* Posts by GrumpyWorld

32 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2013

Linus Torvalds banishes masters, slaves and blacklists from the Linux kernel, starting now

GrumpyWorld

Only a white person could think this would help

Yeh, lets do something trivial and unhelpful instead of trying to sort out the real problem.

Cats understand the laws of physics, researchers claim

GrumpyWorld
Linux

Re: By "rudimentary understanding of gravity"...

..almost certainly better than anyone else.

Did Spotify hire Alan Partridge to run its Netflix-style video push?

GrumpyWorld

great new celeb TV

Following the unexpected success of ‘Celebrity Popstar to Kitchen Fitter’; Tony Hadley Entertainment is proud to present their new reality TV show:

‘I used to be a Celebrity now get me a real job’

Our hand-picked celebrities will each learn a new trade over the course of the next 13 weeks and each Friday night the celebs will pair up in order to demonstrate their new found skills. Viewers will then be able to vote on who stays and who goes.

We’ve even managed to find a pair of Geordie presenters who can almost speak English and have not been seen on TV before. I think it’s fair to say that Pants and Dick are almost as thrilled as their Mams.

In this week’s show:

‘Little’ Jimmy gets his first new hairstyle in over 30 years courtesy of Jodie who has been studying with well-known hair-stylist Nicki Clarke.

Nicki has been cutting the hair of the good people of Wakefield for over 15 years from her salon above the Golden Dynasty take-away in Throgmorton St.

Darius gets a crack wax from student beautician Mylene; if I know Darius he’ll really be looking forward to it.

He’s positively bristling with anticipation.

In our International Bakery challenge Preston gets to sample Paris’s baps.

It’s probably his turn.

This will be a truly life-changing opportunity for one of our Celebs, as, in a first for British Television, the winner will be awarded a prestigious NVQ certificate!

At the BBC, Agile means 'making it up as we go along'

GrumpyWorld

amateurs

If this had been a project by one of the big banks they would have simply recruited a load of consultants and wasted way more money than that...

Remember Netbooks? Windows 10 makes them good again!

GrumpyWorld

Re: Still Junk

No, today's replacement is the UX305 and very nice it is too.

GrumpyWorld

Re: Unix

Perhaps I had been spoiled by a grown-up operating system from Burroughs; simple things like:

Copy A as B from X to Y

where X and Y could be different devices on different mainframes.

GrumpyWorld
Mushroom

Unix

Invented by arseholes for...

I thought it was a joke operating system from the 1940s when I first worked on it in the late 1980s.

You just put this twiddly character in here with this random collection of letters to get it to do X.

No don't put the twiddly character there! It will purge your hard drive instead...

GrumpyWorld

I had 'upgraded' my eeBook (dual Atom) to Win7 and it was never happy, however put Win10 on there and its a handy little device for taking on weekends away. For surfing and Mail or a game of Online Bridge its just fine.

Boffins: There's a ninth planet out there – now we just need to find it

GrumpyWorld
Coat

Cinderella

..since it's not a dwarf...

Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick!

GrumpyWorld
Coat

its amazing what we achieved with Algol

anything else is just window dressing

Joining the illuminati? Just how bright can a smart bulb really be?

GrumpyWorld

Re: cart before horse

...and the bulbs wouldn't look so ugly.

R&D money for science – from your taxes?

GrumpyWorld

CERN

Cost a fortune and continues to do so; anything of actual practical use so far?

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

GrumpyWorld

I hate to poo on everyone's parade but...

Sanitation. Sanitation. Sanitation.

Without some efficient way of disposing of the 'night soil' major population centres would not be viable. Without them most of the other discoveries would either have not been made or would not be useful.

Manual methods of disposal are OK up to a point but do limit population densities and the overall size of a town (you can only handcart it so far). Mind you; they did lead to the famous Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle for which we should all be grateful.

If we all live in 3 hut villages then arguably subsistence farming will do just fine; its only when we start collecting together in large numbers that you need the advances in agriculture.

Major advances in science are usually collaborative efforts (or at least supported by the Royal Society) which requires some sort of intellectual organisation. A pre-requisite for these is a population centre.

..and we are nowhere near getting to limited liability companies; unless they are building and operating the sewers....

Weight, what? The perfect kilogram is nearly in Planck's grasp

GrumpyWorld
Headmaster

Balls

Why the piccy of a ball-bearing?

The reference kilo is a cylinder....

Batteries on wheels are about to reshape our cities and lives

GrumpyWorld

Lazy...

It's not like the olden days, now all you do is push a few buttons and the car goes off and robs the bank for you. Least it would if there were any banks near here...

GrumpyWorld

I'm waiting for the Apple car(t)

...designed without a steering wheel cos' if it needs a steering wheel you have failed right?

GrumpyWorld
FAIL

more tech...

...that nobody wants.

Prof Hawking cracks riddle of black holes – which may be portals to other universes

GrumpyWorld

the weakest link?

IIRC Hawking Radiation is justified by an application of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle to 'objects' at the Event Horizon of a Black Hole (i.e. since you can't predict that everything is going in then some things must be coming out).

I was never convinced by this and offer up an alternative definition for an event horizon:

The set of points at which HUP ceases to work in the vicinity of a Black Hole.

Get whimsical and win a Western Digital Black 6TB hard drive

GrumpyWorld
Facepalm

designed to work together

God designed the body, God designed the brain.

The body works perfectly with the brain to crush this piece of crap.

Smart meters set to cost Blighty as much as replacing Trident

GrumpyWorld
Unhappy

Re: "Change in accounting methodology"

Nope, just fudging them differently.

Battery bods Sakti3 hoover up $15m from power-hungry Dyson

GrumpyWorld
FAIL

All those engineers and their vacuums still suck...

Tesla's Elon Musk shows the world his D ... and it's a monster

GrumpyWorld
FAIL

useless valet parking mode

OK, so this car can get itself in and out of the garage; but, can it plug itself in or does it need to summon the butler to do that?

Hipsters ahoy! Top Ten BOARD games for festive family fun

GrumpyWorld

Re: Can anyone recommend a starter gamer for 9yr old?

Carcasonne would work.

GrumpyWorld

Castles of Burgundy

excellent 2-4 player for under £20

The mix of strategy and luck makes it probably the best 2 player game I know; we have rattled up more than 200 games in the last 12 months (last years Xmas pressie).

good review here: http://www.shutupandsitdown.com/blog/post/review-castles-burgundy/

Carcasonne (original) is very good too, but we hold two tiles in hand (pick 2 to start with, play one, pick another) to increase the strategy and reduce the luck.

Big fan of Acquire too but is probably out of print.

Don't touch 'All creatures' 2-player mini-game offshoot of Agricola, it is probably the most boring game ever made. (Yes, even worse than Agricola!)

Watch out, Samsung and Apple: Xiaomi's No 3 in smartphones now

GrumpyWorld

Re: As long as Apple is making the profits.

That's why Samsung sell 2 to 3 phones for every one Apple sells....

Totes AMAZEBALLS! Side boob, binge-watch and clickbait added to Oxford Dictionary

GrumpyWorld
WTF?

Countdown madness

Was amazed that 'spooler' was disallowed.

Microsoft stands on shore as tablet-laden boat sails away

GrumpyWorld
Unhappy

MS Surface Pro would be my No.1 choice

...if only they were cheaper...

Not really a comparable product to an iPad or Tab more like a MacBook Air.

Robots? What a bunch of workers...

GrumpyWorld

Try Collect+ instead

its cheaper and might be nearer.

Linux 3.11 to be known as 'Linux for Workgroups'

GrumpyWorld
IT Angle

AKA Windows for Warehouses

Because it was the first upgrade that no-one really wanted to touch..

'Thundering mechanical behemoth' walker mech to attack Leicester today

GrumpyWorld
FAIL

I think he should go back to the day job..

..."Would you like fries with that?"

Microsoft to open Windows Stores inside 600 Best Buy locations

GrumpyWorld
WTF?

If only they had something worth selling...

...perhaps they could try an Android version of the Surface?

PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)

GrumpyWorld
Facepalm

leadership challenge

DC is so worried about a challenge from the Mayor of London that he's attempting a 'Boris'?