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Can I mount a Rasberry Pi in Duplo blocks?
Posts by Nigel 11
3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
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I need to multitask, but Windows 8's Metro won't let me
Thursday 31st May 2012 15:23 GMT
Choice
Gnome 3 really p*ssed off Gnome 2 users because it went against the whole Open Source ethos by denying them CHOICE. The Choice to stick with Gnome 2, or to instal both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 on the same system until they decided which they liked most. It's as if Microsoft had inflicted the Metro UI on us not as a new product (which is bad enough) but as an automatic upgrade to Windows 7. Gnome should have forked Gnome 3 and looked for a new maintainer or developer for the Gnome 2 project.
However, although Gnome made life hard for Gnome 2 users, there is still choice. Scientific Linux, Centos and RHEL6 all stuck with Gnome 2. There's Cinnamon. There's Trinity Desktop (which is derived from KDE 3, but I believe that it can happily coexist with KDE 4). There are more than a few other window managers.
In the Windows world, there's no choice, just whatever UI Microsoft supplies.
Thursday 31st May 2012 15:12 GMT
Doomed to failure?
Microsoft are not doomed until their customers realize that there's nothing left for them with Microsoft, and start moving to Apple or to Linux. So far they're only at ther stage of bitching loudly and hoping, praying, that someone at Microsoft will listen.
Microsoft will be doomed the day they announce the Windows 7 support termination date with only Windows 8 as an upgrade path. On that day IT departments all over the place will commit to their plan B and it'll all be over for Microsoft.
If Microsoft shareholders are smart, Ballmer will have been sacked before then, and the new boss's first pronouncement is that Windows 7 will be maintained until there is something acceptable to replace it with.
SpaceX signs deal to put its giant rocket to good use
Fedora aims cloudwards with Beefy Miracle release
Wednesday 30th May 2012 12:07 GMT
Re: Fedora is all very nice and all...
The nice thing about Linux is that if you don't like a UI, you can choose another one. It's easier with some distros than others, but there again one has a lot of choice of distro.
Think I'll be checking out Mint shortly. Also on my list are Trinity (UI derived from KDE3) and Cinnamon (classic Gnome UI implemented with Gnome 3 libraries). The reactionary distro is Scientific Linux (or Centos or RHEL6) which still use Gnome 2 and promise several more years support.
Still think that whoever inflicted the Gnome 3 "everything is a tablet" interface on us ought to face a long time in purgatory. About as much time as he or they wasted of other people's lives, preferably forced to work 24/7 with a truly diabilical ever-shifting omni-awful UI that looks a bit like Metro, but works less well.
Microsoft forbids class actions in new Windows licence
Wednesday 30th May 2012 11:52 GMT
Re: the EULA is worth jack shit
Does the USA allow one to waive one's legal rights in this way? Or at all?
Also given the nature of lawyers in general and USA lawyers in particular, I wonder if Microsoft won't be facing a class action lawsuit from the legal profession concerning this nefarious attempt to prevent citizens from asserting their legal rights, thereby depriving lawyers of their right to profit thereby? Sooner rather than later?
Assange loses appeal against extradition to Sweden
Wednesday 30th May 2012 11:45 GMT 
What the UK should have done
Why haven't we (the UK) obtained an assurance from the Swedish authorities that Assange will be returned to British jurisdiction if he so desires, after he is found not guilty by a Swedish court, or after he serves his sentence in Sweden if he is found guilty?
That would kybosh all the conspiracy stuff about it being a front for extraditing him to the USA, and clear the path for an allegation of sexual misconduct to be dealt with in the proper way. (I don't say "rape" because what I've read suggests it isn't. Statutory rape, maybe). It could also have been done in days.
If course if the Swedes refused this, it would prove the conspiracy!
Super-powerful Flame worm could take YEARS to dissect
Wednesday 30th May 2012 11:31 GMT
Smart Geeks
Smart Geeks also don't do work that gives anyone a reason to kill them.
I can't remember where I first read it, but the all-time classic along this line involves pure mathematics. If you were to find a fast algorithm to factorize a huge number into its only two prime factors, your only hope (other than keeping it secret to your grave) would be to spam your paper as far and wide as you could, and then go into hiding for a few months until the powers that be worked out that it could not ever be suppressed.
Most mathematicians believe such an algorithm to be impossible. If there are any that justifiably think otherwise, they have good reason to keep quiet about it!
Trekkie wants to build USS Enterprise … in twenty years
Monday 28th May 2012 13:54 GMT
Not that bad, probably
As far as we know the density of gram-sized dust in interstellar space is low enough that one wouldn't hit one (to a high degree of probability).
Much smaller dust would be dangerous. Carrying your reaction mass as ice frozen into a long thin cylinder with the crew quarters at the back end ought to work, as long as none of the incoming dust generated enough energy to blow the whole mass to pieces, or enough gammas to fry the crew.
Monday 28th May 2012 13:36 GMT
Rad-shielding
Actually, not. You use inverse-squares. Keep the crew quarters a good long way away from the (unshielded) reactor. With micro-G acceleration, a boom can be very long and very thin. Or you use an unmanned nuclear tugboat and a very long string.
If you meant rad-shielding against solar flares, that's a bigger problem. Although with nuke propulsion, you can probably afford a large cylindrical mass to put between the crew refuge and the sun.
Free Windows 8 desktop app development is dead
Monday 28th May 2012 13:25 GMT 
Qt, anyone?
I'd suggest hobbyists, or anyone else who doesn't actively want to restrict their software to Windows 8, take a look at an open widget kit. Qt is awesome. WxWidgets is easier to get started with. There's also Tcl/Tk.
While you're at it, dump the MS languages and learn Python, or some other open scripting language.
Then your app should work on pretty much any flavour of Windows or Linux or Mac, and you won't be helping Microsoft to lock anyone else into their walled garden/ prison.
Man's car warns of AIR RAID OVER LONDON
Monday 28th May 2012 12:12 GMT
Re: Bullfights?
Please, PLEASE someone post a link to the draft standard with all the possibilities in it!
I wonder if there is a huge list of $ANIMAL on road for all likely and unlikely values of large mammal, bird or reptile? I wonder if there is one for the peculiarly English "Police holding up traffic so mother and baby ducks /swans can cross the road"?
Steve Jobs' death clears way for vibrating Apple tool
Monday 28th May 2012 11:45 GMT
Re: Deja vu from recent Reg headlines
Did he ever say he hated styli? Or just that he hated devices that needed a (device-specific) stylus?
If the latter, I'm with him. One should be able to use any not-very-pointed stick. I find a Bic Biro with the cap on almost perfect, and cheap enough to lose one daily without caring.
Monday 28th May 2012 11:40 GMT
Re: So
The thing I've never understood is what's wrong with an ordinary stylus?
Its key advantage over a finger is very simple. It has a point. Not sharp enough to damage the touch-screen, but sharp enough to interact to millimeter precision. For some modes of use, an un-augmented finger is too blunt an instrument.
And its disadvantage? It gets lost.
I 'd solve this problem the same way I solve it with everyday writing implements. Make them cheap and make there be lots of them lying around. In fact with my (not-very-smart) touch-screen phone, it's a biro (with the cap on) that I use to control it most of the time, reserving the pull-out telescopic stylus for times when there's no biro to hand. The phone is supposed to be finger-operable, but I find it so much easier using a biro.
I can see that the haptic stylus might be a plus for certain minority categories of usage and user. For most of us, a biro will suffice. You can also use it to write on paper!
Mr. Biro should be proud. His invention may outlast the everyday using of paper.
People-powered Olympic shopping mall: A sign of utter tech illiteracy
Monday 28th May 2012 10:42 GMT
Re: The problem is kiloWatt-hours
Emphatically not. Energy = Power times time. Kilowatts times hours for this unit. It should help remind anyone with a few brain cells to spare that the cost will relate to the power of the appliance multiplied by the amount of time it's turned on (or unnecessarily left on).
It's not a metric unit, but it's a useful one. Are the metrication fanatics seriously contemplating abolishing the hour, day and year (and birthdays!) and measuring time exclusively in kilo- mega- and giga-seconds? If not, they should accept the logical consequences, that units with time measured in hours or days may make a lot more sense in appropriate contexts.
Even scientists do this. When it comes to the distance of stars and galaxies, they work in Light-Years, not petameters (and exa- and zetta- and yocta- ). Why? Because the light-year makes perfect sense in cosmological terms. Ten billion light-years means what you are looking at happened ten billion years ago, when the universe was much younger.
Monday 28th May 2012 10:19 GMT
Sci-Fi
FTL Travel and Time travel are effectively the same thing (if General Relativity is right). Both are impossible, at least for anything larger than a subatomic particle, if current physics is correct.
Uploading consciousness is not believed to be impossible. We simply don't know. Perhaps there is a fundamental problem (consciousness *may* be a quantum phenomenon). Perhaps not. It may be a mere technological problem, that will be solved within decades or centuries.
The "hardest" SF doesn't wilfully break the generally believed laws that govern our universe. It runs with them.
Monday 28th May 2012 10:08 GMT
Energy / Power isn't complicated
It's just taught badly.
Everyone has an intrinsic feel for water, so do it this way. Energy is the total amount of water that goes down a pipe. Power is the rate at which it does so.
A toilet is high power, but flushes don't last long. A dripping tap is low power, but over a day will expend more water than flushing a toilet.
Electrical power relates to the flow of electricity rather than water.
If the height that the water descends is fixed, then there is an exact analogy (stored water has potential energy). Electrical voltage is analagous to pressure (which is determined by height).
Water also has the advantage that kids can muck around with it in a "lab" with no risk of anything other than getting wet.
Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'
Fake Angry Birds app makers fined £50k for shock cash suck
Russian satellite beams home 121-megapixel pics of Earth
Thursday 24th May 2012 10:00 GMT
Can do / can't do
the USA won the space race, and just about everything else in the 1950s and 1960s, because of a can-do attitude. How times have changed.
Today, the West is tying itself up in ever-increasing tangles of bureaucracy and red tape run by people whose attitude is 100% can't-do. If it's not explicitly allowed in the rulebook, it can't be done, so there's no point trying and it's our job to stop you if you disagree. My feeling is that the USA's version of this is rather more agressive than the UK/EU version, but both impede progress most successfully.
I expected the can-do magic to pop up somewhere else in the world. Russia?!
Why can't ICANN just 'get s**t done', ask dot-brand hopefuls
Wednesday 23rd May 2012 15:12 GMT
Re: Maybe because
Why indeed?
I wonder whether the folks buying these new TLDs have thought it through, or whether it's just a dot-vanity project costing what's less than petty cash to a large ego's corporation?
I have trouble remembering URLs and extra TLDs won't help at all. Google doesn't forget and doesn't care.
Big Bang secrets hidden in hundreds of petabytes of tape
'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8
ALL NHS patient records online by 2015
Monday 21st May 2012 18:34 GMT 
It's all a ghastly plan ...
... to make sure that anyone suffering from any, er, embarassing condition, takes himself or herself to a private clinic rather than getting treated on the NHS. Because it will soon be common knowledge that anything you've been treated for on the NHS will be public knowledge available to your spouse or to your prospective employer in exchange for a few tenners in some dodgy pub.
But if you think them knowing about your easily cured STD is bad enough, just think about the possibility of being made unemployable for life because one of your parents has been diagnosed with a slowly fatal incurable disease that you have a one in four chance of having inherited. Or that you're the parent, and you want to spare your kids until they are a bit older.
Happy goldfish bowl ....
What's copying your music really worth to you?
Monday 21st May 2012 16:41 GMT
Re: CDs are only a delivery mechanism now
Speak for yourself, and read what I said. I have nothing against uncompressed or losslessly-compressed bitstreams on whatever media, and these days you can put tens of uncompressed CDs on a cheap memory stick. But if you can enjoy the sound of a C-major chord polluted with random C-sharps and E-flats and other tones that are not even a part of the twelve-note chromatic scale, then you do not have an ear for tonal music.
Monday 21st May 2012 16:05 GMT 
A way forward
This probably wouldn't work with popular music, but if one of the large music companies offered me a way to listen to anything in their entire classical catalogue whenever I wanted for a monthly subscription fee in the Sky-TV ballpark, I'd jump at it. If it used DRM to prevent me making copies I'd still take it. I'd rather listen to a different performance every time, than revisit the exact same one I'd bought.
Provided - PROVIDED - it was an uncompressed or losslessly-compressed bitstream hitting my DAC.
It'll never happen. Well, not unless the world's musicians get their tech act together and tell Sony et al to go jump in a volcano.
Monday 21st May 2012 15:35 GMT
Re: CDs are only a delivery mechanism now
I don't listen to compressed music at all. Digital compression creates non-harmonic distortion: frequencies in the output that are non-integer multiples of the input frequency, that have no musical relationship whatsoever to the source. For anyone with a liking for tonal music and a decent ear, this is fairly close to torture.
It's nothing to do with headphones. Even a cheap pair of 'phones is quite a high-fidelity reproduction device, and if they distort at all, it's harmonic distortion unless you have the volume up dangerously high. As for vinyl vs CDs, one can prove by measurement that the vinyl introduces the greater distortion. However, it's pleasant-sounding low-harmonic distortion, so it's understandable if some folks actually prefer it ito a CD.
Resistance is futile? Memristor RAM now cheap as chips
Monday 21st May 2012 16:21 GMT
Re: Endurance
It's not a whole lot worse than TLC flash!
With decent controller architecture and a lot of spare bits, you could today make a decent memory stick or SSD out of this. OK, you'd not want to use it as cache or index storage for a busy database.
If it has small pages instead of huge ones like flash, and if that 3000 is worst-case not average life, it might actually be better than TLC already.
Microsoft to devs: Don't ruin Win 8 launch with crap code
UK prosecutions for hacking appear to be be dropping
Iran threatens to chuck sueball at Google over missing gulf
Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones
Friday 18th May 2012 14:02 GMT
Re: Anecdotal story about a dodgy buy on the street
in the Canaries, they don't even bother to pretend that the Rolexes are genuine. They pile them high and sell them cheap. If anyone thinks they're buying the real thing they're idiots, and if anyone from Rolex thinks they are losing money because of it, they're also idiots.
I bought one so my decent watch didn't get ruined by sand or saltwater. It was branded Rolexe (sic).
Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK
Japanese operator to test quake-proof floating phone-mast BLIMPS
Tuesday 15th May 2012 11:43 GMT
Re: That truck is problematic.
Definitely. You want pre-installed autonomous solar-powered emergency cells. Smart enough to configure themselves, both into non-interfering cells for the mobiles and for mesh communication with surviving neighbours.
And how to turn them on? I'd suggest smart enough to listen to the "proper" fixed cellphone infrastructure, and turn themselves on if that dies. Smart enough to link into it at the edges of the disaster area would be a plus. But I'm wondering, why normally off? In rural areas they might as well be [part of?] the normal network in everyday operation. Possibly even in cities, unless they have to be fundamentally incompatible with operation in a high cell-density network.
Anything that can't be done with existing hardware? I don't think so. It's a software problem!
For our next trick, we work out how to deliver a replacement cellphone network to a disaster area by bomber. (Planes which are usually sitting around doing nothing when a natural disaster strikes, long range, may as well use them for good as well as evil). Thinks: anchor, tether, electronics package, combination drogue / blimp support that inflates on the way down. A helium cylinder could double as an anchor, the tether could be a tube. Same form factor as the usual military payload?
Fastest-ever hydrocarb scramjet hits Mach 8, doesn't explode
Tuesday 15th May 2012 10:29 GMT
Re: Makes you think though...
So what is the military use? I'd have thought that if they can make the technology reliable, it's for delivering conventional explosives onto mobile targets ... this thing may be too fast to intercept and too fast to move when you spot it coming.
But also a good step towards Earth to Orbit without needing huge expensive rockets to lift fairly small payloads. Ultimately, this might lead to a genuine spaceplane, if HOTOL doesn't get there first .
Intel CEO predicts DOOM for fab industry and competitors
BOFH: Siri, why do users lie?
Queen unveils draft internet super-snoop bill - with clauses
Wednesday 9th May 2012 18:07 GMT
Re: Note for GCHQ:-
Looks like a business opportunity to me. Start researching Swiss law now, for a service you can sell to respectable people who worry about journalists, PIs and spouses getting access to logs that are supposed to be for MI5 only.
Swiss, because they're a country that will cooperate with law enforcement agencies, but where they still believe in privacy. The really bad guys will find other more bribeable jurisdictions ... or possibly, put their servers afloat in the Pacific garbage patch or in orbit!
Wednesday 9th May 2012 17:59 GMT
http://www.random.org?junk=a-long-string-of-random-garbage
I wonder how long this new surveillance regime will survive if some malware gets distributed which (invisibly) does the equivalent of browsing something much like the above every couple of seconds (or milliseconds), and ignores the error responses. Their logs will fill up with the random hexadecimal strings.
Some infinitessimal part of which might be steganographically concealed messaging?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
