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Comment Re:Ironing (Score 1) 37

Sounds a lot better than the home-brew technique I've use a bunch of times in the past:

Dry film negative photo resist is available on ebay (or in New Zealand from me), briefly it's used thus: cut to size, adhere to cleaned board, expose to UV (sunlight fine) with negative artwork (tracks transparent), develop in weak washing soda solution, etch, strip in stronger washing soda solution. No need to work in a dark room just don't do it in front of a window, normal household lighting is fine.

For more details, see my tips for using Dry Film Negative Photoresist

Comment Re:THE virus is a bit of an overstatement (Score 1) 202

. He is saying consuming large amounts of sugar is tied to the onset of diabetes. Which is what the American Diabetes Association also says.

Of type TWO diabetes. This discovery is about type ONE diabetes, the cause of which has nothing to do with the consumption of large amounts of sugar or otherwise. They are two quite different diseases, with different causes, different treatments, and different complications. Unfortunately they didn't get different names, they really should have.

Submission + - Pitch Drop caught on camera. (huffingtonpost.com)

Bitsy Boffin writes: As reported by the Huffington Post, a Pitch Drop has finally been caught on Camera...

How long would you be willing to wait for a drop of the black stuff in Dublin? After 69 years, one of the longest-running laboratory investigations in the world has finally captured the fall of a drop of tar pitch on camera for the first time. A similar, better-known and older experiment in Australia missed filming its latest drop in 2000 because the camera was offline at the time.


Comment Re:Try Darcs, you'll like it! (Score 1) 165

Darcs is lovely. But completely impractical.

It's a real shame because it *almost* does version control right. But not quite.

My main gripes:

  • Slow. Very very painful sometimes, minutes of processing for an operation on local disk slow...
  • Implicit dependencies make it virtually impossible to "cherry pick" - a feature which which is supposed to be one of the single biggest reasons for using Darcs, but which implicit dependencies make almost useless, "you can't have that patch without that other massive patch which you don't want but happened to touch the same file in an inconsequential way".

Comment Re:So many have tried. And failed.. (Score 2) 91

Helicopters are

1. Hard to fly

2. Have a problematic requirement for a long tailboom with a torque countering thrust at the end of it

3. Or counter-rotating rotors with complex drive requirements

4. Have rotors that are long and ungainly and need to be stowed

5. Need large amounts of power to generate all required lift

Making one into a car means solving all those problems, AND adding all the safety equipment etc that is required for a modern car, AND still having it light enough to get off the ground safely.

Fixed wing, Gyrocopter, or Paraglider based machines are a much easier task than a helicopter based flying car, as evidenced by there being actual existing modern examples of all three (Terrafugia, PAL-V, Maverick), and no existing examples of a helicopter based one.

Comment Re:CSS is great, unfortunately designers can't use (Score 1) 190

To an extent, but as another poster replied, it's more down to simply how the designer's brain works, can't blame them for that, but it doesn't make life easy.

I think at the bottom of it is the common problem that CSS was developed by programmers, not designers, and the programmers didn't understand that the designers don't think like they do, and that they can't think like they do.

As a result, it's just not a good fit for designers, so they use it badly.

Comment CSS is great, unfortunately designers can't use it (Score 3, Insightful) 190

CSS is great when used properly (although, somewhat hereticly, I would kill for definable constants a-la 'color: PRIMARY_WEBSITE_COLOR;' without resorting to dynamically writing the CSS ).

Unfortunately graphic (website) designers are completely shit at using it. Even simply understanding when they should use an ID and when they should use a class seems to a'splode their brain, "huh, what is wrong with using this same id a bajillion times in the page". Don't even try telling them that "redtext" is not a good classname. Heck half of the time it's ".span1"!

They don't even know (even after telling them half the time) that you can use multiple classes on a single element, let alone combine selectors, everything is a single ID or classname to them. The amount of copy-paste in most web designer's stylesheets is simply offensive, all because their brains don't allow them to modularise their desires into useful reusable CSS classes. Cascade? Inheritance? These are foreign words to the average website designer.

There is no point telling a designer how they should can make their CSS better, they just won't understand. Worse, if the programmer, who does know how to use CSS as it was intended, attempts to fix their stylesheets (or worse, cut up their photoshops into proper HTML and CSS), the original designer just won't understand how to do anything in the stylesheet anymore.

Windows

Windows 8 Killing PC Sales 1010

yl-roller writes "IDC says Windows 8 is partly to blame for PC sales suffering the largest percentage drop ever. 'As if that news wasn't' troubling enough, it appears that a pivotal makeover of Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system seems to have done more harm than good since the software was released last October.' According to a ZDNet article, IDC originally expected a drop, but only half the size."

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