Posts by Martin 37 60 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
How come this has been posted for 3 hours and no one has mentioned Adult Entertainment? Porn is always a driver of adoption of technology, especially technology accessible to male teenagers.
So when your teenage son spends EVEN MORE time alone in his bedroom with his Oculus "playing Call of Duty" and starts getting hairy palms ...
This is obvioiusly the market Zuckerberg is aiming for, unless he just wants some of the action himself.
"Coding in higher level languages will ALWAYS produce programs that are slower than what they would be if they had been written in assembly. The reasons for this are obvious; Assembly is difficult and time consuming to code in."
Sorry, have to disagreee on this. I would say instead
"Coding in higher level languages will USUALLY produce programs that are slower than what they would be if they had been written in assembly. Sometimes this is important, more often it is not as silicon is cheaper than prgrammer time. The reasons for this are superficially obvious; Assembly is difficult and time consuming to code in, so is best left to an opytimising comiler to do"
@Fred Flintstone - contact me offiline register@cybercontrolsystems.co.uk and I'll give you the full gen. Basically it was a homebrew in 1990 which I replaced in 2005 with off-the-shelf Dupline via Carlo Gavazzi with Red Lion HMI and commercial interface to Fronius PV inverter. There's better out there now.
I have a home automation system - and it's real home automation, ie lights and heating, not the vastly expensive "home cinema" scenario that gets called home automation. It's wonderful, I couldn't live without it, but why is there such microscopic take up?
Some of the comments on Cringely talk about it taking off in order to meet more stringent energy saving requirements on heating.
I watched the evolution of the computer magazine over that period, through Byte and PC World.
At the beginning .. there were genuinely interesting computers - Sirius, Apricot, anyone? Then along came the IBM Pc and all its clones.
I remember a review which wasn't called "Another 20 indistinguishable beige boxes" but should have been, and could hear the desperation in the writer's mind as he struggled to find something, anything to say about these boxes. Even the internal wiring came in for comment, and tiny percentage difference in the specification and performance made into column inches.
Since by then everything ran Windows, there was nothing else to distinguish one clone from another.
And yes, in those days you bought the magazines for the adverts, to compare specs and price up a new system.
While reminiscing - PCW used to run competitions that actually required thought and mathematical ability, usually involving 10 digit number so you couldn't use 16-bit ints or floating point. (Of course the BBC Micro had 32-bit ints which made it ideal for these puzzles!)
My favourite was the following:
Using the digits from 0 to 9, generate all possible permutations, and list the billionth. How long will it take take you to work this out either with pencil and paper or a 68000-class processor?
Oh Christ, Canoscan.
Started everytime you booted up and ran at 100% CPU all the time. Since I scan about once per month (timesheets!) it had to go. Luckily it wasn't hard to kill, but it sounds like it made better malware than this Netweird thingie.
Sorry, I don't buy it. I use Dropbox and the major limitation on its use is that my Notebook hard disk is so small I can't keep everything I want inside Dropbox.
Dropbox is a replicator not a network drive. I wish I could tell Dropbox I don't want THAT folder on THAT device. (You could simulate the effect by having multiple logons and sharing folders between accounts but I've got one paid for account and don't see why I should have to have multiple paid accounts to make up for a product deficiency)
Time Machine also sells disks. When my Time Machine cheap USB drive is full, I label it, put it on the shelf and get another from Maplins. I've got 5 on the shelf.
Also just bought a pair of 1TB cheapo USB drives for a media server. Wishing I'd bought the 2TB ones now. Of course I can add another pair of 1TB drives but that's 4 mains sockets (and power supplies) just for the disks.
We are a Very Long Way from being able to use The Cloud as the one and only storage medium. For backup it has its uses but as a primary storage medium, no way Jose. How did it go with Chrome OS, again?
Just remembering when Office Automation meant the advent of the paperless office. As I recall the main beneficiaries of that were HP, Epson, Canon.
.. but I pointed it out as fake based on the thread, not the head.
It is easy in 3D software to create a helical coil, much harder to create a good sharp helical thread. And although there are machine screws with helical coil threads they are for huge things like machine tools, and not down at the size of a small casing screw.
NOW will you all believe when I say we are ruled by 6 ft lizards in human suits?
..and not good ones. Motif - Ugh. Take it out and bury it but make sure it's dead first. The Hello World programs were about 200 lines. Even Windows can do more with less.
The colours, as you can see were grotesque. Wow! We got more than 16 colours! Lets see how many we can use at once! What do you mean turquoise and pink don't go well together? Add in orange and purple and we're good to go. That was the days of named X11 colours.
About the only good thing was that you could save sessions, so next time you logged in all your terminal windows opened up again in the same place. Something Apple has just "invented" in 2012. Of course, I never used anything except terminal windows - since you did everything serious via the command line, why would you?
Is that really a graphical calculator taking up 50% of the screen space? Real men use bc.
It is indeed funded by other consumers, but the amount added to bills is between £1 and £3 per household per year. There is a lot of ill-informed noise (yes, you, Andrew) about it being too burdensome on "poor people".
The price of solar equipment has dropped faster than expected, so a cut in the rate was inevitable and part of the mechanism of the scheme - but a cut of over 50% with virtually immediate effect is knee-jerk bureaucracy at its worst.
The PV installation (surprised?) firm I work for had been scheduling jobs into January before this announcement was made, so we already have many unhappy customers who will not be getting what they have paid their deposit for.
I got a system from a company in Wimborne, and it came with a little Wattsure inverter monitoring thingie that sits in the loft. It's no good waiting to read your meter every three months; you want to know how well the system is performing and more to the point if is stops working or is producing under expectation. As well as getting graphs, it notifies me if there is a sudden change in output.
Seems like all PV systems should have something like that.
And yes, SAP procedure is based on irradiation levels in Bromwhich which is where the BRE are based - the company that develops the SAP procedure. So anyone south of there should be doing better than expected, anyone north is likely to do worse.
My experiences have been the same as everyone else - no order processed since 27th Feb. I used to be a loyal and frequent purchaser, but no more.
This is a genuine email received in response to trying to fill in an online contact page requesting cancellation of an order:
Dear Sultana,
Unfortunately, there was no content included within your query. Please re-submit your form via the 'contact us' link on our website, ensuring that you complete all the fields and any comments you may have and we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as possible.
Thank you in advance.
Regards,
Sultana
Customer Services
dabs.com Plc
(I have of course no idea who Sultana is)
I got one of the first Tivos in the UK - within a few weeks of introduction. It did exactly what I wanted then and still does now. I had spent some time and money trying to cobble together a PC and tuner-based alternative to a VCR, which plainly didn't work.
I have upgraded the disk from 40GB to 400; I'm on my third handset.
I never watch TV live. Even if there's a program I want to watch I'll let the Tivo get about 10 minutes ahead, so I don't have to sit through the adverts.
I paid my £10/month to Tivo and then Sky for 10 years. I was convinced the £300 (?) one-time fee was not the best deal as there was bound to be something faster/better/cheaper along in less than two years. There wasn't.
Yes, it would be nice if it would carry on forever, but whining about it isn't going to help. And I for one am not going to Virgin or Sky - the content available on Freeserve is more than enough for me, I just want a Tivo service to record it for me so I can watch what I want when I want.
So the ugly great big silver box is going in the bin, I suppose.
So long.
Ken was lambasted in the trade press and by the competition for being misquoted. Unix was the up and coming thing; making its way out of academia into commercial use. Ken is stated to have preferred the undoubted reliability of the home-grown VMS and was reported as saying Unix is so much snake oil.
The full quote was that Unix of itself was so much snake-oil, by which he meant it was not a silver bullet to all problems of cost, performance, application availability. To that, I think he was right.
but his blind spot of not seeing the need for a computer in every home was a real blind spot.
I was in the HP premises in Bristol at the time of the announcement of Carly's departure. There was an astonishing outburst of cheering and applause. Someone had a trumpet and played something - I can't remember what.
The overall feeling was summed up in Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead. Hurd was seen as 'mostly harmless' at the time.
I'm a lefty but I hold a phone in my right hand. I can then type or write with my left hand, or even push buttons on the phone with my left hand.
So if I was a righty I would be MORE likely to hold the phone in my left hand and experience these signal problems?
I have a ShinyPhone 3GS and have it in a leather case to protect it from scratches. This case often interferes with the phone's ability to tell when I am trying to use the touchscreen. This is an example of hardware that Is Not Perfect. Am I ranting about it? No.
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