Posts by David D. Hagood
1190 posts • joined Wednesday 21st May 2008 17:09 GMT
Re: The ST was 32 bits
"the 68000 was a mostly 16-bit implementation of a 32-bit ISA,"
Sorry. Dead wrong. The 68K family ALL had 32 bit data registers (D0-D7) and 32 bit address registers (A0-A7).
The only real difference was the 020 and up added an MMU to allow for virtual memory, whereas the 68000 didn't have the MMU.
Re: Those who do not learn from the past...
And with Microsoft buying a bunch of patents from AOL, you have to wonder if they noticed the similarity as well....
Posted in Renault Twizy budget e-car
There's a comment you'll not often see around here...
"I wanted one, right upon til the moment I realised it doesnt have windows."
There's a comment you'll not often see around here.
Posted in Toshiba prices up 13in monster tablet
Gi-Pad
What we need is the Gi-Pad!
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22blue%20man%20group%22%20%22gi-pad%22&hl=en
It's time to start.
Rock concert movement #1: the one-armed fist pump
Ready Go
Those who do not learn from the past...
http://verydemotivational.memebase.com/2012/04/10/demotivational-posters-history-2/
"Licensing Violation Detected!"
"
Licensing Violation Detected!
We have detected more than one person in the field of view of the sensor. Allowing more than one person at a time to use your laptop is a licensing violation of your Sony software.
Your access to the laptop will now end.
[sucks for you] [deal with it]
"
Posted in TED
Re: What does this app do for me the related web site does not?
"Also, does your podcatcher include all the further listening recommendations? Well does it?"
1) No need to be so aggressive - the second question was redundant.
2) The podcatcher will if the RSS feed does - which goes back to the web designers doing their job. Plenty of other feeds do precisely that.
And to the other poster with respect to gpodder and Python: that's why I run GPodder on my computer, and let it sync to my phone. This also saves on mobile data usage.
Posted in Renault Twizy budget e-car
Glorified Golf Cart
So, this is a glorified golf cart then? Seriously: when I visit family in Phoenix, you see this sort of use-case all over, filled by golf carts.
This may be a bit faster than a golf cart, but not much.
And sadly, the price isn't that far out of line with a new golf cart, either.
Re: The ST was 32 bits
If you are going to call the 68000 a 16 bit CPU because the external bus was 16 bits, then the 386SX is also a 16 bit CPU, as the external bus is 16 bits. But the 386 would be a 32 bit CPU. Since the instruction set is the same, the core is the same, and only the bus changes, that is a nonsensical result.
Moreover, as the CPUs move to high speed serial interfaces (Hypertransport, PCIe) you move to an external bus that is 1-4 lanes wide - will you call those 1 bit CPUs?
Posted in TED
And again, why?
Once more I see an app and I ask "What does this app do for me the related web site does not?"
For TED, I will append "or that the associated Web site + a bog standard podcatcher doesn't?" - I have GPodder set up to pull down the TED talks videos, so I don't have to be online to watch them - and my podcatcher works with other sources as well.
As (one of the various interchangeable cooking show people I cannot be bother to remember with specificity) says, "I hate single-taskers in my kitchen! If it cannot do more than one thing who needs it?" Why do I need to clutter my phone with a large number of single-purpose apps when a couple of general purpose apps will do as well or even better?
Of course we must have Scotch Whiskey in space....
Of course we must have Scotch Whiskey in space - it is a critical component of warp drives!
The ST was 32 bits
The 68000 was a 32 bit processor, so both the Amiga and the ST were 32 bit computers - long before the PC was 32 bits.
Posted in WTF is... UltraViolet
What is c, e, and pi in your world?
"Secondly, if a studio decides to offer, say, 4K by 2K copies, it can do so easily. If it likes, it could provide existing customers with access to those higher resolution files simply by updating their licences."
And they will use RFC-1337, "IP over invisible unicorn ponies" to deliver it.
No, wait, they will NOT offer you this upgrade - you will have to buy a new disk, a new player, and a new level of service in Ultraviolet to get an upgrade like this.
And since Sony is involved, it will eventually be discovered that the service has installed a rootkit on your Windows computer (because That Which Is Not Windows shall not have Ultraviolet) and has disabled your Blu-ray writer and permanently enabled your webcam ("the better to monitor you, my sweetie"). Also, one day you will be given the choice to either "upgrade" your software, which will no longer work on Thursdays (because pirates copy things on Thursdays), or lose any ability to use the service.
That's why I disregard Ultraviolet, or the "digital" copies that are nothing but a waste of media. If I care to spend my money on a movie, I get a Blu-ray/DVD pack (and if there are other formats in the pack, so be it). I use the Blu-ray on my HD TV, and the DVD gets introduced to Mr. Handbrake.
I don't the case for ink jets
I just don't the case for ink jets. If you print lots of stuff, you'll go broke on ink. If you don't print lots of stuff, you go broke on ink because the cartridges dried up. If you occasionally need to print a photo, go to [Kinkos|Walgreens|WalMart|OfficeMax|Office Depot...]. If you print lots of photos, get a dye-sub rather than an inkjet. If you rarely need color, get a black and white laser printer and have one of the stores mentioned above print the color stuff. If you frequently need color, but not photographic quality, get a color laser.
And really, unless you are space constrained, having a separate scanner and printer gives you more flexibility and will likely be cheaper than buying an all-in-one.
Re: Is this why lots of asteroids are made of Iron?
Iron is the "bottom of the hill" from a fusion standpoint. For any element lighter than iron, you get energy by fusing stuff to make it.
Iron and beyond take energy to make via fusion. So as a star runs out of hydrogen, it starts fusing helium and making carbon (NOTE: this is a gross oversimplification). Then the star runs out of helium, and starts fusing carbon. Eventually, a big start has a bunch of iron. It tries to fuse that, but that doesn't make energy, and the star runs out of ooomph to keep itself from imploding. Thus - lots of iron sprayed about.
For a REALLY big star, as it implodes, it starts making antimatter (pair production catastrophe), and then it REALLY goes BOOM. Otherwise, it either makes a dwarf star, a neutron star, or a black hole, with either a fizzle, a bang, or a BANG, respectively.
Re: Blunder
It WAS a blunder, and after one of the most triumphant examples of how science is supposed to be done.
Maxwell showed the speed of light in a vacuum was fixed by 2 fundamental properties of the universe.
Michelson and Morley showed there was no absolute reference frame for the speed of light.
Based upon the evidence and the math, Einstein derived special relativity, made falsifiable predictions from his theory, and those predictions were borne out by experiment.
That's how you do science.
Then, absent any evidence, Einstein asserted an eternal and unchanging (at the macro scale) universe, and since the math conflicted with that unfounded belief, inserted a fudge factor to make the math support his unfounded assertion.
That is how you DON'T do science!
And that is why, in later years, Einstein asserted it was a blunder - because it was not supported by any evidence. Indeed, when Hubble determined the red shift constant, it disproved the assertion of a static universe.
Later, when more evidence of an accelerating, expanding universe was found, scientists began to re-examine the alteration of the equations, *because there was now evidence to back them up*.
And again, that's how you do science.
Posted in Google ads 'misleading and deceptive'
Yes
If you hired a cab driver and instructed him to break the law by running over people, and he complied, the damn straight he's guilty, just as you would be.
However, the differences are:
1) Is it truly deceptive for competitors to run ads over a search for a given subject? I like having alternatives brought to my attention, and I realize they are not associated with the main company.
2) If deceptive, is it unlawfully so?
3) If it is unlawfully so, is Google aware of it being unlawfully so?
Re: 1Gbps?
US$200/mo for 1.5M? You are either
a) paying for a business service level agreement, with five nines of reliability
b) a total fool
c) counting non-Internet (e.g. cable TV, premium movie channels) into that cost.
d) bullshitting.
I live out in the country, and I pay US$30 for 4.5Mbit DSL, truly unlimited (I've been torrenting over 10G a month for some time).
Re: Who else
"I find your lack of faith in copyright *disturbing*."
Two points:
Point #1: I think there's some redundancy in the headline: it could just as easily be
Coder's "lives sucked out" by Visual Studio.
Point #2: Why not use Eclipse?
Squirt guns are easier to automate....
Why a squirt gun?
Squirt guns are easier to automate than a poo-thrower.
Alternatively, given bonobos propensity for copulation.... Maybe the squirt gun should be full of tapioca?
They over-saturated the market....
First - there's a reason that people like me always refer to them as "Worst-Buy" : Much of what they have in terms of things like computer parts is crap, is over priced, and out of stock. Add to this "Oh, you need this special cable - genuine extra-virgin Yak Wool insulation, oxygen-free copper with iridium plating, a mere snip at $500. And you need the extra 5 year "we say we will replace this but we won't" plan. And these special surge protectors - they'll make the music sound better!" and people like me avoid them just on cost.
Then you have the idea that the shopping experience is unpleasant - here I am, trying to buy music, trying to remember what other songs I might want to pick up, and then little Billy RicerKid comes in, tunes all the stereos (both car and home) to the same crap, turns the bass to +12 and the volume up, and leaves, and the store personnel do ziltch about it. And of course, if the music I want isn't <stage_direction>puts finger in cheek, withdraws with a </stage_direction>POP-ular music they won't have it, and is it any wonder I get my music online now - even if I am buying CDs rather than downloads (because some of us like having backups, and having something without compression artifacts).
But the last thing is that WorseBuy has over-saturated the market. I live in a city of 300k people. There are 3 BestBuy full stores, plus a mobile audio store in one of the malls. All within 15 miles of each other. Does that make sense?
Re: Paging Felix Edmundovich
I initially read that as
"The rationale of trolltalitarians throughout history."
That should be a new word, IMHO.
Science is skeptical...
Science is all about being skeptical. The two most scientific words in the English language are "Prove it".
Even if I am a slavering, "Einstein was in on the cover-up! Relativity is a lie the Global Conspiracy uses to hide The Truth That The Aliens Are Here And Are Running Things!", if I re-run the Michelson-Morley experiments, with modern equipment, and can show a result that is NOT consistent with General Relativity, and publish my results, with enough information that my experiments can be independently reproduced, then it doesn't matter that I am a complete nutter, it is the duty of any phycisist to at least attempt to check my work, and if it pans out, to acknowledge that "He may be nuts, but his results check out!". NOT to say "He is one of those Relativity Deniers, we need to re-educate him and all his followers."
One of the things that worries me is that many of the people crying the loudest about climate change are insisting upon severe changes in how we live - changes that will have enormous negative effects. And rather than acknowledging the severity of those effects - going into detail how they will indeed impact us, realistically and frankly, and then showing the science of why those severe results are still better than the results of ignoring the issue - those people tend to just gloss over the negatives with "but CLIMATE CHANGE - your arguments are invalid!".
And I ask this: IF the results of not changing our ways are so severe that we all must be asked to suffer, THEN how come the people who are the most strident about this are not INSISTING that we do a Big Project, a la the Apollo Project, to design a state of the art, type accepted, mass produce-able nuclear power plant, and start building them and replacing every combustion power plant on the planet? We know how to do this, we know it can provide base load that wind and solar cannot, we know it will at least buy us several decades to work on the other solutions, and it will reduce the pain and suffering needed to achieve the goal of reversing any anthropogenic element of climate change. Logically, it is the highest probability of success action we can take at this time. Yet, it is curiously absent from the discussion - so is the real goal other than reducing anthropogenic climate change?
.world? EarthFemaleDog, please!
.world? Which one?
.mercury
.venus
.earth
.mars
.jupiter
.saturn
.neptune
ICANN has missed a big gravy-boat here - after all, you simply CANNOT allow somebody to create $YOURBRANDNAME.jupiter, now can you?
Sign up now, and we will throw in a 50% discount on all Kuiper belt objects, all asteroid belt objects, all Oort cloud objects, and all Trans-Neptunian objects (each sold separately).
Posted in New Google tool lets you PROBE YOURSELF
What if I want a one-off?
I am immediately made uncomfortable with the "opt in for this" - does that just mean I am opting-in for the mails, or does that mean opting-in for them to begin accumulating a bunch of information they aren't already accumulating?
If the opt-in is just for the email, how about giving me the ability to get a one-off report? Just let me go to a web page, sign in (so they know I'm me) and give me the report on me.
If that won't work, then it sounds to me like the reason is "we need permission to track a bunch more about you to generate the report".
Re: Remains the property of NASA....
I'm not sure this is correct - Liberty Bell (Liberty 7) is owned by the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space center, and is, in fact, the only flown, manned US space capsule NOT owned by the Smithsonian, precisely because KCSC and Discovery Channel salvaged it from the ocean.
Re: Fascinating. The thought strikes me that some people are probably............
"crapping themselves in the face of this kind of evidence. I.e. Religious fundamentalists"
Quite the contrary. I suspect that within days of scientists announcing they've spotted life on other worlds, the various televangilists will be in full voice:
"Friends! Do you want to spread The Word Of Our Lord Jaaaaysuuuus to those poor unfortunate souls out there? Of course you DO! We need a bazillion dollars to build our Ark Of The Word, the spaceship Of The Lord Our God! Send your donations to 'Mission(ary) to the Stars!'"
(I'm not afraid of alien overlords - if they are hostile we are screwed. I am far more frightened of an alien ship opening, and them saying "Have YOU accepted GLORB as your personal saaaaviooooor?")
Now say "Peter Piper Picked a Peck..."
Apple: Here's our design....
Nokia: No. Our way or nothing.
Me: Damn, Mr. Ballmer, you're getting good at not moving your lips! Now have Nokia say "Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers".
As the Brunching Shuttlecocks said
When I was in school, I could carry a knife and aspirin, and my life outside school was my own.
My feelings on these over-zealous school folk can best be summed up with a line from Brunching Shuttlecocks:
"... Or, as almost every word in a sentence:
FUCK THE FUCKING FUCKERS!
"
Limp - OBJECTION!
The FTC, limp? OBJECTION - you have to have one for it to be limp.
The FTC is like an old tabby cat: toothless, clawless, neutered, and basically wants to do nothing but lay in a sunny spot all day.
Posted in Microsoft takes down ZeuS botnets
it was indented
It was more readable when indented, but the Reg undid that....
Re: No "Choices", No "Options", No Tracking or Datamining ever.
"...it MUST work just like the Do Not Call Registry for telephones."
You mean, "not at all?" - Do Not Call is weaker than a toothless tiger - a toothless tiger can still rake you with his claws. I receive (and report) numerous violations on a weekly basis, all on my cell phone, which was registered on the DNC list within an hour of my getting the number - and yet I constantly get:
* abandoned predictive dialer calls
* calls that "conveniently" have the required "name of company who called" given while the voice mail announcement is being given (so I never hear it)
* calls that invite my voice mail to "press 1 to stop these calls"
* calls that would require me to spend my money to call them back.
You may want a Do Not Track that works like Do Not Call.
I want a Do Not Track that works, period.
DHT FTW
Do they block distributed hash table magnet links?
Reddit article
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/rdgtz/i_won_the_windows_phone_challenge_but_lost_just/
I find it interesting that this is no longer on the main page over there....
So I'll put the link here so it can be found.
As for "throttling non-Windows phones": There's lots of ways to achieve that:
Look at the OUI part of the MAC and throttle any non-Nokia devices.
Look at the browser ID on the first HTTP transaction.
Throttle everybody, have Windows phone on different WLAN.
If Microsoft ran a 100m dash
If Microsoft ran a 100m dash to show they were fastest, they would:
1) Tell all other competitors to show up at 13:00, when the race was to start at 12:00
2) Microsoft would start out at the 99m line....
3) ...In a Ferrari...
4) ...at 200km/h
5) The competitors would be visited the night before by Bruno and "Bent-Nose" Mike, who would introduce the competitor's kneecaps to a tire-iron.
And in the unlikely event that the competitors still finished the race ahead of Microsoft, Microsoft would still claim to have "beaten" them (with the tire-iron, of course).
True, once caught, Microsoft "apologized" and made good, but, if you look at the Reddit version of this story, several other people have identified other malfeasance such as forcing the competitors to use the store's WiFi, which curiously enough seems to be throttling non-WinPhone devices.
"Smoked by Windows Phone" indeed - as in, a bunch of smoke blown up your nether orifice by Microsoft.
Posted in Microsoft takes down ZeuS botnets
Re: Interesting...
"how do you dismantle an IP address?"
Null route it on all core routers.
But seriously, what needs to happen IMHO is:
thread collect_ips
while true
collect IPs connecting to botnet Command and Control
store in infected computer database
wend
end thread
thread enforcement
while true
For all national governments
for all ips in infected computer database
look up owner of IP block containing IP
if owner is in government's country
if owner not contacted yet
snailmail owner "this machine is infected. See it gets cleaned up. You have 2 weeks to comply." --signature=required
owner contacted
else if time of contact > 2 weeks
disconnect owner from network.
end if
else
look up owner's peering partners in country
for all peering partners
if partner not contacted yet
snailmail partner "this machine is infected. Either compel owners of netblock to fix it or de-peer owners. You have 2 weeks to comply." --signature=required
parnter contacted
else if time of contact > 2 weeks
disconnect partner from network.
end if
end for
end if
end for
end for
end while
end thread
Harsh, but it would put a big dent in the botnet problem: ISPs would either have to bestir themselves to contact their lusers and get them ot fix the machines, disconnect the lusers machines from the network, or face disconnection themselves. Even if an ISP is in a country that doesn't help enforce the rules of the road, that ISP eventually gets de-peered from enough countries that do enforce the rules that they cease to be an issue.
(Now I await the masses of "how dare you ask anybody to be responsible for the consequences of their actions you fascist bastard!' to downvote me.)
How about containers?
One way to speed up web site loading is to load as few files as possible - so what about adding an extension to HTTP and HTML to allow a web site to specify files within a container (e.g. a tarball, or a ZIP), and to allow the browser to fetch the whole container?
So even on a site like the reg - you could have a container with all the static stuff (images like the boffin graphic on this post), a container with all JS and CSS (since that might change), and then the content. Like all files, your browser should only fetch the images and scripting containers if modified, so one fetch once, and then the content can work with them.
Posted in UK.gov gives nod to .scot
We need .scot
We need .scot, if for nothing more than:
great.scot - a site for Dr. Brown fans
mr.scot - with such subdomains as i.need.those.engines
My responses:
"We want your Facebook profile and password"
Response 0:
"You first"
Response 1:
"I want your bank account ID and password".
Response 2:
"I want a unicorn pony. The difference is, with genetic engineering, I might one day get what I want."
Response 3:
"Either this is a test of how well I manage security, or a gross invasion of my privacy. If the former, I am not sure I want to work for you. If the latter, I definitely don't want to work for you. I am sorry you have wasted my time - this interview is over."
Response 4:
(I shan't write it, but it is one of the shortest English language sentences, consisting of seven letters, a space, and a period, a vulgar imperative verb and a second person pronoun.)
Posted in Revealed: Google's SECRET London office
Re: All working for Google?
"All Working for Google?
I thought we'd all be working for the government within ten years?"
Your two statements are not incompatible.
You will be working for the Government.
Which shall be Google.
All hail our newer, darker overlords! "Don't be evil - facilitate it!"
Re: Energy, power, cabbages, whatever...
You beat me to it. Thank you.
If you talk about "energy at any instant in time" you are talking nonsense, as energy is power * time - let time go to zero (an instant) and energy by definition goes to zero too.
And I'd hope anybody working on fusion would know the difference - and I'm sure they did. But the meatbag of a distorter^Wreporter didn't.
Re: What innovations will the next 18 years bring?
"ultraviolet QR codes?"
That actually is a pretty neat idea. Use a UV LED to cause the pattern to fluoresce, and take the picture (without flash, of course). It would be a good way to de-uglify things, and would also make a dandy way to introduce a bit of obscurity to a link (e.g. stamp your property with the code - bad guy doesn't see it, gets busted, cops scan swag with UV light, scan code, call you.)
You could even do a real Indiana Jones moment: arrange some pattern of objects in the world that, when illuminated by the sun on a give day and time, forms the pattern. I'm surprised some artsy type hasn't done this.
Dumb companies
First: Used properly, QR codes are great - they are everything that the Cue-Cat should have been, but wasn't.
BUT: I've seen some stupid companies use them. I got a post-card sized item of junk mail in my mailbox (US Postal Service: about all we do now is advertising), with NOTHING but:
The company's name.
A QR Code.
That's it. No info on what these jokers do, or why I should want to scan their code. If they think I'm going to just blindly follow a link like that - they've never seen a certain Christmas Islands domain, have they?
So, what did I do? Not scan their QR code, that's for damn sure. But being a curious monkey, I searched for the company name, found out what they did (avoiding their actual web site like the plague), and decided that yes, I really didn't give a frip, and fed their missive into the shredder.
Anybody who goes around scanning random QR codes stuck to random objects by random people should be forced to live in an Amish community as an Amish person - they clearly are not ready to live in this technological world.
It's the hardware, stupid!
The thing that made the Amiga great was the hardware: when PCs were doing good to have simple FM synthesis, or *maybe* 8 bit PCM, the Amiga had multiple channels of variable-rate PCM, with envelope modulation. At a time when PCs had dumb frame buffer graphics, or *maybe* simple line drawing hardware, Amigas had hardware accelerated 2D blitting and sprites, and the ability to switch video pages and modes on a scanline by scanline basis. At a time when PCs had very SMALL framebuffer memories (tens of kilobytes to maybe hundreds of kilobytes), Amigas had megabytes of chipRAM that could be used a frame buffer.
Yes, the Amiga OS was multitasking, etc. But it was the hardware that allowed a 7.9MHz 68K to whup up on X86 CPUs, even after years had passed and the X86s were an order of magnitude faster.
Now-a-days, what do you get? The same video and audio hardware I can get in my PC.
If *anybody* wants to build "the Amiga for the 21st century" they are going to have to do something special at the hardware level (and that will mean it won't be commodity hardware, and thus not cheap). The PS3 "coulda been a contenda" had Sony truly wanted to be in the home computer market, not the video game market, but... they didn't. If somebody did something special - maybe hardware accelerated IO (offload everything from Ethernet to USB to Firewire to SATA to an ancillary processing system), maybe a display system where every window is a polygon in a 3D engine, with hardware video decode for everything, maybe something the rest of us are so hidebound by our current experience we cannot image - that somebody would be building "the Amiga of the 21st century".
But as it is, this is Yet Another Linux Box (which is still infinitely preferable to YAWindowsB).
So, meh.
Just don't Jar-Jar Jeremy, please!
I just hope they resist the urge to "improve" things:
* Making Jeremy Hillary Boob PhD into a Jar-Jar ripoff
* Adding a kid-friendly sub-racing section instead of the Sea of Holes
* "correcting" Max's accent into something more "socially conscious"
And of course, changing the Apple Bonkers because of a certain computer company...
The one with half a hole in the pocket.
Posted in N7Player
Metadata driven players have a weakness...
The problem I have with all these metadata driven players is they all have a severe weakness: if your metadata is bad (incorrect or missing ID3 tags), they fall down. They all fail to take into account one of the most common, and useful, pieces of metadata that a music file can have: what directory it is in!
If one album is by "Paul McCartney & Wings" and one by "Paul McCartney and Wings", guess what - that's 2 artists! Nevermind they are under the same directory.
Or the case I ran into: I had 2 albums named "Greatest Hits" - one by Linda Ronstadt, one by the Little River Band. Guess what: even though they were in two separate directories, my phone's built-in player decided they were the same album.
So: does *this* music player (and, no matter how pretty this is, its main goal should be to play music, not ogle the album covers) have sense enough to work if the metadata isn't perfect?
Posted in So, what IS the worst film ever made?
The Third Eye
a.k.a. The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066592/
You'd think that with James Mason, Burgess Meredith, and little Jeffrey Bridges in his first role this would have to have some redeeming value - but you'd be wrong.
Horribly, horribly wrong.
Posted in Belkin Dual-Band Travel Router
And how many ads does it ram down your throat?
Give Belch-kin's history of using their Ethernet routers to redirect you to their advertising, I wouldn't let one of their devices be in my path to the Internet if you paid me.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=belkin%20router%20hijack&spell=1&sa=X
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1039_3-5104863.html
Of course, the fact that most Belch-kin gear is overpriced by a factor of 2 is just another reason to avoid them like a drunken, broke in-law.
European or African?
"Shaq is 22.x flaccid penises."
Are those European or African?
The Python-esque one.
