Posts by Chemist

Re: Hardly

Evening RICHTO, still plugging away at the cr*p

"much of the early home computer revolution was powered with Microsoft BASIC"

much of the early home computer revolution was hindered with Microsoft BASIC - fixed

"Linux.."

Evening RICHTO,

What you fail to grasp is that the 'examples' you give are bugs, which may or may not be exploitable. With older versions of Windows it was a design choice to let USB sticks auto-execute.

Re: Non-information

""Hm... "Lille" may either give a coastal city in France, or a small village in the north of Belgium. Not always that obvious you must select country.""

What about the major French city of Lille that is neither of those ?

Re: Unfortunately,

Thanks for the laughs Michael. Not entirely a joke on my part as a I really did hand-assemble my first software on a Science of Cambridge Mk14 with the hideous NS SC/MP instruction set/arch

Re: WTF?

And the signal is transmitted as a square wave ? With the harmonics going on forever ? Are you sure ?

Re: So Unlucky.......

Your chances of winning the lottery will be much better assuming you enter twice every week for ~23 years.

I'd make it ~~1 in 6000 ( if you just spent £1 a time )

Good luck !! ( either way). Of course your number might be drawn the day the asteroid falls.

Re: @Chemist - Windows it's like the belly-button

Ah well, you reinforced the belief out there that it's not possible to live life without Windows.

I've heard & seen people saying such rot as "Oh, you need it for banking", "Can't edit HD video without", "3G dongles only work with Windows", "How do you manage RAW camera files ?" and countless others.

The one that amuses me most is "How do you manage as a scientist without Excel?) - well I managed for 20 years before Excel and most of the time Excel was available the data sets I handled were FAR bigger than Excel could handle. Even now I get people to send me data as CSV files and crunch the data with purpose-written C. That's the way to handle 7 million lines of data.

Re: either

"Godminster chedder at the mo"

Godminster cheddar is magnificent !

Re: Pressure Differential

"when the helium eventually leaks out."

It will not leak out to give less than atmospheric pressure though. At this point there may well be slow exchange of helium/air

Re: Strewth,

"Just use a video projector. Plug it into your WMC box if you have too"

You have certainly never seen a quality slide at huge projection - it's never forgotten.

BTW -all Linux here, mate, what is this WMC you speak of ?

Re: reason for Patch Tuesday

"@TiddlyPom "Security by obscurity does NOT work.

Of course it works"

It helps as part of a strategy - but on it's own it's very risky. The gold hoard is a bit of a red herring as without any clues it really is just a matter of luck whereas scanning (say) IP addresses and ports severely limits the search scope and can be automated.

My router has one open port forwarding to a server for SSH purposes - I've run it for years and the router logs have never shown a SSH access attempt on anything other than a standard port - -the security by obscurity bit is the actual port number is non-standard but I don't rely on that - the only valid username allowed ssh access on the server is very unusual and the password is 20 characters long and horrible. As a further precaution I've now blocked access to ports below 1024 at my ISP

Re: The reality is all too real

@RICHTO

"Im not clear how that is FUD"

Gosh, I thought you'd know !

Just visiting the link doesn't root the phone - you have to get involved -there's even a link for donations for goodness sake.

This no more roots an OS than me deciding to put a different Linux distro on a computer as far as I'm concerned.

Re: @Fred (was: On the off-chance any of you missed it ...)

I've read all this article with a feeling of disbelief - my and mine have been using Linux happily for years without any of the problems and traumas depicted.

Only today I've edited a video, installed some bluetooth tools, converted the last of my vinyl disks to digital and done the usual e-mails etc. without any drama or bother - what is it with you people ?

Otherwise Happy New Year !

Re: Considering the distances from Earth for the *other* candidates this is pretty close.

I calculate the energy required to accelerate 1 tonne to 10%c as ~5E20 J. According to Wikipedia the sum of energy release from ALL the nuclear weapons test/uses is ~the same. Now I've not read the details of ORION but something seems amiss.

The joke icon...

....is, er, for a joke not a statement of fact.

Re: mmmm

I'm glad you posted this because it does help to illuminate the general ignorance around about Linux photo tools - even though I'm just a keen amateur I find it satisfying to convert a good raw photo from my 550D through 16bit programs like darktable or showFoto or do most of the tweeks in ufraw (again 16bit) and final (un)sharpening in GIMP. Even the command-line program dcraw and it's library which are at the back of many of these programs will output 16bit.

Apart from dcraw all these are GUI programs but for efficiency a little bit of scripting around dcraw will convert, resize, enhance an entire directory of raw images into a decent set of jpg proofs ( I use 1080 v) without the large sizes associated with the original .JPGs

e.g.

#!/bin/bash

#

dcraw -w *.CR2

#

mogrify -resize 1624x1080 -quality 100 *.ppm

#

mogrify -unsharp 0x1+.5+0.02 *.ppm

#

mogrify -format jpg *.ppm

Re: Arrgggh a mass rebooting session as well!

"seldom" it said !

"Doesn't track mouse movements on the extended screen!"

It's a bug- you need to report that

Re: Hydro Electric Power Stations

No, it isn't !

Weight on ground, energy used to lift weight to height above ground,physics well understood, energy released again as weight falls to ground - really it's not complicated - where on Earth do you think it comes from ?

Just potential energy - it's no hard. If you tensioned a spring the energy wouldn't come from the ground state of the spring -it would come from the muscle energy required to stretch it.

Re: Z-80

"The 6809 seemed to be one of the best of the 8bit breed"

I think the problem was it WAS rather slow and the complex, elegant addressing modes and position independent code which made it such a great cpu to program in assembler were dying the death as compilers generally only used simpler modes. It was caught at the wrong moment in time really with the 68000 being developed on one hand and the shift over to RISC on the other.

I've often thought that an updated 32 bit with high clock speeds would have been interesting but past is past and I'd much rather have a multi-core modern cpu running at 3GHz even if much of the power seems to disappear somewhere these days.

(I do have a 6809 still running in a home-made Forth system but I guess I've not switched it on in years)

"There's an amazing joke here somewhere, but I just can't find it..."

They're putting copies of W8 back !

"Sand is not silicon"

Indeed it is not. Further the silicon is highly purified which I think probably dwarfs the raw material cost.

Re: Android is malware

"it is the third worst phone ever behind iPhones and Blackberries."

Your conclusion ?

Re: Who would leave a perfectly serviceable highway?

"3 different McDonald's."

There are DIFFERENT McDonalds ?????