Posts by Matthew Smith

Overshoot

The ramp will take care of that, assuming a one runway design for the carrier.

@Imagine

"imagine what it would be like running windows 3.11 on todays dual core machines"

If you carefully choose your mobo chipset (maybe Intel?) and video card (Matrox) then it will probably work fine, within the limitations of device drivers. Remember, most of us are forced to upgrade OS due to lack of device drivers, rather than any particular desire to fill our new HD with bloated plodware.

The dongle is king

Doesn't AutoCAD still come with a dongle? Surely if this physical key is transferred then Autodesk have little to complain about

Why they can't ditch DRM

The BBC can't make its programs freely available for download, or for streaming outside the UK, for a very good reason. It isn't the DVD sales they are worried about, it's the sales to overseas broadcasters which I seem to remember reading provides half their income. Top BBC programs tend towards the "timeless classics" (e.g. David Attenbourough) rather than the "latest blockbuster" (Lost, BSG?) so the solution of simultaneous premieres is not so obviously attractive.

Re: Why the obsolete interface?

The wide cables are more of a liability with mechanical drives, with all that vibration and hot swapping. It probably makes sense to use up stocks of wide SCSI kit in this way. As a proof-of-concept for a single board solution this is how I would prototype it myself.

Missing 2 important teatures

I got myself an Olympus C-300 (aka D-500) from Cash Converters (£30 well spent), and there were only 3 problems with it. Apart from it being a bit too small to hold comfortably and steadily in my ham fists (a problem which this Sony seems to address) the two great lacks were a manual focussing ring and a shoe for a flash. Without these essentials it just doesn't cut it as a tool for taking photographs, rather than snapshots.

re: re: Not Bricking

It isn't a brick until the BIOS can't be repaired without a soldering iron. Reinstalling an O/S is roughly equivalent to changing the oil in a car engine. A computer without an installation disk is therefore about as useful in the long term as a car without an oil filler cap.

From 18, anything legally allowed is yours.

Except for that essential for a fulfilled life, the HGV licence

It depends on the price

I worked out (while waiting for Eclipse to load one day) that I need exactly 3 cores for developing Java apps. If these things are only €20 more than an dualie, then I would buy one, but if they are only €20 cheaper than a quad then I would go without peanut butter for a week or two.

It's possible that only 3 cores could save the need to buy a noisier fan and bigger PSU, and I'm a very noise and price sensitive kinda guy. I'm running a 2200+ Sempron at the moment, even though I could afford a Barton at the time I bought it.

I'm certainly in favour, although I suspect you won't find many outside the homebuild market as the supply could dry up in an instant when AMD get their yields up to scratch.

Water Supply

Another analogy would be the water supply. There is sufficient capacity and pressure in the system for everyone to run a bath on the top floor, and there may be service level guarantees to this effect and a flat annual fee.

If, however, some people are running their taps constantly for selfish reasons (e.g. running industrial processes in their houses or maybe having oversized ornmental fountains) then this will destroy the reliability of the service for everyone. Nobody else would complain if the water company imposed sanctions on those excessive users, whether they were installing meters, limiting their pressure, or changing them to a more appropriate tarriff.

The only problem with ISPs is their advertising. They are overselling what they can provide, in their desperation to compete for customers. They all advertise unlimited service knowing that admitting this is impossible to provide for everyone simultaneously would make them seem uncompetitive. Having these bandwidth hogs paying their subscriptions does allow the ISPs and telecoms companies to invest in high speed equipment, so the typical user isn't too badly off out of it.

I don't see a major moral problem with them blocking illegal file sharing. There is the privacy issue involved in distinguishing the illegal traffic, but "freedom to steal" is something that I can't condone, except when someone is starving and steals a bare sufficiency for survival. A look at an average torrent user's activity shows they are stealing considerably more than they need to survive.

Also @ Simon Painter

Wasn't the only non-imaginary anthrax attack traced to a native common or garden variety of homicidal nutter? He stole it from his employer IIRC. You had better pray the Caliphate doesn't extend its jurisdiction for slander cases into your state.

Also, did you manage to sell your stockpile of Cipro before it expired, or did you flush it into the sewers to help the alligator population breed new strains of MRSA?

@ M Neligan

The Barbarians didn't supress science for a thousand years, nor did they invent the concept of heresy for contradicting the holy book. These were both the actions of the rump of the Roman Empire.

And as for Galileo, Leonardo and Newton (I will add Gibbons to this list). They all operated in a society where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were all placed in jeopardy by anyone who neglected to pay sufficient lip service to the Christian authorities.

Re: Shouldn't that be 1862.6 MILES/sec?

No. The speed of light is only of interest to engineers and scientists, who have been co-operating globally for at least a century. If on the other hand, you are only concerned with beer and bananas in your flange's locale, then you can continue using the ug and the oogah.

24 fps

24 fps has been standard for 35mm film since the start. Increasing this would be a mechanical nightmare. 24 times a second, the film must be moved while the shutter/gate is closed (which must be as quick as possible to avoid missing motion) and then brought to a dead stop before the gate opens again. This puts enormous strain on the sprockets and the holes in the film. This wouldn't be so bad if it just needed uprated cameras, but the same thing happens in the movie projectors too. They would all need replacing with beefier models, the films will have to be printed on stronger plastic, and all the splicing tables would need to be bigger (a 4 reel film becomes an 8 reeler etc.).

No harm in shooting at double speed though, if it's all going through digital intermediates (as most movies are now) but the 24 fps print could possible show double images where the shutter was closed.

ElReg is the new Slashdot

They had a website until five minutes ago

Re: Scary Thought

When you have the "take me home, car" autopilot in place, you don't really need to fly. You could have simulations of glorious skies flying past at 400mph displayed on all the windows (viewed from a recumbent position on the back seat) when in reality you are sat in a tailback on the M40, or trundling along on a conveyor belt in a tunnel.

Number of users

This argument about programmer's time being more valuable than new hardware only works if you are talking about bespoke software. If you are writing a program to publish for a million users, then the economics shift in favour of optimising.