Posts by Bob H

Re: @Alien8n

@Alien8n,

I did mention the need to kill key characters elsewhere in the posting.

@Simon Harris,

I love the idea that dystopian futures are an excuse not to make our own lives better.

You seem to have pointed out quite a number of films more than TV series and yes there are many examples of both TV and films being dystopial. However my concern is valid because the writing trends elsewhere and notably more so to me recently, have been rather against what Gene R. wanted from Star Trek. We can assume the writers, producers and directors will be somewhat experienced in the genre and thus will bring their own interpretation to the series. However dark can also be viewed as a criticism of many ST films, but especially so of the TNG films.

Actually his rants, while often caused by bad code, have also included suggestions that people kill themselves so I'd call that personal.

That picture is cropped here is a full size view.

Re: @Chuq But it isn't in English

What about auto-translation between the two versions, should be possible and a bot could even process to create the parallel universes.

They convinced me to move to EE from my old Orange contract which was amazing, because I needed more data allowance, the service is crap and they really don't care about me as a long term customer.

I've been thinking about going elsewhere but frankly I don't think there is much out there that actually appeals to me. I would have been Three but their service sucks in my village.

Re: Yeah...

@Nigel

Actually at 2k resolution the 4k silicon can already do HFR+HDR, which I found quite cool, if HFR+HDR content was available that would make me buy a 4k TV for sure.

Re: NSA?

Hanlon's Razor applies here:

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Optimism

To be fair they can just blat out the entire band you might operate in and saturate the receiver so that it couldn't actually decode anything. Automating evasive action would struggle to take into account the fact that the jammer can move to track them. The drone could try to return to base but it would lack GPS so it would have to do that via the IMU.

But don't worry, these devices are illegal for anyone but federal agencies to use and they'd need to apply for a licence to use them from the FCC. If you're flying a drone and the federal government don't like it then you probably are going to have their finger in uncomfortable places very soon anyway.

Re: Waste of time and money, you can't break the rules of biology.

I am not disputing what you say about the finite angular resolution but in addition to that it turns out that human vision is much more complex than just simple angular resolution. An expert who was speaking yesterday at an event was pointing out that the human eye isn't a camera, the human eye has too much processing that affects "resolution", the real resolution of the eye is affected by the objects on the screen.

Re: I will be boring again

I had a Toshiba notebook that transformed into a tablet many years back, it was great and I kept it alive for a long time before dust finally killed the fan and despite stripping it down regularly I had to give up.

As you say the deal breaker is the 8.9in display, >10in or no deal.

@Kev99

Did you really just post that on The Register?

Re: in ye olde days

My father used to own a computer company in the late 80s, early 90s, he supplied a lot of freight forwarders and the computers regularly had to come in for a clean. His guys established that with some minor modifications to the fan arrangements the machines would survive longer. But they still came in caked with oil and engine soot.

I will always treasure the smell of foam cleaner from RS.

When I was in college one of my tutors confessed that he used to leave his chilli hotdogs to heat up on a very expensive piece of equipment. After a while it ceased to work and when they took it apart they found that stray chili sauce had eaten through the PCB.

Re: Is this one of those "Private" clouds...

Yes, the use of the phrase 'cloud' seems to have been abused here, as said above: cloud is just "someone else's server". This is clearly a virtualisation strategy, but the word virtualisation is so 5 years ago. It is a shame that NATS IT bods have to worry so many of us by using the word cloud when they mean virtualisation.

Re: As an alternative

I ran my own own home server for several years on static IPs, then I got myself a dedicated host and I also ran mail for my family. I used Dovecot, postgrey and various other tools (clamav and spamassassin).

Eventually the dedicated host's HDD died and I spent ages doing a RAID recovery, doing backup recovery, etc. Frankly that tipped me over the edge. The maintenance, dealing with the odd mail that didn't get through and dealing with the hackers attempting to get in was tedious. Okay, dealing with my families requests was the most tedious part, but overall I didn't need the grief overall.

I have since moved my mail and other stuff to Dreamhost on an unlimited hosting deal and at least I don't have to think about it. The performance of Dreamhost mail isn't fantastic and the webmail is basic, but I am happy enough not to have to think about maintenance. I could move my mail to Google but I decided to draw a line somewhere and give myself a little control.

Wikipedia isn't exactly authoritative but:

"The use of basic (low-precision) Galileo services will be free and open to everyone. The high-precision capabilities will be available for paying commercial users. Galileo is intended to provide horizontal and vertical position measurements within 1-metre precision, and better positioning services at high latitudes than other positioning systems."

The BBC confirms this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4555276.stm

"COMMERCIAL NAVIGATION: Encrypted; High accuracy at the cm scale; Guaranteed service for which service providers will charge fees."

Graphic from the BBC to prove the point:

http://bit.ly/1Qsw2xq

Re: UK EPG is broken for Windows Media Center

The EPG for the broadcast HD channels is compressed with an algorithm that requires a Freeview HD licence so that would explain why there is no HD EPG when Rovi data is unavailable.

Re: DEs

I have an O2 Joggler which is a table top touch screen computer running an Atom processor on a lower resolution display. I have to say that the screen keyboard experience of Mint isn't fantastic and I don't think any of the distros are great for a desktop environment because the desktop flow doesn't match that experience.

@Zmodem

Fortunately I am an engineer not a coder. I didn't mention textures or 3d, the issue is if an object moves across 1/3rd of the screen at 1920 then it passes fewer pixels than if it travels 1/3rd of the screen at 3840 pixels. This impacts what is called the temporal resolution.

Have you also worked at the BBC perhaps? ;-)

Troll or not?

To be fair many of these codecs are built on solid research that takes many, many years. I wouldn't call them patent trolls because a patent troll tends to depend on someone else's work and most of the MPEG LA patent holders are genuine researchers. What is good is that some of the more fundamental mathematics which have driven MPEG2 and MPEG4 are expiring in patent so many simple applications basic mathematics can no longer be charged for. If a company spends millions on research they perhaps deserve to get revenue from it?