* Posts by Tom Hawkins

65 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2006

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Climate change: looking for a haystack, not a needle

Tom Hawkins

So to summarise...

Article: People who complain that we can't forecast the weather therefore we can't possibly predict the climate are mistaken because the two are different things. Lots of examples of systems that are impossible to predict on a micro scale but easy on a macro scale.

Comments: yeah but no but yeah but how can you possibly say we can predict the climate when we can't even predict the weather stoopid? like duh?

;-)

Biometrics tackle immigration abuse

Tom Hawkins

Justify...

They have to justify it to me because I live and vote here, and on behalf of the guy with the Filipino wife (who sounds as though he is of UK origin, though he doesn't say this) I don't want my government to pursue pointlessly obstructive visa policies - for all the reasons well explained above.

Culture matters: Why i-mode failed

Tom Hawkins

National Rail Enquiries WAP service...

...could certainly be improved on, but it's disingenuous to say it doesn't work. I use it frequently for both timetable lookups and real-time arrivals/departures and it does the job fine. The Japanese one linked to above is certainly slicker than the National Rail website, but we're discussing mobile interfaces here - is there such a thing as an i-mode emulator site so we can see how it looks on a phone?

Tom Hawkins

Good travel information

...on Britain's expensive, sorry *extensive* train network:

http://wap.nationalrail.co.uk/

is there anything the Japanese one does that this doesn't?

Wattson to make electricity monitoring elementary?

Tom Hawkins

For the Brits...

...and rather cheaper, if less iPoddockesque:

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=38343&TabID=1&source=1&doy=24m7

O2 lacking Apple focus

Tom Hawkins

Well it doesn't work for me...

...at least it didn't last time I bothered to try, and I'm sure I checked with Firefox as well as Safari and Camino. I've bothered O2 tech support at least twice about it and the only response I got was some instructions on how to delete cookies in Internet Explorer :-P I only stay with the b*ggers 'cos they're cheap (and so am I).

Enraged reader savages iPhone fanboys

Tom Hawkins

Dualit? Don't give me Dualit...

We had a Dualit kettle. It leaked. Dualit refused to fix or replace it (user error, apparently... you're not supposed to leave water in it when you're not boiling it!)

Beyond the valley of the drolls

Tom Hawkins

Data driven

Is it just me or does this concept work best when the underlying quote is particularly sarky? E.g.:

"If you think X can solve your problem, you don't understand your problem and you don't understand X"

"Studies have shown that X is the work the Devil makes for idle hands"

or the old classic

"Q: Why do people take an instant dislike to X?

A: Because it saves time."

(sources and original values of X left as an exercise to the reader)

Physics GCSE: 'insultingly easy, non scientific, and vague'

Tom Hawkins

Not this 'health & safety' guff again...

"Oh, and one final thing, remember practical science? You do? Well forget that. Health & Safety has all but eradicated the good stuff"

No it hasn't, although some teachers think it has. The Royal Society of Chemistry surveyed schools and education authorities about this and found that very few substances or experiments were actually banned from schools, but there were some misconceptions about what was allowed. Still, the report comments, "97% of schools demonstrate the reaction between potassium and water, 96% the van der Graaff generator and 90% dissect a heart."

http://www.rsc.org/ScienceAndTechnology/Policy/Bulletins/Issue5/SurelyThatsBanned.asp

Microsoft demos mind-bending photo app

Tom Hawkins

And the big deal is?

So it looks like a moderately whizzy application for looking at pictures in sort of 3d. Am I missing something?

"He even rotates this massive collection - yes, the entire collection - as if it were a single photograph."

I'd have thought this was pretty trivial to implement if you'd had the chance to do the extensive pre-processing of that 'gigabyte after gigabyte' of data, as they clearly have done. Did anyone even edit this Microsoft press release before publishing it? I'll decide whether it bends my mind, thank you very much.

Why do robot experts build such lousy robots?

Tom Hawkins

Re: Humanoid robot

"It has a rather novel way of programming new movements/sequences into it, all you have to do is physically move the arms/legs into the position you want and the PC will record that position"...

Err, I don't think that's particularly novel - it's known as 'walkthrough programming' and has been used for teaching industrial robots for a long time...

Danes 'prove' sudden iBook death syndrome

Tom Hawkins

"...point me in the direction of the evidence for your statement..."

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/10/16/rescuecom_reliability_audit/

will that do? :-)

Beeb's iPlayer service gets greenlight

Tom Hawkins

Composers may be dead...

...but performers of classical music are very much alive, and income from recordings is important to them. Making the BBC's classical music output available free would be great for consumers in the short term but would undermine the orchestras and players who keep the art form alive in this country, one of our greatest cultural assets IMHO.

EU consumer chief roasts Apple

Tom Hawkins

Can someone explain...

...how come Apple has this supposed moral obligation to make iTunes and the iPod interoperable with other music stores/players, in spite of the fact that there are perfectly good ways of obtaining the same music without restrictions elsewhere... but meanwhile no-one seems to be suggesting that if I buy a piece of Windows software from Microsoft (who appear to have much greater domination of the software market than Apple do of the music market) there should be an equivalent obligation on them to make it work on Linux or a Mac?

Sure, it'd be great if we could take iTunes-purchased content and play it on another MP3 player without re-ripping, but until such time as Apple's "dominance" prevents fair entry to the market by competitors I don't see how this falls foul of consumer rights law.

Oh my Word

Tom Hawkins

Antiquary? Hah!

Word 5.1 on the Mac (copyright 1992, according to the about box) still works pretty well for me, running without complaint under Classic on OS X Panther. What features in more recent versions do I miss out on? Let's think... zoom; paragraph numbering that always messes up; style editing that takes about fifteen mouse clicks to get to (Word 6 onwards) or has been bastardised beyond all usability (Word 2003); err... yup, like I said, it works pretty well for me, and it's not even too bad at opening docs from the latest versions. Shame about the zoom though.

I guess it'll finally die when I eventually upgrade to an Intel Mac, unless I find I'm so attached to it that I keep running it under some kind of emulator...

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