Posts by GBE 569 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2010
I've never had water that tasted "delicious" (unless you count various beverages and dishes that have had so much stuff added that nobody would ever call them "water"). I find water to be pretty much tasteless. How something like that could be called "delicious" is beyond me. The goal for water is to be comletely bland and tasteless.
"Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
True for me, but not in the way that AC seemed to think. I find neither option terrifying at all.
I find the former much _sadder_ than the latter. I'm much happier thinking there is other life out there (though I'm not really sure why). Due to the vast distances involved, I don't see why we would have anything to fear from extra-terrestrial life.
"but a proof read would have worked wonders. This reads like a ten year old's homework assignment."
Yea, that was painful.
Most of it was decipherable despite the typos, subject/verb disagrements, incorrect/missing punction and various other grammar problems. There were a couple sentences where I just plain couln't figure out what they were supposed to mean: there seemed words missing (or perhaps extra ones thrown in by mistake).
> What part of World War 2 took place in Spain? Is history teaching in the UK really that bad nowadays?
The spying part. Based on what I've read, about 2/3 of the population of Spain during WWII were spying, trying catch spies, pretending to spy, on their way somewhere else to go spying, on their way home after spying for one side or the other.
> No way are they going to model the look on a harmless fish when they can make it look like a lean mean killing machine.
Tuna can swim 75km/h and are very active, efficient and deadly predators. They are just as much lean, mean, killing machines as are sharks. They just don't happen to mistakenly attack H. sapiens the way sharks do. ;)
I'm not sure being attacked by a 2m tuna would be much better than being attacked by a 2m shark...
> I think the studio that made the film win this one
>> I thought the same. But if the film also gets cancelled from theatrical release, then it'll be a big loss for the studio.
The release won't get cancelled -- only a single premier got cancelled. That's probably a net gain considering nobody actually _pays_ for tickets to premiers and Sony can probably get some of the money back on the catering.
I'm pretty sure this is going to be a huge win for Sony.
If I were more cynical I'd credit Sony's marketing people with a lot of the rumors and threats that came out after the data dump. I don't think I'd go so far as to credit them with the data dump itself.
Really?
We have to explain this to you _every_ friggin' time there's an article about this ship?
The ship was named after the city in Puerto Rico, which was named after the Spanish conquistador who became the first Spanich governer of that island. The connotation (which is strictly British BTW) over which you are giggling like a 12-year old didn't come into use until later. One might more logically ask why Brits named effeminate men after after a Spanish conquistador.
I honestly didn't notice any difference until I read the article about it.
I do now see that the layout of the comments page is broken rather badly (at least in my copy of Firefox). There's a tall column of coments with several inches of whitespace on each side. Below that, there's the login/logout stuff shoved up agains the right hand edge of the window. Then below that there's a column of ads a few inches wide and a couple feet tall with 10-12 inches of whitespace on the left. Then the footer way, way down there below all that.
Fail.
I honestly don't understand why peple think web sites have to be redesigned every year or two simply for the sake of change. Is the web designer union that strong? Web sites don't ever seem to get any better -- just different.
I assume the real purpose is to intentionally move everything around so that people can't find anything. That way they have to waste time stumblling past more crap and more ads before they find what they actually came for.
I'm pretty sure large brick and morter retailers swear by that...
Well, rocket science is actualy pretty easy:
F = m*a
F = G (m1*m2/r^2)
Throw in some freshman level calculus, a $300 PC to run some orbital calculations and simulations on, and bob's your uncle.
Rocket _engineering_ OTOH, is a complete and utter bitch.
The launch failure was undoubtedly due to an engineering problem, not a science problem.
<pedant>
quote: an American might say that CHAPS in its current state was "about as much use as the tits on a boar hog".
I've heard that many times, but never with the word "hog" on the end
In common parlance, "boar" means adult male hog, so the "hog" is redundant and makes the listener think you might think there's such a thing as a "boar sheep" or "boar cow".
In less common usage, "boar" means adult male <certain other mammals>, in which case tits are just as useless.
</pedant>
Ah, core memory....
I had a job interview at a company that was still making core memory in '85, and I know it was still common in newly deployed military hardware through the late 80's. Around 1988 I was working on a design that included a couple US Navy AN/UYK-44 16-bit mini-computers, and some of the gold-braid types were nervous because we were proposing the use of brand new SRAM and EEPROM cards instead of core.
The article is about an _application_ that has been filed. Blaming the PTO for that is like blaming you for the junk mail you receive.
It hasn't been granted. It hasn't even been examined.
It's just some bullshit that Apple sent to the PTO because one their IP attorneys had nothing better to do one afternoon, and wanted to chalk up another mark towards his quota.
If it gets granted, _then_ you can bitch about the PTO.
We switched to using Salesforce as an issue/bug tracking system a couple years back. It's absolutely awful and nearly useless. [It may be useless, but at least it's slow and expensive -- which, I presume, must be the goal.] It makes the ancient version of JIRA that we had been running on a cobbled-up in-house server wonderful. Now, I finally understand: Salesforce is an elaborate April fool's joke that I was just too dim to grok.
"Dubbed the App Runtime for Chrome, it's a way of packaging Android apps so that they will launch and run on Chrome OS, via a special runtime implemented using the Chocolate Factory's Native Client (NaCl) in-browser binary execution tech."
I'd take it with a grain of salt.
I was thinking the same thing: _that's_ not the BSOD. The BSOD is the one you see when Windows stops completely and does a memory dump. IIRC it dumps some address and status stuff to the screen in hex, dumps core to a file somewhere and then just halts. There's no pressing a key to kill an app or anything like that. You're done: you take a picture of the screen with a camera (or write down all the numbers you see) and then pull the power plug.
The article is about the BSOSALU (Blue Screen of Some App Locked Up). A bit annoying, but nothing like the actual BSOD.
My idea is to use moving mechanical reflectors and ambient light to project an image onto the user's retinas!
I've got working prototypes and with a little funding can supply a practically unlimited number of units at under $50 a unit!
Where do I sign up for my million dollars?
When I bought my first e-book, I had to decide: B&N or Amazon.
Didn't have a smart-phone or a tablet. Didn't want to buy a dedicated e-reader yet. Didn't have a Windows or MacOS computer. With the Amazon e-book, I could read it on my Linux desktop and laptop. With the B&N e-book: nope.
Not much of a choice after all. I've since bought a number of e-books from Amazon and a Kindle paperwhite (which I use mostly with library books and things like PDFs of owners manuals for various things). If B&N had provided a way for Linux users to read their e-books, I probably would have leaned towards B&N just for the sake of keeping some competition alive -- but that ship has sunk.
"In the same way that the post office doesn't open letters and parcels unless a warrant has been received concerning the recipient or sender, I can't for the life of me see why online services should be treated any differently."
Because when you signed up for your "free" e-mail account, you paid for it by giving Google permission to sift through all your email and other data looking for whatever they want.
"In curtailing personal freedoms, the US is turning into the world leader,"
That's all an extension of a Bush policy based on the "they hate our freedom" theory.
If we eliminate all our freedom, then nobody will hate us anymore, and we'll all be safe from terrorists!
Bush and company were very enthusiastic about eliminating freedom in the US and had made a pretty good start on it. Some of us had hoped that Obama would reverse course on that plan, but we've been sadly disappointed. Progress towards freedom-elimination may have slowed a little at best...
Price in a particular market isn't determined by cost of manufacture, cost of shipping, or the price in some other market.
Price is determined by what people are willing to pay for something.
Apparently Brits are willing to pay more.
Stop buying MS Office, and the price will go down.
I agree the story seems to be both pointless and wrong.
All the primary evidence seems to agree with Wikipedia and Google. I don't put much faith in her comments about being born on Bastille day.
I suppose the author could start claiming the birth certificate is a fake, but then I'm afraid he'd be lumped with with all the Fox-news right-wing wackos still harping on about their conspiracy theory that Obama was not really born in the US.
"Of course they couldn't take money at the desk, nor dispense it. But as long as you wanted a new chequebook, or a chat about a loan, brilliant."
Perhaps I'm the odd one out, but I never go into a bank unless I need to talk to somebody at a desk.
I get my cash from ATMs, and deposit checks with my phone.
I rarely deposit cash, but I can do that at the ATM 24/7 too.
About 5 years ago when I bought my house I needed a cashiers check for the closing. That's the last time I used a cashier behind a counter -- and I'm pretty sure somebody sitting at a desk could have done that as well since all they did was type on a computer terminal and then walk over and pick up the check off the printer.
I've flown from US to London and back maybe a dozen times and US to Australia a few times. All those trips were coach except for one, and flying long-distance in coach is definitely less pleasant than business or first. But, a while back I read a biography of John Adams which included detailed descriptions of _his_ trips between the colonies and England. He had better class accomodations than most, but compared to that even coach class on the cheapest airlines is a delight. Steerage class on the ocean liners of the 20th century wasn't exactly a picnic in the park either.
The URL is
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/24/microns_third_quarter_revenues_disappoint/
yet from the article:
"Micron Technology – ... – has announced what appear to be cheery results today."
"Net income was a pleasing $806m compared to just $43m a year ago."
"Micron's own-branded SSD revenue was 20 per cent of the flash revenue – a 60 per cent plus growth rate from the second quarter."
"Micron said demand for PC DRAM was more better than initially expected."
If that's dissappointment, sign me up for some!
Definitely.
I've noticed that overweight, out-of-shape, 50-something men who can't throw a baseball are drastically under-represented in major league professional baseball. I demand this disparity be addressed immediately.
I'll be waiting with bated breath for my contract offer to arrive in my mailbox.
"Well, pray you don't get a dodgy ram stick."
Don't worry, you won't.
Because there is no ram stick (more technically called a DIMM module).
There are just some ram chips soldered to the motherboard instead. That's the whole point of the gripe: there are no ram sticks nor sockets to stick 'em in.
"Now, private punters don't like transaction charges and can get an account without them from one of the big rip-off artists (who make their money back on selling debt and outrageous "whoops" charges) so they can get a deal which, on the surface, looks better by staying right where they are."
I don't ever get charged the "whoops" charges, so not only does it look like a better deal on the surface, it _is_ a better deal. There are no transaction charges, I have a no fee credit card which rebates 1.5 percent of transactions, no ATM fees, free cashiers checks, and they pay a small but non-zero interest on deposits As long as I keep the total balance below $100,000 there is absolutely no risk.
I do have to pay to have check blanks printed, but since I only write a dozen or so checks a year, that cost is pretty negligible.
I'd give it a serial look if I could get it with with plain, generic Androind sans all the bloatware and the mucked-up UI that manufacturers always put on their devices to provide "product differentiation" (or whatever their calling the particular flavor of manure they splat onto the devices this month to make them less usable (unique, but less usable).
From the fine article:
"PCIe 4.0 PHYs will still be fabricated using good ol' FR-4 glass epoxy electrical insulator as their foundation."
I don't get it. A PCIe PHY is an IC. They don't use FR-4 fiberglass -- that's what printed circuit boards are made out of. A PCIe PHY is generally soldered on to a motherboard that's made of FR4, but the PHY itself is not fabricated using FR4.
Can somebody lend me a clue?
From the article:
>> "The data is eventually decrypted with numbers generated by an algorithm with a mathematical processor," according to BitDefender.
An algorithm with a mathematical processor?
What's that supposed to mean?
Would you install "security" software from somebody who writes gibberish like that?
Same here. I had an iPod touch for a while, and I loved the device itself, but getting music to and from it was a nightmare because it required use of the iTunes application. The iTunes app was huge, slow, buggy, crashed a lot, and was based on all sorts of insanely stupid assumptions that caused no end of grief.
With my Android phone, I just plug in the USB cable, mount the fileystem, and copy files back and forth. It's completely brilliant!
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