Posts by S Watts

I've got a super free multi-petabyte storage box for you: /dev/null

Rigorous backup processes...

Late last millennium, the establishment I was working for was transitioning to ISO9001; and outsourced the generation of their operating procedures to a third-party, as is the way with such places. Clearly, the third-party was paid by the kilo, as we received and had to dually implement and adhere to bookcases of glossy manuals.

Of course, there were reams of procedures ensuring that all our data was rigorously backed up to removable media; which could be archived safely off-site.

However, when the need arose, we discovered that there were no procedures outlined to ever get any of this data back...

‘That’s not art’ says Apple as it pulls nudes from AppStore

BBC Link

Aunty headlines this as being pulled due to "complaints over possible child pornography" - Not any actual such content then - just that there may be, sometime, somewhere, somehow, perhaps...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21160812

Rover spots 'possibly artificial' MYSTERY SHINY OBJECT on Mars

The last surviving martian...

...just about to get run over.

OAuth 2.0 standard editor quits, takes name off spec

Re: Easy to implement isn't always good

"""Then came the POSIX layer for Windows NT...."""

...allowing it to comply with US Gov (DOD?) tender for a POSIX compliant (level not specified) OS, undercutting the UNIX iron-mongers, and thus forcing a shambolic and archaic operating system on the end users.

Facebook accused of 'wanton' use of Canadian woman's pics

Succinct quote...

If you don't pay for a service, then you're the commodity, not the customer.

(possibly paraphrased from elsewhere)

Wacom Cintiq 24HD interactive pen display

Didn't Apple...

...patent pivot mounting a monitor recently? Filed under the bleeding obvious, but that wouldn't stop their lawyers.

Warp drives are PLANET KILLERS, Sydney Uni students find

Re: There's a former company called GDW...

The stutter drive of 2300AD used the quantum tunnelling effect to move the vessel forwards by small amounts; each quantum leap taking zero time.

As an Astrophyics undergrad at the time (mid 80s), it made me curious as to what the effective speed was of a particle when it moved by this method. However, I suspect that the answer would be let down by the lack of a definitive concept of position...

2300AD (aka Traveller 2300) is still available through other publishers (Mongoose?). I liked its "hard SF" design and setting. (much abuse of the player's characters by corporate police state in the shadow of the Braziville elevator...)

Linux PC-in-a-stick to cost coders £139

Re: Misleading?

I'm sure that this device would be quite capable of emulating an IBM PC if anyone felt the need.

But I also agree that it doesn't compare well with the Raspberry Pi.

Russia and NASA plan to COLONISE the Moon

Eagles

Now, if only they used the Eagles as their design - coolest ships ever!

Philips Cinema 21:9 Gold 50in ultra widescreen TV

Ambient + Letter Box

The Ambient light feature is appealing; but when the picture does not match the screen's aspect ratio, the usual blank bands would disassociate the effect.

So why not blend the ambient light tones into the screen in place of the black banding?

Iran displays video footage of captured US spy drone

landing gear?

"Because in all the sneaky pics taken of one in flight, the landing gear is retracted."

I don't think that the undercarriage configuration is so secret it couldn't be mocked for something like this. In fact, the "shown footage" link in the article includes stock picture of one of these on a runway.

Meanwhile: If this is genuine, then I wouldn't doubt that Iran _could_ have had some assistance from military advisers from "elsewhere", assuming they needed help...

Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH

okay, Dire Wolves with frikin' lasers on their 'eds.

Which actor should play Steve in upcoming biopic?

film title?

Somebody *must* have suggested "iJobs"...

Major BT exchange titsup in power outage

Still not working Wednesday morning

Spent a couple of hours on the phone to India^B^B^B^B^B BT Help line last night. They promised to call back Thursday evening... (really!)

Captain Kirk's Google+ account gets zapped

100 items/user/day

"more than 10 million users ... sharing more than 1 billion “items” each day"

Really? 100 items per user per day?

That seems a high rate - unless items are *very* small (ie each character is an item) or the system is very verbose.

Mozilla cranks out Firefox 5 with cross-platform 'Do Not Track' feature

no more "not responding"s?

FF4 suffered chronically from "not responding" or "script taking too long", which was a real blight on usability.

So far, I've had FF5 running (WinXP/x86) all day, with several windows and many tabs... and not a sign of either issue.

Hopefully this will hold true for Win7 (which has to wait till I get home).

Time to say goodbye to Risc / Itanium Unix?

Building large projects

We build a large-ish project on both Solaris/SPARC and Windows x86.

Event though the Windows build machine is a higher spec [1] than the Solaris box, and only builds a sub-set of the UNIX product...

* On Solaris/SPARC the system build quicker, and builds in the background while other users can happily work uninterrupted (including multiple builds). This box is about 7 years old now, and has a rather dated toolchain.

* On Windows/x86 the build takes longer, much longer, on a dedicated build machine which cannot be realistically used for anything else in the meantime. This box is about a year old.

For serious jobs I still find that the SPARC/RISC architecture is far more usable than x86. Haven't tried x64 since the system is 32-bit and I really don't want to be responsible for porting to 64...

[1] by simple processor/core count & speed, memory and disks.

LG Optimus 3D dual core Android smartphone

sometimes...

Sometimes I just want to make a phone call...

Super-injunctions 'unfair' cos of Twitter gossip, says Cameron

BBC: MP names injunction footballer in Parliament

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13503847]

So can we say the name now?...

Rapture postponed as world inexplicably fails to end

Maybe it did...

...and all the most devout believes have been replaced by evil doppelgängers.

Would explain why Monday morning feels like I'm in purgatory...

Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax dies

misspent youth

I really enjoyed my misspent youth (and not-so-youth) thanks to E. Gary Gygax's legacy, and still play MMORPGs now, though they don't lived up to their tabletop antecedents (but more on that another time...).

It is a sad day.

Polish IT worker calculates exact speed of snail mail

European or African Garden Snail?

So what was the baud rate for this connection, and how does it compare to RFC1149?