http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0323/breaking56.html
He gave up smoking the stuff not for his health, the health and safety of his family or anything sensible like that. He gave it up because he didn't want the Gardai calling around to his house and upsetting his family. What a hero! What a gobshite!
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Interesting news but with a disturbing element
Elite systems are valuing the market for recycled Spectrum games on the iPhone at $150,000 which is kind of nice, but then they talk about going after copyright infringers. I do hope they mean the sort of people who're currently selling emulators and game bundles to punters who don't know any better and which are all available for free as I would hate to see them go after sites like World Of Spectrum which are responsible for keeping these games marketable in the first place.
Manic Miner lives on!
Elite Systems are selling signed prints of the Manic Miner artwork for the knockdown, reduced price of... £50! Signed, you ask? By Who? Who do you think?
Despite my cynicism, if circumstances were different I would have already bought one before writing this!
Despite my cynicism, if circumstances were different I would have already bought one before writing this!
App Store, Shmapp Store! What's in a name?
I see Amazon are attracting the attention of Apple's lawyers for their intention to call their android app store, "Appstore". I really doubt Amazon will find many people rooting for them, least of all those who were burned by the stupid one-click patent dispute (was it really over 10 years ago? Hard to believe the years have gone by so quickly!)
Then Microsoft wade in: "An app store is an app store," Russell Pangborn, Microsoft's associate general counsel said in January. Like shoe store or toy store, it is a generic term that is commonly used by companies, governments and individuals that offer apps," he continued.
Yes, just like those rectangular information display things that people were using on their monitors for years before Microsoft realised there was gold in it. What were those things called again? Boxes? Squares? Portals? Ah yes, Windows, weren't they?
Then Microsoft wade in: "An app store is an app store," Russell Pangborn, Microsoft's associate general counsel said in January. Like shoe store or toy store, it is a generic term that is commonly used by companies, governments and individuals that offer apps," he continued.
Yes, just like those rectangular information display things that people were using on their monitors for years before Microsoft realised there was gold in it. What were those things called again? Boxes? Squares? Portals? Ah yes, Windows, weren't they?
Monday, March 21, 2011
An open letter to John Gormley
Dear Mr Gormley,
It is with bitter satisfaction that I read of your decision to step down as nominal leader of the Green Party. That decision comes as little surprise but yet you still seem to be in denial as to the cause of the party's demise.
The simple answer is that the Green Party made a Faustian pact with little regard for the long-term implications. For a party which claims to have the environmental health of the planet as its raison d'être it's hard to fathom just why you all drank the Fianna Fail-flavoured Flavor-Aid so readily and consequences be damned. At the time it was glaringly obvious to even the most casual observer that Fianna Fail were in the process of crash-landing this country into the ground but you in your hubris decided that you could change all that.
It's hard to tell whether you were misguided, over-ambitious or just plain stupid but the fact of the matter is that you shouldn't have done it. Instead you went ahead and propped up a corrupt, selfish and incompetent government at the very time that the opportunity should have been taken to consign them to the bin. For that I will never forgive you and am delighted that the Green Party has been shown where to stick its so-called principles.
The Green Party could have been so much more if it had just stuck to basic principles, but you decided instead to play politics with one of the dirtiest players in Irish political history. All I can say is good riddance to you and to them.
For the record, our household recycles nearly all our waste. Leftovers (when they happen) are composted and the green bin is well-filled every two weeks. I literally can't remember when I last put the black bin out for emptying, and it's still only a third full. Nearly all the lights in our house are CFL or LED and we use an electronic power logging system to monitor usage and identify heavy usage. Car trips are kept to a minimum as is our central heating usage.
Why is it that so many of us make a real effort to do it right and yet you, who claimed to represent us couldn't even have the good sense to think about the future that we all have to live in?
It is with bitter satisfaction that I read of your decision to step down as nominal leader of the Green Party. That decision comes as little surprise but yet you still seem to be in denial as to the cause of the party's demise.
The simple answer is that the Green Party made a Faustian pact with little regard for the long-term implications. For a party which claims to have the environmental health of the planet as its raison d'être it's hard to fathom just why you all drank the Fianna Fail-flavoured Flavor-Aid so readily and consequences be damned. At the time it was glaringly obvious to even the most casual observer that Fianna Fail were in the process of crash-landing this country into the ground but you in your hubris decided that you could change all that.
It's hard to tell whether you were misguided, over-ambitious or just plain stupid but the fact of the matter is that you shouldn't have done it. Instead you went ahead and propped up a corrupt, selfish and incompetent government at the very time that the opportunity should have been taken to consign them to the bin. For that I will never forgive you and am delighted that the Green Party has been shown where to stick its so-called principles.
The Green Party could have been so much more if it had just stuck to basic principles, but you decided instead to play politics with one of the dirtiest players in Irish political history. All I can say is good riddance to you and to them.
For the record, our household recycles nearly all our waste. Leftovers (when they happen) are composted and the green bin is well-filled every two weeks. I literally can't remember when I last put the black bin out for emptying, and it's still only a third full. Nearly all the lights in our house are CFL or LED and we use an electronic power logging system to monitor usage and identify heavy usage. Car trips are kept to a minimum as is our central heating usage.
Why is it that so many of us make a real effort to do it right and yet you, who claimed to represent us couldn't even have the good sense to think about the future that we all have to live in?
Friday, March 18, 2011
Phase change memory goes nano
It seems that there have been some new developments in miniaturising phase change memory devices. This is a good step towards cheap, robust, mass-produced, non-volatile memory. I imagine that there are further optimisations that could be done in an end-user application of the technology. For example, at the moment they are producing the electric field for each individual bit when setting the material's state to crystalline. This could probably be parallelised by having an area of 256-bits heated to release the crystallised elements back to the amorphous state and then all the bits out of those 256 that need to be set to one would be heated while an overall electric field is applied. This way a whole chunk of bits could be programmed all in one go. Alternatively, the erase could be done as described and then with the electric field applied each of the bits could be programmed serially while the field is on using a 16 x 16 grid address, saving on the number of address lines that would have go through the device.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
National Ignition Facility milestone
Nice to see this for a bit of good news at the moment. It's been a while coming but it looks like steady progress is being made towards a solid proof of concept for fusion-based power generation.
A Most Peculiar Adventure
I stumbled across this some time ago while browsing the Freeware database at freeware.org. It's a RogueLike done for the 7-day challenge but using a rotational direction mechanism on a hexagonal board plus some other twists. It has some great sound which really adds to the atmosphere and I just found myself drawn into it.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Yes, the country was going to hell but we kept quiet - For the good of the country!?
I love how the cockroaches start coming out into the light again to tell us how clever and stoic they were, but never a thought for how much they could have done for us if they'd had the guys to say it when it needed to be said. I have a certain sympathy for Brian Lenihan in that he wasn't up to the job and had to carry a gobshite into the bargain, but to claim that his silence was for the good of the country only compounds the rubbish that Cowen was spouting to the end (who, if he had only expended a fraction of the energy and conviction he showed when trying to defend his incompetence into the running of the country, would have done something towards ameliorating the mess we're in at the moment).
Brian Cox - Showbiz 'scientist'
Apparently Brian Cox, the celebrity scientist who presents the BBC's Wonders of the Universe (which I still haven't got around to watching) doesn't think that TV programmes blasting music at the viewer is an issue.
I guess if he had problem distinguishing information from background noise he might have some consideration for those of us who despise having overly loud music forced on us to the detriment of intelligibility. It's the sort of thing that programmes like Brass Eye and This Morning With Richard Not Judy used to satirise to good effect.
I guess if he had problem distinguishing information from background noise he might have some consideration for those of us who despise having overly loud music forced on us to the detriment of intelligibility. It's the sort of thing that programmes like Brass Eye and This Morning With Richard Not Judy used to satirise to good effect.
Will we default? I don't think we have the gumption.
David McWilliams posts yet another interesting take on the current shenanigans affecting our economy at the moment.
I personally feel that if concessions aren't made by those who helped blow the bubble then we should default. Sarkozy and Merkel are desperately trying to look as if they have some kind of authority when it simply isn't the case. Merkel of all people should be have more than a passing awareness of the dangers of inflicting punitive sanctions on a country for mistakes it made.
I would love our government to put a referendum to us later in the year with a few choices:
1. Do what we're told by Europe. Sell off all our assets and end back up as serfs.
2. Offer Europe a take-it-or-leave-it best-effort deal
3. Screw the loan, pull out of the euro, start printing our own currency again and take back control of our economy.
It's especially galling that the very people offering us the loan are offering it to us on the basis of paying them back the money they pumped into the bubble in the first place, making a tidy margin on the interest earned (in effect, doubling their interest on the original loan?)
The other European countries' banks (primarily German and French I think) need to learn that their actions have consequences too and they can't push all the pain onto Paddy last just because they screwed up too.
HOWEVER, I don't think we as a country have the balls or the cop-on to make a stand like that. If we had, we wouldn't be in this position in the first place. You only have to look at the mentality of the people who tried to get 'free' money out of the ATMs when they went haywire in December last year. You can see that the mindset of hoping to get something for nothing with no regard for the consequences still persists and I don't think the lesson will ever be learnt.
You only have to think about why warnings like this still have to be made in 2011 to see what kind of state we're in. No wonder Europe thinks it can ride roughshod over us - It probably can! We could make a start by ending crap like "Arthur's day".
I personally feel that if concessions aren't made by those who helped blow the bubble then we should default. Sarkozy and Merkel are desperately trying to look as if they have some kind of authority when it simply isn't the case. Merkel of all people should be have more than a passing awareness of the dangers of inflicting punitive sanctions on a country for mistakes it made.
I would love our government to put a referendum to us later in the year with a few choices:
1. Do what we're told by Europe. Sell off all our assets and end back up as serfs.
2. Offer Europe a take-it-or-leave-it best-effort deal
3. Screw the loan, pull out of the euro, start printing our own currency again and take back control of our economy.
It's especially galling that the very people offering us the loan are offering it to us on the basis of paying them back the money they pumped into the bubble in the first place, making a tidy margin on the interest earned (in effect, doubling their interest on the original loan?)
The other European countries' banks (primarily German and French I think) need to learn that their actions have consequences too and they can't push all the pain onto Paddy last just because they screwed up too.
HOWEVER, I don't think we as a country have the balls or the cop-on to make a stand like that. If we had, we wouldn't be in this position in the first place. You only have to look at the mentality of the people who tried to get 'free' money out of the ATMs when they went haywire in December last year. You can see that the mindset of hoping to get something for nothing with no regard for the consequences still persists and I don't think the lesson will ever be learnt.
You only have to think about why warnings like this still have to be made in 2011 to see what kind of state we're in. No wonder Europe thinks it can ride roughshod over us - It probably can! We could make a start by ending crap like "Arthur's day".
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