Posts by Fibbles

Re: Maybe the answer is that people are moving from base linux flavours

You're reading the graph wrong IMO. Assuming the frequency of search queries correlates with interest in each distro and assuming that the sum of the distros listed on the graph represents total interest in Linux distros as a whole:

- Interest in Linux was flat from 2004 to 2006ish.

- Interest roughly doubled around the release of Ubuntu and stayed that way for a few years.

- Interest in Linux has fallen and flattened out back at 2004 levels.

This goes against MIller's assertion that interest in Linux distros has waned since 2004 - 2005. It just happens that interest in his preferred Linux distros has waned since that time.

You'd be able to see this more clearly if Google Trends allowed for plotting a line representing the total of all the others. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to give that option (or at least I can't find it anyway).

In terms of general 4k gaming this new AMD card just doesn't have the chops. Even a Geforce Titan struggles to stay above 30fps at 4k in Crysis 3 using the highest settings with AA enabled.

Crysis 1, which is what I assume we're talking about, is a much older game so in theory should give better framerates. In reality however, the first Crysis used the superior MSAA instead of the cheap post-processing AA that the sequels used. This means that playing without jaggies incurs a much higher performance cost because you're asking the GPU to generate up to 8x more depth info than it would without AA. Doing this at 4k is probably well beyond this card's capabilities.

TL;DR: Unlikely but you can't know for sure till you benchmark it

Re: pwnt

Is it? Back when I was heavily into FPS games, anything less than a dedicated server was regarded as sub-standard. Everyone in the clan used to chip in £1 per month to rent our own server.

Re: still early days

Game developers switching to OpenGL will benefit you even if you're determined to stick with Windows as your OS.

With OpenGL, the only thing that limits graphic features is the hardware support. If a game ships with the latest OpenGL 4.x graphical bells and whistles then you can use them so long as your hardware supports them. It doesn't matter if you're using Windows XP or Windows 8.1.

With DirectX, it doesn't matter if your hardware supports the DX12 features that the game ships with. If Microsoft won't release DX12 for your version of Windows then you're stuffed.

Re: Jurisdiction..?

Because that's not how copyright law works?

Every country signed up to the Berne convention has to give automatic copyright to the creator of a work. However, it's up to each individual country to determine who the creator is and how long their copyright can be enforced (though newer signatories must provide a minimum period of 50 years for most types of work).

If you want an example; 3D objects in the UK are only subject to a 15 year copyright, unlike most other countries. This means that in the US and elsewhere George Lucas still owns the copyright to the Stormtrooper helmet design, whilst in the UK it is now public domain.

Re: Misdirection

nmapping the internet is a fast way of attracting attention, no matter how stealthy you might think you are.

If you scan everyone then your actual target becomes obfuscated.

Re: So, how much energy was wasted...

Exercise bikes are considerably less portable than these patches. If we're not concerned with portability why not use a nuclear power-station...

A fair point about gyms though. They should be using their punters to power the lights.

Re: OED is trolling you

The dictionary reflects the language as it is currently used, so additions and deletions are just a natural part of that. Only the aspies demand that it stay static, like some sort of standard specification for the language.

Re: Professor??

Professor is a title awarded because based on level of education and occupation. Generally it's someone with a PhD in a teaching position (though the exact definition varies from country to country). Age doesn't even come into it.

Re: Noooooooooooooooooooooooo

Just bill the owner for repairs. Their animal, their responsibility.

If they refuse to pay up they can look forward to paying for repairs plus your fees in the small claims court.

Re: Are golfers...

I suppose if we're getting technical, only people who compete in one of the athletic sports are athletes. Though in the US the term athlete seems to apply to participants of any sport.

Re: Jolly good work.

The simple truth is that a good number of movies are crap and I'm bugger if I'm going to pay 15-20 squid on a new release to find that out. The crap ones get deleted and usually not-fully-watched.

Well if they're crap, I guess that makes your actions acceptable then?

The actions of pirates don't suddenly become morally justified just because the big corps going after people for copyright violations act like complete bellends.

Re: stepped foot

Stepped foot is perfectly cromulent, even if it's not common usage. As is tread foot.

Re: Hashing...

Tweak one pixel and you're in the clear again?

If they're only using hashes then yes. However, if Google have access to a copy of the offending image they could employ their reverse image search technology which can identify matches even when they've been scaled or saved to an alternate file format producing different compression artefacts.

Re: The Soviet Propaganda Department

Which part do you assume is Russian propaganda? That Israel regularly launches attacks on Palestine or that the US provides tacit support?

Re: aware of the benefits of 4K

As soon as you can't make out the individual pixels, any further increase in resolution has no benefit;

Just because you can't see the individual pixels doesn't mean they have no benefit. If you are too far away to see an individual pixel on a screen or dot in a print, you end up perceiving the average result of those pixels/dots. A higher resolution results in an average that is more accurate to the original source.

Re: A glimmer of hope

Now, if the US could simply pass legislation making it illegal to produce non-user-serviceable products. As it currently stands, it seems that Apple is turning MacBook Pro laptops into non-upgradeable devices and that's a bad precedent.

Some things really shouldn't be user serviceable because most users are completely clueless. Capacitors in PSUs spring to mind; anyone who doesn't know what they're doing could give themselves a nasty injury. I realise that some people here may have adequate skills to service a power supply but if you can do that safely you can also probably figure out how to get past funny shaped proprietary screws.

Re: Mobile-specific web pages are usually a UI travesty

See those giant empty bands on either side of your widescreen display? Those are there because web designers are too stupid to make the content pane dynamically resize to fit the screen.

No, the whitespace was there in the early days of the web because everyone used tables with fixed sizes for layout. This meant that regardless of what sized screen the content was viewed on, the size of the content remained static.

Content on modern websites does scale appropriately with the size of the viewport. However you're unlikely to find many websites that are wider than they are tall, just like you won't find any magazines or newspapers with that layout either. Magazine editors developed what's known as the grid layout and it has been almost universally adopted by web designers. It's a system that helps maintain proportions that are pleasing to the eye. If you have lines of text that are too long, they become unreadable. Likewise, if you have too many separate images horizontally the eye has trouble keeping the rows separate and it appears as a cluttered mess.

Re: firefox ESR updated too

As I said, prepare to be constantly disappointed. Also, your melodrama is ridiculous.

Bam. Problem solved. Users have choice. They can shift from old to new at their leisure, or not at all. There's no plugin. There's no cursing at the fucking thing because it gets part of the way towards the old UI but never quite all the way. You are asked if you want the new UI, and if not, you are given the old UI with zero fucking around.

Yeh, problem solved... Apart from it means Mozilla now have to maintain two UI's. Much like you'd have to support two UIs. Why on earth are you offering a choice and doubling your support workload? Presumably you're employed to manage your business's IT efficiently, not offer pointless choice everywhere and ramp up the costs. Unless of course the users you're going on about are your cats and Mittens is so precious he must have his right to choice respected at all times...

Re: top tip

I sold an 8 year old dual G5 for $450 last year. Try that with ANY pc. I also sold a two year old MacMini for 85% of purchase price. Again, try that with any PC.

If anything, that just shows that Apple users will always pay over the odds for average and/or old tech because it has their favourite logo on it.

Is this supposed to show Apple users in a good light?

Re: Profit wouldn't slip if they wrote better games

Complex AI requires a lot of CPU power. PC games could have quite interesting AI but unfortunately most games a hobbled to run on consoles which have relatively weak CPUs. That's not something that's likely to change any time soon since console makers will always favour the GPU over the CPU when costing parts (because better graphics are an easy sell).

Complaining that there's no innovation in the games industry because of tipple As like Halo is rather unfair though. It's like saying that no interesting films are made any more because of Jason Statham. You're just looking in the wrong places.

Re: Could be for the best

They would probably say that 1024 x 768 monitors are obsolete - but that gives a text size I can read easily.

You know the size of text rendered on your screen is not dependant on your resolution, right? You could change the DPI setting in your OS. Alternatively, if you only want to alter web pages you could either set you web browser to render all pages zoomed or you could set it to override default font sizes.

Re: What century are these guys in?

Presumably there are admins out there who want to vet every patch before it is applied to make sure it won't bork their system. I'm not a sys admin but if I was I'd rather have to explain to the boss that the server is down because the distro provider arsed up one of their security patches than have to explain that it is down because I hadn't gotten around to applying the latest security patches.

Re: What is the solution?

Whilst we should always be locking up people who commit actual assaults, it seems to me that we should be offering psychological help to the rest. If someone is showing paedophilic tendencies (viewing child pornography for example,) it seems better for society as a whole to offer them help with dealing with their problem whilst taking steps to keep them away from temptation such as barring them from certain jobs. Publicly shaming paedophiles when there's been no actual victim just drives them underground, causing them to form social connections with other underground paedophiles leading to the reinforcement of undesirable behaviours.

The above probably isn't going to be a popular opinion any time soon. Look at it this way though; sometimes schizophrenics freak out and kill people but when we identify somebody with the condition who hasn't actually committed a crime we offer them help, we don't drag them through the courts whilst naming and shaming them in the news.

Re: Manco

New Reg reader challenge:

Using English as the grammatical framework whilst selecting words from any other language construct a mundane, inoffensive and coherent sentence where each word is also the name of genitalia in an another language.

Re: to quote Douglas Adams

There are many legitimate problems with Facebook. There is also a sizeable section of the Reg readership that never grew out of that teenage mindset where everything mainstream is bad. Facebook is the punching-bag du jour, eventually it'll be something else.

It's really not that hard to build a UI that adapts to different form factors. See Responsive Web Design for details.

Re: Thought Crime

By the sounds of it though the pilot didn't actually start to feel endangered until he flew his helicopter near the drone in order to observe it.