Posts by Tom_

Slippery Slope

No, more like a cliff.

Cryptogram

Looking forward to reading all about it in this month's Cryptogram.

We should be archiving it on the moon, so it survives any Earth based disaster that's small enough to leave the moon's surface unharmed. eg. climate change, many levels of asteroid impact, supervolcano, gamma ray burst, etc. Even if all life on Earth is wiped out, the sum of our knowledge will remain available for any life that comes along later, either from elsewhere or starting from scratch locally.

I propose a system that starts with extremely large scale symbols, visible to the naked eye from the surface of the Earth - enough to inspire curiosity, so as to encourage further investigation. Then smaller symbols, still large enough to be seen with primitive optics, which explain some basic science. As concepts get more advanced, the symbols can be smaller, as they'll have already explained how to develop better telescopes. Smaller symbols can be duplicated over more of the moon's surface to allow for redundancy. At the stage where rocketry, orbital mechanics, etc. are sufficiently explained, everything else can be stored in a bunch of duplicated vaults - readily available for direct physical examination.

Large symbols can be written with nuclear weapons and smaller ones with orbital lasers and rovers.

/bosh

Not even close to useful yet.

I don't need to print a washer, shower curtain ring, action figure , circuit board or anything else so trivial.

I'll buy my first 3D printer when I can print Kelly LeBrock.

Was briefly enthused...

At first, I thought I could buy one of these and stick it on my home network and then be able to use my PC or Raspberry Pi to graph the sensor data over time.

Nope.

Did they just roll back to the previous day's data?

It's shocking that people have seen money go missing. I mean, being unable to use your credit card or withdraw cash is obviously bad, but you can get around that by keeping credit cards from more than one provider. Seeing your wages vanish is another thing entirely.

What about keeping XP?

I've got an NC10 that I still use for programming during my commute. It came with XP and I run Visual Studio on it, which sounds absolutely horrific, but works well enough. Building is slow, but just writing code is fine, so I can upload it and do my builds/debugging on my desktop when I'm at home.

So what about sticking with XP? As I understand it, the idea is that Microsoft will stop supporting it, so there will be no further security patches and that's the main concern. Is there more to it than that? Can the netbook be kept secure enough to continue working on it and include some minor web access in that or is it really curtains?

In other words...

Owls are quiet. If we can copy their methods then our machines can be quiet too.

Well, shit.

'employee representatives may want to take legal advice: “If they don’t have the benefit of that, they are left probably for the first time in their lives with a set of issues they haven’t faced before..."'

What?

PS2 introduced DVD to the masses when dedicated players cost more than the games machine. PS3 did similar with Blu-ray and also introduced a platform that could be updated with new apps, adding things like iPlayer and Netflix over time. PS4 offers a hardware upgrade that will make the games look better (and potentially run smoother), but adds nothing as obvious beyond that as the previous two generations.

I hope it does well, but I think it might see a more gradual uptake than the PS2 and PS3, despite Sony having managed to reign in the cost compared to the last iteration, which had a huge launch price.

The day one sales are impressive, but possibly more indicative of efficient logistics than mid to long term demand for the machine. I'm just saying it's early days and probably too early to draw any conclusions.

If only someone had told them..

...horses have four legs.

Quality Mistake

"discovered last by amateur Russian astronomers "

Poor things. :)

Next up...

Doc Brown's DeLorean.

My approach

1: Don't use the self-checkouts. If they want me to do it myself, it should be cheaper, as I'm not paying for the cashier.

2: If there's no other option, try using the self-checkout.

3: If it doesn't work at any time, just leave all my shopping on it and walk off.

Comet of the Century

If it's a bit of a dud let's hope it ISN'T the comet of the century.

Racetrack Playa

The road past Teakettle Junction, heading out to Racetrack Playa is perfect for testing this. There's a good long stretch that's like driving along corrugated iron, with corrugations about a foot apart. I've never vibrated so much in my life.

NSA angle

So, seeing as the NSA has access to GMail, this means they can wipe all Android phones at will, right?

Parameters

I remember looking through the data files and finding that it was dead easy to adjust all the driving and handling characteristics of the cars.

Out came the indestructible 900mph taxi of doom.

Wait a minute...

Is his whole argument that the software that comes with Hadoop clusters makes it a bit easier than writing your own software to run on a bot net?

He he

"At time of writing, however, it's unclear whether the newspaper had turned itself into the Information Commissioner's Office."

Costs hidden...

"Such clues are, apparently, too subtle for the great British public who need real-time displays of their spending before they'll drag themselves off the sofa to turn off the unused shower."

The trouble is that the utility companies do all they can to hide these clues by averaging bills over long time periods, etc. ie. Over the last ten years or so, my electricity and gas bills have been the same each month for a year at a time or maybe two or three years. They just don't show the diffrerences in using the clothes dryer less for a couple of weeks or making an effort not to leave any lights on. It's all smoothed out and hidden away.

I wonder what started the argument.

Maybe the host took ages to move instead of going to the fridge for more beers, causing his guest to remark, "Get us another beer, would ya? This one's gone stale, mate."

Anecdotal Evidence

Here's some for you.

I'm on my third iPhone 5 because I've had to return two to Apple due to hardware faults (looked like the video RAM for the camera was faulty).

From this I draw the conclusion that the iPhone 5 is not as well made as the 1 or the 3GS I've had before.