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Comment Re:FP? (Score 2) 942

by greenfruitsalad (#48034645) Attached to: David Cameron Says Brits Should Be Taught Imperial Measures

I've heard these retarded reasons so many times when I lived in England... as if using 2 separate units and fractions was easier than using simple numbers
- is it really easier to say "6 foot 4 and a half" instead of "1.94 metres". guess what? nobody measures height of people in metres. people just say "i'm 194"
- what about ounces and fractions tea/tablespoons? again, retards would claim they don't want to talk in hundreds of mililitres. fine, for larger quantities we use decilitres (2dcl == 200ml == 7oz and the tip of a teaspoon)
- stones and ounces instead of kilos? you're english, nobody apart from children in your vicinity weighs below 20 stones. If they do, they're foreigners and don't understand stones anyway.
- it annoyed the hell out of me when google maps in my phone said "in 1000 feet, turn right". why didn't it just say 12000 inches? makes just as much sense.

I also spent some time in Ireland where they successfully switched to metric. At the time it was quite new and all the road signs were in both miles and km. It was funny listening to builders fixing my house, they measured everything in mm and it sounded just as silly as you are describing - e.g.: the bathroom was 5700mm by 4300mm.

Comment Re:I wasn't fundamentally altered by it. (Score 1) 191

by greenfruitsalad (#48021691) Attached to: The Odd Effects of Being Struck By Lightning

somebody shed light on this one please:
25 years ago, (when I was but a wee lad), in the middle of hot summer, I was running home because it was about to rain. The clouds were almost black and really low, the wind was getting crazy, a few large drop here and there. One could feel in the air a storm was about to start.

I pulled an umbrella out of my bag and as I opened it above my head, my thumb and index finger were still on the plastic runner; suddenly i heard a crackle and saw sparks between the metal shaft and the 3 remaining fingers of that hand. There was no lightning or sound of thunder around me, but the tips of my fingers got properly burned and I could not feel them for a week. WTF? (I'm no electrical engineer.)

Submission + - 'Why I Hope to Die at 75'

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ezekiel J. Emanuel, director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the US National Institutes of Health, writes at The Atlantic that there is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. "It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic." Emanuel says that he is isn't asking for more time than is likely nor foreshortening his life but is talking about the kind and amount of health care he will consent to after 75. "Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either." Emanuel says that Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. "I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop."

Comment Re:WebRTC, Asterisk/FreeSwitch and a JS SIP client (Score 2) 194

I'd simply buy proper hardware SIP phones. Polycom VVX series, Yaelink vp530pn (nice conferencing for 3 or more parties) or something made by Cisco (i haven't played with those). As long as it isn't made by Grandstream, it is practically maintenance free. You just set up a SIP server in the middle or buy the service from a third party.

Submission + - New Raspberry Pi Model B+ (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: The Raspberry Pi foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi B+ and the short version is — better and the same price.
With over 2 million sold the news of a RPi upgrade is big news. The basic specs haven't changed much, same BC2835 and 512MB of RAM and the $35 price tag. There are now four USB ports which means you don't need a hub to work with a mouse, keyboard and WiFi dongle. The GPIO has been expanded to 40 pins but don't worry you can plug your old boards and cables into the lefthand part of the connector and its backward compatible. As well as some additional general purpose lines there are two designated for use with I2C EEPROM. When the Pi boots it will look for custom EEPROMs on these lines and optionally use them to load Linux drivers or setup expansion boards. What this means is that expansion boards can now include identity chips that when the board is connected configures the Pi to make use of them — no more manual customization.
The change to a micro SD socket is nice, unless you happen to have lots of spare full size SD cards around. It is also claimed that the power requirements have dropped by half to one watt which brings the model B into the same power consumption area as the model A. This probably still isn't low enough for some applications and the forums are no doubt going to be in full flow working out how to reduce the power even further.
There are some other minor changes, comp video is now available on the audio jack and the audio quality has been improved. But one big step for Raspberry Pi is that it now has four holes for mounting in standard enclosures — this really lets the Pi go anywhere.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/int...

Comment Re:Which raises the critical question: (Score 1) 415

by greenfruitsalad (#47431495) Attached to: Python Bumps Off Java As Top Learning Language

where Python Style Guide encourages readability, Ruby's one encourages encrypting your code into a messy string of colons, semicolons, various braces, hashes, percentiles, ampersands and other special characters.

so, even though what you say is true, I find Java code way more readable than Ruby

I shudder every time i need to use ruby (in Chef Cookbooks)

Comment Re:2-year CFLs (Score 1) 278

by greenfruitsalad (#47429821) Attached to: My most recent energy-saving bulbs last ...

regarding the "equivalent to 100W" practice; what I find most annoying is when I buy one where "equivalent to 100W" really IS equivalent to 100W. for example, I bought a 20W fluorescent bulb for my hallway and now, every time I turn it on, I can see my x-ray skeleton being burned into the wall next to me.

Submission + - The rise and fall of the cheat code (redbull.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new feature published this week takes a deep-dive look at the history of the cheat code and its various manifestations over the years, from manual 'pokes' on cassettes to pass phrases with their own dedicated menus — as well as their rise from simple debug tool in the early days of bedroom development to a marketing tactic when game magazines dominated in the 1990s, followed by dedicated strategy guides.

Today's era of online play has all but done away with them, but the need for a level playing field isn't the only reason for their decline: as one veteran coder points out, why give away cheats for free when you can charge for them as in-app purchases? "Bigger publishers have now realised you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You've got to give us some money first!"

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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