Nintendo might be able to claim copyright

I doubt that that is the case. The resulting video is clearly a composite work (generated imagery on one hand and player input and commentary on the other). Copyright law is clear that each party retains its own copyrights in such cases (assuming Nintendo's is valid, which is not itself 100% clear). Nintendo do know that, so while it's easy to get overexcited and throw terms such as "fraud" around, the term does seem to be apply to this land grab.

Re: Excuse me?

About the laptop analogy... let's try another one: whether I'm employed or not, I still have to use the loo. Then, from your point of view, I should be taxed for using it, right? So, what's your take on this now?

You are taxed for using the loo. Get a new loo or bathroom installed and it will come out of your taxable income and the bill will be subject to VAT - you are actually taxed twice. You are not taxed for the toilet at work which is needed solely in connection with your employment.

Re: Excuse me?

Is he really saying that he has to pay more taxes because Google employees are "allegedly" paying less by not paying tax for their free meals?

It seems pretty clear cut to me. His argument is essentially "If you don't pay the tax that you are supposed to, but I do, I have to pay more tax to make up for the tax you didn't pay." Do you argue that tax evasion and benefits fraud are victimless crimes? Who do you think ends up paying the bill?

Your analogy with your laptop is a poor one. It is a tool provided by the company for the purposes of carrying out the company's business - if it was not for that employment you would not need access to the companies systems, applications and so on. Food is a personal rather than employment expense: if you quit your job you still need to eat.

Re: ""Email is fundamentally broken," Jon Callas, Silent Circle's CTO"

Just don't email anything you wouldn't shout from the rooftops. Sorted.

Remember that the next time you are looking for an important message among thousands of spam mails, or indeed get a message from president@whitehouse.gov that turns out not to be Mr Obama. Email's security problems go way beyond simple eavesdropping.

Re: Ever wondered if...

Not in an observed supernova, because the chemicals are already here. However, everything in your body outside of hydrogen, (any trace of) helium, and lithium are cooked in stars, and IIRC anything from neon up comes from a star that went supernova (certainly iron and beyond).

That used to be accepted wisdom but it has been shown at the very least not to be entirely true. Putting the heavier elements on supernova was only really a hook on which to hang an awkward problem without a better answer, since models suggested the process would actually work in reverse, tending to force everything back towards lighter elements as opposed to building heavier ones.

It is carbon stars that are now regarded as responsible for much of the heavy elements and we have direct observational evidence to support that conclusion. Technetium has been detected in carbon stars spectroscopically, and since the most stable isotope has a half life of "only" four million years it is reasonable to conclude that it must have been formed in situ. The process doesn't release any energy by itself of course, but there is energy available to drive the processes from other reactions that are occurring.

Re: lol

Core performance on the M5 should be far better than the T5 systems; it's got much more L3 cache per chip (48MB vs 8MB), fewer cores (6 vs 16) so a massive boost to L3 cache per core (8MB vs 0.5MB). Obviously, you need more of them to match the T5 equivalent system for raw compute capability, but anything which is memory intensive will prefer the M5 boxes.

Oddly enough that's the one I skipped over - it seems to me to be a conceptually flawed "me too" attempt to claim single-threaded credentials. Niagara and successors have always focused on overall throughput instead. The entire approach made a lot of sense - you can either spend increasingly large amounts of silicon on caches and various prediction stages gaining ever smaller returns or you can simply state "Cache misses and pipeline stalls are gonna happen. Do something else when they do."

The entire core design is premised on that attitude - it is madness to have so many threads per core otherwise. The M5 deviates from that basic approach with no alteration to the threads per core, no smarter pipeline, just an increase in the already relatively distant L3 cache. I'll be interested to see how it works in practice but I suspect it is a purely marketing-driven variant with little practical benefit.

Re: What has this got to do with a Supernova?

The Mark I was actually the second of the Manchester machines. It is the SSEM or "Baby" which holds the honour of being the first stored program computer. It was only built as a test bed for Mark I development and quickly broken up but it was a distinct machine in its own right.

Turing never really had anything to do with either machine - he was more concerned with the NPL pilot ACE and actually spoke of the Baby/Mark I in highly disparaging terms. He considered the design wasteful of hardware - he argued against instruction decoding in favour of effectively embedding each and every control signal in the basic instruction format. Subsequent developments have essentially all followed the Mark I pattern as opposed to Turing's preference, but it seems there is such a cult of Turing admiration that details like that are often brushed aside.

Re: Hint, kids (of any gender) ...

... if your partner(s) is(are) more interested in the computer/drugs/comics/alcohol/politics/religion/sports/exercise(in any form)/ElReg/TV/music or anything else than they are in you, as an individual ... my advice is to simply move on.

Frankly I wouldn't want to be around anyone display that kind of attitude with no reference whatsoever to the circumstances. Can you honestly say you've never stayed at teh pub past the time the missus expects you back for example? If she's demanding sex but it's 2am and you are in work early the next day is a refusal really unreasonable? Finally, consider your own prejudices. If the genders were reverse and it was a naked man chasing a woman around the neighbourhood and demanding sex would you still feel the same way?

Re: I'm not seeing what the problem is?

It isn't just non-western governments either that get sniffy about maps over seemingly innocuous things. The then Post Office Tower (then Telecom Tower then BT Tower) in central London was completed in 1964 and pretty difficult to miss. However, its existence was still an official secret until 1993 and it was omitted from OS maps as a consequence.

Re: Lots of companies doing this

It's precisely that - an accounting wheeze. One of the main metrics you'll see in any company report is the return on assets - not how much money you make, but how much money you make as a proportion of how much money is tied up inside the company in real estate, plant, reserves etc. The argument is that a company making £2m on £10m of assets is "better" than one making £3m on £20m. In purely percentage terms it makes sense at least in the short term but it isn't how great companies are built. If you can free up cash to spend profitably elsewhere perhaps, but more often than not it simply ends up going back to shareholders or blown on overpriced vanity acquisitions - witness the current kerfuffle over the proposed Dell buyout for example.

The problem is that inevitably makes the company smaller in absolute terms and it either loses markets (when divisions are sold off) or running costs (when assets are sold and outsourced). Neither is good for the long term prospects of the company. Greater leverage also means greater risk, higher borrowing costs and greater vulnerability to events such as the financial crash.

There's plenty of examples of good companies being run into the ground this way: personally ICI is always the one that comes to mind. A once great industrial behemoth got taken over by the beancounters who sold off division after division and plant after plant, arguing "those are low growth areas" all along the line. They apparently didn't notice the company had shrunk and shrunk until it was taken over by foreigners for beer money.

In short, if you have money involved in the widget business pull it out pronto when it is run by people proclaiming "this is how you run a business" instead of "this is how you make a better widget".

Re: I have lost the ultra-violet wiping-out gadget (ask your dad)

Yes, and she did state EPROM, unless it has been edited after the fact...

Re: Copy & Paste from /. ?

More likely the other way round - the text is clearly written in response to something else, and it fits quite well as a follow up to the Panic post. It is posted in isolation on Slashdot without any context making the whole message seem a little out of left field. It would also be far from the first time someone has bulk copy and pasted something to Slashdot with nothing in the way of attribution.

I've no idea as to the respective time zones for those timestamps but is seems clear which was first in reality.

Re: GPIB?!?! AHHHHHHHH!!!!

It's still in quite widespread use if you look in the right places. While mass-produced stuff has generally abandoned it even in its traditional test equipment heartland it retains the advantage of being very easy to implement - it's the only bus that can transmit at those kinds of speeds while being built on a generic stripboard for example. If the device in question is a unique one-off that's a very strong attraction, since the costs of PCB design and fabrication can't be amortised over a large number of units. The relatively simple protocol (especially by multidrop standards) at both ends of the connection helps massively with those short-run costs too.

I work in just that kind of short-run embedded engineering shop. Several times I have sat down at 9am with a list of requirements and gone home at 5pm having designed a circuit, written the firmware and host software, built the thing and tested it. That's doable with GPIB. The next preferred option would be 10base-T, but that means careful impedance matching, PCB layout, a TCP/IP stack on the device, more sophisticated host software, etc etc. The unit costs will end up lower but you have to offset those against the design costs: that's generally at least a day's work and if the production run is three or four easier is almost always cheaper.

Re: There is a reason for Software Smugness

Thinking about better algorithms is never a bad idea.

Of course it is, what is really dumb is presenting that kind of moronic statement as an axiom when in reality it is merely justification for one's own vanity. Smart people use dumb methods on occasion simply because of an appreciation of real world factors and having the common sense to employ some form of cost-benefit analysis. How many chunks of code are only ever used a small number of times, possibly even once? Think about "code" in the broadest sense of the word - it could be some one-off data manipulation job or even a simple for loop at the shell prompt.

Consider a job that we know in advance is a one-off. You use your "better" algorithms and take two hours to devise a solution that does the task in two seconds. I spend two minutes knocking something up that does the same job in another two minutes. Your solution may be "better" purely in a vanity sense but is that really the best use of resources? Remember your assertion: "Thinking about better algorithms is never a bad idea."

Re: Who cares?

The only person here without a decent brain in his skull is YOU. So many of you gasoline car-centric bigots can't deal with the idea of a motor vehicle not using gasoline for motivational power that you can't accept even the *idea* of alternatives. I'm a motorcycle rider and I look forward to seeing what great ideas the future will hold for motive transportation systems.

I've driven less than 200 miles in the last twelve months. In fact thinking about it apart from a hire car when I away last summer I haven't driven at all. In all probability you burn far more petrol than I have. This isn't some great position of principal but a simple reflection that my life is arranged in such a way that I wouldn't benefit from a private motor vehicle in ordinary circumstances.

The facts don't matter though - you didn't even know that so you assumed motives that I don't have and attacked me on invalid premises as a result. We see the real motives in your post, adopting a holier-than-thou attitude over my presumed transgressions because you ride a bike rather than drive a car. I've got news for you: it's the same fucking thing that goes in the tank as a car so I don't know what your attitude derives from.

No. This isn't the first time Musk has cried foul over shitty reviews. Again, he is unable to actually challenge the NYT account - the telemetry "disproving" the article actually correlates pretty well in substance. This particular electric car is not some future nirvana made real today. The fact that you want it to be does not make it the case.

Re: Lowest common denominator

It seems a lot of the "quantum leap" criticism is at best misdirected. The key property of a quantum leap being alluded to is not (as frequently supposed) the size of the leap, but that it is a transition from one state to another with no discernible intermediate state. In other words, it is not a metaphor for "huge advance" but "step change".

I've no doubt that the phrase is frequently misinterpreted but the correct interpretation has always seemed perfectly clear to me. Even in everyday contexts it is frequently (probably even usually) used in a perfectly correct manner even if not precisely what was intended.

Re: x.25

Yes, the cloud there is still going strong - it moved to Frame Relay and now MPLS. Of course it has a real meaning there - the "cloud" is a visual depiction of the network internals that you neither know nor care about since that's purely the telco's problem.

Re: Kettle, black

coming from the browser that hasn't rendered tables correctly for over 14 years.

I'm no FF advocate but fair's fair. If you bothered to read the bug report you would see it is nothing to do with "correct" table handling, but undesired behaviour when presented with invalid table code. There is no "correct" handling that eventuality.

Re: Assume it was an auto box.

Disabled guy suddenly expected to put in 10x the control input to either break or stop at 200km/h???

As has been noted elsewhere we know nothing about the disability so that is just speculation. It is also ridiculous to say that manual steering require some kind of superhuman strength - plenty of people do it every day, yes, even disabled ones. It is finally absolute nonsense to suggest the steering is actively locked with the ignition off - as I showed even a moment's thought shows it to be complete and utter twaddle made up on the spot.

Re: Assume it was an auto box.

Steering wheel lock?

What about it ? Do you think the towing eye would be any use whatsoever if the steering was locked whenever the ignition was off? You would have no power steering, nor power brakes for that matter, but they'll work fine purely mechanically.

Personally I can see a role for a smart TV along for very lines. When I first got this (Samsung) TV that I'm using as a monitor I observed it had an ethernet port, a general computer processor and support for USB keyboard and mouse. The only thing stopping it being a thin client X/RDP/VNC/whatever terminal is a bit of software. That software simply isn't there though so I have a Neoware thin client also sat on my desk, consuming power and taking up space for something the TV itself is perfectly capable of doing for itself.

Re: WinFS?

The OS's FS just stores files of various types and names.

Congratulations on completely missing the point, or indeed what the basic premise of WinFS was. Your argument goes that since the OS has historically provided only unstructured flat files this is all applications have been written to use and hence their is no reason to support anything else regardless of the benefits available to applications designed to use a richer OS persistent store.

WinFS was not some kind of glorified extended attribute scheme for simply tagging files but something altogether more substantial. The essential idea was that any file holding useful information generally has some form of internal structure: instead of each application needing to process a raw byte stream and parse that structure for itself the OS can keep track of that structure for any application once for all applications using that file. This has potentially huge benefits for efficiency and resource and code sharing: if you read up even a little on what was really involved you may begin to see the real benefits of the actual model as opposed to basing misinformed criticism on a wildly inaccurate guess.

Re: Precidence not necessary

Sure, trademarks are different to patents or indeed copyright - they not subject to automatic term limits but have compensatory restrictions in place of that limit.

It would appear to me that the very most trademark protection "Space Marine" could have even as original coinage would be as a "descriptive mark" which are themselves difficult to enforce (see here for a fuller explanation). The ability to cite prior works in the same and related genres would surely amount to evidence that it is generic in nature and thus not subject to even that protection. I hope the author does challenge this and Games Workshop invalidate their own trademark. I'm guessing via the mechanism used - challenging Amazon who will not want to get involved in the dispute - is tacit acceptance they know the weakness of their hand.

Re: Cost

Honestly, I expect to pay £50-100 for a "homebrew" one of these (i.e. the price range of a half-decent commercial inkjet, or some large homebrew lego project), and £300-500 for a full commercial-quality one. Until then, I don't see what market they serve.

3D printing is not new - it's been around in one form or another for the last 20 years. When they were first introduced you could easily be spending a couple of grand in consumables just for a singe average-sized "print". The printers themselves had six figure price tags. It was a restricted market but the market was there, and the people buying them were happy to pay the money. The customers were generally in product development and were realistic versus the cost of the alternative: namely hiring a model maker to make a prototype that might be ready in two weeks time if it was a simple job and he wasn't busy. The costs were comparable but printing generally had faster turn around times.

Now several key technologies are starting to come off-patent and we are looking at 1% of that cost. Suddenly that greatly reduced price tag is somehow too expensive? Sure, you can't yet print a one-off toothbrush that is cheaper than one made by the million. This surprises you? On the other hand if you have a regular requirement for fabrication of one-off custom components they are highly attractive versus making them some other way.

If your requirements are occasional rather than regular there are always the bureaux, just in the same way that the other week I had some A0 drawings printed out. I don't have an A0 printer, I don't have the space for an A0 printer. That doesn't mean I am denied the option of relatively low cost A0 printing on the high street.

Re: MX80

PCB mills have been available for years for a fraction of the price that can do pretty much anything relatively flat, not quite as powerful as a Dremel but certainly a match for the traditional PCB or dentist drills. I have one here that'll take full 12x18 boards I bought a couple of years ago for under £500. It's useful for what it can do - relatively quick and the resulting boards are fairly cheap. It's also really nice being able cut and drill on the same machine with just a change of tool. The downside is that very small burrs don't seem to be available which affects how fine you can go - if you want to mount ½mm pitch SMDs you'll be out of luck.

Re: Prior art ?

It seems trivial and obvious, but there is a subtle difference. Pretty much every store I've been in uses desks / stands, not tables (and definitely no stools / chairs). Their wares are there to be looked at, not played around with.

Think a bit more broadly than simply phone shops. Tables parallel to the walls, shelving along those walls, stools... it sounds very much like most book shops in fact. No mention of what the actual merchandise is, in the quotes in the article at least.

Re: The vi thing

"I only ever use Linux".

This being a thread about editors for *nix systems and all.

Precisely. It isn't installed as standard on any on the principal BSDs, Solaris, AIX etc etc. POSIX mandates the presence of precisely one full screen text editor. It's called vi, not nano.

Re: Yet another bad research paper

I was thinking much the same. Whatever these figures mean (if anything at all) they sure as hell don't mean what people will naturally assume. My guess would be that they've simply junked some of the TCP traffic management features (the soft start mechanism for example) and cooked up these outlandish figures by basically shitting on everyone else on the network.

Re: The vi thing

10 years ago I might have agreed with you, but nano/pico has been (IIRC) has been ubiquitous for at least that long, and it's fair to regard it as the basic editor which will always be available

I can only translate this as meaning "I only ever use Linux". If you got any further than that you would realise just how wide of the mark this is.

Re: @Steven Jones

Mercedes Benz do a braking system where there is no direct mechanical / hydraulic link between your foot and the pads (it was used on the McLaren / Mercedes SLR, maybe others too). There was some electronics in the way. Apparently it is very 'odd' to drive, but the car did have tremendous stopping power...

Power assisted brakes are more or less ubiquitous - far more so than power steering or even ABS - but AFAIK all current road cars use some form of mechanical linkage for both brakes and steering. The power assistance only works when the ignition is on - it would rapidly deplete the battery if used outside of that - which means among other things you wouldn't be able o tow a car without the linkage.

This is well understood by the sports car manufacturers in particular who could greatly improve handling by trading camber angle for caster angle in the front suspension geometry. They resist that temptation to a certain exist since increased caster increases the steering wheel resistance - too much and it gets very difficult to drive without the power steering.

Re: Another Constitutionally protected right goes down the tubes!

Obviously, you really can't legally or ethically change providers when the phone is still under contract but once that contract is up...

Why not? If I subscribe to an X month contract and am given a phone in return it is mine and the first sale doctrine would naturally seem to apply. It is my phone, so I may use it for the contracted service, put in in a drawer, flush it down the toilet, sell it to someone else... you get the idea.

Sure, I've signed a contract and I have an obligation to uphold that contract. That generally means covering the cost of my subscription and any non-inclusive calls. Nothing about the device I use to make use of the contracted service, nor indeed whether I even make use of that service at all.