Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1631 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
The LHC has detected evidence of the existence of the hypothesised "quaint quark", postulated to be responsible for the phenomenon known as "nostalgic action at a distance", where people's memories of their childhood hellholes are magically transformed into images of wonder and light...
MS are dealing with marketplace demands. As a major player, they're dealing with essentially commoditised services. They can't have highly reactive pricing, because most of their customers don't have reactive pricing for their customers; pricing in US dollars would effectively be instantly reactive pricing dependant on exchange rate movements only, and making smaller adjustments to pound price to account for exchange rates would be literally reactive pricing. That means dollar pricing would bugger up MS's clients' budgets very quickly indeed, which would be total disaster in international markets.
Consider:
Microsoft sells only in dollars.
Market movements lead to deflation/devaluation in Xland.
Speculators then consider that the majority of companies in Xland are going to have a soaring cost-base, so consider all such companies a liability, further destabilising the economy of Xland.
Microsoft's policy of making large, infrequent corrections to account for exchange rate moves is actually pretty good for everyone.
"They invested a lot of money up front to get this going, with a view to making back that investment with a profit over many years.
The 'over many years' is the main point here. At the moment it looks as if they wand to do it in one year."
I seem to recall that Microsoft's MO is to have the minimum number of price changes possible. At every price change they try to predict future trends and price accordingly.
If I'm recalling correctly, I picked that up from a Reg article on enterprise VLAs some time last decade.
"We then did a napkin math to find out how many kits would we need to emulate 1GB of RAM... and I don't think FESTO produced enough didactic kits to do that.
Did you calculate the floor area required as well?"
How about the effect on local air pressure in changing between all 0s and all 1s?
"As the night continues, rapid fluctuations in air pressure will bring in a series of warm and cold fronts, as some geek tries to unzip a ISO CD image.
"Then watch as BT die a death except with granny who wouldn't know who else to use, and has to start competing properly again, and lower their stupendous prices for what they offer."
I did some IT work for a company offering white label broadband. The business guys there told me that BT was actually officially barred from offering competitive prices due to its dominance in the market....
""I fail to see how the geometry works unless you find the headphone jack to be of sufficient diamet.... oh, you said flAshlight. Nevermind."
Ahh but I'm sure that somewhere out there, there is smartphone controlled device of sufficient diameter to encompass your every need!"
And then your magic wand can interface with your magic wand!
The sideways flame... two theories:
1) That the flame is continuously ventilated, so the fire acts like it would before the fire suppression systems stop circulating oxygen in an emergency situation.
2) As the materials are in a closed area (the test vessel) the expansion of the gases due to the heating (and also the additional pyrolytic gases increasing the local pressure) leads to a constant movement of the burning vapours away from the centre of the fire, which in this instance means movement from the right of the container to the left.
Personally, I'd put my money on 1.
As a signatory to the Berne Convention, the US government is responsible for not having any laws that allow any body, public or private, to rip off the copyright of anyone from outside their country.
That should in theory mean that if the court finds against the complainant, they'll be able to take it to the WTO and get a judgement against the US. The way that works is that they can then ignore copyright of anybody the hell they like from the US to the value of the debt.
What would be really cool would be for them to decide to make fully legal clones of MacOS or iOS devices.
" No, nature never intended to run applications in something called a "browser", which was born for a very different use. "
I'm pretty sure nature didn't create sand just so that we could melt it down and form massive crystals that we then slice into thin sheets and bombard with focused photons in order to start firing pulses of electrons through them.
Computers are way beyond what nature intended anyway.
I remember a time when an operating system was considered to be a waste of resources. The Dreamcast was the first console with a proper OS, and even then, almost everything was coded for bare metal.
A web-browser is a type of GUI, designed initially for very specific types of data and presentation. If I'm knocking together a quick program for my own use, I'll often put up with the general crappiness of Javascript so as to take advantage of HTML forms as a quick and easy GUI.
The point is that UK law has been gradually refined to get past contractor cons. There was a time when a company could pay minimum wage to an agency, and the agency would take their cut leaving the worker below minimum wage, and they claimed this was legal because the agent wasn't an employer, but the worker's representative.
The standard now hangs on the worker's right to negotiate terms and hours.
If you can't negotiate hours, you're not self-employed. (With Uber you choose your hours. OK.)
If you can't negotiate rate, you're not self-employed. (With Uber you can't. Not OK.)
And notably, in agency settings "bodyshopping" is employment -- if your agent can drop in a replacement for you, you're not a specialist unique worker, so you're not self-employed. (If Uber is considered the agent selling you to the public, they're bodyshopping. Not OK.)
" I believe it's a (really stupid) EU directive, so come Brexit we can have our fire extinguishers back in black, blue, cream and red - as God intended. "
I agree that the old colour coding was better, but the problem was that the colours were not encoded in law. If we had had strong legislative protections before the EU directive came into force, we would have been exempt.
But the EU directive was a very good thing, because before it you could make extinguishers any colour you liked. When I was doing fire safety training, the trainer asked the whole class to imagine walking into their local MacDonalds, you know, "shut your eyes, picture it" sort of thing. Where are the fire extinguishers? Everyone stopped. No-one could picture them. MacDonald's's standard interior design used chrome fire extinguishers that were designed to blend into the background, which meant if a fire did break out, you'd be unable to find one quick.
Speaking of chromed fire extinguishers, these were also very popular on military bases. Because of restrictions on discipline, the only thing officers were allowed to do as a punishment was to assign domestic chores. Chrome fire extinguishers gave something particularly tedious: polishing. Do something wrong? Your job is polishing the fire extinguisher. Of course, the person who got the real punishment was the person who tried to use the extinguisher to put out a fire, because the polish was highly flammable!
But yeah -- our own stupid fault for never actually having any bloody laws to stop the sort of stupidity above.
Clearly those are some extremely bad examples, but surely the best approach is to encourage sensible fact checking, rather than dismiss the whole idea based on poor implementation?
My vision for the future of fact checking would be to start with figures and quotes. Most published quotes are stripped of context -- the fact checkers only need to put that back in, which would instantly undermine most purposeful misrepresentation.
The old "increased production" argument also fails to account for the limited resources we have to hand -- we're already churning through natural raw materials at an unsustainable rate (particularly crude oil, possibly the most inherently valuable yet underpriced substance on the planet). Mineral mining operations have negative effects on food production (either directly by digging up farmland, or through environmental pollution in the local area). Increased production is a Very Bad Thing, so we do need to find an alternative pressure valve to cope with increased productivity.
" I can't quite work out where the author is coming from: libertarian - all state is bad - or socialist - all capitalism is evil? Their penultimate argument, if it is in fact an argument, that:
"Those of us who are laid off are not entitled to any of the gains that the new technology produces. The owner of the new technology alone is entitled to its proceeds, while all of our fellow citizens are now responsible to pay for our living (through taxes that fund basic income)." "
What you're missing is the second part of the headline: "That's not how capitalism works."
The author includes a lot of spraff about economic theory, but that's a common fallacy -- equating industrial/post-industrial economics with capitalism. None of the economic theories capitalists adhere to are unique to capitalism. The difference between capitalism, cooperativism, communism and socialism is simply the model of ownership and the resulting distribution of profit.
Capitalism is nothing more sophisticated than "the guy (aka "capitalist") who puts the money (aka "capital") in to start/improve the business owns the machine and gets the profit". There is nothing more to it than that. The paragraph you quote is simply a restatement of what capitalism, and a claim that this means basic income shouldn't exist.
But taxation has always diluted pure capitalism, so we do not live in a truly capitalist society anyway.
It's not even about responsibility to the customers though, is it?
Technology is the limiting factor here -- self-driving car control systems are optimised for road-awareness, and rightly so. If you need the computer to analyse the off-road environment, you're going to need to process a huge amount of data, and the hardware and algorithms will become scarily complex.
But before you let a self-driving car leave the road in an attempt to avoid a collision, you need that complexity; otherwise you risk driving into an occupied bus shelter, through a fence into a garden full of playing children, or over a cliff.
Like it or not, the safest place for a self-driving car is on the road.
" Just don't worry your pretty little heads about who is really running things. "
Who? Who? If I've told you once, I've told you a million times: The Network is not a person. It is a very sophisticated computer program that successfully simulates features of natural life. But it is not "alive".
" The point about FLOSS is that it accumulates features and can afford to play the long game. "
Slow and steady wins the race, as they say. For example, remember the year of the Linux desktop? Long game...
(Yes, I'm being sarcastic, but it's worth noting that I'm a Linux user myself. I own multiple PCs, only one of which currently has Windows on it, and even that's out of use because I can't be bothered tracking down a year-and-a-half old bug report from when certain Window 7 boxes started failing to update -- mine was among them.)
I believe the only analogue in the SID was the ladder DACs the filters and a mixer, hence why there's no sinusoid wave form. The filters idea was genius really, as it meant that a triangle waveform could approximate sinusoid (run it through a low-pass filter, and the closer the cut-off frequency is to the fundamental frequency, the closer the triangle approximates a sine wave).
I think the problem with recreating the SID lies less in the design, but much of the specific sound arose from minor flaws -- line interference due to proximity of components and issues relating to power distribution meant that the sound was imperfect, hence a lot less synthetic sounding. I still hold that (restricted number of voices aside) the C64 had the best sounding music right up until Lucasarts put an orchestra on the CD for X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter, and the subsequent move to MP3 soundtracks (although that was a travesty, as iMuse was the cleverest thing ever to happen to computer music and is still sorely missed).
You'll also see it at times on pages that are after the end of the document, and just included because standard binding is based on sheets that each account for four pages.
Anyone who took school exams in Scotland will be more than familiar with "this page intentionally blank" (or whatever), cos just imagine the consternation if that wasn't explained to you in an exam, and you spend the rest of the summer worried you'd missed a question or hadn't written enough.
" "Let alone the inability to compile code except on their machines, which greatly limits my ability to do CI, automation or anything else efficient except on their overpriced POS hardware."
If you can't be bothered to buy a machine for the platform you're developing for (you know, to just test that things actually work as emulators are never perfect) than maybe you should not be developing for that platform. "
The problem is you have to buy a Mac to develop for iOS. OS X is not iOS, a Mac is not an iOS device. The Mac has the best iOS emulator, but as you said, "emulators are never perfect".
It's a massive frustration for a lot of would-be app developers that even experimenting with iOS development has initial costs in the region of a grand. (Well, there's the Mac Mini as the "cheap" option, but most folk skip that and go for one of the portables.)
" Will we be able to use our existing apps on the new OS, or will that require a major rewrite as well? Windows phone flopped because of poor app support, any OS lives and dies with its apps. "
I'd be very surprised if you couldn't. Remember that app developers are basically coding for the Dalvik VM, and the real machine level code is in Google's libraries and the infamous "binary blob". I doubt Google will ever set it loose in the real world if they can't port the Android userspace onto it (and the ChromeOS one, for good measure).
Lack of filesystem is less of an issue than it used to be, and far less a nuisance than I expected. IOS now uses a mechanism called "share sheets" to pass data between apps, and it's almost to the stage where your apps can be thought of as virtual folders.
However, I agree that iOS still has a long way to go. The lack of plug-ins is a real nuisance for photo and video editing, because it forces you to switch between apps if one doesn't have the function you need, and the intermediate step usually seems to involve recompressing in a lossy format, hence constant degredation throughout the process.
The pencil might help with highlighting, but it certainly won't help with typing. Mouse/keyboard switching is generally hassle-free because you just do it, but a stylus has to be picked up and put down as you go.
Anyway, the big limitation with iPads, including the Pro, is the lack of ports. With only one lightning port, you can't plug in a memory expander and an audio interface at once, for example, and that's a serious limitation if you're aiming for high-end video work. (And yes, you can do high-end video work on i-devices, as long as the depth-of-field limitations don't bother you.) IHaving a dedicated interface for the keyboard is a start, but I really think that it will only deserve the "pro" tag when you can attach two or three Lightning and/or USB devices.
The only good thing in The Fall was whats-his-name as the pyschopath. He switched from everyone's-best-pal to stone-cold-heartless at the drop of a hat. Anderson had no charm and no charisma. Her matter-of-factness about her extra-marital affair made me wonder why anyone could possibly develop any sort of lasting emotional attachment to her.
I really can't stand her as an actress. She should only ever play baddies.
@Nifty,
The BBC BASIC RAND() function was not random, but deterministic. If you seed it with the same number, it will return the same sequence of numbers. It is only once you seed it with a single random number that it becomes a pseudo-random generator. Normally, that seed is taken from user-generated timing data, but it could come from another source. But anyway, in the seeded pseudorandom generator, you are not combining two "poor" random sources -- random_number+algorithm = pseudorandom_source
@bazza
"That'll happen [increasing movement of work to capital city] anyway to some extent whether or not train lines get built. No population / government / state / civilisation anywhere in history has ever solved this problem."
West Germany did a pretty good job of keeping economic activity geographically diverse. The rail network in the former West is a true network, unlike in former East Germany, where it takes on the hub-and-spoke form around Berlin, the same form that France has with Paris at the centre, and Spain has with Madrid at the centre (and a secondary hub at Barcelona).
Germany rode out the big recession pretty damned well compared to the rest of the continent, so I don't know why we're all still modelling the French approach rather than the German one.
The original definition of "cloud computing" was based on network diagrams. The "cloud" icon in a network diagram represented a network you didn't have a definition for -- most typically the internet. Academics were fascinated by the idea that the internet was not just a series of dumb switches, and that treating it as such was a waste of resource. There were a number of experiments with getting internet nodes to progressively process data as it was transmitted across the network, and the idea looked promising. But in reality, you would end up with a "tragedy of the commons" scenario, with a few antisocial heavy users using up the resource (like how a relatively tiny number of 24-hour DVD downloaders made unlimited internet packages unviable).
The only true cloud application in use is peer-to-peer sharing (torrents and streams), because there is no map or fixed architecture to the computing/storage element; it is unknown, so can only be drawn on a map as a cloud.
Modern so-called cloud services are nothing more than hosted solutions, the same as we've always had. However, they often use the cloud to obscure what's going on, and the client doesn't get full information. I'm sure this doesn't apply to really big players, but before I left managed IT services (about 5 years ago), I always argued that we should refuse to subcontract to cloud services because they prevented due diligence, or at least push that line until the client accepted that they couldn't hold us to SLAs on something we were utterly incapable of evaluating.
" A previous article mentioned that the Android "monopoly" is in regard to licensable smart phone operating systems, a narrowly-defined category if ever there was one, and one seemingly created for the express purpose of chasing after Google. "
I don't know where you picked that up from -- the IDC are reporting that Android has a market share of 70% of all smartphones in Western Europe. (Source: Bloomberg)
While the Android/iOS/Windows Phone split might not be as extreme as the Windows/MacOS/Linux split at the turn of the century, the parallels are striking. Windows got its dominance through the ability of limitless OEMs to market PCs, leading to a competition between OEMs on price, lots of marketing paid for by others, as well as multiple OEMs meaning more ready supply of devices. Microsoft used that dominance to squelch competition in various parts of the application space.
This is almost exactly the same.
I think Android's problem is that they're open source (ish) and have therefore given their clients some rights that they strictly didn't need to, but they've then turned round and made it thoroughly impractical to exercise those rights.
Paradoxically, the best course of action is for them to just close up the platform and turn the whole thing into a binary blob.
" Anon just because some of the people that these places turn out are a total waste of time and more importantly yours if you are fool enough to employ them. "
And this is different from other countries' education systems in what way exactly? I've met some total muppets who graduated from top universities, and government is typically full of them.
Defining a whole population by the few individual members you've met is what is known in the trade as "being a bigot".
I suspect the reason for the direct access is the issue of non-visible disabilities. If a police officer sees a single, fully mobile person get out of a blue badge car, how is he to ascertain whether that's not someone with brain damage leading to reduced memory (thus needs the car in plain sight on leaving the shop) or someone with a colostomy bag who just needs to get to a WC in a hurry.
I've heard plenty of stories about such people getting regularly stopped by police, and the police have (rightly) toned down their checks to avoid embarrassment to the public. But this has left them unable to challenge any abusers, and that's not fair on those with a genuine need. At least now they can radio in to the control room and ask to confirm whether the car/badge is flagged as non-visible disability or not, and only challenge where it isn't.
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