Posts by Len Goddard

Middle England's allotments become metric battlefield

Re: Get a life...

Rubbish. The pole is a quarter of a chain, which is perfectly logical.

As for the perfect acre being 4 poles by 40 poles, it is much easier to remember as a chain by a furlong. Since a furlong is 10 chains, an acre is thus 10 square chains. What is a chain? 100 links, of course.

As for money, the old system had many advantages - restaurant bills could be easily divided between parties of 3, 6, 8, 12 or whatever. Plus it gave innumerable opportunities to cheat foreigners.

I still miss the old red exercise books with all the measures on the back:

rod, pole, perch, bushel, peck, Troy ounce, furlong, and so on.

Metric units are so ... pedestrian ... by comparison. Just because we have 10 fingers doesn't make 10 a good base for a number system.

Microsoft DirectX 12 pushes gaming code closer to GPU bare metal

Re: Gamers on the whole will move anywhere and pay anything if...

This is true of a small core of hardcore (mainly FPS) gamers who tend to make noise out of all proportion to their numbers. Devs like to get them on board for that reason but it is not where the bulk of the money comes from. You still need to cater to the majority who have neither the time nor the money nor the obsession to work this way. If DX12 does stay WIn 8 only then most games will offer DX11 (or even DX10) support until Win8.x numbers justify exclusive games. MS may not do much to tweak gaming performance but I notice I still get nVidia updates which boost various games on Win7.

But many, if not most, of those games also support DX10 so you don't need DX11 support.

Re: Windows 7 or it will not be used

I agree. Several things came out as Vista only ... and were then backported to Win XP simply because the Vista customer base constrained the audience so severely. Win 8/Win 7 is much the same case.

Whitehall and Microsoft thrashing out 1-year NHS WinXP lifeline

Sorry, this is just a case of buck-passing. The fact that the systems still require IE6/7 (both moribund and renouned for bad security) is itself a disgrace. The end of XP has been known for years and those responsible for the back-end systems should have had them upgraded in good time. The NHS has enough financial and political clout to beat up on the PAS suppliers if the new versions are as bad as you say, but this should have been done some time ago not at or after the XP withdrawal deadline.

My work-from-home setup's better than the office. It's GLORIOUS

This is not news

I've had better machinery, more competent software and a generally more pleasant working environment at home for many years.

It's one of the reasons I retired a couple of years ago.

For Windows guest - KVM or XEN and which distro for host?

Unanimous, more or less

I've never seen such agreement in a computer discussion involving linux & windows.

Currently, most worthwhile computer games will need a native windows platform, so load host windows with hypervisor of choice and linux guest of choice. With a little care you could put all the userland linux stuff on a separate hard drive with a native linux boot/root partition and allow access to it both via a virtual client and via dual-boot if you want the full power of linux for some heavyweight task.

Having said that, I would go 2-box and put linux on a Haswell NUC. You can mount this on the back of your monitor thus consuming no valuable desk real-estate.

Finally, I have a particular dislike of Putty. You might consider installing Cygwin and OpenSSH. This will give you a linux-like command shell under windows from which you can use command line SSH to access your linux, be it virtual or on another box.

Top patent troll sues US regulators for interfering with its business

Venue

I sometimes get the impression that most of the patent trolling abuses could be prevented by banning Texas courts from hearing patent cases.

Amazon, Hollywood, Samsung: PLEASE get excited about 4K telly

Bigger House

So, I need to buy a bigger house so that I have a room large enough to hld a screen which is big enough to be able to see the difference between 1080p and 4K (why not 2160p?). Stuff that - I still mainly buy DVDs because with a decent upscaler it is all but impossible on my 46" TV to tell the difference between upscaled DVDs and native blurays. I make an exception for really dramatic photography (Earthflight, anyone?).

4K is just a techno-churn factor to try to get us to replace perfectly good TVs following the abject failure of 3D to do the same thing. I'd rather spend the price difference on media ... if they'd just produce films worth watching.

Apple fanbois warned: No, Cupertino HASN'T built a Bitcoin mining function into Macs

Re: dangers of 'sudo'

Any command which escalates the user to admin rights has its dangers in the hands of an inexperienced user (or an idiot). However, if you disable sudo you have to enable root login which has different and, in the opinion of most linux users, significantly more dangerous implications.

Disbling sudo might "work for you" but if you are going to advocate it you should at least add a rider to explain that the alternative may be worse.

The advantages and uses of sudo are explained here (and in many other places).

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo

WATCH LIVE: Comet ISON DESTROYED by Sun, NASA brains fear

After fighting for about 10 mins to get signed in to Livestream all I see is max number of people accessing stream.

Max 64 - you have to be kidding.

WHO was it that TAMED the WOLF? Heel, Rex! No! Aarrghh!

It may be a dumb question but ...

is it possible that wolves were domesticated independently in more than one location?

Nookie becomes, um, a virtual reality for Oculus Rift gadget gamers

Surprised

I am, TBH, surprised it has taken this long for such a device to become available.

However, you would have to have a LOT of trust in the technology to use it. Or be really desperate.

Feline OVERLORDS ditch camera-toting human servants, film selfie vids

Been done

BBC did this a year or more ago:

Little Cat Diaries

The Secret Life of the Cat

They tracked all the movements of a group of cats in a village via collar locators and had catcams mounted on a number of them. Made an interesting documentary. Not sure where the art comes in.

Do not adjust your set: TV market slows, 'connected TV' grows

Saturation

Could it just be that most people have as many big TVs as they want/need and in times of financial insecurity paying a lot to replace a perfectly functional set with one which has some at best marginally useful extra functions is simply not an attractive proposition?

I finally swapped up from CRT SD (32") to LCD HD (46") a couple of years ago. There is nothing that the latest TVs can do that I cannot achieve with my current set and the things connected to it. Looking to the future I see no sign of that changing soon (4k is a joke - a very beautiful joke but still a joke for normal domestic use).

I'd rather spend my money on a new oven. At least it would save me having to clean the one I've got.

Blighty's great digital radio switchover targets missed AGAIN

Not any more

The BBC provider plugin for RadioDownloader has been removed ... at the request of the BBC.

get_iplayer still works and generally downloads better quality material than the official BBC podcasts.

Bionym bracelet promises to replace passwords with ECG biometrics

Exercise

Does it still work after you've been out jogging. Or had sex. Or smoked a joint. Or performed any other heartbeat-affecting action?

Researcher bags $12,500 after showing how to hack Zuck's pics

I'd pass on the money

If I could figure out how to replace Zuck's photo with that of a warthog, I doubt they could pay me enough to make it worthwhile to not do it.

Fandroids blow $200,000 on secret PANIC BUTTON for their smartmobes

Yes, a physical shutter button for the camera!

Wow, the future is HERE: Charge your phone (wirelessly) in your CAR

Easier with a cable

A USB charging cable takes up a lot less room than a charging case. Probably cheaper to replace if you lose it as well.

New tool lets single server map entire internet in 45 minutes

lucky man

I've never been able to make Win 7 autodiscovery work on my home LAN.

Maybe I should figure out why and market the problem as a scanner defense?

Google Glass: Would you pay a mere $299 to plop one on your brow?

Re: FunnS'y

Disliking a particular piece of tech doesn't make you a luddite. In this case it just shows you have some sense.

Can't agree on a coding style? Maybe the NEW YORK TIMES can help

Re: curly bracket hell....

I agree with you about where the { should be.

However, it is my understanding that the reason for having it on the same line as the if() is that in the days of manual teletypes it saved waiting for the carriage return AND saved paper - remember that once upon a time we didn't edit code on a screen.

It also saved a card if you were submitting your code that way.

Bloke in shed starts own DAB radio station - with Ofcom's blessing

Why bother

Given the lack of popularity and limited penetration of DAB into the home, why would a local station (or a pirate) bother? Audience would be limited to a few DAB adopters and the broadcaster's mum (assuming (s)he had given her a DAB for Xmas).

Intel's homage to Raspberry Pi: The much pricier Minnowboard

Expensive

I just received an ad from ebuyer.

Asus motherboard, celeron processor, 4Gb memory, 500Gb HDD, DVD drive, case with 500W power supply.

Complete assemble it yourself PC for under £170.

Makes this thing look grossly overpriced.

Google Reader replacement 'Old Reader' crashes

Disappointed

"The Old Reader's site is now displaying apologies, cat photos and a promise that a fix “will probably take a day or two”."

I can't find the cat photos.

Mars, bringer of WAR: Quatermass and the Pit

Great TV, great film

I was too young to see the original TV broadcast - not sure we even had a TV back then - but the film was, I think, the first "X" rated movie I saw ... accompanied by an understanding father who actually bought the tickets.

The film was, I thought, excellent and when I finally caught up with the serial I was surprised to see how close the two were. The film was almost an edited and coloured version of the serial. The film makers had resisted the temptation to "improve" and it was all the better for that.

Pirate Bay bod and pals bag $100k to craft NSA-proof mobe yammer app

Re: The nothing to hide brigade

But if you live in the UK you don't have a secret ballot. Your ballot paper is numbered and the number corresponds to the counterfoil with your name on it. In theory this exists solely as a protection against fraud and the matching can only be undertaken by order of Parliament or a court in fairly extreme circumstances. In practice? There have been allegations of illegal matching (unproven) and more serious allegations of shoddy security of the used ballot papers (which hang around for a year before being disposed of).

So we don't need the cameras.

Nokia tears wrapper off Lumia 1020 monster imaging mobe

No memory card, fixed battery

My first thought was that here was a phone with the potential to replace my trusty Canon G9 for casual use when I'm not lugging around a full-size camera. But without swappable memory cards and a way of replacing the battery without having to leave the thing charging it becomes impractical.

Shame.

Win 8 man Sinofsky's 'retirement' deal: $14m shares, oath of silence

Re: I'll believe in a conspiracy...

If he doesn't like the horrible TIFKAM he is entitled to say so. Telling people who speak out against a change they dislike is unnecessary and arrogant.

If you like TIFKAM you are entitled so say so. The OP here is equally entitled to describe it as a horror. I know who I would agree with

Boffins fire up old dish to send interstellar SMS

Maxox

Everybody involved in this project should read Charles Stross's short story Maxos first.

Available here : http://www.concatenation.org/futures/maxo_lo.pdf

Culture Sec: You - Google. Where's the off switch for all this filth?

Re: Will somone think of the children!!

To answer your questions.

Yes, it is a problem

No, they don't

And for your final assertion, mass filtering is a hideously crude tool which will either be ineffective or cause a huge number of collateral problems.

They are your kids, it is your responsibility to educate and supervise them.

Facebook's Sean Parker fined $2.5m for tasteless eco-trashing wedding

Should have stopped the wedding

or arrested him at the altar. Or both.

He should be made to work as a labourer on the restoration work until it is all back the way it was. Then shot.

Motorola shows off tattoo and swallowable password hardware

I'm missing something here

I take a pill and it broadcasts an 18-bit "password". Somehow something connected to my computer picks this up and uses it to authenticate me. Or does it just pass it on to my bank or whoever I want to deal with? Anyway, that is not the issue. I have my nice hot evening vindaloo and the pill passes through to wherever such things go, and the next morning I take another pill. Do I have a bottle of pills with identical passwords or do I have to somehow go through some reauthentication process to change my broadcast ID on every site I might want to use that day?

I think I'd rather spend 89.7 seconds a day typing passwords.

Windows 8.1 Start button SPOTTED in the wild

How to please nobody

What an achievement. They've actually found a way of making it worse by appearing to give back the start button then making it do something NOBODY asked for.

Classic Shell forever!!

Dell's PC-on-a-stick landing in July: report

Bah. A Raspberry Pi in an old cigarette packet can do all of this. And its cheaper.

US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster

Lateral thinking needed

You have to cool them because you have piled them into a rack in close proximity.

Now, if you suspended them from the ceiling by ethernet cables of varying lengths you would have a combination passively cooled Beowolf cluster and hi-tech mobile. A really practical and useful addition to office decor.

Tablet? Laptop? HP does the splits with Tegra-based SlateBook x2

Why no hdmi on the tablet section?

From memory, the transformer has the HDMI output on the screen so that you can connect it up to a larger display without having to carry the keyboard if you don't want to. Not a major problem, but could have been more convenient.

Ubuntu without the 'U': Booting the Big Four remixes

Re: I'm just waiting

@h3 - I was beginning to think I was the only person still using focus follows mouse with no autoraise. It confuses the hell out of people brought up on windows but can be exceptionally productive with some application mixes.

Re: I'm just waiting

You miss the point. A lot of people liked the Ubuntu gnome-2 style interface and had been using it for years. A lot of them are not OS-junkies - they don't want to have to learn new and exciting ways to screw up their workflow, they just want a stable platform which won't throw up nasty surprises. If Unity had been introduced as an alternative desktop on a new 'buntu there would have been no howls of complaint, but it userped the gnome style interface with something completely different. In my case, Unity was totally unsuited to the way I work. I switched to Xubuntu - which is not too far from gnome - and am now experimenting with Mint/Mate but all of this is completely unproductive.

And yes, I know that gnome had moved on to the less than popular gnome 3 but that was because the gnome development community suffered from the same arrogant "we know what's best" attitude as Canonical.

High-rollers’ shop pitches wallet-pounding, wall-pummelling MONSTER TV

Why?

No room, no content, no point.

(and no dosh).

Google tool lets you share data from BEYOND the GRAVE

Google Hereafter?

Ohh, I can use it to send encrypted instructions to my ex. on how to access my offshore accounts.

Without the encryption key.

Next from Microsoft: 'Blue', the Windows 8 they hope you don't hate

Wrong move

Unfortunately, Shuttleworth has gone the same way as M$ and cursed Ubuntu with the equally ghastly Unity interface. You can choose one of the other 'buntus it feels like being in a backwater with the primary development effort focused on Unity and, I suspect, Umbutu phone (why does that sound familiar). Fortunately there are other distros - Mint is picking up a lot of refugees.

Multimillionaire Brit games dev wants your cash for Shroud of the Avatar

Re: New Ultima?

Hey, I liked Daggerfall. OK, it was buggy when released. Yeah, OK, it was still buggy when they stopped fixing bugs but it had scope and some of the bugs were awesome - pushing through cracks in the dungeon scenery so that you could walk up the outside of the tunnels and get to otherwise-inaccessible unfinished bits of dungeon they hadn't bothered to delete! (Just remember levitate so that you don't fall through the floor of the world).

But this is online. His Lordship wants to create a less scripted environment and allow non-adventure type play. Good luck to him. With the instant-gratification, power-user, "where's the walkthough?" mentality of so many of today's gamers it will go free2play quickly and tits-up soon thereafter.

One of the "charms" of the original Everquest was that there were a lot of things you could do which the dev's hadn't anticipated, and the code was so tangled that it took forever for them to find out how to stop you. This allowed for creative use of unintentionally situationally-overpowered spells (harmony, I think, was one). Eventually it all succumbed to the demands of the class-balancers who insisted that every class be able to do everything.

Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

to misquote

Vi is the worst text editor.

Except for all the others.

LHC spots mesons flipping between matter and antimatter

Beauty returns to quantum physics

Genuine physics aside, I am delighted to see that the bottom quark has oscillated back into its beauty state.

I was very disappointed when the original Truth and Beauty names for the T & B quarks were replaced by the mundane and unimaginative Top and Bottom. Although I suppose there is a place for Tops and Bottoms in an SM theory ...

Keyboard, you're not my type

Re: The keyboard hasn't evolved because...

I never put one in a dishwasher but many years ago I knocked a cup of coffee over one, so I took it to the washroom and ran water through it until it came out clean then just left it on the window to dry out in the sunlight. It was still working fine a year later.

Still the best

I'm typing this on a genuine IBM Model M keyboard (made in 1985 according to the label on the back). The only potential problem is the lack of a "windows" key but I'm running linux so who cares. I suspect the keyboard will outlive me.

Apple patents situational awareness for oblivious fanbois

A minor problem, perhaps

"In one such scenario, a phone might switch from from a ring mode to a vibrate mode – because it's dark, say, and the phone senses it's in a cinema."

Or maybe, the phone's in your pocket ...

Trekkies detect Spock's Vulcan homeworld ORBITING PLUTO

Re: Intollerable!

No, that was Minerva.

See "Inherit the Stars" by James P. Hogan