* Posts by A J Stiles

2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006

Monty Python legend Eric Idle and rockstar boffin Cox write a song

A J Stiles
Boffin

Re: Age versus size

Actually, you might want to make that 14 billion light years across. According to relativity, any two things moving away from the same point (i.e., the original site of the big bang) at the speed of light, are also only moving away from each other at the speed of light.

But I'm getting giddy from all the big numbers. I likes me exponents negative, I tells you!

A J Stiles
Thumb Up

Still makes me tear up a bit

This version has the same affect as the original version.

Universal Credit dole 'liable to be paralysed by IT cockups'

A J Stiles

How simple does it need to be?

Forget means-testing of benefits, as the cost of determining "who is entitled to how much" works out greater than the cost of paying everybody money to which they may not be entitled. Just pay everybody the same figure; say, £200 a week, irrespective of whether they are working or not. This is in place

Then take an extra £200 a week off every taxpayer, through PAYE.

It's a lot easier to know whether or not you have paid any money at all to someone, than whether or not you have paid the right amount. And if somebody is working (therefore not entitled to the Dole), they will be in the tax system; and so you can always reclaim that money straight back from them.

(Where's the Meerkat icon for "Simples" when you need it?)

Steve Jobs' Apple-powered yacht makes belated first trip

A J Stiles

End In Tears

This will end in tears.

It was Philippe Starck who created that juicer. You know, the one found in kitchens with very clean ovens and where no lemon is ever squozen.

The mode of delivery alone should be enough to tell you that this craft is not seaworthy.

EDF: We'll raise bills 11% - but only 2% is due to energy costs!

A J Stiles

Re: Don't import more oil@A J Stiles

Whatever else was wrong with Thatcher, nobody could accuse her of not knowing her science.

Before the miners' strike of 1984, coal was "The Fuel of the Future". Having just witnessed the beginning of the robotisation of car manufacture, it's fairly obvious that Thatcher had her mind set on robotising coal mining. As long as there is coal to be dug up, machines could simply continue digging it up with minimal human intervention. Building the machines in the first place is obviously going to be more expensive than paying people to do the job by hand; but machines don't need to sleep for 8 hours a day, and they don't go on strike. Lessons learned from building the first generation of mining robots can be applied to the next. It's pretty much a no-brainer.

And the only reason not to go ahead with such a project was hidden in the third sentence of the preceding paragraph.

Britain's coal reserves had long been massively overstated. Reporting the true level had never been in anybody's best interests anyway: not the miners (who would have lost their jobs) and not the bosses (who would have lost their contracts). Best for all concerned to keep quiet until it became impossible to conceal any longer; because the consequences would have been exactly the same anyway.

A J Stiles

"Go ahead and let the oil run out. At some point during that process prices would naturally drive up to the point that transfer to alternative sources would make sense."

That would be a bit like what is happening right now, only worse.

If we weren't making some effort to manage the transition to renewable energy, then the price of fossil fuels would remain fairly constant ..... then suddenly increase tenfold. That's 900%. In one go, without warning. And you'd have no choice but to pay it.

For all the talk of renewables being subsidised, the reality is that all our lives, fossil fuels have been effectively subsidised; we haven't had to worry about the replacing what we've used up, nor have we been covering anything like the full cost of cleaning up the damage they do. We ran out of coal, we've nearly run out of oil. For all their faults, renewables will soon be all we have left.

A J Stiles
FAIL

Re: Don't import more oil

Um, no there isn't.

Britain's coal mines are pretty much worked-out. Which is why Thatcher closed them down in the first place: extracting coal locally was costing more than importing it from abroad. Every day, the miners were coming back up with just a little less coal than they had the day before. You won't find anybody in the former mining industry willing to admit it, because they all hoped to hang onto their jobs right up to the moment when it finally became impossible to deny the obvious. But the evidence is there (or rather, it isn't, because it's all been burned by now).

A J Stiles
Facepalm

Re: Yes, lets focus on short term cost increases...

I can only assume it is because they think that downvoting people who point out that the party is going to end, is somehow going to keep the party from ending.

Sooner or later, the strategy of invading countries to secure energy supplies is going to fail.

A J Stiles
Megaphone

Energy price rises

Unfortunately, energy price rises are par for the course. And if you must blame somebody for this situation, try blaming successive governments imagining that fossil fuels were not going to run out while they were in power. Just be grateful that there is actually still some electricity to be bought; because generating capacity is reducing even while demand is increasing, and it's a matter of time before demand outstrips supply.

About the only way out of this mess is to generate your own electricity.

China's largest rare earth supplier halts production

A J Stiles
Holmes

Not the only source

The thing with minerals is, they can sometimes be had more easily out of used kit than out of the ground. Especially now we have recycling programmes in place for electronic equipment.

Let's hope China haven't bet the farm on demand for rare-earth minerals increasing forever, considering the way the West got burned expecting the same thing to happen with house prices.

The Big Debate: OK gloomsters, how can the music biz be FIXED?

A J Stiles

Re: There's no nice way to say this .....

Um, no. The rules have changed -- that is the whole point. Just because something was hard to do, doesn't mean you're automatically entitled to be paid for it. If the thought of people benefitting from your hard work without paying you for the privilege really bothers you, perhaps you shouldn't do said hard work in the first place.

A J Stiles
Meh

Re: @ Oddbin and all the other freetards

"What's wrong with stacking shelves in Asda?"

Nothing much, but the job will be automated out of existence before the children being born today are old enough to do it.

A J Stiles
Coat

There's no nice way to say this .....

There is no nice way to say what follows, so I will not even try to sugar coat it.

Unfortunately, the past situation -- where the record companies, being the only people having the wherewithal to distribute music from artists to people, were able to set prices -- resulted in recorded music being massively over-valued. To the point where even the artists started believing that a song might be worth more than a few pence.

It's rather like the situation when Perkin's Artificial Mauve became available, for a fraction of the cost of the shellfish-based dyes that used to be the only stable purple pigments. Suddenly, purple clothing was affordable to everyone And if your whole business model depended on purple dye being expensive and difficult to obtain, then it was no longer sustainable.

Unfortunately, making music probably isn't a sustainable way of earning a living anymore, because other people can make copies of it far too cheaply. That isn't something that can be stopped, either. Even if copy-prevention was not mathematically impossible, there would still be a deep-rooted instinct in all gregarious predators which, in humans, manifests as a pathological loathing to paying the full asking price. (In dogs, it manifests as preferring the taste of exactly the same food from someone else's plate.)

And whilst I understand that musicians have to eat, I don't for one second accept this as implying that making music has to pay enough in and of itself for you to be able to afford to eat. So if you, as a musician, can't live with the simple fact that many people aren't going to pay for your music, or if you are so desperate to make sure that nobody gets a copy of your work without paying you for it, then I'm afraid your only option is not to make any music in the first place.

I can't say the music industry wasn't nice to have around, while it lasted. But it's been rendered unsustainable by developments elsewhere. It's been a blast; but the thing about all parties is that eventually they come to an end. All that remains to say is so long, and thanks for all the records.

Boeing recipe turns cooking oil into jet fuel

A J Stiles

Re: Why not diesel?

"Maybe the cost of making diesel from fossil fuel is cheaper than making it from free used cooking oil?"

It probably is. But as fossil fuels run out, it won't always be so.

How Bodyform's farting 'CEO' became a viral sensation

A J Stiles
Coat

Re: Wheeeeee, SPLAT!

Surely it will take more than a few boxes of sanitary towels to ensure a soft landing?

iPad Mini: Why is Apple SO SCARED of the Kindle?

A J Stiles
Stop

DVD

You can get fully Open Source software to read DVDs (even with the ineffective, broken DRM) and convert it to other formats. As long as you own the original DVD, this falls within your Fair Dealing rights.

Facebook won't pull unmarked police plates page

A J Stiles

Re: The obligatory XKCD reference:

Actually, there are two pretty simple fixes for that.

One is to use a custom collation in your database which treats e.g. I, L and 1as the same character; likewise O, D and 0; B and 8, S and 5, &c. And then you simply don't allow any combination to be issued if it would match an existing one under this collation.

The other, even simpler one, is to specify exactly which characters are permitted in which positions. If the format is, for example, /^[A-Z]{2}[0-9]{2}[A-Z]{3}$/ then there is no possibility of confusion (a digit "8" recorded at position 1, which is alphabetic, must actually be a letter "B").

A J Stiles
Holmes

Re: Reverse tactics

No, no, no. You need to encrypt the licence plates in such a way that honest people can read them, but criminals can't read them.

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

A J Stiles
FAIL

Much council "recycling" == landfill -- WRONG

Councils get paid good money by private firms for the recyclables they collect. Along with parking, this is an important revenue stream.

Please explain how any private firm manages to turn a profit by paying for stuff and then burying it in landfill.

A J Stiles

I've always maintained .....

..... that hoarding is natural, and it's the pathological throwers-out who have the problem.

Although "Help! I can't hang onto anything!" doesn't work so well as reality TV.

Australian boffins have a ball with lightning maths

A J Stiles

Re: Math(s) Bacon & Ketchup

Presumably, "52.1739130435% extra free" didn't quite cut it as a snappy slogan.

Pints all round as Register Special Projects hacks hack off feet

A J Stiles

Re: I miss the ounce...

31.623 g. would be a much better amount for an ounce. Because then, there would be exactly the same number of grams in an ounce as there were ounces in a kilo.

Microsoft plans big licencing price hikes, shifting to per-Device model

A J Stiles

Re: Think this will affect you?

Get a good Open Source Migration consultant in to help you with the job. You might have to change some of your IT staff, but there are plenty of school leavers who hate Microsoft with a passion and won't expect to be paid much more than breadline wages (so what you are going to offer them will come as a nice surprise).

A J Stiles

Re: The Price of FOSS...

Any decent Open Source Migration Consultant will rewrite your mission-critical Excel macros in OpenOffice Calc as part of the service you're paying for.

Or, if you've been (mis)using spreadsheets as databases, they will create a bunch of scripts to do the same stuff but with a proper Postgres or MySQL database backend.

'Cause you see, that's what OSM consultancy involves. Beware of the cowboys who think all you need is an Ubuntu install CD, is all .....

A J Stiles

Re: The Price of FOSS...

This is an oft-parroted canard. I don't expect to convince you, because your mind is clearly already made up, so what follows is mainly for the benefit of unconvinced readers.

Firstly, training is a one-off expense, whereas licencing costs are ongoing. And secondly, the practical differences are minimal. Most people lay out Word documents using spaces, and create headings by choosing a bigger font and bold -- and add up the figures in an Excel spreadsheet using a calculator. They are hardly going to notice.

A J Stiles

Think this will affect you?

If you think this will affect you, you need to realise just one thing: You DO have an alternative.

Consider migrating to Open Source *today*. You've very little to lose, and a lot to save. There are people out there who can help ease the transition.

Sanitary towel firm's 'CEO' sets traumatised man straight

A J Stiles
Thumb Up

Genius

Drinking the blue stuff and farting -- pure class!

Periods are just a bodily function, for crying out loud. One that's been happening to half the human race, every four weeks, since time immemorial. You would have thought people would have got used to the idea by now.

'Hypersensitive' Wi-Fi hater loses case against fiendish DEVICES

A J Stiles

Re: Think of the Children!

Commer. Some were real, but they were expensive and unreliable. Many were dummies, and hardly less effective at producing queues in post offices near where they were deployed.

Since the real detector vans were based around superhet receivers, they had their own local oscillators which leaked out. So you could build a TV detector van detector, and use it to switch off your TV set when it detected a TV detector van. And if you used a TRF front-end for your TV detector van detector, then this would even prevent the TV detector vans from being fitted with a TV detector van detector detector.

Small biz scrappers urged to take the fight to hackers

A J Stiles
FAIL

Re: "not be a form of vigilantism"

If people, by taking the law into their own hands, put the proper authorities out of a job, then who is going to come to our rescue when -- as history shows always happens -- the vigilante mob turn bad?

Due Process. You won't notice till it isn't there.

Übertroll firm bags DRM patent for 3D printing

A J Stiles
Meh

Meh

DRM doesn't work. It's mathematically impossible. It relies, underneath it all, on a proposition being simultaneously true and false. Nothing anyone could invent is going to change that.

Anyone seeking to challenge the patent need only compare DRM to a perpetual motion machine (which are already excluded from patentability).

Cloud company foraged for hard drives to stay afloat

A J Stiles
Boffin

Re: any takers

They are used in older (non-HD) Sky boxes. Up to 500 GB will go in and just work; anything beyond that needs a bit of preparation but it's explained on the Internet.

Lenovo unfolds smaller Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid

A J Stiles
Linux

"Both models will run Windows 8, of course."

Not for long if I buy one, it won't.

How long before the ambulance-chasing lawyers with their fetish for mis-sold endowment mortgages and Payment Protection Insurance start picking up on mis-sold computer software?

Register SPB hacks mull chopping off feet

A J Stiles

Re: Fond of Fahrenheit

"Anything below 18 requires room heating" -- You're just nesh.

Anything over 20 degrees needs air conditioning ..... Or privacy.

A J Stiles

SI please

SI all the way, please. Even the heights and distances. (It's about time the Americans learned something.)

(41 year old Briton, 171cm., 69kg.)

A J Stiles

Old pint glasses

We could scribe a line at 500ml,. leaving a 68ml. oversize for those who like a head on their beer.

Mobe app makers doubt Windows 8 will be worth the hassle - poll

A J Stiles
Stop

What it really needs

What Windows Phone 8 really, desperately needs is an Android emulator.

Is Oracle squeezing the MySQL lemon too hard?

A J Stiles
Holmes

Hmm

How many of the people parroting the "MySQL lacks feature $FOO" (which would be trivial to provide in the application layer, even if it hadn't been implemented in a more recent version of MySQL than they are b!+(#ing about) line would ever actually need $FOO anyway?

Most of the time, all you want is a simple variable persistence layer; and MySQL is very good at providing that.

A J Stiles

Re: @AC 15:42

It doesn't quite work that way.

If someone contributes code directly to MariaDB, they -- not the MariaDB project, and not Oracle -- own the copyright in their contribution (and MariaDB, in their turn, will only accept it on the condition that the contributor places it under the GPL).

Any bits of MariaDB in which Oracle don't own the copyright, can't be used in a non-GPL offering without permission from the copyright holders -- which, one might infer from the fact that they contributed their code to MariaDB and not MySQL, they're unlikely to give.

Top admen beg Microsoft to switch off 'Do Not Track' in IE 10

A J Stiles

Re: I see no ad's

Me neither -- I'm blocking adverts by running my own nameserver, which tells a few spare ribs.

I've even been thinking of offering advertisement-free surfing as a premium service, if I can get some ADSL capacity to resell.

Pastafarians: Get your noodly appendages off that Facebook suspect

A J Stiles
FAIL

Re: Fuck you God, Zeus, Vishnu, Odin.....

s/muslim/theist/gi and you might be onto something.

It's religion in general that is the problem, not one specific religion. Once you have successfully persuaded someone to believe something as absurd as "an invisible man in the sky is watching what we eat and who we have sex with", you can persuade them that said invisible sky man wants them to behave in ways they would ordinarily consider reprehensible.

A J Stiles
Unhappy

Re: Fuck you God, Zeus, Vishnu, Odin.....

"Why can't we just send all the believers off on the B-ark already?"

Because we've got believers in charge :(

We can't kick the Muslims out until we have kicked the Christians out. I know there's no difference between Muslims and Christians, you know there's no difference, hell, most normal people know there's no difference; but one of the things believers are noted for believing is that there are good believers (i.e. them) and bad believers (i.e. everybody else).

Happy birthday, Compact Disc

A J Stiles

Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms

Weren't there more CDs of this than CD players in the UK at one point?

I remember my first CD very clearly -- it was "Solitude Standing" by Suzanne Vega. My first CD player was a Philips, with a green LED illuminating the spinning disc.

I also remember my first CD recorder -- and my first effort at making a multimedia CD! (It was a bootleg, made from a cassette, with audio in the first session and some HTML files in the second session. It was The Levellers, live at Glastonbury in 1992; and I only know that because I saw the actual show live. Of course I named the CD "Headlice, White Lies, Max Tar Ciggies" .....)

Microsoft releases JavaScript alternative

A J Stiles

Re: 'twatting'

That's a present participle, not a gerund. (Although the construction in English is the same.)

On the other hand, "People who don't know what a gerund is need a good twatting" is an example of using "twatting" as a gerund; here it is used as a noun which implies the verb "to twat".

A J Stiles

Re: What a laugh if ...

"There are other FOSS licences where you have to hand over a pint to the author, or you can use the code if it's 'not for evil' (I kid you not) others where you have to be vegetarian, or send a postcard to the author" -- these licences (citation pls? kthx) would fail to meet the Open Source definition. A requirement to be a vegetarian would contravene clause 5; a requirement not to use the code for evil would contravene clause 6.

A J Stiles

Re: What...

"Microsoft have the best over all development language and development tools products over a long long history than any vendor by miles, so probably not a lot..."

How have you managed to remain ignorant of the GNU project all these years?

A J Stiles

Perl manages without static typing

Perl manages just fine and dandy without static typing.

JavaScript's mistake was trying to use the same operator for two different operations on two different (but not-always-distinguible) scalar-ish types. As a result, you can't reliably add numbers in JavaScript, because the + operator concatenates anything with a string-ish manifestation.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to fix this and not break every bit of JavaScript ever written.

Adobe bets on cloud collaboration for Acrobat XI

A J Stiles

Hmm

Wasn't part of the original point of PDF files, that you can't edit them?

As long as I can still create PDFs with GhostScript and view them with Evince, there's not much to worry about.

Bloke jailed for being unable to use BlackBerry Messenger freed

A J Stiles
FAIL

Re: Bah!

Because if you attempt to complain about overly-broad or draconian legislation, you will be shouted down as being on the side of the paedophiles / terrorists / drug dealers.

A J Stiles

Re: Hmm, should this have ever gone to court?

There used to be a requirement in English law for "mens rea" -- you not only had to do the thing that was illegal, you also had to have intent to break the law.

This requirement was dropped sometime, when it was found to be inconvenient as it made it too difficult to convict people.

HTC outs Jelly Bean running One X revamp

A J Stiles

What about .....

..... an update for the Desire HD?

Still running Gingerbread here.