Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1721 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"It's possible for a man to be arrogant and correct."
However, it is usually impossible for an arrogant man to convince anyone else that he is correct. Dawkins is an expert at preaching to the choir such that the choir think he's actually said something meaningful, but his entire writing style is antagonistic, and no debate that starts with one party calling the other stupid ever bore fruit....
If he'd at least had the guts to say it was because of the cover-ups, he might have got some respect, but he's repeatedly refused to accept any real culpability.
"If not, he will be sent down and, upon his death, may he burn in hell."
Actually, is there not something in the Bible about those who are punished on Earth being let off the hook in the afterlife, and those who escape punishment on Earth being damned to eternal torment? Perhaps someone ought to remind him that the longer he denies any wrong-doing, the less time he's got to receive Earthly just before departing this mortal coil....
(These revelations were the straw that broke the back of my dwindling faith. Now totally definitely agnostic.)
Get yourself to a university. Stick your head in a few lecture theatres. Netbooks have a reasonable chunk of the student market. Small and light enough to take to class, cheap enough to afford. I did once write to the Open University complaining about their mandating of .DOC files and suggesting that telling everyone to install the *totally free* OpenOffice.org wouldn't be onerous. They replied saying they had chosen MS Office because most people already had it and they didn't want to force people to install new software. (!!) I also suggested to them that IT support would be much easier if they offered a standard OU netbook offering a completely uniform operating environment, while also opening up an alternative revenue stream. They didn't go for that either.
Windows version, then? Here's a nickel, kid, go and buy yourself a real operating system.
Me, I used to fire up my Linux eee pc at the same time as my Windows PC and use it to check my email while I was waiting for the other PC to boot up.
I also found it a handy video phone as Skype on my 3-or-4-times-as-powerful machine kept stalling due to something or other running in the background.
@Mark .
"But no, what happened is the market reached saturation - everyone who wanted one, had one, and there was no draw to convince additional people to buy them."
I'm not convinced this is strictly true, I just think the current market for the netbook is a bit "niche", because I'm teaching in a university, and there's three types of devices on my student's desks: tablets, Macbooks and netbooks.
The student market is somewhat niche, but it's nothing to be sniffed at. I'm surprised it's not enough to keep two or three models in production, because I figure a lot of students might opt for the tablet this year but decide they need a proper keyboard next year....
I actually suspect that tablets could provide a genuine second wind for the netbook. If you Google "android mini laptop" you'll see that there's a white-label device or two out there using cheap tablet parts to built up 7" smaller-than-eee netbooks. Cutting the touchscreen makes it cheaper than a tablet, apparently. If tablet users do start using keyboards and mice to use their tablets for something more, we might start seeing better pseudo-desktop support in Android. If the manufacturers can build a range of netbooks and tablets off the same production line will minimal retooling, then the netbook might make its comeback in the form of Android.
If this comes it will start in the Far East, as the no-names have nothing to lose by challenging Wintel dominance, and everything to gain.
And finally... why do I think this is realistic?
Even Microsoft is trying to merge the mobile and desktop experience. If the public is given the choice between the Android mobile experience or Windows Phone, which would they chose? ...what has the reaction to W8 been like so far...?
I've just ordered a new charger for my 4 gig stock 1st gen EEE. I suspect I might find I need a new battery shortly, but I'm sick of classes being held up because my vastly-more-powerful 2012 laptop doesn't want to display the video I'm trying to show my students. It's small, light, with good codec support and an SVGA port. Job's a good un.
"This whole Jesus/religious story you are preaching is fiction! Let’s stick to the facts and not waffle on about wastage or how tax is spent in ways you do not approve of."
Go on then, prove it! The "render unto Caesar" stuff and the "turn the other cheek/go the extra mile" stuff are very likely the teachings of a genuine radical in Judea during the Roman occupation. It's all about passive resistance.
Now imagine two thousand years from now, the dominant religion is Gandhiism, which worships Mahatma, the son of Brahma, born of a virgin in India. Three world leaders came to pay tribute after his birth was foretold on Twitter, and they went to Queen Victoria to ask where the new King of the Indians was, which led her to massacre all the children in Amritsar.
Would that change the fact that the teachings of Mohandas K Gandhi were and are teachings of peace, of love, and of general moral good?
So why do you dismiss the good teachings of religion along with their bad parts? Throwing the bathwater out with the baby Jesus, so to speak....
It doesn't take a crook like Bernie Madoff to discredit this sort of thing.
London City Airport only became profitable when it folded, loosing the original investors a lot of cash. Another group picked it up cheap and the turnaround was pretty much inevitable because they didn't start with a crippling debt.
The original channel tunnel company went bust, leaving another group to pick it up cheap, and again, it was because the original debt burden was lost that the thing went profitable.
The same thing happens on smaller projects if they're still ambitious, such as the Edinburgh International Climbing Arena, that the council picked up cheap after the guys that built it went bust (the original construction cost was too high to ever make a profit).
For anything really big, you need someone else to make the loss first so that you can make the profit in the aftermath.
(And of course this is the point of patents: to afford some protection to the trailblazing losers so that they remain competitive against the guys without the debt burden from the R&D. Space patents will most likely deal with the specifics rather than the core problems of space mining, particularly given most of the big problems have already undergone a lot of public debate, so there'll be a fair bit of wiggle room to work around them....)
Well, I can see from the internet that the US doesn't seem to care about eternal discounts ("must end soon" being a permanent fixture on many smaller websites), but in many countries it's fraud to claim a discounted price when there's never a "full" price to discount it against -- the UK is one of these.
So what choice did they have? If they'd raised the price only in countries where they were legally obliged to do so, there would have been a backlash against "rip-off" foreign prices etc.
If they want to drop the price, they'll have to wait a while -- 3 months, IIRC in the UK, and it's unlikely to be much longer elsewhere.
@Matt Bryant,
"I'm pretty certain no-one in the NRA really believes games cause violence,"
Why so sure? You're forgetting the basics of being "invested" in an idea.
The gun owner says "I am a good person -- I don't kill people". He then conflates his self-identity as a "good person" with his group identity as a member of the firearms community. This group identity is tied to the physical items we call guns. Therefore the firearms enthusiast has to believe that a gun is a good thing, as it is part of his "good person" identity.
The evidence that he is presented with overwhelmingly indicates that guns are Very Bad Things indeed, and that now threatens his own self-image, as he actually considers the gun a part of his person. Therefore he must convince himself 100% that the problem is elsewhere.
That's the psychology behind it, and that's what we've got to fight against.
The clue's right their at the top of the article: "critical infrastructure". Bob's job was in the US, and not already outsourced, because of security implications. Bob "outsourced" himself by granting access to a secure network to people not adequately vetted to connect to it. He has not only breached his contract of employment, but he has brought his employer into breach with their clients, a breach which will no doubt lead to a very, very expensive audit of every single line of the codebase.
I'm with you on that. If there had been some withering satire in there, I'd have supported the viral thing. eg if they'd quoted figures on failures and inefficiencies in the private rail sector.
What I was expecting was Hornby or someone making a public stand against the prostitution of our cherished industrial heritage, the degradation of rolling stock, the poor maintenance of lines etc. Instead I just got told "there's this toy company you've never heard of, and they're getting cheap publicity by spamming the civil service..."
OK then, go and tell us what material facts are incorrect and what is opinion masquerading as fact, because as far as I can see, Andrew is providing in-depth analysis on a current news story by looking at a very similar case study from recent history.
This is what you call "good journalism", and while Orlowski may have resorted to a little too much editorialising of late, this is the sort of critical insight that made many of us start reading the Register way back when.
I now understand US class action lawsuits infinitely better than I did this morning, and I now also understand why it is prone to abuse.
(Incidentally, what I knew before this morning was mostly based on reporting of the Google Books settlement process here on the Register....)
I had a terrible response from 4OD at my parents house over Christmas -- someone was clearly throttling it somewhere along the line, as multi-megabyte software installs downloades pretty damn quickly, and 4OD was fine at "unsocial hours". And I used to work in an office that became distinctly unproductive after 3:30 when schoolkids got home and choked up the BT bandwidth that we needed to connect to our data centre hundreds of miles away.
There isn't quite enough capacity on the internet as it is, and squeezing extra pixels into the next series of Strictly isn't a good use of what there is.
And besides, while I'd never underestimate the ability of codec writers, I'd never overestimate the intelligence of codec implementers either. MP3 was long derided as a useless music format because (as I understand it) the most popular encoders in commercial use for over a decade were really really bad at encoding music without degrading the signal atrociously.
And consider the whole backward compatibility problem -- DAB is rubbish and there's a better option (DAB+), but we can't use it because there's existing sets that don't support it. The only reason we've been able to move to Freeview+ is because of HD. Freeview+ on SD would give superior results, but it would render a lot of kit obsolete.
So if the codec writers produce that amazing new mathemagic just a little bit too late, we won't get to use it....
@Khaptain,
"No, not create another religion but simply to educate people to think for themselves.. We will never completely remove "ignorance" but we can reduce it."
Unfortunately, it's much easier to get the public to echo your views than to actually think for themselves. Consider the number of people who believe that science disproves religion, and consider Stephen Jay Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria". It doesn't matter how much we intend to teach by logic and reason, most people who believe us are convinced purely by the presumed "authority" of the speaker, secular or religious.
Over the last few years I've seen a new myth appear and it's all over the sodding internet: the claim that "Hogmanay" (Scottish for New Year's Eve) comes from the Gaelic "Oge maidne"... which doesn't exist. There is something similar -- "òg-mhadainn", but this means the very start of a morning (predawn, I believe). And yet it has spread so profusely that you'll even see someone posting pictures of his New Year's parties under the heading "Oge Maidne".
It's being copy-and-pasted around so much that it's killing genuine truth....
"It's not always 'the programmer's' fault."
That was part of the message of the article, even if it was a secondary one.
But I think the problem is fundamentally this:
No matter how much design you do in advance, all programming is essentially "design by prototype" as there isn't a single programmer I know who can order his thoughts and visualise all the possible side-effects of a large codebase before he hits his IDE.
Therefore it follows that the output of any coding process is a prototype. That's what we need to start teaching to managers: "it's a prototype, it demonstrates the principles and design decisions required for making a production model, but it's not a production model." If you need to, say it's a matchstick model of the structure you want to build: it's identical aside from being a bit weak.
The lighting connector is not the same as a USB connector, because the connections inside the computer are different. You don't want two different interface types that use the same physical cable, as that confuses the plebs who try to plug one into the other and get confused when it doesn't work. If the new iOS devices have internal chippery that talks both Lightning and USB, great. I have an old USB mouse at home that has a PS2 controller chip inside, and I can attach a PS2 adaptor (with no fancy components) and plug it into a PS2 port -- but that doesn't mean PS2 and USB are the same technology, and it certainly doesn't mean
that the USB standard should have mandated a PS2 connector!
I'm not a fan of Apple's money-sucking lock-in, and I will only buy Apple when my current dev project matures to the point where I have to start actively testing the cross-platform portability (and even then it will be under protest). I'm not even sure I'll be able to release for iOS (as my revenue model is more online subscription than app, and if Apple thinks it can suck 30% out of my server revenues they're sorely mistaken).
But I still wouldn't criticise them for using a different shaped connector for a different type of connection!
Are you using "hibernate" or "sleep"?
Laptops have a sleep mode where the computer goes into a low power mode and keeps memory in RAM.
"Hibernation" is possible on any PC: Windows writes the full system state to disc then powers down.
If your computer takes a few seconds, it's just taking a nap, not bedding down for the winter, so it keeps the power connected to RAM while cutting the processor and hard-drive.
One of the biggest problems with wikipedia these days is the idiots who think they know more about a subject than other people who have written on the subject or who wont say where th einfo comes from
The biggest problem with Wikipedia these days is the collection of admins who will ferociously monitor a page to prevent anyone else from editing it but themselves. Therefore making sure that the information on the page is basically their own opinion. As a result
1. They edit the page to add some text which they hold to be self-evident truth
2. Another editor then has to remove the edit, because it doesn't fit his pedantic, public-school idea of good English ("you and me"?!? Egads!), doesn't make sense, or he just doesn't like it so points out that it doesn't comply exactly to the letter of one of the many woolly standards for sourcing
3. They revert their revert, rightfully ignoring the spurious reason why the self-important mod claimed it wasn't acceptable in the first place. (2 and 3 may repeat a couple of times)
4. An admin then locks the page, puffs up his chest in a self-righteous rage and says: "he was wrong".
{{ref|http://xkcd.com/386/}}
Defend them all you want, but I would urge you to reread the appeal that they put on their website before doing so. They did not ask for money to defend internet freedoms. They did not ask for money to get certain photographs that WP contributors hadn't been able to source for free. They asked for money, and they cited only the operating costs of the website: servers, power, rent, programs, staff and legal help. It is not unreasonable for readers to assume that they need this money for the free volunteer encyclopedia bit.
It is dishonest.
Ah indeed... recorded music as advertising for live gigs -- excellent idea. These live gigs certainly need all the advertising they can get, as they are the artists' main means of promoting their recorded music. So let's build a perpetual motion merry-go-round of advertising adverts for adverts advertising adverts of adverts.
2. ????
3. PROFIT!
Vapourware? How so? It's a marketing dream: commodity Chinese components (Android phone internals), in a box, minus the two most expensive components (screen and battery). The only actual work they have to do to release it is set up their own app store and convince a few devs to upload their games. 2: PROFIT.
“A lot of people look at C++ and want to understand every dark corner. This is what you do if you want to be a compiler writer, but most people should look at what is the easiest way to write a good solution for their problem," said Stroustrup.
Oh no. Heck no. Hell no. F*** no.
That's hacking, not programming. It leads to training people to hack, rather than to program.
If I appear to be repeating myself, it's because it's a Very Important Point.
The world has enough different languages already, generating lots of incompatible code. When your language encourages people only to learn subsets of itself, it becomes effectively a myriad of closely related languages, but undefined and uncontrolled languages. "So you're a C++ programmer. Does that mean C++.subset(a,b,c), .subset(d,g,z) or .subset(f,m,dribble)?"
I suppose it may be fairer to call it "dialectisation", but the end result is that code is harder to share and maintain, because programmers' expectations and assumptions vary so far from each other's.
People hack the solution from the coding techniques they know, because the right way to do it is obscured.
If you really want a language that supports multiple subsets of functionality, you have to find a way to segregate and mark them clearly and unambiguously, so that programmers are able to identify what they know and look for what they don't know.
"The cost is to high and the reliability hasn't been that good. Of the twenty I've bought so far 4 of them have failed within the first week which gives me reason to doubt I'll get the advertised 20,000 hours of use from the remaining ones."
Failures in solid-state semiconductors are generally rare. Early failure normally indicates a manufacturing fault. And manufacturing faults usually result in early failures.
IE expect the duff ones to die very quickly, and expect the decent ones to last a long time.
"But I am puzzled at to why the kid would pull out any electronic aids at an interview other than to make an impression. That gesture by itself is suspect in exactly the ways detailed by the interviewer."
Let me suggest a perfectly innocent reason: maybe it went off during the interview, and he wanted to silence it. Benefit of the doubt, yes?
When I was a student in Edinburgh, he AI department used fish for the workstations, ran out of common ones, and started onto methods of cooking them. The CS department used Scottish islands but were running out of names and was resorting to various little skerries and sea rocks on the admiralty charts....
"Until devs start to actually make use of the hardware in the WiiU fully, I just don't see any point getting it when I have my current consoles."
Which devs? Me, I'm think Android, Linux and PC hackers. If I can use a Wii U Controller with them... cool. My wee Galaxy can sit in my pocket while benefitting from a bigger screen and proper game controls, or pipe my Skype between the controller and the net. And when I get home I can do the exact same thing with my PC. At work, I could use it with dual-screen on my PC to control presentations with more finesse, previewing the next slide before announcing it and changing the order of slides on the fly to respond better to my audience and cover subjects that repeat without having to copy slides (and risk versioning problems when I start editing).
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