Re: Right... about... THERE!

"not NiMH or NiCd batteries which are extremely safe and reliable?"

Sarcasm, I hope?

If not, try getting any suitably beefy rechargeable battery and sticking a coat hanger across the terminals. See how long it takes for the hanger to melt or the battery to bust a seal.

As for reliability.. with NiCad? The battery technology you have to flatten in order to charge up again properly?

Lithiums might need to be treated gently, but so long as you do, they're heaps better than any NiCad and have tremendous capacity to weight benefits over NiMH.

Re: Pah...

"When the ratio of pirated / DRM removed gets enough, they will then reconsider...."

I don't think you understand how this works. Allow me to demonstrate:

begin:

has_piracy_fallen?

say "Our DRM measures have worked, we will continue to develop them in future."

has_piracy_risen?

say "We plainly need to invest more in our DRM solutions. We will continue to develop them in future."

GOTO begin:

Re: Kerbal Space Programme....

I can't believe it doesn't even get a mention...

Shiny!

Re: life is getting simple again

"I can write and market whatever software I want under whatever license through whatever channel on Win/ 86."

Can I use an OS made by anybody except Microsoft to run those apps with? Nope, didn't think so. They are the ones who ask "where do you want to go today", while being the trolls under the very bridge you need to cross to get there.

GPL restrictive? Have you read the Windows T&Cs lately? You do know you can release commercial software for a GPL OS, right? Many people already do. The FSF haven't set their attack dogs on them yet because they are not breaking the rules.

What about making Windows Store apps on anything other than VS2012? So that's yet more Windows tax, then.

GPL and LGPL stuff is only "locked" in the opinion of people who want to break the only restriction it has: Taking stuff developed by thousands of other people and donated into the public domain.. and ripping it off.

So yes, I do say Command Economy, with Microsoft as the Great Dictator. Have you not noticed the crap with TIFKAM yet? You will have TIFKAM and you will love it. There is no choice.

Re: Complete these well known phrases:

Picasso, and in the same sense as the old "standing on the shoulders of giants" quote, attributed to either Isaac Newton or Bernard of Chartres. Nothing is invented in isolation.

In some cases, it's barely "invented" at all.

Re: please could we all agree

It's 2013. Fucking get with the program, guys.

Took the words right out of my mouth. A modern OS should expect to be a guest. Or a host. Or both! Seamless mode has now been around for sodding years.

I shouldn't need to buy Windows Datacenter [sic] Edition and be raped for several thousand pounds per two CPU sockets to do this reliably.

Re: @ M Gale

"'A bad worker blames his tools'

I have another copypasted phrase for you, only this one has a little more thought put into it:

Don't shit on my cupcake and tell me it's frosting.

Re: Great ... for five minutes

Uhm, just as a quick back-of-a-brainpad idea..

Robot floats to surface. Wave motion causes it to flop about. The motor acts like a generator to turn flopping into that magic elastic trickery stuff.

Boom, self-charging jellyspies.

Re: At the risk of being too pedantic,,

And brown meteors, one presumes?

Either that or a bucket full of the blue water under the seat.

Though if weight is that much of a concern... adult nappies?

The mind reels back in horror contemplating it. I wouldn't want to be the people opening the hatch on the ground.

Re: please could we all agree

As I have said many times, mostly to AC people who have nothing but ad hominem to reason with, absolutely nobody is complaining about faster, smoother or less bloated (even though Win8 is a horribly bloated monster).

Everybody is complaining about the UI. Yes I have used it. Yes, I have it. I have it in a VM jail where it belongs. Yes, it is complete, total and unadulterated shit. It swaps what used to be a perfectly working UI with some shit mobile phone shell that ends up as a crapton of information overload and bouncy, garish animations everywhere.

In fact even under the hood, the idea that the OS knows better than I do as to what programs should be given a few seconds to save their shit and exit before being terminated, is a shit idea. The idea that I shouldn't know what programs are running or not, is shit. This belongs in mobile phones, not a honking great desktop PC or even a reasonably pokey laptop.

Have you ever tried running Windows 8 in seamless mode in Virtualbox? Try it. Really, try it and be amazed at the utter shitness. Watch as TIFKAM refuses to display itself unless you have some desktop windows up, and then only the parts of TIFKAM that cover the desktop windows are shown. No other OS is this shit in a Virtualbox-based envorinment, and other VMs use awful kludgey hacks to get around that issue too, so don't try telling me that it's all VBox's fault.

By all means, provide TIFKAM as a way of running your Windows Phone apps on the desktop (for both people that have Windows Phones). But for fuck's sake, get that horrible abomination the fuck off of my desktop by default.

It. Is. Shit.

There. Please disregard me if you like, AC. It doesn't make 2 + 2 = 5, no matter how much you wish to believe otherwise.

Re: Will nobody think of the programmers

"developers will be forced out of the market or end up prducing software that only mostly works some of the time."

My god yes. Isn't it just so wonderful that the PC has been so unified for the past 30-odd years?

As for a Facebook phone... unfortunately no developers will get another rating or review from me specifically because of the Plus requirement to do so now. If I wanted a Facebook account, I'd get a Facebook account.

Maybe the phone will be useful to some people, but.. no thanks.

Re: life is getting simple again

" Commies, Linux-Lovers - Where is the difference :)"

I find Linux to be far more of a "free market" model than the Command Economy of Windows.

Just sayin'.

Re: Massive military might and spending?

I do believe the words used were "Massive military", not "Massive military might".

Three million round-heads with horses and longbows would be a massive military. Wouldn't exactly last long against one person and a suitably stocked GAU-8 though.

*BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP*

Oh I'm sorry, was that your entire army? I didn't notice.

Re: Attacking the bogeyman of the left is not worth going to jail for.

"Good. Apparently the people of Wisconsin agreed, as he won the recall election etc."

The phrase "turkeys voting for Christmas" comes to mind.

Ho hum.

Re: Ah yes, the old trope

I think a bunch of incidents involving ship anchors and nefarious divers have proven that the Internet does route around damage.

Not saying the alternate routes won't get flooded, but the theory is proven and works.

Re: caps are awesome

HI.

I'M FRED WINCHESTER.

Re: Tethered to Three in rurual Warwickshire...

7GB/£25?

Go on a rolling monthly contract ffs. That £25 gives me as much data as I can download. Also 2500 minutes of calls to anybody and a gazillion and one texts.

Seriously. 50GB+ a few months ago. I'm not always dragging anywhere near that much down, but it's nice to know that I can.

Blah blah ECHELON blah

Didn't help toward the tail end of 2001, did it?

How does ECHELON track the source of a message sent via onion to a directional radio, disguised as 35mhz model aircraft servo noise, to onion again, through the compromised computer of someone who thought they were getting free porno, bounced around inside the data centre of an admin who thought that USB mouse in the post really was a free manufacturer sample, out to an embedded system stuck in a tree with a solar panel, through someone's compromised wifi router and galivanting merrily on its way to a botnet stolen through the use of clever Google searches, embedded into a jpeg as slightly shifted luminance values and then recieved by some guy in a 3rd world country with a satellite downlink accessing the web server on one of the botnet nodes?

It might not exactly be Skype, but you don't really need much bandwidth to say "the plan is go, Ahmed."

Question is whether you need to trace the message at all.

"there's some major UK retailers whose entire EPOS solution is written in Java."

And amusingly, it's called "Eclipse".

Was fun when Bunsfield blew up and the whole damn system had to operate with its head cut off, too. Ever tried to work in a store when even internal stock-checks don't work and card payments take anything from 60 to 180 seconds or more to go through? That was... an experience.

Ex-DSGi employee and not regretting the "ex" part one bit.

What it didn't do is add a "downvote this comment into oblivion" function. Good thing too. Far too many religious fanatics about for that to work well.

Re: My Paper?

I'm studying computer games technology. My professional/academic interest in physics goes as far as "can I simulate this using OpenGL/GLUT/Ogre/XNA?"

The rest I'll leave to the Proper Boffins.

Re: Hey, I stopped reading on the first line because of asshattery.

Apology accepted.

That was an admission that you're wrong, right?

Right.

Re: Doesn't need to hand it over

"Yes the security services can magically plug into skype, the point to point service..."

Point to point, via Mae East or Mae West, or LINX, or any of a few other choke points that can quite easily be sniffed, you mean?

Come on. This is hardly a new trick.

Re: GB != Gb

Do it yourself. At the same time, look up "gigabyte" versus "gigabit".

It's still blindingly quick, mind.

Re: Whispering dishes

Yep, they work incredibly well.

That, pointing the "small" radio dish horizontally and zoning in on terrestrial broadcasts, and the "hunt the microwave signal" indoor dish were about the most memorable parts I can think of. Awesome for a science-interested kid.

To be honest, awesome for pretty much any kid that likes to tinker.

Re: I forget...

"With google glass, it is going to be in your field of vision all the time."

Exactly what will be in your field of vision though?

Speed? A pointer to your next turning? Pile-up warning? Dangerous road surface alert? Engine condition alert? Fog Ahead warning?

Oh but hey, it might be cat videos. Let's ban it. All the while we'll happily allow people to sell DVD player kits specifically designed to stick an 8 inch screen in the middle of the dashboard, because that's really useful.

Yep.

A "small" (if several metres across can be categorised as 'small') dish, with joysticks and knobs and needles flicking up and down. Who cares what they meant? When you're knee high to a grasshopper, just being able to move the thing around makes you feel like a rocket scientist.

Re: So what does it actually look like?

I'm thinking diamond/ruby/sapphire dust in some kind of polished epoxy.

Now that's an idea.

Re: Hands-free Google Glasses make much sense than a two-handed watch

Just wait until someone gets their eyesight seriously damaged because they were punched while wearing Google glass.

So some neanderthal gets to break their knuckles on polycarbonate/ABS/whatever and metal, and at the same time provide accurate video of exactly who was guilty of the assault?

I'm as creeped out by the idea of Google cameras everywhere as anybody, but I fail to see a downside here. I'll happily take a smack in the mush in exchange for regular payments extracted from said neanderthal by force of law.

(And yes, I know neanderthals were more civilised than the stereotype lets on, but hey, this is the Reg. Who needs accuracy?)

Re: How about a "BIGGER HAMMER" variant of flaming

But its not a solution in this case. The amount of force that those bolts generate when they explode would more than likely destroy both the launch platform and the rocket.

What about two matchsticks glued head-to-head and wrapped up in tinfoil?

I know, a silly idea. Would be fun to watch though.

Re: Hey, I stopped reading on the first line because of asshattery.

"But you don't, because you're a thief looking to justify it."

I really don't like this baseless accusation that gets thrown around a lot. Don't like stupid copyright/patent terms? Don't like insane DRM? YOU MUST BE A THIEF!

Let's not even start on how making a copy of something is not stealing it whether you have permission or not.

Instead I'll just say that the Oatmeal guy is spot on the money here, and I would really, really like you to attempt to fling that accusation of theft at me. As this rather small sample of my total library shows, I could do with a laugh.

Re: My electric toothbrush

Same here.

However, it also takes something like 15-18 hours to charge an internal battery that is only going to be 1Ah at best. The more current you want, the bigger and heavier those coils are going to be.

Effectively you're building a transformer in two halves. Even a one amp transformer is quite a hefty beast for a model aircraft to carry!

Re: No mass storage: 2 reasons

"using something that Microsoft won't support by default is a non-starter."

Someone had better tell that to the printer manufacturers.

I don't see how installing Ext2FSD (or whatever you like) is any different to installing the latest Epson or HP drivers. Well, asides Ext2FSD being slightly less painful.

(And despite the name, it seems to work with Ext3 too. Ext4 untested on this machine.)

Re: 5 looks good.

This.

In addition, wrap some nichrome wire around the socket with a bit of insulating fluff as a small heater to stop the jack freezing inside it.

Nichrome wire is cheap. Look up e-cig suppliers.

Re: Virtual test facility, available for free.

Got the full version, as I'm sure many others here do.

Currently figuring out how to get 7 mapsat-mod-equipped probes to the Jool system all at once without all the palaver of forming a space station out of multiple bits docked together in LKO (Low Kerbin Orbit). Also mechjeb, because it's an essential mod pack.

An amazing game (inasmuch as a pre-beta sandbox can be called a 'game'). Shame it's entirely written in C#, so even a moderately-sized rocket stack makes this machine hate me.

Native Linux version now, though! Go go gadget penguins!

Re: MY shed includes ELECTRO-magnets.

A sodding big battery to keep that electromagnet activated?

What kind of power do you need for a few hundred grams of stickiness anyway?