Works for me.

Seriously. They have interwebs and everything out there. Leave the kidnappings to the oil engineers and charity workers.

My mate had one of those Archimedes - red function keys if I remember?

I still had an Acorn Electron - but I had the Plus-3 disk drive and Plus-1 cartridge interface. Rendering the initial Mandelbrot set took me 8.5 hours. His machine then managed it in 15 seconds. Man was I gutted.

Because some people OR(speed, drive dangerously, fall asleep at the wheel, road rage, drive without insurance, drive without license).

The list here is quite long. Very few people, in fact, never break any laws on the UK highways.

Shame on the judge and/or law. Understanding the problem FAIL.

Who are you and what have you done with "Anonymous Coward"? Even AC's normal comments, miserably low on thought process and deliberately provoking aren't a patch on this steaming pile of manure.

Are you just visiting this planet? If so, please take everything you've learned so far and delete it. If not, please take everything you've learned so far in life and delete it. You need to start education again from scratch. Try and listen this time round.

Fracking is just another tool in the arsenal of getting hydrocarbons from the ground. Doing it too close to underground wells, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. I would suggest that these cases come down to negligence on the part of the individual drilling company rather than an systematic failure of the process as a whole.

Perhaps we ought to invest in some nuclear power stations before all that resource gets used up. Don't quote any Fukushima nonsense to me - that event has been handled really well by the team there and the overall result is that the most exposure to radiation of ANYBODY in Japan has been roughly the same as mild sunburn.

Nuclear needs to deal with the disposal issue, but we really need it to provide the firmest baseline for any energy policy.

The SNP response? Let's build a 200mile corridor of the biggest pylons in the UK right through the highlands. Quality idea - devoid of nearly any rational thinking.

Your figures are embarrassingly one eyed. The commonly held belief in Scotland regarding "ALL OUR OIL AND GAS REVENUE" is so incredibly short sighted. I've worked for several oil companies and I come from Aberdeen. The oil and gas revenue does NOT make Scotland in surplus, nor is it all Scotland's.

The politics of the SNP government in Edinburgh have been distinct for quite some time. Not a peep comes from Alex Salmond's lips without some underhand comment about Westminster being to blame or holding us back. The task in the UK is to balance the budget. Scotland as an independent nation would never have been able to bale out the banks - regardless of what ideas you peddle as the "truth".

The financial "shit" in Scotland can easily be traced back to our two big banks fighting it out to take over NatWest. From that point on, financial controls at both banks started to slip and were never checked back to reality. The result is plain for all to see. Wasn't helped by the Chancellor Gordon Brown loosening the controls on the banks on a near yearly basis. Our two big banks took a path of richness that ended up in the financial mess we are all in. They weren't alone, but to try and pin the financial crisis on England is simply ridiculous.

We are stronger as a whole. I'm British, Scottish and Aberdonian. Don't bother questioning my loyalty to any of those. But perhaps because I live and work outside Scotland gives me a broader outlook. Every country has a favourite target to hit. England just can't get over Germany or Argentina being an enemy at football. As a nation, we seem to pick England as the enemy for anything we choose.

Sad really.

Correction. None of the Lords get in by birthright. There are 88 hereditary peers currently from the total of 789 members of the House of Lords. Of the 88 hereditary peers, 15 are elected by the whole house (700 of whom are not hereditary remember). The rest are allocated to political parties to match the ratios of non-hereditary peers.

So - a pretty piss poor description of the House of Lords from you.

It also doesn't take much investigation (or even reading of the newspapers) to find that tax evasion is something that happens across the spectrum of political affiliation. When HMRC call it tax avoidance, it becomes legal. Evasion is illegal, avoidance is legal. That's the terminology used.

Complain all you like about whether one person falls in the evasion or the avoidance pile. Complain all you like about the rules. They do, however, apply to all of us in the UK.

D

Oh - and inline de-dupe. Much discussion on it in some lists, but it's a killer feature that would be of huge benefit in the right place.

Argue all you like where that right place is, but an admin ought to have the right to use a tool such as dedupe where they like - even if that may not be your ideal use for dedupe.

I'd like to see btrfs implement a proper block tiering system. They're doing something for storing "hot" blocks on SSD, but what about giving us the full monty? Where I can rank storage types myself, assigning a different cost to each type. Hotest blocks in RAMdrive (battery backed of course), next step down fast SSD and then slower SSD, followed by Fibre, SAS, SATA and finally tape. Yes tape. Just create snapshots as backups. These blocks then sit there and drift down to tape storage when required.

Funny how this has all been done before when disks were really slow. I suppose it's the big gap of incredibly fast SSD's (compared to mechanical) that's resurrecting these ideas. With this done, btrfs could be stuck in as a relatively cheap SAN/NAS solution. All done in a big tower case in my loft.

Conversion to btrfs, however, isn't out of the question. It is unlikely that this would be forced on you during pre-upgrade though.

Thing about scene data is that it gets sent once. You then perform transforms on the models, textures & maps etc. I'm figuring that although there will be an initial load phase for complex scenes, textures and the like, there wont actually be an enormous amount of traffic from that point on.

Although graphics rendering is the largest part of a game at the moment, physics and AI are being pushed harder and harder. There are also games out there with huge AI & Physics requirements that are extremely modest in terms of graphics rendering. If I prefer 2D games to 3D shooters, could I not opt for a very basic graphics module?

Sure, this does mean graphics processing and graphics memory at the local end, but this is scaleable no? Android tablets are playing pretty good 3D games at the moment with very little in the way of classic 3D hardware.

This kind of stuff could be included as a modular part of cable set top boxes for example. User then buys the graphics module that suits their needs and the cable company provide low latency connection to their own hosted games servers.

Basically you're solving a load of issues like game patching, licensing, piracy etc for some other ones; mainly latency related.

I think it's a great idea. Publishers could set up rental periods, pay per play, outright purchases etc. Players will always be connecting to the latest patched version of the game. AI engines and game physics could be improved throughout the lifecycle.

My biggest concern is the client end. I'd prefer to see a local render engine capable of displaying the entire scene. The current solution renders the entire lot on the OnLive servers and then just sends you the screen image updates - is that right? I'd have thought that sending scene and POV updates would have compressed better. Then players could buy whichever capability render client they want/afford.

At the end of the day, this isn't for low latency gaming just yet. But that's purely down the nature of the internet.

Cheers

D

You said "First of all" twice. Doesn't count the second time.

I would mirror most of the rest of what you said though. GNOME 3 is actually pretty good - unless you WANT your desktop to be based on Win95.

Cheers

D

You should really take a step back from the keyboard and look at the history. .0 releases are, without fail, a major step forward in the technologies that Red Hat want to put in their distro. New kernel base, new packages, new security, new authentication etc. The list goes on. To call it "half-baked crap" is really little short of a half-baked comment. You can demand a flawless OS all you like, but without early adopter customers (of whom I've worked for several), these things don't stand a chance of getting ironed out. What do these early adopters get? They are first to learn how to use the new release and have accumulated a wealth of experience with RHEL x before x.1 comes out. It's their choice - just as it's your choice not to use it in the first place.

Finally, I've worked with Red Hat distros for over ten years too. I've got the badges, felt the hurt, dealt with their support guys and even engineers. At the end of the day, it's been worth it. If what is delivered isn't what you expect/demand, change your expectations/demands, or wait until the release that does match those expectations/demands.

Cheers