Posts by David Roberts

I didn't realise

Dukes of Hazard County was a documentary.

Visualisation of the cosmic all

If these black holes are eating one sun a year, what are the odds that at least one sun had habitable planets with perhaps sentient life?

Hello, FBI.

Ah, good.

Got through to the Ferry Boat Inn.

Picture

Ive got a mothball in this hand, and a mothball in that hand.

What have I got?

email is so last century

Sadly, so am I.

Specifying changes to underlying protocol choices may well leave older email clients high and dry.

Still mainly using Windows Live Mail although it was put out to grass many years ago.

Thunderbird keeps getting almost abandoned.

Bright young things use web mail.

Whete is the leading edge mail client development to drive these changes forward?

Call the process

Meltdown mitigation.

Then people will leave it running and accept the performance hit.

That is Avast in the firing line.

Of course you probably won't be running both at once.

Good things could be done

AFAIK you can order a book specially printed with your child included in the story. I think this includes pictures.

So not a long stretch to give your kid a video (Frozen?) with them appearing. Just need a bit of home video of their face. Overlay on a character. Special birthday.

I am sure many adults would like to appear in Star Trek or Star Wars. Robocop should be even easier.

You could watch yourself scorring the winning goal, winning the 100m final..........the possibilities are endless.

Porn is just one aspect of cinematic processing; you might as well try and stigmatise video cameras and editing software (standard on mobile phones) because they can be used to take illegal images. This latest software is just a refinement of current technology. The genie is out of the bottle.

Nostalgia for the BBC micro?

Some fans of the Pi may be remembering the generation inspired by the BBC micro.

However at that time computing was new and different and exciting.

These days the most likely connection with kids would be an Android development platform which let them put their own App on their own phone and then take it home to show their parents.

Not that I would like to police a load of bright kids side loading code onto their phones. I know that most teaching staff wouldn't have a clue how to.

Perhaps a hosting App which can sandbox code but allow kids to develop simple stuff?

Whatever, I suspect that most fans of teaching kids about computers don't have to do it, nor do they have to train teachers to the level required to teach it then support them afterwards.

TL;DR look, a computer - isn't it cool! Is so last century. Focus on the computer they are already using.

P.S. I have a few Pis. Presents from my kids. Apart from a shonky VPN server they are all sitting there waiting for me to have some spare time. Said kids have never shown any interest in programming and use computers of various kinds as tools to get a job done, not one to develop skills that they frankly see no need for. Lack of programming skills doesn't seem to have held either of them back, although one has a successful IT career. Not as a programmer, though. IT training started at Uni because the school IT guy was such a dick head it was agreed any IT course would be a waste of time.

All together children

There's a hole in my bucket......

Water based interception

A few hosepipe and pressure washer fans here.

Probably OK for a very near approach over a large tract of land you own, but anywhere suburban and the main result will be shooting water onto your neighbour's property. Possibly onto your neighbour.

You could always fly your own defence drone over your property (leading to aerial robot wars) but again anywhere suburban this is likely to be illegal (at least in the UK).

Interesting track

Seems to pass over some major flight paths for carriers such as Emirates and Malasia.

Another happy traveller

A few years back we flew to the Antipodes and booked at medium short notice. It was looking quite expensive, especially Premium Economy (which, as far as I can tell is old style (1980s) Business Class).

Fortunately we saw an offer for Malaysian business class which wasn't much more. A380 to KL then A320 to Sydney. The A380 was a dream, with fully reclining seats and masses of space. The A320 was OK but the seats only partially reclined so it was much harder to get to sleep. The overall experience, including the business class lounges at Heathrow and KL, was so civilised that I dread flying long haul economy.

Malaysian was a bit run down, though. KL should be their flagship but the facilities were poorly maintained and showing signs of age. Still beats the hell out of coach class.

So the A380 is the way air travel should be. Shame that the sardine packers are likely to win long term.

Users and menus

I wouldn't be surprised if there were additional checks which were clicked through.

It is not unknown for users opening a "boobs.jpg.exe" attachment to angrily click through the "are you sure you really want to do this?" prompts because:

(1) Do you think I'm some kind of idiot?

(2) Boobs!

Just another hare brained Ponzi scheme

There is no underlying value, and at some point you are going to run out of suckers.

And yet.....this was the tune when the nominal price was $100 and $1,000 and....the standard warning is always past performance is no guarantee of future performance. What if it defies current theory and just stays up there?

I will be avoiding anyway, but as I can't explain the current valuation I can't be sure that it is wrong.

Foreign owned companies

The reason that the FTSE100 is so high at the moment is that most of the revenue is coming from abroad in dollars.

I did wonder about cause and effect

Why would the first fire bird pick up a burning twig?

One possibility; thought it was a cooked snake then dropped it when it wasn't.

Another possibility; picked up a smouldering animal then dropped it because it was too hot, or just to settle down and eat it.

There must be a common use case for moving burning things before the admittedly smart birds can see the effect of dropping something that is smouldering and seeing fire start, and making the intuitive leap that results in the consolidation of observed behaviour into learned behaviour.

Could make future fire insurance claims interesting as well. Bloody bird done it, mate!

I assume that....

....you have to configure it and the router to allow incoming connections from the Internet otherwise it is a NAS and not a cloud.

Unless (like my HP printer) it connects out to a central server so no incoming connection is required.

I had a quick look round but couldn't find a description of the mechanics. I assume it does clever things to the router as most punters wouldn't know where to start.

Hard drive and CPU intensive?

That is Window Update screwed, then.

Damn

Got to wait until 2019 for the RAM upgrade.

Compensation!

I wonder how my two Core 2 Duos and my Core 2 Quad are going to net me?

Should I be ordering champagne and a yacht?

I could start filling the bath now............

Just when

Linus had apologised for fucking swearing.

Incoming in 3 2 1