Comment Re:fight! (Score 2, Funny) 270
I think you mean "pedants".
Comment Re:David Cameron actually believes his own rhetori (Score 1) 629
Before WWII? I think you've been reading the same history book as Dave Cameron (the one where the UK and USA are fighting together in 1940).
There's no question that the UK was a major power 60 years ago.
A better case could be made for ~1955, but even in 1966 Britain was able to argue that its global reach amounted to shouldering enough of an anti-communist burden to justify staying out of Vietnam.
The Falklands War is quite interesting here, not because it demonstrated some lingering imperial might, in fact the opposite - the UK depended heavily on the USA. Where it gets special is that this help was given (initially) without approval from the White House, solely by virtue of long-established intelligence and military links.
Comment Re:Repugnant (Score 1) 156
Hmm he has a web site now, great... should be in there somewhere then! (Look for Lord Young hunched over a desk pronouncing his EU vision).
Comment Re:Repugnant (Score 1) 156
"I have a dream... a dream that one day a man will be able to buy a television in London and plug it in in Paris"
Steve Bell ~1983
Comment Re:PC users liable for TV licence? (Score 1) 128
What, they should pay you?
Comment Re:Just Multiroom, or Multizone? (Score 1) 438
Well the stream comes from Squeezebox Server on the PC so it's just a hardware-software match rather than a hardware-hardware one like Sonos.
And they're doing pretty well so far, longevity-wise - my SlimDevices Squeezebox 3 has upgraded itself to the latest Logitech-branded firmware and works with a new Boombox, and the latest software & services of course.
Comment Re:Sonos - it begins and ends with Sonos (Score 1) 438
(redundant bit) As someone else has pointed out, this is incorrect - the Squeezebox players decode FLAC, MP3 etc. directly from the stream.
(non-redundant bit) And the Squeezebox Server is a very useful central controller for setting up plugins, playlists etc.
I guess the Sonos players can also synch to each other tightly so that playing the same thing in multiple rooms works nicely? The physical Squeezebox players do, but the version you might run on a PC (Squeezeslave) doesn't as far as I know.
And if you're paying in GBP, you'll probably be interested in the BBC iPlayer plugin which is very convenient. No neat Spotify integration yet but it's on the cards.
Comment Re:And now..... (Score 1) 298
Solid bit of transcription there but for the last 4 words!
Comment Re:Linux audio (Score 1) 374
Is there a purist option which would allow me to flip between merging sources via mixing/resampling and letting the bitstream through to the digital output unmolested (e.g from a FLAC file)?
Part of my confusion is that I don't know how volume is supposed to work with digital outputs - is the mixer supposed to simply reduce the amplitude or does it encode a separate volume setting in the PCM stream?
Ta for any info - I've looked but not found anything in the PA docs.
Comment Re:Off with their heads! (Score 1) 379
He isn't.
Journal Journal: MS copies feature, then patents it
Michael Kölling, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and one of the developers of BlueJ, an educational development environment, realized last year that Microsoft had copied one of the BlueJ features into Visual Studio. Flattery, right? Well, recently he was informed that Microsoft has filed a patent describing the very same feature.
Michael's blog entry describing this here
Submission + - Dinosaur extinction - meteor not to blame?
The Fun Guy writes: "Recent microfossil evidence casts fresh doubt as to whether an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Prof. Gerta Keller of Princeton University: "We now have evidence that the Chicxulub impact occurred about 300,000 years before the end of the Cretaceous and thus didn't cause the mass extinction and, in fact, didn't cause any species to go extinct." These findings were presented during the October 2006 meeting of the Geological Society of America."
Submission + - ABC warned over blogger shutdown
An anonymous reader writes: Remember the story about ABC/Disney shutting down a blogger who criticized them? I am glad to announce that the tables have just turned on them. Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned them to drop the case against www.spockosbrain.com. If they fail to comply immediately, EFF has threatened to sue them for (a) misrepresentation of liability under DMCA, and (b) engaging in unlawful, unfair and fraudulent business practices.
This chilling abuse of DMCA to silence critics has gone on for long enough. I am glad EFF is fighting for the rights of bloggers around the world. I hope they manage to teach ABC a lesson in fair use.
This chilling abuse of DMCA to silence critics has gone on for long enough. I am glad EFF is fighting for the rights of bloggers around the world. I hope they manage to teach ABC a lesson in fair use.
Submission + - New ice age theory: Sun's dimmer switch
amigoro writes: "Most believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth's orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. According to an embargoed article to appear on Nature, one scientist think that is not the case. Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, has developed a model of the sun which hypothesizes a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 years — exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth.
He extended the work of earlier scientists who calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature, and his model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations oscillating around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.
The main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can't explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle. But they cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model are bang on with the observations."
He extended the work of earlier scientists who calculated that magnetic fields in the sun's core could produce small instabilities in the solar plasma. These instabilities would induce localised oscillations in temperature, and his model shows that whilst most of these oscillations cancel each other out, some reinforce one another and become long-lived temperature variations oscillating around its average temperature of 13.6 million kelvin in cycles lasting either 100,000 or 41,000 years. Ehrlich says that random interactions within the sun's magnetic field could flip the fluctuations from one cycle length to the other.
The main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can't explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle. But they cycles predicted by Ehlrich's model are bang on with the observations."
