Re: A real boffin would have tapped his own rod.

You're saying that real boffins are wankers?

Walking to school

Oh, the moment I got into high school I was quite happy to walk there. However, you'll find some parents not very eager to let their darling 8 year olds out of their sight even on the way to primary school, understandably enough.

That must be a bloody big pocket.

And talk about headache-inducing.

Neat effect though, until you figure out it's just a TV with the image upside down/mirrored and a giant parabolic mirror. Not so much 3D as floating 2D.

This post had a point, but then I lost it.

The problem here.

School starts at 9am.

A lot of jobs start at 9am.

Not a lot of bosses are sympathetic towards someone who is consistently 15-30 minutes late.

Re: Unix?

Linux, compatible with every class-compliant webcam, which is almost every webcam made in the last few years. No driver needed. Insert webcam. Open app. Use webcam.

If you're going to quip, at least be right.

Re: Law Backwards

You mean like a national registry of identities? A national identity register perhaps?

Yeah, that didn't work out too well for the last government. Issues of trust and function-creep, and all. Plus the expense, plus forcing people onto it.

Personally if someone asks me for ID, I show them the bare skin atop my scalp and declare that as my proof of age. You can use whatever bit of plastic will be accepted.

Re: Project your kids

Umbongo now comes with a free trebuchet design in every copy? Or is that something you need to compile yourself?

USB Thumb Drive?

Last time I tried saving a game onto a USB flash device, the 360 wouldn't even spot it. Fine if you have a .wmv on the drive that you want to play, less fine if you want to spend half the price on a shitload more storage than the official game save cartridges.

I'm writing negative comments because this (and the PS3 Slim) remind me so much of the Sega Megadrive 2 - a device that was smaller, slimmer, cost a whole lot less to manufacture but was otherwise no different (if anything, less capable thanks to the removal of the headphone socket) to the original Megadrive. To many people at the time it was a true indication that Sega had jumped the shark. It was rightly derided. And yet Sony and Microsoft can do the same thing and get nothing but praise? Methinks not.

For Americans, s/Megadrive/Genesis/;

App idea

The server provides a web interface that shows a list of high scores. The client monitors for sudden signal degradation and counts this as one point. The high score list can be sorted by user, phone/device model, OS revision.. oh, all sorts of interesting variables.

Anyone got a Mac to play with?

"Arrogant, Violent, Speeding, Weaving, Law-breaking, Polluting, Arseholes!"

And for another bit of anecdotal evidence, none of the bikers I know are anywhere near as bad as you've just painted them. That includes the HA riders and the occasional geriatric with the "Grot Bike Winner" award on the mantelpiece.

Okay, so maybe the HA guys can get a little loud, but no worse than the Bastard after a good Friday night.

Speed limiters on a bike. Sure. Fit them to cars too while you're at it. Especially the bastards who like to scream past the motorised or non-motorised two-wheelers and who gives a flying fuck if it causes an accident?

Ever been on a bicycle and caught in the slipstream from a boy racer who thinks he's God's Gift to Silverstone?

What?

"Instead he thinks it is because of his son, who has the habit of turning the console off by just unplugging it from the wall. That is it! One fail, and not from the Yellow Light of Death."

If pulling the plug will break the toy, then that toy also has a critical design flaw.

re: re: Menu bar

"As usual, Opera does things properly, everyone then catches up a couple of years later."

Using up almost every ounce of my 1GB RAM plus swap partition to display a single tab? Yeah, I suppose you're right. That and Turbo has never worked.

The movable tabs and mobile-view are a nice idea, but please, why do people evangelise so much about a browser that's more bloated than most?

Changing sparkplugs on an MG F

Open the bonnet... no engine.

Open the boot.. no engine.

So how do you change the sparkplugs? Well that's easy. You drive it onto a ramp and jack the thing up until you can stand underneath. Then you change the sparkplugs.

Apple hardware? Cheap?

"- the iPhone will fall in price, like all tech does. Eventually, when they're dirt cheap, won't it be wise for the general public to have access to apps. Apps aren't free to develop!"

I'm sure you can buy PowerPC Macs from ebay these days. Problem is, they are next to useless and still come with an Apple price tag, compared with a PC from the same era.

The iToys will be exactly the same. You may be able to get a first-gen iToy for reasonably cheap.. when the 10th gen iToys are out and none of the apps will work on the old stuff. Apple is the Bang and Olufsen of computing, and you shall expect to have a similarly fat wallet to afford one.

www.heavens-above.com

Very useful site, for anyone who fancies trying to spot the ISS. Depending on how close it gets, it's bright enough to see on an evening pass so try checking for "all passes" as well as "visible passes". The website seems to automatically mark any passes made before absolute darkness as not visible.

Also a pair of 20x50 binoculars seems enough to make the station go from "very bright moving dot" to "very wobbly elongated dot". At some point I'll get the chance to spot it with some proper optics in a region that doesn't have an orange sky at night.

You teach Linux? Really?

Then I guess you know already that it doesn't matter what desktop environment the user chooses. Applications written for Gnome tend to work in KDE as well, and vice versa. Any halfway-competent distribution just grabs whatever dependencies it needs.

Even with that kitchen-sink approach, you're still probably going to end up with less than half of the bloat of your average Windows 7 install, so why not just install all the common window manager libraries and let the users and developers both have whatever they enjoy using the most?

As for which apps will work on what distro, well I can only speak for the occasional commercial game that is released "for Linux". I can assure you that Epic and Id's products have worked on every distribution I've tried them on. That said, I haven't tried installing Doom 3 on a Belkin router yet. Your mileage may vary.

IM server, what? I think if you're wanting to run an IM server, you're already getting way into techie territory and beyond what 99.9% of users will want to do. If it takes a little minor fiddling with a config file, so what? And would you not have the bewildering array of IM protocols under any operating system?

Standardising on one interface means you will piss off everyone who doesn't like that interface. Good luck getting a successful distribution going that supports Gnome but not KDE, or KDE but not Gnome. And getting every distribution to use the same kernel version? Did you not read that allegorical tale of the cathedral and the bazaar? Yeah, good luck.

So far, so yawn. You've come up with the same tired old arguments that were incorrect five years ago and even more incorrect now. Linux's biggest problem as a domestic OS is simply that old catch 22. No market = no developers = no market. Everything else is sorted, drivers included. Even that old wifi chestnut is fading fast, and any problems there are probably as much to do with the same catch 22 as anything else.

So yes. Written on my Ubuntu laptop. It's quite nice actually. And not shit-brown either. I know how to change background colours.

Hang on, what?

By your argument, whenever I connect my laptop to the Internet, Virgin reserve the right to install spyware on my machine. As do any intermediate networks my packets may happen to travel through. Oh, and if I connect to a free wifi point somewhere, the owners of that AP reserve the right to run SSLstrip and snaffle my usernames and passwords.

I really don't give a damn who's network MY device is connected to. It's my device. Period.

And how are you supposed to use a phone, without connecting to a network? Isn't that the point of a phone?

Ahwell. Increasingly glad I never bothered with the whole smartphone craze. I may end up developing for them at some stage, but I'll be damned if I ever use one as more than a test platform. Google, you'd better change this, quick. Openness and "freedom" is the only differentiator between you and Apple at the moment. Secret remote installation of software is the sort of thing I'd expect a virus to get up to. Really, what the hell were the people who thought this up smoking?

Heh, X3

Oh don't get me wrong. I still have X2 from back in the days when you didn't need to install malware to use it. Even have the official no-DRM patch to completely remove the CD check. I've got M2s coming out of my earholes at the moment with a set of save files that have been built up over the last year or so. Currently saving up for a second carrier + fighter fleet. When I finally hit Omicron Lyrae for the final quest mission, those Kha'ak are going to shit bricks. I think a little grind is okay if you can pause the game and come back later when you can be bothered. Or just hide about 300km above the ecliptic with time compression on full while you get a cup of tea and your trade empire does its thing.

However, I won't buy PC games these days, mostly because of the DRM and the price (and, err, the need for Windows). And if you didn't read my original post, I specifically mentioned the upgrade treadmill. I'm not willing to pay £300 for a graphics card and if I was, I'd expect it to last (a lot) longer than 12 months before upping the detail on a game anything past "low" makes things play like a flickbook.

See I play computer games to have fun, not as a career. If I'm lucky, I may end up with a career making them though. Plus £100 not spent on Windows 7 Crippled Edition is £100 spent on something more worthwhile. Like, oh I don't know, maybe this lovely little airframe/EDF/ESC combo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x2mbEVqJW4

No DRM, and you get change left over for beer!

I used to do that...

..cheap banger of a motorbike, on old slagheaps.

Well the slagheaps are a rubbish tip now, and the local Plod will chase you on quads and crush the bike. Can't do that any more.

Used to take the old air rifle out as well, and terrorise the local can/bottle population. Try that these days and I'll be down for 28 days without charge.

Hang out in the middle of a park/field with music going and a bunch of mates? Sorry, no can do any more. You'll get your boom box confiscated under some illegal-rave law.

It's now pretty much impossible to do anything your average 16-18 year old would find "fun" that doesn't cost a boatload of money or isn't highly illegal and actively enforced against. Not trying to say that there aren't, and haven't always been, some nasty bastards out there. However, for hell's sake, give teens something to do (or at least let them make up their own fun) and they might not hang around outside shops getting rat-arsed for want of something better (and by better I don't mean 'more productive') to do.

Climb up, snip wires. Drill hole, insert water. Whatever.

Not that I'm actually suggesting you do such a thing, oh no.

However I'm wondering how long it would take before the shopkeeper notices anything different.

Re: Cloudy Computing

The idea of Eucalyptus is that you can run your own personal "cloud" (which seems to be as nebulous a term as its sky-borne namesake). As for uses.. well I imagine if you've got a business with a lot of workstations in it, maybe there's some sense in ploughing a fair amount of money into a HAL-strength server while the workstations are cheapy not-so-dumb terminals? Of course, your mileage may vary.