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.
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