Posts by druck 4199 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2007
Lost all faith... wrote:
I only tend to wear a watch when it's impracticable to have a phone with me, such as in a swimming pool. Not that swimming pools don't have clocks, just I'm so short sighted I can't read the damn things.
I have the opposite problem, I'm now so long sighted my wrist is too close to see without getting my glasses, so fishing the phone out of a pocket is quicker. I still wear the watch out of habit though.
When I upgraded from my Galaxy S3 to the S5, the Samsung note taking application I had been using disappeared and was replaced with Evernote, so I foolishly signed in to try it out. What a mistake, I've never experienced such incessant nagging from an app, it bombarded my gmail account with endless emails imploring me to make use of it, explain features I don't care about, and offering free trials of the pro version. No matter if the application itself is any good or not, that earned it a swift deletion.
And they need to sell advertising to fund the search engine.
How exactly do the EU think the worlds largest (and arguably best) search is supposed to be funded?
Or is their next proposal a splurge of billions of Euros of tax payers money to set up an unwanted euoogle search engine, to be what Gallieo will be to GPS. With the added disadvantage it can bend completely to the will of the EU over crazy legislation, such as the right to be forgotten?
AC wrote:
If the smart-meters ever get home networked/domotics & Internet of Things, then it'd be just your Fridge/Freezer that was switched-off for 4 or 5 hours, your freezer wouldn't really notice, but the Grid would survive better.
You don't need a smartmeter or internet of things for that. All the device has to do is monitor the mains frequency, when it is below the nominal 50Hz (or 60Hz in some places) the grid has more demand than capacity. With a few pennies worth of electronics fridges, freezes, washing machines and dishwashers, etc could just pause, not for four hours, but a few minutes is all that is normally necessary before fast response hydro kicks in, giving time for slower backup plant to come online.
ThomH wrote:
There are also some performance-oriented subtractions. ARM used to be famous for making every instruction conditional and allowing each to include a barrel roll. Both of those things are gone in favour of a shorter pipeline.
Yes, they've destroyed the beauty of the original 32bit ARM instruction set, the 64bit set has no character and could be anything. But then who actually programs in assembler any more to notice such things.
xpz393 wrote:
DAB is to radio what MiniDISC was to pre-recorded audio - A nifty improvement on its predecessor, but quickly outdated by a better, less expensive successor before it became widely adopted.
DAB isn't an improvement in any way shape or form over FM.
I remember in the 70s and early 80s being stuck listening to Radio 1 on flat mono Medium Wave before it got its own FM channel, and looked forward to the hour a day when it took over Radio 2's FM frequency and you could listen in high quality stereo. Most of the DAB channels are sub 128K mono, which is just as bad, if not worse than bloody 1970s medium wave.
It did occur to her to pretend she hadn't seen it. She spent half the morning on the phone trying to confirm the time and location (missing from the email), complicated by the fact that voice mail wasn't working due to peoples email in-boxes being full of spam. In the end she went down there and did the presentation, and was glad she did.
I have an 11.6" i3 Vivobook, the wife has the 15.4" i5 Vivobook. I put in a 240GB Samsung 840 SSD in mine, and it's far faster than the i5 for everything. Of course now she wants an SSD too, but it will have to be a 500GB to hold all her unsorted junk, so it's lucky the price has come down in the year since I bought mine.
Back in the 90s I ripped all my music collection to 128Kbps MP3 to fit on small SD cards of the time, and with no psycho acoustic model due to lack of of hardware FP on the ARM. I always wanted to get around to re-ripping it in much better quality, but I recently found out my hearing drops off a cliff after 8KHz, so not really much point.
Please elaborate on those scales falling from your eyes, as every time I've driven a car with DAB, I've been forced to retune back to FM within 15 minutes, given the shocking signal quality pretty much everywhere. Even when you can get it, why suffer low bit rate mono, when the same channels are in glorious stereo on FM.
The best obfuscation of code I ever saw was an application written in interpreted BASIC for the Archimedes (under Arthur, pre-RISC OS). Every variable and procedure name in the code had been replaced with the word ClaresMicroSupplies - but using different combinations of upper and lower case letters. The computer has no trouble recognising these as different symbols, but it's impossible for a human to tell thousands of these apart.
I bit the bullet and did an apt-get upgrade, and it didn't go too badly; taking a few hours and about 1.3GB download, and only a couple of errors reported which seemed to be sorted out with an apt-get -f install. The only thing missing was the Mint 17 wallpaper, but that was easily fixed.
Mint does use a few 100MB less than Kubuntu in most circumstances, but it seems to make a lot less difference to performance now I've got an SSD in the laptop.
I've been using Mint since 13 and liked it very much, however Kubuntu has grown on me recently, and liked the way that did a hassle free update to 13.10 to 14.04. The recommended way of doing a major Mint upgrade is a complete re-install, and I really don't think I can be bothered again. It's about time they made major upgrades hassle free.
