Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26130 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
Personally I'm ready to welcome the new smartphone metaphor
There area couple of 1000 commands in one of the 3D modeling programs I use - it takes forever to find a little used function in the menus or toolbars.
Now that there will be a single intuitive and obvious touch gesture to select between optimising hole placement by tool path as opposed to tool change time my life will be much easier
In Canada there is a levy on all blank CDs to cover this.
In theory it goes to the artists based on all time record sales (so Bryan Adams and Celine Dion) - however the 25c/disk (!) doesn't cover the costs of the scheme so no money has been paid out.
But small local bands selling their own home made CDs do get to pay the levy on the blanks - so that's OK then.
It's not necessarily a HTC prove it is compliant it's more a case of - these foreign phones are doing bad things to a great American company, we might just have to take a look at all of them, that might take a few weeks/months etc.
Back in the day when Japan actually made stuff we would often get this - if there was some sort of issue with a Japanese competitor - our kit would sit on the docks waiting for some paperwork.
It will mean more running red lights.
There was a trial scheme in one town on this side of t'pond. Since they don't have detailed maps of speed limit zones it just tracked how often you braked hard.
More breaking = bad driver = lost your discount insurance rate.
So if a little old lady walks out into the road or a cyclist cuts across you - you have a split second to decide if the dent in the bonnet will be cheaper than the insurance hike.
We used to use "active optics" for correcting mechanical effects and "adaptive" for correcting atmosphere - but now people use adaptive for both.
Adaptive optics doesn't really help for looking down into the atmosphere - but isn't as necessary. Standing at the bottom of the atmosphere looking up - any small change in refractive index turns into a big angle distance and so the image of a distant object moves a long way. Standing at the top of the atmosphere looking down - any movement of an atmosphere near the object has very little effect
In el'reg terms it's like putting your eye up close to a crinkled bathroom window and looking out vs pressing a body upto the glass and looking at it from a long way off.
It's because they have a very "manned mission" mindset - you can't upload a new crew if you kill them with a bug.
The reason Apollo worked - in spite of the technology at the time - was that everything was tested and rehearsed to a ludicrous degree. But this attitude has continued as religous doctrine in everything they do.
I was involved with one of the original instruments on Hubble. Everything on it had to be "man rated", that made sense as far as not using toxic or hazardous propellants that an astronaut could come into contact with, but it extended to everything. We were restricted in comms chips to very low bandwidth designs that were man rated (ie apollo era) that severely restricted the science data.
One report put the build cost of Hubble at 300% of what it would have cost if had been made to launch on a rocket rather than the shuttle.
Not Fresnel lenses - they used a nested set of glancing incidence mirrors
The problem is that only a tiny region near the mirror has the correct angles for glancing incidence - so you make a mirror 1m diameter and you only get to use a few micron wide ring around it. So you have to stack lots of them like tubes and because the wavelength is so small they have to be polished to fantastic tolerances
They're called Wolter mirrors http://www.x-ray-optics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59&Itemid=71&lang=en#Wolter_optics
Nobody cares about a slightly different sized iPad/iPhone/iWTF that might or might not be launched at some time in the future.
Is the entire IT journalism 'profession' being taken over by the people who used to write stories about 'has Paul McCartney got a girlfriend' from 1960s editions of Jackie magazine?
SSL/https mail is the reason for the bill - they can simply order Goolge or whoever to hand over the details from their end. Otherwise they could just tap the cables as they do now and not require any public legislation.
Of course if you used encrypted mail to some server in Iran or Pakistan or Columbia then they wouldn't have any power to compel those organisations to hand over the data, But what kind of UK user would bother having an account on a server like that?
They have distracted all the news stories and reviewers with the crap colours and then announced a fix with nice colours - there have been no stories about whether the compiler is any good.
Or how much of C++11 it implements or why it still manages so little of C99 ?
...and this is the rock solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxy-wide success is founded - their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
SIRIUS CYBERNETICS CORPORATION
It was intended to have tech workers who couldn't get US residency close enough to be able to make face-face meetings in Ca.
Since the US can stop any of them visiting the US from the boat, and VCs who were interested can just as easily travel to Europe/S.America etc then it's not clear that it makes sense.
It could be used by US citizens to 'live' there 6months of the year to be non-resident for tax - like London bankers. But the US is a lot less forgiving on this 'arrangement' than the UK - US citizens pay tax in the USA on their worldwide income, wherever they live. So if you are just going to lie about where you live - you might aswell just lie about your income anyway
Personally I think it's all either a pipedream AND/OR a way of trying to show up how stupid US immigration is.
He shot a bunch of blue-eyed blonde scandanavians - right?
So all we have to do is to ensure that the victims are never portraide like this in violent video games.
Perhaps we could suggest that the baddies are always shown as darker skinned, bearded headress wearing foreign types?
It wasn't that which was illegal - it was MS lying to the court saying that IE was such an integral part of the OS that no other browser choice was possible after somebody demonstrated you could just delete a couple of dlls. When you are a monopoly supplier you tend to be noticed pulling this sort of thing.
The case started when MSFT blocked O'Reilly's competing web server on NT and claimed it was a fundamental OS design difference that stopped the workstation version handling more than 10 connections - before it was shown to be a single registry switch.
So it's really more like a car maker claiming that their cars can only be used with their brand of MP3 player and having a device that detects using an iPod near the car.
Presumably they registered with a CIA email address, paid with a CIA credit card, asked for a receipt for a cup of coffee - for expenses - and turned up wearing a suit, dark glasses and driving a Escalade with dark windows.
MI5 agents would have been more inconspicuous, except that they would have tried to register with a telegraph address and been surprised to find that telephones no longer needed wires.
http://www.bloodservices.ca/centreapps/internet/uw_v502_mainengine.nsf/page/vCJD%20An%20Introduction
The US allows individual hospitals (or their credit cards) to make their own rule son transplants but , http://www.fda.gov/biologicsbloodvaccines/safetyavailability/bloodsafety/ucm095107.htm
Just because they made it clear in the docs doesn't mean it wasn't bloody silly.
If Porsche launched a new SUV but admitted it didn't actually have an engine, and if you wanted to drive it, you had to tow it behind a 911.
Then they would get laughed at, even if they did mention a 0L V0 engine in the specs.
Or a better system - they pay $230 for the e-textbook but can't resell it at the end of the year. And with an electronic version next years edition can very quickly have all the page and question numbers changed so students can't use a previous one.
You can also produce homework questions that can only be answered by clicking a link in the ebook in case any students still try and get out of paying the publishers.
Until Honda decide that you only have a license to use the software in your car's engine management system and can't resell it. Or that they will only service the car for the original owner and will expire servicing on cars more than 5years old and have design patents on the shape of each component to stop any third party spares.
Of course it would be ridiculous for an industry to behave like that to it's customers
