Posts by Bob Kentridge 21 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2007
On the basis of this article I picked up an X60 from the Devil's Tat Bazaar (ebay) for £120. It is a fab little thing that can be used for proper work - rather easier to lug about than my T500 but the same great keyboard, and, I guess as it is a Thinkpad, still in perfect mechanical order. The battery is a bit past it (still got a couple of hours life) but that can be fixed for £20 or so.
Thanks for the fun article and thanks for prompting me to get this great machine!
Didn't they rather imply that it meant a display at the resolution limit of the human visual system? This is somewhere around 35-40 cycles per degree for near optimal stimuli [1], so, for a comfortable reading distance, a 264dpi display would still be pretty much there.
Bob
[1] Smallman, H.S.; MacLeod, D.I.A.; He, S. & Kentridge, R.W. (1996) The fine grain of the neural representation of human spatial vision. Journal of Neuroscience 16, 1848-1865.
Let's hope they're young enough not to know 'Wooden Ships' by JA. They might find the bit where the narrators who are sailing away in the wooden ships look back at the people they left behind a little depressing:
Horror grips us as we watch you die,
All we can do is echo your anguished cries,
Stare as all human feelings die,
We are leaving,
You don't need us.
Maybe ESA should consider making the spaceship out of something other than wood.
Unfortunately there is no 'old hippy' icon...
The connoisseur's processor of its time. I had a Sun 3/60 with a 68020 and 68881 math co-processor in it I think. I wrote little bits of 68020 assembler to optimise long-running simulations.
There was a time when Apple's highest performing processor was a 68020 in the Laserprinter IINT (or something) - running faster than the processors in any of their computers....
I'm not a fanboy. I had to program for Macs in the early 1990s and hated them (remember 7.5.3). I'm not that bothered by phones but I do like my 3GS for all of the non-phone things it does so painlessly. I want to know what the difference in performance is between old iPhones and the 4. Is there any point in updating? I'm not going to switch OS because I don't care about phones and like the one I've got, but when I can upgrade from 3GS to 4 should I?
The software alone works pretty well provided you can hear the voice instructions. The speakers on the iphone itself are too weedy, but if you've already got an FM re-transmitter then you can listen to the iphone as an ipod and hear the voice instructions (the music volume is muted) all over the car radio. So it isn't killer expensive (less than a dedicated satnav) if you aleady have the other stuff anyway.
Lots of people seem to have read the Reg article but not the research paper and are making all sorts of assertions about how stupid medical statisticians are, how they didn't understand elementary logic and how they drew conclusions that were not justified by their data. I too have not read this particular paper. I have, however, read the first author's previous paper on the relationship between shootings and alcohol availability. He analysed a few dozen personal and situational confounds and regressed each out of the final odds ratio based tests of associations between the primary factors being studied. This seems a pretty solid approach to me. I suspect critics are probably more motivated by political predilictions than by specific issues with the method of analysis.
I've seen worse than the flower street names. Many years ago some of my friends lived in an area of Leeds known locally as 'The Harolds' because all the streets were Harold something - Harold Street, Harold Road, Harold Avenue - truly brilliant bit of planning.
On an unrelated note my work machines tend to be called hagbard, gruad, fnord, shoggoth and so on... At home they're called Upstairs and Downstairs.
'Budvar had submitted copies of adverts in Germany and Austria and invoices for customers in Germany and Austria for sales of the beer. The CFI agreed with the Board of Appeal "the evidence which Budvar produced was clearly sufficient to prove genuine use of the earlier international word mark 'Budweiser'".'
If they need any more evidence I remember (reasonably clearly) drinking it in Austria years ago in bottles clearly marked 'Budweiser' from Budvar....
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