Posts by Nuke

@Moeluk - Re: Consider me baffled

I too know sod-all about the iPad other than seeing the name, knowing that it has a lot of fans, and having a suspicion that they are something to do with music (in which I have no interest).

If I were given an iPad as an unwanted gift, I would probably give it to my mum without opening it.

@AC - Re: Is anyone else completely bored of this?

Wrote :- "take off your apple-tinted glasses and Google "pointed oval" and you be amazed at how blind you really are"

You and your upvoters should take off your irony-blocking glasses and recognise a bit of sarcasm aimed at Apple.

@David W - Re: US Patient Office

Yes, I thought the spectacles attached with face studs the only one there worth a patent. I must admit it was not "obvious". Perhaps because it is so bizzare, and yet it might actally be useful.

@Telemark - Re: Same old, same old.

Wrote :- "we heard the same rhetoric about XP as we did about Win7 and now we hear the same about Win8"

Same rhetoric? I don't think so. The rhetoric about Win8 is mainly that it is a radically different GUI from that which had progressively evolved through Win3.x, Win9x, XP, Vista, and Win7. I am a strong critic of MS and Windows, but I have never criticised their GUI before, but with Win8 I now criticise that especially. In the past, MS have employed some of the best graphic designers in the business. Now Win8 throws all that away.

I welcomed XP because, with its kernel coming from the WinNT line of development, it finally ended at last the awful pedigree line of Win3.x - Win9x - WinME in the consumer market.

@banjomike - Re: Use a unique email address on each site...

Wrote :- "..that way, when spam starts to arrive, you know where they got the address."

And then you do ... what?

@Jake - Re: @Andus (was: Dead trees?)

Wrote "Ever drop a card deck?"

In about 1975 I was doing a job (using their computers) at Imperial College, London. Walking outside into one of their squares, surrounded by the high buildings, a guy came round the corner with a 4-wheel barrow loaded with cards in the trough-like metal boxes they were carried in.

A gust of wind lifted the lot. They soared up to the full height (8 stories?) of the buildings and over, fluttering down over the entire area in their 1000's like giant confetti.

Disgruntled of TW

Wrote :- "... so, does the 50V we in the UK currently shunt down every copper telephone line to power the ringer, heating the insulation with16.46 Ohms per 1000ft at 25C"

You must be using an antiquated phone if it takes its ringer power from the line and, if it does, that it takes a significant current. Is it black, weighs about 4Kg, and has like a pair of bicycle bells on the top by chance? Even so, it doesn't spend all its time ringing does it ? (Oh, perhaps it does).

You mention 50V as if that is an efficiency minus point, but in fact the higher the voltage the more efficient the transmission is. That is why the National Grid runs at typically 500,000V. The 50V is not "shunted" down the line; it is a charge. It is current (as in Amperage) that is shunted down the line. I have quite a few close encounters with my overhead line when I prune my trees to clear it, particularly like today after the wind has broken branches, and there is no way it is at 25C.

Re: Really?

Wrote :- ""even if you simply turned on a Windows PC and didn’t do anything further, there was a good chance it would crash all by itself." Really?"

Windows 9x would certainly crash by itself after 49 days, due I believe an overflow in a time counter. [http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216641]. Funny thing was that this fact was not discovered or publically known for several years (the referenced patch is dated 1999) - indicative that Windows back then usually crashed before 49 days for some other reason.

Simon Rockman - Re: Size is important

I used to work for the underground as an engineer and don't recognise most of what you claim. Have you a reference for this 11x cost? And I know it was a figure of speech, but "ALL" work?!

Yes, work in the narrow bore tube tunnels and >major< track work elswhere must be done out of hours for obvious reasons, but the vast majority of work is done in normal hours. I rarely worked out of hours, and putting WiFi into stations would not need to be out of hours either.

"there are generous travel allowances which see people getting paid for travelling they may or may not do"

As a test engineer I had a all-lines pass as part of my job. Would you expect their own workers to pay for a ticket to get to the work site? Perhaps you think the train drivers should buy tickets for their rides too.

@Roger Stenning - Re: Asimov's gonna be spinning in his grave :(

Wrote ;_ " why not just install Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics, then? ........ Simple, innit?"

Yes, thanks for solving that one. We must put you onto the World Hunger problem next.

Or how about a law to stop humans killing each other? Oh.. wait.........

@h4rm0ny - Re: @toadwarrior

Wrote :- "I don't know which is worse: your ignorance or your need to attack people more successful than you."

Wow, careful h4rm0ny, you are attacking toadwarrior - but how do you know he is not more successful than you?

So we are not allowed to criticise Obama, Cameron, Gates, Torvalds, Jimmy Saville, Hugh Heffner, Ghenghis Khan, Stalin .....?

I think toadwarrier has a point. There are many people who succeed in doing great things but who never generate any interest, and there are others (like Woz) who become media heros and who's every utterance is made into headlines.

@Spoonsinger - Re: I for one

Wrote :- "The 'other thing - which shall remain nameless' can easily be bypassed and made redundant if you want. 'Manager''s will probably have people under them who know this"

Helpful if you said what "other thing" you are talking about.

As for bypassing things, many companies (like mine) have the desktops and Windows so locked down that you cannot bypass anything, except maybe with serious hacking which would land you in serious trouble.

@DanDanDan - Re: what do you expect them to do

Wrote :- "You can't tax sales, that's ridiculous."

So what is VAT? And before that there was an explicit "Sales Tax".

@Elmer Phud - Re: The reason firefox users don't upgrade

Wrote :- "If you click on 'About Firefox' it wanders off to check if it's the latest version all by itself."

I just tried it - doesn't happen. My version must be too old for that.

Re: @AC 16:59 @Pete : Divide and conquer

My father in law .. (smarter than most) ... mentioned to me that he'd heard of this linux thing and would like to try it out. Normally this is a pretty straight-forward process, I've done it loads of times, but this particular install took an entire day because ...etc etc ... A smart, non-IT guy, would not have been able to carry out this work because they wouldn't have known where to start.

But would a smart non-IT guy have been able to install Windows?

@ That Awful Puppy

Wrote :- "The Brits consider the Magna Carta to be an important historical document. The Yanks, on the other hand, consider anything created by their founding fathers and whatnot to be basically sacred artefacts"

Indeed. Magan Carta was written at a particular time to address a particular problem (as perceived by some barons) with a particular king. Despite the fuss made about it today, most of it has been superseded by more recent legislation, also bearing in mind that much of the British legal system is based on custom and practice (eg case law) rather than written down by bureaucrats as is the case with some more recently established regimes.

Similarly the US constitution was written under a specific set of circumstances by men mostly descended from non-conformist emigrants seeking religious freedom not long after winning a revolutionary war, and who were therefore somewhat paranoid about "rulers".

Both Magna Carta and the US Consitution are regularly cited today in support of issues which would astonished their authors, if not make them turn in their graves.

@AC at 11:52 - Re: Comprehension Failure

Wrote :-

"If you genuinely don't know anything about SAP and you're in the IT industry, then go back to school.......Try Google next time and you might not look so daft."

He did Google and it led him here.

AM Gale - Re: So without free advertising, FireFox can't get downloads?

M Gale wrote :- " does nobody remember what happened when Microsoft had a near-100% monopoly on web browsers? That's why they have been legally forced to provide the choice."

I certainly remember, and I think that those attacking the browser choice here from some sort of self-imagined moralistic high horse are perhaps new[er]bies who never saw how MS's abuse of that monopoly worked in practice.

MS deliberately kept moving the HTML goal posts for no other reason than to shake off rival browsers and OS's (but claiming "richer browsing experience"). IE was the only browser which worked properly with many sites built with MS's own authoring software (Front Page I think it was). Other browsers would appear "broken" when in fact it was the website which had tripwires put in it by MS software.

For example when my bank website was given a makeover, no doubt with Front Page, it stopped working in Galeon (my browser at the time). The bank told me to use IE to "solve" the problem. I refuse to use IE so I started using another bank instead.

Now that people use a greater spread of browsers (and I don't care if Joe Sixpack picks one at random - all the better spread) web site designers must make sure that they do not only work in IE - or go out of business.

Some people here ask sarcastically "Why just a choice screen for IE, why not Notepad and Minesweeper too?". Well, Notepad or Minesweeper are never going to cause anything like forcing someone to close a bank account or give up trying to use a shopping site, whatever MS do with them.

@Ru - Re: Is this a joke?

Nuke wrote : "I do not know much about the solar sail effect, but"

Ru responded :- "So what you're saying is, you don't know what you're talking about but you're willing to rubbish work"

Quite a flame that. Seeing that almost everyone here is poking fun at the idea (painting logos etc), I just wonder why you got as far down as my comment before you came out. Especially as I was actually taking it more seriously than most and discussing the science.

I was up front with the fact that I do not know the solar sail effect. The guts of my comment refers to the paintball momentum idea. OK, lets's get more technical. I am pointing out that the momentum imparted by placing a thin later of paint on this thing is so tiny in proportion to the asteroid's momentum that it would have to be such a long time ahead of earth impact that the prediction of its future path would be unreliable. It is TFA itself that mentions the paint momentum effect as being, though less, of some significance compared with the solar sail effect. I am saying that if - IF - that is true, say within two orders of magnitude, then the solar sail idea is also impractical.

As for saying that I "know practically nothing about astrophysics and orbital mechanics", be careful what you claim about other's knowledge here. This is a techies' website after all. I don't know if you know these subjects or not yourself, but what is certain is that you know almost nothing about me. I think you might be surprised.

Re: Brits love it?

You are right, most Brits love MS. It is a kind of conservatism and they would never think of using an alternative. To most Brits MS seems to be cuddly - despite all MS have done, because they are unaware of it and cannot believe it if told.

When my (large) company ditched Lotus software for Office, at the briefing I stood up and said we should not be passing money to a convicted monopololist that breaks legal agreements with the EU. People turned in their seats and seemed to regard me as some kind of trouble-maker, and the issue was laughed off like a poor joke.

When I tell people that MS are convicted offenders, schemers and extortionists they look askance as if such a thing could not be possible about a company that looks after their computers and is headed by a saintly genius in the form of a boy-god. [Yes, yes, Gates no longer heads it, or looks like a boy, but they think he does]

Re: @Nuke

Hi Pirate Dave, AC 13:46 and Alan Brown:

I said "Most people were dumb about computers in 1985, and a dumb GUI was needed to appeal to the mass market"

Pirate Dave replied (and the other two concurred) "I disagree. If you were using a computer in 1985, you had to know a few things"

You are right, but I think you missed my point. When I said "most people were dumb about computers in 1985" I did not mean that most people using a computer (2% ?) were dumb about them, I meant "most people in the general population" were dumb about them. Indeed, most people had never even seen a computer.

My point was that a relatively dumb GUI was a pre-condition to getting the other 98% of the population on board, before MS, Intel and others could massively expand their market.

Re: SAABs were a proper engineered job...

MrT wrote :-

"Original 900 Turbo .... had other thoughtful ideas like proper drain taps in the heating system; beats undoing a jubilee clip, yanking off a hose and dodging coolant like on Cavaliers..."

Why single out Cavaliers? Tell me of any car that now has drain taps - I'm not saying there aren't any, I just don't know of any; Rolls Royce perhaps.

For some years I would solder a drain tap onto any car I had, but then they stopped me doing that with plastic headers.

@solidsoup - Re: I'm happy with this size.

Woz is now getting on a bit, as is a whole generation who have grown up with mobiles, and eyesight gets poorer with age. Everyone here will one day need glasses to read the screen if they do not already. The bigger the screen is, the more that day will be delayed; simple.

It might not seem cool to cater for older people, but phone companies cannot afford to ignore this increasing propoertion of the market.