Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Wherefore art thou, firewall?

The firewall is and always will be vital. The firewall's first and most important job is to prevent "exploratory" hacking -- someone getting on to the network and looking for exploits on the individual servers. You can't be sure you've eliminated all security holes, so you add an extra level of defence.

It's just like having a door on your building, and a gate on your campus, really.

Re: I like this.

HDMI out is increasingly common on phones. Hopefully the docking connector will be the same on the phone and the tablet so you can dock the phone and then use HDMI....

Re: Re: Re: Question:

If sales models aren't applicable, why did you start talking about one? And I've never taken a marketing course, I just happen to know what that word means.

If you were to build a platform above the balloons, surely you'd want 3 balloons? 2 points describe a line, and the platform wouldn't be stable if it was only supported on one axis. 3 points describe a plane -- and that's what we'd be looking for here....

Deleting files....

Given that even your average desktop OS isn't capable of queuing file operations, I'm not that surprised if a Freesat box isn't.

Although I still don't get WHY your average desktop OS isn't capable of queing file operations, to be fair....

And there I was thinking "I bet a guys version would sell really well among cyclists.... (Although it's generally best to stick to black around the crotch area -- light-coloured lycra tends to show off contours a little immodestly...

20 years ago....

20 years ago, the lasers and mirrors required meant while the medium was small, the read/write apparatus was humungous. This was because lasers were more difficult to make, and there was presumably significant power loss in the medium.

There have been many incremental improvements since then in both media and laser tech, so I'd guess that it's on the cusp of being a commercially viable technology. The last attempt to produce something was a disc, and aimed at the removable media market, and that introduced certain engineering complications.

These guys have a better chance, as they'll be aiming at the fixed-drive market, and now's a very good time for that, as SSDs have opened the market to non-disk-based systems. It also plays to the miniaturisation trend even more than SSDs - if they can get the power requirements low enough, the next-gen iPod won't only be able to hold your entire CD collection, it'll be able to store your entire DVD collection too... and perhaps even without any additional compression.

Put this in an Android phone and the era of the truly universal personal portable computer will begin, and office desks the world over will have mobile phone docking stations instead of PCs or laptop stands.

AIUI, the iBook format is little more than an extension of HTML. The R&D for it is negligible.

small-c conservative

The article is about "a conservative ideology", not "the Conservative ideology".

Homophobia is by nature a "conservative" trait. In Stalin's time, antisemitism was a "conservative" trait. In Mugabe's case, we have a loosely Christian-based ideology -- conservative.

The only non-conservative trait either of them showed was for self-betterment. The conservative fallacy of blacks as inferior to the white man would never get Bob anywhere. The conservative view of kings, peers and bourgeoisie would never have got Stalin anywhere. But both are pretty much defined by small-c conservatism: keep things the way they've always been.

How about....

How about linking to an article in English, rather than a machine translation of a Dutch one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

Ah, but...

The Photoshop strategy has moved on. When was the last time you bought a camera or scanner that didn't have a copy of Photoshop Elements bundled with it? As they now have another vector to catch the newbie, they don't need piracy any more.

An untraceable single use firearm?

Given that it's generally necessary to dispose of a firearm after it has been fired during a crime, the fact that it'll only survive one shot isn't necessarily a bad thing....

Particularly noteworthy...

The noteworthy thing about these three is that I believe they're all parts of the NES release "The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy". It had multiple worlds, and a the end of one, Dizzy was made to walk the plank by a pirate, and had to escape from the sea by jumping on bubbles. I don't know what the reason was for the Toobin' clone stage (that became Dizzy Down the Rapids).

Not true.

What HP get is the ability to continue to sell WebOS devices, using existing staff expertise, rather than having to "retool" to support WinPhone or Android.

WebOS needs a critical mass that HP can't provide in order to be a success, so they need others to pick it up and make it a viable mass-market option, therefore attracting developers (who will mostly be looking to cross-compile products available on other platforms anyway).

Maybe this isn't "return on investment" -- maybe it's simply "cutting their losses" -- but it's either the most profitable or least loss-making option for the moment.

Are school purchases VAT-free...?

Dubious history

Fossil remains of the later mammoths show signs of endemic disease -- some scientists feel it's unlikely that human hunting could have made a significant impact on the mammoth population.

There's also no evidence that people ate significant numbers of dodos either -- there are two or three records of people trying and it was reportedly one of the foulest-tasting greasiest meats thay had encountered. Modern thought is that the dodo was actually killed off by white man's eternal travelling companion: the rat. Rats are now well-known for wiping out ground-nesting bird habitats by eating their eggs, and the dodo was a ground-nesting bird....

Simply being cold burns a lot of calories...

But wait....

Haven't we seen humans fly it recently...?

Using APIs has its benefits...

"I really hope Raspberry Pi is open and we can all get down to the metal on it but if Broadcom is involved, somehow I doubt it will be."

If you look at open-source hardware projects, they usually sink because the specced components aren't available any more, but the Raspberry PI is as damn near generic as you can get. Ethernet controllers and USB controllers are pretty generic. ARM may be a propietary design, but it's licensable and so heavily commoditised. This means that they should be able to revise the hardware as the market changes and use components from other suppliers without invalidating the existing codebase and forking the system (and userbase).

The only truly closed component is the GPU. There really is no such thing as a generic GPU on the market, and GPU technology is changing rapidly. Mandating Open GL makes any GPU generic, and this means that they can change the GPU later when the current model is discontinued or they can negotiate a better price with another supplier.

On the other hand, if the GPU's native APIs were available, you can be damned sure that developers would use them, and software would become irrevocably tied to the current version of the hardware, which would destroy the long-term potential of the project.

Except that...

The problem is that the fishing technique is called "trawling" in most of the English-speaking world, so you'll see why people get confused.

C64 version

"C64 version. Sprite limitations mean that the number of lemmings is considerably less than the other 8 bit versions. Shame really."

Not quite true. On the C64 version, they used hardware sprites for the playing field and bitmapped the Lemmings onto the background.

Sprite limitations meant that the visible playing area was only a half-screen wide. The restriction on the number of Lemmings was down to the poor bitmap performance on the C64 (it has an 8x8 tiled layout, not a true cartesian map) and the fact that they had to duplicate the movement onto the sprite-mapped background to drop out pixels.

All the coordinate calculations were computationally intensive.

"where's my remake of Bullfrog's Syndicate"

It's in 1996: Syndicate Wars.