Posts by boltar386 posts • joined Wednesday 15th October 2008 11:36 GMT
"concepts of nations and nationalism are utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things?"
Everything human is meaningless in the grand scheme (whatever that is) including you. That doesn't make them worthless. like it or not , humans are tribal animals and that is never going to change.
"Meanwhile their billions of tons CO2 emitted each year leading to a warmer world with faster hydrological cycle is likely to increase droughts. So I wonder which one will win out."
Bear in mind a substantial proportion of that comes from producing silly tech toys that westerners buy. I doubt your average dribbling apple fanboi (for example, could be sumsung , blackberry) considers the use of natural resources it took to create his latest iPhone plaything which he upgraded from the ever so slightly inferior one he bought 12 months ago.
"And we are talking about first time offenders and children at that."
Since when is a 20 year old a child??
"Sadly, the odds are that the people who made the decision to defer his sentence were almost certainly not the same people who had to cope with the consequences of his criminal actions."
The sort of right-on PC morons who run whats laughingly called the UK legal system don't even live on the same planet as everyone else so its hardly surprising. When crime eventually makes its way to Planet Liberal Idiot then perhaps we'll get sensible sentences. Until then I won't hold my breath...
"Cloud, rain, fog, smog, dust clouds, flocks of birds etc causing intermittent or continuing communications problems"
Not major problems inside a house. Well, I suppose if you're a chainsmoking Dr Doolittle...
"Also people and wildlife damaging their eyesight by looking into the beam"
Doesn't have to be a laser. Non lased light can do the job just as well using fast switched LEDs.
"Basically, its only useful when you can't use wired or radio networking, and that's a fairly limited market these days."
For outside sure , its probably a non starter. But for across a room there should be an issue.
... then why not just use infrared or visible light to start with and have an even higher throughput?
Or am I missing something?
"Whoa there! You're having a go at a guy because he CHOOSES to always drive within the legal limits, and so *might* be annoying other drivers who chose to break them?? What next, the mean bastards who lock their doors and wind up the burglars?!!"
Poor analogy. The roads are public space so you're oblidged to take other drivers into consideration. Most peoples houses are not.
"Why would you put a speed camera up where most people don't speed?"
Because the consequences of speed are potentially far greater therefor it only requires a few people to speed for it to be a problem.
"The reason those camera's are on the A40 / A23 are, as you said, because people think the speed limit is too slow and SPEED. Your own argument justifies the whole situation."
No, they make the limit artificially low then put speed cameras up. Its a money making scam.
"I have simply never had the need to speed - I passed physics at high school so I understand the laws of momentum."
In that case you'll also understand that T = D / V. The faster you go the quicker you get somewhere and for people under time pressure that matters.
Why do I get the feeling your the sort of sanctamonious muppet driving along in some one point buggerall wheezmatic midget mobile at 25 in a 30 zone with a 300 metre trail of cars behind you?
In the UK you'll often find speed cameras on straight stretches of road where this is an unreasonably low speed limit and it would be quite safe to go faster (A40 and A23 spring to mind). The only reason to put those cameras there is to catch the unwary and make some money. But if they REALLY cared about safety they'd put speed cameras outside schools for example to catch the idiots doing 35 through packed streets when kids are trying to cross. But has anyone ever seen a speed camera outside a school? I haven't. And you know why? Because most people stick to the limit and so they wouldn't make much money. The fact that a single individual one in a while might kill a kid, weeeelll , who cares eh? There's no money in saving lives is there?
"Plus, there's no reason why cars can't safely tail off the gas themselves when the driver pushes beyond the limit to stop them speeding."
Err , yes there is. If you're overtaking a car you want to get past as fast as possible and if that means breaking the speed limit for a few seconds so be it. The last thing you want is to suddendly find your car has stopped accelerating, you're in the wrong lane and there's a 40 ton truck heading towards you.
""We still have hardware engineers who still want a Unix workstation," says Dana. "You can't get them to let go of it.""
Lets hope he listens to them and realises they like using Unix for good reason, and doesn't just consider them old crusties who don't like change and tries to force a Win7 (or god forbid Win8) desktop down their throats because he got a good bulk license deal during a recent Seattle snake oil salesmans visit.
"Your mac address is in your IP6 IP address's host identifier portion."
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I *think* thats only for the link-local address which should never be visible beyond your immediate LAN. IP6 has 3 main address types , the loopback ::1, link-local and the routable address (whatever they call it) whereas IP4 just has loopback and routable.
Is that the numeric/hex address is just too damn hard to remember or to type manually. And for anyone who starts waffling on about just using DNS - yeah , good luck with that when your DNS is broken but you need to access a machine fast or when your company doesn't even bother entering certain machines into the DNS namespace and you have to use the numeric address.
"Old systems that have varchar(15)/char(15) in the database to store 255.255.255.255 will end up truncating FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF:FFFF"
varchar 15? Wtf are you on about? Since when did network stacks use SQL to store anything? IP4 addresses are stored as 32 bit integers, IP6 as 128 bit arrays.
Personally I think 128 bits was pushing it and has just made life difficult. 64 bits would have been more than enough as it still gives you 19 million trillion addresses and the address would have fitted into a nice 64 bit long int as well as being a damn site easier to type.
Are we SURE oxygen starvation was the real reason he passed out?
"Only prissy townies take showers every day."
Not all of them if some of the people I've stood next to in the tube are anything to go by. Anyway, if you don't wash every day could I kindly suggest you stay down on your pig farm and don't come anywhere near people with functioning noses.
Thanks.
"The other problem with desalination is that all of the water starts off at sea-level, not surprisingly. London is only about 5m above sea level on average, but it will still take a large amount of energy to pump the water, rather than rely on gravity."
Its already pumped! How do you think tap water reaches people at the top of tower blocks??
Aside from the reservoirs are usually fairly low down in valleys to capture as much water as they can so water generally needs to be pumped out of them rather than just flowing out all the way to the treatment plant.
"Another alternative is to build a bloody big pipe from the north and west to the south and east!"
A pipe isn't even required. There are plenty of canals or even rivers that could be used to do it perhaps with just a few small lengths of pipe to join up the gaps.
"f it wasn't for the nimbys/tree huggers (propped up by US Aerospace) you would have supersonic flight everywhere(at least the option of)."
I'm not so sure about that. Supersonic flight uses a huge amount of fuel and short of charging utterly ridiculous ticket prices its hard to see how it could be a viable business proposition these days. British Airways (don't know about Air France) didn't ditch Concorde because of safety fears, it ditched it because the aircraft required huge amounts of maintenance and it was making very little money. The safety scare was simply an excuse to get rid of a "prestige" service that was actually a boat anchor around the companys finances.
"(wonder how long uk-australia would take in a long range concorde?)."
Quite a long time. It would have had to stop at least twice to refuel.
"You will never know what tomorrow killer app will be or how much power it will need..."
Apps just suck up more and more power but don't deliver the equvalent amount of functionality. Do I really need a Ghz class CPU to run a friggin word processor when , for example, MacWrite which had perfectly servicable functionality and and pleasant GUI ran happily on a 20Mhz 68000?
Sure , for 3D games, AI and maths intensive operations such as image transforms in photoshop you need the fastest silicon you can get, but for everything else? No , sorry. The reason most apps require more CPU is a combination of lazy and/or incompetent programmers, inefficient bloated libraries and in a lot of cases slow , memory sucking managed languages.
"What IT needs is not more women. It needs fewer of a certain type of men."
What, you meqan the nerdy types who are bloody good with computers? Yeah , great idea, swap them for some touchy feely metrosexuals instead. They might not know one end of a usb stick from the other but they'll be a great shoulder to cry on when Sharon has another bust up with her boyfriend.
Meanwhile, how shall we persuade all those women who like being around small children to leave primary school teaching so we can persuade tough guys to do it?
"At least this iDiot can fucking spell, you self-righteous, ignorant little prick."
Wow , looks like a apple fanboy threw his iPad out of the pram today.
"That does sound quite close to my experience of French lessons. I still dislike the language because of it."
Unfortunately thats because schools in the UK teach languages as if they're programming languages.
IF sentence is in this tense
THEN add this case ending
ELSE blah blah
Not to forget learning verb tables rote.
You can't learn a spoken language that way , it just doesn't work. You need to speak it, listen to it, read it and write it over and over and over regardless of minor mistakes, they don't matter. The grammer will eventually work for you subconciously. There is simply no way you can speak a language while consciously attemping to parse the grammer in every single sentence.
"BASIC, by modern standards, is a terrible introduction to programming, Pascal or MODULA-2 are much better."
No , its a terrible programming language to use for real programming, but for an *introduction* its perfect. The syntax is simple and concepts are easy to grasp and thats what novices need. They really don't need to worry about syntax quirks or objects or procedures when they can't even understand if-then or loops. Sure, after 6 months of Basic move them onto something more serious, but for people who know nothing about coding its pretty much perfect.
"I like to think that humanity should be above that kind of thing."
Why? You think you're better than someone who believes in revenge? I've got news for you pal.
"The right to live is the most basic human right of all, and nobody -- nobody -- has the right to take it from you."
Really? Says who? Human rights arn't carved in stone , they're a man made construct - they are whatever society decides them to be at any given time. If a society decides that executions are legal then they have the perfect right to take someones life.
And thats before we get onto war where every society permits it.
"I dunno why you're all laughing. He got them down from $2b to $1b. That's a fifty percent cut, ya know."
A 50% cut on something that is worth buttons is hardly deal of the century. Nutterberg has lost his marbles. Photo file sharing with noddy picture modification facilities, hmm, call me a cynic but I smell 3 month fad at $33 million a day.
Pinterest anyone? What, you've forgotten about februaries Most Trendy Site Ever Ever Ever already?
"You may not believe it when you see it on TV, but it does hurt when your daughter yells "You never let me have any fun, I hate you daddy!" and runs to her room."
So what? You're her parent, not her friend. Being a parent means doing whats in their best interests even if their 9 year old brain can't yet understand why and doesn't like it. Also part of growing up is being told you can't do stuff and not liking it.
And yes, I do have a kid.
"The technology predicts what users are about to type to provide intelligent local echo and line editing of keystrokes, as explained in "
Err , it already knows what the user has typed because its just intercepted the bloody keypress!
ITYM it predicts what the server will do with that particular keypress and what the server will
reply with - if anything.
Personally I think its a solution looking for a problem - either do old fashioned local echo (echo everything and to hell with it for line buffered programs) or don't bother doing it at all. I want to know if the remote machine is getting my data , what use is local echo on the client if the data is going nowhere?
Back in the early 90s I was at university which had a boatload of Sun workstations running (then called) SunOS. Proper pre-emptive multitasking, multiuser , remote access of command line AND graphics (took MS 2 decades to catch up there) and running Openwin which at the time was a first rate graphics enviroment. Hell, there were even some Mac IIs which had a well designed GUI (shame about the OS kernel).
Then a friend as pleased as anything showed me Windows 3.1 he'd just installed on his 386 and expected me to be impressed and couldn't understand why I just laughed at the sorry little piss poor graphics shell.
I've now had a career in unix programming for almost 2 decades and have yet to regret not going down the MS route.
"Quite right. Blind people don't deserve to use the web! We should allow everyone to discriminate however they want - freedom of speech!"
Yeah , right on brother!
And lets not forget deaf people - its pure discrimination that radio doesn't come with subtitles!
Every disability should be catered for all the time everywhere no matter what the cost or practicalities because its ooman rights init?
"I'm pretty sure there was some sort of fuss about websites a few years back, someone in the UK government was pretty sure that accessibility laws applied to them somehow."
Another politician talking bollocks. There's a shock.
"he stupidest implementation of fullscreen apps I've ever seen in my life, a raft of bugs, and not much else."
Sounds like Jobs being gone is already having an affect.
"I smell lawyers."
Unlikely. Accessability applies to public physical enviroments, not computer screens. Running Windows is not an essential part of life, never mind developing in Visual Studio.
"I've lost my phone line for two days - while the ADSL was still working. I still don't quite understand how BT performed that trick."
Apart from the physical cable connection to your house the 2 systems are completely seperate.
"Dude you're either deluded or a little too obsessed with the semantics of programming language to consider the economic reality of building a system like this."
Having worked in backend systems for a number of major investment banks (UBS, JPM, ML to namedrop a few) I think I know the reality of building large systems.
"I've built HP systems in Visual Basic.NET*."
Visual Basic eh? Wow, you're a real hard core.
"Because no matter how good you are (and I'm really good)"
Ah , and modest too. Tell me, how come someone who is "really good" at C++ is earning a living coding in VB?
"it's going to take way too long and cost far too much in C++."
If you hire amateurs. If you hire pros like banks tend to then it gets done in a reasonable time plus its damn fast and doesn't suck up resources like a fat man at an all-you-can-eat buffet which is generally what happens with managed languages.
"You will in fact have used my VB code if you've ever done an online tax return."
So this code runs in every country in the world does it?
"It's just that .NET is a logical choice for a distributed, high-performance system. "
Thats what the London Stock Exchange thought - until they installed a system built with it. Now they're back with a C++ system running on Linux. The fact that C++ makes you shudder probably demonstrates that best you stick with your handholding C#. After all, C# and Java were both partly created as the runners up languages for devs who weren't up to developing in C++.
Anyone who knows C++ inside out can learn easily C# or Java. The reverse however is rarely the case.
.NET may be many things but high performance and reliable it is not. And to use it on a system that needs to be up 24/7/365 is frankly irresponsible.
"decently-skilled devs are relatively commonplace and affordable."
For a system this critical you should care how affordable your devs are - you don't want some cheap as chips kid who's learnt the latest flavour-of-the-month language on a 2 week course, you need a highly skilled developer who knows what he's doing and if he costs a lot (which he will if he's good) then so be it.
"Well, I'm going to guess that it might be to do with the fact that they're dealing with more than a few ambulances going to more than a few addresses, each ambulance having more than a few different capabilities, and more than a few different permutations of urgent/semi-urgent/non-urgent casualties with those classifications"
And what , you think there was just one person sitting in a room dealing with the whole of london?
"Probably because there are more business requirements than you can fit on the back of a commentards comment."
Ok smartarse - name some.
It could be worse, we could have a PM who's nothing but a cluess PR spiv - all talk and spin but no action.
Oh... wait....
But probably the unix servers have the databases whereas the windows servers are the middleware. I can't imagine any sane company using Mono for a life critical system such as this. Mind you , you could say the same about using .NET in the first place.
As long as you know where the patient is, where all your ambulances are (GPS monitor) and whether they already have a patient onboard then surely its easy for the operator to assign a crew? Why does it need some hideously complex and expensive piece of software to do this?
"There is no empirical field data that supports the validity of the hypothesis, and pertinent geological and paleoclimatic data are available spanning more than half-a-billion years. "
There is no reliable climatic data going back that distance in time, either CO2 concentrations or temporature. They're guesses at best +/- quite a large error percentage.
"It is quite possible, even likely, that until we understand weather, we will not understand climate."
Thats a bit like saying because you can't predict the second by second patterns in a pan of boiling water you won't be able to predict that if left long enough on a fire it will boi.
"First point, the greenhouse effect is about greenhouse glasses allowing sunlight to pass through from space, but then reflecting back heat from below. It isn't about CO2 absorbing infrared light."
Wrong - it is exactly that. Infra red that would have escaped back to space after being reflected (or as a result of visible or UV being converted into IR) gets absorbed by the atmosphere instead. Back to physics 101 for you.
"Secondly, many other gasses are far bigger causes of the greenhouse effect than CO2. Water vapour is about 100x the greenhouse gas that CO2 is."
Oh FFS , why does this old chestnut keep cropping up as if its the answer to everything?
"As things get hotter we produce more water vapour which increases the greenhouse effect; but at some point that vapour condenses into clouds "
And there you have it - it condenses out of the atmosphere. Left to its own devices it would completely preciptate out of the atmosphere and we'd have snowball earth. CO2 doesn't precipitate out , it remains - its a constant force.
"our understanding of the effects of water vapour on the cycle is close to zero, but we do know it has a huge effect on the results."
That is complete and utter total bollocks.
"Newsflash, unless the OP was basing his prediction on the past 10 weeks of casual empricism, the 2011 data are relevant. Why don't you go look up the data for Jan-Feb 2012?"
I was talking about the weather so far this year numbnuts , wtf has that got to do with rainfall totals in denmark for LAST year??
"Here in Northern Europe, Denmark, the precipitation levels for 2011"
Newsflash - its 2012
"Little - very little - quantatively and reliably understood at the mechanistic level."
Oh really? Which part of carbon dioxide absorbs infrared light and therefor heats up the atmosphere and hence more of it means more heat retained isn't reliably understood? Perhaps you have a new take on the physics you can share with us?
"a relatively simple biological example"
I'm sorry , but wtf? You think the human body and cancer is "relatively simple"?? Perhaps you should get a job in the pharmceuticals industry , you could make your fortune curing all diseases and become a world renowned scientific celebrity.
Well what are you waiting for?
.... is looking likely given the current weather patterns and low rainfall we've had. Apparently this is due to the jet stream moving north (though no one ever says why , the jet stream is just another reactive system, its not the atmospheres prime mover). I really hope not but I suspect in britain the records of the summer of 1976 may well be broken.
