Posts by Robert E A Harvey
2417 posts • joined Sunday 8th October 2006 16:17 GMT
Page:
Two things
1. DANGER WILL ROBINSON
This is rapidly becoming an affectation, not a solution to anything. It does rather sound as though the Nokia Asylum is now firmly in the hands of the nutjobs, not the nurses.
2. Your tag
"Near filed Communications". Really?
Posted in Higgs Boson hiding place narrows
Big laugh
My idea is that maybe the Higgs Boson is really large. perhaps 12735 kilometers, with a mass of 5.9721986×10^24 kg, and in an orbit 3.041954×10^11 meters in diameter around something rather larger.
Mine's the one that seems implausibly massive
FileTable
I can't decide if this idea is rather clever or if I should run screaming from the room.
I assume such access will be read-only? The idea of ones database integrity being threatened by windows explorer is a bit like someone designing that vent on the death star that Luke dropped the bomb down.
Cheap as Chips?
I don't know who came up with this expression, but have you been in a chip shop lately?
"crossing their collective fingers"
Perhaps instead of crossing their fingers they should get their fingers out?
I think a radical re-think on things like WGA, support for DCMA, continually asking for the distribution cd even though we are now on SP3, multiple confusing versions, forcing hardware vendors, and silly prices might change my mind about shunning their OS.
A serious look at removing the restrictive practices on data formats, allowing a choice of menu or ribbon UI, fixing some long-standing bugs in VBA, properly integrating the various members, reviewing predatory pricing, might change my mind about shunning their office suite.
They remind me of the car makers of Detroit, waiting till people buy what they make instead of making what people want.
Posted in TSA to revise nudie scanner software
but but but
>the administration is rolling out new software that will display a generic
>human outline identifying any concealed objects
The ones at Schiphol have been doing that for a long time, and on a screen where you and the "search operative" can both see the results, as large squares on an outline.
3 years ago they refused to let me see my own scans 'for privacy reasons' but that was long since fixed and the Mr Blobby version was introduced. At least 2 years ago.
Land Sharks
Is there a word for both despising and admiring something at the same time?
tosh have form
...on this front port thing.
I had one with the IRDA port on the front, so you needed to put yer phone about 100mm in front of it, & had to work the keyboard nipple at arm's stretch.
Pillocks.
What about Linux?
Did you not boot Linux & find out what worked?
& if not, why not?
Old enough
...and the Donald Campbell coda
Posted in RUPERT MURDOCH HIT BY PIE
surprises
I thought that nothing that happened now would surprise me. I was wrong. I wasn't expecting that.
OK, so the whole chance to quiz him degenerated into farce, but that's just Karma.
And, no matter how reprehensible, RUPERT GOT PIE'D.
Put a smile on my face anyway
fixed that for you
>This go-round should succeed
s/should/could/
It would be nice to think it would. Experience, however...
Fair
I do think the NT2000, XP, and W8 are remarkably successful bits of software. Astonishingly so, really, given the amount of under-the-bonnet expected from dumb users (defrag, aunty-virus, aunty-malware, emptying temporary directories).
And, once you have learned the wrinkles and the buttons not to press, people have got a whole lot of stuff done with it that they might never have done before.
But, at the end of the day, it is analogous to a spanner. If you need a spanner, and the spanner you have fits the nut, it is a good spanner. I just get pi**ed off having to buy the same size spanner over and over again. It's not as thought I've worn it out!
But, yes, it is a remarkably good spanner and fits a lot of nuts....
Fair
Yes, I think the idea of a big fat icon with a little titchy live screen of some sort is useful. And, by any definition of the word, not Dumb.
Not original, but useful. It has been done elsewhere.
Bringing it to the lumpen proletariat may be both useful and original, and well done them.
(they employ tens of thousands of clever programmers. I bet /most/ of the ideas are good. it's the corporate policies I object to most of all.)
wince
wince just needs to FOAD
Posted in Is Anon ready for the social network?
whot?
>Google+ allegedly banned an unknown number of Anonymous members.
They weren't very Anonymous then, were they?
Posted in Beyonce bigs up girls in space
Beyonce
To the best of my knowledge she has never bothered my 'earoles.
An astronaut is worth ten million manufactured pop vehicles.
@ gerryg
>Think Boris bikes and their infrastructure
Yes, but you could not run a parcel courier system with boris bikes, because the rack might be empty when you needed one.
And you shouldn't run a business where the boss can't do any work between hotspots. It would be daft.
>Even So
>Are there any programs, other than perhaps some behind the scenes plumbing that you
>can, or even want to run on all those different systems
Vi?
FTP?
I run a programme to fetch BBC radio programmes on my router, linux desktop, file server, and have run it on a friends telly.
On a research ship with Decca Radars I developed a perl script to parse out the test match scores from a BBC web page and merge them with NMEA data so they would scroll across the bottom of the radar. Developed it on a linux based workstation, and finally installed it on the embedded dish steering box for the satellite internet link. Probably still there, though I suppose that changes to the web page have broken it now.
@AC 19:19
But most of us have been kicked in the knackers by M$ so many times that it still hurts.
I've wasted years of my life learning API after API, and it is always useless next time round. I no longer give a stuff about what they do. They come up with really great things like that camera gadget that goes with an ex-box, and I just ignore it because I am sick to the back teeth of being treated like a mug. Only this week I got caught out because some VBA object in excel does /not/ do what it says in the programme's own help file. They never finish anything, it's all bodge-sell-discard with them and I am sick of it.
Every damn thing I have learned about *nix still works, even fvwmcommand. There are things I learned in 1983 playing with Microsoft Xenix or in 1995 with Irix that still work in HP-UX . And Red Hat.
Ah.
Right. "Truckers".
As you were, then.
does what it does well
It seems to do what it does very well.
Snag is, I don't want something that does what it does.
...to rule them all
Has anyone noticed the similarity between 'Balmer' and 'Balrog'?
Could be worse
>bad people always "go into" PR
It could be worse. She might stand as an MEP. Although she would blend in nicely with the rest of the trough-feeders
Posted in Yahoo! reads! your! emails!
Fukem
Well, I only use gurgle mail for signing up to web sites, and my yahoo address has been idle since 1999. I do pay for mail.com, but they have become AOL which is deeply disturbing and I may well go back to running my own mail server, like I did in 1994.
Bugger the lot of them.
1 thumb up & 1 thumb down
I appear to have been awarded a gesture. Anyone know what it causes to happen?
Boggle
My wife plays electronic boggle with ye grandkids.
Little separate single-letter lcd tiles that all interact by position on the tabletop.
Prior art?
Playmonaut
Surely you need to build a playmobil centrifuge & weightless-sim water tank to qualify the pilot?
....you can use explosives!
that's the clincher, surely?
...at least one opposable thumb
or teeth.
tsa
I have a toolbox that has to be locked. For TSA purposes I hung the key on a bit of string on the handle. That didn't stop them crowbarring it open. I was given a bit of grey paper telling me how to complain. Neither phone number nor web address worked.
...If it's claimed that The Sun also uses shameful and/or illegal methods of investigation...
Not going to happen. The wretched rag contains nothing but tits and footy, and people are falling over themselves to get those in papers.
Investigation goes with Journalism goes with News stories. All wholly alien to the Sun.
This is what happens
When you put Security in the hands of underpaid members of the underclass. The TSA staff I have met have been either illegal immigrants, drug addicts, or ESN dribblers.
at least they're non-obvious.
Fair. I actually think it is quite clever, and in so far as it is an idea and not an algorith don't really mind it being patentable.
What I don't understand is the idea of patenting the gesture, as well as the idea. The shape I make with my hands is my affair.
Posted in News of the World TO CLOSE
Half a result
The filthy organ is gone
Now we need to deal with the wicked witch.
Hurrh!
well done, the EU!
trying to get power...
Combined cycle. Small gas turbine to generate the power, and the exhaust gas heat recovered to heat adjacent office space.
oh
Oh, ForeHEADs.
Sorry.
As seen in previous discussion
Glad, really.
Can't be doing with hot weather.
A quick wash down
Good point
Well made
Posted in Microsoft inks Bing deal with Baidu
Miss! me miss!
they borg'd multimap, so for a while I was using it to cursor a point on the map & read off the lat/long & OSgrid co-ordinates.
Then they removed this useful feature.
Quite interesting to try to do high-accuracy positioning with these satellite images, from both systems. Last time I looked google maps and bing were usually around 5 to 15m different from the printed OS sheet, although which was closer varied. I suspect they use different methods of 'stretching' the pictures to fit known co-ordinates - mostly GIS roads as far as I can see. And I think the underlying mapping is different. There will also be rounding errors, & an error caused by the pixel/selection resolution sampling error. They all seem to use WGS84 for the roads & transverse mercator for the images, but instead of the 'standard' 3 degree interval for central meridians, I think they generate one for each photo image. If they were really clever they would use inclined mercator along the photography track, but I suspect the images are squared up and projected before they get them.
For armchair archaeology, you need both Bong and Gurgle, and I wish one or the other would let you do a time-lapse of different source images for the same spot.
For searching I prefer iXquick & alpha to both of them. And streetmap.co.uk for reading off coordinates. But bing does have an OSGB layer which google lacks, probably inherited from multimap.
Posted in Microsoft inks Bing deal with Baidu
...sarcasm detection gland recently removed.
I must be getting old. He fooled me.
<-- easily fooled
an apparent attempt to make Microsoft look good next to Google.
Going to need A LOT more shiny paint.
Posted in Microsoft inks Bing deal with Baidu
wondering
I am in two minds about which half of this deal is the evil overlord, and which the toadying minion.
unfortunately
As far as I can tell 'registered as a newspaper' just means you can send it - unsealled- by post for half the^W^W a bit less money.
You don't need a licence to print or distribute.
but
people give away the phone number. The remote access number should be different. I bet hardly anyone knows what theirs is.
Yes to all of that
I agree USB host is required for external HD.
But I also want USB client with bulk-storage mode so I can write to it from Linux.
And what about a cli I can ssh to?
And how about it becoming a second screen or graphics tablet when plugged into gnome/kde?
And better speakers as a given.
Heuristics complete
I've just run a massive analysis on my array of super-computers, and can predict that I am 94% certain that the iPhone after that will be called the iPhone 6.
