Posts by stucs201 1293 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2010
I have a theory he actually gave us the question before the answer:
"What's the use of our arguing half the night whether there may - Or may not! be a god if this machine gives you his phone number in the morning!"
It might not have been the next morning, but Deep Thought did produce a numerical answer...
Already happened. How else do you explain this?
Possibly NSWF (if you have a particularly fussy bofh). Probably fine though.
Possibly worth sticking on eBay. I sold mine (original CGA version, not the later Elite Plus) a few years back. Prompted a brief bidding war up to £50 quid. That only actually stopped when one of the bidders realised that he not only didn't want to pay the price it had got to and would prefer a dodgy download, but also started listing copies of that illegal copy for sale. Still not sure if I should have reported his listings, or if that would have got him banned and wiped his bids out on my listing (dropping it to a much lower price).
Unfortunately even when it stays set to most recent it isn't chronological.
If friend A comments on a post from friend B then the post from friend B (sometimes) gets sorted based on when the last comment was made and the story changed to 'A commented on this', rather than the original post directly (which may or may not appear again further down).
Whereas I think what most users want by chronological is sorted based on the time of the first event that made it appear. I.e. the original post if its from one of their friends, with timestamps of comments only being used if the story wasn't listed at all until a friend commented on it.
Small number statistics from people you know will tend to be skewed by people's tendency to buy something that someone else they know has. So once you've got a couple of people in your social circle with a nexus its likely there will be more.
In my case (aside from the usual iPads amongst the iPhone owners) I see a disproportionate number of assorted Kindle Fires and Nooks. I do know one Surface owner, but he's not someone all the owners of the others know - so no influence there.
Tactile touchscreens - configurable, pressable buttons.
HDMI input on tablets, so I can use one as a screen for other smaller devices.
Phone-screen pixel density on a 24+" desktop monitor.
Higher dynamic range on displays. Not just stretching the current range to higher brightness - a proper standard for darker darks and brighter brights in new content without making existing content for today's displays overly garish.
Totally flexible displays - flexible enough for a smartscreen size screen in a small flip phone.
Not just hammer and screwdriver, but also knife, saw and tooyo'oenoo' (*) too.
Or if you want just a hammer-screwdriver
(*) tooyo'oenoo' = pliers, as I'm sure many of us are aware due to other articles here on el-reg.
Surely even as is it works at least as well as when people put any other tablet and bluetooth keyboard into a 3rd party case?
However I think there is a better solution. If its detachable then why don't they make a second style of keyboard? Something thicker and more substantial of more netbook depth. That should allow room to include a slide out tray to support the kickstand (even better if it locked to it somehow) or perhaps a hinged support for the screen without using the kickstand. Either way there also ought to be room in such a keyboard for a large second battery.
If they did this it would both increase the flexibilty of the Surface while mitigating the compomises a little. Want to the sort of work you'd normally take a laptop for - use the proposed chunky keyboard. Need to slim down a little but want a cover during transport - use one of the existing keyboards, not really any chunkier than the covers for other tablets. Need to travel really light or just browsing in bed - leave both keyboards out of it.
True it still might not be as good a laptop as a dedicated one, but it'd be getting closer. It'd also push the price higher to buy two keyboards, but not compulsary to do so and you'd need to balance against not buying both a laptop and tablet.
Thought of. Yes. Which is why I suggested that the prize should be for a practical way to implement the idea, not the idea itself. That the idea exists that makes excluding an implementation of it from the prize on the grounds of not being flight especially daft - its already known that there are possible alternatives to flight to solve the problem.
Surely a better question would be to ask for solutions for "fast intercontinental travel with less environmental impact that current planes"? Why is assumed that flight has to be the solution because its what we use now? For example if someone came up with a practical way to build intercontinental trains in vacuum tunnels it'd go a long way to helping with the actual problem, but not fit the constraints imposed here.
Feature phones used to have a lot of the functionality now only associated with smartphones (basic web browsing, mp3 playback, simple java apps). Often they were quite small and had decent screens for their size. They definately weren't cheap.
I've got an old 6600 fold. OLED screen. Tiny. Enough internet for facebook (a lot of people's internet usage - admitedly not around here). Can I get anything even remotely similar these days? No, now the choice is between a big slab of glass and no buttons or huge buttons and no features.
I so miss this third option.
Looks quite nice from screenshots. Only thing I'd change would be a search box, rather than a button.
I'm also starting to use Avant more too. Also has options for a less dumbed down interface (though with a rather different menu structure than I'm used to). The other nice things about this one is being able to switch between the IE, Firefox and Chrome rendering engines as needed.
I've no problem with people using energy for whatever they feel they want to. If they've done sufficient real work to earn the money to pay for that energy then fine - thats their perogative. However being expected to be rewarded for running specialised hardware that doesn't actually do anything? There the money is flowing in the wrong direction. The only people crazier than those who expect money in exchange for meaningless bits are those actually handing over money for them.
Yes you're right there is a cost to all forms of currency exchange, but at least with more conventional currencies there should be a reduction in cost as technology improves and gets more efficient. These virtual currency things are desinged to consume ever increasing resources as time goes on.
You're not wrong as such. I'm not saying that the problem didn't exist before, just that bitcoin and its derivatives aren't solving it (which seemed to be the suggestion of another poster).
The real problem is people valueing shuffling bits around in a computer over things of actual worth: resources to build things, energy to run things, scientific knowlege. All too often aquiring the real wealth is seen as an expense, not a benefit.
Unfortunately while bitcoin provides Alice with a finite number of bits of green paper and hides some of them quite well it doesn't stop her switching to notes on pink paper (litecoin) when she runs out of green paper or it just gets too hard to find.
"You might make the same point about the greenback. Spending all your day toiling away for a piece of paper without any inherent value (can't eat, can't use as a tool, ...) is equally absurd"
Not the same thing. Its about the value of the work done to get the currency, not whether the currency itself has any intrinsic value. At least in that case you've (for most jobs) done something useful in order to be rewarded with that currency - built a house, grown some food, etc. With virtual currencies the 'work' done isn't of any use except to support the currency. Even then paper money can still be used as toilet paper or burnt for fuel if the banks ever collapse completely.
In global (rather than personal greed) terms almost anything is a better use for a GPU. Spending all this computer power and the fuel to run them just to generate some data with no real (rather than arbitary) value has to be one of the craziest financial ideas since the Golgafrinchians burnt the forests to increase the value of the leaves in their wallets.
Such a waste. Running BOINC or Folding@home would be a much more worthwhile use of this hardware and electricity. Heck even playing games would at least keep someone harmlessly entertained for a few hours.
...its the proximity. It doesn't matter if you're sharing a screen or just a LAN, as long as you're in the same room and can see each other and communicate (gestures, not just speach) directly then its so much better than the same game played online.
At university I used to really enjoy multi-player Doom on a LAN, but have zero interest in playing its modern descendants online. Even the online games I have played the most (old text based MUDs) there was a group of us who'd gather in the same room of obsolete terminals to play them.
Even survival mode there are many more things to do than fight monsters and kill the dragon. I see killing the dragon as just one of many things you can decide to do, or not. Its not even the last thing to do, if you focus on it you can get it dead in a few hours but not have what most players would consider an established base.
I'd agree about hardcore mode though, that probably is more gamelike and you probably do want to focus on the dragon rather than build stuff that'll get deleted one day.
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