Posts by James Hughes 1 2645 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
FFS.
Whilst no Dyson apologist (just a happy customer), got to point out the FACTUAL ERRORS in your post.
The Dyson is marketed as a BAGLESS VACUUM. That's why it doesn't have BAGS, Bags clog (yes, they really do) and suction efficiency decreases as the bag fills. And emptying and avoiding particulates is trivial. Pop off the container, put it in the wheely bin. Pull trigger. Stand aside if windy which is usual the only hazard.
Second point. The Dyson HEPA filter is washable, and never needs replacing. As is the motor filter.
Since Dyson's have a 5 year warrantee, and have had for some years, I presume your broken Dyson was really quite some time ago? Wait though - you've had the Vax for 4 years, so the Dyson must be six (by your numbers), so was within warrantee at the time it failed. Something doesn't add up.
Oh, and I still see parts for Dysons from years ago on market stalls. Not that mine have ever gone wrong.
Hmm, my recent experience with Vax is that they are a bit shite (a fragile vacuum and a stream mop - the mop really does push the boundaries of shitely designed product). Esp. compared with my Dyson ball thingy which I have been very impressed with.
I'm a school governor on the curriculum committee at a small primary school, as well a softie, as well as a volunteer for Raspberry PI, so that my credentials for what they are worth.
People need to realise that teaching coding (and it's still very early stages) won't affect the basic reading, writing and numeracy teaching. A huge amount of effort goes in to teaching those with special educational needs (i.e. those who are not up to scratch in the basics), and that will not change with the introduction of a new subject. Every child who is below standard gets extra teaching (at least in the school I am involved with). So people should not be complaining that that is going to change just because there is now coding on the curriculum as well. It's a strawman argument.
As for teaching coding itself, I believe that in order for children to make decent career choices, they need to be exposed to coding at school. That way you can find out whether the required aptitude is there. I would put money on there being some prospective best SW engineers in the world, currently sitting in a call centre somewhere, never having coded in their life.
As for the benefits of teaching coding to all, there are a number of principles that are part and parcel of learning about coding that are beneficial even to those who do not end up in a coding career. Logical thinking, decomposing tasks in to subtasks, touch typing(!) etc. Even a basic knowledge of the complexities involved will help when some of these people make it in to management rather than a coding career.
Now, whether the teaching needs to be as long as two years for all, I'm not convinced. I think 6 months for all might be adequate, then stream the people who want to do it/are good at it and get those who don't to concentrate elsewhere.
Year of Code itself? Run by people who really don't know what to do. They have the wrong people in charge, which is sad because there are many people who have be working towards this for years and are very experienced, and who could have been brought in. Hopefully it will sort itself out, but since it seems to be heading the way of most government initiatives, I don't hold out too much home.
Anecdotally.
We had one fat girl in my primary school, and about two fat people at my senior school. (left school in 85)
Now, I see more chubby/fat children at the local primary, and at the bus stop for senior stuff, than I saw in my entire school career.
But it would be interesting to have official figures. But I trend to believe my own eyes rather than those anyway.
Almost all comments against, slagging off GG, slagging off what people look like when wearing them. Just like every other piece on GG that's ever appeared on ElReg.
And, just like all those other pieces, you guys are just not thinking ahead.
These things or their offspring, are going to be everywhere.
I possibly disagree. Just had an XP install that I have been using for years changed to Win7. It appears to be much faster, uses the memory better, and generally feels much perkier all round. It is 64bit which may be part of the difference.
Of course, Ubuntu on the exact same spec machine next to it is still faster.
H265 can get about twice the pixels in the same bitrate at best. The main difference is the variable macroblock sizes IIRC . H264 is 64x64 pixels, H265 can be much larger, with the associated improvement in compression when large areas are fairly constant. This plays in to the hand of higher resolution of course, where you have more pixels in the same image area.
Never ceases to amaze how many people in the UK have a TomTom or similar stuck right in the middle of their windscreen. Given that a little stone chip can be an MOT failure due to it limiting visibility, one wonders why people think planting a damn great lump of plastic on their screen is a good idea. I hate having any sort of view obstructed when I drive - I really don't want to hit anything.
I also particular enjoy it when it snows, and see all those people who have cleared a small area in front of their eyes rather than the whole screen. I can only assume they must be Jedi.
I'm not sure what Eddy's point is.
It's not Tesla who set the market price for their shares, it's the market. They may be overvalued, I don't care if they are, but that's out of Tesla's hands. And of course, they are for sure not the only company that is overvalued.
The important thing to me is that Tesla are improving the electric car and the electric car market. And that is a good thing.
Nice troll. Almost every single point you make is false, as you would know if you actually spent even 2 minutes looking in to it. I presume you work for a competitor?
Facts: Three fires in action, two caused by impacts with massive metal lumps. 1 caused by driver crashing in to concrete wall. Drivers were safe in all situations. There is currently an investigation going on to see if anything needs to be done to improve the situation. My reading of the accidents is that there is very little that could be done to make the cars any safer, these were big impacts. Even the people in the incidents have said they don't blame the car.
Facts: No house fires have been caused by the power supply connector- the statement is that it *could* burn the people using it. This has now been fixed anyway with a recall (albeit an over the air one). Just like problems are fixed in other makes of cars when they are discovered. It happens all the time.
So, when you start spouting about stuff you know less than nothing about, and simply have a misguided opinion, please sit back, have a think, look in to it. Then, once you have the evidence in hand, you at least have a valid base from which to start spouting.
After minor checking up...
"Aerojet has agreed to recondition sufficient NK-33s to serve Orbital's 16 flight NASA Commercial Resupply Services contract. Beyond that, it has a stockpile of 23 1960s/70s era engines. Kuznetsov no longer manufactures the engine, and the lack of a continuing supplier brings into question the long-term viability of Antares. To address this, Orbital has sought to buy RD-180 engines, but maker NPO Energomash's contract with United Launch Alliance prevents this. Orbital has sued ULA for this, alleging anti-trust violations.[17] Aerojet has offered to work with Kuznetsov to restart production of new NK-33 engines, to assure Orbital of an ongoing supply.[18]"
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJ-26.
What Voland said. I'm really not sure what they are going to do although they have enough engines for quite a few launches. I can only guess they are either in talks with someone or are designing their own in house. But what I haven't yet heard.
SpaceX have a real advantage here with designing and manufacturing their own engines, and going for many small ones rather than a couple of large ones. Fnarr.
Saw a 4K TV in John Lewis before Xmas - very impressive quality.
But as other say, increasing the frame rate is a better improvement to video picture quality on the 'smaller' devices (<50"). H265 should be good enough to reduce the bandwidth enough to get similar requirements to 1080p at the higher rez, but again, that would also help with higher framerates.
In other news, I recently bought a BluRay player, but only as my DVD player was shite (Thanks SS). It is noticeable better at playing back DVD than the DVD player -the upscaling has defo improved over the last couple of years. So much so that I wonder whether the extra cash for Bluray is worth it (not that I have bought any yet).
Bit of a cheat though, given most mobile GPU's don't advertise the total number of cores they have. For example, the VC4 in the Raspberry Pi, a >5 year old design, has 18 cores (IIRC), two of which are general purpose 16 way vector processors. It also has shite load of other HW blocks for dedicated purposes (camera, composition, codecs etc). But, to the general public, it's a single core Arm with a single 'GPU'.
Core count is rather an ineffective way of proclaiming performance.
NASA's decision on SpaceX was completely right, though, with hindsight.
As for Orbital/Cygnus, I'd be concerned that their engine supply is rapidly dwindling, those engines are Russian made (in the 70's) refurb jobs, and I'm not sure what they will use if/when the supply runs out.
SpaceX of course have their own engines, in fact, they have their own everything.
SpaceX launch tomorrow IIRC.
QUOTE "Give it to a noob and see how they get on.
If you're experienced in Linux then you'll be fine, otherwise you're always going to hit hardware and driver issues. You get them on Windows and that has full support of manufacturers.
If you run commodity hardware then you tend to have a better experience then higher end stuff."
Yup, gave it to my noob father. He's been using Linux for three years now. I occasionally have to field a tech call for him, but they have all been about 'how to I format a paragraph' type of thing rather than any issues with the OS.
As for the original install, which I did, I ran the Ubuntu install disk, and after about 1/2hr he had a working system - I did nothing 'technical'. That was on a brand new (at the time) Acer Revo.
Oh, are you sure Window has the full support from manufacturers? Have all these manufacturers drivers etc been updated to work on Win8? No? Bit crappy, this full support of which you speak.
High end stuff? I refer you to a post from someone abovewho works in the the high end banking sector. Where they are migrating to Linux.
It's anecdotal, but as an employee of a medium/large sized company...
I have three Dell PC's on my desk - two desktops and a laptop. One desktop runs XP, the laptop runs Win7 and the other desktop runs Ubuntu.
The laptop is quite new and has an SSD. It works quite well, but doesn't seem particularly snappy. The two desktops are the same machines, and comparing the two, the Ubuntu device is considerably faster in almost every aspect.
In my time in the company, I have had the Windows laptop trashed by a suspected virus, had upgrades to faster devices simply to keep up with the amount of extra software we have to run for security and malware prevention. The Ubuntu machines just sits there and works, as, actually, does the XP box, albeit more slowly.
The Ubuntu machine is a godsend when working with our build servers (also Ubuntu devices) and other backroom heavy duty hardware - so much easier to work with that Cygwin on Windows.
So, that's really just an example to show that Linux can and does work in a commercial development environment. In my experience here, the Linux devices work JUST AS WELL as the Windows devices, and indeed in many cases better. There is an upswelling amongst many here that we really should move to Linux completely, but IT seem keen on retaining Windows, even though we are more productive with Linux, certainly from an engineering point of view.
I'm pretty sure we are not unique.
Not bad for a joke OS.
Well Mr AC, your lack of knowledge of the subject is quite astounding. I really think you should stop digging that big hole for yourself.
Can I ask when you last had any personal experience? Or why you think that Windows is overtaking Linux in the server room (it isn't btw, and I won't give references, because you didn't)
The one think I will say, is that this 'joke' of an OS powers more devices than all the other OS's put together. Android devices rely on Linux, as do vast numbers of embedded devices (TV's, routers, DVD players to name a miniscule subset). The Raspberry Pi runs Linux, as do a host of other small devices. So, can you please explain your nonsensical 'joke' comment, which by it's very nature does seem to give some indication of what a uninformed individual you actually seem to be.
@AC.
Yes, edges cases for those things that are actually problematical.
As I said I have no problems with my desktops running Linux - printing works fine, sound works fine. The other items don't bother me and are therefore edge cases to me.
As for your comment which boils down to 'the internet said it so it must be true'. Do you really believe that? Do you really truly believe that you can make a accurate assessment of Linux and its capabilities from analysing bug reports on the web? Did you do the same for Windows? I bet you get more problems reported for Windows than Linux (even when you take in to account the different market penetrations)
Now, I'm not denying there are problems with Linux, but the majority of users have no problems at all with it. Just like the majority of users of Windows have no problems with their choice of OS.
I still find it amazing there are people who think Linux doesn't work, give a long list of problems, provide no facts, and have obviously not used it in some time.
Of course, and as with Windows, there are some problems. But I, in all my Linux installations, have rarely had any problems, and the number of problems I have had with Windows outweigh those I have had with Linux. I now use Linux of all homes machines (old and new), with no problems with graphics, sound, printers, networking etc. Compare that with Vista where I had persistent problems with wireless and eventually horrendous slow downs until the device expired.
Please please please, can all those people who continually bash Linux (and ALWAYS get the market penetration figures completely wrong), try it on a modern desktop or laptop, and just see how well it all works. Please. Then at least when you have a complaint (and you might) about it you will have some reason.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
