Posts by Graham Hawkins

Higgs boson hunters have god particle in their sights

If I am not mistaken that slide uses Comic Sans....

Yeah - but the colours are nice...!

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

A-Level Computer Science - happy days...

... in 1974 at the local High Wycombe technical college (now of course a uni).

Punching BASIC to tape, then loading and running the program on a mainframe at the OU in Milton Keynes, via 300baud modems. All on on proper teletypes! Instant results, great fun!

Then off to uni to program in batch processed Fortran via punched cards - what a disappointment!

Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels

Language is not that important...

When I did computer science A, we learned Basic using punched tape & teletypes, talking to the OU over flippin' great 4U modems. When I got to uni, the first year programming course for physicists used Fortran on punched cards... how I enjoyed that!

Now, just a few years later, I'm sat here reading El Reg while waiting form some C++ to compile. I got here via all sorts of assembler, scripting, Fortran, Java, C... oh and some hardware too.

It doesn't matter what language you start with, you need to learn to think, problem solve, and structure your solution sensibly.

US told to keep its beak out of European decisions

Gotta love the bEUrocrats!

I'm sure that Sun employees in the various EU states will be delighted at Ms Kroes prevarication while their chances of continued employment spiral down the plughole...

Almost makes me think UKIP is a good idea. No wait, what am I saying.

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Mostly OK...

Clean 9.10 UNR on AAO worked well. Some nice UI improvements over 9.04.

Clean 9.10 Kubuntu on desktop failed to setup display resolution properly. Solved with backed-up xorg.conf from 9.04. kblutooth is crap as per https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192238. New KDE doesn't seem to have crashed as often as the last KDE PoS.

Virgin Media network goes down down south

Died around midnight on 29th...

...maybe they are retuning for Freeview.

That Digital Britain report in full

DAB??

DAB doesn't work at all for the BBC multiplex round here - Bracknell/Wokingham/Reading. What are we supposed to do?

16 teams to field 24 e-bikes in 'zero-emission' TT race

@Ian Entwistle

They could be forced to have a little heating element dipped in a tub of Castrol-R, and a 500W hifi playing a recording of an MV500...

Would that help it be more like a proper TT race?

The secret sauce in SanDisk's ExtremeFFS

TLA

Oh FFS, couldn't they have found a better acronym?

Xerox waves job axe at 3,000 staff

£20 note anyone...?

That'll be since John Bennett's been banged up for 7 years & banned from owning photocopiers then...

AMD Fusion for Gaming

Nothing new here...

Ken Salter's FSAutoStart was doing the single click shutdown/restore of extraneous processes years ago.

And as Steven Knox pointed out, it makes little difference on a top spec machine. But it makes a big difference on a slow, memory limited, PC when running a big game...

Meat Loaf gets Q gong

@AC

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Well, thanks for dredging that up from from somewhere >30 years deep in my memory... shame it didn't had 26,000 tons of iron ore to hold it down!

'Ringleader' of retail hacking ring was Fed informant

Imagine there's no countries, It isn't hard to do

What a testament to the possibility of international co-operation...

Pity it only works with thieving gits.

MS takes Windows 3.11 out of embed to put to bed

Everyone who actually remembers using this operating system is long gone.

What do you mean 'gone'?

The f*cking arrogance of the youth of today!

Put you baseball cap on (backwards) and p1ss off back to school!

Firefox 3 Download Day falls flat on face

Record for the fastest off-line for a record-breaking download attempt?

Well it was down when I looked... less than an hour after the 'Today you're history, Firefox' email arrived.

SanDisk Sansa Fuze

Whose chips do you want with that?

"The latter is particularly valuable as SanDisk has long made a song and dance about being the only mp3 player manufacturer to make its own audio chips."

I don't think so - it may use its own flash chips, but it uses AMS audio processor chips (as the frustrated RockBox devs will tell you http://daniel.haxx.se/sansa/v2.html).

US lag sues over prison crash diet

Show some respect for his complaint...

then force feed the murdering git Big Macs till he explodes.

Royal Mail sites hit by downtime cock-up

@Kenny Millar

It might be up in 24 hours, but don't forget that you'll have to take the card, and some id, to the nearest sorting office, between the hours of 7:00am and midday, on a normal working day, and pick it up yourself...

DARPA whirly-wing jet gyrocraft hits noise snags

Ah happy days...

as a kid standing in my back garden as a kid watching a Rotodyne flying over for the Farnborough Air Show...

When the future looked bright and full of wonderful technology.

Official: James Blunt is a w*nker

Young People...

Ashley Pomeroy wrote: "whereas James Blunt is part of the modern wave of pop music that young people listen to"

I have 3 young people in my family (16, 19 & 22), and they all think Mr Blunt is as described on amazon.co.uk too. As do I (50).... None of us would be caught dead listning to him!

Mobiles can upset hospital equipment, after all

Re: It's official

But only if you're already nearly dead...

Cells 'react' to GSM signals claims research

@tangerine Sedge

But it DOES have a measurable effect.

It make ~0.000002% of the population dress in aluminium foil and feel slightly nauseous...

Teen sticks Xbox 360 power supply in bowl of water

Re: He did it wrong....

He would of course also need to cool the power supply in the bath to get the Darwin Effect. Dunno what comes out of the LT side of an X-Box PSU, but it's probably not enough to do the trick...