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Comment reducing childhood obesity through healthy gaming? (Score 2) 80

why not simply go outside and play a REAL LIFE fucking game instead of some shite computer game if your concerns include childhood obesity....

in addition to burning more calories, using more muscle groups, and breathing fresh air, you will also learn to speak to and relate to other human beings, first hand, and learn essential social skills like co-operation and mutual goal seeking...

ffs

Comment UK Legal Point. (Score 1) 131

Unlike the US, in the UK, individual lawyers first duty is not to the Client, but to the Law Society (Guild in other words) so the point here is that there is a difference between Andrew Crossley, individual lawyer, and Andrew Crossley, company with a single partner / lawyer.

You get a lot of "odd" cases that this throws up, especially in Family Law where it is quite likely that a given Client has at some point instructed more than one Lawyer in more than one Case (eg two separate cases against the ex, or two separate cases against two ex's) and you try to hand documents issued by the 1st Lawyer to the 2nd Lawyer, who will not want to touch them, see them, or even discuss them (seriously) with you.

The point being, the Law does some strange things, it throws up anomalies like these, that don't make sense at first to laymen, and never will without an adequate explanation, which these sorts of articles make a point of never giving, instead highlighting the inanity.

Comment Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score 2, Interesting) 207

My 1990 MB W124 diesel has ABS, yet it doesn't have a single computer anywhere on board, no ECUs, nothing.

The interesting fact is more modern cars with the same basic systems PLUS computers are LESS reliable, and always generating system problems and failures.

Often, the fault is not the "computers" themselves per se, hardware wise, not even software wise, it is the peripherals (eg MAF senders etc) that die, and then take the whole system down.

Comment ARM, Acorn, RISC, x86, MIPS and RAQ2 (Score 3, Interesting) 283

Have run all of these, in anger, in production, at one point or another.

I still have an extremely soft spot for the RAQ2, 64 bit MIPS processor.

Image link - http://dev.gentoo.org/~vapier/pics/mipsel-raq2/inside-main-board.jpg

Nota Bene, NO HEAT-SINKS OF ANY KIND, and yet these puppies could saturate a 10 Mbit connection (of course this was the days before flash and stuff) and the whole mainboard used about 10 watts, most of which was the RAM, the biggest power eater was the IDE HD.

Downside was it was MIPS, which is a lot like the downside of the Acorn ARM based A series and Risc-PC series, eg not x86 compatible, ergo not mainstream.

Now that ARM is used is zillions of other devices, ARM is no longer the backwoods, everywhere except in "a computer" eg desktop or server.

Which means ARM on the desktop or ARM on the server won't suffer so badly for not being x86... it will still suffer, but not so badly.

RAQ3 went away from MIPS to x86, IMHO because of this accessibility and availability of x86 code, not because it was technically superior to MIPS... one RAQ3 wasn't more powerful than two RAQ2 in any sense except power consumption and thermal rejection.

In practical terms x86 has gone nearly as far as it can go, both in terms of light speed and die size, and thermal dissipation per cubic mm, so the alternatives are catching up, not so much because of sheer lifting power, but because of thermal dissipation per cubic mm they still have "development room" left to play around in.

The next 5 years or so are going to be interesting, as this "development room" is explored and used up, and especially so if anyone comes out with a robust cross architecture compiler / translator.

Comment DO NOT DELETE. (Score 5, Insightful) 385

I can't tell you the number of times I nearly deleted my archived data, going back to 1997 in my case, not just e-mail either.

Then I got falsely accused of everything except 9-11 as part of a separation / child custody battle that started with a nuclear attack out of the blue.

It is amazing how much of that old data is relevant in such cases, "He did x on 1st June 2000 at our house!" and you have data showing you were 200 miles away doing something you had completely forgotten, with someone you haven't spoken to or seen for 7 years, at the time...

DO NOT DELETE YOUR ARCHIVES, EVER!***

*** unless of course you are a bad person and they incriminate you, in which case you'd better avoid everyone else who archives data.

Comment Re:Why not? (Score 1, Troll) 255

NO NO NO NO NO.

It is NOT 3d, it is NOTHING LIKE 3d.

The "object" that I am viewing (the flat, 2d, screen) is a fixed distance from my eyes, the parallax for EVERYTHING displayed on the screen, and the focal length for EVERYTHING displayed on that screen is the same.

This is as "3d" as those optical illusions are "motion". eg NOT.

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