Posts by David O'Rourke

Butcher breaks out of own freezer using black pudding

Re: "psychosomatic illness"

The Wikipedia page on gluten cites three papers that talk about the toxicity of some cultivars of oats for patients with coeliac disease. I would hope that a GF black pudding contained only suitable oats.

Re: "psychosomatic illness"

Actually, both delicacies traditionally contain oatmeal, and oats contain gluten.

Ohio bloke accused of torching own home after his pacemaker rats him out to cops

Pleading the Fifth

Presumably a pacemaker inside you doesn't count as part of you. Otherwise he would have had the right not to incriminate himself

Machine-learning boffins 'summon demons' in AI to find exploitable bugs

Source code not required

Actually you don't even need access to the source code. Researchers have shown that they can deliberately produce false results from a variety of ML algorithms whilst treating them as black boxes.

Super Cali: Be realistic, 'autopilot' is bogus – even though the sound of it is something quite precocious

Autopilot

Although I know exactly what a typical autopilot can and cannot do, I cannot hear the term without thinking of the cheerful inflatable chap from the Airplane movie.

Still got a floppy drive? Here's a solution for when 1.44MB isn't enough

I still have a machine with a 3.5in floppy drive, and I still use it regularly.

Admittedly for somewhat esoteric reasons.

It's the only PC I have left with a parallel printer port, necessary for a piece of hand-built data gathering hardware. Unfortunately that PC also has a broken IO subsystem, and no Ethernet, so the only sensible way of getting the data back off the machine again is via floppy.

Still it's a hobby isn't it

Bundling ZFS and Linux is impossible says Richard Stallman

Re: Open/Closed

Many versions of the GPL license allow for closed source or non-GPL compatible code to be used with GPL if the two connect solely through a well-defined API or similar. This is generally how driver models are implemented and the license sees this as being different to the way that binaries are linked whether that's statically or dynamically.

Google ditches the bits in the bottom of the box

Re: Google's loss

I agree exactly with the spectacularly refined chap. iGoogle is the only reason I signed up for a Google account. It's exactly the trade off between service and privacy that we are supposed to be aware of. iGoogle made it worth my while, without it, I'll almost certainly stay signed off and Google will lose some of my traceability

Sagem DSI86HD

Poor customer support

I'm afraid that I couldn't recommend a Sagem set top box to anyone because of their atrocious customer support.

My PVR bricked yesterday (not entirely unexpected) because of shoddy firmware. But this problem has been known about for two years or so and, calls to customer support during that time have received blatant lies about an imminent fix.

My advice, don't buy Sagem. (and I think you'll find plenty of other users of the same PVRs feel the same way)

Nationwide Freeview tune-up takes place today

@adam payne - Sagem not on affected list

The Sagem models have never appeared on the official lists of devices affected, but it's been pretty well known amongst the forums that the PVR72xx range could not cope with the split NIT.

I've refrained from retuning for the last year or so because of this, but the retune has forced my hand and the box is now pretty much useless.

Many of the boxes on the list, known to be affected were sold prior to the digital tick scheme. But these Sagems had the tick, and have never worked properly (mine had a note in the box from Sagem telling me about (some of) the bugs in the firmware that they were working on fixing.

In my opinion, the device has never actually been fit for purpose, and I will probably be chasing my retailer under the sale of goods act.