Posts by Irk

Re: Grey Squirrel

I should also add that goldfish have fairly good memories and the 3 second goldfish memory thing is a myth.

"The Discovery Channel's show Mythbusters tested the contemporary legend that goldfish only had a memory span of 3 seconds and were able to prove that goldfish had a longer memory span than commonly believed. The experiment involved training the fish to navigate a maze. It was evident that they were able to remember the correct path of the maze after more than a month."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfish#cite_note-24

You'll notice fish gathering to the front of a tank when a person stands there if they're usually fed by that person.

Re: So what prevents Google from load balancing to power budget???

Translation:

"What prevents Google from implementing load balancing to balance out their peak uses of energy and make the most use of renewables?"

At least, I think that's what was meant. And I don't know the answer if it is what was meant.

Re: What I don't understand...

Gun nuts keep tossing around the figure that more people in the US are murdered by hammers than by guns. If that's the case, they should rest easy that if the government takes our guns away, we'll still have the hammers.

Re: You don't have small kids do you?

My 7 year old beat Minecraft and installs mods. Children are naturally clever as they are reality's QA department. And they never tire out, but their attention spans are ludicrously short unless they're doing something you want them to stop doing.

Passing your kid your phone has a tremendous amount of convenience, and they might as well learn technology as early as possible. Life as a kid isn't like it was thirty years ago. Life as a parent isn't either. Most mothers are full-time workers so either parent is usually getting home stuff done when they're not at their job. There's less errand downtime, even more things to do, more things to keep track of, and you drag your kids everywhere with you because you moved to wherever you could find a job, which means the kids' grandparents and other family can't just watch them for you. You're on the run, you're keeping track of Reality's Hyperproductive QA and Drooling Machine, you've only got so many arms, you don't want to lug ten gadgets and toys and stuffed animals with you. Let's be serious, if you don't pass the kid your phone it's because you've already gotten the tyke a tablet.

I remember when the NES was going to be what made society fall apart. We're still ticking...

Re: The welsh lobby

@skelband

Sounds like the same hogwash bandied about in the US by opponents of any sort of bilingual/spanish-oriented instruction in public schools. In the end, it's a culture war.

Re: I keep coming back to the same thing....

The US has a poor history of toxic waste disposal, and that was widely publicized and mitigated against in the 80s. We call them superfund sites now due to the large federal project to clean up all that. Many private waste dumps were abandoned/not kept up right, and often placed near schools or buried and then built on, so now they're underneath actual communities. The lower 9th ward in New Orleans was one such site - when Katrina flooded it, the waste got into that water too, exacerbating hurricane cleanup. All low-income areas of course, we wouldn't make our rich people live on toxic land. There are some very interesting forms of cancer that come from New Orleans and surrounding areas that you just don't see in other places.

One of those superfund sites was right next to my primary school before it was cleaned up. It was an abandoned field. Kids were just playing in it until something was done.

All that to say: the sordid history of waste cleanup and regulations in the US is burned into memory. Anytime someone brings up nuclear, everyone worries about the waste. Whether or not that worrying is warranted is beside the point when an entire generation got forced to live in a prior generation's industrial sewage until the federal government had to step in. You remember that stuff happening when you were six, and then you get surrounded by a pro-eco movement in the late 80s/early 90s as you're developing most of your hard-set beliefs. The pro-eco movement was and still is a sort of religious fervor at times. In the face of all that it's hard to accept the hard science and embrace nuclear. The whipped cream on top is the news coverage on Fukushima.

To be honest, this is a problem psychology/sociology could answer more easily than the safety numbers on nuclear reactors. Populations remember fear for a long time. As much as the Reg likes to call social scientists trick-cyclists, they're the ones best informed on how to change the attitudes of an entire populace when those attitudes are based more on feelings and deep-ingrained memories from old propaganda. Combine that with some work in the media and maybe we'll get attitudes changed.

Re: But I like real books!

I like physical books, so I can loan them to people. But I also like hitting "buy" and getting a book I can read anywhere my phone goes with me, which is to say everywhere, regardless of whether a local shop has a paper version in stock. (If I want to buy ebooks local, I can find an indie author I know or go to powells.com .) For collector's items I go physical, for voracious reading appetite satiation it's been digital more and more often. Sometimes instant is worth it.

Re: My hypothesis

Form factor's a thing all around - most people toting around tablets are holding them like clipboards. The portrait angle definitely helps for that. You can't really stand up and hold a netbook and still work with it, it's still forcing you into desk mode even if you don't have a desk. Someone in the elevator this morning pulled a tablet right out of his jacket pocket and tapped away. That's not really convenient with a netbook.

Re: Dear Microsoft

Any studios making Windows 8 apps right now could make a killing. The market's wide open and there's very little competition. Most apps in the Win8 store are free "I learned to make an app with a tutorial in 3 hours" apps that you wouldn't even bother downloading. I recall it being that way early in Android/iOS's lives too, though. So anyone who wants to make something right now that's not just a port of a guaranteed seller or something useless like Unofficial Facebook Like App #58 could easily turn a profit.

Shame I don't develop apps or I would have already gone in and done it.

Re: Suggestions

I like Google RIP. Then it can be known as DeathGRIP.

Re: Apparently, we are special

I draw a lot, especially in cafes, around friends, at family get togethers, in meetings, etc. Mostly to avoid social awkwardness, I get fidgety if I'm around a lot of people and have nothing to do. I've done pro illustration work but all my sketches are fanart in ballpoint pen; hardly mindblowing stuff.

I can't count how many times I've been asked to design people tattoos.

Re: Eff them all and let God sort it out

You could care less? A lot less? Then that means you might care a great deal!

You could already get two apps on a screen at once before, the refinement in Blue is that you can have them share the screen equally vis a 75/25 split. On a tablet it's very nice and stable, certainly helps for concentration and focus. But I'm not sure I could ever use Win8's App UI for development/actual work. It does seem sort of tempting, though... might cut down on my ADD, and with a multiple-monitor setup it could probably work out. To be honest it's a bit tempting.

Most people's complaints seem to be that Microsoft's choices mean that users will have to change how they work to suit the OS. Fair complaint, but that happens with progress and is fairly inevitable. Switch to desktop if you want desktop-style functionality, use apps if you want to - the OS has plenty of choice built in, but until Blue there hasn't been much attempt by Microsoft to teach users how to exploit the full potential of the OS. 30 minutes of blog articles and tutorials is well spent, though, and that's not much work for learning to use a new tool.

Re: Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981

Misattributed.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

The Classic has a potential 160GB of dedicated music space that fits in a pocket and holds a battery charge all day, for the person who needs a device to be able to survive 24 hours without being constantly connected to a charger while working. No internet needed, no games needed, no phone calls needed - and all that stuff drains down the battery and is good for what, in the end? Other devices do all that stuff better.

In the 90's I had a cassette Walkman with a belt clip that pretty much traveled with me 24/7 - all I wanted then was for it to be able to play any song I owned at will instead of having to rely only on the (squeaky) tapes. Now I have that. If I could get 160GB of storage (no flashy stuff, just music playing for headphones and AUX jacks) from another brand, I'd switch. But graphics and internet and games have flooded the market, and when it's not the bonus features crowding out battery life and driving up price, it's the storage cutting off at a paltry 16GB. For a dedicated music lover that wants to listen to that one song RIGHT NOW, none of those other devices serve the right purpose. (Cloud storage is a cute alternative but once I'm on the go, I'm getting charged data rates for sucking all that data down to my phone, and that eats up battery as well. Also drive through a tunnel or between some hills and see how reliable data connections can be.)

Unless by now there is a non-Apple mp3 player available at 160GB with a music-playing battery life of 8-10 hours. If there is then I'll gladly switch. Only problem with the iPod Classic is I can't get music I lost the backup for OFF of this thing without a lot of trouble.

Re: From the article ....

The only time I've filled my car up not to full was when I was a college student and couldn't afford more than a few gallons of gas a week. Filling up the most when you're already stopped makes more sense than having to stop off earlier further down the journey when you won't be sure of where a safe place to refuel will be.

Journo could have easily waited longer to recharge the vehicle to full, then reported "Supercharger stations take longer than an hour to recharge car". It would have looked better than "Instead of being cautious, I tried to rely exactly on a trip meter estimation in a day and age when computer phones still can't reliably tell us whether their batteries are at 100%."

Re: Car stereo

Aren't we already at this point? My car's stereo might as well just be an AUX jack for my mp3 player or phone.

Re: I hope this bill becomes law...

Not really, state taxes aren't dictated by the federal government, hence California and New York's taxes remaining in place. Some states such as Oregon have no sales tax at all so it won't really be an issue there. This policy is all about the federal level of taxation. Republicans are eager to put more weight on states' rights than federal rights so this legislation is no surprise to anyone.