Re: Silicon Roundabout Bollocks
@phil dude so long as it's not 8th week in Trinity
I was at Trinity, and I don't recall getting stupider in 8th week. Drunker, maybe.
You're not from Balliol are you?
2803 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2010
Nobody points out that cruise ships must fail due to the slow nature of the journey, because the point isn't the speed, but the journey itself.
Cruise ships seem to contain a vast amount of stuff* to keep the passengers amused between stops. This is easier for ships because they're very, very big. It also suggests that the journey itself is less alluring than you might think.
*Water slides, gourmet meals, lectures, adultery... you can probably tell I've never actually been on a cruise.
I could be wrong, but I believe font hinting, unlike ClearType, is not about compensating for low resolution. Its purpose is to describe the way in which the components of a character scale differently. The differential scaling affected Gutenberg too, though it probably took a few centuries before the rules were formalised.
As for the resolution achieved in the 15th Century, it was limited by granular phenomena just as much as today's pixel displays. The paper used was rough, the ink was grainy, and type matrices were not very accurate.
Surely the viewer is supposed to "forget" that there is a camera filming and be immersed in the film?
Yes, but to achieve that the director has to use the grammar of film. If the whole thing was shot with a single static camera the audience would soon lose interest.
The point of lens flare is not to replicate a live experience, but to signify one. Not "this is like real life", but "this is like other cinematic experiences that meant something". The same is true of cut-away, zoom, panning, tracking and all the other elements of film grammar. They're only bad when they're intrusive.
...an Airport Transit area. It's important to remember that he wasn't, technically, stood in the United Kingdom
IANAL, but I think the idea of extra-territorial zones is a myth. Some areas, such as embassies, are subject to diplomatic protection, but they are still part of the UK. There's a bit of US territory at Runnymede, and a bedroom in Claridges was declared to be Yugoslav soil during the war. But there's no reason why a transit area should have any special privileges beyond the fact that people can go there without passing Customs or Immigration. It's more like a bonded warehouse than an embassy.
@Dan Paul
There have been several other articles and discussions relating to Mr Miranda's detention and the episode in the Guardian cellars during the past few days. If you look at those you'll find that the significance of his name has been repeatedly pointed out.
@Pascal Monett
What we have today is not a "parody of democracy", it's representative democracy, the worst possible system except for all the others.
The pure, direct democracy practised in the Greek city states of antiquity was impractical in the populous Western European societies that re-introduced democracy. With modern information technologies it might be possible to revive direct democracy, but that wouldn't necessarily be a good idea. The voters of Athens may have been in a position to know everything about the subject of a vote, but that didn't necessarily mean they took the trouble to do so. Don't forget that "demagogue" is a Greek word.
@AC 19:37 Because when things go wrong, they can go wrong in a BIG way
This is exactly the mental process behind fear of flying. Air travel is much, much safer than road travel, but the rare accidents are much more noticeable. People think (wrongly) that they can escape from a road accident, but that they're powerless in the face of an air crash or nuclear incident.
limits deployment to clusters of up to 6 processes per month
A FoundationDB process is a single worker process you run on a computer
OK, I think I grasp what a process is. But what's a "process per month"? It sounds like floating-point ops per foot. or GHz per millibar.
Or does this in fact mean that every month you can deploy to 6 cores? So at the end of the year you have 72?
"You're assuming the people from GCHQ are in some way competent."
Let's not be too condescending. Remember that these people are from the organisation that pretty much invented the computer*.
I think JonP has it about right.
* GCHQ was previously called GCCS, and was based at Bletchley Park.
I would love to believe that the whole Miranda affair was a successful coat-trailing exercise. There seems to be no particular reason why he should carry Snowden-related documents on his laptop, especially if flying via London. It's probably not an accident that the Guardian acceded to the disk-destruction demands of GCHQ on the same day.
The only word that adequately describes the recent pointless behaviour of the security services. They're incapable of doing anything effective, so they start detaining people and smashing kit to show how tough they are.
It's especially disturbing that stuff leaked from an American agency by an American national is safer in New York than London.
used the free wifi to check her bank balance
You're confusing the security of the network transport (probably none) with security of the browser protocol (probably HTTPS) and security of the banking application (good, one would hope, but it seems to vary from bank to bank).
Anybody relying on the security of the network transport can expect break-ins, whether it's free WiFi or ADSL through a private phone line.
people are still wary of making large electrical purchases online.
I can only speak for myself, but white goods and larger brown goods are things I only purchase online. White goods, especially, all look much the same, and you can't evaluate their efficiency or reliability in a brick and mortar store. So my usual purchasing strategy is to decide on a brand and model using sites like Which, then search for the model number online. Having filtered out the obviously dodgy suppliers, I order from the cheapest. I don't have to waste my free time driving to retail parks and gawping at twenty similar appliances.
Customer service? I can't say I've been impressed by the service in Curry's, Dixon's, Comet et al. And if your washing machine breaks down, you don't take it back to the shop for repair.
Speedy delivery? Understandably, most stores don't hold stock of large white goods on site, so the delivery process is much the same as for an online purchase.
developers downloaded out-of-date versions of the most popular frameworks 33 per cent of the time
If your application is running in Framework version X, you don't need to keep downloading it. I would guess that most downloads of obsolete versions are intended to build developer environments when legacy applications have to be modified or maintained. In an ideal world the application platform would be upgraded at the same time - in the same ideal world we'd all have unlimited time and money.
@Andyf
I don't want to start another of the all too frequent town-v-country spats, but the scenario in which you join a 60 mph road from a 90 degree side turning is a common feature of driving outside towns. It's normally a two-lane A road, with continuous traffic during the rush hour. If you don't want to sit at the junction for ten minutes, and prefer not to earn the undying enmity of other drivers, there's nothing for it but to floor the pedal and accelerate up to 60 with squealing tyres and occasional fishtailing.
Opinions seem to be sharply divided on whether this man's home network was adequately secured.
I suppose there are Europeans with the skills to hack into it and take over the baby alarm, though why they would bother is a mystery. But the article also says He heard a male voice coming from inside his daughter's bedroom, calling out her name. This implies that alleged hacker gained access to a computer, where he was able to find out the baby's name, then hacked the baby alarm. Possible, but vanishingly improbable.
I was delighted to see that much of the Meccano used to build this centrifuge was green and notably old-looking. Unlike the modern Meccano as I've seen.
The thing that impresses me most is the lightweight frame of the base, which doesn't appear to be fixed down in any way. It must be superbly well-balanced. If I made a thing like this it would probably walk across the floor and smash the windows.
When I first encountered these lamps, I'm sure they were called Astra (or possibly Astro) lamps, and the distinctive glass container appeared to come from a swanky brand of fruit squash (oxymoron alert!) whose name escapes me.
They seemed to disappear during the 70s, along with kaftans and joss-sticks. But then they reappeared with a new name. Is this evidence of the great wheel of existence? Or is my memory playing tricks - it was the 60s, after all.
Icon of hippie with a good-sized joint.
In the days before world+dog got into relational databases, data had to be stored in files. When databases started to become popular there was a notorious vendor nostrum: "Just put everything into a database, and then you can get whatever information you need out".
To an extent, this was true. Extracting meaning from data stored in files was always difficult and resistant to ad-hoc queries. But the implication that a database is a sort of magician's bag, into which you dump masses of disorganised data and from which you pull meaning and truth, never was.
The advocates of big data seem to be resurrecting the magic bag.
the decision applies only to switching providers on BT's Openreach copper network
As I'm not a communications engineer, can somebody explain to me what is the relevance of the element that the conductors are made from? Why shouldn't people who are unfortunate enough to be connected via inferior aluminium wiring benefit from this change?
Your standard methodology will skew the results. I believe many aficionados of China tea prefer the second infusion. Also, it effectively eliminates some very fine teas that are better drunk without milk. For example:
Darjeeling
Lapsang Souchong
Gunpowder
By way of contrast, the worst tea I ever tasted was during a holiday job as a tram conductor in Blackpool. Every member of the crew brought an enamel brew can containing pre-mixed leaf tea and sugar. After adding boiling water they'd swing the can round a bit, then add condensed milk. The result was brick-red and so sweet that you could feel your teeth getting looser as you drank it.
Emily Thornberry, Labour's shadow attorney general, said: "This is government incompetence of the first magnitude."
Gosh, that's a surprise.
Don't these politicians (of all parties) understand that it's this kind of stereotyped response that makes them some of the most reviled and distrusted people on the planet?
This is a clerical error of some kind, serious, perhaps, but not "government incompetence of the first magnitude", which needs to be something bigger, such as starting a war over WMDs that don't exist, or selling off the gold reserves when the market is at the bottom.
When I first encountered the concept of trolling in discussion groups, I assumed the reference was to the fishing strategy where a lure or bait is dragged through the water to catch predatory fish. It seemed a vivid analogy for the way trolls operate.
Lately, however, it seems to have mutated, and it now seems to be a reference to the Scandinavian monsters that lurk under bridges. The Reg troll icon looks more like one of these than a fishing lure. This feels like a much blunter metaphor.
Was I wrong in my initial assumption?
people who can't afford the fancy plans with "free" phones get to subsidise those who do
Few people can be bothered to upgrade their phone or switch plans at the end of the contract period*. Even if you do, the total cost is usually more than you would have paid if you'd bought the phone and used a SIM-only contract.
So the subsidy is likely flowing the other way.
*This certainly applies to me and to everybody I know. Phone contracts are like gym membership - you overpay because you don't finish the contract when you could.