Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
If you actually read the article you've just cited, you'll see that while there was *a* ginger gene in Europe back then, this was not *the* ginger gene -- it was a different gene.
Of course, if red hair evolved twice in Europe and fair hair once, that suggests that light pigmentation is more than merely "acceptable", but of a real evolutionary advantage -- and that would most likely be vitamin D production, as others have said.
How do you like your eggs?
The way I don't like them.
Most people genuinely don't know what they want. The real proof will be one year after the launch of the iPad when someone does a study of the number of books read by an average iPad users (or at least iPad user who bought it planning to use it as an ereader anyway) vs average Kindle/Reader user.
User experience will encourage reading on dedicated ebook readers and discourage it on iPad.
You mark my words (most ebook readers allow annotations, after all)....
Company wants to get into a market.
Company codes a solution.
Regulators state it isn't safe and/or doesn't protect data.
Company says it can't afford to make it safe and/or protect data.
It baffles me how companies have got a way with pleading "technology". YouTube is a publisher -- it's a branded site with lots of branded content, but they cry "ISP" when asked to take responsibility for that content.
Chatrooms put people in touch with each other but without any sort of supervision or vettin as would occur in the real world (eg IDing drinkers in pubs). They cry "technology" and they're let off with running a profit without protecting their customers.
Stuff it, guys, off-line computer programmers deal with regulatory constraints all the time. If we write software that doesn't comply with them -- we get fined.
On-line companies ignore regulation, steamroller through, and when someone pops up and points out the flaws they say "it's too expensive to fix". That's a flawed business model, and that's the business's fault.
No sympathy from me.
This technology reads your brain as you carry out the thoughts that trigger the finger movements. It doesn't mean that you don't have to move your fingers, but it does mean that you can still type if your fingers aren't there.
But if your fingers/wrists/arms are very sore rather than missing, these thoughts will still trigger the movements and exacerbate the pain.
(Former sufferer of a (thankfully) mild RSI, still requiring careful management of keying time and posture.)
"One day, a relatively simple headset may allow a person to manipulate a cursor and enter text without benefit of such antique interfaces as mouse, keyboard, voice-control or touchscreen - so freeing up his or her hands for critical tasks such as drinking coffee or scratching."
The point is that they are reading instructions to muscles. To drink coffee you have to think about moving your hands appropriately. If you're thinking about drinking coffee, you won't be able to think about typing simultaneously without spilling it!
Most mobile apps are mere mashups of functions in the OS anyway -- it's more configuration than coding.
That was really the original goal of open source software, wasn't it? To remove the need to "reinvent the wheel" in code and just plug all the modules together to achieve the necessary
Back in the early Unix days, this resulted in the various C libraries that we now all take for granted (even if in their ported forms as used by other languages) and all the standard shell utilities that could be scripted together with pipes and redirection.
Modern FOSS has lost its way a bit, producing a lot of monolithic code that has to be heavily refactored to extract individual functions.
Case in point: OpenOffice.org. The GUI, rendering engine and backend are all tied together. Why's this bad? Cos every time they upgrade, the translation projects have to start again or you're stuck on the last version. Why shouldn't you be able to render and edit 3.0 with a 2.0 interface? Sure, you'll not get all the new functionality, but at least you'll be able to both use your own language and read files created in the latest version....
The current law on books is that every book or periodical that gets published commercially in the UK must be supplied to 5 libraries that hold copies in perpetuity. There is no judgement on suitability. If it's published, it's in. They are just trying to maintain the status quo, and I think that's a good thing. I have seen many websites vanish with only a partial mirror at archive.org . Among the legions of dross at Geocities, there were several gems, including one of the two best internet libraries of Scottish Gaelic song lyrics that were lost.
Then there's the idea of corpus research. Having access to all these tweets and comments would allow language researchers to examine questions like how the internet is changing literacy, and that is a genuinely interesting and important topic.
Immature sexually frustrated nerd reads teenage trash -- number 7.
Wants woman: needs photo for lonely hearts site -- number 9.
Photo not having desired effect: needs to "enhace" his package -- number 2.
Woman bites -- now needs to talk his way round the obvious doctoring -- number 8.
Failed attempts using info from number 1.
Falls back to number 3 for simpler explanation.
As stated, this leads to a domestic situation requiring number 10
Woman goes on line looking for number 4.
In the process she discovers number 6 on the hard drive.
Woman calls power company and broadband provider demanding immediate disconnection.
Man uses remaining battery in laptop and neighbour's unsecured wifi to download number ´5 and restore his access to number 6 and its ilk...
"We believe that a 50 pence levy placed on fixed telecommunication lines is an ill-directed charge. It will place a disproportionate cost on a majority who will not, or are unable to, reap the benefits of that charge,"
Isn't this pretty much the definition of all government spending? The majority of people pay National Insurance to subsidise the minority who have serious illnesses or long-term unemployment problems. A city dweller who never travels more than 5 miles in his car pays the same road tax as a farmer who lives 50 miles from any major town. An immigrant not educated in this country and with no children is still required to fund UK schools.
It is in the country's interests to maintain a stable rural population, and right now "market forces" are freezing rural people out of broadband, and they are the people most in need of improved communications links.
No amount of tax breaks is going to make rural cabling more profitable than sticking to dense urban centres -- compulsion is the only option.
"I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people forget to manually eject their USB pendrives from a computer before pulling it out of the port."
Most users don't "forget" to do it -- they didn't know in the first place!
So design error one is making it possible.
Design error two is that the OS doesn't pop up a great big flashing error every single time you do it, but gives you a small non-descript dialogue box or balloon, and includes a little checkbox saying "don't show this error again".
Unplugging a device without stopping it first risks data loss, so the user shouldn't be able to ignore it....
Foreign students!! They all want to blow us up!! When I was at uni I had a classmate from the Middle East, and she killed me with a suicide bomb in a lecture!! One of my classmates had a flatmate from the Middle East -- he killed me with a suicide bomb in the pub!! I was also killed on three separate occasions by foreign students I didn't know entering nightclubs with improvised incendiary devices, and twice in the Scotmid Coop by foreigners bearing bandoliers of hand grenades.
Edinburgh used to be a peaceful city, but since the University started letting in foreign students, you can't walk the streets for fear of being blown up unexpectedly by an angry student suicide squad!!
"For starters, hardwiring a mobile device to peripherals is counter-intuative!"
Even accounting for the spelling mistake, that makes no sense. First up, they aren't hardwiring anything. If you follow the link, what you get is a picture of an *external interface* that allows you to plug in devices. They may not be hot-swappable, but they're certainly cold-swappable. That's a bit different from "hardwired".
And what's "counterintuitive" about wanting to plug your digital cameraphone straight into a printer? Think about all the money the various camera/printer companies ploughed into Easyshare, DirectPrint, PictBridge and the like -- people want direct-from-camera printing, and I'm personally a bit surprised Google didn't see fit to support and sell that as feature out of the box.
It would also fit with making the Android a business phone -- carry your docs with you and print on demand (but only with the sysadmin's permission in the form of a central security policy, naturally).
...his mum did! It says it in the article, in black and white (unless you've been playing silly beggars with custom style sheets in your browser again).
It's men that shouldn't see a woman's face, and his mum is quite likely not to be a man, so it's no problem at all for her to see the potential daughter-in-law's face. Really she should have insisted on meeting her in person, so maybe he should be suing his mother for neglect of parental duty too....
If you're going to be derisory about other people's cultures, get your facts straight first!
If it's up for sale, it's best off being bought by the French -- Nord-Pas-de-Calais make a phenomenal amount of money off sales taxes at "booze-cruise" hypermarkets and wine warehouses, and the biggest customers of the ferries are tourists heading to France and French haulier Norbert Dentressangle delivering goods to the UK.
A French-owned Calais would be an investment that would be expected to pay off in multiple ways -- sell it to a corporation and it's profit above all else.
I'm not in favour of privatisation, not by any stretch, but this xenophobic "not the froggies" nonsense is risible. If we sell, they're the best buyer.
Don't know about yours, but my netbook has an external monitor connection.
Once they all move from VGA to HDMI you'll even be able to use an HD telly as a 1920x1080 monitor. At that netbook could quite realistically replace the home PC for a massive percentage of the population.
Yes, there'll be a camera-equipped model -- it's inevitable.
However, this patent is not evidence of this. Even if they had no plans to make one themselves, it's in Apple's interest to make sure that every patent they make for the iPhone covers as many devices as possible, if only to make sure that anyone who wants to do it has to pay through the nose.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't current iPhone/iPod Touch games already work this way, using the device's accelerometers?
The wheel designer hasn't created the problem of visual reference -- that's something the game designer's did. I'm guessing that they compensated for this in the programming of the game....
"And surely the iPad is powerful enough to cope [with running Windows]?"
My car won't work on a railway. That's not because it's not powerful enough, it's just not built to run on rails. Windows has never been released for ARM, so it can't be run on the iPhone.
Unless you do what the Finnish Mac phone guy did and emulate an x86 processor in software, but that's something that the iPad is certainly not powerful enough for!
I don't shave often enough, I spend months between haircuts. It's all too much effort, but now I realise that I can get "positive results" from having my nose broken and reset -- all my problems are solved!!!
In all seriousness, saying anything positive about cosmetic surgery (ie non-reconstructive plastic surgery) is effectively talking up dysmorphia, which is a clinically recognised mental disorder.
Anyone who visits the cosmetic surgeon should be considered dysmorphic, and as such incompetent to give consent. And if a surgeon operates on someone incompetent to give consent, he must be struck off.
Yes, all cosmetic surgeons should be struck off.
I voted computer engineer, but I only voted at all because I know that if it comes out, Moss and Roy will get their hands on one. I have no idea what they'll do with it, but it ought to be hilarious.
In fact, it probably doesn't matter -- now that the suggestion's out there, it'll probably find its way into the series whether or not it actually exists.
...Rockall, Force 4, N by NW; teacup, force 10...
At my primary school, we had kids dictionaries. Bigger print, simpler explanations, fewer rude words. This is not an affront to children's intelligence.
In some other schools, they used "proper" dictionaries, dirty words and all. This was not an affront to decency. (Heck, we even had the "big dictionary" at the front of the class too, and another in the library.)
To me, either policy is acceptable. If a particular school authority wants to change policy, that is acceptable too, and it's acceptable that a transitional period sees both in schools.
What is unreasonable and unacceptable is that both sides make this out to be a major human rights crisis, and that these rights have to be protected on an individual-by-individual basis.
It's not the kids who need to grow up, but everyone else.
(Besides, when does a kid really need a dictionary anyway?)
If it H.264 cost $5,000,000 for browser implementation, and there's now 5 major browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari), that's 25 million dollars.
If we assume that they're going to make the same amount of money from consumer digital video devices, that's another 25 million, totalling 50 million dollars.
Then we take the assumption that they're planning to make more from commercial encoding (broadcast, DVD distribution, VoD sites) we're looking at least another 50 million.
So it would appear that they want over $100,000,000 for a video codec.
Did the spend an inordinate number of man-hours working on this, or are they taking just the pi[NO CARRIER]
OK, so we're not expecting to get a brand-new battery every time, but as battery capacities degrade with age, you have no idea how far you can go after a change. It's like going to a petrol station, asking for a lucky dip on fuel amount and running without a petrol gauge. (My work laptop still shows over 90% charge 30 seconds before it pops up a low battery warning and spontaneously shuts down....)
I just have this nasty feeling that an orbital nuclear strike platform is more likely to be used for a military strike than against a catastrophic piece of space debris. Comparing the number of known catastrophic space debris strikes against the number of armed conflicts in human history doesn't leave you with favourable odds....
Testers and debuggers generate very very few lines of code, but they're not an insignificant part of the dev process.
Can we see a follow-up that examines paid-for testing. If Red Hat et al aren't putting doing their own thorough testing, they're setting themselves up for liability....
"Persuading users to use stronger passwords is an age-old problem that dates back to the dawn of the PC era."
It's not an old problem, it's a new problem.
In the old days, you had about 3 passwords; you had to convince the user to make them strong. Once they were strong, you could use them for a long time because they were secure. Because you didn't change them, you could remember them.
Now, we all have a dozen or so passwords. If we make them strong, they're hard to remember. The harder they are to remember, the more likely we are to reuse them. Because some people use weak passwords, corporate policies add a layer of security by forcing us to change them every few months.
I can remember every password I had on the computers at uni, because I used them frequently for a long time. My password for the office PC expires so quickly that I've barely learnt it by the time I'm asked to change it. The cognitive load is high, and every time I sit back down and unlock my PC, I have to filter out "noise" from half-a-dozen old and "other system" passwords before I get to log in.
So my passwords are getting weaker all the time as it's the only way to remember them.
It is a new problem -- it just looks similar to an old one.
As usual, a bunch of people say "why are you complaining"?
Google has got to the point where it rarely makes life any easier. Googlemail is presumably already turning a massive profit. If Google are increasing profits without improving UX, then it follows that Google are increasing prices (we are paying for Googlemail by our willingness to accept adverts) at no advantage to the user. It's a classic bait-and-switch: get them hooked on something cheap, then start turning the screw.
The cunning part of Google's plan is that the customer doesn't even realise he's paying!
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