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Comment BBC BASIC (Score 4, Interesting) 548

I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC back in the 80's. It was simple, powerful, let you do pretty much anything and best of all came with a built in assembler. Now that was really neat.And it just worked. It was easy to optimise individual subroutines in assembler. This was age 10. At my simple state school with a couple of BBC Model Bs in the corner, I wasn't the only one doing that either.

I make a living writing C++ now and seem to do fairly well at it. The kids coming out of university that I interview these days haven't touched BASIC, or C++ for that matter. We want them to write good C++ when they come and work for us. The intelligent ones adapt easily to working with pointers etc. The less able ones that have somehow made it through the interview process struggle.

The Almighty Buck

BBC To Make Deep Cuts In Internet Services 246

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the BBC has yielded to critics of its aggressive expansion, and is planning to make sweeping cuts in spending on its Web site and other digital operations. Members of the Conservative Party, which is expected to make electoral gains at the expense of the governing Labor Party, have called for the BBC to be reined in and last year James Murdoch criticized the BBC for providing 'free news' on the internet, making it 'incredibly hard for private news organizations to ask people to pay for their news.' Mark Thompson, director-general of the BBC, said 'After years of expansion of our services in the UK, we are proposing some reductions.' The BBC is proposing a 25 percent reduction in its spending on the Web, as well as the closure of several digital radio stations and a reduction in outlays on US television shows. The Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union, which represents thousands of workers at the BBC, says that instead of appeasing critics, the proposed cuts could backfire. 'The BBC will not secure the politicians' favor with these proposals and nor will the corporation appease the commercial sector, which will see what the BBC is prepared to sacrifice and will pile on the pressure for more cuts,' says Gerry Morrissey, general secretary of the union."

Comment Already gone? (Score 5, Informative) 241

Looks like DNS has already gone...

Searching for cryptome.org. A record at G.ROOT-SERVERS.NET. [192.112.36.4] ...took 31 ms
Searching for cryptome.org. A record at D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. [199.19.57.1] ...took 9 ms

Nameserver D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org. reports: No such host cryptome.org

Comment Re:Another pointless plugin? (Score 1) 200

If you want something that works everywhere now, you're out of luck. JOGL probably works in the most places, but I've not seen many things use it. WebGL has a lot of potential. When I visited Google a couple of weeks ago, one of the guys there showed me a port of Quake 2 to WebGL. It was pretty impressive; the game is quite old now, but it was running in Chrome on a Mac without needing any extra plugins. All of the resources were loaded on demand, which produced some interesting effects (the walls were flat shaded when you started the level and only became textured a few seconds later, as the server provided the textures), but you can fix that with precaching.

Comment Re:Social frameworks better than bullshit placebo (Score 1) 507

And wait a minute, WHAT FUCKING MEDICAL SCHOOL IS TEACHING HOMEOPATHY?!

You'd be surprised. My health insurance (in Gemany) pays for all homeopathic treatments up to the age of 12, and only for specific treatments after that. The caveat is that the treatment is only paid when prescribed by a certified physician which has had additional training in homeopathy.
Treatments from "natural healers" without medical schooling or certification are not allowed.

Comment Re:Damn Good. (Score 1) 312

Well if you actually think about what you're saying, you'll realise why it's such a stupid suggestion. You put cameras in every home, you have to look thru all the cameras in every home for a change of finding something wrong, which means you're looking into the homes of mostly innocent people. Even the good cop would have to be. However, if you place the camera/tracking device on the thing that's actually being stolen, and activate it when it is reported stolen (many cars have this) then any interaction you have with that security device is not invading anybody's privacy, except for whomever's trying to steal it, and they don't get privacy protection. An abused system doesn't mean a useless system, it just means measures should be put into place to stop abuse, for example, the owner of the thing in question (laptop, car, or in this case it should be the kids' parents) has a security code that enables tracking software, so the tracking software cannot be used without their authorisation. Problem solved. Without any need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Comment not just scaling (Score 1) 368

In what sense is it not a scaling algorithm bug?

This affects alpha blending, including anti-aliased drawing tools.

I think people tolerate it because it's like traditional cartoons: you get a bit of a dark line around everything, more or less. IMHO, that's yucky.

Serious problems happen when you repeat an operation in the same spot. Things like a smudge tool get an odd sort of asymmetry, with black-to-white and white-to-black operations being different.

Comment Re:Placebo No Treatment? (Score 1) 507

"In some countries reimbursement is explicitly linked to how well you fare against whatever the current standard of care is"
I think that is because the state (which will refund part of the treatment price) doesn't want to spend possibly
more money to a new drug that isn't any better than existing ones, which may have been used for years,
and are better known.

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