Posts by David D. Hagood
1192 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
That's what building codes are for
"Architects who don't seem to want to cater for anyone actually using their creation. We used one who flatly refused to have ugly power sockets ruining the smooth flow of his walls,[....]"
Here in the US we'd just say "well, sorry, but building codes require an outlet every 6ft on any wall larger than 6ft. If we do it your way, the nice building inspector will not issue a certificate of occupancy and all your nice work will be for naught."
"Put the minis in the bag, and nobody gets hurt"
"And NO SEQUENTIAL MAC ADDRESSES!"
Seriously - do they have a way to track the MACs on this devices? If so, they can look for them in the wild, and work backwards from the person holding them, and find the fence.
Also, were Apple to just announce "Sucks for you, those minis will self destruct the first time they talk to the app store" that would sort-of take the shine off them, wouldn't it?
Computer Security - It's Not Rocket Science!
Computer Security - It's Not Rocket Science!
How about
.dot
.dash
.slash
.space
to really confuse people?
As the Harley owners say...
"Loud Pipes Save Lives."
Did I miss the price? and Freeview....
Did I blind spot the price on this beast, or perhaps does the price only show on the non-print version (Sorry Reg, when I see a multipage article I go straight to the Print version - STOP MAKING ME SCREW AROUND WITH MULTI PAGE ARTICLES).
And as for Freeview - since this has USB master capability, in theory somebody could just write an app to talk to a USB Freeview tuner (at least Freeview is MPEG4 IIRC, and will thus be something this can do hardware decode. Unfortunately, ATSC is MPEG2 and I have yet to see an Android device with hardware accel for MPEG2).
Celestia...
Oh look, they've webified Celestia - http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
except for that bit of
a) working locally
b) having a much larger database
Re: Wow! I'm more important than I thought
I've started adding whole Chinese IP blocks to my personal firewall's blacklist - because I, too, feel the Chinese seem to be "overrepresented" in my intrusion lists.
Posted in Israel declares war on Hamas via Twitter
WWII as an RTS
Is anybody else reminded of:
http://www.strategypage.com/humor/articles/military_jokes_20057151.asp
Excuse me, I must...
Excuse me, I must go outside and fart upwind. It will have more impact upon the world than these petitions do.
The whole "We The People" petition program is a gigantic waste of time. It's only purpose is to allow the administration a chance to practice being on message for every one of the petitions raised. There is more chance that the after-effects of that last burrito I had will have a measurable impact on the administration policy than any of those petitions ever will - the administration has shown that over and over again.
Moreover, those petitions SHOULD NOT have any impact. Online petitions are too easy - there is too much chance for people to support something while being spectacularly ignorant of the cost (so long as that cost is born by somebody else).
When the people of those various stated go forth, collect the needed signatures of registered voters, put the issue on a public ballot in their states, get the public to vote for its acceptance, and put that to the Federal government will I give more than a puff of methane in the breeze.
I hear...
I hear Hans Reiser is looking for a roomie....
What else from my childhood....
... can Hollywood rape?
Star Trek - now with "younger, edgier" characters (and more plot holes than a colander), plus the abominations that were the last season of the last TV show.
Star Wars - that taun-taun has already been beaten to death on this forum.
Tron - It might have been nice if the person who did the sequel had maybe seen the first movie? and if the motivations of the main characters had made a bit more sense? and could it hurt to have some actual in-jokes for computer nerds, like the first movie?
Starship Troopers - couldn't have been any more antithetical to the books if they'd tried.
Speed Racer.... no. just no.
I suppose I should be thankful that Hollywood has not yet gone after Space:1999, Salvage 1, or Wizards.
Yet.
FTFY
"You carry a weapon *and assume merely carrying it acts as some magical force field, and are unwilling to use it when the time comes, and are unpracticed in its use*, and theres more chance of it being used against you rather than the attacker"
IMDB to the rescue....
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you stand up, admit what you did, and resign, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
"Worried dad" my left genital - This is an Agent Of The Government, out to Oppress Us ALL! By making cell phones into a weapon, now when The JackBooted THUGS see us trying to film their TOTALITARIAN CRIMES against the 99%, The MAN can use the excuse "I thought they were pulling a pepper spray can, so I shot them - and the phone, too, because it was a weapon!"
(how did I do? Did I capture the tinfoil-chapeau brigade correctly?)
Re: Not that readily
"Obviously, if you're too much of a shy little wallflower (like wot I am), then going up to the pretty young pharmacist and bellowing "DO YOU HAVE ANY BIGGER CONDOMS?" is.. mortifying. "
You are an imposter - NO man would have a problem with that announcement; indeed, most would be happy to grab the PA microphone and say "Pharmacy, we need larger condoms for the stud on checkout 3!"
This being LOHAN...
What about
Control Rocket Altitude Confirming Kosher (CRACK)
Mission Electronics Trimming Hazard (METH)
Deploy Rocket Under Good Situations (DRUGS)
But does he have
But does he have
1) An arm for microelectronics work
2) An arm for polite company
3) An arm for fighting
Bah - I'd rather have an imaginary 3rd arm...
(the one with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in one pocket and The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton in the other).
This is just so the mice can play
This is just so the mice can play....
The one with "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" in the pocket.
Why not make yourselves heros, Egypt?
Why not make yourselves heros, Egypt, and ban death, illness, and poverty?
You have as much likelihood of making that happen.
Posted in Angry Birds Star Wars game review
I'm holding out for
Angry Birds Lego Star Wars Kingdom Hearts MLP.
Re: "Grout" might be more applicable still
""Grout" might be more applicable still, given its mechanical sealing properties as opposed to largely cosmetic ones."
Funny, but given this is Macrobe we are talking about, I'd have argued the exact opposite - largely cosmetic, not structural.
Considering the behavior on most online forums
Considering the behavior on most online forums - the screaming, the feces-throwing, the blind groupthink - I wonder if perhaps this has already happened and I just missed it....
Re: Chimpanzees are not monkeys
Insensitive bastard, making fun of his speech impediment....
Posted in WTF is... RF-MEMS?
I do SDR for a living.
I do SDR for a living, and you are wrong. There are 3 things that prevent your idea from working:
1) Not enough bits on the converters. To have an SDR in which the antenna dumps into the converters, you need very fast converters - to cover all the bands a phone might need you'd be looking at gigasamples per second - hundreds of gigasamples per second to do 60GHz. The best gigasample converters are around 12 bits. The dynamic range just isn't there - a strong signal in the FM band will swamp the converter and prevent it from hearing that weak signal in the cellular band. Yes, you get some processing gain as you band-limit the signal in the digital domain, but if the desired signal is too small, you still won't be able to resolve it.
2) not enough processing power. Even if you ignore the above, it takes a lot of processing power to handle a gigasample/second signal. Your phone will last just long enough to open the socket before draining the battery.
3) Noise. Sorry, we live at about 280K - and the noise floor is such that a wideband converter will see so much thermal energy that it will be swamped no matter what. Remember point 1? You don't even need a strong FM signal in the area, just the thermal noise from the phone will be enough. Unless you want your phone's 500 kg batter (remember point 2?) to be even heavier to run the cryopumps to keep your phone's front end at 2K.
Even the best SDR on the market has a few analog IF stages to bring the signal down in frequency to something more reasonable, and to band limit it to bring the noise floor down, and to decimate the sample rate to something that can be processed reasonably.
tl;dr: - you still need to have a tunable antenna, SDR isn't a panacea.
US Civics 101
OK, since many of you quite logically have not had US Civics 101, since you don't live here, let me give you a quick run down on the issues around voting here.
1) Voting is regulated largely state by state. Remember that the design concept of the US is a bunch of more-or-less sovereign states, sort of like what the EU is trying to be. So just as Germany cannot tell England how to conduct their votes, Maine cannot tell Kansas how to conduct its votes. Before you suggest we change that, I would suggest you ask yourself if you WANT Germany to be able to tell you how to conduct your votes.
2) Voting isn't just for the President. There are a host of other items on the ballot - Federal level senators and representatives, state level representatives and senators, local issues, and various other locally elected officials - so we cannot have one ballot for everywhere.
3) Voting may be different for different locales. Depending upon precisely WHERE in the district I live, I may have a different ballot, even from somebody else voting at the same voting location.
4) One of the design concerns we have in our system is preventing the following scenario: I work for Dr. Evil. Dr. Evil issues a memo: "You WILL vote for MiniMe for judge. You WILL bring me proof of this. If you don't, you WILL feed the alligators in the pit." In order to prevent that, we do not allow anybody to have any form of receipt that could be used to prove how they voted - you aren't even allowed to use your cell phone, so you cannot take a picture of your ballot. Hence, there is no way I can provide Dr. Evil with proof of how I voted, so I am free to say "Sure, I voted for MiniMe". All of these "let me have a receipt so I can check if my vote was counted right" need to work in a way that Dr. Evil cannot put the thumbscrews on me to insure I voted "correctly".
Now, I will admit: one of the driving factors for e-voting is the mindset of "WE WANT TO KNOW WHO WON - NOW!!!!!!!". If we could just get everybody to be willing to wait a few days we could do hand counted ballots, but this "we must know for the 6'oclock news (and so what if the Hawaiians are still voting - screw them!)" would not allow the time for hand counting.
Here's how to think of frame rates
OK, here's how to think of frame rates.
The speed limit on the highway is 60 MPH (your monitor is 60 Hz).
Assume strict law enforcement (sync to vertical refresh on).
Consider a Yugo (low powered system) and a Jaguar (high powered system).
On flat ground and no headwind (simple scene, minimal polygons and textures) both are the same speed - 60 MPH.
Now, we hit the Rockies, and get up to 10000 feet, on a 15% grade (complex scene with lots of polygons and textures). The Yugo is making 20 MPH, the Jag is still running 60.
Now, what if you don't happen to live by the Rockies, but you want to compare the two cars? You find a nearby stretch of road with no speed limit or no enforcement (sync to refresh OFF), and you see how fast you can go. The Yugo goes 60, the Jag goes 160.
But the important question is
But the important question is, "does it have a beeper?"
It simply MUST have a beeper that beeps when armed.
A count-down display is also essential.
And of course, a red and a blue wire.
Re: This! Yahoo! exclamation! mark! thing!
Just Shatnerize the post in your mind.
It! Makes! It! Somewhat! Moreberable!
Other reservations?
Will Microsoft have any other reservations in their tablets?
* Reserving half the CPU for DRM, Genuine Advantage, and virus scans
* Reserving half the display for ads
* Reserving half the network bandwidth for updates
I know I have MY reservations....
And will the Japanese make up some new superstitions?
And will the Japanese make up some new superstitions around meaningless genetic variation, as they have around blood types?
(For those that don't know: for some reason the Japanese have decided that the types of sugar molecules on your red blood cell directly correlates to personality types. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_types_in_Japanese_culture)
Re: Come back <blink>, all is forgiven.
"Before you know it, there will be <marquee> tags everywhere, Closely followed by flying toasters and dancing jesuses."
And embedded MIDI files. Don't forget embedded MIDI files.
I know I haven't forgotten.
No matter how I've tried.
Re: If you want to do OO, use an OO language.
@Christian Berger - *I* never said Java was a good example of OO - quite the contrary. I inferred the AC preferred Java over C++ due to his comment, and challenged him to perform 2 OO tasks in Java.
Is C++ the ultimate OO language - NO. Due to it's C heritage, there are many things about C++ that are fugly. And while templates are very powerful, having yet a third programming paradigm (structured programming, OO, and then template metaprogramming) is IMHO not the way. Having to go to all the lengths to have templates work in the face of variant parameters (e.g. SFINAE) rather than having as simple "if typename has a member named Ptr that is convertable to/from T*, instantiate this function" makes templates far more difficult to deal with. (and while concepts would be nice, they still are a) not a part of the language standard and b) are still fugly to set up).
However, I have yet to see anybody propose a better OO language that will run at any kind of speed (Smalltalk and Ruby get disqualified here).
Re: If you want to do OO, use an OO language.
@AC: Ah, let me guess, you like Java. Go implement RAII in Java, and come back when you have done so. Go implement an object type that handles complex rational numbers, with error bar tracking and unit analysis, and make it possible to do a simple "a = b + c" without manually calling member functions, and come back.
Several issues
I've said it before and I shall say it again: the Gnome development team needs an adult, somebody to say "You can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat", or rather, "No, you cannot work on 'teh new shinee features' until you get the basic system working.", things like:
* get ATSC working again. When they decided to create dvb-daemon (which, itself, is largely a reimplementation of much of what MythTV does, not that reimplementing MythTV in a cleaner fashion isn't a good idea), they ripped out all the code in the Gnome codebase that spoke ATSC. And they've never put it back. So Gnome now cannot do broadcast TV in the third most populous nation on the planet.
* stop screwing around in C. I had evaluated both GTK and Qt professionally, and initially I was leaning to GTK because it was C, not C++. However, when you start looking at GTK, you see that it really is trying to implement an object oriented pattern, but because they are using C, it is error prone, requires a great deal of donkey work from the programmer, and difficult. If you want to do OO, use an OO language.
* Stop screwing around in Vala. So, having noticed the issues with C, rather than moving to C++, the Gnome team decide to implement their own OO language. Of course, it won't be as widely supported as C++, won't have the libraries C++ has, won't have the experience base C++ has, but hey! It will be at least 20% cooler, right?
* Stop conflating "user friendly" with "user stupid" - allow for some degree of customization, because not all users are the same. Not everybody needs 20 gears in their vehicle, but a tractor/trailer driver cannot use an automatic!
* Stop using the Registry^W^W GConf as an excuse to not provide user interfaces for configuration. Again, when the Gnome developers are grudgingly forced to acknowledge that some users do need to configure advanced features, the standard response is "Go into Gconf-editor and tweak this key." That's just being lazy - stupid lazy.
* Stop needlessly cross-linking things. OK, you want to allow Evolution to sync with PDAs, great! But don't FORCE me to install the Palm Pilot crap if I want to install Evolution - do your damn job as a software engineer and design a proper interface between Evo and ANY PDA, and allow the implementations of that interface to be installed, or not, and let Evo discover them at run time.
* And while on the subject of Evolution - Either fix it so it doesn't lock up and have to be restarted on a regular basis, or kill it. And if you don't kill it, how about NOT slavishly aping the UI of Outlook, This idea of not being able to directly launch a mail window, or a calendar window, or a contacts window, but rather opening a new window that is a clone of the current window, THEN switching the role of that window SUCKS.
* Stop reinventing CORBA badly. CORBA had strong checking of the interfaces, while I cannot count the number of times I have seen big parts of Gnome break because somebody changed a DBus message format without telling anybody. Plus with CORBA they really could start doing software as a service - you want to access the cloud, just access the name server for it, get your object instance, and rock on like it was local.
* Building on that: network transparency is important, stop pretending it isn't. X, PulseAudio, and CORBA all allow any program to run on my local display, even if it is located halfway around the world. Microsoft ignored that, and had to restore it with things like RDP (and third parties like Citrix had to work on it as well). Being able to SSH to a server and run, well, damn near anything greatly simplifies things like VM appliances.
If the Gnome team wants to work on "teh shinee", why not do things like a proper OO environment, where I can drag something to a printer icon to print it, or to an editor icon to edit it, or to a mail icon to forward it, or to an Stereo Litho icon to make it into plastic, and the "something" I am dragging can work out what the appropriate response it? How about using 3D on the desktop to meaningfully convey more information to me, rather than just making my windows look like they are gelatin.
His. Delivery. Lends. Itself. Tothisapp.
His. Delivery. Lends. Itself. Tothisapp.
Anybody else remember The Goodies...
Anybody else remember The Goodies... The episode where they were running credits, and they had:
"The dumb blond with the big tits"
followed by
"The big blond with the dumb tits"
(Bill Oddie in drag, with the dress and bra on backwards)
What's really dumb about some of these jackasses..
What's really dumb about some of these jackasses is that they weren't even spoofing valid numbers.
I'd calls on my cellphone (which is on the DNC and was for the whole time I've had this number minus the time to get home after I first got it), and the number would be of the form:
1-212-555-12121
Now, for those of you not familiar with the structure of US phone numbers, the final block of numbers should have 4, not 5, values in it.
So whenever I saw that, I knew it was a spoofed number.
(and also, for you Brits who may not know this: in the US, there isn't a special block of numbers for a cell phone - indeed, I can have a land line #, and BY LAW if I get a cell phone I can move that number to the cell (assuming I drop the land line) That's one of the reasons the UK style "calling a cell costs the caller" system won't work here - a given number could have been a landline yesterday, today it could be a cell, and it could be back to being a land line in a couple of weeks).
Re: Sigh...
I've also wondered about the coherence length as well - if you are doing holography, you need a coherence length > the depth of field.
Re: This is no toy
Me, I've wanted to go to the top of Pikes Peak, and have somebody in Goodland, KS, and see if the trip can be made....
The folks on the Cog Rail say you CAN see a corrugated roof in Goodland on your way up, if the sun is right.
Re: Agreed!
"what the hell does it do with it all?"
about:memory in the Firefox URL bar.
Re: While I think that to some extent users are suffering from download fatigue in
"If the citing officer does not follow the correct procedure,"
BUT: That's the COP making the mistake. If YOU make the mistake - e.g. your speedometer is in error, or you didn't see the sign, etc. - TOUGH NUGGIES, court clerk's on the left as you go out, cash, check, or credit card please.
This wasn't the court's fault, it was Microsoft's.
Other correlations to check
Of course, there could be other correlations here:
Do teenagers from better-off families (thus: more likely to have a smartphone) have more sex?
Do teenagers who's parents don't disciplinary them (parents who spoil their kids being more likely to give the kid a smartphone and data plan) have more sex?
Do the socio-economic leanings of the parents have an impact? (more modern-liberal parents being more likely to give the kid a phone than more modern-conservative parents)
Open letter to the judges...
An open letter to the judges:
Gentlemen, should you ever find yourselves in Wichita, KS - please allow me to take you out to dinner, my treat.
137km?
I seriously doubt that the green laser will be flashlight-levels of illumination at 137km as stated in the article. I suspect an extra digit there. 13km I could easily believe, but being able to illuminate, say, the ISS at flashlight levels from the ground? I don't think so....
Re: Transactions
The problem is that the time it takes for the ATM to send the message to the back end, the back end to process the full transaction, and send a response to the ATM is longer than the targeted time to complete the transaction the ATM designers have been told to hit. It's not like there is one big server in the middle of the desert somewhere handling all the bank accounts of the world - your ATM may not be talking to the computer that actually tracks your account.
So the simplistic "lock the account" approach won't work in today's "I HAD TO WAIT A WHOLE MINUTE FOR MY MONEY THIS BANK SUCKS" mindset.
Now it's "lost his brain"
Now it's "lost his brain" - IT'S GETTING WORSE!
"Nurse Zombie, have you seen anything unusual in the patient's room?"
"Nuuuahg!"
Be careful, or the poor man may become:
1) a political pundit
2) A Microsoft/Apple/Android Shill
What? Nothing about a hard blow knocking down blowhards?
What? Nothing about a hard blow knocking down blowhards? What is this site coming to?
At Will, not Right to work
"Right to work" means you cannot be compelled to join a union to work someplace.
You are thinking of "At Will", which means your employer can terminate your employment at any time for any or no reason (although if you are terminated without reason you are entitled to unemployment and termination pay).
Somebody's read "The Prince"
Somebody's read Machiavelli's "The Prince" - when you get caught in a scandal, either immediately say "Mea Culpa" and move on, or find a scapegoat to take the fall (advice which Bill Clinton spectacularly failed to heed).
In this case it sounds like they tried to do both: The head honcho put out a Mea Culpa AND tried to get an underling to join in as well. Forstall probably has read The Prince as well, and knew he was getting fitted for the goatskin - so he refused, and was sacrificed anyway.
