Posts by Len Goddard
152 posts • joined Tuesday 4th September 2007 12:25 GMT
Bah. A Raspberry Pi in an old cigarette packet can do all of this. And its cheaper.
Lateral thinking needed
You have to cool them because you have piled them into a rack in close proximity.
Now, if you suspended them from the ceiling by ethernet cables of varying lengths you would have a combination passively cooled Beowolf cluster and hi-tech mobile. A really practical and useful addition to office decor.
Why no hdmi on the tablet section?
From memory, the transformer has the HDMI output on the screen so that you can connect it up to a larger display without having to carry the keyboard if you don't want to. Not a major problem, but could have been more convenient.
Re: I'm just waiting
@h3 - I was beginning to think I was the only person still using focus follows mouse with no autoraise. It confuses the hell out of people brought up on windows but can be exceptionally productive with some application mixes.
Re: I'm just waiting
You miss the point. A lot of people liked the Ubuntu gnome-2 style interface and had been using it for years. A lot of them are not OS-junkies - they don't want to have to learn new and exciting ways to screw up their workflow, they just want a stable platform which won't throw up nasty surprises. If Unity had been introduced as an alternative desktop on a new 'buntu there would have been no howls of complaint, but it userped the gnome style interface with something completely different. In my case, Unity was totally unsuited to the way I work. I switched to Xubuntu - which is not too far from gnome - and am now experimenting with Mint/Mate but all of this is completely unproductive.
And yes, I know that gnome had moved on to the less than popular gnome 3 but that was because the gnome development community suffered from the same arrogant "we know what's best" attitude as Canonical.
Why?
No room, no content, no point.
(and no dosh).
Google Hereafter?
Ohh, I can use it to send encrypted instructions to my ex. on how to access my offshore accounts.
Without the encryption key.
Re: Windows got the BLUES
I don't case if Win 8 presents two alternative UI's. Provided it lets me choose the one I want and make it a default without any need to ever use the second one. If Win8 had offered a choice of Win7-alike or TIFKAM as the boot time default and made each usable standalone (with the option of running mixed mode) then I would have no objections.
But they couldn't do that, primarily I suspect because 99% of the population would have gone for the Win 7 look&feel. Instead they force the tinkertoy tiles onto us in the hope it will make us want their unloved phone OS. They hope to leverage their desktop presence into the mobile market. Unfortunately for M$ there are now viable desktop alternatives for business and in the home market there are few apps other than games which cannot be run or replaced on linux. And with the recent announcements from Valve/Steam even that may be changing.
Wrong move
Unfortunately, Shuttleworth has gone the same way as M$ and cursed Ubuntu with the equally ghastly Unity interface. You can choose one of the other 'buntus it feels like being in a backwater with the primary development effort focused on Unity and, I suspect, Umbutu phone (why does that sound familiar). Fortunately there are other distros - Mint is picking up a lot of refugees.
Re: New Ultima?
Hey, I liked Daggerfall. OK, it was buggy when released. Yeah, OK, it was still buggy when they stopped fixing bugs but it had scope and some of the bugs were awesome - pushing through cracks in the dungeon scenery so that you could walk up the outside of the tunnels and get to otherwise-inaccessible unfinished bits of dungeon they hadn't bothered to delete! (Just remember levitate so that you don't fall through the floor of the world).
But this is online. His Lordship wants to create a less scripted environment and allow non-adventure type play. Good luck to him. With the instant-gratification, power-user, "where's the walkthough?" mentality of so many of today's gamers it will go free2play quickly and tits-up soon thereafter.
One of the "charms" of the original Everquest was that there were a lot of things you could do which the dev's hadn't anticipated, and the code was so tangled that it took forever for them to find out how to stop you. This allowed for creative use of unintentionally situationally-overpowered spells (harmony, I think, was one). Eventually it all succumbed to the demands of the class-balancers who insisted that every class be able to do everything.
to misquote
Vi is the worst text editor.
Except for all the others.
Beauty returns to quantum physics
Genuine physics aside, I am delighted to see that the bottom quark has oscillated back into its beauty state.
I was very disappointed when the original Truth and Beauty names for the T & B quarks were replaced by the mundane and unimaginative Top and Bottom. Although I suppose there is a place for Tops and Bottoms in an SM theory ...
Posted in Keyboard, you're not my type
Re: The keyboard hasn't evolved because...
I never put one in a dishwasher but many years ago I knocked a cup of coffee over one, so I took it to the washroom and ran water through it until it came out clean then just left it on the window to dry out in the sunlight. It was still working fine a year later.
Posted in Keyboard, you're not my type
Still the best
I'm typing this on a genuine IBM Model M keyboard (made in 1985 according to the label on the back). The only potential problem is the lack of a "windows" key but I'm running linux so who cares. I suspect the keyboard will outlive me.
A minor problem, perhaps
"In one such scenario, a phone might switch from from a ring mode to a vibrate mode – because it's dark, say, and the phone senses it's in a cinema."
Or maybe, the phone's in your pocket ...
Re: Intollerable!
No, that was Minerva.
See "Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan
Drones don't take pictures
Drones don't take pictures, people take pictures.
You can't ban guns on the grounds that they can be used to kill people, but it is all right to ban camera equipped drones because they might take pictures, or websites because they can be used for illegal file sharing.
The law should be aimed at the illegal act, not the enabling tech if that tech has other perfectly legitimate uses.
Not in any non-U buntu
AFAIK this crud is only in the Ubuntu unity interface, not in the other 'buntus. I moved to Xubuntu when unity appeared because it is as ugly and unpleasant as TIFKAM.
Having said which, Stallman is quite right in this case and Shuttleworth should be ashamed of what he has done to what was a well respected distro.
tectonic activity
Maybe we should stay very quiet in case they come here to get away from the volcanos.
Posted in LHC CMS yields unexpected 'new stuff'
Flattened gluons?
I thought gluons were point-like particles, so how do they get flattened??
The Fisher Price Playblock Interface (Fippy for short).
It is still Connery for me, despite the political incorrectness of the films. Most of the later Bonds have had to suffer from pretty naff scripts padded out with special effects and big fight/chase scenes. The results are neither memorable nor impressive.
Dalton made quite a good fist of his two outings. Brosnan was too smooth. Moore was far too smooth. Lazenby was not bad but struggled with a really poor script and a leading lady who couldn't stand him (is it really true she ate raw onions before every love scene?). Craig comes second for Casino Royale, but Quantum of Solice is so forgettable that the only thing about it I can remember is that I have seen it.
Reusable
The sad thing is that I took all the usable kit to a computer recycling charity recently.
What I have left is of no conceivable use to anyone, except I could possibly frame one or two of the really ancient and obscure expansion cards and hang them on the wall.
Re: One of these was already invented
I encountered a machine to do this in an interactive science museum in the Netherlands about 45 years ago. At that stage I already knew about the effect as I had seen it on Tomorrow's World some years previously.
Do you get extra Ig-ness for plagarism?
People don't buy windows 8
I doubt that many people will rush out and buy a copy of win8 to upgrade an existing machine. Most copies will be sold with new hardware, particularly once MS puts the screws on vendors to stop them installing win 7.
I'm actually having a hard time remembering when I last upgraded a copy of windows on existing hardware. I think it was when I went from 3.1 to Win 95. Not a happy experience. M$ does not have a good record for allowing upgrade-in-place, preserving installed apps and configuration options. Unlike my work Ubuntu system, which was upgraded every six months from 5.10 to 11.10 with more or less no problems.
Change happens, get used to it?
Whenever anyone questions change some cretin comes up with the mantra:
"Change happens, get used to it"
Why? It is just as reasonable to complain about change for the worse as it is to complain about maintenance of a bad design.
I'm perfectly happy with windows the way I have it set up now - win7 with classic shell to make it look as close to the XP/classic interface as possible. So I suppose this is more or less a Win 2K look and feel. Basically it does what I want without too many unpleasant suprises - most unexpected behaviour is where the emulation fails (such as the brain-dead version of Windows Explorer in Win 7). I could have slavishly learned each new interface along the way but why should I? The best OS is the one you don't notice - things just happen the way they always did.
I don't object to new interfaces provided they are not mandatory. If Win8 had a nice prominent initial setup option - Use Classic Interface - I could quite happily leave TIFKAM to those who want their desktop to behave in the same way as their tablet or phone (a not unreasonable desire). Unfortunately it does not, and the monolithic Windows design precludes complete desktop replacements in the way allowed in linux. And yes, I did move from Ubuntu to Xubuntu because the Unity interface screwed up my normal workflow (ingrained over the last 6 years) but Xubuntu required very little change in behaviour.
Use firefox and noscript
You can block the java plug-in (and other things) in firefox by using the noscript plugin then enable it on a temporary page-by-page or site-by-site basis if you really have to have java. You can even allow it on whitelisted sites if you feel brave.
Not that it is that important for me ... I just checked my setup and discovered that as well as being blocked my java is at 1.6 anyway. Ho hum.
I had one of the early transformers and I thought it was an excellent tablet, but I finally disposed of it for the simple reason it would not play mkv videos and I have a lot of material in that format which I have no intention of transoding to mp4 just to satisfy one device. Does this one play mkv?
Single speaker is also disappointing. My TF101 had stereo.
Well, I do care about computer games. I enjoy them, despite not being in what is generally regarded as the target demographic. And, to be honest, games are the only reason I still have windows on my home PCs (my office PC ran linux only for years before I retired). If Win8 forces a reasonable number of games developers over onto Linux I will jump for joy and happily purge the ghastly Windoze mess from my life forever.
Taste
Seems to me that this thread shows the essential futility of the original article. There is virtually no concensus on what is good or bad. Also, just because YOU don't like a show doesn't make it crap and just because I like it doesn't make it great.
You can attempt to analyse shows on the basis of some arbitrary checklist of qualities but once again you descend into a morass of argument over what should be judged good and bad. Fine for a university course on contemporary media but essentially useless otherwise.
In the end, a show is good if enough people watch it to pay for its production and encourage the makers to produce more of the same or similar. Unfortunately that makes a lot of stuff "good" which I personally loathe so I don't watch much TV nowadays.
Me, I liked (in no particular order) Luther, The Wire, Lewis, Hustle, West Wing, Fringe, Spirals, Wallander, The Borgias, Rome, Firefly and many others. Equally, I'd rather watch reruns of Porridge or Yes, Minister or Mash than most recent comedies.
You are always likely to have more good US shows than British simply because they make so many more. They also frequently can excellent shows for silly reasons or as a result of poor ratings due to schedule mishandling (yes, Fox, I'm talking about you).
Now I'm off to watch the recent Shakespeare Hollow Crown cycle. That's not something likely to emerge from the US.
Unnh
So instead of being inflicted with metro we get lumbered with Unity?
Not interested unless I can overylay the Xubuntu desktop.
Posted in Ten... alien invasions
Wrong film
I'm 90% sure the Quatermass Experiment still actually comes from the second of the quatermass series, where alien organisms were being grown in an "artifical food" plant. This is the guy who fell into one of the vats.
I'm lost. The more immersive and engaging the show, the more likely any knowledgable viewer is to take action to avoid it being interrupted by advertising, like pre-recording it and skipping the ads.
There are a staggering number of fallacious premises in this whole area. Nowadays, measuring program viewing numbers gives absolutely no indication of ad penetration, if it ever did. The only really important measure is whether sales, or at least brand recognition, goes up as a result of advertising or down as a result of not advertising. This is rarely measured because it is hard to do, and anyway in most cases the results almost certainly wouldn't show anything the advertising companies would want their customers to know.
complete fail
I was looking for a video of hot babes in heels and short skirts but all I got was a message saying "This video is private"
Useless
I just went and looked at the new tab page. Of the nine options, 4 are different pages on the same website, four have titles but no images, one says "file not found" and seven of them are for sites I already have open on other pages.
So I took the suggestion in the article and clicked on the square icon thingie. A blank page is less distracting. Maybe I'm getting old but it seems that most "usability enhancements" nowadays are just complicated graphical ways of performing simple tasks.
Reconsidering
So, "digital technology" is now a symptom of diabollically inspired anti-Catholic propoganda?
Nice to know.
Meanwhile, now that this film has received divine blessing I shall have to reconsider my attitude towards it. I used to like it.
And after this is deployed, the entire internet grinds to a halt, swamped by clones arguing about basket weaving techniques, and the real people have to go back to telephones and paper mail.
Posted in ITU adopts two ultra-high def TV specs
Content delivery
How are we supposed to get these wonderful images into our homes? 8k pictures are approximately 16 times the size of 1080p. Bluray won't cope, we'll need a new format UV-ray perhaps? And of course some film makers want to go to 48fps instead of 24, or maybe higher. Add 3D to that and we'll need X-ray lasers in our disk players. Or we can rewire the whole country with multiple fibres to each premises just to deliver the ultra-hi-def adverts which will be the bulk of the content.
After much thrashing around and downloading of Classic Shell et al I've finally managed to make Win 7 work more or less the way I want it to ... ie with the Win2000 user interface. It is not as good as Win XP was due to some upleasant behaviour from the file manager but it is tolerable.
I don't want a new interface every time I get a new computer (which is about the only time I change the version of Windoze). The classic interface does everything I want the way I expect it to. It is not the best interface in the world but it is familiar. If I try to learn Win 8 it will have changed again long before I am half as comfortable with it as I am with Classic.
Buy the DVD
I'm reaching the stage where I am ready to cancel my TV subscription and just buy the DVDs of the shows worth watching (of which there are not many). At least that way you don't get interested in a show just to have the morons at fox cancel it after the first season.
Re: It's not ads that are the problem
It is much the same in the UK. It used to be that if you clipped the ads out of a 2 hour program you were left with 100-105 minutes of programming. Nowadays you are lucky to get much over 90 (and that includes 90 the credits which probably have voice-over ads for upcoming programs). The old 2-breaks for 1 hour and 3 for 2 scheme has become 3 and 4 respectively, with the extra break stuck in near the end for maximum exposure. This is particularly a problem with older programs where they shoehorn the extra break in with no regard to content.
"And the murderer was"
<5 mins advertising>
"Colonel Mustard in the TV room with the fatally boring advert".
Re: Commercial stations...
I remember some arrogant cretin of a network executive coming up with the unbelievable statement that skipping the ads was equivalent to stealing the programming.
My PVR doesn't do a fixed-period skip so I run through them on fast-forward (30x). Oddly, research shows that the impact and retention of advertising material at this speed is much the same as if you watch them at normal speed. TBH, advertisers are better off if I don't watch their rubbish because on the odd occasion that I notice an ad it is usually because it has annoyed me so much I will never use that product again. I haven't eaten Shredded Wheat breakfast cerial for about 40 years because one of their jingles got up my nose so much.
Re: BBC
Nah, you put a cookie on to say they are willing to be tracked. If the cookie is not there, you ask. That way people get so fed up being questioned they say yes just to shut you up.
Meanwhile I think I'll go check a few guv'mnt websites and complain if they are non-compliant. After all, they should set an example and as far as I can see are the only ones that we can guarantee can be taken to court.
Client for win7
If they are so proud of their implementation I wish they would ship it with Win 7 home/pro.
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
Apple IIe
Lots of nostalgia here, but what happened to the Apple IIe? Expensive by the standards of most of the machines here, but amazingly versatile with a huge range of plug-in boards for printers, graphics, memory extensions and a wide range of games.
It has happened
Well, more or less.
Apple is being sued for using a touchscreen for more than pressing virtual buttons:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/23/apple_touchscreen_flatworld_interactives/
The only good outcome that could result from this fiasco would be a general acceptance that far too many trivial and bad patents are allowed (many of which would fall foul of prior art provisions in the eyes of anyone except a patent lawyer).
Patents should protect truely innovative and creative works for the benefits of the innovators and creators, not act as restraint of trade instruments to prevent competitors from including obvious and necessary features.
To be honest, I am slightly surprised that no one has patented the use of fingers on touch-screen devices, thus forcing the development of nose and tongue controlled devices to prevent infringement.
Re: Piss off!
When paedophiles and terrorists appear in the same sentence you can be 100% sure that someone is trying to scare you into agreeing with a measure for which there is no reasonable and logical argument.
Posted in Sci Fi recomendations?
Vinge
A Fire on the Deep by Vernor Vinge is superb., although I was not enamoured of the prequel. I also loved Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook.
Posted in Kogeto Dot 360° video lens
Handle
It needs some sort of pistol grip to avoid getting your thumb in every shot. TBH, it seems like a gimick to increase the amount of truely bad and uninteresting video/still photography polluting the web.
