Posts by TheProf

The ball's gone flat

Just imagine a petulant child picking up the ball and declaring "It's my ball and I'm going home! To recharge it."

The Rout of Civilisation

Just think, they can now falsely direct a vehicle down a too-narrow lane, across a river without using a bridge, the wrong way down a one-way street, across fields, under bridges that are too low and all the other things that real GPS does to vehicles.

It'll be wonderful!

Perspective

In the accompanying picture is George Lucas small or far away?

Ah!

"To put 3MW in perspective, that's roughly the yield of the rooftop array on BMW Mini plant in Oxford."

I love it when someone explains something abstract in an easy to understand manner.

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Receiving the signal

Will I need a new phone/sat nav to use this new system or will it be easier to just move abroad now?

You may laugh now

But wait until Apple invent this in 3 years time.

More???

I can never find the right one now. I know I've seen it somewhere but after looking through the 8 pages of them my phone offers me I can't remember why I need it.

I think I'll have a browse through the animated GIFS. There's bound to be one that expresses my exact thought.

an under-glass fingerprint sensor.

And there was me expecting to see an under-display fingerprint sensor.

Vinyl tinted glasses

Yeah! Playing Bring It On Home is so much easier on vinyl.

Hold 12" sleeve gently in one hand and slip the inner liner out. Repeat above to extract vinyl and holding the record by the edges carefully examine the paper label to find out which side the required track is on. Holding record in one hand use the other hand to lift lid of record player. Place disc on turntable and commence decontamination routine. (Varies between users but dust and static elimination is usually required.)

Set turntable to required speed and carefully lift record arm off cradle and, squinting in the poor light, try to locate the 2mm wide space between tracks and gingerly place stylus on the record surface. Lift record arm and try again until correct track is found. Close turntable lid and retire to comfy chair for 8 minutes of listening bliss.

The alternative is a remote control for your CD player that has enough buttons on it to look ridiculous be useful.

G**gle this Sony RM-D7M and prepare to be amazed. (It's for a Minidisc player.)

Been done before

The Mel Brooks film The Producers (1967) that led to the musical play based on the film The Producers (2001) that lead to the film based on the musical play based on the film The Producers (2005).

Good for the Pythons! If they (continue to?) make more money than the current crap crop of funny people then good on 'em.

Of course I'm still waiting for the Marx Brothers revival.

Edit: Ah what @Jay 2 said.

Movie time

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was enjoyed? Out of the 3 (the others being CE3K and The Fisher King) I'd have thought that was the least likely to be enjoyed. I like it but that's because I like Gilliam's work. And it has Uma Thurman in it.

I've just borrowed and watched Aliens, Total Recall and John Carpenter's The Thing. And now I recall why I haven't bought my own copy of these exciting 1980's (loosely speaking) films.

Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to why a commercial space tug has a 'self-destruct' mechanism? And assuming a logical reason can be made for such a device, why does activating it fill all the corridors leading away from the control room with steam? And how come the escape shuttle won't take 4 people when there were 7 members in the crew?

Pictures please

"giant Kit-Kat-sized power adapter"

This is the bit I found most interesting but you didn't supply a picture.

Shame on you. Poor journalism, moan, gripe etc.

Pump It Up

Vacuvin Wine Saver. Less than a tenner at Amazon at the time of writing.

Or why not ask a friend or even a total stranger to help you finish the bottle? It's a great way to meet new people.

Contrast

Could this be a problem with the light contrast present in different faces?

I've just looked at a series of images of faces and the white faces had a greater contrast range. If I squinted at the images, the white woman with the ridiculous Groucho eyebrows was still recognisable whilst the other faces merged into blobs.

If facial software it trying to identify points on a face isn't it going to struggle with a face with lower contrast? Blonde eyebrows on a white face and black eyebrows on a black face = low contrast. Of course that doesn't explain why it's accuracy is lower with female faces. Do women do anything to alter the shape or colour of their faces?

More than

"The report found that those in the Philippines spent the longest time on the site – an average of 13 minutes and 28 seconds per visit, more than the overall global average of 9 minutes 59 seconds."

So the longest time spent on the site was longer than the average time spent? Fascinating.

After deletion

I'm wondering how this affects Google's search engine.

I was under the impression that Big G's search results were based on the number of sites that referenced something. In this case for example, say 100 other sites pointed to DodgyTelecom. Google then ranks the result based on 100 connections.

So, if today Google delete that information (100 connections), what happens tomorrow? Does Google trawl the web again (or whatever it is they do) and then delete the references to DodgyTelecom or are they allowed to start serving up those results?

What about other search engines? Are they allowed to serve pages based on DodgyTelecom searches?

And of course the actual pages where the damning evidence is published still exist don't they? And that Way Back machine probably has it all archived away.

Bing

Ha ha ha ha! Bing!

Also don't click on the adverts.

Bing! Snigger.