We need a BOFH phone: connect up to it, fail to give the correct code (or it just detects you are connecting up to it - this is The Bastard we are talking about) and the phone charges up a 10kV 10uF cap and dumps it onto the external connections - then throws a crowbar across the phone's battery.
Bonus points for having a battery that lacks any of that namby-pamby safety stuff in it.
Why not just use a radio trigger? Have 2 groups, a few miles apart, with telescopes and cell phones. Each reports the azimuth of the balloon, as recorded by the telescopes. A bit of math, you have altitude. At desired altitude, send the launch command. You could likely use a simple model RC controller in the 2 meter amateur band (with a licensed control operator, naturally), and if needed an amp to get the needed power levels to make the trip (I don't know the regs in the UK, but in the US amateurs are allowed up to 1W for such operations (Part 97.215) - and 20 miles line of sight shouldn't be an issue at 1W.
Remember all the people who complained that the Cell was hard to program, due to the fact the SPUs were not the same as the PPC cores, and that the SPUs needed the programmer to explicitly manage moving data from main memory to the SPU memory?
Now this - is this any better (other than the fact that there are more than 8 cores)?
Will nVidia allow this chip to be sold in anything other than board level assemblies? That was the problem (from my perspective) with the Cell - IBM didn't want to sell the chip alone unless you were buying hundreds of thousands of them, so you had to buy a board from one of the board vendors like Mercury Computing. If nVidia won't let companies create their own boards (or package this into more useful form factors than 6U Compact PCI) then it will have similar issues.
Does anybody else see the irony of CongressCritters, who get all sorts of taxpayer funded free travel, much of which is of questionable needfulness, criticizing Google for the crime of paying (but paying ENOUGH, by the CongressCritter's reckoning) for air travel?
Finally, a phone manufacturer gets it - making the phone thinner does little good past the point where it will fit into a pocket, so instead, add more battery and keep the same thickness!
Now, if we could just persuade them to stop being silly about making high pixel count cameras that only work well in full sun, and instead reduce the pixel count and increase the pixel area, so they work well in normal lighting. If I want to take >4MP pictures I'll use a camera with better optics than the damn-near-pinhole on a phone.
1) No car dock - unless you want to either turn the phone upside down, or have some weird "Slide it UP into the dock, then lock in place" design.
2) No desk dock, no "bedside charging stand/use it as a clock" (which is sad, because OLED means the display could dim enough to not be annoying, unlike a backlight LCD, which if dim enough to not be disturbing is dim enough to be unreadable)
3) If plugged in and you want to take a call, the cable is looping over your hand. Look at your old wired telephone handset - does the wire come out the top or the bottom?
As for "no 1080p video" - the one thing nice about being able to play back 1080p video is that you can then have one video file for both your phone and for your TV - rather than having to transcode a file for your phone had adding 25% to your video storage needs.
(of course, since most of my 1080 video is ATSC and thus MPEG2, I still have to transcode it so all my devices can use hardware acceleration since no phones or tablets seem to have HW MPEG2, but at least if I do transcode it to H.264, my TV will still play it - maybe. If I hold my tongue just right during the encode. Frackin DLNA - Doesn't Like Nearly Anything.)
To all the "we should work on driving on the right side before metric-fication"
Never happen. You start driving on the right side of the road, and speaking English, and people might mistake you for eeeeeeevvvvvviiiiiiiilllllll 'Muricans.
So Brits will never accept it.
('scuse me. I have to run by Wal-Mart, get some Hoppes #9, and clean my guns.)
Re: Napoleon and his metric system conquered Europe,
"you might start by giving them a proper system of units.'
OK, so why use arbitrary units like grams and meters? There's nothing any more fundamental about them vs. pounds and feet - the only thing the metric system has going for it is that almost all the multipliers are factors of 10: deci-, kilo- etc.
Why not spec things like the amount of beer, or gas, or meat in terms of a REALLY fundamental unit - the Planck mass? One million Planck masses is .76 oz or 21 grams. 550 ml of liquid should be roughly 25 megaplancks.
Start with the month. One lunar month is 28 days. You can easily discern Full moon, Half moon, New moon, half moon - so 4 divisions per month := 1 week := 7 days.
Why 60 and 24? Because 12 := 2*2*3, 24 := 2*2*2*3, and 60 := 2*2*3*5, which means 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6, 24 by 2,3,4,6,8 and 12, and 60 by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, etc - which for the ancient Babylonians made 60, 12, and 24 really useful numbers to base things around because they sucked at long division.
So take a day: again, you can divide it up into 4 chunks pretty well (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight), so dividing those chunks by 2*3 gives you a pretty useful set of time parts.
The months - well, blame the Romans for that - it would be more sensible to have 13 months of 28 days with 1 day left over (2 every 4 years).
I'm just trying to help the Greenpeace-ers here - I'm sure they don't want to pollute the atmosphere with their horrible greenhouse gas emissions of CO2 and CH4.
Nuke, because were they serious about the environment they'd be for it.
OK, if they are that sure of themselves, let the start a Kickstarter project!
(a battery driven helo making 100km - pull the other one, my ass is crooked.
And assuming this is true - why not use smaller batteries and something like a Capstone turbine generator - batteries for take-off power, turbine to make electricity for cruise. This is an aircraft: every kilo's sacred, every kilo's great, if a kilo's wasted, God get quite irate!)
Unfortunately, very few laptop's sound systems will be able to generate a frequency that high - most computer audio cards have the reconstruction filters' corner frequency at 20kHz.
But I agree: For those of us who wear hearing protection when we (attend concerts|mow the yard|fly|shoot) and still can hear up there, this would be, shall we say, less than desirable.
There was a short story I read a long time ago: movies were projected using polarized light, with his and hers tracks: so when the steamy luuuurve scene came on, the guys would see the camera zooming on on the hot starlet's longing face, and the girls would see the camera zooming in on the studly leading man's mug.
A reporter was at the screening of the newest flick, starring the current male icon of studlyness and the current female icon of hawtness, both of whom were in attendance for the premier. Everybody gets their gender-color coded glasses (blue for boys, pink for girls, natch). The lights dim, the movie starts - and the reporter sees the Stud and the Babe switching glasses.
Obviously, this TV, like all new tech, is being driven by that driving, pulsating engine of all innovation, porn: this allows his and hers viewing.
The biggest single problem with IPv6 is what I call the 90% problem: until 90% of the world is using it, it provides no benefit. Since it provides no benefit, there is no reason to adopt it until it hits 90% - so it never hits 90%.
This is NOT to say that IPv6 doesn't have benefits - with RSVP, better flow control, better multicasting and anycasting and so on - it could make streaming video services finally "work" with no more "buffering" messages (and conversely, no more "buffer bloat"). It could greatly improve cellular data (cell phones could get routable IPv6 addresses and hand out routable addresses to devices served by hot spot mode), and it could greatly improve security (since encryption is much more built-in to IPv6).
However, NONE of those benefits have been communicated to J. Random User. And since JRU is not aware of why he should be demanding IPv6 support from (his ISP|his OS vendor|his equipment vendor), he DOESN'T demand it - and so ISPs, Microsoft, and equipment vendors are not strongly motivated to make it happen.
"the President - a professor of constitutional law - is likely to veto it. "
Obama studied the Constitution, yes - but he did not study the Constitution like an art lover studies the Mona Lisa, but rather as an exterminator studies a cockroach - to better find ways to defeat it.
Moreover, considering the other acts, Executive orders, and laws that Obama has supported that increase the power of the federal government over the states and over the people, I doubt very much he will hesitate to sign this bill into law given the chance. The ONLY factor that might slow his hand would be the concern that this is too close to November, and that it might cost him votes. Then he will think about the sort of people that would hold his passage of this bill against him, and he will consider what "alternative" they have to him, and he will realize that they have no meaningful alternative (thanks to the idiocy that is the Republican Party leadership) and will sign the bill with a glad hand and heart.
Moreover, given that the main owners of the timeshare that is Obama are the *AA, and that this will be abused to enable them to continue to persecute anybody who is not being a good little consumerprole, the odds of him actually vetoing this are such that unless you happen to have a sub-meson brain, an atomic vector plotter, and a cup of really hot tea, you aren't going to see it happen.
"What we really need are per-user UI choices to be selectable at login time."
BLASPHEMER! HERETIC! UNBELIEVER! Do you not know The One True Way Of User Interface Design What Was In A Book I Read! That The One True Path shall be followed by all users! The Gods Of Interface Design hath Decreed that user preferences are The Tool Of The Evil One and shall not be permitted! All user must have the same, holy One True User Experience! So It Has Been Written, So It Shall Be Done!
</Gnome_developer>
(of course, it is perfectly fine to bury user choices twelve levels deep in the Registry, err, I mean Gconf.)
Sad to say, but I may just have to do it that way - I *wanted* to save bandwidth by downloading the CD via Bittorrent, and using that, but there seems to be no way to keep the CD installer from flat-out deleting whatever directories it feels it has the right to (e.g. /etc, /lib, and any other "system" directory, nevermind that I set things up the way I wanted them because damn it is is MY MACHINE).
This is the really silly thing - I can understand "dummy mode" for most people, I can even understand the installer foretelling grave misfortune if I don't let it lobotomise my machine as it sees fit, but damn it I do NOT want my system directories DESTROYED WILLY-NILLY just because they are too damn lazy to get their installer correct.
And I don't understand why Canonical doesn't make 4.6G and 9.2G DVD images available via Bittorrent, to save more downloading from their servers. Let me have as close to a full image, with all the .deb's I can get, on ONE transfer, and save their servers from being hammered.
Having an Enigma emulator on my phone is nice, but I want the code breaker engine on my phone - that, and a port of Maple. That, the ballistics app I have, and a time machine, and I am ready for my trip back to 1939!
This must truly be an amazing device: it has such purity of reproduction, I could hear the whalesong from the review all the way from Kansas!
But it cannot be any good - it doesn't have Genuine Oxygen Free Copper, nor 24k Gold plating, nor Extra-Virgin Yak Wool insulation, nor $5k/ft sooper-grade USB cables, nor a harmonic-neutralizing rock pad to sit on, nor was it properly "trained" by 20 hours of Tibetan Throat-singing monks! And not a single fire-bottle in sight! - don't you know you simply MUST have tubes in the outputs!
and I immediately ran into several WTF moments right from the start:
On an already working and configured Ubuntu 11.4 system, running the "upgrade" option from the install CD
1) Informed me that it would wipe all my system wide settings!?!
2) Asked me to set up the time zone (which was already set)
3) Asked me to set up my user account (which was already set up. Indeed, under NIS, no less).
4) Formatted some file system (which one I don't know as the formatting message went by too quickly, so it wasn't / or /home - maybe /boot?)
5) Died immediately thereafter, telling me only that "something" went wrong and that it was dropping me to a desktop to work it out myself (with no option of "and here's the log messages as to what went wrong").
Of course, since cadmium is such a harmless element
And this is going to go over very well with the various environmental protection entities and organizations, since cadmium is such a harmless element.
Oh wait, I forgot: cadmium isn't harmless at all (despite what some Chinese toy manufacturers think) - it is very carcinogenic, which was one reason behind NiCad batteries being largely removed from the market.
1) restrain the child from kicking anybody. This may require a degree of physical contact (grabbing and lifting the child clear of the ground). Ideally a quick swat to the backside with an open hand as well, to deliver the "short, sharp shock" to bring the child back into contact with reality. Then you place the kid in a room with as little to destroy as possible, and don't let them act out.
2) You call the parents and inform them that they are to pick the kid up and take him home - he is suspended for a week. If the parents give you any guff about "I'm at work and I cannot/will not come get the kid" - you send the police around to their place of employment and have them informed that they are either going to pick the kid up or be picked up themselves for child abandonment.
3) You tell the parents that until the child can be controlled the child is not allowed to come back to school, AND that the parents are responsible for seeing the child is properly supervised during the day (either one of the parents, or a responsible adult), and that this WILL be checked up on by social services.
4) You inform the parents that a requirement of the child being allowed back in school is that the parents agree, in legally binding writing, that the school may use needed force to prevent the child from hurting itself or anybody else. NOTE: needed force for a 6 year old is physical restraint by an adults hands, a swat to the backside by an adults hands - NOT tasering, Mace-ing, straps, etc.
In short, you do that most horrible of things: you make people TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for their actions. The parents have primary responsibility for teaching their feral fonication-fruit how to live in this world we find ourselves in, and if they will NOT do that willingly, society WILL make them.
Re: Indeed it looks great, but will it compete against Sony Playstation 3 at that price?
"it has a better DAC"
Unless you are using component video or 6 channel discrete audio, there is no "DAC" in the commonly used sense - HDMI and SPDIF are all digital - the DACs are in the TV and Stereo.
1: Given how so many countries see fit to complain about how other countries handle their internal affairs (and I will admit the US is right up there in doing so), how about saying "Here we have a grade-A bona fide serial killer named Dennis Rader a.k.a. BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) - admitted his guilt, plead guilty, victims' belongings in his shed as souvenirs, said he was going to start working out to get back in shape so he could kill more people - Does any country want to take responsibility for him for the rest of his days? No? OK then, shut up about what we do with this garbage."
2: Some people (e.g. BTK) are going to be a clear, present, and continuing threat to society for as long as they shall live. Since we do not yet have the ability to re-wire their brains to fix that, all we can do is lock them away from society for the rest of their lives. So the question is "how long is the rest of their life?" - 50 years or 50 minutes? Sorry, but in this case I have no problem with putting them down like the rabid vermin they are.
3: Other people may not have such a clear cut case against them: they may be maintaining their innocence. But then, very few people will get up on the stand and say "I did it, I'll do it again given the chance, so what?".
Many people assert that "We cannot put them to death, because that is not reversible." I have some bad news for you sunshine: neither is locking them up for 10 years before you find they are not guilty - you can release them, but you cannot give them those 10 years back. That's why a cornerstone of American jurisprudence is "If you have reasonable doubt about their guilt, you MUST find them not guilty." Whether the penalty is death or imprisonment *shouldn't* make a difference in deciding guilty or not guilty.
4: If somebody ISN'T a clear (as in "no question about it"), present (as in "this isn't just a theoretical risk"), and continuing (as in "sure he's whacked now - but get him off the drugs and he'll be right as rain") risk to society, they should NOT be executed (and likely not imprisoned, either.)
I am NOT in favor of executing somebody save in cases of out-and-out premeditated murder. In cases of premeditated murder, you have to examine if the person can be salvaged. If not, then life in prison - and that should be 50 minutes.
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Simple rule, really
Everybody follows a simple rule, really:
"What *I* have isn't porn, it's erotica.
Anything milder than what I have is just pictures.
Anything I don't like is porn.
Anything harder-core than what I have is extreme porn."
So from her perspective, "ladies in bikinis" is just pictures.
I'll leave inferences about the other items to the reader.
Report from the future
" and we are dropping the Metro interface, which may have been teh shizzle in the day, but is now looking dated and cheesy..."
BOFH phone
We need a BOFH phone: connect up to it, fail to give the correct code (or it just detects you are connecting up to it - this is The Bastard we are talking about) and the phone charges up a 10kV 10uF cap and dumps it onto the external connections - then throws a crowbar across the phone's battery.
Bonus points for having a battery that lacks any of that namby-pamby safety stuff in it.
Why not a radio trigger?
Why not just use a radio trigger? Have 2 groups, a few miles apart, with telescopes and cell phones. Each reports the azimuth of the balloon, as recorded by the telescopes. A bit of math, you have altitude. At desired altitude, send the launch command. You could likely use a simple model RC controller in the 2 meter amateur band (with a licensed control operator, naturally), and if needed an amp to get the needed power levels to make the trip (I don't know the regs in the UK, but in the US amateurs are allowed up to 1W for such operations (Part 97.215) - and 20 miles line of sight shouldn't be an issue at 1W.
People said the Cell was hard to program
Remember all the people who complained that the Cell was hard to program, due to the fact the SPUs were not the same as the PPC cores, and that the SPUs needed the programmer to explicitly manage moving data from main memory to the SPU memory?
Now this - is this any better (other than the fact that there are more than 8 cores)?
Will nVidia allow this chip to be sold in anything other than board level assemblies? That was the problem (from my perspective) with the Cell - IBM didn't want to sell the chip alone unless you were buying hundreds of thousands of them, so you had to buy a board from one of the board vendors like Mercury Computing. If nVidia won't let companies create their own boards (or package this into more useful form factors than 6U Compact PCI) then it will have similar issues.
And people take issue with US food
Reading this article, I find it amazing people criticize US food choices!
But again: I dare any Reg Hack to come over to the US - preferably the nominal South-east area - and try a proper Waffle House All-The-Way.
Does anybody else see the irony....
Does anybody else see the irony of CongressCritters, who get all sorts of taxpayer funded free travel, much of which is of questionable needfulness, criticizing Google for the crime of paying (but paying ENOUGH, by the CongressCritter's reckoning) for air travel?
Finally, somebody gets it
Finally, a phone manufacturer gets it - making the phone thinner does little good past the point where it will fit into a pocket, so instead, add more battery and keep the same thickness!
Now, if we could just persuade them to stop being silly about making high pixel count cameras that only work well in full sun, and instead reduce the pixel count and increase the pixel area, so they work well in normal lighting. If I want to take >4MP pictures I'll use a camera with better optics than the damn-near-pinhole on a phone.
I don't know which WWF I think less of
I don't know which WWF I think are worse:
1) The totally fake, attention whoring, talentless hacks who put on a show just to make a buck
or
2) The guys in Spandex tights in the wrestling ring.
Re: that's a lot of money
"In a vacuum it's a good phone."
I find it hard to hear my phone in a vacuum.
Connector on top: jury's in: FAIL
Sorry, but the charging on the top means:
1) No car dock - unless you want to either turn the phone upside down, or have some weird "Slide it UP into the dock, then lock in place" design.
2) No desk dock, no "bedside charging stand/use it as a clock" (which is sad, because OLED means the display could dim enough to not be annoying, unlike a backlight LCD, which if dim enough to not be disturbing is dim enough to be unreadable)
3) If plugged in and you want to take a call, the cable is looping over your hand. Look at your old wired telephone handset - does the wire come out the top or the bottom?
As for "no 1080p video" - the one thing nice about being able to play back 1080p video is that you can then have one video file for both your phone and for your TV - rather than having to transcode a file for your phone had adding 25% to your video storage needs.
(of course, since most of my 1080 video is ATSC and thus MPEG2, I still have to transcode it so all my devices can use hardware acceleration since no phones or tablets seem to have HW MPEG2, but at least if I do transcode it to H.264, my TV will still play it - maybe. If I hold my tongue just right during the encode. Frackin DLNA - Doesn't Like Nearly Anything.)
Re: 1/6th of the UK are twits
And I'll respond to you as I do to everybody who expresses that same sentiment:
OK, so why are YOU wasting YOUR time here, rather than "help[ing] the economy or charities"?
All the "right side of the road" trolls
To all the "we should work on driving on the right side before metric-fication"
Never happen. You start driving on the right side of the road, and speaking English, and people might mistake you for eeeeeeevvvvvviiiiiiiilllllll 'Muricans.
So Brits will never accept it.
('scuse me. I have to run by Wal-Mart, get some Hoppes #9, and clean my guns.)
Re: Napoleon and his metric system conquered Europe,
"you might start by giving them a proper system of units.'
OK, so why use arbitrary units like grams and meters? There's nothing any more fundamental about them vs. pounds and feet - the only thing the metric system has going for it is that almost all the multipliers are factors of 10: deci-, kilo- etc.
Why not spec things like the amount of beer, or gas, or meat in terms of a REALLY fundamental unit - the Planck mass? One million Planck masses is .76 oz or 21 grams. 550 ml of liquid should be roughly 25 megaplancks.
Re: Yeah, Date/Time Units Are A Buttfuck
Start with the month. One lunar month is 28 days. You can easily discern Full moon, Half moon, New moon, half moon - so 4 divisions per month := 1 week := 7 days.
Why 60 and 24? Because 12 := 2*2*3, 24 := 2*2*2*3, and 60 := 2*2*3*5, which means 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6, 24 by 2,3,4,6,8 and 12, and 60 by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, etc - which for the ancient Babylonians made 60, 12, and 24 really useful numbers to base things around because they sucked at long division.
So take a day: again, you can divide it up into 4 chunks pretty well (sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight), so dividing those chunks by 2*3 gives you a pretty useful set of time parts.
The months - well, blame the Romans for that - it would be more sensible to have 13 months of 28 days with 1 day left over (2 every 4 years).
Is the pod air tight?
Is the pod air tight?
If not, can we make it air tight?
I'm just trying to help the Greenpeace-ers here - I'm sure they don't want to pollute the atmosphere with their horrible greenhouse gas emissions of CO2 and CH4.
Nuke, because were they serious about the environment they'd be for it.
Rather, it should be "Flash doesn't support tablets"
Adobe has announced that they will not be providing any updates for Flash on Android, preferring "other technologies" such as HTML5.
So while Android tablets support Flash today, in the foreseeable future they will not.
Patrollled by large weather balloons....
The riff-raff will be kept (out|in) by large patrolling weather balloons.
The one with the large #3 on the back.
Lasers battle cattle burps
Most of the methane from a cow is emitted via burps, not bottom burps.
(as to which end of an apatasaurus the methane came from - good question.)
Re: Memory
Sure: How many times did you put your socks down where-ever they are: likely, once.
How many times did you play Wolfenstein? Likely, many more times than that.
How much attention did you pay putting your socks down last night? Likely, not much: you had bigger things to think about.
How much attention to playing Wolfenstein did you pay? Likely, a lot.
Too true
Too true.
The Reg needs to add the "You Don't Say" meme picture as an icon.
Kickstarter!
OK, if they are that sure of themselves, let the start a Kickstarter project!
(a battery driven helo making 100km - pull the other one, my ass is crooked.
And assuming this is true - why not use smaller batteries and something like a Capstone turbine generator - batteries for take-off power, turbine to make electricity for cruise. This is an aircraft: every kilo's sacred, every kilo's great, if a kilo's wasted, God get quite irate!)
That's a good question
So what would a PIN number be - a hash of the digits of the PIN? A check digit?
Would than mean an ATM machine is a machine which dispenses ATMs?
Re: PIN not PIN Number
It is NOT a tautology, because it's not a tautology (that, by the way, is a tautology).
It is RAS syndrome (redundant acronym syndrome syndrome).
And I hope Simon disciplines his PFY appropriately - 40 joules per utterance from the BOFH cattleprod should do nicely.
And 20 for himself, for letting The Boss grow this much of a clue before "resetting" him.
Re: Indeed.
Unfortunately, very few laptop's sound systems will be able to generate a frequency that high - most computer audio cards have the reconstruction filters' corner frequency at 20kHz.
But I agree: For those of us who wear hearing protection when we (attend concerts|mow the yard|fly|shoot) and still can hear up there, this would be, shall we say, less than desirable.
Re: whats the use?
"I honestly can not think of a single *useful* application for this invention."
Screening priests?
(needs to be younger, of course).
His and hers pr0n
There was a short story I read a long time ago: movies were projected using polarized light, with his and hers tracks: so when the steamy luuuurve scene came on, the guys would see the camera zooming on on the hot starlet's longing face, and the girls would see the camera zooming in on the studly leading man's mug.
A reporter was at the screening of the newest flick, starring the current male icon of studlyness and the current female icon of hawtness, both of whom were in attendance for the premier. Everybody gets their gender-color coded glasses (blue for boys, pink for girls, natch). The lights dim, the movie starts - and the reporter sees the Stud and the Babe switching glasses.
Obviously, this TV, like all new tech, is being driven by that driving, pulsating engine of all innovation, porn: this allows his and hers viewing.
Teaching Angry Birds is a bad idea
Orangs are smart - smart enough to build a catapult from the ropes and trees in their enclosure.
Do we really want to be planting that idea in their head?
(could be worse: chimps. Catapult. Poo. 'nuf said.)
"Right Turn, Clyde!"
Re: Standing 1.13m (3ft 8") tall and weighing 130kg (20st 4lbs)
Dang it - miscopied from my terminal session on the height.
6.99*10^34 Planck lengths.
But still only 5 billion Planck masses - for a quantum quantity, Planck mass is huge.
Re: Paging David Banner
I think you mean "Bruce Banner".
And that's DOCTOR Bruce Banner to you - he gets angry when people forget the Doctor!
(For some reason, when they did the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno TV show, they decided "Bruce" wasn't butch enough, and went with David - don't ask me why)
Re: Standing 1.13m (3ft 8") tall and weighing 130kg (20st 4lbs)
Or 6.99*10^4 Planck lengths and 5.97*10^9 Planck masses.
If we are going to complain about using random, arbitrary units, let's REALLY use something fundamental!
(cue somebody complaining about me using base 10 rather than base 2...)
Re: dum dum dum
@oddie:
I have visions of the homeless descending upon this city, like Borrowers on the model railroad town.
(and before certain types blow a gasket - obviously it would be the homeless, because the not-homeless already have homes)
Jumbo Shrimp?
Mini Mammoth? Is that like Jumbo Shrimp?
System76
A while back I was in the market for a new laptop/desktop replacement. I looked at Dell, and their Linux offerings.
I was not amused.
Then I looked at System76: https://www.system76.com/
Much better machines, much better support for Linux (as in, that's ALL they do), and I am much happier with my choice.
Linux on the desktopIPv6!Why?
The biggest single problem with IPv6 is what I call the 90% problem: until 90% of the world is using it, it provides no benefit. Since it provides no benefit, there is no reason to adopt it until it hits 90% - so it never hits 90%.
This is NOT to say that IPv6 doesn't have benefits - with RSVP, better flow control, better multicasting and anycasting and so on - it could make streaming video services finally "work" with no more "buffering" messages (and conversely, no more "buffer bloat"). It could greatly improve cellular data (cell phones could get routable IPv6 addresses and hand out routable addresses to devices served by hot spot mode), and it could greatly improve security (since encryption is much more built-in to IPv6).
However, NONE of those benefits have been communicated to J. Random User. And since JRU is not aware of why he should be demanding IPv6 support from (his ISP|his OS vendor|his equipment vendor), he DOESN'T demand it - and so ISPs, Microsoft, and equipment vendors are not strongly motivated to make it happen.
Re: Since no one else has said it yet...
I think so Brain, but seriously, me and Lady Ga-Ga? Meat chafes me so!
Re: A bad bill
"the President - a professor of constitutional law - is likely to veto it. "
Obama studied the Constitution, yes - but he did not study the Constitution like an art lover studies the Mona Lisa, but rather as an exterminator studies a cockroach - to better find ways to defeat it.
Moreover, considering the other acts, Executive orders, and laws that Obama has supported that increase the power of the federal government over the states and over the people, I doubt very much he will hesitate to sign this bill into law given the chance. The ONLY factor that might slow his hand would be the concern that this is too close to November, and that it might cost him votes. Then he will think about the sort of people that would hold his passage of this bill against him, and he will consider what "alternative" they have to him, and he will realize that they have no meaningful alternative (thanks to the idiocy that is the Republican Party leadership) and will sign the bill with a glad hand and heart.
Moreover, given that the main owners of the timeshare that is Obama are the *AA, and that this will be abused to enable them to continue to persecute anybody who is not being a good little consumerprole, the odds of him actually vetoing this are such that unless you happen to have a sub-meson brain, an atomic vector plotter, and a cup of really hot tea, you aren't going to see it happen.
Re: I see we still haven't learnt
<Gnome_developer mode="on">
"What we really need are per-user UI choices to be selectable at login time."
BLASPHEMER! HERETIC! UNBELIEVER! Do you not know The One True Way Of User Interface Design What Was In A Book I Read! That The One True Path shall be followed by all users! The Gods Of Interface Design hath Decreed that user preferences are The Tool Of The Evil One and shall not be permitted! All user must have the same, holy One True User Experience! So It Has Been Written, So It Shall Be Done!
</Gnome_developer>
(of course, it is perfectly fine to bury user choices twelve levels deep in the Registry, err, I mean Gconf.)
Re: I've started evaluating 12.4
Sad to say, but I may just have to do it that way - I *wanted* to save bandwidth by downloading the CD via Bittorrent, and using that, but there seems to be no way to keep the CD installer from flat-out deleting whatever directories it feels it has the right to (e.g. /etc, /lib, and any other "system" directory, nevermind that I set things up the way I wanted them because damn it is is MY MACHINE).
This is the really silly thing - I can understand "dummy mode" for most people, I can even understand the installer foretelling grave misfortune if I don't let it lobotomise my machine as it sees fit, but damn it I do NOT want my system directories DESTROYED WILLY-NILLY just because they are too damn lazy to get their installer correct.
And I don't understand why Canonical doesn't make 4.6G and 9.2G DVD images available via Bittorrent, to save more downloading from their servers. Let me have as close to a full image, with all the .deb's I can get, on ONE transfer, and save their servers from being hammered.
TRS-80's in high school
I wrote a bouncing ball program on the TRS-80's back in high school.
In assembly. In the timer interrupt.
I had a basic program that would poke it into high mem (and adjust high mem to protect it).
So here was the bouncing ball on the screen. People would hit BREAK, expecting it to stop - and it wouldn't.
To be fair
To be fair, under later versions of Windows, the results of a ctrl-alt-del are not irreversable - just dismiss the dialog and carry on.
The results of ctrl-alt-backspace on your desktop session are very irreversable.
Enigma is nice, but...
Having an Enigma emulator on my phone is nice, but I want the code breaker engine on my phone - that, and a port of Maple. That, the ballistics app I have, and a time machine, and I am ready for my trip back to 1939!
But it reproduced whalesong perfectly!
This must truly be an amazing device: it has such purity of reproduction, I could hear the whalesong from the review all the way from Kansas!
But it cannot be any good - it doesn't have Genuine Oxygen Free Copper, nor 24k Gold plating, nor Extra-Virgin Yak Wool insulation, nor $5k/ft sooper-grade USB cables, nor a harmonic-neutralizing rock pad to sit on, nor was it properly "trained" by 20 hours of Tibetan Throat-singing monks! And not a single fire-bottle in sight! - don't you know you simply MUST have tubes in the outputs!
I've started evaluating 12.4
and I immediately ran into several WTF moments right from the start:
On an already working and configured Ubuntu 11.4 system, running the "upgrade" option from the install CD
1) Informed me that it would wipe all my system wide settings!?!
2) Asked me to set up the time zone (which was already set)
3) Asked me to set up my user account (which was already set up. Indeed, under NIS, no less).
4) Formatted some file system (which one I don't know as the formatting message went by too quickly, so it wasn't / or /home - maybe /boot?)
5) Died immediately thereafter, telling me only that "something" went wrong and that it was dropping me to a desktop to work it out myself (with no option of "and here's the log messages as to what went wrong").
So far, not impressive.
Of course, since cadmium is such a harmless element
And this is going to go over very well with the various environmental protection entities and organizations, since cadmium is such a harmless element.
Oh wait, I forgot: cadmium isn't harmless at all (despite what some Chinese toy manufacturers think) - it is very carcinogenic, which was one reason behind NiCad batteries being largely removed from the market.
Call the cops. On the parents
IMHO the correct answer is:
1) restrain the child from kicking anybody. This may require a degree of physical contact (grabbing and lifting the child clear of the ground). Ideally a quick swat to the backside with an open hand as well, to deliver the "short, sharp shock" to bring the child back into contact with reality. Then you place the kid in a room with as little to destroy as possible, and don't let them act out.
2) You call the parents and inform them that they are to pick the kid up and take him home - he is suspended for a week. If the parents give you any guff about "I'm at work and I cannot/will not come get the kid" - you send the police around to their place of employment and have them informed that they are either going to pick the kid up or be picked up themselves for child abandonment.
3) You tell the parents that until the child can be controlled the child is not allowed to come back to school, AND that the parents are responsible for seeing the child is properly supervised during the day (either one of the parents, or a responsible adult), and that this WILL be checked up on by social services.
4) You inform the parents that a requirement of the child being allowed back in school is that the parents agree, in legally binding writing, that the school may use needed force to prevent the child from hurting itself or anybody else. NOTE: needed force for a 6 year old is physical restraint by an adults hands, a swat to the backside by an adults hands - NOT tasering, Mace-ing, straps, etc.
In short, you do that most horrible of things: you make people TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for their actions. The parents have primary responsibility for teaching their feral fonication-fruit how to live in this world we find ourselves in, and if they will NOT do that willingly, society WILL make them.
Creamy rice pudding and income tax
But when it says "42", how do you know that's the right answer? Especially when you weren't very clear on the question...
Could somebody hand me that cage with my pet mice?
Re: Indeed it looks great, but will it compete against Sony Playstation 3 at that price?
"it has a better DAC"
Unless you are using component video or 6 channel discrete audio, there is no "DAC" in the commonly used sense - HDMI and SPDIF are all digital - the DACs are in the TV and Stereo.
Re: Windows
"My dashboard for my domain on Google shows Drive as active.
You go to the Google Drive website and it says it isn't available yet."
Obviously they are buying their drives from Quantum....
Anybody want this garbage
1: Given how so many countries see fit to complain about how other countries handle their internal affairs (and I will admit the US is right up there in doing so), how about saying "Here we have a grade-A bona fide serial killer named Dennis Rader a.k.a. BTK (Bind, Torture, Kill) - admitted his guilt, plead guilty, victims' belongings in his shed as souvenirs, said he was going to start working out to get back in shape so he could kill more people - Does any country want to take responsibility for him for the rest of his days? No? OK then, shut up about what we do with this garbage."
2: Some people (e.g. BTK) are going to be a clear, present, and continuing threat to society for as long as they shall live. Since we do not yet have the ability to re-wire their brains to fix that, all we can do is lock them away from society for the rest of their lives. So the question is "how long is the rest of their life?" - 50 years or 50 minutes? Sorry, but in this case I have no problem with putting them down like the rabid vermin they are.
3: Other people may not have such a clear cut case against them: they may be maintaining their innocence. But then, very few people will get up on the stand and say "I did it, I'll do it again given the chance, so what?".
Many people assert that "We cannot put them to death, because that is not reversible." I have some bad news for you sunshine: neither is locking them up for 10 years before you find they are not guilty - you can release them, but you cannot give them those 10 years back. That's why a cornerstone of American jurisprudence is "If you have reasonable doubt about their guilt, you MUST find them not guilty." Whether the penalty is death or imprisonment *shouldn't* make a difference in deciding guilty or not guilty.
4: If somebody ISN'T a clear (as in "no question about it"), present (as in "this isn't just a theoretical risk"), and continuing (as in "sure he's whacked now - but get him off the drugs and he'll be right as rain") risk to society, they should NOT be executed (and likely not imprisoned, either.)
I am NOT in favor of executing somebody save in cases of out-and-out premeditated murder. In cases of premeditated murder, you have to examine if the person can be salvaged. If not, then life in prison - and that should be 50 minutes.
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