Posts by arrbee

Bit-part actress slings sueball at IMDb over age gripe

thespian photographs

The 'general use' photos you see of actors/actresses are rarely current - in most cases there is no downside to using the same photo for years.

Ofcom's Local TV dream: No smut, an hour of news, endless ads

In case anyone is confused, the reason for pushing local TV in this way is to divert money away from BBC local radio, forcing a reduction in both broadcast hours and local staff (reporters) and making life easier for the commercial local newspapers & radio stations, most of which are owned by a few large companies.

This is likely to be popular with local councilors and some sections of the local business community.

Facebook shoves your face into creepy 'sponsored stories' in 2012

Presumably using AdBlock or similar does not stop your visage being used in ads sent to your friends list as a result of you Likeing unwisely - it just stops you knowing about it.

Anti-piracy laws will smash internet, US constitution - legal eagles

Well there are a number of documented cases of the major music labels streaming tracks to which they have no legal rights, so it should be pretty easy for an affected rights owner to have them blocked according to what we hear about this law.

Of course there is probably some small print that will restrict this power in such a way that only the major corporates will be able to use it.

Doctor Who girl Amy Pond axed in 'heartbreaking' exit

rumour central

In a bid to get decent backing for the show the new companion will be whoever wins "Strictly".

Just as they arrive a Tardis malfunction will result in all of its occupants turning a strange shade of orange.

E-book reader sales to boom as prices plunge

The USD 79 price is for a version with adverts.

The equivalent to the GBP 89 model sells for around USD 109. This has been mentioned before.

.

Cheap energy revives US manufacturing, skint Brits shiver

So if things do start going truly pear shaped, do you want to live in a country with a thriving manufacturing sector with the national reserves of technical and practical knowledge and experience this brings, or would you rather live in a country reliant on bankers and mediatits ?

Facebook rolls out Timeline to world+dog

ghostery

if you're not using it, or something similar, with your browser then you *are* a facebook asset, with or without a formal account

( also pages like those on a similar-but-different site to this one load ~5 to 10 times faster )

Don't buy my new £210 box set - Elvis Costello

ah yes I remember, wasn't he the poor man's Graham Parker ?

Rock star physicist Cox: Neutrinos won't help us cheat time

Standard scientific approach - extraordinary findings require extraordinary (levels of) evidence. The next step will be to see is someone can get a similar result using completely different equipment.

US quakes before MENACING TURKEYS, snow globes

meanwhile in the UK...

...the commonest injury at Christmas is broken toes due to dropping a frozen bird on them.

Huge PDP-11 in a lorry: How I drove computers into schools

what ?

Like a previous poster I had a PDP-11 that would comfortably fit on the back seat of the car, together with 3 or 4 vdus if you didn't mind them being on the floor (and no we're not talking about a US car here). Given enough terminals a dozen people or more could use it simultaneously with no problems, although you'd need a TPM to make good use of one of the larger database products around.

It only really started to suffer if 4 or 5 people tried something like compiling at the same time - especially since there was always one guy who'd worked out how to run several compilations at once from the same terminal. IIRC the bad news message was "dynamic pool exhausted".

Tell the kids today you could do all that with half a meg of memory in total and they'll just stare at you (*) - although my last 11 had 1.5MB, which was not bad for a 16-bit machine.

Oh, and 'mainframe' refers to a family of related architectures and has nothing to do with the PDP-11.

(*) can we have a boring old fart icon please.

Hubble snaps mystery green death nebula in NGC 1846

Green

There are a few stars that look green(ish); the colour largely reflects temperature and there are many blue and red stars, not to mention yellow (in most cases its easier to see the colours in a telescope).

Note that colour is only partly correlated with age - some stars start off red and then just fade away

(providing a fine example to M. Hucknell).

Hero dev writes the CODE that COULD SAVE THE WORLD

what was that ?

If you keep an eye on a list of NEOs then you'll quickly notice that most of the closer-approaching objects are detected *after* they've gone past. So nice to know they're still improving the analysis software, but it might be an idea to work on better detection tools as well.

Good to see the old (1920s ?) blink-comparison technique is still going strong.

Boffins one step closer to Terminator vision

one immediate use

would be as a replacement for the mirrors on large trucks etc - i.e. project images from side & rear cameras onto "screens" in locations currently occupied by side/rear-view mirrors.

Maybe with a terminator-style outlining of targets^W cyclists.

Microsoft and Samsung uncloak slimmer Surface

Could be neat hooked up to satellite imaging

Results in on why life, the universe and everything exists

occam

So we have

a) where has all the anti-matter gone

b) there is load of mysterious 'dark matter/energy' but we don't know what it is or where its come from

Hmm.

Survey: Future IT guys will 'crowd-source' to fix stuff

sounds like government IT

Isn't this the approach used for most government IT projects run by the favoured corporates ?

Couple of directly employed consultants and the rest are contractors moved in and out depending on the profit margin per body (err, I mean depending on the project requirements).

Feds nab granny in moon rock sting

rock on

Until recently almost half (by weight) of all the rocks brought back by the Apollo missions were still lying around in sterile environments at various US establishments waiting for someone to come up with a use for them. I wonder if this is still the case.

BT gets 14 days to block Newzbin2

asymmetric

So why do I get the feeling that if a copyright holder complains about illegal (infringing as was) content of a site belonging to a major corporate then nothing will happen ?

Would you trust a dot-bank site more than a dot-com?

You underestimate them, I refer you to

http://gregpytel.blogspot.com/2009/04/largest-heist-in-history.html

I would tend to trust a bank that sticks to fractional reserve banking rather than pyramid selling - of course by now most of the former have probably been irreparably damaged by the (by definition criminal) acts of the latter.

When Ellison goes, will he go gracefully?

I'd rephrase it slightly...

he sees a way to sell an interpretation of reality that is black and white to customers who want to be sold stuff in simple black and white terms so that they can be decisive and not get bogged down by inconvenient details, and who then leave it to their internal IT folk to translate the black and white back into the real world of a million colours

NASA: 'Asteroid armageddon less likely than we feared'

whoosh

If you keep an eye on the list of rocks passing closer than the moon's orbit its, err, interesting that nearly all of the new entries to this list are added after they've gone past.

Don't bother with that degree, say IT pros

money money

Just to point out that the GBP 9000 amount only covers the annual university fees; for most student there is also a small matter of accommodation & living costs, so thats another GBP 5000 (say).

Of course the loan to cover the fees has special conditions; e.g. if you end up on a 4-year course and then earn not much more than the average wage over the next 20 years (which would seem to be more likely as the proportion of students increases) then you end up paying back ~GBP 30000 and the tax payer coughs up (writes off) ~GBP 35000.

Aussie fans of old BBC fodder get paid iPlayer offering

When complaining about the BBC and its net offerings, remember that there are a number of commercial organisations waiting for the opportunity to scream unfair competition and demand the BBC is broken up (NB: not made to go subscription instead of licence fee, that wouldn't suffice).

Hence they try to tread carefully - which often means they cock things up.

Ancient auto: still running, up for sale

I used to have a Marina that got through water like that.

CERN's boson hunters tackle big data bug infestation

Indeed

It would be interesting to know what proportion of these defects are of the kind "did not check value returned by printf statement" - i.e. something which should be done but often turns out to have no practical impact on the actual use of the program being assessed.

Facebook suggests sharing everything all the time

Its getting more subtle than that:

- prospective employer (or maybe potential parent-in-law, policeman, etc) acquires a summary of your likes & dislikes as recorded on FB;

- optionally adds similar info for those of your FB friends with who you're most often in contact;

- runs this info through an app which generates a summary of your apparent personality (probably labelled "psych profile" or something similarly authoritative).

Think hand-writing analysis for the 21st century.

Also think how many organisations would pay money to have such a system in place to, say, automate the screening of job applications.

Schoolkids learn coding at GCSE level in curriculum trial

In the early 70s it required your school to have links with a local university or large college which by then would have its own minicomputers in various departments (including CompSci of course) and also have either a mainframe or access to one shared between several institutions.

Of course this was long before any idea of a national curriculum - an enthusiastic teacher with the ear of the headmaster could get stuff done with zero form filling ! Oceanography was another subject I remember being added to the GCE list around that time, and Astronomy at O level.

revolutionary idea

Not unlike learning to program at school in, err, 1971 ( ye gods, thats 40 years ago ).

Its possible I've been coding in Fortran 4 ever since.

Hunt: Online file-sharing is a 'direct assault on freedoms'

Hmm, be interesting to see the reaction when Universal or iTunes or one of the other majors is blocked due to offering unlicensed copyright-infringing tracks.

Big Music trumpets ‘Cliff Richard’ term extension

irrelevant to most artists

Given that Big Music routinely ignore their contractual obligations to pay royalties on a massive scale I don't see how this change will benefit most musicians at all.

Not to mention the deliberate use of unlicensed material on Big Music products.

Big Music operates on the basis of "well if the rights owners get a serious lawyer then we might offer them something to go away". Of course this makes it almost impossible to value a Big Music company since it may have huge hidden liabilities that can only be discovered by a detailed audit beyond the normal 'due diligence' procedures. Not to mention that they often claim, in writing, to unpaid artists that their internal systems are unable to provide details of royalties due over periods that may be up to 10 years or longer - would you invest in a company whose financial reports are presumably derived from such systems ?

iRobot Roomba 780 automated vacuum cleaner

A I

I'm waiting for the version that can tell the difference between what is rubbish and what fell to the floor by accident and puts the latter back in the correct place (preferably without sarcastic comment).