Posts by kwhitefoot

Re: How would we know?

I very much doubt that anyone did any kind of risk analysis when the kettle was invented.

At last a comment that actually has an interesting and relatively uncommon point. Pretty sure i don't like the idea but have point on me for bringing it up.

Re: ew Acer.

My two Acer netbooks are doing quite nicely thank you (Aspire One ZG5 from 2008 and Aspire One 725 from 2012).

On the other hand I've had Thinkpads fail (especially fans), IBM desktop machines with dodgy power supplies. And have you tried using the trackpad and trackpoint on the Lenovo thinkpad W540?

Count this as a footnote

I know what you mean by modern (I think), but really things are not modern simply because they are current or new.

Many of my colleagues describe C# as modern; I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Re: Its all about selling your labour

Unfortunately the BS is contagious and our current government here in Norway is hell bent on selling all sorts of strategic assets like StatOil, the wildly successful airport express trains and anything else that doesn't currently make a loss. They are also keen to reduce employee power by making it easier to hire and fire and to employ people part time ostensibly to reduce unemployment in a country which hardly has any (3.5% in 2013 according to the World Bank http://bit.ly/1JDKzqB).

I could understand selling state owned companies that weren't working properly but they never seem to do that they just sell the ones that are bringing in plenty of revenue. Even the bloke who runs the magazine Kapital (a very pro business monthly) and who is as free market as they come is alarmed that well run natural monopoly companies are in the sights of the right wing privatisation fanatics.

Re: What a complete joke

> we now refuse support for Debian, and may soon refuse them permission to use our trademarks

We who? Who's trademarks? If things are as bad as you say it seems a little churlish to withhold that information.

Re: Double-tap to wake

Saved me the trouble of typing that. Also my N9 was about half the price.

That's odd, I vaguely remember having almost no trouble.

I had Debian running on a bunch of DEC Alphas. Not really any problem at all, certainly no assumption that Windows would be used. Brilliant machines used to run ProE on DEC OSF that were thrown out when the company decided that an all Wintel system was the way to go. Then they had to buy Intel hardware that was nominally twice as fast with twice as much ram to ProE to work as well as it did on the Alpha's.

I got four of them for nothing.

It was a bad day when DEC went under.

Re: Looks like the family is lying about the LOL jk

As an American friend of mine is wont to say: And your point is?

Re: Unit of data

>but who charges that much in the UK?

I was wondering the same. Here in Norway on my PAYG (Chilimobil) I pay the equivalent of about 12p per MB. And that is expensive per MB here but my data traffic isn't enough to warrant an all in contract. For what he paid I could download a TB but I would have to be downloading for 12 hours a day at about at the maximum rate a 3G connection can manage.

So it seems to me there are other questions to ask Orange beyond the obvious ones about mis-configured handsets.

Re: Bad ideas never die...

Scandinavia is not a monolithic block you know. Which bit of it do you hail from? As far as I am aware Norway has no identity card even if you want one. I've lived here for over 25 years now and never heard of such a thing except occasionally as something that some politicians would like to introduce.

Re: I guess that it's back to using Google then.

Can El Reg provide a feature that hides AC comments?

Re: What an arsehole...

For me the principal problem with the article and a lot of the comments is the lack of context. Too much of both seems to rely on the reader possessing a lot of background information.

For instance "choosing to do it my email" suggests that it would have been practical; is it?

I suspect not as Carvalho Chahab lives in Brazil and Torvalds in Oregon but I had to consult a couple of web sites to find out (https://www.linux.com/news/special-feature/linux-developers/636068-30-linux-kernel-developers-in-30-weeks-mauro-carvalho-chehab, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds).

For what it's worth (not much) I think that it is rarely worth swearing in public, it tends to distract observers from the point that is being made.

And, off topic, why the fuck does El Reg not turn properly formed URLs into hyperlinks in comments? Swearing included because I doubt that any attention will be paid to the point so I might as well let off steam.

Re: Red keys? Nah. Get yerself one o' these...

That reminds me of my Nascom-2 which had the best keyboard I've ever used. No crappy mechanical switches in it, it had Hall effect switches if I remember right. Probably still have it somewhere, I wonder if I could get it hooked up to a PC?

Re: User Rights and Facts

You wrote a very long piece but didn't give us the most important information which would be a link to a resource that backs up your assertion that "all rights reserved" has the meaning you attribute to it.

Your name isn't Max is it?

Sounds like Max's autonomous corporations in Charlie Stross' Accelerando.

Lipstick?

Only five books is a major problem. On my Nokia N9 I have pretty much all of Sherlock Holmes, the BASH Beginners Guide, On Lisp, Alice in Wonderland, The Origin of Species, loads of Wodehouse, Frederick Pohl, Montaigne, Dante's Divine Comedy, Treasure Island, etc., etc. It gives me something for every occasion.

Can't see it working out unless they have some magical way of getting the hardware cost down so that the 10EUR is actually a substantial fraction of the cost.

Plus it only has a five inch screen so I don't see that it is enough better than the 3,9 inch N9 to warrant carrying another device.

Perhaps you could enlighten us then.

See title.

Re: @proto-robbie

Tesla beat Edison not because he used AC but because the use of AC meant that he could use higher voltage and therefore lower current. Until a few decades ago conversion to and from HVDC was difficult and expensive. Now, comparatively, it is neither. When Tesla was at the peak of his abilities there were no controllable high voltage valves, even when they did become available they were bulky, expensive, and fragile. ASEA started development in the 1930s but real systems weren't up and running (as far as I know) until the 1950s.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current for an overview. This shows a lot of DC interconnects in Europe and points out that the longest in the world is in China, just over 2000km.

I suppose at this point I should reveal that I work for ABB which makes these things (althoughin a related division). Of course I speak for myself not ABB, etc.