"Apple Radio?" What the fuck happened to my Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band albums?"
Posts by Steve Mann
157 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2008
Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive
Ads watchdog: Er, what does woman in her undies have to do with ‘slim’ phone?
Back seat drivers fear lead-footed autonomous cars, say boffins
Bah!
Well, Google can take a cue from The Marching Morons and glaze the vehicle with OLED screens so the passengers can be shown a slowed version of their hurtling progress down the street.
Or we could do the sensible thing and Ban This Filth Now.
Googlecars are low speed cruise missiles waiting to be purposed by the unscrupulous.
A cookie with a 7,984-year lifespan. Blimey, Roy Batty only got 4!
Bah!
I dunno which is the more worrying possibility: that the programmers responsible were too damned lazy to work out the reasonable lifetime one of their cookies should endure or that they didn't understand the whole concept of expiration.
Of course they were working on the principle that *everyone* clears their cookie cache at session end.
I mean, why wouldn't they?
Apple LIGHTSABERS to feature in The Force Awakens
Re: Retrogression of the "Force".
I don't understand why you would make the light saber more primitive for films that take place AFTER all other events.
Obviously, lightsabers are now so ubiquitous with the clueless un-midiclorinated that they have become riddled with viruses, malware and trojans. These, and the active countermeasures the sabers now come with as standard, suck so much juice the actual blade gubbins are starved for power.
Luckily, in Episode 8, Apple save the day by inventing the iSaber which uses a different operating system that "can't get viruses".
Sadly, Apple turn out to be run by cruel and cynical Clonemasters who strictly limit the supply, and galactic civilization collapses as everyone spends all their time queuing outside the local SaberStore instead of running the galacti-banks or driving cabs or checking income tax returns for "errors".
In episode 9, amid the anarchic chaos, some unsung hero invents the FOSSsaber, and it looks like the galaxy is saved again. Unfortunately, everyone plus their space-dog forks the design and now the iQueuers are entertained by gangs of people screaming at each other about who has the only real SaberSystem and how everyone else is deluded and dumb.
This goes on until the long-ago galaxy in question is swallowed by the quasar at its center.
20 years on: The satirist's satirist Peter Cook remembered
Mom and daughter SUE Comcast for 'smuggling' public Wi-Fi hotspot into their home
Globe-spanning SEA-ME-WE 3 sea cable feared cut, broken or ...
Aaah, what's that smell, Nook? Yes, it's death: Barnes & Noble to jettison e-book biz
Kaspersky rips The Mask from sneaky Spanish spy campaign
Re: Professional?
"They are not just better, they are apparently godlike enough to be able to infect the uninfectable. I'm eagerly awaiting the clarification that the OSX and Linux variants still require the user to accept the install and provide the root password ^^;"
But gosh, didn't we just read about three weeks ago of a proof of concept buffer overrun attack against Linux that allowed arbitrary execution of code? In these very pages?
Boffins claim Voyager has already left the Solar System
Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea
Your own £19 Pocket Spacecraft could be FOUND ON THE MOON
But...
Polystyrene is much less dense than water. How did those containers ever sink?
But the point is taken. Had the Glomar Challenger really been after what it was said to be after in my OU textbook "Understanding the Earth" instead of Russian nuclear submarine wrecks, it is interesting to speculate what would have come up with the manganese nodules.
Police 'stumped' by car thefts using electronic skeleton key
Re: I'd rather they took my car than poured a kettle of boiling water over my head.
"So, Stevie, how are you going to guard the iron? The waffle-iron? The cast-iron skillet? The 8" chef's knife? The scissors? The screwdrivers? The wine/beer bottles? The hair curler? The knitting needle? The fireplace poker? Etc?"
The iron is in the basement o' crap, good luck finding it since none of us have seen it in months.
Waffle iron broke and was tossed.
The scissors are always AWOL but on the off chance the bloody kid put 'em back in the drawer she undoubtedly put 'em back open with the points sticking out. If my experience is anything to go by the screaming of the pig-stuck burglar will alert us.
If he opens the cupboard with the hair care electronics in it he will precipitate a crapolanche the likes of which hasn't been seen since that mountain in Iceland blew up.
The beer and wine is in the basement: see comments re: iron.
No-one knits in this house.
We don't have a fireplace.
The etc? is a problem but I feel up to the task of defeating anyone with my own counter etc? etc?
Which leaves the 8" kitchen knife. My only hope is that he will knock over the butcherblock because he will have a leaky snake-filled kettle in one hand. I always do when trying to get a cutting implement one-handed.
In all fairness I feel you are being disingenuous. The specific fear here was the Headboiling Intruder and I have shown how to deal with him.
In point of fact anyone entering the Steviemanse will be deafened by the alarm system, designed for maximum disorientation and annoyance. Unless they have the power to ghost through walls.
Then I'm f*cked.
Guess who PC-slaying tablets are killing next? Keyboard biz Logitech
Re: bollocks
Double bollocks. On buying a couple of Raspberry Pis I needed a keyboard for each as all mine were PS2. The Logitech K120 was less than $15, bought over the counter in Staples and is perhaps the nicest keyboard I've used in years, action-wise. The wireless Logitech mouse I got for use with my laptop was so good at around $15 I bought two more of them. My early adopter Logitech PC wireless mouse is still going strong ten years and more down the road, and did not break the bank (though it was a sight more than 20 bux and the receiver is the size of a small ash tray).
If what you want is a solid piece of kit that gets the job done, my experience is that Logitech can provide it at a reasonable price. If you want all the bolt-on cruft and want it wireless, then you can start paying a lot.
And while I am willing to believe the UK sees a ferocious markup on these things, if you are telling me that you can get the same build quality at 30 quid that you'll pay 120 for for Logitech kit, well, I have trouble accepting that without seeing a teardown report supporting that claim.
Drilling into 3D printing: Gimmick, revolution or spooks' nightmare?
A Use Case
For all the people looking for a use for this technology that proves it is a Force To Be Reckoned With, I offer the credit on the Aardman "Pirate" movie of last year, which quietly mentioned "rapid prototyping".
That's what non-hobbyists call 3D printing though sometimes the term involves CA Milling.
Did you know you can make a machine to do that from a 3D printer chassis and a Dremel rotary tool? You need to add some bits to make it clever and experience tells me the rotary tool doesn't have the bearings for ultra-fine work, but for gouging wood into submission with a router bit you are in like Flynn. There's even a company that sells the chassis you need.
This lash-up will separate the men from the boys though, since a DRT runs at such high speed there is a real danger of setting fire to the workpiece if you don't gauge the feed rate properly. But, as I always say, where's the fun in making things if there's no chance they will burst into flames in the process?
My experience has been that using a DRT to drill anything is inviting trouble since in most materials the bits will cook-off at even the slowest speeds. Found that out the expensive way. Dunno why they even sell the bits.
Re: One thing we're ignoring...
So much not correct here.
3D printing is still, in the "inexpensive" printer arena, an art rather than a science. I'm not going to go into why, the build blogs are out there and all you have to do is look.
If you don't want to be left "finishing" a piece post-print you need to spend upwards of $2K. Below that the vertical resolution on all commercial machines (yes, including RepRap) is so poor you get striations on the finished part.
For about $1.6K Sears will sell you a ready-to-cut wood milling machine, about the size of an ink jet printer. Good for making signs, decorative boxes or whatever else you can think up. Plug and play.
NC milling machines can be gotten for around $2-3k that are worth owning. There's a bloke sitting not ten feet from me who won one in a raffle last November when he attended a seminar run by the manufacturer. Turns out, not just computer firms give away stuff at jamborees. Who knew?
A Unimat lathe can be bought for under $2k. I see them on eBay all the time. Then it's a matter of acquiring the skills by lathing materials and reading books. You'll need other tools, micrometers and so forth, but those you can acquire as you develop a need for them.
It takes a few seconds to drill a hole using my floor-standing 15-speed drill press, which cost me about $350 - less than the price of a cheap laptop. If it took an hour to drill a hole, the bit was blunt. The hint would be the small of hot metal and (optionally) melting plastic or burning wood.
I know people who own laser-cutting machines for cutting wood. Never looked into those myself, but given the people concerned that means they can't be ruinously expensive. Laser-cutting can be used in all sorts of fab projects - the case for the makerbot was laser cut the last time I looked at them.
Perhaps one of the real advantages of moving to the USA was is there is ready access to inexpensive machine tools of all shapes and sizes. Makes up for all those guns blasting away in every direction night and day, and having to run from one piece of cover to the next just to go anywhere.
As for your computer geek who can't drill a hole - perhaps one can only truly claim to be an engineer if once one has written some code one can solder a few components to a board on which to run it and knock up a case to put it all in.
Extremely Loud BAH!
Yeah, this is the way to report on a technology still in its infancy.
Use comments from academics and fellow journalists (who like to coin three-dollar words to make ordinary concepts sound more clixby) and politicians (and their catspaws, government agencies) who don't know the difference between star trek and real life.
This is my view. Imagine a time when this technology has moved out of the garage and into the home. Can we find an analogy...sorry I can't. Imagine you drive a classic car, say a Thunderbird or a TR3, and you break a tail light filter. Imagine being able to order the pattern off the web and buy a kit of the raw materials which your handy-dandy universal fabricator (rather optimistically named by some large corporation) will, before your very eyes, work up a replacement for you.
Not as exciting or controversial as "me build gun in garage!" but that is where the future will bring us, in good time.
All the rubbishing of hyperbole cooked up by fellow journalists is, to be honest, a bit masturbatory. Of course the hobbyists are keen. Did you ever try talking to someone who makes and flies model aircraft? That doesn't mean the technology won't live up to the hype given enough time.
I'll finish up by saying that I started my working life in a machine tool manufacturing plant in the UK where we made hydraulic, multi-spindle machines of great quality. What management refused to believe was that the new Japanese machines would steal our market from under our noses. After all, theirs were single spindle, made of plastic rather than iron and steel and were controlled by these new-fangled "microprocessors", which were not durable in those days. Do I have to spell out how that ended? The road where the factory used to stand is still named for the company. I doubt anyone who lives nearby knows that, though. The factory was history before most of them started school.
Weev gets 41 months in prison for exposing iPad strokers' privates
Multimillionaire Brit games dev wants your cash for Shroud of the Avatar
Bah!
I've funded through Kickstarter - specifically I kicked in enough to get an advance copy of the Schlock Mercenary board game because I wanted the product and the kick-in got me a couple of extras I wouldn't see if I bought after the thing was printed up. I was happy with the results and don't feel I was ripped off.
I refused to fund a for-pay event an acquaintance was planning as I thought it was a bloody cheek and contrary to the entire Kickstarter ethos, though I couldn't say exactly why other than he could sell advance tickets and there were people waiting in line to loan him money at very reasonable rates of return.
I almost kicked in for a Delta Robot 3D Printer, but concerns over the life-expectancy of the product when compared to a "traditional" 3D printer made me keep my 1.3K in my pocket.
Like many I feel Kickstarter is "intended" to help the struggling entrepreneur, not the multi-millionaire who surely has resources above and beyond reaching into his own pockets, and people already on retainer to make the most of what money he can find.
Of course that isn't what these people see though. They see a source of cash with people just waiting to hurl it into the ring. More power to everyone concerned, but I don't agree with it and won't support it.
Re: multimillionaire seeks funding?
Isn't that what "advance sales", "investors" and "venture capitalists" are for?
I rather thought Kickstarter was a device to get marginal projects with limited appeal to market, not for them with enough dosh to attract their own backers to get gifts of money from the masses to fund another installment of a popular franchise with minimal effort or need to wine and dine anyone.
Who does he think he is, an Investment Banker?
Bottomless, unsatisfied Xbox widow cuffed after boyf flees nookie
Re: Hint, kids (of any gender) ...
" That's how we did it in the olden days"
What "olden days"? I'm older than Nitrogen and in my youth lads would bonk anything that would lie still long enough. That is what youth is for and why it is so stupid. There is nothing left to think with if you are bonking your brains out as per the design spec.
The aberrant part of this sorry tale is the bit about the slug who spends all day on the XBox instead of in the saddle.
Bees use 'electrical sixth sense' to nail nectar-stuffed flowers
Bah!
Are these the same scientists who once tried to claim that ferns could remember who treated them nicely and who was mean to them? I have an innate tendency to ignore scientists when they talk about sixth senses and electric fields because, you know, the whole crop circle thing.
"The grain shows signs of having an extreme electrical field applied to it, some sort of vortex effect."
"Electric field" as in "wooden plank", "vortex effect" as in "drunk yoof, walking in circles".
The bees probably just jot down where they get their pollen or use Google Maps like the rest of us.
LOHAN teases with quick flash of spaceplane
Bah!
If this contraption is capable of planoforming it will need to be big enough to hold a couple of pinlighters and a snoozing of cats in addition to the Playmonaut or "Go Captain" to use the correct term. This will in turn require a much bigger launch truss and volume of whatever lift gas is deemed best.
I look forward to the acrimony of the cost-overrun committee meetings.
I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square
Hmm.
Well, a PC I got in 1996 came loaded with Lotus Office Suite and I rather liked it, though it was obvious that it needed to be brought up to the state of the art as far as a scripting language was concerned. Unfortunately, I seem to remember IBM acquired the Lotus name around then and killed off everything but Notes and Domino.
How to destroy a brand-new Samsung laptop: Boot Linux on it
Bah!
So my guess is that Samsung now owes everyone a new motherboard? Dear me. Perhaps it's time to consider socketing the eprom, NVRAM style, lest a class action suit bring down the manufacturer.
My sympathies to all those affected, even though I don't have an evangelical stance on any particular O/S*. No-one should be subjected to this level of incompetence.
* except the pile of steaming crap that is OS9, the most mendaciously oversold OS in the history of OSes.
Panasonic: We'll save Earth by turning CO2 into booze
Brit mastermind of Anonymous PayPal attack gets 18 months' porridge
Microsoft blasts PC makers: It's YOUR fault Windows 8 crash landed
Intel to leave desktop motherboard market
Bah!
My guess is that we will be seeing more "system on a chip" computers sold into the market of the trad desktop as people become more at ease with Linux (and when the Linux distro community get that people don't do computers for fun and don't want to learn about them any more than they want to learn how to build an airframe before flying somewhere or change a crankshaft bearing before they go for a drive).
I can't wait for that day. It will make my life easier if I can find such a machine for my elderly mother-in-law who really struggles with basic computer concepts ("My e-mail doesn't work" means the preview window is no longer visible) and cannot grasp certain safety issues like not opening stuff from Africa or Belarus written by people she has never met.
Sorry, Apple-haters, but Cupertinian doom not on the horizon
Bah!
I'm not a fan of Apple kit myself, but I don't want to see them hounded out of the business either.
The real problem for the writer of this article is that he wants the stock market to work as it did before, well, Apple led the wave of computerized transactions.
People used to buy a product that impressed them, or see one in action, or use one, or ride in one, and they would buy the stock, get real stock certificates which they would hang onto for life because their money would be safe in a company that made such obviously better goods.
That isn't what happens today by a long chalk.
People buy stock electronically. there is no point to having a certificate because the stock was bought as a quick return money-earner, and the value of the stock under those conditions is decided by how panicky people are in any given moment.
You'd think in a world where transactions of this sort move faster than they can be traced, short-selling would be more tightly controlled than it is, but the mentality is that short-selling "worked" in the trad shout-and-paper trade world, so it just works, 'kay? (Ollie White's MRP classes had a great take on what happens when you computerize a 'working" paper system. If you can find them, they are worth a look.)
It isn't about how shiny or better the product is, it is about how much money the board was told would be piling up set against what is actually being shoveled out of the way when the sums are done.
Shocking. But, you know, life. I honestly wonder sometimes why some companies go public, given that the abrupt (and necessary) shift in company goals must pose a serious risk of whiplash injury and the predators who can break a company just for the hell of it without serious investment or oversight.
Making apps for touchscreen mobes? YAWN. Try a car instead
Re: Personally I am happy with
*My* car uses the ABS to implement TCS. Turn off the one, you lose t'other. Works really well, too. I sailed past stranded SUVs in the last blizzard (though I got stuck when the snow piled up higher than my bumper in a car park, which took me an hour to get free of on account of not having a shovel and having to kick a path out with my feet.).
I can disable the TCS using a good old always-in-the-same-place button on the dash, but I never do.
GUIs in a car == more stupid than anything else I can think of.
Scientists snap first film of giant squid in action
UK armed forces could be 'fatally compromised’ by cyber attack
Why is solid-state storage so flimsy?
A great concept
Most of this article leaves me with a "stating the bleeding obvious" aftertaste, but one casual throw-away phrase struck a chord: "Future Proofing", and coupling that with "laptop" crystallized a desire I have.
I'm tired of having to migrate every bloody archived document I have from my old machine to my new machine for fear (realized, sadly) that the long-term storage device(s) will fail and will not be replaceable due to the mad dash into the future. I can get spares for a vintage foreign car easier than I can get a domestic computer component spec'ed 15 years ago.
How pleasant it would be if the major devices that go to make up my laptop had interfaces that were themselves guaranteed to provide connectivity despite the details of the device itself. Switch from backlit LCD to PBP (Psychotronic Brainwave Projection)? No problem because the intefaces will cope. Hard Drive to SSD to Atomic Differentiaion Matrix? Ditto.
Yeah, I know it would be damn near impossible, but I would really like a portable Marshall Tucker Band device, where changing the individual parts due to the realities of time does not mandate a brand new system. Something like Lego, where new stuff works with the old because the peg/socket interface was sorted out at the start.
Gotta Dream.
Home Sec to decide Gary McKinnon's fate by 16 October
Re: Bah!
If you are referring to the business in Antigua, no it didn't already happen. In that case a US citizen formerly resident of California upped stakes for Antigua in a specific effort to evade certain laws (the tax statutes being one subset of them) and he was indeed prosecuted, but not for the offense the alleged criminal in the case at hand is accused of.
Gambling is a hot button issue in the States and the laws surrounding it are Knee-Jerk from the perspective of one who grew up able to legally bet on anything from horse racing to the date of the first snowfall. It took me years to understand it, and yes you break US law if you use US-based wires to conduct a gambling transaction (it is a variety of wire fraud in effect). Good luck finding a way to avoid doing that. Even the switching at the end office counts, so using your iSlab will still get you in hot water.
But what we have here is someone who broke into a military computer. Is it really reasonable to believe that he didn't think anyone would be very upset indeed about that, or that the people who were going to get upset would be insanely powerful with a long reach? The pentagon? When have they ever evinced a touchy-feely understanding manner when it comes to trespassers?
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't buy it. I didn't buy Reiser's car-cleaning with a hosepipe excuse either and got downvoted for saying so, so I sorta expected to get red-arrowed this time too, but I stand by my assessment of the situation as I see it based on the information I have now.
The lesson is clear; If you don't want the threat of being hauled summarily off to answer charges in the US don't f*** with computers that are the property of the US government.
Jeeze. Whatever happened to "if you don't own it, don't touch it?" No wonder we have stupid "attractive menace" laws that make it the owner's fault if a teenager crushes himself by effing about with a parked and properly secured motorcycle or drowns himself trying to gain access to a secured, private swimming pool.
Amazon: Time for a new Kindle Fire, this one's sold out
Bah!
Not a tablet? By what yardstick?
Actually I'm not arguing that it ain't an iPad, but as far as what people actually use 7" tablets for, I gotta disagree. I use mine as a reader mostly, but I've watched TV on it and surfed Da Webs (though it isn't how I'd do it by choice, nether is a smart phone which I see put to the purpose by others every day). It plays games and I can take notes on it if I absolutely must.
The only change I'd like to see apart from a systemic one on the DRM front (like that will ever happen) is I'd really like an electronic dictionary interface arranged so that the dictionary can be searched properly like a dictionary and not like a bunch of document pages. How f-tarded it it that searching the Kindle default dictionary for "Zebra" takes forever as every mention of "zebra" is found *before* the actual dictionary definition? All the dictionaries I've tried for the fire are functionally useless outside of the (nifty) in-book lookup because of this oversight. The reader should understand that a dictionary is fundamentally different from just another book.
pantpantpant. Rant over. What was the question?
Rogue kebab provokes Carlisle post-pub car deathmatch
Space shuttle Enterprise makes final voyage – to New York
Re: Smashed a wingtip
My thought , as I watched the unspace nonshuttle's wing being smashed was "blimey - all that fuss and they couldn't run to TWO barges lashed gunwale-to-gunwale to properly protect this historic treasure from teh stoopids"?
Wings poking over the sides of the barge. There's no way that could have been foreseen to be a potential f*ckup in the making.
Never mind. Once fixed the wing will just be that much more phoney. Or maybe they could call Grumman for a new one - the plant where they were made is only a few miles away. After all, it's not like any part of this machine ever went anywhere near space.
It's marvelous that the place where they made the only part of the shuttle that wasn't judged to be flawed in some way after the Challenger incident can't get an actual, been-there-and-back space shuttle.
Yes I'm grumpy about it all. If I'm gonna pay for the bloody thing to be shifted about the Hudson river I want it done properly and I want a real shuttle with scorch marks on it and a real rocket engine in the back when they charge me a couple of limbs to look up close at it.
Grumblegrumblegrumble
MPAA sympathetic to returning legitimate Megaupload files
1,000 Foxconn iPad workers trash dorms in riot against guards
LinkedIn admits site hack, adds pinch of salt to passwords
Microsoft 'hardens' Windows Update from Flame penetration
'Fileless' malware installs into RAM
Bah!
Java is ubiquitous in the world these days for anything as it "makes the developer's life easy".
IBM use it in their product lines, Symantec use it, hell, every bugger uses it. To think of it as something for internet use is to understate the problem by several orders of magnitude.
And before people start wittering about Norton anti-virus, I'm referring to the enterprise level product lines there, stuff like Veritas.
The tendency here seems to be more Java as time goes on, not less, and it's everywhere.
Scroogle unplugged for good this time
ICANN snubs critics, opens domain extension floodgates
Bah!
Because everyone will remember to use blahblah.pepsi rather than pepsi.com
We've spent 15 years training people that the right of the dot is always ".com", irrespective of whether that is suitable for the site or not.
We should throw away the phisher-infested trojan-packed spam-canal that is the intarweb and build something better instead of retrofitting it with new formica counter tops.
We could start by defining a distributed-structure capable protocol that knows about session state.