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g_lined's comments

g_lined | 3 years ago | on: Apple gets $19M fine in Brazil for not selling iPhones with charger

The comment you're replying to makes the point that if you already had a charger, you could use the old charger and the old cable. There is no requirement to use the new cable that it came with. If you agree that people probably already had one from a few years ago, then they already had everything they needed to charge the phone. The 'new cable' did not stop anything from working that previously worked.

g_lined | 9 years ago | on: DuckDuckGo Hits 14M Searches in a Single Day

This is to stop your HTTP referrer leaking your search terms: "DuckDuckGo prevents search leakage by default. Instead, when you click on a link on our site, we route (redirect) that request in such a way so that it does not send your search terms to other sites. The other sites will still know that you visited them, but they will not know what search you entered beforehand." https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

g_lined | 11 years ago | on: One day left to help Internet Archive reach its donation goal

I agree this is a great cause, but did I miss why there is only 1 day to go until a goal is reached? They don't explain the consequences of only getting USD1.48 million instead of 1.5.

There is someone who said (I'm sorry I can't find the quote) that they don't donate to charities who don't specify an aim for a campaign or how they will know if they've succeeded. I like the spirit of this and feel that more information is better than just "Come on, guys, we need 1.5mil before 12am!".

g_lined | 11 years ago | on: Virtually all TV comedies, from Seinfeld to South Park, follow a simple formula

While both the BBC and Channel Four are public broadcasters with a public service remit, Channel Four receives no money from the licence fee and is solely dependent on advertising and similar income.[1]

It's better to say not that failure is an option, but rather than making a season of programmes as they are being produced and axing the show if it is failing, the UK system allows shows to be produced well ahead of transmission but in small chunks so that if it does do badly it doesn't need to be recomissioned.

[1] http://www.channel4.com/4viewers/faq/name/does-channel-4-get...

g_lined | 11 years ago | on: Retina 5K iMac: Powerful Proof of the PC Renaissance

Given a retina display aims to copy the sharpness we see in our every day lives from real objects, I would suggest it doesn't intrinsically carry a risk of tiring your eyes, in the same way as we don't get tired seeing all day long even though the edges of everything we look at are generally sharp. Rather in the sense of drawing on a drawing board, or reading books, ones eyes do get tired. Given that OSes are in their infancy when it comes to giving us the tools to properly manage size and resolution, it could be that some tasks are more tiring than they used to be.

g_lined | 11 years ago | on: Justin.tv ending archiving, deleting all archived videos after June 14

I downloaded the VM today and spent a fair while trying to diagnose a CheckIP error. It turns out, after going on the IRC channel that none of the projects on the VM are up to date and hence the VM can't be used to help the project. Hence the error. If I see the website update to mention justin.tv I'll certainly fire it up. But it seems a shame that there is nothing I can do to help with their project as a whole; I couldn't even see any way to donate - I guess I should just donate to archive.org.

g_lined | 11 years ago | on: It's time for the US to use the metric system

Britain, including Scotland, is Metric. The fact that metrication happened in the 60s means people of a certain age describe the weather in both F or C, depending on the situation. The UK is certainly unique in the EU for its exceptions which include the use of miles per hour for speeds, miles for distances and, for example, 'pints' for beer. But much EU legislation on the sale of goods has been enshrined in UK law and means that most items have to be sold in metric units of weight/volume etc.

g_lined | 12 years ago | on: My life in London's houseboat slums

Not in my experience. The requirement of 6 weeks' rent as a deposit is, however. I wouldn't be surprised if some ask for 8. This is partly what makes it so difficult to get in to the rental market for some people.

g_lined | 13 years ago | on: Hulk: A Haskell IRC server

It is increasingly trivial to try millions or billions of hashes per second. Using scrypt forces the computer to use more resources (in this case, memory in particular) which means that scaling the guess rate is orders of magnitude slower and cannot be significantly increased by building faster computers (because it's limited by memory not process speed).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt

It comes down to this: Why use something which is designed for speed like hashes to do something that can be broken by highspeed guessing?

g_lined | 13 years ago | on: Sweden To Charge TV Tax For Anyone With A Computer or Tablet

Because if it's funded by the Government then it becomes a Government TV station. Using a 'BBC' method where there is a law requiring the license fee to be paid and allows for a third party to collect it and deliver the money direct to the broadcaster. This design can loosen the influence the government has on the channel. Whether you agree with the outcome or not, the idea is that the BBC's of this world are not government spokes-channels.

g_lined | 13 years ago | on: Mega has launched

They take a hash of every X MB of your data before upload. If the hash already exists, then they don't upload it. You just get added to the access list for that particular chunk along with the others who have uploaded it.

g_lined | 13 years ago | on: Mega has launched

Note that they are likely to use something like 4MB chunks of the file rather than whole files. This prevents things like metadata/name differences creating a different hash for the whole file.
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