Posts by A.A.Hamilton
66 posts • joined Wednesday 19th September 2007 09:09 GMT
Strange motion
Why no change of gait like other quadrupeds?
The numbers are misleading
Although I buy into one of the central messages of this article (apps. are as much a source of vulnerability as the underlying OS), the numbers are misleading: they refer only to known issues. What the total number is (i.e. including the actual, but as yet unknown, issues) is anybody's guess. And anybody does have a habit of guessing, doesn't he?
Completely contradictory result
Typing the first of these search arguments into my version of LInux Chrome, with Google as default engine, produces a majority of hits as quotes from the the Bible: Jonah, Proverbs, John, Judges, 1st Peter, James, Matthew, Moses, 1st John and so on. Not a naughty bit among them.
Oh you daft bugger: it's just simple arithmetic: look how far it has got to go and what speed it's travelling at. It's bound to take a year (it's along way).
Gawd, young people these days -... no common sense, etc etc
[exits stage left to an asymptotically decreasing level of grumble]
Re: 24 inches..? Is that all?
2nd para. of review starts with the words "...TN display...". Enough said.
The whole concept is off-putting
I don't have any great concern about the technology MS is using or how they deploy it - for this application. What immediately turns me off this article is the use of the word 'Bing'.
Come on you chaps out there with the highly developed sense of, well, something: what possible justification can there be for the use of this utterly inane word here in quasi-literate UK? What possible connection does it have to IT? In fact. to anything?
It looks like crap; it reads like crap; it feels like crap; it must be crap - yes?
A comment from the unknowing
I don't know enough about the need for Java and hence the risk implied by this article. Is 'Java' the same as 'Java script'? What is 'java in the browser' and how do I eliminate it if I need, at the same time, to retain 'java' on Windows (various generations) and LInux to run some applications?
Basic guidance would be appreciated.
You can't have one without the other....
..."leaflets about benefits and STDs...."
Posted in Welcome, friend, to Metroland
Re: 'A gruesome picture of my lunch'
Rather overdoing the soy sauce, aren't you?
Not a fititng reward for a most inventive piece - for which my profuse thanks.
Re: The last remaining domain
Surely you meaknt '... kokntiknually kokntribute koukntless kommeknts ... koknknaisaknce' ?
Re: The last remaining domain
I kuite koknkur with your sekntimeknts, Khaptaikn, my Khaptaikn.
Re: Have they tried turning it off and on again?
Well, I went to the downloadmoreram web-site - and find that I have to download 4GB of RA via my browser. You would have thought that they could at least have made a torrent available, hmmm? Or at least they could have made RAM into rar, probably halving the download traffic.
That's quite important with VirginMedia: the zeroes are often too round for the fibre-optic cable; you could rotate them 90 degrees around their vertical axis of symmetry, but then they would like too much like ones. It's my I bet the ones would come down the wire quicker if they were also rotated 90 degreees, to look like hyphens.
RBS should use advance critical thinking skills like this. Oh, wait....
Re: You need more "everything"- NOT
Thanks for this comment - especially the link to gigapan. That's just wasted half a morning for me!
I have 50+ years of photographic experience, sadly this is actuallly about 100 times 6 months of the same novice experience; your comment has explained, in one simple paragraph, what I have failed to unerstand in all that time and why my Nikon D80 delivers such poor images [poor operator (80%) + poor lens (20%)].
"...it's my house..."
...which proves to me I was always in the wrong career in the wrong place. Damn, too late now.
Re: Math error
I opened the url you quoted. The very first thing I see is a large image carrying the words "...serving 14 million customers...."
This changes the argument a little, doesn't it?
Further, the volume you quote seems to be the total supplied by Thames; the original article is suggesting desalination as an adjunct to the existing sources of supply - not a total replacement.
I would also question the unit cost that Thames Water might have to pay - 6p. This doesn't allow for off-peak units being cheaper, and Thames bargaining power being far greater than ours. We are the domestic 'prey' of the electricity supply companies, whose greed is un-constrained, even by their main supporters club - the appointed Government regulator.
The additional cost might be no more than £1 per week per household - which is not an unreasonable price to pay for the additional benefit that would be enjoyed.
Re: Who is the other man?......
He'sjust reacting to having heard the expression 'get-go'.
FFS Reg. can we leave out these blatant 'west of the Atlantic' expressions for ever, from now on? We are, after all, talking about a region of London - you know, London, UK (good grief, how many really significant ciites called 'Paris' are there, aside from that in France?) <sign>
Re: 3 CEO's
Well, possibly.
Your prediction seems reasonably believable from our wesern perspective - but that might be the mistake in our thinking. The word you used - harmony - has such a powerful meaning in China. Chinese culture imbues their entrepreneurs with a sense of competition that is far more visceral than you find here in the West. They treat each other under the maxim that 'business is war'. But, paradoxically, they are also supremely effective at working together in the national interest - because of another outstanding cultural characteristic: nationalism. In the Chinese view there are only 2 types of people in the world: Chinese and foreign.
So let's wait a while and see the results before we judge them. At least it is an innovative approach.
btw El Reg. can you please make it clear whether you are reporting Chinese personal names in the UK format (First name, Last name) or in (reverse) Chinese format.
True believers
If Google really believes their discharge is cleaner than their intake then they should be happy to discharge upstream from their intake. This is not what the diagram shows.
Bigger = better ?
Let's hope that the merger releases some cash for investment in another 16MB of RAM, or (oh! heaven) a dual core processor, for their (apparently solo) server - watching so-called streaming-videos on their site at what is effectively 1 second per minute is not a great user experience. You tend to lose the thread of the story after a while.....
Re: If
..... but "we are whizz at maths." could be an addendum to the title. The calculation that x kwh per hour is the same as x kw is quite staggering in its depth of understanding.
@JohnMurray
...possibly - but you won't be able to touch it and it would be an unusually aged cat, wouldn't it?.
a neutron star moving at over three million miles an hour
Teacher (to flatulent student): Stop that, Smith.
Smith: Yes sir; which way did it go?
Well, which way is this one going - that's all that matters.
'click of a mouse'
I tried clicking some of the old PS/2 mice I have lying around in a box - single click only mind you (have to follow instructions carefully in IT, eh?). Did I see any of Newtons papers? You must be joking.
I hate these exaggerated claims. ("...you <copulating> moron, even my grandmother can use Linux....)
Posted in Headmaster freezes schoolkids for Gaia
Can I 'Fail' your 'Fail'?
Shirley it depends on what you decide the boundary conditions are: if you start with the CO2 that was absorbed by the growing tree then you are already in a CO2 deficit situation (something put it there to start with - perhaps on early geek burning his pre-cambrian copy of El Reg). The subsequent 'grow/burn' cycle still leaves you with a deficit balance, doesn't it?
By extension to the limits of boredom, we have to blame it all on the Big Bang.
the famous beach......
.... that's populated with condominiums.
I would have thought that's a sharply painful experience.
Oh, wait, it says 'populated' and 'condominiums'. My mistake.
So naive
"but ultimately Barnes & Noble's allegations will be judged on their merits,”"
- no they won't. They'll be judged on the deviousness of both party's legal counsel.
Prof. Sterner: a new tax opportunity
I assume that rural Sweden (Denmark) has a highly developed, regular, frequent, reliable, reasonably priced public transport system, running 24/7/365 for use by the rural poor?
This story suggests a new tax opportunity: we could designate our (unusually high) share of unemployable FuckWits in this country as Professors and tax them accordingly.
Confused by the 'and'....
"since 2008, when he first took on the Alps and flew across the English Channel"
- that's a hell of a range for a backpack.
Who>
What I want to know is who shot this movie, without leaving a trace on the surface? What is NASA not telling us, like how did the movie maker rendezvous with the rover device so effectively?
Posted in HSBC UK systems major outage
@James O'Shea
Woudln't it be more effective to use the low-water mark? Or is there something about the process of increasing tidal water depth I have misunderstood?
@Herby
"I'm surprised that it hasn't happened to the small pox virus already."
How dare you refer to our esteemed bankers in that way? They are most definitely not small.
@petur: " ...crap...from...Ami Pro"
Ami Pro, while being a pretty good product, was, at first, a WSINWYW product. I was going to say that Easy Writer was the first WYSWIG product, but in a bout of honesty and painful recollection, I have to say, with all due respect to past friends on the west coast, it was much more of WYSINFG.
@Hehehe
..which would explain why it has amplified so much in the last 60 years.
If only
"remotely unlocking and starting a car via mobile phone"
I'll gladly give anybody a mobile phone if they can start my Marina on a damp morning, even with the key.
@Charybdis
Much as I agree with all your comment, it doesn't tell us that all projects sail between Scylla and Charybdis, don't they? And those two effects usually overcome any amount of good team working.
Re: Watson, It Amazes Me !
That's brilliant: you have immediately identified a major weakness with Police procedure: if both hands are in use to locate one's own buttocks then there are 2 possibilities for the location of the torch. Anybody who can hold a torch in the mouth and illuminate their own buttocks is overqualified to be in the Police Force.
The second option for the location of the torch leads to a non-sequitur situation, doesn' it?
The idea of looking for somebody else's buttocks with a torch in the mouth.... no, I think I'll just request my coat.
The movie has already been made...
... I watch it my mind over and over gain, along with all the Iain M and Iain Banks books. Nobody is going to make a better set of graphics than those in my mind.
Remember the old Infocom slogan - that so true: "we put our graphics where the Sun don't shine", while others ended up with an effect that could be described with identical words but a totally different meaning.
Banks' books are not all equal - some are more equal than others, but I'm thankful to have read them all.
Re: We need one for the office
Magnificent summing up of the process of printing throughout the history of personal computing.
A colleague of mine made the comment - almost 20 years ago - that having looked at calls to our help desk, it was clear that printing was, by a huge margin, the most difficult IT problem that people had, that it always had been and always will be.
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in the past 30+ years when the result of my printing requests have exactly matched my expectations and also been what I wanted. I currently use printers from HP, Lexmark, Epson and Canon. None of them work as one would reasonably expect. I stopped printing on labels and envelopes many years ago when the frustration and wasted material costs became unacceptable.
And don't talk to me about high quality photo printing....
@Chris W: "... Anybody from the tea boy at IBM..."
Bit out of date there - we lost the tea ladies in 1980 or so, as I recall. Not sure on balance if the decreased cost justified the loss of the feeling of ''isn't this a nice place to work?". It may actually have introduced the concept of 'work' to 'a nice place'. There were claims that the move stifled creativity arising from free form discussions around the tea trolley, however - in my hut at least - most of these discussions were about the free form of xxxx and her thigh length shiny black boots, which seemed to require special attention from a couple of managers.....
"Their gona get lynched."
What is a 'gona' and to whom does it belong?
Posted in Google Books spanked by Amazon Kindle
Google and product development.....
"...Mountain View has made it a practice to release apps when they're merely half-baked...", or, in the case of BungleEarth for 64 bit LInux, before they are merely warm.
Maybe they are too close to the Mountain there on the west coast and are suffering from oxygen starvation. But I don't see how they can have a View at all - not when the management has its corporate head so far up the anterior portion of its own alimentary canal that all it can hear in the dark are the echoes of its own propaganda.
It's all in the tradition long-beloved of snake-oil salesmen: promise a lot today, deliver a little, tomrrow - so you can promise it all over again in the future, in a different bottle.
@I think you are misunderstanding me
'as long as it is true' -presents two issues to me:
1. How can I be sure anything I say is true? (I might be deluding myself; I usually am)
2. How can I prove it. (or how can I delude everybody else?)
'Veritas' is a laudable principle, but may not be sufficiently practical in today's complex world. The failure to be able to satisfactorily resolve these 2 issues could prove life-changingly expensive, eh?
@Not the first signs of dodgy KGB agents...
Anybody else read the referenced BBC article? The most exciting part is '.. a Hillman Saloon in front of us...'
I don't recall ever having seen that phrase in any article I have ever read in any medium during the past 40 years. There must be some hidden meaning there....
New employee value assessment procedure
Blimey, I've made planty of trips to China and nobody ever offered me a camera or USB memory stick. Does that mean I'm of no value ? (Don't answer that). However, there's the germ (!) of something here for HR's employee-value assessment procedures: " your China-trip expense claim should include the number of cameras, memory sticks and 'other' you received'
Posted in US women protest for the right to bare
re Right to bare
The article ends with this:
Hitachi IT Operations Analyzer - 30-day free trial
Isn't there an upper case T missing here?
There's on object in front of you...
"Two hours per day [of clicking practice] for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you,..."
I don't like to pooh-pooh the efforts of researchers, but, honestly, when was the last time you found yourslf without an object in front of you? This aspect of the research seems pretty fail safe to me - to the point of stating the bleeding obvious: "Yep, there's an obect in front of me..."
And how long are you going to last, I wonder, if you wander around any of the platforms on the London Underground making clicking noises - irrespective of whether or not you are a Brasilian electrician? btw it might be interesting to speculate which tube line would guaranntee a Darwin award the soonest....
@Chrysanthemum
No, it's infinitely more improbable than that, being a reference to the work of the departed genius D. Adams, creator of the short-lived, gravitationally assisted philosopher-whale, amongst other vitally important observations of the world within us.
50% less mutual?
Something (*) in my head says that this ought to be 100% less mutual, surely? Or is it just me?
A thoroughly satisfying article by the way; thanks..
(*) - possibly a small particle of brain
@David Weber was right!
Don't be daft - assuming for 1 minute that we could somehow attract this carapaced horror completely to the Antarctic, there to be annihilated by unstoppable hordes of suicide Penguins, it would have passed through, and wreaked havoc, on the rest of the world on the way.
A much better solution is to send somebody (I'll be back....) into the future with a really big ice-maker.
