Posts by Matthew Smith

Yay! Let's party like its 1999. Now step back and watch my hamster dance.

Finally replacing it at work

I'm steadily upgrading people's machines here at long last from XP to Windows 8. This upgrade is only happening now because :

1. The latest Avast anti-virus is blue-screening the XP machines.

2. Our account with Dell is giving us very nice Win 8 machines for only £300.

And most importantly :

3. I've discovered Classic Shell, which installs over Windows 8 and removes the 8 part, making it usable.

Windows 8 is a serious impediment to people migrating away from XP. Without ClassicShell, I wouldn't be doing it now.

Pi day is 22/7 in Britain

Jobs hated the idea of removing components and repairing them. He died as he lived.

Pfffttt

The vid clearly shows Scrabble being played. Not sure how far you will get with just R,F and S.

Britain might take the lead in quantum computing

And it might not.

Wheres the ambition?

Considering that the payoff to this mission isn't for another 10 years, its all a bit underwhelming. If this was to happen on a moon around one of the outer planets, or the base unit was mobile and could sample from multiple sites, then I would get on board. As it is, it all feels like something that could have been done in 1974, never mind the space year 2024. Good luck to them anyway, but I can imagine a couple of Chinese astronauts sat on a rock nearby watching everything take place.

The Mythical Man-Month - Fred Brooks

The C++ Programming Language - Bjarne Stroustrup

'Shes clicking here hooves'?!

Eh? Was David Icke there?

Antactica is melting too

Antactica is a continent. Water ice is draining off the land, and the salinity of the southern ocean is dropping.Water with lower salinity is quicker to freeze, hence the increase in sea ice.

Putting the Mars into Marxist

20 years ago these books rocked my world. I studied engineering at university just so I could go to Mars. Sadly I re-read them recently and they've not stood the test of time. Cardboard characters and so utopian that they make Star Trak:TOS look like Soylent Green.

If I win, I'm going to get a bit thick felt tip and write 'ZED EX' all across the front.

" I didn't get fired, but I did get relieved of command and I reckoned it was probably time to go." Hello, constructive dismissal case.

Whats the matter?

What exactly are the photons being transmuted into? Atomic particles like electrons? Sub-atomic like quarks etc?

I don't understand these miles and kilometers thingies

Whats that in a proper EL Reg measurement, IE : Multiples of Wales.

Fountains of the deep

There has been lots printed about the Book Of Genesis mention of 'The fountains of the deep opening to flood the earth'. Well, they are actually correct. Of course there is water kept deep below the ground by divine providence.

For we all know, that is where Cthullu sleeps.

:€

Pffffttt

I'm tired of articles trotting out Apple's 'failures' over the years. At least they tried. Newton was still incredible tech for 1993, and the lessons from that would have been included in the IPhone. Otherwise we should be celebrating the bad old days of Microsoft where they made heaps of money trotting out mediocre versions of Windows and Office and forcing customers to upgrade. They didn't innovate, but they didn't fail either, so hooray for them.

Oh, you youngsters

'Doctor Who'esque was a genre of game in the early 80s. There wasn't a 'Teach yourself BBC Basic' book released that didn't have a variant on it. You had a sprite onscreen that could move up/down/left/right. Scattered randomly across the screen were daleks (Or walking fridges in my version) that homed in on the sprite. When two daleks were in the same square, they were destroyed. Simple stuff, but it got me to the, er, tax-database developer that I am today.

Aurora

Please say that Project Aurora is true, and the contact has one in their garage.

Creature of Havoc

Lawks, I spent years, years, trying to get through CoH. In the end I gave up using it as a gamebook, and just read it as an interactive novel.

Also, the only spell that matters : VIC

Oh the hypocisy

But the game itself is a rip-off Game Dev Story. Whats the developers high moral stance on that? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Dev_Story

Apple needn't worry

Its not as though South Korea is going to be around by the end of next quarter.

"Super-fast broadband by 2015"

Are there any known hard figures on what speed this 'super-fast' is expected to bring?

Not a meterorite

1. The trajectory across the sky was almost horizontal. It should have been vertical.

2. It could be seen to be moving. If it truly was from space then it would be travelling at kms per second.

3. While it would leave some vapour contrail, there was too much smoky contrail left undispersing in the sky.

It was a plane.

The only search that anyone performs

Search : Images

Depth : 10 degrees of friends

Wearing : Bikini

"A method for inducing cats to exercise"

Inducing? As in forcing the cat to chasing the laser against its own will? Bah! The patent would be null and void once it was test on my old moggy. She'd think it was some sort of sunbeam and go to sleep.

"using nets and lasers"?

The game has an impressive tech tree.

Good find

So thats where the RBS backup got to.

Victims?!

I know this is meant to be a civilian project. But I just can't get past the double meaning of "the green boxes mark out where the drone's software thinks a victim might be found". How long to we see a weaponised Raspi?

New unit of measure

The Reg occasionally looks at strange units of measure, especially comparing countries to be multiple times the size of Wales. Well, I like the introduction of the banana. 3/4 banans in size looks good to me.