Posts by Tom 7

Android Studio compilations may be CPU bound?

Not sure - Android Studio just seems to be incredibly slow. I've got 64Gflops of CPU and enough GPU to play Crisis and by the time AS is ready to talk to me I'm off down the pub.

I dont do a lot of development for android but when I do I use my phone plugged into the TV and AIDE on the phone itself.

As for PC sales - well I saw a reasonable 40" HD telly for <£200 the other day and stick a RPi2 on that and you've got something that will keep you're average desktop user happy. Amused the buggers in the telly shop when I tried it. A pi will fit nicely in 2 jacket pockets : PS + external NAS in one - HDMI lead and Pi in another and you've got a really nice device to BYOD.

Re: WTF?

I often wonder if Gartner are involved in some form of pump and dump. Reading their 'reports' certainly shows a lot of dumps.

Re: New form of lift

A relative of mine in the US has a condom shaped balloon. Alas it lives in the garage most of the time as it seems to piss off a lot of people over there and guns, lots and lots of guns....

Re: Looks like one of my own pictures of Mars

I have a couple of late Victorian Astronomy books in with that very picture of Mars in!

Re: Cost Benefit Analysis?

Here's a scenario for you - really sunny windy day with lots of over-generation of electricity. A smart meter made by an engineer with a pic controller in it and an old phone so it only costs about £20 more than the original beast.

The electricity price drops to bugger all. Your home system recognises its gone cheap cost it can blue-tooth/wifi into it and see its nice and cheap. You can heat your hot water for near free and granny can fill up her storage heaters without worrying herself to death.

Your system also learns that it can be nice and cheap at night and can do a bit of thinking for itself and heat your water on cheap electricity rather than gas or whatever.

All perfectly possible now - which may explain why the companies are desperate to fit the old 'smart' meters that they effectively got the government to agree to by 'lobbying' cos they know you will never crawl under the stairs to stare at a shit LCD to see if its worth saving a couple of quid by turning the immersion on.

Re: And the problem is?

One part of the problem would be that the cost of managing the sale of crap cutlery to the staff and the discussion of same in meetings would far exceed the cost of giving the cutlery away for free.

Crapita are so used to charging their customers for badly miss-micro-managing their work they've now started to eat their own shit.

Re: Excellent article

Prejudice and ignorance are really easy to deal with - Double Blind tests. No fucker can tell the difference - you dont even get the placebo effect that might come with homoeopathy. Its all marketing woo.

Work out the Doppler effect from the warm air rising from your body while sitting on the sofa and then follow the link to buy some of my special 'air stop' foam at £200 a cubic meter, or alternatively my £10,000 room conditioning tape which you string across the room to prevent air flow.

Re: Transit vans

Ironically a fully loaded transit van is actually smaller than an unladen one - assuming the suspension is still intact.

Re: Burn them....

with methane hydrate to cover all options.

Re: It does seem as if its a bit of a hole @Peter

There was a third transmission received - it does look like access is a bit more restricted than one would want. Rosetta's orbit is being moved to see it they can improve things. I have my fingers crossed but not too tightly.

Re: That's not the point

@ Trevor_Pott Thas how revolutions used to start - ooh look topless girl on a mountain!

Re: 20mtr up.

And 20mtr horizontally in a huge number of cases.

Re: Speaking as a Scientist...

"No, Linux machines have build processes that require root elevation without justification."

Until you make a reasonable request to IT for permission to do what you need to do and then you will be given permission to do that (not as su) and accept the responsibility that goes with that.

The sensible thing is to stop anything happening until you are sure it should. MS could learn from that.

Re: providing the world's population with the protein it needs to survive.

"Meat isn't the most efficient way of utilising land to produce protein for humans. "

Actually in some places it is. You'll get something from a mountain top from goats and sheep. And ditto for a lot of land that is marginal. The broads used to produce more food as 'foetid marshes' in the form of eels (Ely cathedral was paid for with them), ducks and water reed roots than any modern farming method can.

Nature has a remarkably efficient way of filling areas of land with a combination of plants and animals - and insects which should be eaten too - and, while it currently wont make a flavourless, nutrition-less white loaf for the market as cheaply as modern farming methods as food prices rise we will be ditching the tractor for slightly more man-power hungry methods of growing more food than monocultures can.

Re: There's always

There were stories of a cooker not far from a transmitter playing Radio2 continuously as it arced over a very small gap.

Re: Failed?

Unit testing in a nutshell - destroy everything and then run away.

If this happens outside london we'll get plenty of help

all those media choppers will keep the windmills whizzing round!

if you're over 15

you will have seen all the jokes in the big bang and spot the ones coming in friends - long before the canned laughter man hits the button. Weeks before in some cases.

Re: European Extremely Large Telescope...

Nowadays its more of a get as high as possible so there ain't so much air to get through! Its nice and high up where they're building these monsters so you get less weather, less air to reflect back any street lights, less wobbly air to correct for. There are places in europe that high (2500m+) but the vibration from snowboarders hitting the doors would make it impractical.

I'd be interested to see if their are any figures for less brain power in the scientists who work at this height - I notice problems standing up these days.