Posts by Dexter
46 posts • joined Friday 16th October 2009 14:40 GMT
Do we know that anti-matter responds to gravity the same as matter?
I seem to recall someone was trying to test that, but of course it is very hard with the tiny amounts of anti-matter we can make.
It's not bespoke software which is the problem.
It is badly written old software which non-one understands any more but which only works on XP for whatever arcane reason.
Re: No push to upgrade business machines anymore
Indeed, my work laptop still runs Windows XP. Still works fine once it gets going (it takes 20 minutes to boot up but that's mainly due to corporate bloatware - if I boot it away from work it is quite quick).
I guess all that has happened is that PCs have been fast enough for any business purpose for the last 5 years or so, so there is no need to upgrade unless one breaks.
Re: I think you're on to something there
And then in a few million years time the mutant Martian super-cats will come back and enslave us.
Giving cats space craft and robotics is madness; it is only their lack of opposable thumbs which stops them taking over.
I don't think this has been thought through properly
Posted in Soak up CO2 with sponges, says CSIRO
How much CO2 does it take to manufacture the wonder sponge in the first place?
It may have to absorb a lot of CO2 before it is actually carbon neutral.
Posted in Shiny, shiny! The window's behind me...
I thought a 'matte' was something to do with backgrounds in films. 'matt' is the opposite of 'gloss' surely.
It's matt paint I buy - not matte, which I guess would be used for painting cinematic backgrounds.
Or is this a UK/US thing?
No picture?
Why is there no picture of the cat? I think that's the least we could have expected.
The idea that C++ is not suitable for embedded systems is a myth.
C++ code isn't any bulkier or slower than C code. In fact I've seen plenty of C code which ends up longer because it can't use things like virtual functions.
Of course some features of C++ (notably exception handling and use of the STL) can cause code to bulk up.
But you don't *have* to use those features; you'd certainly not use the STL for embedded code.
Exceptions if done correctly (obviously depends on compiler/.code generator) should cause no overhead at all if the exception doesn't fire. If it does fire, you've got a stack unwind to handle, with its associated destructor calls, but that's not much worse than setjmp/longjmp
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
Re: Just threw out
Just sold my old Palm IIIx, complete with folding full-size keyboard, after 12 years faithful service - still working fine, but I no longer had any computers with an old-fashioned RS232 interface to sync with, and the desktop software would only run on my old machines. Palms were very good machines.
Replaced with an iPod Touch, which is an excellent (and under-rated) PDA.
Posted in Ten technology FAILS
Re: Hmmmmm
And the reason 8 track failed was because of its short usable life... I'm old enough to remember trees on the side of the road draped in long gossamer strands of Dark Side of the Moon after someone's 8 track ate yet another tape. While 8 tracks were more convenient, cassettes were a lot more reliable.
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You can record stuff onto cassettes; 8 tracks were read-only.
How is Corona different from YARN? Or better?
Am I the only one who hasn't split something all over their keyboard?
I did once manage to submerge a laptop in water due to stalling my car half way across a ford; it never recovered, but astonishingly HP replaced it under warranty.
Posted in 20 years of GSM digital mobile phones
Does there exist a smart phone with a decent battery life?
By decent I mean more than 24 hours of occasional use.
I've yet to see a smart phone which lasts longer than about 8 hours.
My (non-smart) Nokia lasts 3-4 days if used for calls, about a week if not.
That's not quite as good as the older monochrome Nokia I used to have, but it is good enough.
Until smart phones can last the length of a business trip without needing a recharge, they are not up to the job, IMO.
Posted in We don’t talk any more... on the commute
Re: “Is this the train to Faversham?”
"I've never dared go that far"
iTunes is fine in the Mac, and always has been.
I have to wonder; is the crappy performance on Windows a deliberate Apple policy to sell more Macs?
Am I the only person left on the planet who uses a mobile phone for making phone calls and talking to people, rather than texting, surfing the web, using twitter and facebook?
Posted in 'Immortal cancer' found in Australia
Michael H F Wilkinson wrote:
I have this image of an ageing, degenerating brain, and a mind bereft of all joy, in a perfectly healthy body, which stubbornly refuses to die.
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You've been watching the X factor, haven't you?
It's all very well saying "this was fixed in Windows 7 years ago".
I work for a company where we still have to use Windows XP (and IE for many intranet things).
And as usual, to get useful stuff done on XP, you need admin privileges.
Many people don't get a choice.
Robots!
This thing is ideal for driving Lego or Meccano robots.
What could be more educational that terrorising the cat with a home-made robot?
Yes, Soft Phones can and do slow down your PC.
The Cisco Soft Phone is absolute rubbish.
Takes ages to start up, eats memory on your computer and slows it down, and crashes.
Re: I dispair
In the case of the Russians, you certainly get more bang for your buck.
How many failed launches have they had recently?
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
Anything with lots of CGI in it. Sadly this is about 50% of films now, and quite a lot of TV.
(Lord of the Rings, Avatar, any modern disaster movie, any modern TV program about dinosaurs).
I don't want to sit in the cinema and watch a video game, thanks, and CGI animation always looks terrible, IMO.
every GPS enabled mobile phone contains a relativity corrector to ensure it takes into account the time difference between the ground and satellite
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This isn't true; the relativistic correction to the clocks is done in the satellites - the clocks are set so as to compensate for relativity, so when they are observed from the ground, they appear to be running at the correct rate.
Oooh. Can I apply for .c0m ?
Looks just like a .com address to most people, but I can put my SpamBots there. Excellent.
Posted in Shale gas: If we've got it, flaunt it
Fracking
There's a good, fairly balanced article in the latest Scientific American.
It's not the fracking itself which causes problems - the wells can leak (causing methane or nasty chemicals to get into water supplies), and the tanks which are used to store the waste fluid can overflow or leak, contaminating water supplies.
It's probably no worse than mining for the environment; but mining doesn't have a great record.
Cat-powered internet?
So the internet really will be made of cats.
I'm not sure I like the direction this is going.
Kernel Panics
Yes, they still happen, seen a couple in the last couple of months on Ubuntu (9.04) and RedHat (fc10).
Linux is certainly more stable than it used to be, tho.
re: and dropped the cat on the floor
Everyone knows the answer to this paradox; the toast falls off the cat and lands jam side down. The cat lands feet up, flees the scene, and won't come near you for days.
Posted in Desktop Linux: the final frontier
Photo printing, scanning, iPods
None of them work on Linux; that's why it's no good as a desktop for me.
Printing normal stuff to my HP Officejet - no problem.
Printing 6x4 photos? Nope. Works fine on WIndows. Works fine on Mac. Broken on Ubuntu.
Scanning only scans at some terrible quality.
Works fine on WIndows. Works fine on Mac. Broken on Ubuntu.
Syncing your iPod - forget it. The encrypted ones can't work at all.
The non-encrypted ones sometimes half work, and then occasionally trash your album artwork or make other random changes.
Open Office is fine most of the time, but it still chokes on some Excel and Word documents, and it has bugs - formatting going crazy.
So Linux is fine for web browsing, email and light document usage.
But it's not fine for a lot of other things; I haven't even mentioned lack of device drivers for things like slide scanners (which tend to be Windows-only).
Decent broadband supplier
Zen internet are pretty good - they just do Broadband
Men not wlecome
So the real conclusion here is that it's not OK no have sex with another bloke, no matter which sex you are?
Cui bono
Of course the main people affected by climate change will be poor people in far away countries, not rich Westerners.
No wonder so many rich Westerners don't give a ****
Apple?
Surely the logical buy for Apple Computers would be Apple Records.
Gets rid of those pesky copyright issues, and they'd be able to sell the Beatles back-catalogue on iTunes.
You heard it here first.
Forwarding
There's some pretty simple rules with these messages.
If you get a message in ALL CAPS. Ignore it.
If you get a message telling you to forward it to all your friends. Ignore it
In fact, these rules are so useful you should forward them to all your friends.
Birds already did it
Neat, but didn't Albatrosses crack this problem a long time ago?
Posted in Ten Essential... Budget Compact Cameras
No viewfinders!
None of these cameras has a viewfinder - so they will all be useless in bright sunshine.
I'd far rather have 4MP and a viewfinder (as on my 5 year old Olympus compact) that 12MP and no viewfinder.
Posted in Final Fantasy XIII ate my Playstation
The clue is in the title
Which part of 'Final' did he not understand?
Posted in 'Gossips' say Apple will acquire ARM
@DON'T
Apple would only have two motivations to buy ARM:
- It wants a stranglehold on the predominant chip, so it will hog it and make it an Apple exclusive. That would screw up all other mobile producers real good.
- It is still allied with Intel, and plans to murder ARM so that Intel will reign supreme with its crappy Atom chip.
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Surely the most obvious motivation would be:
- It wants the massive license income from the ARM chips everyone uses.
Why kill the goose? There's a massive revenue stream there.
Andus McCoatThen
You don't really think the cat knocked the iPhone into the water by accident, do you?
Cats hate anything which you pay more attention to than them.
The iPad is just the right size for a cat to sleep on....
7 second boot
Is very slow for a solid state based device.
My old Atari ST used to boot in a couple of seconds, and that was 20+ years ago.
Posted in The Beatles go digital, sort of
What's new?
All the Beatles music has been available from a bunch of perfectly legal sites based in Russia for years.
Worked for me
Upgraded at the weekend. No problems at all, in fact the audio line-in feed, which had been semi-broken by 9.04, now works again.
It's good but
I've been using Ubuntu for the last year or so at home after one too many WIndoze virus.
Absolutely great for web browsing, word processing and general stuff.
But there are still some things that it doesn't do well, and some that it doesn't do at all.
Printing 6x4 photos is a major hassle compared to Windows. Scanner support not nearly as good, even with HPLIP, quality is very poor.
Doesn't work properly with newer iPods (doesn't work at all with the Touch or the iPhone) - scrambled all the cover art last time I tried.
And of course there are all those cheapo bits of hardware I have which only work with Windows, such as a little frame grabber and a slide scanner.
Fine for a lot of things, but it's not a replacement for a 'mainstream' OS like Windows or Mac OSX.
Why not
Why not change school hours in the winter in Scotland, rather than shifting the clocks?
Wouldn't that cause less disruption?
Netbios
Not fair to blame Microsoft for NETBIOS - IBM were responsible for that one
(see also, EBCDIC, SNA, JCL, etc)
