Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1744 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"being thick as two short planks is genetic"
Genes are only one factor in intelligence. But by far the biggest factor is education. Children in an environment with low mental stimulation are less well educated when they start school and never catch up.
(On the other hand, I've known many people in degree-educated jobs who do seem quite thick despite all that education...)
The "fluke" tag is entirely justified. There's plenty of times I've looked like I've been on for a one-shot win, but one plank has fallen awkwardly and blocked everything, making the level uncompletable. That difference between a perfect win and a complete fail is too tiny to be under my control -- AB is largely luck.
Perhaps so, but the first lesson they need to learn is where to start, and they started at the wrong place. They built a huge whopping rig before having a working prototype -- they said that they've still to develop the Arduino code, but they should have got that up and running with a Lego or plywood prototype before getting the welding equipment out. I can't see how they're going to manage to retrofit the actuators into the bearings -- they might have to dismantle it and start again.
Car dealerships pay a LOT of money to be an official Vauxhall/Ford/BMW whatever dealer and service centre. Warranty terms often specify that all servicing must be carried out by an official dealer, and that repairs must use official spare parts. That keeps the customer's business with the manufacturer for several years. Even afterwards, there's still a lot of money in aftermarket parts that are increasingly specialised and difficult to reproduce.
Furthermore, a car costs thousands of pounds and R&D is a relatively small component of that -- manufacturing costs are high.
Manufacturing costs for digitial media and cardboard packaging are negligible, but the time spent developing a commercial game is absolutely huge.
"I’m also sure that the copyright mafiaa did some lobbying on this to ensure the plebs pay more for their music."
Erm... why? The content producers have nothing to gain from this. Low taxation keeps pre-tax sales prices high, so I would imagine it means the label's share of the sale stays up. Slightly lower prices also lead to slightly higher sales, so they win again.
You don't like record labels -- fine. But don't blame them for every evil in the world.
I'm not a hardcore gamer (I got out of gaming after suffering work-related RSI) but as someone who was on the road frequently with work a few years ago, I can see the benefit in being able to walk into a hotel, kick off my shoes, jump on the bed and start playing my games. The work laptop always had one or two games on it (up until the drive encryption and app lockdown -- grrr!!!) but that also meant carrying DVD ROMs everywhere.
At the time, a device like the Xperia Play with wireless TV connection would have been a godsend.
They don't do this now because that would be against "the market". It would be "big government", which is Satan's own political system eh wot, doncha know.
Funnily enough, there is one area where educational materials *are* centrally funded: Gaelic-medium education in Scotland. The Mail, the Tax-Payers' Alliance et al will immediately jump up and down about the thousands being spent on a-language-that-isn't-God's-own-English, and completely fail to do the sums... under which they'd find that centrally commissioned material is actually head-for-head cheaper than stuff subject to market forces.
You can explain this to an economist in two words: "reduced risk", yet somehow the idea that reducing competition reduces efficiency (which is generally true, but not applicable here) leaves them incapable of accepting this simplest of simple law of economics.
There isn't much of value in urine, but it does provide nitrogen in a soil-friendly form. At normal concentration, urine can singe and burn plants, but water it down, and it becomes a good source of nourishment. My big brother used to wee in the garden after a night on the juice, and we got nice thick green patches out of it, because it was adequately diluted when it came out.
I think modern society is forgetting that our ancestors had problems with teen pregnancy too. Society evolved a very neat solution for dealing with the problem, and I think it would serve us well to learn from the wisdom of our ancestors. Unfortunately, that solution has been taken from us by liberal laws. No, I'm not talking about whipping (for some people, that's a turn-on, so more sex) or "honour killings" (if you're willing to kill your kid, then obviously it's your fault he/she turned out that way -- you're not a very loving father. No, I'm talking about the good old, traditional shotgun wedding.
It's got everything:
* compensation for the injured party (the knocked up girl gets financial support)
* punishment for the injuring party (where do you think the phrase "ball and chain" comes from?)
* an active deterrent (before you sh@g this burd/bloke, ask yourself, could you bear spending the rest of your life with them...?)
Seriously, Thailand, enact a shotgun marriage statute and the numbers WILL drop. Guaranteed.
" You make it sound like Google maliciously and deliberately posted the photo just to embarrass him.But the fact of the matter is that this guy is not the first to get caught... err.. out, nor will he be the last. "
No, it's that Google negligently published the picture without any editorial control, despite various similar incidents in the past. Google's business model is "give offerings to the Almighty Algorithm", and is predicated on minimal human intervention. Even if he gets the money he's asked for, Google will continue to do this, and people will continue to be compromised in Google snaps. Because it's making lots of money for Google.
I went to a traditional uni, and a decade in IT since has proven the value of a proper education, instead of a glorified Microsoft bootcamp.
I may not have known the tools everyone was using, and the company may not have realised the value in training me in them (instead of moaning that I didn't know how to use them), but for everything I picked up, I was better than my colleagues. Why? They were limited by the tools. "This is how it works." "You can't do that with X." Or better yet "you can't do that with computers."
Basically, I learned about computers, and most of my colleagues learnt Visual Studio and SQL Server. Now I've left corporate IT to start work on my own development project, doing lots of very simple things that my colleagues would have thought impossible, because there isn't a .NET function that does it for them.
Give me a traditional education any day.
The firewall is and always will be vital. The firewall's first and most important job is to prevent "exploratory" hacking -- someone getting on to the network and looking for exploits on the individual servers. You can't be sure you've eliminated all security holes, so you add an extra level of defence.
It's just like having a door on your building, and a gate on your campus, really.
Even better -- give them a "continuous partial salary".
People _do_ _not_ multitask in any higher cognitive functions. People only multitask in one higher function alongside other automatised functions. Split attention kills productivity, which is why always-on email is so corrosive in the workplace -- it breaks all sense of flow or concentration.
Have Asus no idea about branding at all? The name "Asus" is a week brand (I keep mixing them up with Acer, and I've got an Asus laptop and an Acer Ee.... oh look, I've done it again). They've just dropped the Eee brand for Transformer, and just when the ultimate "Transformer" form factor appears, they go and change it again. What's wrong with "Transformer Phone" or "Transformer Padphone"?
The next step could have been a "Transformer home" -- a lap-mounted keyboard with phone dock and wireless HDMI.
One computer, all form-factors. Transformer, indeed.
A boffin's pipe should lie at least 15 degrees off the mouth's normal (otherwise known as "the nose"). This allows for a relaxed, comfortable light grasp when pondering a question put to you by a fellow intellectual or an inquisitive member of the public.
A pipe held co-incident with the normal offend causes offense or injury when you inadvertently prod someone with it.
"Ever since 3.1 the logo has always been RGB-Y, its very distinguishable and plain out recognizable."
I'm not so sure. Starting with Google and Playstation, bright, bold colours have become something of the norm. The iconicity of the Windows logo was that it was four colours -- which colours they were doesn't really matter. Then there's the individual colour branding of MS Office apps, which has bled across to LibreOffice, imitating the ancient art of crisp-packet design (that's potato chips for those who get up late in the morning), which has further devalued Windows-colours as a brand.
And aside from that, colour technology has moved on. With fades and wipes and grades and alpha-channeling, on-screen colour works in ways that are far more different from what came before. The Start button (which is on it's way out anyway) has become increasingly out of step with every generation of Windows since 95, because it's a product of its time -- when Windows 3.x ruled the roost, there wasn't much more than a few bright, bold colours, and that was exciting. The Windows logo screamed "look, we're in colour!!!!", nowadays it just screams, and delivers no message.
20 years ago, the lasers and mirrors required meant while the medium was small, the read/write apparatus was humungous. This was because lasers were more difficult to make, and there was presumably significant power loss in the medium.
There have been many incremental improvements since then in both media and laser tech, so I'd guess that it's on the cusp of being a commercially viable technology. The last attempt to produce something was a disc, and aimed at the removable media market, and that introduced certain engineering complications.
These guys have a better chance, as they'll be aiming at the fixed-drive market, and now's a very good time for that, as SSDs have opened the market to non-disk-based systems. It also plays to the miniaturisation trend even more than SSDs - if they can get the power requirements low enough, the next-gen iPod won't only be able to hold your entire CD collection, it'll be able to store your entire DVD collection too... and perhaps even without any additional compression.
Put this in an Android phone and the era of the truly universal personal portable computer will begin, and office desks the world over will have mobile phone docking stations instead of PCs or laptop stands.
The article is about "a conservative ideology", not "the Conservative ideology".
Homophobia is by nature a "conservative" trait. In Stalin's time, antisemitism was a "conservative" trait. In Mugabe's case, we have a loosely Christian-based ideology -- conservative.
The only non-conservative trait either of them showed was for self-betterment. The conservative fallacy of blacks as inferior to the white man would never get Bob anywhere. The conservative view of kings, peers and bourgeoisie would never have got Stalin anywhere. But both are pretty much defined by small-c conservatism: keep things the way they've always been.
One thing i notice is that they are talking about percentages of "users" -- a single figure.
But one thing we know from surveys of sexual habits is that guys always come out more loose than women. In fact, I don't think there's been a single survey where the amount of sex men have doesn't seriously outweigh the amount of sex woman have. So the question is: is there a gender bias in the samples? Or in other words, do more guys use Android?
The reason Rovio like it is because it helps "Angry Birds". What helps Angry Birds does not help the software market as a whole. Angry Birds makes money from merchandising, most software does not. Piracy targets popular items, so establishes them further. It supports Rovio's dominant market position, it harms everyone else.
The noteworthy thing about these three is that I believe they're all parts of the NES release "The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy". It had multiple worlds, and a the end of one, Dizzy was made to walk the plank by a pirate, and had to escape from the sea by jumping on bubbles. I don't know what the reason was for the Toobin' clone stage (that became Dizzy Down the Rapids).
Not true.
What HP get is the ability to continue to sell WebOS devices, using existing staff expertise, rather than having to "retool" to support WinPhone or Android.
WebOS needs a critical mass that HP can't provide in order to be a success, so they need others to pick it up and make it a viable mass-market option, therefore attracting developers (who will mostly be looking to cross-compile products available on other platforms anyway).
Maybe this isn't "return on investment" -- maybe it's simply "cutting their losses" -- but it's either the most profitable or least loss-making option for the moment.
WebOS has to stay pretty tight, hardware-wise. Android's biggest problem is that it's available in too many formats, so the user experience is very much hardware dependent. As WebOS isn't (currently) hardware agnostic, whereas Android is (hence lack of acceleration), WebOS's niche has to be on the user experience. As a commoditised OS, it has a feeling of genericity, but if the hardware is less generic, it will continue to outperform Android (and possibly also WinPhone) making it a candidate for OS of choice for anyone trying to produce an iPhone competitor.
