Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: What counts as a tablet?

And some people actually suggest that there isn't an anti-MS bias here! The post contains a simple factual assertion, easily verifiable, and it gets downvoted. Do people actually require video footage of someone pressing the compile button in VS without re-writing their application?

Re: The Surface Pro looks pretty tempting

You should be able to put Linux on the pro version as you want. The RT, being ARM-based, is almost certainly going to have a locked bios that will prevent installing a different operating system. Possibly if someone produces a signed Linux bootloader, I'm not sure.

Re: Maybe.

"anyway, pot kettle black. I'm sure you're chucking crap in every Apple article possible from what I remember"

Find me one instance of that.

Re: MS need to shed Ballmer

"Balmer throws chairs at his staff: he is not a “people person”."

Originally it was rumoured that he'd thrown a chair across the office when someone told him they were going to work for Google. Now chair throwing is apparently an established fact, a recurruring thing, and at actually targeted at people. In a few more years, he'll be using a custom built catapult to launch sofas at people's kids.

Re: Maybe.

I haven't clicked on the link but I'm guessing that it is the momentary freeze of a pre-release version of the Netflix app running on the pre-release OS that was installed on the pre-release hardware in a demo that he finds so damning. I'm guessing it's that because he posts it repeatedly every week. If someone as overtly prejudiced against Microsoft as Bob is reduced to this as a damning inditement, then Win8 is looking pretty good. (And I've been using it for a couple of months on the Desktop and am finding it very reliable and quick).

Re: This could've been an interesting take on the story...

"OK. I have now read the rest of your previous post and it contains not one single reference to anything specific in the paper. I have no idea why you're pretending that it does."

Well there was the specific reference to ten of the respondents disbelieving the Moon landings and the specific reference to the sample size of 1100. That's about all I needed for my point. If you want the specific column references and labels for the relevant questions, they are 'R / CYMoon', 'Y / CYClimChange' and 'AC / Cause CO2'. But that's hardly necessary or germaine. So I have no idea what "specific reference" omissions you feel are undermining my argument.

It's an explanation of why ten respondents are the applicable sample size for talking about whether or not AGW-skeptics are more likely to disbelieve the Moon landings, not the total 1100 respondents. You could ask a thousand people what they thought of Lady Gaga but if only ten of the respondents to the survey are muslims, then your sample size for what muslims think of Lady Gaga is not 1100, but 10. The point is basic and understandable.

Re: Meh!

I too would love to see such an article. Academics tend to be very wary of approaching this particular elephant in the room however, for fear of the massive attacks on them it tends to generate. We certainly can support more people on the planet than we currently do. We almost certainly cannot support everyone with an average US-level lifestyle. Whether we can support the current or greater numbers of people that we have right now long term, or if we're consuming resources at a greater level than we will be able to replace them, I have no idea. Fossil fuels will obviously run out, a shift to nuclear should be able to cover us for quite a long time. But potable water is actually being used at a greater rate than it is being replaced from what I've read and there is agricultural degredation as land is depleted of nutrients and forests are destroyed to make land for growing cattle feed (soy) for the US beef market. Long-term sustainable or not, I have no idea. And the climate is changing (whether by human activity or something else) so that will have effects. But whilst we don't know for certain how much we can sustain long term, there certainly seems no technological or socialogical reason why there needs to be quite so many of us. We could all still create new technologies and have a good social life if there were only four billion of us. So why take the risk?

The better educated people are and the more opportunities there are for women in the workplace, the greater population reduces in a humane and voluntary way.

Re: This could've been an interesting take on the story...

"That's an awful lot of words. Unfortunately, the first few lines of the third paragraph are nonsense so I didn't bother reading the rest"

That's a good start.

"As I said in my previous post, the relevant figures and calculations are all detailed in the full paper - which is available as a pdf linked to in the article. I can't see anything unusual in there. Can you point out the problem you see with the statistics in the actual paper?"

I have both the report and the raw data used for it open right now. If you had bothered to read my full post, you would find the information you requested already posted.

Re: It's real!

"I believe in mood landings, I had a right strop at the top of the stairs the other day."

Bloody Daleks.

Re: Giggle

"Thank you, your angry swivel-eyed foaming made me continue to giggle."

I think it is right to get angry about bad science and academic dishonesty. If that makes you giggle like an idiot, that's up to you.

For most of us, laughing at people for caring about things stopped being considered cool sometime in Secondary School.

Re: Libertarians reject science shocker

I have some vegetarian sausages in my freezer. They're quite nice actually.

Re: This could've been an interesting take on the story...

Granted it's about the difference in ratios, but when 0.9% of your sample report believe the moon landings are a hoax and 6 out of those 10 also agree with the author that burning fossil fuels over the last fifty years has increased the atmospheric temperature to some measurable degree, then you're on very dodgy ground in making your headline conclusion that AGW-skeptics believe the Moon landings were faked. More of the believers in hoax also believe that CO2 raises temperatures than don't believe that.

Now what you're saying is that it can still support that conclusion if you are looking at the ratios. I.e. if 40% of people who think CO2 has no effect disbelieve the Moon landings, but just 20% of people who do think CO2 has an effect do, then disbelievers of CO2 causing warming are more likely to be disbelievers of Moon landings.

That's potentially true, but there are some serious problems with it. The first is that the sample size actually is too small. You say that 1100 responses is reasonable, but that is the number of total responses. The number of applicable responses as any good statistician would immediately pick up on, depends on which question you are asking - in this case whether you believe the moon landings are faked correlated with belief in AGW - which in this case is just ten people. I'll illustrate. If I ask a thousand people to rate Lady Gaga as a musician as Good or Bad, that could be a decent sample size (we'll ignore selection bias for now, just as the author of this study has). But if that group there are 10 Muslims and 7 of them say she's Good, then whilst my selection group for how "people" think might be 1000 respondents, my selection group for what muslims think, is ten. Not 1,000. But ten. The reason is because there are 2bn muslims in the world and 10 is a non-representative sample. Think of it as a Venn diagram where whatever you want to test has to fall into the intersection of both groups. The moment you start restricting the set of people you're talking about, you have to start discarding some of your responses. That's a slight simplification, but good enough for non-Statisticians and essentially true. There's nothing that really changes that basic principle.

The sample size really is too small to draw the conclusions drawn from it and the way it is presented, is very far from suggesting to people that of the respondents, only 0.9% who believed the Moon landings were faked; and that of them, 60% were actually believers that CO2 increased global temperatures. The stated conclusions and headline are horribly misleading to the point that I call them wilfully disingenuous.

And the whole thing is flawed from the outset not just because of the framed questions and ropey analysis, but because it has the selection bias from Hell.

Disraeli said there were 'lies, damnded lies and statistics." I wouldn't even dignify this paper with that last one, just the first two. It knew what it wanted to prove and by Jupiter, it would do so! I wonder how many of the commentators here actually have the survey and the results spreadsheet open and have looked at it. I have, and it's rubbish. If I can poke holes in it, then any competent statistician would (and will) rip it to shreds. This thing is a blot upon the whole field of statistics. Sorry that I worked my way up into a rant, but however cynical I may become, an academic should be better than this.

Re: Libertarians reject science shocker

I misread that. He got more than 10 respondents. It was 10 respondents who said that that the Moon landings were hoaxes (that's 0.9% of respondents). And interestingly, those 10 respondents included people who agreed with his views on AGW.

Apologies for the wrong information.

Re: Some Confusion

Yep - I initially misread it like that and posted similarly above. You can actually get hold of the data yourself now (it's been provided by one of the AGW-skeptic sites) and see how dubious the conclusions are. 0.9% of respondents apparently believe the Moon landings were hoaxes.

The other elephant in the room is how he chose the sites to send the survey too. A lot of mainstream AGW-skeptic sites are checking and confirming they aren't aware of being contacted.

Re: This could've been an interesting take on the story...

He seems to have also had an interesting approach to choosing who to send the surveys too, with a lot of mainstream AGW-skeptic sites checking and confirming that they aren't aware they were ever contacted. So it seems he may have deliberately picked fringe sites to contact as well.

Re: Giggle

In what way is it a "brilliant story"? Have you read the survey? It contains numerous questions that cannot be answered in any way other than that which confirms the author's preconceptions, there seem to be three different versions of the survey floating around, the conclusions are based on the ten responses the author actually got to their survey (an absurdly small sample size), no realistic measures to control for self-selection of the sample group - indeed, it actively prejudices the sample group. For instance, the survey sent to the "non-skeptic" group was done under the author's own name whilst elsewhere that was concealed. It was also a very odd list of "skeptic" sites that the author chose to select for sending the questionnaire to, avoiding several popular and mainstream "skeptical" sites, and instead targetting more fringe sites.

Read a question that asks you to assert whether the 2003 invasison of Iraq was about WMD or not and tell me whether you think that question is an acceptable way to categorise people as "conspiracy theorists" or not.

The author of this study is a crank. I have seen YouTube videos by him where he says he has seen <insert flawed viewpoint> posted on AGW-skeptic forums, therefore AGW-skeptics think that thing. It's like saying I saw a post about how great the iPad is on Reg forums thus the view of El Reg is that the iPad is great. And I'm not exagerating. This person actively demonizes people he disagrees with using fundamentally flawed logic and terrible science. And if you take a look at this survery, even if more than 10 people had responded to it and they weren't purely self-selecting, the flaws in it would make it very difficult to tease out any actual meaning from the results.

The only way I can see this making you giggle is if it confirms some bias you already have and therefore you just like seeing an attack on those you disagree with, regardless of whether that attack was actually legitimate or not.

Re: Libertarians reject science shocker

And you got all this from his 10 respondents who participated in his survey? You are certainly a master of insight to be able to get the above from such a tiny sample size.

Re: It's real!

And how do you feel about Iraq as a conspiracy theory. One of the questions in the survey reads:

"The Iraq War in 2003 was launched for reasons other than to remove WMD from Iraq..." and asks you to rate the truth of the statement.

So if someone thinks just maybe WMD (I'm sure we'll find some soon) wasn't the reason, they're a "conspiracy theorist" and lumped in with people who don't believe in the mood landings?

Re: Use a bot?

That poses an interesting problem for them. They have to keep the prices low for shopbot visitors because otherwise they wont even come to your site in the first place.

Re: market stalls violate google patent?

Nah - stock market works the other way round. Big players with the most money get charged less than others.

Re: Each according to his/needs, each according to his/own abilities? Or...

"Yes, i am standing by for the frackin down-thumber schills"

Schills (sic) ? You think TARGET is paying people to downvote critics on El Reg forums? I think you overestimate the effect of your comment on their shareprice.

Re: This is evil

"By the way the examiner who failed to find the blatantly obvious prior art on this should be given a pink slip straight away."

Absolutely. Not only is there prior art for this (we could also include Monty Python's Life of Brian which I seem to recall involved a detailed illustration of this process and a gourd), but having just skim-read the patent, there's no actual methodolgy in this at all.

If Google had conducted research and concluded that if visitor x comes back to an item in the store more than 4 times a month, they have a 98% chance of purchasing, if they look at similar items in a range X% above and y% below the items cost, then the chance of them buying at base price + 1/3% is only 1% lower than the chance of them buying it at base price so put the price up... that sort of methodology and actual research, then I could see at least that they would have done some work that they might want to protect.

But the only innovation I can see here is the creativity needed to spin the definition of 'haggle' out to 24 pages.

Re: This is evil

Age doesn't tell you what technology can do, but it does tell you what people will do with it.

Re: Disappointing

"I have a professional SLR... I wish my lenses were £400. Try adding another zero to the end of that, then if you really want to go to town, double, triple and even quadruple that."

Oh I'm well aware that there are more expensive ones out there. I'm also well aware that I am not a good enough photographer to need them. ;)

I agree with your whole post and I've experienced the same myself.

Re: BBC NEWS

WP7 isn't being completely dropped. Nokia are even bringing out a new WP7 device in parallel with the WP8 ones. You can code for both WP7 and WP8 at the same time. I agree many will hold off from buying a WP7 device in favour of wating a couple more months, but anyone who buys a WP7 device is still going to get something that works well as a phone with a lot of modern features and software being released for it for a long time to come.

Re: Microsoft caught red-handed faking the PureView ad

Uh, that's Nokia, not Microsoft.

If you're interested, a proper video of a non-OIS camera and the Nokia one, both mounted on the same rig and carried by someone walking, is here:

Nokia OIS

Looks like a nice feature.

Re: BBC NEWS

I've given up using the stock market as a good way to determine value of a company. Half the time people are manipulating it, the other half people are deliberately shorting it. Look at the way Facebook share price rises just before another slide begins where you can see that some invisible hand (bad joke) has pumped it up so that smaller fish will buy in and the bigger fish can divest themselves of toxic shares at less of a loss. There are big players in the markets and whenever they're confident that a stock is going to start going one way, it's in their interests to begin that process with a slight shift in the other direction so they can get in at a better price point (whether lower, or higher if short selling). It's a bit like someone counter-turning on a motorbike.

Basically, be wary of drawing any conclusions from the stock market unless it's your field of expertise. My area of expertise is technology so I look at that to determine value, and these look like solid products. I think they will sell well.

Re: Disappointing

8MP is actually plenty for most purposes. At that point, image quality is far more influenced by issues such as lens quality than raw MP. Yes, if everything else is the same then more MP is better, but a 15MP camera is far from necessarily better than a 10MP camera without knowing *a lot* of other information. I have a professional quality SLR. Lenses for it can cost £400. It is 18.5MP, less than half that of the Nokia N8 and takes better pictures than any camera phone ever has and, possibly than they ever will.

MP in a camera is a lot like RAM in a computer. If you don't have enough, it's a problem. But once you've gone beyond what you need, adding more and more isn't going to make anything run faster or better.

Re: SD card

"96GB is going to come very close to holding my whole music collection finally pensioning off my ipod."

With a typical song being about 4 minutes in length, encoded in 320Kbps, 96GB is... about 17,000 tracks? Do you have every full length piece of Classical music or something? How can you possibly listen to that much music? Genuine question - not criticising.

Re: Downvotards amaze me

A poster declares that 0.7mm thicker than one of the market leaders means a phone is useless and you can't see people wanting to express how silly they think that is as being other than a "MS shill", then I believe you should reassess your own biases.

Re: I had a Lumia 800

Complete opposite for me. I bought the Lumia 710 because of the OS which I liked a lot. I really didn't care much about camera quality or memory so the cheaper one was great for me. I found the OS very responsive and it did everything I cared about. So much so I wasn't planning to upgrade to a WP8 device, though the cheaper one of these new phones looks useful.

Re: There is a 100% effective filter ...

"Kids are always more technically savvy than their parents"

When my kids can write network management software for SDH and SONET telecomms systems, I will consider the possibility.

Re: Green Cross Code

"Why shouldn't kids be looking at porn? I seem to remember jazz mags doing the rounds in my days. Am I a damaged deviant now? (Don't answer that one.)"

The Consultation Form makes no allowance for your views. In one place, it asks how you think filtering of "obviously harmful material (such as pornography)" should be handled. Now I think pornography can be damaging to children because a lot of it is dehumanizing and nearly all of it gives a very distorted idea of what real sex is like (for most of us). But parents should be able to make their own views on this, not have the government mandate what is and isn't harmful. And in my opinion, porn is a lot less harmful than some other stuff such as heavy violence, racist material and the example of the rewards of dishonesty that many of our politicians set for society.

In general, the consultation form is a bit of a "when did you stop beating your wife" document with a number of presuppositions and limitations on what you can and cannot say by the framing of the questions. In particular, it makes little allowance for people who think parental controls might affect them if they're not a parent.

But it's still important to make your voice heard and takes ten minutes to fill out. It can be done here: Consultation Form and takes about ten minutes. We still have a few hours to rant at people who can actually do something, rather than just on the El Reg's forums.

When I worked in the NHS I personally knew two GPs (and my sample size was small so undoubtedly there are many more) who believed in homeopathy. I am not joking.

Re: Misnomer

"By your standards then, Creationism/Intelligent Design is a theory? Fails every scientific test but might possibly still be true? Thanks but I'll stick to science and I'm sure you'll forgive me my skepticism."

Not by "my standards" so much as by normal definitions. You seem to be treating "theory" as meaning accurate science as a result rather than a method. Creationism is a hypothesis. I.e. "Everything was made by God in six days." There is nothing that says it is true or false, it's just an idea. Intelligent Design I don't know much about but you say it fails every scientific test. Well then if it presents things that are testable then it is presumably a theory. Your idea that "theory" means something can "fail every scientific test but might possibly still be true" suggests that you don't understand what a theory is. If it fails testing, then it is a disproved theory. If it can't be tested, it is not a theory, it is a hypothesis. I already gave an example in my previous post of Newton's Laws which are a theory which were testable and found false (though it took a few centuries delay and someone fantastically clever to do so). That doesn't make them not a theory.

I have no idea where you're coming from when you say "you'll stick to science" other than to suggest you look up the definitions of hypothesis and theory. Nowhere is it written that theory means something is true. It's an idea that is testable.

Re: Scepticism is useful

Well then it's a good job that AGW-skepticism doesn't "burning ever more fossil fuels is the ONLY answer to ANY question". I'm a skeptic who is massively pro-Nuclear. Does that cause you cognitive dissonance or am I just not a true scotsman?

Re: @richto

I think with Server 2012 and Powershell you have the remote command line access you ask for, but modded you up for a good answer.

Re: Does Windows Server Core 2012 really not have a GUI?

There are actually three modes, a pure, pure GUI-less instance, a version that has a Desktop but no real GUI per se, and then the full GUI thing with all the tools, et al. It's my understanding that the first is the preference if you're managing multiple servers - you just leave it without a GUI and manage it remotely using PowerShell scripts of the Server Manager tool which will handle all your instances.

They are different modes rather than different installs. So if you want to put the GUI on one of your instances temporarily, you can do that. It will be removed when you switch back to the GUI-less mode. I don't think it really makes a difference with a single server, but when you have a lot, it's significant. Just like I don't install KDE on all my Linux servers because I just manage them remotely, why have one on Server 2012 for the same scenarios.