Posts by Kubla Cant 2807 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
Student me in the late 1960s:
EE claims it delivered 100Mbps
Just like the EE network I use on my mobile phone? Funny, it never seems that fast.
In other news, EE kindly supplied me with a picocell-type device that connects to my broadband, so I can use my phone at home without having to go and stand in the garden. If I had their new gadget too, the ugly box outside the house would use the mobile signal from the picocell, which will route it down the broadband connection, and so on ad infinitum.
Not that it excuses the error, but didn't you have a travel adaptor of the right kind lurking somewhere?
Think about it. You buy travel adaptors so that you can use your native plugs in foreign outlets. Why would somebody who lives in the UK have an adaptor that connects a continental plug to a UK outlet?
Our intuition was that cars, bicycles, or similar vehicles, already have this great ability. Therefore, we developed an algorithm to make drones that can imitate them.
Your intuition was rubbish. Cars, bicycles, and similar vehicles have no ability. Their drivers or riders may, in some cases, have great ability.
If driving the speed limit cause traffic jams then there is some thing else wrong such as the limit is way to slow.
Not true. In heavy traffic conditions it's common for the speed limit to be reduced to prevent traffic jams. Urban motorways have variable speed limits for just this reason.
I would imagine any tools that primitive humans had, were invaluable and consequently always kept close.
I'm sure I've read that, on the contrary, early hominids seem to have made and discarded tools in surprising quantities. It could be that once you have mastered the technique it's easier to knock up a new tool than find where you left the one you used last. Perhaps stone tools aren't convenient to carry around when you don't have any pockets.
IIRC, there were two mazes of twisty little passages.
One had subtly different descriptions for each location ("...twisty little passages, no two the same", "...passages, all different", etc) so you could map it using the descriptions. The other had the same description everywhere ("twisty little passages, all the same"). The way to map this maze was to drop things, so you could identify passages by their contents.
While playing elaborate pranks on the scammers may be fun, you are wasting your own time as well as theirs -- and your time is probably much more valuable, to you at least.
The answer to this is some kind of phone bot. I came across a site run by a man who'd written a bot to handle cold-callers. Mostly it just says "Uh-huh", "OK", and "Yeah", but occasionally it comes out with something like "You'll have to repeat that... I've been taking sleeping pills and I've just woken up." or it shouts a request for coffee to somebody else in the house. There's an amusing recording of an insurance salesman interacting with it.
Elsewhere, there's a great recording of a guy who freaks out a telephone canvasser by pretending to be a cop investigating the murder of the person being called.
if as much engineering design effort had been invested in the plastic jewel* cases as the optical technology on the disc
Never mind the jewel cases. The real problem is the Cellophane wrappers, which seem to have been designed so that you need a scalpel to open them. Occasionally, rarely, they have a tear-off strip, which normally breaks off when you pull it.
There's nothing like buying a new CD and deciding to play it in the car. Numerous fatalities must have been caused by people bombing down the motorway while scrabbling at the packaging with fingernails and teeth.
* Why are they called jewel cases? They're totally unsuitable for keeping jewellery in, and I can't imagine that even the original designer thought a cheap plastic box looked jewel-like.
To be precise, listening to vinyl is like eating in one of those posh restaurants where they offer a sort of Edwardian menu consisting entirely of roasts, steak pudding, jam roll and custard and Stilton.
I have a BMW, but the music system won't play FLAC. It only does MP3, CDA and WMF.
Aibu in thinking that google should do more to protect young consumers from fraudulent sites?
I love the fact that she* uses the expression "Am I being unreasonable" so much that she has an acronym for it.
* Sorry if this seems sexist. I assume it's she because the site is called Mumsnet.
Too true. A friend bought a wireless printer. Well, I say "printer", but it didn't do much printing. Most of the time it sulked in the corner and the operating system reported it as off-line, or in use elsewhere.
In the end we just connected it with a USB cable and it now works faultlessly.
By the way, you win against the scammers if they call you a mother [bleep] before they hang up
I've won. I went through the rigmarole with the scammer who phoned me, but I acted really stupid, which made it so difficult and complicated that he passed me to his "supervisor". After another 15 minutes of acting stupid, I agreed to give him a credit card number. When I read out the number from a Tesco loyalty card he got really angry and said "Why are you wasting my time?"
"Passengers are reminded that ...
You haven't been listening carefully. In rail-speak, the people who travel on trains are now "customers". They travel between "station-stops".
And they're congenitally incapable of remembering to take all their baggage and possessions with them when they leave a train.
Attorneys, Doctors, Realtors, Electricians, and Engineers are all protected professions in many states
I can see the need for regulation of Attorneys, Doctors, Electricians, and Engineers. But Realtors? Are they not just what we call estate agents? The qualifications for that profession being a slimy disposition and an untrustworthy moral compass.
In what way does the possession of a copy of Linux Mint on a USB device qualify somebody as a "Linux Mint terrorist"? I have copies of Mint on several devices, including laptop and desktop computers. Does that make me a Linux Mint battlegroup?
I dare say he also had a smartphone - could he also be an Android terrorist?
I'd be very happy for manufacturers to produce 'dumb' TVs
It's one of the curious paradoxes of a market economy that smart TVs are probably cheaper than comparable dumb monitors, because more people want to buy them. Fortunately, there's nothing to stop you treating your smart TV as dumb and connecting a PC, PVR or STB to it.
It's probably an instance of the classic code smell known as "magic values".
First class tickets aren't available, so the price should be null. You can't use null because it's not supported or it breaks something elsewhere. How about zero? No, we don't want to risk people travelling for free. A negative number? No, we might have to pay them to travel. OK, we'll use a big number.
Long.MAX_VALUE might have been a better choice. If it ever got printed it would be pretty noticeable.
JavaScript is lighter weight and easier to pick up than Java, so it's a better fit for an introductory course, particularly when a lot of the students won't go any farther than building websites anyway
JS is only "easier to pick up" and use for "building websites" in a very limited sense. It's all a matter of what you're picking up.
Once upon a time, when web pages were mostly HTML, JS was mainly used for enhancements and tweaks, and scripts didn't contain much beyond procedural code and simple inheritance. The language specification scarcely changed for ten years. It sounds like the course is teaching this kind of antique JS.
These days, JS is a hotbed of crazes, functional programming enthusiasms and novel frameworks. There are at least three language versions in common use. Knowledge gained on version N of a framework will be useless when version N+1 is released. Web sites now consist of large single-page applications, and their syntax and code organisation will be utterly baffling to someone who's been taught "window.alert('Hello world')" scripting.
Regardless of opinions about the relative merits or potential longevity of the two languages, Java has more overall consistency between APIs and stability between versions. Students who have completed an introductory course in Java stand a better chance of finding their way around real-world applications than they do in JS.
are you really trying to argue that there isn't evidence of useful nutrients being contained in vegetables?
The weasel-word here is "nutrients". In spite of what self-styled nutritionists tell you, here's nothing intrinsically good about nutrients.
Most food consists of a mixture of nutrients, things absorbed by the body, and non-nutrients such as fibre, that pass right through. A bag of white sugar contains nothing but useful nutrients. It also delivers plenty of energy - another weasel-word. But it's not really a wise food choice.
If you eat the fruit, do those sugars not get digested in the same way?
The same amount of sugars, but not digested in the same way. The problem is with the time it takes for your blood sugar to rise. Whole fruit has a lower glycaemic index than fruit juice. Many fruit juices deliver the same glycaemic load as a glass of Coke.
Also, a recent study reported that prepared, bagged salads could carry a dangerous risk of salmonella because the juices on the cut ends of the leaves are an ideal growth medium for bacteria. I would guess that the juices in a bag of cut fruit are salmonella heaven.
I recently worked a contract where all the developer machines ran Ubuntu. I really, really tried to get on with Unity, but after a couple of months I called it a day and installed the latest Cinnamon. You had to select the desktop at startup time, but apart from that it ran pretty well. There were occasional glitches, but that may well have been a result of running the bleeding-edge Cinnamon on a slightly old version of Ubuntu.
For home use I occasionally run through the latest and greatest distros and desktops, but I usually come back to Mint/Cinnamon.
a publicly used telephone
Telephone sanitisers mostly cleaned phones in offices. I think they're unfairly vilified. The real culprits were the people who employed them - a bunch of snake-oil merchants selling a solution to a non-existent health risk.
I dare say somebody used to clean public phone boxes, but you'd never have guessed.
That seems to be the opinion of many people over the age of 70. These are people who didn't make their money using a keyboard.
As a person over 70 currently making a decent living as a developer of internet applications, I object. You are confusing over-70s with idiots, who can be any age.
This man's an ill-informed fool because he's a politician. Ignorance and bluster are the main qualifications for his job.
Artery-attacking mega-chain Burger King
I've spent the past 45 years avoiding saturated fat, so I was more than a little annoyed to learn that current medical opinion is that there is no link between dietary cholesterol and arterial disease.
But what a strange world admen inhabit, where the best way to encourage people to buy your product is to cause them annoyance and inconvenience.
Unfortunately, the term "architect" has taken over the unlovely role previously occupied by "analyst". Time was, you could just be a programmer. Then that job title became a bit infra dig, and anyone whose job didn't involve floor-sweeping became an "analyst programmer".
Last year I worked in an office where everyone was either an architect or a business analyst (except me - as a contractor I was allowed to be just a developer). I think it's a way of providing a chimerical career path for the permies.
Nothing against real architects.
@oldtaku Unity is still a worthless piece of crippled crap that nobody ever wanted but Canonical
QED.
I've used Unity professionally on a number of projects. It's not my favourite desktop environment, but it has good points as well as bad. So do all the alternatives, including Windows and OSX.
The belief that expressing polar likes and dislikes in intemperate terms is a way to prove their validity is one that most people grow out of by adolescence.
In the nine months between school and university, I worked as a technical editor*. In those days we had to make our own proof correction marks with a pencil. I don't think the option to buy packs of them was available. For much of the stuff I corrected, 20 marks would have been hopelessly inadequate.
How does a pack of correction marks work? Do you get five carets, five of the loopy deletion mark**, a couple of feet of underlining for bold and italic, and assorted subscript, superscript, caps, lc marks? What do you do if you need something exotic like wrong font?
* For a company that built nuclear power stations. In the intervening years I've been looking out for a "nuclear accident caused by faulty operating instructions" headline.
** Does it have a name?
@Patrician Please show me how to play Mass Effect:Andromeda on anything other than Windows
This thread started with a post saying "I could probably move about 60% of my staff to running on Raspberry PI's running Nix with OpenOffice". I don't know what business the OP is in, but I'd be surprised if it involves an office full of people playing Mass Effect:Andromeda.
Last week we had to keep bumping the thermostat manually up a degree. A few weeks before that the heating never came on because the house was at 19 degrees for several days.
Why did you have to alter the thermostat when it was cold? Isn't the point of a thermostat to maintain a constant temperature by switching the heating (or individual radiators) off and on? The fact that your heating didn't come on when the weather was warm suggests that the thermostat is working as expected.
a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" to modernise the criminal justice system
This point of view seems to embody the characteristic failure mode of these monster public-sector projects. Instead of building on what's already in place, they have a megalomaniac urge to throw everything away and start again.
My experience (admittedly on a relatively microscopic scale) is that this attitude is common among people who lack the patience, or the ability, to examine the existing solutions properly.
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