Posts by Joe Harrison 858 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jun 2007
It's not very convincing. DA14 is 45 metres across therefore is worth tracking and warning about. The one that hit Russia was 17 metres across therefore is too small to bother with. There does not seem to be a big difference to me especially given the difficulty of accurate measurement of remote space rocks.
Meanwhile the population of DA14 is cheering "yay that big planet thing didn't hit us"
Water, because it is a big factor affecting how your cup of tea turns out. For example here in the Thames Valley hard water zone it's virtually impossible to make a decent cup of tea. Using bottled water or those jug things is an improvement but it's not so easy to make authentic Yorkshire tea outside of Yorkshire.
It's unfair to restrict "train yourself at home on the cheap" only to IT people - everyone should do it. For example airline pilots don't need all that formal training they can run flight simulator after the kids have gone to bed. And brain surgeons could have a rack of little bubbling tanks in the garage containing squidgy grey things. I would still feel completely safe taking my brain on their planes.
Wash your mouth out the Joggler is a lovely piece of kit - assuming you bought after the reduction from 400 pounds to 50 of course. I have one right now it is my general media control thingy in the kitchen. Very well built with nice solid chrome at the front. None of your creaky thin plastic box like cheapo tablet would have.
Obviously share peoples' security concerns but in practice contactless payment is extremely handy. Bought a sandwich in M&S the other day and a lot easier just to wave the card than fiddle about with PINpad for three quid. If it were integrated into your phone then eventually would no longer have to remember car keys, door entry card...
OK I got it a bit wrong about the simulated beard. In fact you have to smear the boot polish around a bit more asymetrically. The faces without the red squares successfully remained undetectable,.
http://cdn.gajitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/defeat-facial-recognition.jpg
Vendors always claim "this time it's real" for their certification programs but honestly they are a treadmill delivering value only to the vendor itself. Any decent syllabus will by definition be time-consuming to complete and by the time you finally do get there you will find that the industry has moved on to the next thing.
I did absolutely tons of Novell and Microsoft exams but always no sooner had I got the latest shiny badge than it would be obsolete and back to square one. Comes a time you have to draw a line and ask yourself is this a good investment of your time.
I get tons of mail and I know that most of them I will never need to read again. I also know for certain that there are a small proportion of them I certainly will need to refer back to in the future, and I don't know in advance which these will be. So I keep everything, but it doesn't make sense for me to waste energy diligently filing the useless 95 percent.
I saw the sign on the platform advertising free wi-fi so tried refreshing some app I had open but it kept saying no connectivity. Turns out you first have to try to use your browser which will then redirect you to a sign-up page. There were far too many fields to fill in easily with fiddly phone keyboard and then guess what my train arrived.
Why did they care about the solstices back in the year dot? Yes you needed to have a rough idea of seasonality for farming purposes but they would have that easily just by watching the sun every day. But no, they have to drag these huge stones all the way from Roswell or somewhere. Doesn't pass the smell test.
Surely this will just encourage people who think they produce high-value content but actually don't? Or to put it another way instead of eleventy billion pages of free crap on the www there will be the same number but you have to go through the 15p refund cycle each time you click the wrong one. It sounds very inconvenient trying to find things.
If you want to read slushy novels on the train this size screen is ideal. I would rather have one that could show me a good actual-size A4 page from the boring but useful documentation library. 9.7 inch tablet does a reasonable job but a kindle-style e-ink thing could be much better.
These questionable decisions don't just cause problems in isolation. There's also our other cost-saving favourite; not giving you Windows installation media when you buy a PC these days.
Which leads to the ridiculous situation of your new optical-drive-less computer popping up stern warnings that you really should get three blank DVDs ready and click here to make a backup.
I installed Android on an x86 O2 Joggler and I was very surprised at the significant number of apps which would not install or run. Similarly my import (Rockchip) tablet which I reflashed with ICS 4.0.3 and again locked out of things I would otherwise give a try, most recent example Amazon UK's app. Remember it is not only about what your hardware can't run it is about what Play Store *thinks* you can't run and won't let you have. Hunting for the APK gets tedious really quick.
tl;dr ? Unless you are a bleeding edge geek with time on your hands stick with 2.3 on ARM
Sounds maybe exciting but more like a lot of work for no reward.
What he thinks will happen... "truly amazing, absolutely unique, social media, AI, incredible never-seen-before crowdsourced solutions"
What will actually happen... black cube has one or two random bits chipped off by inquisitive passers-by who go "wtf?"
Or some creative soul figures out how to turn the iron drill into a depleted uranium one and solves it immediately
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