Posts by Gordon 11 336 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2009
What I would like to see is a sync feature that works on a LAN (e.g., for synchronising different desktop and personal devices) without third party intervention.
I have this set-up. using the documentation and code supplied by, let's see..., Mozilla!
https://docs.services.mozilla.com/howtos/run-sync.html
Surely one does a pilot/proof of concept then build it up to a full system
That's technical thinking.
"Real Business Leader" thinking is to make your project as big as possible, so that you are seen as "Being Important". Then, once you have the budget you have to spend it. It may all fail, but in the meantime you'll have been paid a lot. And with good planning you'll have moved on to another "Big Project" before the failure is noticed, so won't get any (or not much) of the blame.
Ordered by Cameron, the tosser who leaves his kids in the pub and drives off.
I sympathise with him for that. My wife once left our son in the butcher's (in his pushchair). Arrived with pushchair and two daughters attached - left with two daughters in hand. It's easily done. When you don't feel they are in danger you stop worrying.
But getting more back on thread (re: the rape seed oil above) my wife also mentions a car journey her friend had with her mum (aunt/gran?) on board. As they passed a field carpeted in a yellow flowering crop she piped up with,
"Look at that field of..." then paused, searching for the word...
"fuck".
More importantly, however, it's a bummer for Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, which has been touting IE11 as its best-performing and most standards-compliant browser to date.
That may well be the case.
Has anyone considered that the problem might be better seen as the MS web-site itself is producing such poor HTML that it confuses MS's own browser? No doubt because MS has been so used to writign MS-style HTML, and using tools that do the same.
A few of the websites saying to upgrade the browser are classing IE11 as IE7 or at least that's what the websites are saying I should upgrade from.
I've seen JavaScript code that checks versions lexically, rather than numerically. So it check for, say > "7". Which fails for 10 and 11 (the test should be > 7).
But that's an IE10 and-up issue, rather than IE11
If your wifi only propagates next door rather than halfway down the street...
...then you have a problem when sitting in the garden (shed).
Not really an issue for those in apartment blocks, but it is an issue for others.
I'd like someone to come up with a small, portable (cheap) dual-band Wi-fi extender that could be placed in, say, a window that has a pointable, directional aerial so it can be used as a booster in such cases.
A massive star collapsing into a black hole, or a star being swallowed by a galactic mass black hole should do the trick.
Although since both involve a strong gravitational field that the particle has to exit I always wonder what sort of energy it must have had when created and ejected!
This restriction is configured because IIS versions installed on workstation operating systems can only serve up to 10 simultaneous HTTP requests
That should be "may only...".
I'm sure that the hardware of many MS workstations is more than capable of handling 10 simultaneous requests, but MS only allows you to have up to 10.
These freedoms are my RIGHT, dammit
A right given by whom/what? You don't have any "rights" beyond those that others have found/battled (and, yes, died) to obtain for themselves and others, including you. There are no universal, invariant, absolute standards here.
And it's not luck either.
We've been given the right to choose between a douche and a turd.
It's democracy in action! Put your freedom to the test.
Actually the democracy part means that you can stand as a third option. No doubt your ideas will be perfect and everyone will vote for you. Then you have to implement them, and that's when reality will bite you.
The current system is far from perfect, but it has arisen through practice, not just some paper/mind-based theory.
I'd rather live in a hotter world than one where nothing can live becuase of too many melt downs from nuclear plants...
Who said you'd be able to live in that "hotter world"? After all of the wars caused by lack of food/water as the climate changes, you may well be one of the majority who gets killed along the way.
From the online Oxford English dictionary
From practical experience.
I used to eat these frequently in the 60's (the Brain's factory that made them was just a mile or so away) and I have eaten them in the last few years too.
They were served up for dinner at Frenchay Hospital (2 years ago), and my Dad looked forward to them when they were on.
Or uh just use wifi.
It's not just he middle of nowhere that has no Wifi.
There are many ways to avoid streaming an HD film in real time over a phone link.
Why not download things in advance onto your phone/slab and leave them there for a "rainy day"?
Or take a book...
And believe that you don't have to have it now just because you feel like it - use some restraint.
a 480 per cent rise in "ICT-related labour productivity"
Does that mean that there is now ~6 times as much done using ICT (hardly surprising, given how much has moved to using ICT) or that an ICT task that used to take x time now takes ~0.17x time?
Given that a lot of "ICT-related" tasks are writing documents (with the bizarrely named "productivity suites") and reading them I can't see how that can have been speeded up, given that the rate-limiting factor in both is the human.
I assume that if the universe is non-deterministic at the quantum level, then we have free will
No - that just makes things non-deterministic.
Free will means that what you think/choose can affect the outcome. So, if you believe in multi-verses, the version of you that thought "yes" goes off down one path while the version that thought "no" goes off down another. But they can't contact each other, so can never detect this.
Which is part of the problem. Whether you do or do not have free will won't affect what you actually do as it can't be detected since to do so means you have to predict the future, then change it, at which point did you change things, or was your prediction wrong? Just like Gődel's theorem says, some things are unprovable...accept it and get on with life.
Why would Britons be disturbed by the use of a surname as a first name? Many British people sport such names - Bamber Gascoigne, for example.
And, indeed, me. Popularized after Khartoum.
Mind you, given the "Beautiful" and "Greatness" - how many US citizens have now been named "Posh"? We need to know....
Now you know why the open-source community has been banging on about open standards.
New product's Marketing team arrives with Glossy Brochure over Big Lunch. It can do everything - product sold.
Tech bods point out that it is full of non-standard components - told to implement what has been purchased.
For the parts that work, the purchasing team takes the plaudits.
For those that fail, the tech bods take the blame.
[It's the same, the whole world over....]
So I have no sympathy with any company caught up with Windows XP or IE6. They dug the hole - now see what the bottom of a hole looks like.
Don't let it put you off. Unicode in Perl more or less "just works".
Agreed. I wrote a script recently then, at the end, remembered that some bits of the data would be coming in with things like (un)"intelligent quotes". I set about looking at what I'd need to do, only to discover that it was all being handled correctly without me having to do anything special at all.
There is a great number of modules in Perl which do "what you need".
But on Linux, /dev/random is supposed to produce *true* randomness,
Has anyone tried using the background radio white-noise to help with this? I can see lots of references to people trying to get rid of white-noise, but none for people trying to make use of it.
Its output should be completely unpredictable by an adversary who even knows the exact state of the rest of your system and all the past output.
But surely, at that point Heisenberg would point out that you cannot tell the clock-speed of the system, so cannot predict anything about its future?
My son managed to achieve boot-to-Desktop in 8.0 by removing all entries from the Start screen apart from the Desktop one, which he put at top/left. Then, when he booted the system (very briefly) went to the Start screen then flipped into Desktop mode on its own.
And there he added an extra toolbar for "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Wuindows\Start Menu", and has a Start button.
It's even retroactive. Purchased a CD on Amazon long ago? Check your account.
No need to. They mail you about it.
At least they did me, last week. So apparently I now have access to the on-line versions of CDs I bought as presents for other people.
So Amazon is actually giving me access to music I do not own!
I expect the BPI to be suing Amazon shortly...
The "NSA joke" is done by using different (self-contained) fonts for parts of the document (show up if you use acroread to convert it to Postscript) and then using character codes that only make sense visually with these glyphs
This stops you cut&pasting sensible text.
Presumably it also stops things like Google indexing it as expected.
So if you don't want the NSA to snoop on messages you send. perhaps you should take a leaf out of their books and send everything as PDF using substituted fonts? [Unless they've got a system for handling that anyway, of course...]
use tabs!
A practice that keeps all of you code off the r/h side of the screen leaving you with a lot of wasted real-estate on the left.
That's one the the things wrong with tabs.
Another is that you can set what they mean - which means I can set them to be something different to you. I once spent some time trying to figure out why Zork output looked different by one "space" on my terminal (yes - a green-phosphor terminal) to others. Until I discovered it was using tabs in its output, and I had my tab stop set differently. On that day I removed them all, and have never liked them seen (I'd never seen them used before).
I'm also sure that I once read Leslie Lamport (of LateX) refer to tabs as the "Spawn of the Devil". I can find no reference to this, though. But I agree.
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