Posts by Jim 59 2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
The big engine jump was Doom->Quake I think, which introduced that first-person swaying motion. Jaw dropping at the time. Wolf may be dated, but was efficiant coded. Modern FPS games require about 500 x the memory and processor speed. I find their universes to be much too big sometimes, so large as to induce a feeling of pointlessness as you walk round them.
I just saw both images side by side, and the evidence does not support Grazia's story about mirroring the arm. Everything in the image has been thoroughly adjusted, including the Duchess's waist (much smaller), boobs (bigger), face and dress.
I guess all magazine pictures are essentially cartoons now, ie entirely synthetic and exaggerated images. Even the event is fake. The duchess never occupied the posture depicted. I hope this is just a passing fashion, and mags go back to showing real, actual pictures.
The pure flash array has not taken over yet and might never. Moore's law applies to all technologies in this area. Flash is getting geometrically bigger and cheaper, but so are the disks it seeks to replace. Unless it can catch up with disk soon, flash may itself be overtaken by any number of embryonic storage technologies.
Assume amanfromMars posted from the Rose and Crown.
I saw Stone's report, and it does indeed stick in the mind. A noticeable feature was the quantity of consumer goods stewn all over the ground. He picked up a brand new trainer at one point.
Interesting comments about the beeb. The bit about anchors interviewing reporters for opinion is spot on. It can be quite interesting to hear opinion from somebody on the spot, but actual news would be better, and confine the opinion to another show.
I agree that the beeb and other news organisations initially wanted (or expected) the riots to be about some leftish cause, but they changed their tune quick enough when it emerged it was more about the latest Nikes. Maybe they watched Stone's report ?
The beeb has evolved into a strange monster over the decades. It is is self-preoccupied. Switch on Radio 4 and you will typically hear an advert for a later program on Radio 4, about Radio 4, in which some famous people (ie. BBC employees) talk about The Archers and how it has affected their blah blah blah). It also suffers from gene depletion. Everyone connected with the BBC holds (apparently) the same opinion about everything, and the organisation won't employ or deal with anyone who doesn't. The resulting weight of advocacy inflicts great tedium on the listener.
They still do many things well though: Royal Wedding, Wimbledon, the Boat Race, Just a Minute.
Steve Jobs says "We're living in a post-PC world.". Not until voice recognition becomes an everyday practicality. To illustrate the point, proceed as follows:
1. Get a tablet.
2. Try to do something with it. Try to sell a car, book a holiday, pay a bill, comment in a forum.
See? Tablet = a PC with no input = lame.
Agree. Gnome3/KDE4 are amrtphone wanabees. They make my 21" screen look like a giant phone, thereby negating the whole advantage of the big screen.
After rooting round in my loft I recently found some old Windows 3.1 disks. Cranked up Windows 3.1 in vmware, it looks and feels a little bit like Android.
I feel that "intelligence" alone is nonsense for evaluating someone's mental ability. The brain is made up of different parts, each having different powers. People therefore differ in their reaction to learning. Some grasp ideas quickly but superficially, others learn more slowly but gain a more proper understanding. Some have great memories, others may have poor memories but more powerful "cpus". Some are great at pattern matching. Others think in lists, etc .etc.
It is generally believed that intelligence varies widely from person to person. It is as if one person can be 10 or 20 times more intelligent than another. Rubbish. This belief is put about for the convenience of schools IMO, in order to explain why some people get 4 A levels and others nothing at all.
I studied TV as part of an electrical/electronic engineering degree in 1988. One day, the lecturer, Mr Hutton, said that satellite TV (encryption) was the first time in history that a consumer technology had been used to the detriment of the consumer, ie. to simply take way something they already had - football in that case, F1 now.
Some F1 wonk on the radio today says we can all watch it down the pub. Great, encourage the fathers of the nation to spend 3 hours in the pub every other Sunday. That'll help.
"6. The assumption that if someone costs more, they automatically they know more about any subject than a cheaper person e.g. £1500 a day Accenture consultant MUST know more than a £450 a day contractor, who knows more than anyone permanent in-house"
Not quite. Each fulfills a different need. It is Accenture who receive the 1500 of course, not the consultant. He is on a salary of about 50k and has about 7 to 10 years of experience. The equivalent in-house guy will be paid about 45k, but will cost his employers up to twice that because of overheads. Also when the project is done, they must keep paying him forever. The contractor, who in theory should have better experience than both, will cost about 100k per annum, but after 6 months they wave him goodbye. Hence getting a body for 6 months can cost you 250k (consultant), 50k (contractor) or 100k+ (employee).
"...some senior managers drinking partner..." - love it.
Large IT companies welcome government contracts because they are a license to print money. After all, the government's budget is virtually infinite, and it does not manage suppliers anything like as tightly as a private customer. The government is an ideal customer: poorly organised, careless of funds and very very rich.
Great article. Online dating is weird though. There are usually many many more men in the database than women, perhaps by 10 to 1. The model therefore does not function in anything like the way that the operators say it does.
Also, everyone in ODL is preoccupied by interests as a matching property. In the face-to-face world, interests are irrelevant, within reason, and it is largely down to background and personal chemistry.
Interesting viewpoint about Apple being a whole industry in itself. It can't be true though. In manufacturing kit, Apple must be using machines made by machine companies, made up of tools and parts from other companies, and so on. The components in the phone are likewise produced by third and fourth parties. Then there are the raw materials too. Apple are not making stuff directly from sand.
Perhaps the article is true but only on the software side ? iTunes us great, but relies heavily on internet switchgear, and thus puts demand in to that industry. Any way you look at it, Apple is affecting/enriching other companies, just not through obvious, explicit agreements like that between Microsoft and Intel.
So you hate LOTR but your life has had a large involvement with it: the books, the films, the radio adaptation, the game and now discussing all 4 at some length. In 2000 you read all 1200 terrible pages again, just as a penance, before playing LOTR online for 4 years and still playing. Your whole life is spent in LOTR purgatory. No wonder you hate it.
Guy, if you are gonna troll, don't go overboard. Special effects are okay but a believable story is more important.
Right on. Gandalf's staff was never originally broken. The witch king just escaped a good shoeing from Gandalf when their confrontation was interrupted at the gate. A dramatic scene that did not, as I remember, make the film.
I agree with your post and with JRR when he said the book was too short. LOTR shows well the difference between books and films. Both are good, but the film is (has to be) a much more brief, superficial experience. A film made verbatim from a book would be awful. Then again, LOTR is not quite like any other book.
I agree that too much weight is given to attractive views held by 0.01% of scientists, and too little to the other 99.99%. Listening to the BBC (and ITV), you would think that global warming is a lively debate, split perhaps 60-40, not a well documented phenomenon that we need to plan for.
Unfortunately, the "man in the street" will seize on any non-global-warming research with great happiness, for obvious reasons, especially if the BBC promulgates it. His grand children will not thank him.
I think it is amazing that people can orbit the earth while just hanging around in T shirts. And that Russians and Americans are happily in the same space ship. Back in '81 when the first shuttle launched, we all half expected to be nuked in a USSR/Nato war. Yuri G would have been pleased.
Murdoch merely owns the company that owns the company that owned the NoTW. In my view that puts him far enough from the action so as to be unaware of it, or at least to introduce enough doubt about his knowledge and guilt.
RB on the other hand was NoTW editor. It does not seem possible that she could be unaware of what, it has emerged, was a common practice at the paper and the source of many front page stories. How could she edit the paper and not be aware of it ?
"Except that an encrypted file system is like a safe with a combination. While the police can use anything against you if they can get into the safe they cannot force you to give them the combination(in the USA"
Well spoken. However, the encrypted file system is virtually impossible for anyone to get in to (as far as we know). Whereas the authorities can force their way into pretty much any safe. So the "safe" situation is not a true reflection of the "encryption" situation.
If they authorities can search your house for documents, why should they not be allowed to search your PC for electronic documents ? [I am undecided on the matter, just asking for opinion]. So much that we do is online, anything relevant to anyone's life will be found on their PC these days, and often nowhere else.
I cannot boast 30 years of unix experience, only 22, and little of that with AIX. I would say that the most advanced unix is probably Solaris, with which Sun have introduced many innovations over the years. AIX is successful because it is more proprietary in nature, and integrates closely with IBMs dedicated hardware, allowing, for example, the feats of business continuity outlined in your post.
" ...Linux still has a way to go in enterprise environments to replace [AIX]. I hope so, anyway, as I would like to get to retirement age without losing my career!"
You could be a Linux admin guru by this time next month of you want. In admin terms, AIX and Linux share some important elements, eg. LVM.
Agreed. Proprietary Unix differs from Linux in the bespoke hardware it runs on. Manufacturers go to great lengths to offer high availability, performance and scalability features with Unix,while Linux is offered more as a commodity, running on commodity hardware.
Unix is tailored to the enterprise, offering built-in support for fibre, SANs etc., and various "business continuity" features and fault management frameworks.
Linux on the other hand, though it is fit for enterprise stuff, is more commonly found in LAMP stacks and other commodity roles, usually running on off-the-shelf hardware rather than purpose built kit.
Regarding Unix jobs, Linux offers a very handy way forward for unix bods feeling the squeeze.
Yes, DRM is evil and I avoid it like the plague. The alternative - free music for everybody - is tempting but ultimately could mean the death of professional music.
I would like to think that eventually, the average person will have a music collection composed of 90 % legitimate music, and 10% they ripped off, and that the 10% piques their interest enough to fire off periodic legitimate purchases. Rather like the old situation with tape/vinyl. Hardened bittorrenters will hopefully be in the minority.
Oh and good article.
Some of these on the banks of the River Wear near Chester-le-Street. The trunks are 2 inches or more in diameter, and quite woody. Every so often the council tries to napal them from orbit, judging by the results. Going "medieval" with an axe would be no easy task, and could spray the deadly sap around. Meanwhile another hogweed would creep up behind you.
Cloud services are a new business offering, the natural successor to the "utility computing" model of the early noughties. But where utility computing employed special hardware, cloud runs on the same gear as non-cloud.
Cloud is the right solution for some customers some of the time. But at the back end, it's hard to see where savings will be made. The cloud does not change the hardware or the business of supporting it. Leveraged labour savings have already been made, ever since the advent of outsourcing 15 years ago, and are not increased by the cloud.
Cloud offerings are a handy addition to IT. As a service package, the cloud may even open up some new markets. But at the back end it is just more of the same hardware and software. More IT, not less.
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