Posts by Dave 126 10664 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
Fair play to US servicemen for their restraint and self-control, is all I can say. When the WBC routinely picket the funerals of dead soldiers- attended as they are by soldiers who are very much alive, kicking and combat trained- I'm surprised that no-one in the WBC has been seriously hurt.
Causing riots at funerals? Like shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre, no?
Free speech is about being able to challenge your rulers without being banged up in prison or beheaded. It is not about being a prick.
Likewise, freedom of the press is about bringing politicians and institution's to account- it shouldn't be about harassing innocent citizens for the titillation of others.
Actually, all New Testament bibles have the line "Treat others as you yourself would be treated", and "Blessed are the peacemakers". Kurt Vonnegut, a former head of the Atheist Association of America*, has made a great case for living in a world in which the Sermon on the Mount happened.
Christianity started out as the religion of the poor, under the Roman empire. For much of the last two thousand years, political views and movements have been expressed in religious terms, culminating eventually in the enlightenment, a milestone of the very civilisation that has shaped your views.
You make me embarrassed to be an atheist.
*(in his first speech as president, he says "Isaac [Asimov, the former head] is in heaven now" to howls of laughter)
I wish that their prophecy comes true, and they move to Israel. As Loius Threoux (who when meeting the WBC had not long come back from meeting Ultra-Zionist Settlers in Israel- total nutters) noted with sublime understatement: "Oh, that will be interesting..."
I noted that Anonymous said they would spare no enjoyment... the WBC's hate videos are a hoot and look they they had a lot of fun making them, using the pastiches of the same popular culture that they claim to attack.
Loius Theroux and Keith Allen have both visited them... Theroux did better, since they couldn't quite work them out.
>This is evidenced by the simple fact that they are paying at least 30% more for their computing devices than an equivalent from another manufacturer
Tom's Hardware would disagree with you. I could take your word for it, but Tom's were good enough to show their working and you weren't. Sorry. Obviously the UK case is different, because exchange rates can up the margins, but this study was done by a US organisation.
Generally though, Mac users are more likely to be baby-boomers with some expendable income, their children are grown up, house is paid off etc... people who probably didn't use digital technology from a young age. Remember- for every objectionable hipster with a Macbook in a coffee shop, there will be a dozen Macs in the homes of perfectly pleasant people who don't get worked up about technology for its own sake, but do whatever they do in one of the myriad other areas of worthwhile human activity besides IT.
>The linux users are the most savvy of they bunch and thus recognize most charities are scams with hugely bloated administration
If the Linux folk are so savvy, wouldn't they be able to differentiate between the efficient charities and the bloated ones, rather tar them both with the same brush? I think that they are, and they can. There are also organisations that attempt to rate charities on their effectiveness, should one want guidance.
>Not suitable for HD recorders then!
I beg to differ... many people use PVRs to watch weekly broadcasts at times convenient to them, and then delete them. If you want to store the recorded footage 'for keeps', then you would have to take steps to transfer it to additional storage anyway, because one day that single HDD will fail. I believe there is PVR firmware which allows content on a PVR HDD to be transferred to other devices on the network.
For 'normal people' who don't tinker with their toys, all a bigger PVR HDD means is that come the day it goes Pft!, they lose more hours of the recordings they have made.
[Disclaimer: I'm not advocating illegal duplication of copyright material, but the above is a technique that allows broadcast material to be retained for reasons that fall under fair use provisions- such as academic use or parody. ]
>Environmentalism is a religion, a kind of Doomsday Cult. It is probably the most popular religion in San Francisco.
Do you mean that ALL people who are concerned about the issue are zealous nutters? I'm an atheist, yet I do not kill, do not steal, and keep the clean separate from the unclean (food safety). Similarly, I'm not a member of Greenpeace or whatnot, yet if I were a town planner, I would sooner approve a building that was kept at the desired temperature through the use of design and materials over one that relied purely on fuel heating and powered air-conditioning.
Just as there is a lot of common sense in the scriptures, (on how not to get food poisoning, on how not to depress yourself by coveting your neighbour's wife's ass, or creating ill-feeling over the above) there is some common sense in being less wasteful and at least studying potential alternatives. This isn't faith- how long have aluminium smelting plants been built near hydroelectric plants? For decades.
Trying to tar all environmentalists, or even the the yet-undecided, with the same derogatory brush is like comparing your local vicar with Jim Jones of suicide cult infamy or the Spanish Inquisition. Not every concerned citizen is a Swampy, just as not every climate change doubter is a Koch brother. If your argument can be made on it merits, lets hear more of you, and often; but please don't pollute the discussion with name calling.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Jones
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family
>This study really does need say it's specific to the USA, it really doesn't work elsewhere in the world.
It doesn't need to say that, because it made it clear that the data came from the US grid and weather.
>Air conditioning is considered a necessity and is expensive to run - a situation that simply doesn't feature in the UK or wider
Even termites can construct structures that only vary by 1ºC over a 24 hour period, and they're insects. Can't we build a little smarter? If we looked at Moorish architecture, with courtyards, water features and thick walls, we would be doing better than just erecting another condo with a hundred Mitsubishi air conditioning units hanging out of the windows. I'm not saying we currently have the solution, but we can do better than "we need air con, so let's give up now". Still, what with Florida being filled with AC-dependant senior citizens, and their enthusiasm for voting, it could be a struggle...
>But it's also not very difficult to mug a defence-less little old lady, however that doesn't mean one should get away without prosecution for doing it.
My above question was not meant to infer that McKinnon was right, or wrong- it was just a question.
Anyway, I'm tempted to up-vote you, just for comparing the US Department of Defence and a proverbial old lady : D
> this seems like mindless vandalism to me...
Maybe it is, but the first thing to do would to explore how likely the following two assertions are to be correct:
-The engineers have a reason to do what they are doing, but subtleties of their reasoning have not survived the journey through a Reg article... or
-The engineers are mindless vandals.
My first assumption was that it was being done to study the resulting impact, but the article says that won't be seen at the time. Maybe it is enough for them to study the crater/ejected material after the event, but they are destroying the second probe soon afterwards. Maybe it is just some house-keeping, keeping junk out of orbit so as not to pose a danger to future missions to the Moon (however small a chance). Dunno.
Vista would force restart your computer every so often, to install updates, wiping unsaved documents (avoidable) and killing any long tasks like batch rendering or downloading (unavoidable). This behaviour couldn't be turned off in the Home versions. Personally, I consider that to be more annoying that having to bat some coloured squares out of the way on start up.
>But there's literally nothing that would make you want to go through the hassle and expense of installing 8 when you have 7.
I'll take your word for it, as I'm happy enough with Win 7. That said, I haven't any USB 3 hardware, or any need yet to explore Storage Spaces. Lots is written about the Win8 UI, (I'd just assumed that technical users will use 3rd party tools modify it to their liking... surely 'power users' have their own pet tweaks they like to make to any GUI?) but less about the 'under the hood/bonnet' new features/bugs.
I kind of get the impression that MS knew many people would be happy enough with 7 not to bother with 8, so they have been more experimental with 8's UI, with a view to implementing the resulting feedback into 9. This view is deliberately optimistic, though!
Hehe.... This, from the preface to a summary of the Apple II, and its competitors the PET and TRS 80.:
I was convinced that the Apple II was the best, and even when there were certain clear advantages in the IBM PC platform regarding memory, processor speed, and volume of available software, I stubbornly held to my bias (after all, I had a lot of knowledge and money invested in the Apple II and did not care to change to something I didn’t know as well). This kind of attitude was the source of many of the computer “religious” wars of the 1970s and 1980s
-http://apple2history.org/2010/10/25/the-competition-part-2/
Agreed- I forgot to mention that as a valid criticism of the Xperia P phone I mentioned above. That said, maybe soft-touch buttons are more reliable than some designs of physical buttons, but I don't know... back in the day when they had keypads, I had a couple of phones that developed a dodgy button or two.
I'm not sure why someone down-voted you, you were merely expressing your personal preference, whilst accepting that not everyone feels that same.
>Too big, far too big, too big, too pricey, Too big and no apps, too big...
Help us help you- what size are you after, 3", 3.5", 4"? I have a 4" model, the Xperia P, and doesn't worry my tailor or give me cramp in my hand, but it may be considered 'pricey' compared to some handsets and cheap compared to others. (I have no Hammer pants)
You want small size AND a keyboard? Hope you've been a good boy this year!
Hi guys, thanks for your responses.
After reading bits of a very long XDA thread, it would appear that whilst the Nexus 7 can be bodged to work with USB OTG, the (LG-made) Nexus 4 can never be - it seems that its hardware can't supply power to the microUSB port. Apparently there are other LG phones that suffer from the same hardware issue.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1966864&page=23
Oh, and I guess that a universally supported, non-propriety file system capable of bigger-than-4GB files is too much to ask for 2012 : D
@AC desiring lots of resolution in a 3.5" phone... who's your optician? : D
The Xperia Go is around 3.5", and yeah, the resolution is a bit poor if photos and web browsing are your thing. I find the resolution on my P (4") good enough, small text in browsers is readable for my eyes but I wouldn't want it to be any smaller! I guess that if you often tether a tablet for browsing, the need for a large phone screen is somewhat negated.
I get on well with my Xperia P (much the same 'footprint' as the iPhone 5, but not as thin) and it doesn't have any annoying idiosyncrasies as my past feature phones have done, but since it is my my first smartphone I may not be the best judge. I would note that the update to ICS has a feature to make the battery last much longer than when it reviewed- it achieves this by turning off some of the data when in standby, so isn't suitable if you need receive an email or Facebook etc notification ASAP. Texts and calls, of course, come straight through.
MiniHDMI cable, 1600 mA charger, and screen protector in the box. Headphones (ear canal type) sounded very reasonable, until the cable broke (pulled out of the microphone junction).
I'm not desperate for Jelly Bean, but a quick search suggests that after Sony roll it our for the flagship models (T, TX, V) around February 2013, it will be coming for the P, S and Go. The same search reveals the Sony Xperia TX, a big screened model that has a removable battery and microSD- I mention it here because it is a feature i know some fellow commentards appreciate, and this model seems to have come in under the radar.
>I'm honestly surprised HP is so high on the list though.
Yeah... though we don't know the questions that were asked of the people being polled. Maybe when many people are asked about 'technology', they think 'printers', though the HP Touchpad gained a lot of attention last year (for the wrong reasons), the HP Microserver has been on sale forever it seems, and they are a brand that have been around for a while. They might also have entered the popular conciousness through news stories- once was a time that HP Labs Bristol were in the press every other week with something odd such as robotic DJs.
I met a young 'un the other week who was doing work towards her PhD at HP, using lasers to measure the angular momentum of gas molecules... she'd used her phone's camera to align a target to a laser (better than her eyeball, I guess) which now only produces images in shades of magenta.
Hehe, we had some fun in the pub beer garden the other month... a couple of the regulars came in with half a bike fitted to a stand, with dynamo, switch and car headlamp unit. You coulc switch between no resistance across the dynamo, the dimmed light and the full headlight- at which point cycling became very hard.
The comedy arose from the effects this concentrated physical exertion had on us, our hearts and lungs being sub-optimal due to being.. well, pub regulars.
Can anyone do a back-of-the-envelope estimate of the efficiency of charging a lead acid battery by this method, compared to the weighted rope method outlined in the article?
(My intuition suggests the rope is more efficient, since it is quieter and doesn't get as warm, but I may have overlooked something)
Batteries are expensive.
Batteries are not nice things to have decomposing into your soil when you've slung them away.
Batteries can't be recharged indefinitely.
Batteries may not be as efficient as this method of energy storage (that recharging batteries get warm is a clue)
Batteries are harder to repair than a piece of rope and sack of stones.
Conrad's Heart of Darkness
- there is mention of different lights being used as markers of status... the officer-classes were allowed (clean) paraffin wax candles, the lower-class Europeans in the camp had to use tallow candles that were unpleasant to work by.
>i have also never tweaked or had the need to tweak a driver.
I've never tweaked a driver for better performance, but have updated them in efforts to improve system stability. My laptop came from a well-known vendor, but it wasn't a mainstream model and the drivers weren't great. YMMV.
Apple's combination of SSD plus mechanical HDD uses a Logical Volume Manager in OSX, so most of the speed benefits of a large SSD are seen in small SSD + HDD combo- the OS decides which files are present on the SSD, and which on the HDD, all invisible to the user.
Still, having a mechanical HDD drive that is difficult to access isn't ideal.
>perhaps you could explain how the Retina Display can be recycled when it's a display fused to a gorilla glass panel?
Probably mechanically- there are a fair few companies and universities boasting of having developed tools to separate the screen layers from each other, and there is no reason to think that separating parts from the glass is any harder than they from each other.
This isn't actually the chief problem for companies that recycle flat screen monitors- many monitors and TV that use cold cathode fluorescent lamps have yet to reach the end of their life, and the mercury present in the CCFLs is costly to make safe- it requires costly labour (wearing bulky protective suits) to remove the CCFLs.
If you want to separate components from batches of old products, it is actually preferable to have them glued rather than screwed- you can heat the whole batch, rather than pay someone to wield a screwdriver. Since the EU had been putting the onus on end-of-life disposal on manufactuers for over a decade, it isn't in their interests to make it difficult. Like any industrial process, it becomes more efficient if you are dealing with large quanitites of the same product- since Apple sell something in the region of 2 million iMacs a year, a sufficient quantity that dissembly lines and tools can be optimised for them, or at least an operative will have familiarity with them.
>I find support in terms of drivers, etc for laptop versions of graphics cards to be extremely lacking.
That's because nVidia usually tell you to contact your laptop vendor... ho hum. You should be alright, but it might be worth checking what the latest BootCamp drivers are like.
If I indulged my paranoid side, I might install a CPU-temperature utility but it isn't necessary- if it does overheat, it will throttle itself (the game will go slow and jerky for a few seconds, before running smoothly for ten seconds, repeat).
>loses all their files when the power cable comes out
What have you got, a RAM disk? I believe OSX has an integrated back-up utility. If you're talking about loosing your open files, then it's good practice to save them regularly, or place a bead of Blu-tack around your plug, or whatever. Last time I kicked the kettle plug out the back of a computer, I was pleased to discover this then-new Office feature called AutoSave...
The wired model is about £40, the wireless one is about £55. I have a mate with sausage fingers, and he swears by Apple keyboards on his Win PC, though I think I may have been successful in weaning him onto a wireless 'Chiclet-style' Logitech model that cost £12.
Green? Using glue instead of screws actually makes products easier to reduce to their components parts come the end of their life- rather than have a man spend 30 seconds unscrewing each machine, you can put a batch in an oven, and then toss aluminium in one bin, glass in another etc.
I don't know about the i5 chip in this machine, but my Core2 Duo CPU is rated to 109ºC, and starts throttling itself at around 100ºC. I'm pretty sure that it can be subjected to higher temperatures when turned off without damage. You should be able to use a heat gun (its a heat gun, designed to bring areas to vaguely uniform temperature, not a blow-torch!) to loosen the glue without overheating any components inside the iMac, especially as the aluminium case will do a good job of distributing the heat to the desired areas.
Lets say that you expect your TV to last five years... a £200 premium over an equivalent model works out as being £40 a year, sod it, lets call it £1 a week. What can you bring to your TV set that would justify the cost of a weekly Radio Times? (Hmm... would be interested in seeing whether the rise of EPGs has impacted the sales of dedicated television listings magazines... some people still like to hold the week's listings on paper, wielding a highlighter)
Thanks for the clarification guys... I didn't phrase things well. The point I was grasping at was that Win 7 machines will happily run Linux, since Win 7 doesn't have signed boot loader as Win 8 does, so a Win 7 machine will surely have a UEFI that allows the SecureBoot to be turned off. As I understood it, the concern about other OSs was that it wasn't guaranteed that all future machines would allow this, or, if one wished to keep the SecureBoot enabled, if one would be able to get a signed bootloader for the desired OS.
Cheers JamieV,
I've heard of a few competing software solutions, for all iOSXAndroidWindows combos- there were plenty of blogs that announced it works, but none that I could find that actually said how well it works. Thanks for your recomendation, I don't know why I was of so little faith...
Often short stories make better films than full novels... certainly most of Philip K Dicks stories that have become films were short stories.
The latest Total Recall is a curious beast, trying deliberately at times to break with the Paul Verhoven version in some interesting ways, and at others to pay homage to it. The editing wasn't quite to my taste, and left me feeling it was less than the sum of its parts, but YMMV. As for the ending, you'd best watch it yourself. Still, Kate Beckinsale...
>on that criteria alone it's got to be Johnny Depp
For sure , but Mr Depp does seem a bit too comfortable playing nutters. His Hunter S Thompson seems almost nonchalant. Nicolas Cage in Bad Lieutenant appears to be just on the verge of falling apart at the seams throughout most of the film.
But yeah, Herzog or Gilliam.
You do realise that the RROD defective machines were replaced, so hasn't changed the numbers that you are playing with?
I won't defend the platform- the first generation of machines were as noisy as hell (unsuitable for any kind of media playback) - and the paying to use the online features (which as far as I know, is a peer-to-peer system that doesn't place too much workload on MS's servers - though I may be wrong) isn't great, but you are exhibiting that unfortunate tendency to class whole swathes of your fellow humans as 'idiots'. Pillock.
A year's subscription to XBOX Live Gold is less than quid a week... far cheaper than that extra half pint on a Thursday, a take-away snack once in a while, a coffee on the way to work, or a monthly trip to the cinema. Why single out this one expenditure for your poorly thought-out judgement?
The PS3 is the more versatile, civilised machine, though. No charge to play games online- but that's just as well given Sony's history of keeping user's account details secure.
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