Posts by firefly 65 posts • joined 1 Mar 2010
Agreed re the kindness and civility of Chinese people but ultimately they are part of the problem. Unlike in the West many Chinese see an attack on their government as an attack on both them and their country. The old adage that 'people get the government that they deserve' still rings true.
I would argue that it is zero sum. When you invest in a company, you do so in the expectation that it will provide earnings by selling it's products and services, will experience growth and pay dividends.
Bitcoin and other cryptos make no products, provides no services and pays no dividends. Every dollar that someone 'makes' from crypto has come straight from someone else's pocket. That's what makes it zero-sum, and you could even argue it's negative sum if the huge electricity costs are taken into account.
I had a Mk1 ('84) Orion Ghia and it was a nice car, like an armchair on wheels, the CVH engine was ok for the time and it had decent styling. Then the Mk2 came out, the soft plastics gave way to cheap hard plastics, the styling was blander, it actually had less equipment than the Mk1 and the CVH engines were being showed up by Vx's OHC engine and others. Then we had the complete and utter train wreck of the 1990 model Escort/Orions. It seems only Ford could turn out progressively worse cars with each new generation.
I actually have a Focus now and it's a decent car but I'm surprised Ford are still in business today considering some of the crap they turned out from the mid 80's up to the late 90's.
Microsoft seems to have forgotten that lax use of VL keys, and dare I say piracy have helped get them get where they are.
If they had KMS and MAK activation back in the 1990s, we'd all be running Linux on our desktops today.
I used to have a TechNet subscription but they just shitcanned that and are forcing everyone to get an MSDN sub for ten times the cost. Sometimes I wonder if they want us to use their products at all.
True, however while alpha particles can be stopped by the skin they cause immense damage if inhaled or ingested, as Alexander Litvinenko found to his cost.
Beta emitting radioactive iodines have a habit of accumulating in the thyroid gland, which is why potassium iodide tablets are issued to people after a nuclear incident to 'fill up' the thyroid, preventing the takeup of the radioactive iodines.
Thyroid cancer is the most common cancer associated with nuclear accidents, but it's one of the most treatable cancers known, with well over 90% of people surviving.
According to the BBC's own article Fukushima leak is a Level 1 incident, the lowest you can get and classed as a mere anomoly. So ask yourself why they the hell they even wrote a piece on it, let alone publish it on the front page.
People should also ask why there has been little reporting on how the Japanese people are trying to rebuild their lives after a disaster that claimed over 20,000 people, yet an incident that has cost no lives gets all the column inches.
And also the same Daily Mail that campaigned relentlessly for justice in the Stephen Lawrence case whilst no one else seemingly gave a shit.
I don't quite get the hate for the Daily Mail. Yes it's a rag with a right-wing slant but it seems that Guardianistas and their ilk love to berate it.
If you really want to pour scorn on a mainstream newspaper look no further than the Daily Express. Most of the crap they print varies from being plain wrong to downright disturbing.
I liked the UT games, but there's a reason why they never took off in pro-gaming.
The problem with the UT series was both the movement and netcode was inferior to Quake. UT had to resort to double jumps, dodging and adrenaline combos to achieve what could be easily done in Quake with normal movement. The prediction engine was also a little suspect, I recall many times the thing registering a miss when I was certain I had the shot.
Quite easily, flip the craft 180 degrees and your thruster becomes a brake. This is has been proposed as a means of moving humans through deep space, you accelerate the craft at around 1G until you achieve half-light speed then flip the craft around and decelerate at 1G, the advantage being that a similar gravity to the Earth is maintained throughout the vogage the avoiding muscle atrophy of the occupants.
Km/h for air or sea travel is indeed an abomination but not for the reason you stated. A knot is one nautical mile per hour, and a nautical mile is one minute of an degree of latitude. A pilot will know that for every 60 knots of groundspeed they travel east (or west), they will travel 1 degree of longitude every hour.
It's one of the few 'old' measurements that makes better sense than metric, and quite frankly any change towards km/h should be resisted.
I don't see how the casino lost anything. In poker you're playing against your fellow players around the table and not against the house. The house makes its money by taking a small percentage of each pot, known as the rake, or in tournament play they will take 10-15% of the buy-in.
The only possibility is that the casino, so not to piss off some valued customers, voluntarily compensated the players who were scammed.
Linux, because...
Unicomp bought all the Model M tooling and kit from IBM and the keyboards they make are pretty much identical to the originals save for things like USB and Windows keys. They even have the thick steel backboard like the original.
I like the Model M but I'd get crucified if I used one in the office for the racket they make. Cherry have a nice range of keyboards that have fairly quiet mechanical switches.
Absolutely. ARM is the Have It Your Way (tm) chip designer. You can licence entire SoC designs, or licence the ISA and build it in to your designs. Or licence anything else you like about ARM for that matter. You can then go to any chip-baker you like to build them for you be that TSMC, Global Foundries or Warburtons.
With Intel it's all or nothing, you can't licence x86, you buy entire CPUs from them or nothing at all. This inflexibility will be their undoing, not to mention their ludicrous pricing and addiction to 60%+ margins.
A number of people are pointing towards Intel's future designs with their potential to best ARM on performance and equal them with power consumption but it doesn't matter how good they are. Intel are late to the party, and in the the rapidly declining PC market it's hard to see how they can supply chips for $10 and still maintain their position as as a industry bellwether.
Rubbish. I was an avid Quake/HL/UT player 'back in the day' and I knew several players of much higher ability than myself who went on to play in professional tournies. The striking thing was that many of them used old ball mice and CRT monitors for their rigs, long after optical and LCD became the norm.
People who insist on expensive 'gaming' kit remind me of golfers who think that a £5k set of clubs will cure their slice. The height of the lunacy was the 'gaming NIC' that would give you no change from 100 notes for a theoretical 0.1s reduction in latency.
So they say, but I've picked up several items from bricks and mortar stores in the last week that have been the same price or marginally cheaper than Amazon. And those shops pay corporation tax.
Did online grocery shopping once. Dented tins, bruised fruit and vegetables that looked like they'd been sat on and bread that had a day of shelf life left. At least in a shop you can pick out the nice looking undamaged stuff and do a 'reacharound' for the fresh bread at the back of the shelf.
Don't get me wrong, I shop online frequently for obscure or tech stuff, but those who shop for *everything* online are not getting the best value for money and are quite frankly, lazy.
Why not pardon those executed for witchcraft, the Tolpuddle martyrs or the victims of the Bloody Assizes?
Turing is one of my heroes but he was convicted under the law at the time however reprehensible we find that today. Let that conviction stand as a reminder of an age where we understood what makes us human a little less than we do today.
First of all I call bullshit on your figures, 12x2TB drives would cost at least £800 alone, an MSA shelf would be another £800 and that's before you've bought your HBA and server. Secondly the NAS devices reviewed here are designed for homes and small offices and are designed to be quiet and consume little power. Your disk shelf, drives and server would consume around 300w and would make a hell of a racket. And thirdly, these devices are designed for simple storage where transfer rates, especially writes, are relatively inconsequential.
Apples to oranges doesn't really begin to describe it.
Totally agree, the price of these NAS devices is ludicrous considering a Microserver is £120 after cashback, comes with 2GB of RAM, a 256GB drive and supports ECC. The 5.25" bay is also useful if you want to install an optical or tape drive or even another 2 HDs for a total of 6.
Granted they don't work out of the box, so you're going to have to fill it with drives and install and configure your favourite OS, but I don't think that's beyond most Reg readers.
Ah yes Kirbys. As faithfull to Murray Spangler's original pillow case and fan design as you can get. Love the way all the dirt has to go through the fan and that lovely grinding noise you get when if you happen to suck up a coin. Not to mention the dusting you have to do after you've finished vacuuming because ninety percent of what you've sucked up has been blown back into the room.
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