Posts by EddieD 1117 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
It shouldn't matter if the plot is known. If it did, I'd never go to see Shakespear again. Or Pinter, Orton..well, you get the idea... Well written, well played and well directed drama can't be spoiled.
Ah. I see a problem.
The plots of Dr Who are very formulaic - (spoiler alert - the Dr saves the day in the nick of time...) - so little is ruined.
There seems to be more drama in the bluster of this writer than the whole series.
Love 'em.
I've still got one lovingly wrapped in my laptop cupboard to run legacy (OS9) software - and it still works perfectly.
I had a terrible sinking feeling when it's PSU got condemned by PAT testing, but the barbie doll iBooks had a compatible unit (although not aesthetically), so it's had another reprieve.
Even though I'm a pc wrangler by choice, this is still a thing of beauty.
And now I know it can run Panther, I'll dig out a spare disk drive....
Llamatron, Attack of the Mutant Camels and Trip-a-Tron (although the latter certainly suffered from a lack of sufficiently powerful hardware to give it a reall test...) - they ate up a large chunk of my life in the early 90s - thoroughly addictive, and it's awesome to see them back.
I'm still not getting an iThingy though....
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/calc/h/casio.jpg
I had the one on the left - rounded corners on the device, square icons (okay, buttons) with rounded corners...
When are Apple going to invent a time machine so that they can sue Casio for pre-emptive copyright violation.
All the best
Per-lease... That was (IMO) ripped off the Sandman's Gun in Logan's Run (the book, not the film or tv show) - that had voice selected munitions years before Judge D got his. (acutally, there are a lot more, erm, similarities, between the Judges and the Sandmen...graphic novelists reading obscure SF for inspiration...who'd have thunk it...)
Apple rip folk off on video connectors. It's a fact of life. I have a box containing 9 different adaptors for connecting various MacBooks to external displays for visiting speakers (who refuse to pay the Apple after sales tax). I'm missing about 6 or 7 for the complete set, so some folk have a problem.
Oddly, my HP desktop, which has a video card which has 2 HDMI outputs came with 2 HDMI-DVI connectors. At no extra cost.
Similarly the Dells.
Giving an 80% rating for something that should be supplied as standard, or at most be a fiver, is a complete joke.
To be fair to the beeb, and the mountains of our cash that they spend on vanity projects, www.bbc.co.uk has been pretty reliable for the dozen+ years I've been using it - it's the website I use to check that machines have web connectivity when troubleshooting.
No biggy - most sites have occasional outages. And besides, so what. There's nothing really critical on there, kick back, grab a novel, a beer or maybe relax your eyes, or even....find another site with the same info.
I tried out the new firefox, and was reasonably impressed - it certainly seemed snappier, and the layout is nice and flexible, but...it killed all the extra navigation buttons on my mouse (except the scroll wheel), and with a bolt, a plate, and arthiritis in my wrist, I need those buttons.
Reverting to 3.6 was easy, and I'll certainly be going back to give FF4 a more thorough try out as soon as I've scoured the web to (or actually sat down and tried to) find a fix for the mouse problems.
64bits though? Pretty please?
But then I had 4 outages, lasting 5-8 days each, in the space of one month, I was left without television from 20th December until 6th January, no refund, even after a letter to the boss, so I cancelled my subscription, and have been telly-less for two years, and I love it. Okay, I have reasonable broadband, so there is iPlayer and other services, but I
Like everything else with Virgin, when it works it's very very good, but when it's bad, it's horrid.
"The UK Government has previously said that it will simply copy the exact lettering of the EU Directive, adding no clarification or interpretation of its own when it creates regulations to turn the Directive into UK law."
i.e. they're going to make a nebulous and poorly worded law, using words that they copied and didn't consider, and then let the lawyers sort things out in the courts - legislation without cogitation.
Marvellous
Ofcom has no teeth. Every time this crops up, there are words, there are ideas, but no deeds, the ISPs flog their snake oil, the consumer gets screwed.
Not expecting much from this, the ISPs are not going to want to say "Try our magnificent, marvellous, munificent 20MB broadband (normal speed 6MB)" - they'll find wriggle room, one way or another
I have Virgin, and I'm not too happy with my 10MB (Large) broadband - I get about 4-6ish MB/s from it, on a good day. At 3 in the morning. After I've chopped the wires to everyone else's house on my street. Unfortunately, everyone else on my street knows this trick, so you have to get there first.
However, almost everyone else I know who uses VM gets roughly what they pay for.
The snag is, when VM works, it just works. When it doesn't work, getting VM to first acknowledge that there's a fault, then second, you have to get them to do the work, which in my street means quite a huge level of work - the cables date back to the early 90s, and they need replaced, along with the streetside boxes - alas, VM have decided that whipping out their impressive girth of 50MB/s (for a few users) is more important than getting the (few) customers with intrinsic problems sorted.
Headlines are always good to trot out at shareholder (and creditor) meetings.
"This might justifiably annoy motorists, as it is they who pay for the streets and roads"
Complete bollocks. The road networks are paid for by everyone, whether they drive or not, as they are paid out of general taxation, of which VED/FDE are a small component.
Hell, even as far back as Winston Churchill in the early 30s this was the case - I know the RAC foundation is a throwback to a more primitive time, but even they must be able to catch up sooner or later.
When I started typing this comment, I was going to blow steam about wastes of money, don't the police have better things to do...
And then I realised that for some reason I was surprised when a terribly poorly drafted piece of legislation, with more loopholes than a drift net, where the actual parameters of the offence are written in nebulous prose, and any attempt to clarify the law with the legislature and judiciary is met with no response, causes the already overstretched courts to have to deal with non-crimes, and have caused an innocent person to be given the stigma of paedophilia.
Just been announced that it's cancelled.
Bernie was walking a tight line - for him to announce that it was off would have been a bit of a slap (however deserved) to the Bahrain rulers, he had to let them announce it - he wants the circus to return to this town. His language this weekend, whilst inelegant, indicated that this would be the outcome.
There's a terrible joke "How do you know if someone has an iPhone? They tell you...."
Probably true in most cases. Certainly with business phones like the RIM machines, I don't think they'd be taking part in things like this.
THis is all however irrelevant. What I put fingers to keyboards to whinge about was the lack of consistency of plot colours between the two graphs - IOS stays blue, but the others are all over the place.
If I was marking this, definitely a grade killer.
Leave enough fuel in to go to parking orbit, and then when you've got a few of them, weld them together to form another space station...
Seriously, NASA, ESA, and the rest need to look at why so much serviceable stuff is designed to combust on re-entry, and whether we could do something more useful with it.
I'm always in awe of what these guys do, but it's tempered a little by the sheer amount of waste.
"I'll offer another Unpopular Opinion here: that WP7 is really remarkably good already." - most commentators have reached the same conclusion. Having used it in a shop, I agree, it's nice, it's different, it works, it's intuitive (not that I was allowed to try anything fancy). Having used a relatively recent Nokia, it's a step forward.
For me, as with the iPhone, the issue is not Microsoft, but the closed nature of the platform - sooner or later I'll sell my soul to the devil, okay, Google, and even though I don't want to turn Android*, it's probably going to be my fate - but it will be a reference model, I'm just waiting for all the new toys at MWC to drive down the price of the Nexus S.
*Free banana** to whomever sources the quote
** Collected from Scotland after my banana tree has grown...
Bollocks. If you're having to do that, you don't know what you're doing.
With XP, my home machine lasted 4 years, till I replaced the hardware. I'm currently at 5 years on my work machine, and my new home machine is now hitting 16 months on Win7, no issues.
I have anti-malware software installed, I run, at all times, as an unprivileged user (if it works for *nix..), which is not so hard as people like to make out, and I use an offline scanner once every couple of months, nothing turns up. This is how I work on all my machines - my Linux server, my (now departed) Mac, and Windows - and I take nothing for granted and check them all.
Windows makes it too easy to run with elevated permissions, if you change your work methodology to stop this, it's not too tricky to secure.
Even for the register, this goes beyond the limits of patronising.
Almost all research, whether in the physical sciences or the Humanities comes down to statistics. This number of patients die with this drug, this proportion of hadrons collided in this fashion, what proportion of cats have died when locked in a box with a jug of cyanide that will spill after a certain proportion of nuclear events have happened, nuclear half-life is the time when /on average/ 50% of particles have undergone decay.
I work in a department spanning various cognitive disciplines, including psychology. To dismiss the research that is done in the departments as statistical bullshit, displays the rather juvenile and facile level of understanding that folk come to expect from the Reg, even when the tongue in cheek attitude it normally possesses is taken into account.
It costs over a fiver to get a swim in the local pools, anything that can keep that from rising sounds like a good idea.
If in doubt, don't tell anyone. Call it Redditch Council Combined Heat and Power reclamation, bury the details in the third annex to the second footnote, put the whole report in a disused filing cabinet in a cupboard in the cellar behind a door which says "beware of the leopard" and when someone complains tell them that the plans have been on display an if they can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, then it's their own fault. Apathetic blo....
Anyways, more seriously. If we are going to be serious about energy conservation, then decisions like this are necessary. Heat is energy used, and rather than waste it, find something to do with.
Every time Apple do this, I show a relevant article to my boss, and he signs a form so I can get a new set of tools.
I don't do a great deal of work on Macs, but you have to be prepared...
Back in the day Mac SE30s had a plastic lid melted over the screw holes, and any DIY repairs would be immediately apparent, and warranties voided. It was a bit of a bugger - there was a half AA battery on the motherboard that powered the PRAM, and when it went flat, the Mac stopped work - I forget how much Apple wanted to replace it, but voiding the (already expired) warranty and fitting a 50p battery from Mapin saved shed loads of cash. I think it was the advent of the Centris and Performa models that allowed a little user intervention, but very limited - only Apple CD-ROMs and HDDs etc would work...
Plus ça change and all that....
As for the longevity of Apple products - they're not any better in my experience than any other well made machine, and in the case of the polycarbonate unibody macbooks, not as good- it's amazing how quickly a student can make the shiny white case look shabby.
Plenty of projects working on battery charging - one, using vanadium redox liquid tech* allows a battery to be recharged by pumping fluids into them, and there's little excuse for lazy journalism in not investigating them for an article like this - but see earlier comments.
The simple fact is that there is not yet enough research into new battery tech - and with stupid stunts like this pulled by the BBC, who really should know better, making it seem like a dead-end idea there's likely to be little impetus to proceed.
One hundred+ years ago, cars were again limited by fuel capacity, high consumption, and the dearth of filling stations, and no-one thought they'd catch on. This changed over time, as consumptions dropped and the availability of fuel points increased, and fossil fuel motor vehicles became viable.
*From wikipedia, included as an idea of possible future changes
There are 2 o2 shops on Princes Street (i.e. within a lot less than 1 km of each other, a further shop in the St James Center, less than 1km away from either of the two on Princes Street, and none of them ever look particularly busy. And then there's Carphone Warehouse (x2) and Phones4U (x2).
It definitely reminds me of the late 80s-mid 90s when every other shop was a PCwarehouse/Ye olde Byte Shoppe/whatever - there has to be a rationalisation of such things.
We still need a couple - so I can eyeball them in person, before ordering online, more cheaply...
There was a link from a bbc blog to CNN which carried a thoughtful article about this topic
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/07/rushkoff.facebook.myspace/index.html?hpt=P1
predicting the demise of facebook as part of the great tradition that saw off compuserve, AOL, bebo, myspace (and noting that Goldman Sachs are performing the same function for Facebook as they provided for other folk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Controversies...)
"In short, I think the time has come to urgently revisit how the exemptions in Data Protection Act and FOI Act should apply national security agencies"
Aye, but the national security agencies don't think that the time has come, and they're the ones that the govt will listen to. Keep up the needling, and keep records so you can say "Yar boo, told you so", cos that's all that we can do.
First thing I saw Leslie Neilsen in - and still surely my favourite, but that's not important right now...
The main problem with trying for a good quote is that most of his lines require context for the deadpan to work...I'll settle for this pisstake of Dirty Harry.."Yes, well when I see five weirdo's dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy"
If the coffin doesn't fall off the catafalque at the very least, I'll be disappointed.
I think I'll dig out my Airplane and Police Squad flicks this evening.
"There's an add-on for that..."
I've just added an add-on, to my already straining Firefox, to block all these third party "like" buttons - for all the "off by default" bromides fed to us, I reserve the right to use belt and braces to hold up my privacy, particularly on a site that handles such sensitive data, particularly where the lining up of anonymous visitors and nonymous tracking data is so utterly trivial, and even more particularly on one of those marvels of the modern programming, the public sector IT project - which normally have more bugs than a tramps backside.
Thank heavens for add-ons.
Depending on building construction, signal attenuation can vary dramatically - some buildings don't have much impact, but my wee flat, constructed in the 19th century, with 40cm stone walls, which then have insulation panels that are backed with aluminised mylar film fitted internally - well, let's just say that I go from 5 bars outside the front door*, to zero bars sitting in my arm chair - a grand total of 3meters away.
If I leave the phone by the main window in the bedroom, I can get a sort of signal.
Wi-fi coverage is the same - I have to move the router to the window if I want to go sit in the garden with my laptop.
Also, outdoors, you can get enormous variation in the signal levels with shadowing and other such wondrous imponderables (know unknowns as certain vice-presidents would say).
This tool presents a general overview of the signal in an area. It will never have sufficiently fine granularity for the precision a lot of folk here think it should have.
I haven't seen a similar system on other providers, and, IMHO, it's not a bad first approximation of a useful tool, provided people look on it reallistically.
*I can see my nearest base station from just outside the front door
It seems to be pretty accurate, if a little optimistic about some of the coverage in the north west of scotland (last time I was in Glenelg, just next to skye, I had to wait until low tide and boulder hop out about 10 meters to get a signal...), but it shows the big gap in coverage round Loch Rannoch.
Nice.
If I had a smartphone I'd be interested in the Wi-Fi hotspots - there are about 4 within 20meters of my office.
About time, and nice implementation - it's worked without problem on all the devices I've tried.
...an iPhone costs about $200 in components, yet, in blighty, costs upto £600 ($800ish)
Ooh look, a ratio rather similar to the costs of the Kinect.
It seems that labour, marketting, r'n'd, distribution (inc import fees) etc., cost proportionately the same across the tech industry
Sorry to have to buy into an irritating meme, but this is news, how?
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