Posts by cdilla
30 posts • joined Tuesday 13th January 2009 08:49 GMT
As a young kid Patrick Moore was who inspired my interest in astronomy, but it was visiting Jodrell Bank that inspired me to take up astrophysics. I first saw the dish from afar the top of Mow Cop when I was 10. Pure Science Fiction. I asked to see it up close and recall, as did AndrewC, controlling a small dish.
I revisited several time through my university years too and was further inspired by briefly meeting Sir Bernard there shortly before he retired as director.
It is a rare thing that bestows such nostalgia and is also so prominent in current science.
Definitely more of this sort of thing from El Reg.
A pleasant change to the increasingly poor items posted elsewhere.
Cynosure
It seems LP's cynosure is AO. Sad to see him moving further in that direction.
memories
I have memories of two childhoods. One of my own very happy childhood, and a second equally happy one set in Greentown Illinois courtesy of of the great Ray Bradbury.
Whilst many of his books and short stories have repeatedly passed through my reading list over the past few decades, it is Dandelion Wine that is always with me.
I first read parts of it to my son when he was six. By the time he was twelve he had read it himself many times, and so another generation began to see the world through the wonderful visionary eyes of Ray Bradbury.
My top two authors. RB and DNA. Now both gone.
So...
... who can recommend a fast and reasonably priced VPN service? VyperVPN?
I'm sick of Governments, ISPs and advertising agencies grubbing through every packet. And now it seems that we'll suffer outages, degraded performance and higher costs (to pay for all the monitoring) to boot. Bastards.
Posted in Is there life after ads for St Zuck?
Re: There's the problem......
"Who is going to pay for it? The masses want stuff "Free" "
There are people who create an maintain complex code for free several of my PCs run entirely on free software.
I'm keeping an eye on the freedombox foundation and have my dreamplug ready and waiting. It may be years before something comes along that free, secure and gains critical mass, but the world is not entirely devoid of skilled and dedicated people working towards that end. Likewise the number of people who are finally "getting" what the likes of facebook are about and are disengaging from them, is growing all the time.
Posted in Is there life after ads for St Zuck?
All Facebook is interested in is making money off the private data provided willingly or otherwise by its users. They don't have the users interest at heart at all and will continue to take liberties with privacy to squeeze every last penny out of them.
The sooner a proper user-centric privacy oriented social media infrastructure is established the better.
Hopefully the vampiric and intrusive "services" like facebook will soon be a thing of the past.
All credit to the creators though, for exploiting the moment and making their fortune.
Posted in Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs
Sheevaplug Dreamplug
As others have already pointed out the great Sheeva and Dreamplug machines should not have been left out. They are cheaper than some of those cited here and the Dreamplug especially offers a lot of connectivity (2xLAN, wifi, bluetooth,2xusb,sdcard,jtag, sata, optical, audio, mic).
My sheeva and dream plugs are used for a variaty of linux based server and monitoring duties.
I have a R-Pi too, though am spending more time on making a case for it than actually using it :-)
An excellent read
Thanks for this well presented and interesting article.
More of this kind of thing!
educational
I didn't buy a ZX81 for it to be educational, but it was.
I had written fortran programs as part of a physics degree course but never something that would show some real time visual output. With the ZX81 and subsequent 8-bit micros I thoroughly enjoyed creating demos, games and other rpograms. Along the way I learned z80A, 6502 and 6809 assembly and machine code, something that eventually allowed me to break from my mainframe cobol career into a PC C++ career.
My kids are Nintendo generation and they just don't have the same kind of entry point I did into programming.
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
There's only the Grundy I didn't have at one time or another. Sad sad sad.
Have to agree that the 6809 instruction set was a joy to program with which was why my Dragon got so much of my attention.
Good to see the Ace appearing, I picked on up at an auction a couple of years after it was released. I'd used forth at uni (for controlling radio telescopes), and it was so damn fast.
Anyone remember the Enterprise? That was my dream machine, but I don't think it ever made it to mass market.
Posted in Ten... eight-bit classic games
Jeff Minter
Surely at last one of Gridrunner, Matrix, AMC, Ancipital, Batalyx, Yaks Progress or may of the others should be there?
The baffling paucity of Jeff Minter titles in this list aside, it's good to see these games getting coverage still from time to time. The glasses may be a little rose tinted but I still do play these from time to time (on iPad these days) and recapture the essence of those heady days.
OK, you've convinced me
I'll buy one immediately.
appropriate penalty
"a couple of hours community service" sounds like an appropriate penalty to me.
Posted in A Farewell to Oates: Adios, El Reg
Good luck
Good luck in your future endeavours. You are one of the better (ex) Reg Hacks.
Top Entertainment
Best entertainment on the site all week. Bar none. Sorry Simon.
Posted in So, LOHAN: What's it to be?
Gawd, not LOHAN please
Pick something beer related ffs.
And if you absolutely have to go with LOHAN, at least mitigate the awefulness by making it stand for, and hopefully execute, Loft Orlowski High And Nuke.
Posted in Bug-Byte Manic Miner
Marvelous memory
Thank you for that wonderful memory. I was in my mid twenties when I played this and it's successor JSW. It is pure, distilled nostalgia to see and hear it again :-)
Tory sleaze
Tory leader smooching with sleazy media bitch. That's nothing new.
And will anyone do any time at all over this? Hands up anyone who has the slightest faith that the British Government or the British legal system or the British police will see to it that there is a satisfactory outcome to this... thought not.
The political leaders bleat about how the image of British journalism is being tarnished! How the hell can a turd be tarnished?
Cool
Nice to see El Reg doing its bit to cement the reputation of LulzSec by acknowledging there is a "LulzSec wannabe" demograpahic out there.
Unexpected, but good on you all the same.
Posted in Moderatrix kisses the Reg goodbye
A definite loss
A definite loss to the El Reg wonderwall.
Good luck in your new venture(s) and don't look back.
dyr
It's an increasing trend with El Reg comment mongers to type with wild and inaccurate abandon before doing even the most cursory of investigation in to the subject matter.
There are one or two, well, OK, just one, El Reg hack of which that criticism can be leveled too.
amazon involved
I have started receiving the same kind of span/phishing emails on an email I only use with amazon.
I did buy something using my amazon account that was supplied by Pixmania.
Time for Pixmania to come clean and for amazon to close down their liason with them.
Posted in El Reg to launch space paper plane
Twatdanglider
I'd plump for Twatdanglider or just t'danglider (we'd all know what it meant).
A medal indeed
Any action against the insidious cult of scientology should be praised.
Posted in BOFH: Spontaneous Legal Combustion
Top wordsmithing
"perjurous casserole of untruths" - worthy of Stephen Fry indeed. A most entertaining BOFH.
common sense
At least common sense prevailed in that tossers like Colbert should be given short shrift.
Posted in Failed Nork rocket bits straddle Japan
hypocracy
It's disappointing to see Obama adopting the same old stance of telling other countries that they are not allowed to develop the same technology the americans and their friends have had for years and that the americans themselves have previously used to kill tens of thousands of civilians.
Hipocracy in the extreme.
Good idea
The sooner it's implemented here the better. Many many investigations over the past few years have shown talking on the phone to increase the likelyhood of accidents. Do a search at New Scientist and you'll find many articles including...
"Hands-free cellphones carry car crash risk too"
"Hands-free phones not risk-free for drivers"
"Hands-free kits do not reduce crash risk"
"Cellphones worse than drink-driving"
Not policeable? I don't think that's an issue.
Car's fitted with handsfree should fail MOT's.
Any car with a live phone in it could automatically detected by roadside or mobile detectors and be subject to an automated fine system. (yeah so passengers can't use them either - so what).
Assholes in cars on phones are not the only killers on wheels, but they can be legislated against, identified and removed from the roads.
