* Posts by James Hughes

82 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2008

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Aussie air zealot savages prêt-à-porter stealth fighter

James Hughes

re: IT Expert

So, IT experts are not allowed to be experts in other areas as well?

Oh dear. I'll stop reading then.

'Interfering' BT Vision attracts campaigner glares

James Hughes

DTV interference

Can stuff like this cause interference on DTV (i.e. Freeview)? My two tellies have started getting occasional dropouts for no apparent reason, (signal drops from 70% to 10% for about 1s) so was wondering where the interference may be coming from - could it be something like this? I have even had weird traffic on my car radio next to the house - like a police broadcast over radio 4.

We must be told!!!

Robotic exoskeleton gets gardening job

James Hughes

Dig up sprouts..?

You pluck sprouts, not dig them up....

SpaceX erects Phallus Falcon 9 rocket

James Hughes

Come on people...

No its not photoshopped - www.spacex.com for video of it being 'erected' and loads more piccies.

And the quicker you can get the rocket from hanger to launch, the cheaper it is. Why wait two or more days, whilst paying all the ground crew to hang about, when you can do it in 60minutes.

Another reason for quick launch is rescue missions - by definition they need to be quick as there is a lack of emergency services in space. Hence the second shuttle on the launch pad the other day for the Hubble repair mission (canceled anyway I believe), as there is no other option (ISS out of range).

Why do people always post before even the most basic of research?

BBC: Top Gear Tesla didn't run out of juice

James Hughes

Three phase

All streets have three phase already - houses are usually just fed off one phase of the three at the post. Some houses already have three phase - often if previously installed with Economy 7 or similar because of its high power requriements. All factories already have it.

Cost to get linked to three phase < £1000 (last quote I had was £600 I think, but supply own distribution board.)

Price would come down if more people wanted it.

Tesla takes Top Gear test to task

James Hughes

Er..

Isn't the Tesla still a prototype?

Didn't Clarkson actually think the car was quite good? (even given his petrol head nature)

Would the BBC dare fake anything in the current climate?

@Nick - er, of course TG is entertainment, based in and around the car world. And top quality entertainment at that. If you want solid facts and reviews, you could watch FG I suppose, but that is pretty dreadful. Or go out and buy Autocar, or Which Car or whatever they are called.

Designer pitches solar-powered AA battery

James Hughes

Original Thought at last....

Just the sort of thinking that the world needs. It may not bear fruit this time, but it's a great idea.

Nintendo whacked with $5m Wii strap lawsuit

James Hughes

Crayons...

My 3 year old drew on my brand new Series 6 Samsung LCD telly with wax crayons, two days after it arrived.

Can I sue the crayon manufacturers?

Scorpions tale leaves IWF exposed

James Hughes

No story here

Page banned, appeal heard, page reinstated.

So, the IWF did its 'job', why so many calls for it to be replaced (presumably with something much worse)?

As an aside, I agree with the IWF - I thought the image was borderline offensive, but only when taken in context with the album title. Pictures of naked children are basically not allowed to be published, I don't have a problem with that, as even when posed innocently, someone, out there, will get a kick from it. It may not be 'porn' to most people, but to some it will be, so why feed them unnecessarily.

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

James Hughes

Go swimming!

Quick question...

Why are all the commentators who thing this 'censorship' is a bad thing not complaining about not being able to take photographs in the local swimming baths? You cannot do that without permission, because they are worried about child abuse etc. So I cannot take a picture of my own child in a swimming costume in a public place, but I can look at a picture of a naked prepubescent girl with Virgin Killer plastered on in? Double standards anyone?

Presumably, most of the commentators are too stuck behind their monitors whinging about their civil rights that to get out and do some exercise, so have never encountered a swimming pool.

James Hughes

Methinks they do protest too much...

Picture of naked girl with cracked glass effect over genitals, underneath a banner which says Virgin Killer. Nah, no sexual content there at all. Can't see any paedoes getting there rocks off over that one.

/sarcasm

When most of the commentators above have their own children (First you will need a girlfriend, then stop watching porn for long enough to lose your virginity), perhaps they won't be so outraged at this prevention of them watching whatever they like on the internet.

The best thing to happen would be for Wikipedia to remove the offensive picture, and whilst I don't have any sort of nudity taboo whatsoever, I did find the picture unnecessarily offensive . Whether they regard it as porn or not, it would save so much cr*p just to remove it.

Game Group growth slows

James Hughes

@AC - Well

Nope, still not with you. Not sure of the connection you are making between buying second hand and piracy. Surely buying second hand puts more money in to the chain - money that will in all likelihood be used to buy another game (2nd hand or new - eventually the chain gets back to new of course). Piracy puts no money in to the chain whatsoever.

Even Games middleman trading puts money back in to the chain - the fact that they pay little but charge lots is their lookout - if you want more money for your games, try Ebay, or similar. You dont have to use them, they just try to make as much money out of the consumer as the consumer will bear. Pretty much what everyone else on the High Street does.

James Hughes

If they have them, they will come..

Tried to buy a silver DS in Game (and via their website). Didn't have it in the bundle I wanted online, and the silver had sold out in the shop.

Went to Gamestation instead.

To Scum AC above : As far as I know, it's perfectly legal to resell console games in this country - why are you so upset about it? The manufacturers have already made the money on the original sale, they are not entitled to any more are they? You don't to pay Ford every time you sell a second hand Escort, do you? You don't find jumble sales having to pay the producer of the jumper cash everytime it gets resold, do you?

Your mate gets a good deal - games don't deteriorate, so buying second hand you get exactly the same thing but cheaper (I know, just bought games off Ebay that were mint condition for half price)

Grand Theft Auto IV PC debut gets SecuROM sideshow

James Hughes

@mectron

>>The most pirated gam ever. Let's make sure GTA beat that. Until game maker understand that:

>>1. DRM is illegal period, not if or but. It is ILLEGAL PERIOD.

Is it? Why? Seem to be a great lack of court cases given its alleged illegality.

>>2. DRM have NEVER worked in any way to prevent piracy

I disagree, DRM has worked, but not a great extent. It stops casual copying by those who do not (yet) download, not the hardcore freetards, who wouldn't have bought it anyway.

>>3. DRM actual encourage piracy, no game is worth installing maleware on your computer.

Possibly true.

>>4. If Rockstar want more money, sue the make Securom for making a totaly un-effective DRM that have been proven 100% useless every single time,

See point 2.

>>5 How much cheaper GTA wil be whitout all the illegal DRM infecting it?

Same price.

I don't like DRM either BTW, and rarely if ever buy games

Boss frogmarches bound employee to cop shop

James Hughes

Norwich Nightclubs.

Ok, its not related, but its a good story. Son of a friend was recently in a Norwich nightclub. One of his mates was assaulted in the club - headbutted three times, leaving a very messy nose. Attack was unprovoked. Went to front desk to complain they had been assaulted, desk called bouncers. Bouncer toss them all out on the street (The victims that it), called plod over, accused them of affray. Plod took them off to station where despite all their protestations, they were done for breach of peace, and fined £80 on the spot.

The original assault, which resulted in bodily injury, was completely ignored.

And people wonder why the police have a bad press.

Geeks whup Marine ass in Call Of Duty 5

James Hughes

Let make it fair

Now the geeks have to fight the marines for real.

I wonder who will win...???

Arizona boffins get a grip on their newly-fat pipe

James Hughes

@Ed

Quality....

Swedish transsexuals offered prosthetic todgers

James Hughes

Get with the program...

For goodness sake people, the word strapadictomy has been around for at least 20 years....

MP calls for Jezza Clarkson's head

James Hughes

Tell the MP to b****r off

The fact that it was JC who made the comment is completely irrelevant - if it was offensive it doesn't matter who said it.

On the other hand, it wasn't even offensive, and for GODS SAKE, Steve Wright was a FORKLIFT DRIVER not a LORRY DRIVER, so the comment wasn't even about him!!! I listened to this MP numpty on the radio last night and he had the audacity to say he spoke for the families for the murdered women in Ipswich, (The ones Clarkson wasn't talking about) when he hadn't even spoken to them about it! Talk about getting on the bandwagon. The R4 presenter could have given him a much harder time - I wish he had.

Elon Musk's SpaceX offers non-ISS spaceship

James Hughes

Some answers to the above..

Four flights to success is better than the original rocket pioneers as you would expect, but it still acceptable given the complexity. There may be a Falcon 9 fail as well, but since it relies on mostly the same components as Falcon 1, the odds are for success.

Non-reuseable chemical rockets are still currently the cheapest (and in fact only) way of getting to orbit. Nothing else has come close to matching their performance, and a lot of brain power has gone in to trying to think of something! In fact SpaceX stages are designed to be partly reusable, but they havent tried refurbishing one yet.

Most flights to orbit are in fact one way, and getting back from orbit without toasting is actually quite difficult, hence the comment.

Elon Musk to bail out Tesla Motors with own money

James Hughes

Good for him...

Nice to see someone with a big pile of cash putting it to use rather than watching it accumulate interest, or investing to make even more money. EM is doing alright with SpaceX against incumbent opposition, perhaps he will get these guys going as well.

David Tennant quits Who

James Hughes

Cult SciFi?

>>>Well, since they've already trashed the Doctor Who brand, taking it from Cult Sci-fi and making it a Saturday night family special with 2 comedy guests per episode (oh, look the bad guy this week

is Ainsley Harriot mummy), why not go the whole hog and have a guest Doctor each week too.

<<

Er, If I remember my yoof correctly, it started out as a 'Saturday night family special' - cannot comment on comedy guests, too busy hiding behind the sofa.

Thrust SSC team to build 1000 mph 'Bloodhound' car

James Hughes

Non-contributary title because its needs one.

Take a look at Starchaser as another British company trying to promote science and technology in schools. Be worth comparing to see if they are getting anywhere. It about the only way they can keep developing their rockets because of lack of funding IIRC.

It seem to me that the government cannot be arsed to fund this sort of thing, which, if my 6 year old is anything to go by, DOES promote an interest in science and technology. Most of the money comes from donations, which is a bloody sad state of affairs.

Without typo-squatters, how far would Google fall?

James Hughes

Question....

Sorry, but I have a question.

How are Google 'encouraging' this behaviour, as stated in several posts above.

By offering adverts? That anyone can have on any webpage (limited by Google T&C's)?

I can't see how offering a service like this is encouraging typosquatting, anymore that someone offering guns for sale is encouraging murder. Yes, guns can be used in illegal ways, but, once you get past the laws regarding sale of guns, the seller has no responsibility for that the users do with them. Same with adverts.

One billion unwanted opinions in real-time: Now SHOUTED at you

James Hughes

S'alright.

Not my cup to tea, but hey, it'll find its place. It's just a forum with speech instead of text (so, no, not like Skype, or youtube as other posters said), but that means its pretty easy to find the conversations you want. Early days, but could go far.

What is a Linux distro worth?

James Hughes

@Ian

There is a well known metric that on average, a developer produces about 20 lines of written, tested, debugged and documented lines of code a day. I think this is probably a bit out of date now, but the right order of magnitude.

Yes, your open source project may have 16k lines developed in a year, but is it fully (FULLY) tested, is it fully commented and is it fully documented. If it has any of the above, then it's very unusual for Open source, where the majority of stuff I have to work with is badly documented, appallingly commented, but does, to its credit, mostly work (but I have not idea of whether it works in all scenarios)

Linux Foundation unwraps distro normalizer 4.0

James Hughes

@ A J Stiles

And what if the likes of Ubuntu can't be bother to make it work? You still have to do the work yourself...

You simply cannot reply of the package maintainer to do the job for you. Hence the OP's original comment.

Mapping the universe at 30 Terabytes a night

James Hughes

No JPEG....

They have to use non-lossy compression for this, so the figures won't be that great (compared with JPEG or whatever we are using in 10 years time), but still a good percentage I would think.

Not lossy because you may compress out something faint but important. Which is most of what astronomy is about.

Game sharer gets £16K fine

James Hughes

to Aj Stiles..

You say you have never and will never 'buy' software? Too late..

Have you a mobile phone? A car? A Digibox?

All these things contain software that you have paid for, whether you wanted to or not. Part of the cost (often a large cost) of almost any digital item nowadays goes to paying software licences for software on the device - either the OS, or perhaps libraries for particular functionality.

So, as I said, too late. You have already paid - and probably quite a lot in some cases.

Firefox sweeps away carpet bombing bug

James Hughes

RE; Here we go again

So, going back to a browser that is security updated once a month (ish), vs. one that is updated more frequently, because you are tired of a few seconds of uploading/updating?

Weird.

Pretty sure I prefer the latter. And at least I don't usually have to reboot for a Firefox update.

MoD in £1.75m rush order for SAS backpack radars

James Hughes

re: Hmmmm..What about the wild life?

First things first - it find something moving, then you LOOK to see what it is....those new fangled binoculars would be good for that, with this kit telling you where to look.

Excellent, as Mr Burns would say.

Seagate first with 1.5TB hard drives

James Hughes

Not that much space..

1500GB = about 30 Blueray movies. (50GB for a double sided BR disk). Oh, Ok, perhaps 100 if they don't use all the capacity of the disk.

Doesn't go that far in a new fangled media centre when you think of it like that....

James

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