWED critter and its terrifying SPIDER BRAIN

Stevie

Gah!

Truly a magnificent example of a giant marine crabroach.

I'll never go in the sea again.

The question remains: Did this form any part of the diet of the Cavemen, or did they just eat dinosaur?

Hypersonic MEGA METEOR pulled from lake, then Russians drop it

Stevie

Bah!

"More than a dozen stones have been raised but only four or five have been judged fragments of the one true rock."

Presumably the chief characteristic being the word "Chelyabinsk" written all the way through it.

Microsoft plugs Xbox One consoles into its cloud - what could go wrong?

Stevie

Bah!

Skull-Fist-LightningBolt-MushroomCloud the cloud! Reject this World Wide Mainframe tech and lets get back to the game purity of running Tetris on a NES.

Anyone up for Arkanoid? I've got a pristine copy *with* the paddle controller.

Web.com DNS hijack: How hacktivists went on a mass web joyride spree

Stevie

Re: In another area of life

Money transfers are not quite that simple even between banks in cooperating western nations. Every time I've been involved in a funds transfer the sender has had to appear in person to make the request.

However, these were all personal account transactions, and businesses obviously cannot work that way.

Under New York/Federal Statutes, the transaction described is clearly a fraud and the individual who presumably did not sign the transfer instrument would not be liable for the funds in most cases (some exceptions mostly having to do with unregulated accounts or very large sums of money exist that would complicate the outcome).

If you would like to test the law in your jurisdiction, simply have someone else send a fax requesting funds be transferred from your account to:

Stevie Nest Egg Account

Alpenschtock Fiscal Reserve (Routing Code 84115)

Hoordinon D.Q.T.

Zurich, Switzerland

Should the funds arrive I will confirm the success of the experiment and immediately return the money. I cannot, of course, stand as guarantor for misdirected funds lost in transit.

Stevie

Bah!

Oh, it's all fun and games until you hack the wrong website and end up with a drone-fired missile coming through the living room window.

Mac fans: You don't need Windows to get ripped off in tech support scams

Stevie

Bah!

My latest caller (and the last two) claimed to work for "windows". I guess it's encouraging that they aren't smart enough to get the details right. I typically ask "does anyone ever fall for this idiocy?" and hang up.

Since this is a more widespread problem than I thought and seems to be the same crowd working the phones from Bangalore I shall move on to plan B: shouting in my best Welsh-Pakistani accent "DON' BE CLEVER DICKIE!"

BBC's Clangers returns in £5m 'New Age' remake

Stevie

Re: Why can't they write some new programmes?

"in bloody America, was there actually anything Italian in it ?"

My dear boy you must understand that Americans sometimes claim ethnicity based upon fractional gene participation acquired in the great-great-great ancestry and beyond, and that some elliptical speech was being used.

The full title of the remake is "The Italian/American Job".

Actually, that doesn't work either since the star claims to be Irish (see first paragraph).

As you were.

I don't think there is anyone over the age of 20 who honestly thinks the remake is superior to the original provided:

a) They have *seen* the original - it is a bit rare in these here transatlantic parts

2) They understand the difference between chromakey and doing stuff for real.

Next up: The remake of The Flight of the Phoenix: Flogging offense or Hanging offense?

Stevie

Re: "Reinvention"

I'm not sure how this so-called press-release could have been dictated to modern-day reporters not immersed in Clanger Lore, given that the whole thing must have been delivered by swanee whistle.

Stevie

Bah!

Dear Sir,

Re: Clangers, The Next Generation:

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Sincerely,

Stevie.

PS

More Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

OAR-some! 18ft SEA SERPENT discovered off US coast

Stevie

Re: what to do with a giant fish?

I got 12,000 gallons of malt vinegar in a tanker outside on consignment to a "Mike Brown". Is he the one over there stirring the vat of batter?

Stevie

Re: 25 people just to lift it...

Typical! Steve Jobs catches the biggest fish in the world and naturally someone is jumping out of the woodwork from the safety of his armchair to claim it is smaller than Steve said it was.

It's always the same at the Register. Steve Jobs does something great in the world of fishing and there they are to mock.

Let's see *you* invent the iPhone then catch the biggest fish ever in the whole world Mr Smartass.

Apple's Steve Jobs was a SEX-crazed World War II fighter pilot, says ex

Stevie

Bah!

Eh?

Stevie

Re: Fighter-pilot reincarnation? That's Larry Ellison, not Steve

[Voice Mode= Clouseau] Are you saying...that Steve Jobs was Larry Ellison reincarnated?

Stevie

Bah!

Typical shoddy reporting by the Register, to follow a story this, this, this degrading and tawdry without one single excerpt of the text.

A real newspaper would have acquired the serialization rights like wot the Sunday Mirror did with The Human Zoo. Hmmm, the pictures from that one still bring a smile to my face when I recollect them. That is proper journalism.

This monumental oversight constitutes a lost opportunity to make the Register the most read IT Newspaper in the world only outclassed by the lost opportunity to turn a bit more to the left at about 11:30 pm on April 14th, 1912. No wonder no-one takes this e-rag seriously.

Harrumph, sirs and madams, Harrumph!

Stevie

Re: If I wanted to read tittle-tattle like this...

But...sleaze *with* an IT angle. The very definition of Register Fodder.

Stevie

He's not around to defend himself against her allegations,

Excellent! That spells "sequel". "What Steve Jobs Did To Me After *That*"

Bring on the X-rated sleaze. Like everyone else I like nothing better than to be appalled and shocked by tawdry revelations of the famous and energetic while hotly denying that to be the case.

Why a Robin Hood tax on filthy rich City types is the very LAST thing needed

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Not sure how that would work. There is no "stock" in housing, only loans made that bear interest. The loans get sold on, but unless there is a balloon payment built into the original loan there is no point in "shorting" the "stock" in the loan.

Since the loan will not perform better no matter how hard a "stock" holder whines it is hard to see why anyone would want to trade them as stocks in the first place. Loans are more like futures.

Besides, the housing markets are not a rich field in which to sow the seeds of the next crash. The field you want for this sort of selfish idiocy is currently growing a crop of Student Loans.

What I'd like to know is: at what point does sabotaging the economy of the country (and by extension the western world) get properly classified as actions likely to give aid and comfort to the terrorists (I know; we don't use that term since GWB but stick with me) and therefore treason - an offense fr which we *can* kick their miserable asses into the nearest maximum security hell. When did the self-interest at The Top stop being "enlightened"?

Stevie

Bah!

And here I thought the crash was brought on by the banks putting all their eggs in one basket (ie another bank offering CDS instruments) while making bad bets with other people's money, coupled with the basket not having the sense to see when enough was enough.

Related off topic rant.

I have a relative by marriage who is "in finance" and he trotted out the reasons why bonuses - for fuckwits who were asleep at the wheel and who drove the country's economy so hard onto the rocks that it threatened to show the world that capitalism was an unworkable ideology in the most graphic way - were valid.

1) They will go somewhere else if we don't pay them.

My response: Let 'em. If any country is so stupid to allow these weapons of mass economic destruction work within their boundaries they deserve all they get.

2) They are the only people who understand the complex financial instruments they've set up.

My response: We get that in the computer field a lot: people who confiscate the passwords "for the good of all". We stick them in jail until they change their minds, then fire their asses for unethical behavior.

3) The bonuses are a contractual agreement.

My response. So are the Wisconsin teachers' pensions, but everyone is falling over themselves to explain why it is fair of the state to renege on that contract and unfair of the teachers to demand their contracts be honored in good faith.

I also pointed out that if not for my tax money and that of everyone else, these idiots would be standing on the street with a sign made from shirt cardboard saying "will work for food" while the rest of us tried to work out how we would survive the gazillion percent inflation they'd wished upon us and what we would do now our 401K plans had evaporated like an Iraqi WMD. Some acknowledgement of that might be in order *before* dipping into the funds for their next BMW.

'Computer GEEKS' snatch NOBEL Prize for chemistry - without using chemicals

Stevie

Re: Bah!

Re: Einstein. Big words for someone who had to get someone else to do the science to prove his maths worked. Important point: nothing Einstein ever did or said gave you a better fridge or a new form of transport or an iPhone. He can only be properly understood by hard sums experts and physicists and they believe in particles that go backward in time (or did when I was a twentysomething).

Lavoisier was guillotined by the French, which only goes to show you shouldn't do chemistry in France. Perhaps Einstein should have said "Chemistry is too upsetting to the French when they are in the mood to chop off heads". At least that would be supported by evidence.

To paraphrase Sir Humphrey Appleby:

Chemistry is fun. It is the Rolls Royce of science. It is the Science that Harrods would sell one. What more can I say?

Plus: a good chemistry lab is like a Bruce Willis movie on steroids. Explosions, belching flames, toxic spills, liquid nitrogen all over the floor and clouds of opaque and possibly deadly gasses rolling over the bench in a thick rolling carpet. A chemist must not only be a crackerjack scientist and a dab hand with the burette, he or she must also be an Olympic-class sprinter and jumper in order to escape other people's carelessness with the Kipp's.

What do physicists do of a day? Sit around a giant magnet in Switzerland that either doesn't work properly or produces such ambiguous answers that no-one understands or believes in them. I know which science I'd rather be photographed doing.

As for mathematicians, what can you say about a bunch of people who say they are working with "imaginary numbers" except that they have a future in politics?

Stevie

Bah!

Doing chemistry on a computer?!! Where's the fun in that for Lavoisier's sake?

Do-it-yourself Dropbox: Western Digital's My Cloud 2TB NAS box

Stevie

Re: Bah!

AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaand order cancelled when I got home and discovered that although I have Amazon Prime and although the link provided led to a unit offered via that service, that "two day mail" did not mean "arriving in two days" (that is in the TOS if you read it properly and I knew of the weasel words long before) but "fulfillment sometime next month at which point it will be delivered in two days". The earliest delivery date was November 4th and there was a two week leeway after *that*.

So I decided to wait. Lost sale.

Stevie

Re: There are lots of bad reviews...

Yeah, I saw those, but reading some of them I get the feeling that many of them were written by the "Instructions? We don't need no stinkin' instructions" crowd. All the higher reviews seemed more...erudite and knowledgable.

Of course, that could mean they have spent all night using mad NAS skliz to get the things working.

Stevie

Bah!

Thanks for the tip. New WD Cloudyness on the way as I type.

If it's naff there'll be hell to pay.

Thousands! of! Yahoo! Mail! users! driven! crazy! by! revamp!

Stevie

Re: And then there's Yahoo!Groups

Well, you can tell how invested the staff were in the revamp of Yahoo!Groups by the default picture thay plaster on every single group - a picture of a load of balls. I'm not making that up.

The groups were a useful and easy to use feature that built on the old Yahoo CLub format, but have been "enhanced" of late so that homepage pictures must conform to the banner size and shape (which isn't easily found anywhere).

The message streams which used to be easy to navigate have become a nightmare, catering as they do to a tablet of smartphone user (I think) at the cost of completely ufpucking the interface for old fashioned access through a computer for, say, administrative reasons.

Not only is over half the screen real estate given over to ads, they are now interpolated into the conversation threads as if they were postings by members. We used to call this "spam" and I went to great lengths in my most active group to prevent it happening so thank you Yahoo.

But best of all is the process that demands I change my password to Yahoo's idea of a "strong" one, then cannot remember the ****ing thing a week later. I try my password, get refused, ask for a reset and try using the password I *thought* I set (but obviously didn't because if I did it should work, right?) only to be told I can't pick a new password that matches the current one.

I can guess what is going on here - another disagreement on exactly how many characters should be in the password between the routine that judhges it "safe" and stores it away and the routine that grabs it for comparison afterwards. My password is too long for the ****ing checker, which submits a truncated one to the DB and, of course, gets a mismatch error back.

I worked in a UNISYS mainframe shop for umptytump years and learned to fear The Coming Of The New Crop Of CS Graduates who would start their illustrious careers by dropping support for the old and therefore obsolete FIELDATA encoding scheme from various high-visibility products, only to discover that they didn't know half as much as they thought they did, had completely broken the products they'd enhanced and were facing a right bollocking and unpaid overtime to put things back the way they were. It took about four years for each crop to ripen, move on and be replaced at which point the comic opera was played out again.

I thought I'd seen the last of this particular madness when I left the mainframe world, but I see it is alive and well at Yahoo. The sooner they re-employ someone who knows how the **** their systems work the better for everyone including the shareholders.

As for me, this has given me the impetus I needed to start seriously working on my own server, a project I've been wanting to try but had no earthly reason to do until now.

Amazon wrapping FireTube tellybox for Christmas – reports

Stevie

Bah!

"Love Film" ? Seriously? They make people in the UK click on "Love Films" to stream content?

And they say Americans have no sense of humour.

UK plant bakes its millionth Raspberry Pi

Stevie

Re: Nostalgic fortysomething

And if you move sharpish when she is really young you might finally be in a position to see the Pi do what it was thought up for, because young children will delight in a thing for its own sake.

Stevie

Re: the nightmare of the Beaglebone Black Evaluation of Frustrating Bollocks.

Forgot to mention: Extremely early adopter of both Pi and BBB. The Pi just took so long to arrive that two weeks after it was in my sweaty paws the new version with twice the memory was available in the US, so I got one of them too. The BBB I acquired was one of the first batch to roll out of the factory, and there were clear warnings on the thing that it might not be ready for prime time.

Mileages will hopefully vary. I encourage anyone who has had a better experience with the BBB to weigh in with their assurances of an easy time.

Stevie

Re: the nightmare of the Beaglebone Black Evaluation of Frustrating Bollocks.

I did what all proper Unix admins do and eschewed this "writing down what I did and why" step of the game for fear someone else would be able to do it without learning how the hard way and anyway I had more pressing things to do than documentation.

It amounted to the following:

Initial purpose-bought 32 gig micro SD card turned out to have *too much* memory for the BBB. I had to comb the area for an 8 gig card (becoming hard to find in my neck of the swamp) before the BBB would do more than do a lego brick impression when booted.

Odd as in "hard-to-find and expensive to acquire a cable for" mini HDMI slot parked so close on the board to another component (don't have the board here ATM but I *think* it was the USB port) that precluded using a simple adapter to step it up to the regular easy-to-find and cheap as chips size for fear the mini HDMI port would be torn from the board (it's a tight squeeze even with a purpose bought cable). Why was this port not shimmed to mitigate this obvious problem? None can say.

Then the bloody thing would not play with an old monitor via a HDMI-to-VGA coupler, though the same hook-up gave the Pi no problems at all apart from an initial blank screen when the firmware is polled instead of the startup console blither, and which doesn't happen on subsequent tries unless you plug the Pi into a bona fide HDMI capable monitor.

Oh, and the external USB Hub took a couple of restarts and a couple of different ones before it was recognized though both were named brands of hub.

That about covers the "Console Mode" boot.

Since sourcing that effing HDMI cable took forever I attempted to access it via the USB interface, from which an administrative webby control port and programming API for the main app (whose name I cannot remember). This is the primary way it is thought the device will be spoken to anyway, and the BBB runs a webby app server to facilitate doing so which on paper looks great.

Problem 1 - the initial "is the app working properly" page with embedded tests showed the page was *not* working properly though the programming workbench app was. I was instructed to download and reburn the OS image, at which point the app test page worked but the programming workbench stopped working.

Problem 2. The SSH app that loads in the browser (same as program workbench etc) would not open a session to the console. This was working fine before I reburned the SD card. I finally solved it by connecting using Putty, but I could not tell you why after that the browser-based thing started working. I made zero configuration changes. The workbench started working too after this. Obviously the problem was in the session, but what, why and how it got fixed? Put me down for a "Splunge" on that one.

At which point the cable arrived in theater but by then I'd lost the adapter I needed to daisy chain the other end to a useful connector (couldn't find a cable that would do everything itself) and after buying another for a mere $25 I was able to connect my HDMI monitor and a keyeboard and mouse to it and get it sizzling using the console.

The cost for all this ran to many times the costs incurred in acquiring the Pi and getting that working. The GUI on the BBB is more responsive than that on the Pi but the overall experience was better for me with the Pi.

That said it should be front and center in everyone's mind that the two machines are very different and intended for different markets. The Pi is primarily a programming workbench in intent, with a tiny but adequate amount of memory available. The BBB is a professional prototyping tool with no fixed mission in life with a large amount of memory on board.

Neither is an economic way of putting together a general use desktop machine given the availability of x86 type hardware and the wide variety of mature(ish) Linux variants that will run on 'em, though the BBB has more carpet for you to spread your digital crap over than the Pi does.

Both could be used in small and specialized devices/applications. The easiest ride and widest support would seem to be for the Pi, though the community has dirty laundry it doesn't like to talk about (as you've seen here).

I don't think either is a particularly good platform for teaching newcomers how to program in an age when struggling against the limitations of a machine for their own sake will be seen as a waste of time, but that is my opinion and not some sort of universal truth.

Good luck with whatever your project is.

Stevie

Re: They've done more than you ever will to promote some classroom coding, sunshine

Because schools have thirty odd TV's in the classroom to hook the Pis up to?

Stevie

Re: They've done more than you ever will to promote some classroom coding, sunshine

"Does that eMachine come with a monitor?"

Yes.

"Because that is the big cost. The rest? $30 if you don't already have some bits lying around."

I *said* all that. Are you including the cost of the case to put the Pi in? And the special cable you'll need to connect the Pi (relatively seamlessly thank Azathoth) to a non HDMI monitor? Or the SD card?

"As for the faults you are seeing - upgrade your firmware and/or your power supply. It's not the Pi's fault if you don't feed it enough. GUI, yes a bit slow - should get much better soon with the Wayland support going well."

Firmware at latest level. "Six months of buggering about" is short hand for technical stuff that includes that.

Power supply rated over and above that required by the Pi as recommended and supplied by Sparkfun - who can be trusted to do a decent job of vetting before vending and won't sell poorly designed cheap power supplies. Also - power supply used for heavier loads as test and came through with flying colours.

The GUI is slow and stutter and completely unfit for purpose. A slow GUI is like a blunt knife - worse than not having one in the first place.

However, the problem I see is with mouse click registration, specifically the double click, and has to do with the pixel spread over which the activity is detected as much as the speed. This verified in tests (included in "buggering about"). The only reliable way to use an icon to open an application or utility on the first try is to right click on it and select from the menu.

Just because you are in love with the idea of what has been attempted with the Pi, don't get over-invested with the thing. It has severe limitations that make it less-than ideal for the avowed job it was intended to do. Personally, I think the "off message" uses people are putting it to are the only thing saving the project. I acquired two of them for a colleague who won't buy stuff on the internet (Unix Admin, Properly Eccentric) and he has no kids. Wanted them for some bitcoin thing he was noodling with. I digress.

Even if every child with access to one at school had their own at home it wouldn't have driven one million units in sales.

In fact, the target use for the Pi for me was that I wanted to use it in a number of prop projects I have on the boil, but the power consumption makes it a non-starter for most of them. I'll probably be using Arduino in those. I'd rather have the British kit, but physics is getting in the way.

That said, the firing-up experience with the Pi was has been better all round on toast than the nightmare of the Beaglebone Black Evaluation of Frustrating Bollocks.

Stevie

They've done more than you ever will to promote some classroom coding, sunshine

Numbers?

Cos not for nothing, if you *don't* have a spare keyboard, mouse, USB hub, decent power supply and HD capable monitor lying around, the uptake is about the cost of an E Machine and the experience significantly less fulfilling.

And if you have those things at a school already, chances are you have the rest of the kit to go with it. Python will install just as readily on Windows as Linux, a far cheaper and less bothersome thing all round if you already have the windows investment.

And I speak as an early adopter, someone who has been running two Pis (that original one I waited six months to receive and the newer, better model that I got two weeks later) for fun and after six moths buggering about still thinks the GUI is so slow as to be an impediment (especially if you don't put in that powered hub - you'll be plagued by the secret double click insensitivity issue that no-one talks about openly).

I think there are a few kids messing with them, because I've seen them doing so on the web and here in the pages of El Reg. But I don't think those truckloads of Pis are being bought for kids in the main. Nosiree. I think they are being bought by college kids and professors, hobbyists who need a cheap controller and don't want to use Arduino and people who want a cheap set top box.

Because that is what the vast majority of web traffic about Pis is telling me.

There is a great clamour for the Pi here in the USA, where they can at times be hard to find, but they are being sought by old farts like me, not by kids.

Boffins spot LONE PLANET roaming interstellar void

Stevie
Trollface

Re: Dyson Sphere

[4 BenR] To paraphrase my daughter when being told we were going to visit Kennedy Space Center:

"Blah blah science. Blah blah math."

Twitter-mad twits trade 14 million shares in BANKRUPT zombie biz

Stevie

we don't accept foreign currency

Well, yes, but that only explains the part involved with arbitrage. It doesn't explain why P&P are so much higher than necessary, nor why the money only seems to buy the services of a snail with gout should you be so foolish as to make the deal, even when not running the gauntlet of eBay.

Fair disclosure: I'm a bibliophilic ex-pat in a book-crazy workforce who gets frequent visits from exasperated colleagues asking for an explanation of why such-and-such a book costs more than the already high cover price to ship, and takes months to make the journey.

I *tell* 'em it's gouging, that they'll pay for air mail and the parcel will travel by tramp steamer, and I've had it happen to me and to just not use UK sources who are fundamentally untrustworthy when it comes to this sort of thing (to tar with but a single brush, but it seems to be the order of the day) but they keep going back to the well and using me as a proxy when they need to yell about it.

Amercians, eh?

Personally, I look for US sources for UK books whenever possible, and I never use eBay for them any more because I know what I'm getting is what it says on the box with Amazon and I have a proper course for redress if it isn't so when I get the box open.

NASA Juno probe HOWLS past Earth - and goes into HIBERNATION

Stevie

Bah!

Well *I* shall not be adding any more inane morse chatter to the aether (W8YFL) partly because I never got my G4 certification, partly because I let my G8 license lapse thirty summod years ago, but mostly because I don't have a shed with a shortwave radio in it.

EU digital tsar 'Steelie' Neelie Kroes: Telcos must adapt to losing roaming cash

Stevie

Bah!

Kudos for the picture of Doctor Pinder-Schloss.

COMET DIAMONDS from SPACE found in Libya's glass desert

Stevie

Bah!

We must send in -T-h-e--M-a-r-i-n-e-s- a scientific peacekeeping force to secure this valuable desert of diamonds for democracy immediately!

Restart the government! Tell Halliburton there's a new -c-a-s-h--c-o-w- revenue stream up for grabs! Defrost Vice President Cheney and the rest of the Completely Unaffiliated With Big Armaments Think Tank!

Begin Operation Sparkly Freedom of Democracy!