Posts by M Gale

Walking to school

Oh, the moment I got into high school I was quite happy to walk there. However, you'll find some parents not very eager to let their darling 8 year olds out of their sight even on the way to primary school, understandably enough.

That must be a bloody big pocket.

And talk about headache-inducing.

Neat effect though, until you figure out it's just a TV with the image upside down/mirrored and a giant parabolic mirror. Not so much 3D as floating 2D.

This post had a point, but then I lost it.

Re: Unix?

Linux, compatible with every class-compliant webcam, which is almost every webcam made in the last few years. No driver needed. Insert webcam. Open app. Use webcam.

If you're going to quip, at least be right.

Re: Law Backwards

You mean like a national registry of identities? A national identity register perhaps?

Yeah, that didn't work out too well for the last government. Issues of trust and function-creep, and all. Plus the expense, plus forcing people onto it.

Personally if someone asks me for ID, I show them the bare skin atop my scalp and declare that as my proof of age. You can use whatever bit of plastic will be accepted.

USB Thumb Drive?

Last time I tried saving a game onto a USB flash device, the 360 wouldn't even spot it. Fine if you have a .wmv on the drive that you want to play, less fine if you want to spend half the price on a shitload more storage than the official game save cartridges.

I'm writing negative comments because this (and the PS3 Slim) remind me so much of the Sega Megadrive 2 - a device that was smaller, slimmer, cost a whole lot less to manufacture but was otherwise no different (if anything, less capable thanks to the removal of the headphone socket) to the original Megadrive. To many people at the time it was a true indication that Sega had jumped the shark. It was rightly derided. And yet Sony and Microsoft can do the same thing and get nothing but praise? Methinks not.

For Americans, s/Megadrive/Genesis/;

App idea

The server provides a web interface that shows a list of high scores. The client monitors for sudden signal degradation and counts this as one point. The high score list can be sorted by user, phone/device model, OS revision.. oh, all sorts of interesting variables.

Anyone got a Mac to play with?

"Arrogant, Violent, Speeding, Weaving, Law-breaking, Polluting, Arseholes!"

And for another bit of anecdotal evidence, none of the bikers I know are anywhere near as bad as you've just painted them. That includes the HA riders and the occasional geriatric with the "Grot Bike Winner" award on the mantelpiece.

Okay, so maybe the HA guys can get a little loud, but no worse than the Bastard after a good Friday night.

Speed limiters on a bike. Sure. Fit them to cars too while you're at it. Especially the bastards who like to scream past the motorised or non-motorised two-wheelers and who gives a flying fuck if it causes an accident?

Ever been on a bicycle and caught in the slipstream from a boy racer who thinks he's God's Gift to Silverstone?

re: re: Menu bar

"As usual, Opera does things properly, everyone then catches up a couple of years later."

Using up almost every ounce of my 1GB RAM plus swap partition to display a single tab? Yeah, I suppose you're right. That and Turbo has never worked.

The movable tabs and mobile-view are a nice idea, but please, why do people evangelise so much about a browser that's more bloated than most?

Changing sparkplugs on an MG F

Open the bonnet... no engine.

Open the boot.. no engine.

So how do you change the sparkplugs? Well that's easy. You drive it onto a ramp and jack the thing up until you can stand underneath. Then you change the sparkplugs.

www.heavens-above.com

Very useful site, for anyone who fancies trying to spot the ISS. Depending on how close it gets, it's bright enough to see on an evening pass so try checking for "all passes" as well as "visible passes". The website seems to automatically mark any passes made before absolute darkness as not visible.

Also a pair of 20x50 binoculars seems enough to make the station go from "very bright moving dot" to "very wobbly elongated dot". At some point I'll get the chance to spot it with some proper optics in a region that doesn't have an orange sky at night.

You teach Linux? Really?

Then I guess you know already that it doesn't matter what desktop environment the user chooses. Applications written for Gnome tend to work in KDE as well, and vice versa. Any halfway-competent distribution just grabs whatever dependencies it needs.

Even with that kitchen-sink approach, you're still probably going to end up with less than half of the bloat of your average Windows 7 install, so why not just install all the common window manager libraries and let the users and developers both have whatever they enjoy using the most?

As for which apps will work on what distro, well I can only speak for the occasional commercial game that is released "for Linux". I can assure you that Epic and Id's products have worked on every distribution I've tried them on. That said, I haven't tried installing Doom 3 on a Belkin router yet. Your mileage may vary.

IM server, what? I think if you're wanting to run an IM server, you're already getting way into techie territory and beyond what 99.9% of users will want to do. If it takes a little minor fiddling with a config file, so what? And would you not have the bewildering array of IM protocols under any operating system?

Standardising on one interface means you will piss off everyone who doesn't like that interface. Good luck getting a successful distribution going that supports Gnome but not KDE, or KDE but not Gnome. And getting every distribution to use the same kernel version? Did you not read that allegorical tale of the cathedral and the bazaar? Yeah, good luck.

So far, so yawn. You've come up with the same tired old arguments that were incorrect five years ago and even more incorrect now. Linux's biggest problem as a domestic OS is simply that old catch 22. No market = no developers = no market. Everything else is sorted, drivers included. Even that old wifi chestnut is fading fast, and any problems there are probably as much to do with the same catch 22 as anything else.

So yes. Written on my Ubuntu laptop. It's quite nice actually. And not shit-brown either. I know how to change background colours.

Hang on, what?

By your argument, whenever I connect my laptop to the Internet, Virgin reserve the right to install spyware on my machine. As do any intermediate networks my packets may happen to travel through. Oh, and if I connect to a free wifi point somewhere, the owners of that AP reserve the right to run SSLstrip and snaffle my usernames and passwords.

I really don't give a damn who's network MY device is connected to. It's my device. Period.

And how are you supposed to use a phone, without connecting to a network? Isn't that the point of a phone?

Ahwell. Increasingly glad I never bothered with the whole smartphone craze. I may end up developing for them at some stage, but I'll be damned if I ever use one as more than a test platform. Google, you'd better change this, quick. Openness and "freedom" is the only differentiator between you and Apple at the moment. Secret remote installation of software is the sort of thing I'd expect a virus to get up to. Really, what the hell were the people who thought this up smoking?

Re: Cloudy Computing

The idea of Eucalyptus is that you can run your own personal "cloud" (which seems to be as nebulous a term as its sky-borne namesake). As for uses.. well I imagine if you've got a business with a lot of workstations in it, maybe there's some sense in ploughing a fair amount of money into a HAL-strength server while the workstations are cheapy not-so-dumb terminals? Of course, your mileage may vary.

Browsers slower than native code? Whodathunkit?

See that's the problem. A computer game is whizzy and fast, and more than likely running native code. It's probably been made in C, C++ or some other compiled language that's designed around being speedyquick, with maybe some custom high-level script welded into the game engine itself.

In comparison, a browser is somewhere above Visual BASIC in terms of layers of abstraction. It's effectively a virtual machine that runs (x)HTML and Javascript in a nice sandbox where it (theoretically, I know) can't break anything else. Not so good for speed, but certainly better than the computer game approach for downloading random code from untrusted sites that may or may not be trying to use your computer as a drone.

Frankly, I'm surprised browsers run as quickly as they do, given the amount of crap that goes into your average rendering engine these days (a gajillion different lexers/parsers for different markup languages, exceptions for common badly-coded pages that don't follow the standards, exceptions for pages coded for badly-programmed browsers by Microsoft..).

Oh, the obligatory XKCD link: http://xkcd.com/676/

Re: Alternatively (take 2)

For both AndrueC, and whoever left a downvote without explaining why:

Many of my "support calls" (being the local person "who knows computers" has advantages and disadvantages) usually revolve around the Windows partition being so totally buggered it requires a reinstall. There's a fair few times when a run-through with various malware scanners and a general de-cluttering helps, but when the something has decided to b0rk and take out C:\WINDOWS with it, there's not much that can be done.

And these people want me to "just install a new Windows". And yes, by that they mean they want me to download an unauthorised copy from somewhere and install it. Sorry, but no. Either you look after the disks you got with the machine, back up whatever crappy "recovery partition" came with it, or be prepared to spend Microsoft prices.

It's funny, the amount of people who decide to find someone else who is willing to grab some virusbomb from the pirate bay for them after I've given the verdict of "it's goosed, you need a Windows disk". Personally I couldn't give a stuff, but it can be mildly amusing to get another call a couple of months later when their newly "fixed" computer is running slow because it's acting as a clandestine bestiality pr0n server.

So yes. Just install Windows. Just don't expect anybody to pay for it unless they are made of money. And no, Windows does not come with every driver under the sun... nowhere near, in fact. Wherever all that bloat comes from, it's certainly not hardware support.

The one or two people brave enough to take the "try Ubuntu. It's free, legal, it'll let you do youtube/music/facebook/word processing/instant messaging, and you can always buy and put Windows on later if you want games" option have generally not been disappointed, funnily enough. Plus they get rubbery windows, which is always a plus.