* Posts by Jim 59

2047 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2009

The Linux Chronicles, Part 1

Jim 59
Go

Integration

An enjoyable article and well written. But you are barking up the wrong tree.

Linux will overtake windows on the desktop as and when it is factory integrated on a majority of new PCs. The niggles discussed in the article come down to integration and you would experience similar problems with Windows if you had to install it yourself. The reasons that Windows is no.1 are political, not technical. Both Windows 7 and Ubuntu can offer a good user experience. But Windows 7 makes a lot of money for a lot of industry players, and that will not change soon.

BT boss brands Britain illiterate

Jim 59
Happy

@lol

No. Written English provides far less context than spoken English. That's why we pronounce "they're" and "their" the same but write them very differently.

The first dictionaries merely documented the existing language. But for at least 150 years they have been prescribing it, and helping us all to spell things the same way. It's tiresome, but you couldn't really have mass literacy otherwise. I am a geordie. If I spelled this post just like I say it, you wouldn't understand.

The internet increases the emphasis on the written word and gloablises the effrort. Spelling will therefore become more important, not less. Adhering to a standard will help, just like other communication protocols.

Old people generally run the world, so if you want a good job, suck up to them with some good spelling !

Twitter on a ZX Spectrum

Jim 59
Go

Dragon Flame

Cool, very cool.

Your "relative of the TRS-80" is of course the well known Dragon 32. It was not an obscure box, but one of the front runners circa 1982. It came with a "proper" keyboard: a rarity at the time, and perhaps its main selling point, at least to aspiring programmers. Mine came from Boots (via Santa) for £199.95.

It was a repackaged Tandy Color Computer. 6809 processor running at 0.9 mhz. By typing "poke 65495, 1" you could double that to 1.8 Mhz. Overclocking.

Jim 59
Go

more droning on about my Dragon 32

It wasn't ideal for action games because the colour maps were a bit restricted. But it did have one outstanding game - The Ring of Darkness, from Wintersoft. Whoerver wrote that is a genius. A large graphical adventure that used both sides of the program tape, and saved data to a second tape. A superb playing experience from 8 bits and something of a "killer app" for the box. Remarkable.

Ubuntu v iTunes: the music playoff for Applephobes

Jim 59
Stop

Choose

Right on. Users hate choice. I just chose a ham sandwhich and it was terrifying, let me tell you. How fortunate that Microsoft removes our choice of desktops for a small fee. And I know they would remove my choice of sandwhich too, if they could, which is a nice thought.

Google hits coder G-spot with Linux command line tool

Jim 59
Happy

Quite Interesting

Steady on guys. El Reg was just using a little humour to brighten your coffee break, as is its wont. The whole article was written with /usr/bin/ed, I'll wager, by a heavily bearded former contributor to Dragon User or Amstrad Action.

Tape business shows steep decline

Jim 59

curve

Extracting a geometric progression from one sample of a common ratio ? See any problems there?

Fanboi's lament – falling out of love with the iPad

Jim 59

Sheet of paper

"For example, it's been a helpful business partner in meetings and interviews due to its abilities as an unobtrusive, silent note-taker with no display to get between me and my interview subject."

Wow. That's almost as good as a sheet of paper.

Siphon Wars: Pressurist weighs into Gravitite boffin

Jim 59

nah

A chain can bear tensile force, ie. you can pull on it. In order to pull on water, you must first put it in a sealed pipe and subject both ends to (atmospheric) pressure. Only under those kinds of conditions will it be chain-like, not in a vacuum.

I agree with Waver that a siphon won't work in a vacuum. Not sure about his 32 foot limit though. The momentum and speed of the water may make that limit a bit higher.

Jim 59
Go

rightish, but hoist by his own petard

Hmm. There are subtleties here that deserve more care than the superficial treatment doled out by Weaver.

Obviously you need atmospheric pressure for the sucking bit at the start. But that's a red herring. The siphon could also be started without an atmosphere, by a piston or propeller in the pipe.

However I think that a siphon would not work in a vacuum. Without outside pressure on the water, voids (ie. bubbles of void, nothing) could freely open up within the water at any point in the pipe. The water in the downward leg could happily flow downwards, leaving the upward water where it is. Between them would be a void. The "downward" water could exert no force on the "upward" water to pull it over the lip.

With an atmosphere, such voids cannot form because atmospheric pressure tends to close them up. Bubbles of air can form, of course, and can break the siphon if you are careless enough to let the required amount of air in. The siphon depends on the water remaining in one coherent flowing body.

It might be possible to form a very weak/slow siphon in a vacuum. The self coherence of the water might be enough to stop voids forming and hold the water together if the tube were very narrow. But I think that would be capillary action, not a siphon.

Which proves how idiotic it is staying up this late on a Tuesday morning to make my overblown points in the folorn hope that somebody somewhere will be interested. Still, I now feel confident that my toilet will not work on the moon, which is bound to save embarrassment sooner or later.

Jim 59
FAIL

and another thing

Just realised that several people above already expressed my argument and did it more concisely, the bastards.

Ten free apps to install on every new PC

Jim 59
Thumb Up

Dragon

Roger that. Great computer, great manual. I remember sitting cross-legged on the lounge floor, learning to program on the big family TV, dreaming of having a monitor. A golden age in some ways.

Woman finds Romanian living in shed

Jim 59

The silly hordes

Ah, the general public. How inconvenient that they have opinions.

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

Jim 59
Thumb Up

Nice one but no comments, please.

It's predicatable that this story will attract the lowest quality of comments and the most ignorant of commentards. Reg did the right thing by apologising for the orangification, but the wrong thing by allowing comments. Switch them off! before it starts looking like a YouTube page, and we are all reduced to saying things like "i rOcK!!!!!!!!" and throwing potatos at each other.

Microsoft slapped with $106m patent kipper

Jim 59

US law

The US law is at fault, and makes it much too easy to patent things. I think you can patent anything in the US, and they will grant it no question. It leads to huge ammounts of litigation, and millions in fees for lawyers. Since the lawyers also make the laws and construct the legal system, that that will probably never change.

NASA flying car engineer shoots down Reg coverage

Jim 59
FAIL

Leave it out Reg

I broadly sympathise with the inventor. You coverage was poor. Okay, so is his grammer, but he is not a smarty-pants professional writer like you. And his reactions, though harsh, are not much ruder that your article, and nowhere near the proper flame territory usually explored in this column. By comparison with a *real* flame, his emails are measused and mature, and almost restful. Fail.

Twitter bomb threat joke man faces possible jail sentence

Jim 59

Jokes

Agreed - it is madness. A real threat would never be made in the manner of a joke.

Microsoft finally debuts Euro-choose-a-browser screen

Jim 59
WTF?

Browsers

But hold on, where's Netscape ?

Holy Father turns on to Dad Rock

Jim 59
Paris Hilton

Wipe out

As far as I know the Vatican has no desire to "cure" homosexuals. It does not consider homosexuality a disease, and it does not categorise homosexuality as a sin.

The church is a human organisation, massive in membership and very old. It suffers the same challenges as other big, old, creaky organisations. It's not that surprising that they are slow to modernise. Look at IBM in the eighties or the problems Microsoft had with the new fangled internet, or the NHS now and their problems with modernisation. Or the EU or the UN.

The church also suffers from people repeating that it "probably thinks <this>" or "probably says <that>". As a result people come to believe that it harbours many crazy practices or opinions which it does not.

Jim 59
FAIL

Re: um

Yes, we wouldn't want to spew hate would we.

Topfield Freeview HD set-top announced

Jim 59
Go

Topfield

Agreed. The downloadable "MyStuff" package is a UI replacement that makes Sky+ look primitive. And that is not meant to be a cute remark, it is an honest comparison. I too will wait for the 5800 replacement. I hope they put an ethernet interface on it.

Doctor Who attempted to overthrow Thatcher

Jim 59
Stop

BBC Hampstead lefties

The Beeb has been well to the left for 30 years now, and I am sure they wouldn't deny it. Why else would they advertise exclusively in The Guardian. If you work for the Beeb and you don't have the correct lefty opinions, you better get them quick if you want your career to go anywhere.

And it was always Pertwee

Microscope-wielding boffins crack cordless phone crypto

Jim 59
Black Helicopters

chit chat

A foreign government agent is not going to come creeping round my house with a laptop and a vanload of antenna, with all the atttendant risk of discovery. He will just bribe some dude at the phone company to do a tap. Heck he probably has agents at the phone company already.

Jim 59

Interception

Surely any spook/crook will just tap the line and harvest your conversation unencrypted, rather than have all that rf agro. Any spook with the resources to contemplate DECT interception will also have the resources and/or authority to tap your chat by conventiontional means.

I'm not sure that DECT buys you much in the first place. What does it prevent, exactly ?

Alreet, Apple!

Jim 59

You say Wii, I say Wi i

Eldon Square is a bus ride for most people. Metre Centre is a 4 billion year queue on the Western Bypass. I remember when they built the MC, and how they never built any extra roads to support it, effectively turning the existing Western Bypass into a permanent car park.

It must come as a suprise to southerners going to Scotland that they have to queue for 2 hours going past a shopping centre. But it made John Hall rich.

Belkin Home Base

Jim 59

ie. a wireless bridge

Some people use the Airport simply as a wireless bridge, ie. a device to connect 2 networks wirelssly. The Belkin seems to offer an alternative. Other alternatives are the poorly concealed ethernet cable or the ham-jamming power line transmitters. I am still at the decorative cable stage unfortunately. Would be nice if somebody would make a £50 Airport equivalent without all the Apple software bits, just good wireless n.

Mini-asteroid sneaks up on Earth

Jim 59

25m

Presumably thay were greater then 25m before entering the atmosphere.

A bit scary that this asteridwas discovered only 3 days ago. Not much warning.

UK etailer calls self 'the last place you want to go'

Jim 59

hey nice execution

May it bring you great cut thorugh.

A decade to forget - how Microsoft lost its mojo

Jim 59
Stop

leverage

So long as all PC manufacturers continue to integrate Windows at the factory, MS dominance is assured. Every PC comes with with a forced-purchase of Windows, which leverages and mandates the use other MS products in the home, office, back office and even the data centre. It doesn't really matter about software quality or what competitors do.

Microsoft urges Flash makers to pay fat dollar for exFAT format

Jim 59
Go

File systems

Thanks to Neil Stansbury and others. The answer to my original question was simply "because users want to plug TomToms etc. into Windows based PCs". I overlooked that admittedly obvious point, being a Linux user and owning few embedded items.

Jim 59
WTF?

File systems

Why manufacturers buying FAT/exFAT instead of using free ext2,3,4 or similar ?

Fedora 12 - it's a horse, not a camel

Jim 59
WTF?

Deleting it now

Installed, 4 hours of ext4/grub hows-yer-father, then 14 hour nvidia driver nightmare. 18 hours of life wasted, rm -r running now. A bag of unstable wank. And I have been doing unix for 20 years, wonder how the newbies got on.

Sh*t the bed, it's Comment of the Week

Jim 59
Thumb Up

Tyrun - (Back) into the Valley

We were amused by this late contender:

"I also remember crying at my computer to myself after hours of typing a certain program and nothing happening.

At least I don't do that at work [when] my code fails, I leave the room first."

(Back) into The Valley

Jim 59

@Lee Dowling

"If only there'd been a bit easier way to get those listings into the computer"- who remebers the Chipshop on Radio 4, and their audio broadasted BASICODE listings ? You record the noise, then play the casette into your computer. Never worked for me.

Jim 59
Thumb Up

Dragon 32

Cool article. I seem to remember lengthy Dragon type-ins written by two brothers called "Brains". I think it was in Dragon User magazine, or Your Computer. A diary app comes to mind, typed in by me while Dad dictated. We loved it.

I recall "hacking" some graphics library on the school's RM 380z to make some sort of analogue clock. I missed The Valley, as my game love was given to Wintersoft's "Ring of Darkness", an awesome game for the Dragon. You had to flip the casette over half way through, and it saved your character to another tape.

Count yourself lucky with the PCW8256! My Final year Engineering project was word processed on a CPC464 (Protext), and would not even fit on one (3 inch) disk. At least your 8256 had 2 drives.

Kent Police exceeded powers in too-tall photographer case

Jim 59
FAIL

double plus ungood

Yes, that's right Ch Supt Steve, we are just happy for you to do whatever you want without regard to wimpy human rights. Now go and arrest everyone over 5' 11'. Everyone under 5'11" - pour a bucket of water over their heads.

Yank objects to Reg cherry-popping headline

Jim 59
FAIL

Yawn

Complainant was doing quite well until his last sentence turned the whole thing into an internet snark.

WTF is this country called America?

Jim 59

pencil33

Commentard is right. there is no such country as America. Lewis Page means the USA. America is two continents. Canadians, Mexicans, Peruvians and so on are also Americans, and like people to remember it.

Windows 95 to Windows 7: How Microsoft lost its vision

Jim 59

Micrsoft

It's great that Windows 7 looks reasonably good. But quality is surely not the focus of Microsoft's OS business, which depends more on simply making sure every PC comes with Windows installed and factory-integrated. As long as that continues to happen, Windows will always dominate the desktop, regardless of quality. Cheap PC hardware will keep Apple in second place, and lack of integration will keep Linux at third.

Crypto spares man who secretly video taped flatmates

Jim 59

Hidden Volume?

Won't an inspection of the PC will likely show references to the hidden volume or pointers to the data it contains? Than it's hidden no longer. Same goes for hiding data in jpegs and so on.

Excellent comment earlier about NCIS guy "mashing the keyboard randomly".

Welsh yobs clobbered by cross-dressing cage fighters

Jim 59

Couldn't agree more with the vulture

Exactly what Sarah Bee said.

El Reg bootnote section is the best there is. Put a selection of Haines' finest into a book. I'll buy it.

Ubuntu's Karmic Koala opens its eyes

Jim 59
Flame

Fire!

Less important than the environmental issue is the slight fire risk posed by having a home PC switched on all the time. The fire brigade advise switching off all possible items at night, and not without reason. Laptops have heat dispersion problems anyway, and their batteries can explode, if the Reg is to be believed.

Jim 59

Agree with Martin

Exactly. People who say "Windows just works" think they are talking about Windows but they aren't. They are just saying OS installs are easy if you pay someone else to do them. Any OS will "just work" if it is factory-fitted. Microsoft's main business goal is to prevent manufacturers from integrating any other OS, and in this they have been very successful. This lack of competition leads directy to the poor quality of Microsoft products. Why bother making Windows great if the people have to buy it anyway ?

Is LTO-5 the last hurrah for tape?

Jim 59
FAIL

Not this argument again

Tape usage may be changing, but tape is not dead because:

Disk is slower, yes, slower than tape for backup, which is a surprise to many. Network is usually the bottleneck, however.

Disk cannot be sent offsite as many have commented.

Disk is more expensive to buy, run and store, and environmentally damaging.

Disks are a poor and expensive way to store infinitely retained data, which composes a fair proportion of most backup landscapes.

File restore times are not a priority in most enterprises. Backups are optimized for backup speed because restores are comparitavely rare.

As Steve Jones noted, dedup has no redundancy. There are many logical copies of your data but only one physical copy. A serious RIAD failure could put you out of business for good.

Replicated dedup can give wide area deduplication and may be the best solution in some cases where the above does not apply, but is still complex and inflexible.

Google's vanity OS is Microsoft's dream

Jim 59
FAIL

Vanity OS

I agree with your gist on the Google OS. Sounds like a bit of a non-event, destined to go the same way perhaps as google apps, google calendar and so on. However these comments are a festival of ignorance:

"Linux is a fine OS until you get to the applications - ah, yes... GIMP - and integration with the real-world, doing stuff your Mum needs to do."

Yes, Linux has thousands of free apps installable at the click of a mouse. It is therefore not difficult to pick an underdeveloped one. And no, my mum does not need to do advanced image manipulation, does anyone's?

"Linux consistently fails to pass the consumer test."

Linux has not failed with the consumer. It has never been tried by the consumer because Windows is factory integrated on every PC. The Wintel duopoly will ensure this remains so, and awful efforts like Vista will continue to make the public hate their PCs.

IT contractors demand overhaul of company transfer visas

Jim 59

@Value for Monay AC

I have worked with both permanent staff and contractors whose skills were great. There is no difference in skill level, it is just a different mode of business.

Employees are expensive. Ask any employer. Once you add up the pension, holidays, sick, PAYE processing, health, insurance and legal responsibilities, even a modestly paid employee can cost 100k. And if he is well paid, well he might still be on your hands 5 years later. Take on a contractor and you can chuck him after 3 months. This is the most valuable service a contractor provides - the ability to p*ss off immediately when no longer needed. Want to get rid of that £50,000 employee ? It will cost you, it will play hell with company morale and it may even lead to a damaging tribunal. Remember, you can't just sack somebody - that's illegal.

Contractors answer a market need. They are paid a high rate in order to make up for the risk of unemployment and the lack of other benefits. Not because they are "better" than permanent staff. If contractors weren't paid a premium rate, nobody would do it.

Jim 59

@AC on Protectionism

You are conflating two different issues. Yes, industries will spread and migrate around the world. But what we have here (allegedly) is the covert importation of work gangs by an organisation, an activity strictly forbidden under UK rules and not at all a legitimate "part of the global economy".

In the 1980s, for many reasons, British shipbuilding died and went to Korea. The Korean workers did not come to the UK and start making ships here.