Posts by Neil Stansbury
231 posts • joined Monday 11th June 2007 11:38 GMT
Re: The chance of being killed by a shark...
Interestingly, there is a much much bigger danger...
Interpreting statements with a beautiful degree in 'n' and yet still managing to miss the ironic nature of a statement, especially when the original statement ended with the phrase:
"It ain't over 'til the fat lady s..."
The "s..." was there to imply that the fat lady's singing had indeed been cut short, because it was over.
But then perhaps that is just too subtle for someone with a maths degree...
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony)
Re: I'll be damned...
No it's doesn't mean anything like it - it's called network PVRs - they already exist on most CDNs and the BBC and ITV already are or are considering using them.
TV will still be scheduled - everything has a publishing date - whether you watch it straight away or not is irrelevant. It will just be distributed "on-demand" over a 4G et al wireless connection or some kind of fixed line service.
Either way, broadcast is dead - move along there's nothing to see here.
The chance of being killed by a shark...
...is one in 300 million, yet 12 people died from shark attacks last year. It ain't over 'til the fat lady s...
(http://sharkfacts.org)
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/9067719/Shark-deaths-hit-two-decade-high-worldwide-in-2011.html)
Re: Not forever, I think
@mending
"I think Mozilla might be best off creating a product that works on four screen sizes"
They won't need to dude - the UI will be styled with CSS and I'd guess XBL bindings with CSS Media Queries: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/devderby/2011/october/
Canvas and WebGL will allow the developer to abstract away the graphics layer & XPCOM will give you all the groovy XPConnect JavaScript to C++ functionality like sockets and SQLite storage stuff (I hope).
Yum - and no need for Java!
But it's still *not* glass!
"Metallic Glass" is still a metal and it's still not transparent!
The "glass" part refers to the way the atoms are ordered when cooled rapidly, remain locked in the liquid atomic structure rather than forming normal crystals, hence the reason the company that makes it is called "Liquidmetal".
But it is NOT a "glossy glass-that-acts-like-metal". It is not glass and is still a metal!
Nice pic here: http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/31/scientists-develop-metallic-glass/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_metal
Why auction?
Do Ofcom really need to auction these spectrum bands into chucks for specific operators?
It seems a very old fashioned approach. Surely with packet switching & spread spectrum technologies where they are the entire band could be used for multiple operators at the same time? It would also create a very low barrier to entry for new entrants...
He's not dead..
He's camping...
'After that it was a dictatorship - as "right" as it gets'
Unfortunately, your apparent knowledge on Stalinist Russia doesn't disguise your lack of understanding of even basic political philosophy.
Posted in iOS 5 'crashes more apps' than Android
Not my experience
Apps on my Android Samsung 7.7 tab fall over more often than a drunken sailor.
I can't get through a day without at least the GMail app and one of the plethora of awful Android web browsers crashing.
I can't remember the the last time an app crashed on my iPhone - on iOS 4 or 5.
@Mike Richards
<snip>AHWR, which will use thorium as fuel, was designed and developed by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and will mark the third stage of India's three-stage nuclear programme.<snip>
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2008-12-20/chennai/27892708_1_ahwr-heavy-water-reactor-breeder-reactor
<snip>India's Kakrapar-1 was the first reactor in the world to use thorium rather than depleted uranium to achieve power flattening across the reactor core. Both Kakrapar-1 and -2 units are loaded with 500kg of thorium fuel to improve their operation at start-up</snip>
http://www.power-technology.com/features/feature1141/
Facts? Yeah - we've heard of them...
Nonsense
I've been hired by numerous degree students to write their dissertations for them, because they were too lazy and badly trained to write it themselves.
I think your example just demonstrates the point - that your recursive student developer was far more useful in the real world, the fact that he could prove his solution was more efficient should have amply illustrated that he had already learned what a recursive algorithm was.
IMO self-taught developers are ALWAYS more skilled than those with formal training or education.
There is generally much less time for pointless exercises in naval gazing in the "real world" - like insisting that something be recursive when there is no need for it.....
Posted in Acer Iconia A100 7in Android tablet
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7
I'm hoping when Samsung finally escapes from Apple's lawsuits, and gets around to releasing it, that their new 7.7 will nail most of these gripes, especially the thickness and screen res.
"The Box That Changed Britain"
As James Thomas said: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00scpzn
Posted in Blighty gets gold-dispensing ATM
Huh?
Please tell me you ARE kidding?
Why would anyone want to exchange £40 worth of worthless paper that Gordon Brown et al spent the last 10 years devaluing, in exchange for a store of value that has persisted for the last 2000 years, and whose fiat value in the last 10 years alone has risen from $252 t/oz to $1500 t/oz.
No you're quite right - I've no idea either
No
No.. because you don't know how many rapes an individual rapist has committed. So a small number of prolific rapists would mask in increase in rape victims.
So reported incidents per head of population is correct, it also allows for simple(r) correlation between other statistics - violent crime per head, drug use per head etc etc.
The drop in the number of incidents could have many causes anyway, from education, to acceptance of women's rights
Posted in Apple bars WinXP users from iCloud
What?
IE9 won't ever ever run on my PC - Wooo Hooooooo!
Best news I've had all day.
Posted in Smart Fortwo Electric Drive e-car
Yep
With 2 x 230V 13 amp sockets, it just needs one of these puppy's in the "boot" for backup:
http://www.justgenerators.co.uk/pages/HondaEU20i.htm
Or go as slow as you want...
and get yourself one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snx3XXcvGOQ
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/idf-armor-defense-system-foils-attack-on-tank-for-first-time-1.346526
Or...
Or perhaps having massive national monopolies only works when they receive government subsidies because they are so useless and inefficient.
Because when BT was a nationalised company it was such a technically brilliant company that offered great customer service and was the envy of the world - yeah right.
The key words here are: "incumbent", "incompetent", "inefficient".
The answer is simple, run mechanical moles up the central reservations of our motorway network, after that onto the dual-carriageways and A-Roads, the rest we'll get with 4G.
Imagined Loss
Except any damages should be proportional to any REAL not imagined loss.
A bunch of 12 year old kids sharing music with other 12 year old kids results in a maximum loss of income to the tune of their weekly pocket money, whether they have download loaded 1 or 1 million tracks is irrelevant, the loss is only what they were ever capable of buying....
The music industry will at some point need to accept the reality, that when content is "free" to download, people really will download anything, not just what they otherwise might have purchased, thus the bulk of the music industry's "loss" is imagined not real.
Posted in Apple sues Amazon over 'App Store' name
@Reverse Lewis Mettier
Dear RLM
Ignoring the fact that you appear to be:
a) A bit of a knob
b) Seem to have just discovered the internet
Your certainly don't appear to know much about the topic of trademarks, so lets just let the people that aren't intellectual trolls do the talking shall we:
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/tm/t-applying/t-before/t-requirements.htm
[snip]
We will not accept marks which:
describe your goods or services or any characteristics of them, for example, marks which show the quality, quantity, purpose, value or geographical origin of your goods or services;
have become customary in your line of trade;
are not distinctive;
[/snip]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericized_trademarks
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm#3
Now, do us all a favour - be a good little troll and go feed some place else.
The most important thing to speed FF up...
Is quite simply go to "Tools > Addons > Plugins" and select each Plugin that starts with "Windows" or "Google" or "Microsoft" and click disable next to each one.
Most people will find they just have VLC (et al) and Flash left.
Restart and watch the speed increase
The automatic plugin-scanning was one of the core bugs that Mozilla 2 didn't address ;-)
about:plugins might just scare you.....
Electromagnetic Shielding?
The extra exciting part, is the very large magnetic fields generated by the engines' super conducting magnets.
I wonder if these could be used to provide an artificial magnetosphere for shielding the crew on long duration manned voyages.
The engines also generate a magnetic torque that perhaps could be used to rotate the crew capsule creating a centripetal force to create artificil garvity.
Solutions to two long-duration flight travel problems as a result of a by-product!
Aw...bless...queue the violins
For the age old bullshit Civil Service excuses:
...
1) It's some-one else's fault (AKA "it's not my responsibility")
2) We don't get paid enough to be motivated (AKA "I can't be bothered")
3) We don't have the training to do the job (AKA "I'm not qualified")
Let's face facts - being a civil servant is a lot like being on the dole - except that they don't need to scratch on every week.
The British Civil Service truly are the cancer of this nation.
Posted in Cornish pasties awarded protected status
As every Devonian knows....
Pasties "crimped on one side, never on top" aren't in fact ever Cornish pasties but actually Devonian Oggies....
"Our government has gone rogue on us"
No they haven't, they have done what they have always done.
Western "Democratic" governments are more than happy to advocate democracy and freedom of speech - just as long as they agree with it and it suits them. When it doesn't, the "law" gets changed or the people involved classified as terrorists or kiddy fiddlers.
Bait and switch, divide and conquer - it works every time.
Change the entry requirements
A-Level in "Physical Sciences"
Physics
Chemistry
Maths
Or
A-Level in "Biological Sciences"
Biology
Chemistry
Maths
Posted in MPs' IT support costs £1.122m
Probably because...
They know the difference between "right" and "write".
XML is Dead
One spec to rule them all, One spec to bind them.
It appears that nothing nothing less than world domination are the goals of the HTML 5 Working Group.
Not enforcing XML wellformedness on HTML 5 is a shocking omission, and it can only be because they are trying to be all things to all people.
HTML4's coding style is lazy, defunct, and is the web 10 years ago. Arguing that authors can choose HTML5 with a well-formed XML syntax is a moot point - you shouldn't get the goodies if you aren't prepared to make the effort.
Strict well-formed HTML5 would still be fully backwards compatible with previous versions of HTML, and invalid XHTML5 easily falls back to HTML4 as HTML5 does already.
They have already co-opted the SVG namespace into HTML5 and now it seems XBL is next.
Having separate standards is a good thing, and correct XML namespace support allows the inclusion of any other XML standard the authors choose.
Each spec lives or dies by it's own utility and support. We don't need to wait 10 years for one big bloated brain fart to be released.
Browsers should claim to be "Web 2.1" or "Web 3.0" compliant, the W3C specifies the various specs that must be implemented to make that claim.
The arrival of non-strict HTML 5 is a bad day for the web - and especially the semantic one at that.
Not a launch vehicle
This can't be used as satellite launch vehicle, this is still a gun - the G forces exerted on the projectile over such a short barrel distance are enormous, and would easily crunch delicate satellite bits.
Now... constrain the projectile in a donut shaped barrel, taking multiple cycles to bring it up to launch speed before ejecting it, then you might have something useful for flinging stuff other than HE shells....
Freedom of Speech?
I still don't see how this doesn't fall completely under freedom of speech.
You and I make up a language and have a chat.
The language is known only to ourselves.
The Police demand to know what you and I were talking about.
We tell them to f* off and mind their own business.
I would suggest that using coercion to force us to reveal our conversation is an infringement our freedom of speech.
I don't see I am any more obliged to reveal to the Police the meaning of a verbal conversation they don't understand than I am obliged to reveal a written conversation they don't understand. The medium is irrelevant, as is the reason they don't understand it.
Posted in Project Canvas becomes YouView
Wrong name
They should have called it simply - iTV
ITV already own the domain name - itv.com
It takes iPlayer forward to its logical (branding) conclusion
It keeps the word "TV" in the name
and dominates the "i-named-businesses" that Apple begat.
The name also easily passes the "Mum test"!
Almost 50 years of hurt
England are just shit. Period.
And we really need to start accepting it.
When we set more realistic expectations for our nationational side, the disappointment and continual pain will at least be in context that we are crap.
50 years trying to repeat '66 should tell us something. Are we really this fucking thick skinned & stupid? We are out AGAIN in a humiliating defeat, until something changes other than the manager, this will continue to happen again and again.
Players paid £100k a week cant even take a ball on the chest, control it and pass it on to a team mate. Stop hiring overpaid morons for starters.
Go Beeb
Yep quite agree.
The non-exclusivity doesn't seem any different to allowing BBC channels on Virgin or Sky and, I've often wanted the ability to share or "be shared with" my iPlayer content.
Shoulders of giants
Blake Ross could probably do with reminding, that whilst he may have been intrinsic in the creation of Phoenix (as it was then), it was only possible because he was able to stand on the shoulders of giants.
Specifically, shoulders of those who had created the core codebase (XUL, XPCOM, XPConnect) that under pins much of where Mozilla today - a code base he had absolutely nothing to do with designing, creating or writing.
Phoenix - Firebird - Firefox wasn't innovative, it was a recompilation. XUL was - it took Microsoft almost 5 years to understand it and release XAML, and with the hoo haa over Flash - it seems most people still don't
Ask any A+ engineer?
As in the CompTIA A+ Certification?
As in the 15 hour course spread over 5 weeks?
What should I ask them?
Whether they can count to 20 without taking their socks off?
Gosh yes - I must remember to seek out an A+ engineer next time - thanks for the tip.
Posted in HTML5 unfit for web TV, says Hulu
Huh???
Are you a complete cheese head?
Take both your fingers out of your nose and stop and think for more than one breath.
Have you ever bothered to actually use iPlayer?
It can stream full HD upto 1280x720 encoded with H.264.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2009/04/bbc_iplayer_goes_hd_adds_highe.html
If you bothered to engage brain before mouth, you'd also know there is an entire gamut of format definitions available via iPlayer:
flashhd1, flashhd2, flashhigh, flashlow1, flashlow2, flashnormal, flashvhigh2, iphone, n95_wifi
--modes switch for get_iplayer users.
How??
[...]How can it travel the wrong way? Doesn't it start from one end of a track and just go forwards?[...]
Err no... for the simple reason that the Navy might find it quite handy to be able to bring the launch shuttle back to the starting point so you can launch another aircraft immediately afterwards.
Posted in The Cameregg plan: Who got what?
Blimey
I'm feeling a bit light headed. Perhaps I'm dreaming?
There seem to be an awful lot of perfectly reasonable, pretty well balanced, common sense policies there. To use those words in conjunction with Government and Politics.... well.... I think I might need to sit down for a bit.
Lets hope they can actually implement them.
Posted in Election losers? Our clapped-out parties
I'd 3rd that plus...
The oldest modern democracy in the world should have the courage to get back to it's roots and remember why it's here and who it serves. By the people for the people.
PR isn't some magical bullet, and isn't nearly as innovative or comprehensive as it needs to be for true political reform.
1. Any contesting MP must have lived within 10 miles of their constituency for at least 5 years. No more prosttuting yourself around for a constituency to run in. Yes Michael Portillo - as one example I was thinking of you!
2. A new legal definition ala "perversion of the course of democracy". Just like it's "Justice" equivalent - any whip would go to prison for attempting to pervert the view of the "jury". As well as any MP knowingly voting or failing to represent (or should have reasonable established) the views of their constituents.
3. Attempting to abstain from a parliamentary vote. This is a failure to represent your constituents.
I have zero expectation that this will ever happen of course. Perhaps we could just have:
"I choose to vote for none of you - you bunch of talentless, unqualified, unimaginative old farts"
as an option at the bottom of future ballot slips that the rest of us can check on voting day.
Posted in Should you own your own data?
Definition
The definition should be a fairly obvious one - you only have the right to revoke information you have published, anything more would be copyright or libel enforcement via the backdoor.
Yup
Especially when the films are as bad as Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection.
JANET
http://www.ja.net/services/domain-name-registration/register.gov.uk/payments-charges-gov.html
CO2?
Why on earth would you use CO2 to propel them?
Aisde from the need to carry pressurised cylinders around with the need for high pressure seals etc, now the ISS carbon scrubbers have to clean the air of the bots "exhaust fumes" to keep it breathable. I would have thought something like electrically powered gyroscope precession would have been far more sensible.
Yup
Bloody Marxists - always trying to be a bit better.
Yup
and even if it's not a dry-run, certainly a test to see how widespread such a proof of concept could be, and the only people that really know how widespread that "incident" was will be the people doing the routing...
"They obviously load slower than a plain HTML site"
"They obviously load slower than a plain HTML site"...
Hmm there's a webmaster who doesn't get SEO
Search Engines have only ever load HTML - CSS, JS and any other MIME types are completely ignored. There is no sematic content in a CSS or JS file, and any sematic content in an image should be asserted by the HTML page calling it.
I would guess any speed analysis will be computed on the request response time, and possibly the load time. I think this is quite reasonable, and probably a good idea.
Just no reason to buy one...
Until the 3G version comes out. Roll on May
Posted in HP slides Slate into iPad slipstream
Adam
This is the one I would like to play with:
http://gizmodo.com/5471559/notion-ink-adam-tablet-caught-on-video-specs-finalized
