Posts by RIBrsiq
18 posts • joined Sunday 15th November 2009 13:47 GMT
Re: A fair analysis
I completely agree! Because everyone knows that human population density is highest in the ocean.
Wait just one second...!
I think some of you have it wrong
There seems to be a number of people who apparently think global warming is akin to turning up the thermostat on their central heating system.
It is not.
Global warming means, among other things, that there is (not "will be", note) increasingly more energy in the global weather system. This means that global weather is increasingly more... well, energetic, I guess. Meaning more extreme weather events: more rain here, more drought there, less ice elsewhere, etc. Think "major climate change", over time. It should be obvious that this is not good, to say the least.
And BTW, "we survived this long" is a poor argument to make when discussing future prospects of humanity as a whole, let alone our civilization. For one thing "this long" is not, in fact, that long at all: a few million years out of even the 550 million since the Cambrian Explosion is nothing, really. For another thing, look up the word "change" in a dictionary...
"Research" carried out by MISPWOSO, right?
Cats are predators (albeit small and adorable one). If someone doesn't know what that means, they should buy a dictionary.
I expect my cats to ideally be self-reliant. Such that if I stumbled into a freak wormhole while walking across my living room one day and died horribly in the vacuum of space several lightyears away, they would only be minimally inconvenienced.
"NASA's machines have been on the planet since Pathfinder landed on 4 July, 1997".
Actually, Viking 1 has been on Mars since August 20th, 1975CE. Unless it got bored and wandered off to some other place, of course!
Posted in Trekkie pays £45,000 for rusty shuttle
This is my Grandfather's Axe...
"This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the ninehundred-year-old axe of my family?"
That's not to say I see the logic in paying so much for it, but just saying...
Indeed.
Look up Al-Khwarizmi, an 8th century CE mathematician. He did a few cool things, one might say.
Metro
I have to say, I *can* live with Metro and the new Start Screen thingy. I certainly will not love them, though that may come later -- Stockholm Syndrome, maybe...? -- but I can live and operate with them.
Let me first make clear that this is preliminary based on a few hours worth of testdriving the Consumer Preview with emphasis on UI usability and might change once I sink my teeth into this Release Preview, but:
The command line is largely the same, and there still is type-to-search functionality when one presses the Windows key and starts banging away on a keyboard. And I honestly cannot remember the last time I opened a Windows 7 Start Menu and clicked on it with a mouse. So Windows 8's user interface is, for the most part, compatible with the way I work day-to-day.
What will decide things for me is (as usual, I think) the technical stuff: how will it perform? Will it be stable enough? What new features will work how well? Etc.
Speaking of new features, Server 2012 looks rather sexy, I must say...
Re: Oooh, time travel!
I recall reading it in the early nineties, myself...
No, really: the number of graphs and whatnot showing this exponential growth trend in computing power surviving several paradigm shifts is *huge*. Just Google it and see.
Re: DRM and Locks
The difference is that a competent lock smith will have to turn up in person and do her thing at each and every lock, whereas a single breach of the DRM means there's now an easy-to-copy copy of the protected work out there.
Clear?
If you want further evidence, or a practical demonstration, just look around and see all the movies, ebooks, games and whatnot floating out on the 'net. 99% of that has DRM on it in its source format. Surely if DRM did anything it was supposed to do there wouldn't be so much of this stuff out there clogging up the Inter-tubes...?
Re: meaningless metrics 101
Fair enough, I guess: if you don't know what something means, then it's meaningless to you.
But please stop and think that, just maybe, it means something to others.
"Unlike disk media, flash media wears out".
Ah, yes! Explains why I never came across an HDD with a bad sector, much less a failed HDD. Indeed, I don't know where I came up with the term "bad sector" as magnetic media never fails, as the most-learned author pointed out. I guess that's just my poor mind giving out under the stress of all the awesomeness of this most magnificent article...
You know, RAID stands for Redundant Array of *Inexpensive* Disks. As I see it, if the disks you're using cost an arm and/or a leg, then you're doing it wrong. Any and all disks you use will, after all, fail at some point. So you might as well spend the money on proper redundancy and backups.
Sure, enterprise class stuff has its use. But only after you've covered all the other angles and spent all the money needed on all the other bits and bobs and are still left with either a pile of cash still to spend or a performance/reliability hole still to fill.
Posted in SanDisk Extreme 120GB SSD
Re: Capacities
That.
Also, the prefix giga- means "multiply by 10 to the power 9". Thus, 120 gigabytes (aka 120GB) is 120,000,000,000 bytes.
But I can see where you've made a mistake, there: Windows erroneously labels gibibytes (binary gigabytes) as gigabytes.
The prefix gibi- means "multiply by 2 to the power 30". So 120GB would be about 111.76GiB, which Windows will label as GBs and therein lies the capacity "lost by formatting"... :-D
I hope this helps someone.
Reference: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
The autopilot gives control of the plane to its pilots because it realizes it might be in over its head. Those pilots then proceed to literally fly the plane into the sea. And you conclude the right course of action is to *retain* the human pilots...?
Reality check
I like Seagate. I really do. Until very recently, I wouldn't even contemplate using any non-Seagate drives, in fact.
But a quick check at New Egg, for example, shows only 2 internal 3TB drives: WDC Green and Hitachi 7K3000. If memory serves, the situation was similar with the 2TB drives, with Seagate trailing by several months.
So, where's Seagate's alleged technology lead?
@Mark 65
You know, there *are* people out there with better things to do with their time than drive cars...
There also are people out there who should not drive.
In many cases, members of the first demographic who are forced to drive will be good candidates for the second demographic.
Posted in Lite-on iHBS112 internal Blu-ray writer
FFS
HDDs for backup? Really? Ever done actual backups, have you? Or are you speaking of your pr0n collection where... ehm... "quick access" trumps reliability, and loss of any specific chunk of data would certainly go unnoticed? Ever drop an HDD and then try to read data from it? I've had drives die from a 20cm drop, myself.
While I would agree that optical discs aren't ideal for long-term backup, an application for which they certainly aren't intended, they're a good poor-man's choice for the task, I dare say. And considering the number of operational 10+ year old CDs I have (hundreds) vs. the number of operation 10+ year old HDDs I have (0), I would take optical disc backups over HDDs any day.
As seen on TV
That's not true! They can get a criminal from the smudge of a fingerprint captured off of a windshield through CCTV in bad weather!
I saw it on CSI (or was it X-Files?), so it must be true.
Posted in Hackers in keyless Windows 7 entry
@Sean Timarco Baggaley
It's not the absolute price that decides things. If you try to sell something worth 5 cents, if even that, for a couple of dollars then people will naturally not buy it. Even though it's priced "in the region of a couple of dollars". But if you price your product correctly then people will buy it. If people will not pay what you would like to charge for your product, you either need a better product or a different market.
I get no end of people who would not mind paying, say, US$50 for a decent Windows/Office combo (not that Starter crap. The only use for that is if one has a VL agreement and just needs the CoA to stick on a case), but who would under no circumstances pay the current retail price. I don't blame them for a second: FFS, the current retail price for Windows and Office alone exceeds the price of an entire entry-level PC in my market!
