Posts by David D. Hagood
1110 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
IT Angle: MonkeyVision
OK, here's an IT angle for you:
All we need now is to find a monkey with a green ass. We collect 6912000 monkeys - 2304000 red-assed monkeys, 2304000 green assed monkeys, and 2304000 blue assed monkeys. We arrange them as a 1920x1200 grid with one each of the red, green, and blue assed monkeys. We train them to moon (or not moon) on cue.
and then
MONKEYVISION!
Sour Grapes, mayhaps?
Could all of this just be "sour grapes" on Microsoft's part?
"Apple has a beautiful design aesthetic. Our people, not so much. So, beauty and aesthetic design suck, and simple stick figures are the way to go."
(BTW: Getting simple stick figures to "work" is hard, too - just ask Randall Munroe - so I expect Microsoft to do their typical <cough/>fine<cough/> job on that as well.)
So, to not have spiders, you have wasps?
What are these wasps like to non-spider organisms? Here in Kansas, we have several species of wasp, many that feed on spiders. Some of them are downright the skinheads on crack of the insect kingdom, and will attack you for being within some wasp-defined radius of their nest, even if you aren't threatening it directly.
So, while these 'strine wasps may be good at killing redblack spiders, are you just trading one BAMF for another? Will these wasps sting people?
Perfect for air travel
This is perfect for air travel - hear me out!
I've noticed on my recent flights what appears to be a pattern:
* The folks with Android tablets usually have them down in their laps or on the tray table.
* The folks with iPads tend to hold them up where everybody can see them, as if to say "PH333R MY E-PENIS, FOR I HAVE AN APPLE PRODUCT!"
So, when one of those people starts waving their iFruitOfTheLoom surrogate around, you whip out your 22 inch (snicker) and proceed to administer a bit of Freudian smackdown.
Re: Why the phrase "illegal payments"?
Also, on this side of the big water, bung is either
a) misinterpreted to mean an alternative-personal-hygeine, alternatively aromatically gifted practitioner of an alternatively-residenced lifestyle
b) an object rammed into a not-yet-empty keg when the tap is removed.
But to be fair: "bribe" usually means a payment for action/inaction, while "illegal payments" can cover payment for unlawful goods as well.
Re: Tape hasn't kept up with capacity
For my personal needs, 1.5T is about 3.5T too small. You also conveniently skipped over the cost of the drives. Most of the drives at that level are thousands of dollars - I can buy a lot of disk for that. You have to be backing with a significant rotation of tapes to amortize the drive cost down below disk.
Re: "Burglarized"
"Man murdered to death!"
There's nothing wrong with that! I KEEL YOU! I KEEL YOU TO DEATH! (that's worse!)
Good ol' Achmed...
FIX GNOME
I really wish Canonical would realize that the Gnome developers need an adult - somebody to actually perform project management, and to be the voice of the people who matter: the users. I would love for Canonical to look at the Gnome devs they employ and say
"OK, now we are going to behave like grown-up developers. We are going to stop deprecating features users want just because you saw something you thought was 'cool'. We are going to realize that the desktop computer, the tablet, the phone, and the set-top box are all different user interface paradigms, and deserve different treatment. We are going to insure that before we remove a component, an API, or a feature, we have a form/fit/function replacement ready for use, and only then will we mark something deprecated, and only after a reasonable period of time will we remove the feature. We will examine any module we plan on removing, and work up a detailed set of requirements that module meets. We will NOT engage in the 'Cascade of Attention-deficit disorder Teenager' development mode.
Canonical cannot dictate these changes to the whole Gnome developer community, but it sure as hell can dictate it to you who are paid by Canonical. If you don't like it, to quote The Gord, 'Door's to your left.', HR is down the way and they have forms for letters of resignation. Your immediate job is to come up with a plan for how you will provide form/fit/function replacements for the old desktop - that's a panel, a reasonable window manager with support for multiple workspaces, and all the standard Gnome 2 applet. I want time estimates by end of business today, iteration plans by the end of the next business day, and a schedule for the first iteration the day after that."
I'd also love to see Canonical call Red Hat, Novell, and the leaders of the Debian project, and say "We are doing this whether you help or not, but it would be best if you did help. "
Of course, all that said, there's a lot of things I'd like, but that I'm unlikely to get.
Tape hasn't kept up with capacity
Let me ask these questions:
1) What is the capacity of the largest single tape cartridge available?
2) What is the price of that capacity?
3) How does that capacity compare to the average system's disk capacity?
When it's not hard to have HOME systems that would require more than one tape to back up fully, let along professional systems, does that not seem like a reason that tape might be going out of fashion?
Color me unsurprised...
Wired has always been style over substance:
"Here's an article! But it's only 2 paragraphs long, and anybody with decent reading speed and comprehension will see it's totally BS in twenty seconds. How can we make it seem deep and mysterious?"
"Let's typeset it in a big spiral, using ransom note font, in bright yellow, on a swirly hot pink and electric blue background, with the font size getting progressively smaller until it's 5 pt. at the middle. That way, it'll take them an hour to read it, and cognitive dissonance will make them think it must have been deep to take that long to read."
"BRILLIANT!"
So the idea that they are, let's be charitable and say "less than rigorous", on their checking doesn't surprise me. Hence why I stopped my subscription a decade ago.
Wrong meme
All this means is that Pinky is going to start having to be more careful not to aggravate Brain.
But in reality: this is a gene alteration. It needs to be in effect in the womb to cause excessive muscle development. It's not going to be a pill you take, or a shot you get, to [b|h]ulk up.
How it spreads...
"Dear friend
I hope you are well
Please to run "sudo dpkg -i install makemoneyandpenisfast" on attached.
For great money and health!
"
It's a shame they don't just use networking...
I'd rather see the phones support exporting their display via VNC, or RDP, or X (personally, one of the nicest things about Maemo was that it was based on X, so apps could run on my desktop, and I could run apps via SSH on my tablet...)
Likewise, if they'd make these pocket projectors speak one of those protocols over WiFi, then you could use your laptop, or your phone, or ... with it.
AND you could walk around during your presentation, carrying the phone to use as a presentation remote.
(and while I'm wishing... Google, make Android support adding Bluetooth profiles to a device, so I can have a proper presentation remote program that just adds the HID profile to my phone, like Bluemaemo did, rather than forcing everbody to do these dain-bramaged work-arounds where I have to install an app on the computer running the presentation to control it.)
If only they would work on fixing Gnome....
Ironic that FLOSS is helping Windows, but Gnome is foundering. Cinnamon is really not a great replacement for Gnome 2. It's better than Unity or Gnome 3, but that's not a high bar to clear. Given how much of Gnome 3 is not changed (Nautilus, Evolution, etc.) I don't understand why we cannot have our panel back, but...
Re: A more plausible explanation
Actually, it was. It was a warning from a future me, who had some issues with his time machine. Fortunately, he/I had seen this warning so he/I had packed the right replacement parts, and he/I then left this message so that he/I would know to pack the parts and leave the message so we wouldn't run afowl [sic] of the universe's self-consistency rules.
Competition.
eBay is stopping hucksters from fleecing the foolish.
They obviously don't want the competition.
Re: Patents were not such a big deal, 30 years ago
You do realize that DR-DOS - Digital Research DOS - was written by Digital Research, the company behind CP/M?
Repurposing the guts
I'm sure the company that makes this will soon enough repurpose the guts.
EXPELLO! Look - I'm a wizard now!
Let me describe my fantasy...
Let me describe my fantasy for how I'd like this to play out:
Time: the near future (like, tomorrow).
Location: The Ecuadoran embassy, London.
Suddenly, a pair of Blackhawks appear, swooping down. Out of their open doors drop several sets of ropes, followed by Seal Team 6 dropping down.
"GO GO GO!"
They rapidly storm the embassy. What little resistance is met with beanbag rounds.
"TALLYHO!" The Seals descend upon Assange, who is rapidly subdued, and dragged from the embassy. The Blackhawks withdraw from British airspace before the Crown can begin to react - there will be repercussions, oh yes, but not at this moment.
A short distance from the shores, the Blackhawks land on a carrier. Assange is quickly transferred to an unmarked Learjet, still guarded by Seals.
The stench of fear and feces permeates the aircraft.
Many hours later, the aircraft lands. Seals lift Assange and escort him to the door. The hours in the relative darkness of the aircraft have left his eyes unready for the bright sunlight outside, and he is momentarily blinded. Guided by the Seals, he stumbles down the jetway toward a man in a suit, his watering eyes unable to make out the details at first - "Who is this man? What will he do to me?"
Then the Seal leader speaks: "President Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado, may I introduce Julian Assange. He's all yours, we don't want him!"
And with that, the Seals board their aircraft and fly away.
Times
The time to cross the ocean with passengers is not only impacted by top speed, but by:
1) Time to climb to altitude (you really don't want to be doing Mach 1+ down low!)
2) Acceleration time to speed (I don't think your passengers would like a 10G pull to speed).
3) Deceleration time from speed.
4) Time to descend from altitude
5) General airport issues (time to get take-off clearance, time to get landing clearance, time to taxi to the gate, time to get gate clearance).
Going from Mach 2.2 to Mach 6 will reduce the time you spend over the ocean, but not the other times (indeed: time to altitude will increase as will acceleration time).
Now, if you are going to the antipode (e.g. London to Christchurch) you will greatly benefit from the higher speed, but on a shorter hop (London to New York, say), the other terms will dominate.
Re: Sunk cost
Wrong analysis. The correct way to look at this is that a launch has costs above the cost of the hardware (crew, fuel, logistics, etc.) Also, if by analyzing the data they have, they can determine what went wrong and what to do about it, they may be able to correct the flaw on the remaining prototype before launch, which is likely much cheaper than building a whole new prototype.
Posted in New MPEG format paves the way for UHDTV
Increase in spatial, but what about temporal?
This standard allows an increase in spatial resolution, but what about an increase in temporal resolution - from 30 to 60 Hz? Or, from 30Hz to 30Hz stereo? Personally, I'd rather have either of those before the higher spatial resolution - my current TV can do 1080p60, so with an external decoder I could get some benefit from the higher rate now.
And will we see a BluRay that would support that? While many BluRay players likely cannot upgrade their video codecs, I know of at least ONE that should be able to do so (unless Sony decides that it would be more fun to piss off PS3 owners even more).
Re: ES File Explorer
And it has an FTP server built in. (+1)
And it supports SFTP. (+1) (but not keypair authentication (yet) (-1))
And it support Bluetooth-OBEX-FTP server (+1)
It's not the operating system
The parts that Toshiba is waiting on are not the operating system.
The parts Toshiba are waiting are flat, made from cotton rag, green-ish, have pictures of dead presidents on them, and are shipped from Microsoft's bribery and extortion^W^W^WMarketing and advertisement group.
Posted in Nokia CEO: No shift from Windows Phone
Ye cannae change the laws of physics!
Don't you guys understand, "Ye cannae change the laws of physics!" Once you have passed the event horizon, you cannot turn back.
Re: "Many societies ... consider homosexuality to be contrary to their culture [or] morality"
"FFS what is you acutally do in your boring country?!?"
Camels, mostly.
Simple
Move to Madagascar, and close the ports.
Posted in El Reg probes pregnant Playmobil lass
OK, one down...
OK, one down, but to properly simulate your typical WallyMart you need:
* Morbidly obese person who totally ignores the advice "Dress for your body size"
* Oblivious mother and her 14 feral crotch fruit(*1) she ignores
* Suburban white boy trying to be "gangsta"
* Oblivious person paying more attention to their iThing than where they are going.
* Oblivious person with their shopping cart positioned to block the isle while they look at something.
(*1) - I normally use a more alliterative form but in deference to propriety I will substitute "crotch" for the every-part-of-the-language word.
Posted in Ten Android games
I thnk the main thing is...
I think the main thing for tablet/phone gaming is that it's something to fill dead time - "I have 40 minutes until my flight boards, what shall I do with this time?"
To that end, IMHO games need to be:
1) quick. I should be able to complete a game or two during that time
2) resumable - when they say "group 4 may now board" I need to be able to shut the game down without losing a great deal of work.
3) absorbing, but not too absorbing: it should entertain me but not keep me from hearing the previously mentioned boarding announcement.
It seems that many of the games in this article meet those requirements, which is good.
Flawed sample set
Generally, I trust Gallop polls about as far as I can piss upwind - and I live in Kansas.
People like myself, who care about our privacy and our freedom, have unlisted numbers on the Do Not Call list. Moreover, we have answering machines on our land-lines, and screen our calls, and do not take polling calls. Those with only cell phones are even more likely to screen calls, and thus are not counted in this sort of poll. This poll selected for sheeple.
The TSA is ineffectual at best, and is nothing but security theater at worst. The main steps to secure air travel - locking the flight deck and refusing to deal with hijackers - have already been implemented. The idea that a terrorist is going to be able to make a decent explosive from chemicals that, if commanded at the checkpoint to drink will not cause the terrorist's head to explode immediately, goes against basic chemistry. The best thing they could do to improve air travel safety would be to station 2 armed air marshals - one uniformed, one undercover - on each flight.
Re: The goal?
That's one of the reasons I'd really like to see the Polywell fusor a.k.a. Bussard fusor be shown to work. Not only do I want to see a clean source of power, but I REALLY want to see the various "greens" (note: scare quotes) deal with a power source that is hard to argue against from a logical perspective.
Posted in Chinese man's six-ton balls save lives
Seems like a bad idea to me
Fecal matter occurs. Your ball is washed up somewhere. A crowd of people gather.
"The top began moving...
rotating...
Unscrewing!"
Next thing you know, somebody with a background in Science Fiction has a .30-06 trained on the hatch, and the first person out's head is a red mist.
U-LA!
The Doctor's age
Considering the Doctor's age has been given as roughly 1000 years, that means the show is now 5% the age of the main character.
Re: Shock! Horror!
You forgot:
"Blogg's Miracle Rug Cleaner contains BEDBUGS BEDBUGS BEDBUGS and BLACK MOLD!"
Re: Hold fire on the hate....
Fundamentally, any peer to peer protocol will have issues with a good stateful firewall. Any good admin will restrict what goes through a firewall, and will have a default deny rule in place, so any peer to peer VoIP protocol will have to be on specified ports so that an admin can allow it through. Add to that the mess that is NAT in IPv4 and NO protocol will work well without hackery (see Skype).
When we finally get IPv6 widely adopted, much of the nastiness of VoIP (indeed, all peer to peer) will go away, and under that, SIP will work pretty well.
Re: 30%
"Is [Windows Mobile getting 30% of the market] really possible?"
Yes, it is possible.
It is also possible that all the fecal matter in my body will undergo quantum tunneling, appearing 2m to my left, and then re-assemble itself into a 5 star, 4 course meal, complete with after-dinner mint.
It is just not very likely.
Re: Firewall?
I didn't realize that US TV's were so much more advanced than UK TVs. Over here, we have this thing call a "channel selector", that allows the view to watch, or to not watch, whatever the view chooses. We even have the ability to program the "channel selector" to show our favorite channels, so that we can remove those channels that we don't wish to watch.
It's a shame that the UK forces people to watch everything, and that the only response is to attempt to filter out with a firewall what is not desired. I guess Max Headroom was more of a documentary....
(seriously: you don't like it, don't watch it. You have the power!)
To clarify
Rereading after I posted, I realized this may not be clear: I'm not suggesting using a USB dongle. I am suggesting using the RF to bitstream chip that forms part of the USB dongle.
Re: @tom 38
"surely it would be more efficient to just write an app for the 4 users that are on average actually going to use this at any one time?"
NO. Using ONE RF carrier, to handle as many users are in range, with 1 set of data is MUCH more efficient than using 1 carrier per user. Even if you use IP multicast, the leg from the tower to the phone will be on its own carrier (for CDMA that would be its own coding channel, for GSM it will be its own carrier and timeslot).
Given that a DVB or ATSC USB dongle is as small as they are, and given that some phones already receive broadcast FM using the headphones as the antenna, there's little reason NOT to have the phones just pull the TV signal out of the air in the same way.
Re: the can make their own Internet
"If it isn't a political activity, and neither Russia nor China would gain anything from the exercise, then why are they asking?"
But they DO gain: just read this thread. They gain by stirring the pot of anti-US sentiment: "YAH! Y DON DOSE YANK BASTARDS DOZE DAT!"
Sorry, pass
I have supported several Kickstarters - I'll pass on this one. The Kickstarters I've supported have all involved me getting something for my money - a watch, a game, a gizmo. What this Kickstarter offers is.... bragging rights. Even at the $300K level, do *I* get one? For keeps?
I wish these guys well, I hope they get their funds, I look forward to seeing the video - and if they then do a Kickstarter to take their prototype to mass production, maybe I'll kick in.
Re: HP Sauce
"They don't seem to eat lamb either for some strange reason."
Not totally true - it depends upon the region. If you are ever in Winslow, Az., ask the nice girl in the flatbed Ford to give you a lift to La Posada (http://www.laposada.org/), and take a meal in the Turquoise Room. They have (or at least, as of my last visit a couple of months ago had) a platter of locally raised, organic, no-antibiotics given, free range lamb that is unbelievable.
Re: China and Russia
"I guess they only have one choose. [sic]"
What could be done:
1) eliminate all non-country code TLDs (save the management non-CC TLD .arpa - and ideally, rename .arpa to something else like .icmp)
2) Let each country manage its own CC TLD.
3) Let ICAAN put all these dain-bramaged domains under .us.
4) let whoever do whatever with .uk, .eu, .fr, etc.
Of course, then all the folks who love to complain about the US would have one less thing to bitch about.
Re: It sounds great in principle
"There are plenty of (non US) commentators who think this would be the worst idea ever in the history of the internet."
But they, and you, just haven't been paying attention when reading this (and other) sites on the Internet.
The US is EEEEEEEEEEEVIIIIIIIIIILLLLLLL!!!!!!!!! Everything we do is EVIL. Everything we DON'T do is EVIL! Evil suffuses US, and infects all that we touch. Even the very air we have breathed out is suffused with EVIL - that's what is causing climate change! Our urine blackens the oceans! The light reflecting off US corrupts the sky!
Our control over the Internet is key part of our EVIL. Even this very message is an attempt by an EVIL American to infect all the non-US readers of this web site (which, by the way, is on the Internet, and thus is controlled by US, no matter what you think, and is thus STEEPED IN EVIL) with our EVIL. You feel the urge to kill a puppy right now, don't you? OUR EVIL KNOWS NO BOUNDS!
Posted in Microsoft dumps Metro from Windows 8
Alternatives
Windows Titanic
Windows Edsel
Windows Pinto
Windows Beiber
Windows GaGa
Windows Gigli
Windows Chlamydia
Windows Virginity
Sheep don't tweet...
Sheep don't tweet, they bleat. Ergo, sheep use Bleater.
ARRRRGGG!
I hate this "we will track tweets of either candidate" crap!
THERE ARE CHOICES OTHER THAN REPUBLICAN OR DEMOCRAT YOU ASSES!
The whole reason the Democrats and Republicans get away with offering the sub-standard fare they do is that people simply CANNOT conceptualize that there are choices other than those.
It's like going into a restaurant and being told "we have two dishes on the menu: shit sandwich and shit soup", and then ordering one or the other rather than saying "screw you, I'll go to the sub shop across the street"
And in an emergency?
And when an emergency happens, which is easier to keep running:
a single transmitter, plus a number of battery operated receivers
or
a bunch of routers, head-end units, distribution units, and home routers, many of which won't be on any form of back up?
But I am worrying about nothing - it's not like there are power outages that take down hundreds of millions of people's power....
(I wonder why my contractor house hasn't been responding to my emails.... I'll have to ping Bhupesh about this poor performance.)
Re: Forget Kansas - bring it to the rest of us! :)
Sorry, your logic is based upon a false premise:
" the most tornado-prone region of the world (outside North America), as measured by number of reported tornadoes per unit area, is the Netherlands, followed by the United Kingdom (especially England[...])"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_climatology#Tornadoes_outside_North_America
So piss off and stop trying to queer our deal.
Re: It is taking off
Yes, they realize Kansas is in Tornado Alley. They also realize that despite what the media would have you believe, winds high enough to knock the poles down are not as common as you might think (so long as people properly trim their trees so as not to overhang the lines), and that even if you hang lines on the poles, and they are blown down, and you hang them again, and they are blown down again, and you hang them again, you still haven't spent as much money as digging the trenches to bury them.
