Posts by Robert Long

What actually is the issue?

I drive at or below the speed limit; what's so hard about that?

More of the same

Just to add my voice to the "Linux desktop is a solved problem" crowd. I ditched Windows and switched almost 10 years ago and have been using Linux as my only desktop ever since. Windows gets booted every now and then to check that a website looks okay in older versions of IE.

I use WindowMaker. KDE is just a clone of the crappy Windows system, while Gnome is just new, fresh crap design of its own. However, it is worth pointing out that having all these options is an improvement over Windows or OSX, not a weakness.

@ thombat

Since you're quoting me ("The wife's lover admits to mass murder but without a body the husband is convicted of 1st degree murder?! If that's not reasonable doubt I don't know what the f*ck is."), I'd just like to say that I was right: there was reasonable doubt then. There isn't now. But the truth doesn't work retro-actively. Sorry.

Without even a body, and with a *confessed* mass murderer known to have been sleeping with the alleged victim, any jury that convicted had a screw loose. The fact that the jury got lucky isn't a defense for their actions or the police's. What if they'd been wrong? How long would it have taken to get Reisner out of gaol again? 10 years? 20? Ever? Or does it not matter if you bang up the occassional innocent if it means you can get a quick conviction?

Ulster Unionists

Why does everyone pick on the DUP when there were 306 other scumbags inthe same lobby as them, the vast majority of them Labour MPs? Why does the 9 at one end of the line get all the flak and the 306 in front get by on "oh, well, we knew THEY'D sell the country down the river"?

Poser's delight

You lot can lug around a glass brick all you like. I want a phone that weighs about the same as my pen, takes and makes phone calls and charges people who send me text messages £10 a time and deposits it in my pay-as-you-go account.

Like the iPod, the iPhone interface is designed for one purpose only: to force the user to take the damn thing out and show it off as much as possible. Usability came a long way down the priority list, which is fine because Apple fanatics have never cared much about it.

@David Robinson

You have no idea how the laws of thermodynamics work. You also don't appear to even understand buoyancy. You also seem unaware of just how many researchers were scoffed at and threatened with losing their positions for putting forward the evidence for global-warming. Far from being a massive conspiracy to prevent anyone talking about the alternative theories, this is a classic example of an old guard who refused to listen to alternative theories being overwhelmed and discredited by a mountain of evidence that they were eventually (after 100 years) buried under.

Impossible job

If this job was ever completed it would be the biggest IT project brought to a conclusion in the history of the world. It was never going to happen. Putting together a specification is probably impossible, let alone fulfilling that spec.

Bizarre

The wife's lover admits to mass murder but without a body the husband is convicted of 1st degree murder?! If that's not reasonable doubt I don't know what the f*ck is.

Pathetic, even if he did do it.

@Pete

"This is the box that fatgadget are selling for USD. 500."

Which one is?

"But once you've bought one, what then? It won't run windows, solaris, hp-ux or any other other commercial operating system (I said commercial, for the linux boys & girls)."

Plenty of commercial Linux systems available since, oh, 1995 or so.

"if you do want to run Linux applications, you'll have to port them to it's PPC architecture"

By compiling them. Not very hard.

"and squeeze them into the 128MB of memory."

That's plenty for a data server.

"Once there, then what?

These things can't interact with the outside world - except through the spare ethernet port "

Well, since they're intended for ethernet networks, that appears reasonable.

"- no digital I-O, no serial/parallel ports - not even a USB."

Ie, no pointless ports the target market doesn't want.

"If you want to do real work in an embedded environment, buy a TINI or a dedicated embedded system."

Fine. Did you especially want to talk about embedded systems? Perhaps posting to an article about embedded systems would be a good idea; this is about data servers.

"If you are thinking of gettig one of these, save your money. Buy a housebrick and paint it white. it'll have the same functionality, be cheaper and use less power. ................ summary: pointless"

Summary: Pete has no idea what he's talking about.

Vote hacking

Electronic voting will always be easier to rig than paper. It's just a question of manpower. One hacker (or corrupt progammer at the factory) can potentially control an entire election whereas vote stuffing and all the other things you can do to a paper election need people to physically do it. The more people you have the more chance of a leak or just a mistake which revels the conspiracy.

Electronic voting is a stupid idea done badly.

Tautology

"If I didn't need FireWire and more disk for what I do then the Air would be ideal for my purposes."

If this computer did what I needed then it would be perfect. Gee, you don't say! If my car could get me laid it would be the perfect chick-magnet. If I was rich I would find it easier to pay my electricity bill.

As to Jon Green: I see my processor running at 200% (2 cores) while compiling and encoding video every day, so I don't know what you're thinking of when you say "it's very rare ... that CPU power actually matters". FSB is just another link in the chain of performance, it's still not the limiting factor for every, or most, tasks.

The Air is just another overpriced toy for overaged children to brag about in the corporate playground; it is of no interest to anyone who actually needs to use a computer on the go.

Well...

I think this is pretty crap but let's not go nuts: it's not "a backup solution with one drive". Since it's external there's two drives involved and the chances of both yourinternal and the external going down at the same time are remote for most Mac users who don't tend to do really heavy work anyway.

@Olly (again)

"Whether we like it or not China is important in the world and the option of ostracising her is not there."

Part of the reason that option is not available is there is that those who would support that action (including me, obviously) have little power to affect our own governments, and a part of the reason for THAT is the public relations machine which works day and night to tell people not to worry about our new friend's tendency to beat the hell out of people who just want paid for the work they do.

The Olympics is part of China's propaganda exercise, sure, but it is more importantly the tool of our own government's efforts to get us to accept slavery-derived cheap goods without objecting.

Cats and birds

We have a multitude of cats in our cul-de-sac and an enormous number and variety of birds too. Pidgeon-racers (AKA 'tedious toss-pots') like to put about the myth that cats and wildlife can't co-exist, but it's not true.

Oh, the naivety!

"No type of vehicle is inherently dangerous, or it wouldn't be road legal."

Yes, because our MPs would all vote to ban something that they all use if it was really dangerous! Ho ho ho.

Been there, done that

I did this years ago in order to analyse house sales and estate agent market shares. We used MySQL and a combination of Perl (for off-line) and PHP (for on-line). I think I still have the database we put together of all the town and postcode locations in the UK in National Grid format. There is a formual to convert to Lat/Long, although it is complex but then it would only need to be run once. Might take 3 seconds or so!

Query results were cached so that 1996 hardware didn't have to sweat too hard digging up answers to "How many estate agents are there within an x-mile radius of this postcode?" for popular areas, but the reality was that even ten years ago a £500 machine could answer such questions in real-time with a bit of careful programming.

But then, Micky-Mouse CS degrees and PHBs have pretty well killed off careful programming and now we're all expected to get excited about the possibility of the computing gods at MS (!) handing down something that was previously developed in a fairly lazy week by a single programmer using free tools.

High Court Duffers

The High Court is the final resting place of old fools unable to cope with the pressures of a real court. HC judges are inept, incompetant, and largely out of touch with any social needs not covered by Oliver Twist.

So, why exactly are buffoons like this old fart allowed to make up laws as they go along?

Not sure about that

The autothrottle was overridden manually and the engines still didn't pick up their output so I'm not sure how likely that sounds. I personally suspect a simple software bug. Sadly, writing software to control an aeroplane is difficult. Very difficult. Studies, and common sense, show that different programmers presented with the same very difficult task tend to make the same errors, so in cases like this it's entirely plausable that three teams of programmers all made the same mistake even though they worked independantly and produced supposedly redundant systems.

Having watched an A320 doing loops over Italy, I don't think I'd ever get into a fly-by-wire aircraft again.

It's business

Appe don't have much of a business beyond content provision and their hardware more and more reflects that. A modern Mac is just a jukebox; if you want a computer look elsewhere.

Anyway, as such, Jobs is only interested in sucking up to the wholesellers of that content and the end user can take it up the jacksie like a good little poor person. Come back when you've got a few billion in the bank and Steve will listen to your complaints.

Oh, yeah?

Let's all take lessons from a purveyor of plastic tat why don't we?

What's the penetration of broadband that's fast enough to download HD movies "instantly"? I make it roughly 0%. Even if you're prepared to wait for a few hours to be able to watch your movie of an evening the coverage of even that level of broadband is still a tiny minority of homes.

Steve's confused the fantasy land in his head with the real world again; come back in 10 years.