Posts by Tom 7 8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Or maybe the employees normally like their jobs and are just waiting for Battistelli to be replaced.
I've worked in a couple of places where the management have a little difficulty realising that certain of their ilk are not fit for the job but unless they actually want to close the EPO then they will find a way of getting rid of this tosser.
You do realise that if all the biomass on earth was dna and you blew the earth up and by some magic none of the dna died by the time it reached the nearest planet there would be enough for 1 piece of dna for every 500Km^2 of an earth sized planet. The chances of actually getting a single cell that could function IF it found somewhere it could live and reproduce are close enough to zero for me to laugh at the idea.
Panspermia is pretty laughable really. Have you seen a meteor flashing across the sky at night? Pretty much anything organic is going to be roasted. Then there's larger ones that stay cooler inside - how do you get them off a planet - given it would take something like a meteor impact on that said planet and that can shatter quartz so dna stands no chance. And if it did stand a chance how can it have evolved to survive the radiation that space will fling at it for the billions of years it needs to realistically travel between the stars?
And then there is the really bit question - if it didnt start on earth where did it start and how? Panspermia is slightly less likely than God and just as lazy a conclusion.
Its taken us a good 3 billion years to get to the point of destroying the planet to the point where someone on another one nearby could be sure there was some life here. It took the universe 11 billion years to get the ingredients together to make a solar system and a planet that could nurture life, Any where else that got to the elements necessary for life earlier is probably too explosively active in terms of stars emitting high energy crap and shit flying around to sustain organic chemicals for long let alone for life to evolve enough to try and untie its own umbilical cord.
We are probably not the first but if there is some other life out there its very likely to be so far away for us not to be able to see it yet. But dont worry - we still have pubs!
Most washing machines seem to be fuckups anyway - in order to get A rating they seem to need have no hot water connection - they cant say if the hot water is efficiently heated so rather than risk it...
I personally would like a smart meter that does nothing other than tell me electronically what the price is and for how long the price will last so my home energy management system (which may or may not co-operate with my neighbours to ensure we dont push the price up) can do the best it can with it.
I think I can see sales of personal EMP devices going well in the not too distant future.
@d3vy. The solution to the problem is to stop trying to make phones slim. There is no need for it - other than to make them easier to snap but that's not really a benefit to the customer. Everyone seems perfectly happy to make their phone 3 times as thick or more by putting it in a case so why not stop burning people pockets and arses and just make the thing solid and fit for purpose in the first place?
I dont want Softbank. I wanted ARM - it will hold Softbank up for decades to come but it would have been so much better left to its own devices if you'll pardon the pun. I thought ARM would easily go up by 500% in a decade - I doubt Softbank will go up by 100% in that time even with ARM puffing them up.
You've never used a Psion5 or similar. You can hold it in your palm and do things, or hold it in two hands and type with two thumbs, and then pop it in your pocket. Or leave it on your desk and touch type away. Its so much better than having a keyboard for your phone.
I used my P5 to take notes of serial numbers under the floorboards while holding a torch in my mouth - in the days when cameras wouldnt fit under the floorboards!
Your getting old! You can re-write commands you keep accidentally typing so they call the windows equivalent. Just remember not to try and pipe/tee them all together - I haven't been on Windows for a while but they seemed to go out of their way to make that as unproductive as possible.
A BSc - but not Hons. And then straight into a non-technical job So better than a PPE but only up to clicking the headings on a pivot table. It is terrifying the lack of real digital skills and knowledge 'up there'. I wonder if they are as afraid of technical nous as most managers seem to be.
You dont want a decent bluetooth keyboard - you want a decent bluetooth docking station perhaps. As I said in another post I've done some playing with my phone and linux and a keyboard and its very good but its not held together firmly like the the P5 and certainly doesnt drop into a top pocket with ease - or any pocket come to that. The P5 was an ergonomic delight - something long replaced by 'design' and 'thin' but by far more useful.
and with a decent keyboard attached. And to my surprise and delight its usable. No its really useable. There's a few things need working out - zooming and stuff but its a hell of a lot better than the android interface. ISTR two thumbed typing was pretty OK. I think we may be onto something here!
It used to fit in the top pocket of my shirt - amazed people when popped out from under the jacket and wielded in battle.
Used to fall out when bending over - did get a friend to make a shoulder holster for it which stopped it falling out but needed a rethink but even if it was only pi-zero powerful I'd re-visit that any day.
We had a rather large H&S manual produced by an overenthusiastic OCD bloke. When asked if I'd read it I facetiously said 'Yes but I got a paper cut' and not long later took delivery of a laminated version that would have given an olympic weightlifter a hernia. I nearly filled out an incident form to complain of hysteria pains.
If the adapteva chips coming back next month work out OK they look a whole better fit for this sort of thing - and possibly 5 times the TFLOP per W of the best GPU processors.
https://www.parallella.org/2016/10/05/epiphany-v-a-1024-core-64-bit-risc-processor/
And the million core version looks interesting too!
Now all we need is AI that can tell WTF it thinks it is doing...
Oh and you forgot to mention Brian2
You'd think it might be but is it mathematically proven that it wont have collisions within the same range?
As an aside just proving a 1/2 million character PDF document has not been changed is irrelevant as I doubt its ever been read in the first place - that's potentially >10,000 pages.
seriously - if you have some beer brewing and dont cover it properly the little buggers are attracted by the smell and will drop in and the CO2 sorts them out asap. To make it more efficient you just need some see-saw things round the lip to tip them in.
If you homebrew cider I believe it will dissolve the bastards and improve the flavour.
But cold beer does not beat the heat! If drunk in the quantity required to reduce your temperature it closes down the blood vessels in the stomach and the body actually increases its metabolic rate to counteract the effect. A couple of swift pints of real ale are far more effective and dont leave that nasty aftertaste.
Do you not think it would immediately cost more than it should as people ripped it off.
As for the Drake Equation - it needs more data to define the ballpark that would be necessary to get anywhere near a solution that would show it needs a lot more data to to bring that ballpark into our universe.
Not CCTV but a bit of advice. We used to live on a very busy road parking wise and parked up an alleyway at the side of the house and frequently arseholes parked on the yellow lines at the end of our driveway blocking sometimes 3 cars in. We used to phone the police and they would get the offending vehicles towed by a private company if they couldn't contact the vehicles owner and they would have to pay over £300 to get the vehicle back - we got nothing despite loosing a lot of money it taxi and other cost in not being able to use our own cars.
We were advised we could go to the small claims court to recover any costs to us due to the tossers but the police said they couldn't give use the drivers details - unless we were registered with some parking ripoff group.
Fun could be had with a trolley jack and a couple of cast iron bollards but this was not technically allowed but did amuse those involved.
BT was making a good profit for the country. In fact just after privatisation they made £400 million for the new shareholders by changing accounting practices!
As someone who was working on microchips at the time that BT and openreach would give their right arms for NOW but were ditched because they were spending more on new contract accountants in our department than they were on research and something had to give I can safely say that BT and Thatcher pissed in their chips
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
