The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

* Posts by Tom 38

1618 posts • joined Tuesday 21st July 2009 13:02 GMT

Tom 38
Silver badge

You may both use the term 'zucked', but you meant 'sucked', whilst they meant 'fu…'.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Implication being...

"How palatable do you think a game like Civ would be if for example you could play as Pol Pot and win?"

It's actually harder than it looks. You have to be oppressive to your own people, whilst being introverted and technology resistant. It's bloody hard work to win as Pol Pot, race to Fundamentalism, Railroad and Engineers and then start destroying the other players with Fanatics before they discover Partisanism…

Oh you meant ethically. My bad.

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

I like how this is described as networking

Hardly two way is it? Broadcasting might be a better analogy.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: One more time -

The downvotes are because a lot of Android apps ask for a litany of permissions, which are 'necessary' to use the game.

An example of this is the legitimate version of Angry Birds, the most popular mobile game, which (at least at some point) used to ask for SMS permissions:

http://www.androidcentral.com/rovio-explains-why-angry-birds-update-needs-sms-permission

Since the legitimate version of the game asks for similar permissions as the dodgy version of the game, can you understand why 'looking at the permissions' is not relevant - most users simply will accept whatever is put to them, as they have to accept them anyway for a lot of their apps.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Reprimanded?

Almost certainly they have obtained money by deception, IANAL, but surely this is a criminal offence?

Tom 38
Silver badge
Unhappy

Very sad

Pipex used to be one of the most technically correct and proficient ISPs in this country. It's so sad they were gobbled up by the shittest ISP in this country and now offer this turgid service.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: WTF?!

Actually, the current UK plan is to make information freely available, and let 3rd party developers compete amongst themselves to produce the highest quality app using that data.

For things like tube line status etc, this approach has actually worked quite well.

A logical extension of this would be to make services that developers can use to produce apps which actually do things rather than just interrogate data. Your PAYE example would work here - what is needed is a service to allow an individual to enter their PAYE data securely, which app developers can then integrate.

However, 'logical' and 'politics' don't really mesh.

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Downvote because

"""

if you're a parent who lets your kid watch the odd bit of porn, and it brings its friends around while you're out and they all watch porn are you then guilty of distributing porn to the poor innocent litte shits?

"""

Er, "Yes"? Seems pretty clear cut that one.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Joke

Re: Summary

Blimey, I'm going to be spending more time on the mail's website.

Although not at work.

Tom 38
Silver badge

"""

Meanwhile, Platell confessed that she visited the well-known PornHub website last night, and the Mail columnist added that she was "appalled" by what she found there.

"""

I know the feeling Amanda, pop onto PornHub for a 5 finger shuffle, and it's just stuff you've already seen. Appalling indeed.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: "you don't *need* a new machine to code with."

What a load of nonsense. The wannabee kernel mode developer already has a way to do exactly this, by using a vm on their operating system of choice.

I know lots of BSD kernel developers who run OS X on their laptops, and test all their kernel changes in VMs. Very little needs actual hardware to develop upon.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Don't see the point..

This is the real problem with ICT in schools - people like this AC. Supporting Python on Windows is no different than supporting python on the Pi.

This makes me think that the educationalists going ape-shit over the Pi probably think that Pi devices will not require maintenance, support, software upgrades etc.

There is nothing you can do on a Pi that you cannot do on any vintage of a RM PC, teachers and technicians simply haven't wanted to do it. I don't understand why having special devices will get around this.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Thumb Up

I do love a bit of Sir Humph every now and again. The idiot politicians being led by the opaque mandarins. Classy.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: One little problem

That's not really relevant though. The most important thing is that mail is not delivered successfully to a server that is no longer part of your mail store. This could happen if an MTA (or the NS server it queries) caches NS lookups.

By locking out the server, you don't want bounces, and fortunately, you don't get them. Any MTA that would discard or bounce an email after one failed delivery attempt is moronic.

Most will keep them in an outgoing queue, and attempt to redeliver them at a later date. What you hope here is that when it attempts to deliver it later, it will use the correct DNS name and deliver it to the correct MTA.

Only if an MTA has attempted redelivery multiple times will it contemplate bouncing the email back to the sender.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Would be useful, but...

Close but no cigar. When Greene King bought Ridleys (which bought Tolly Cobbold), they continued brewing Tolly Original in Chelmsford at the old Riddle's site.

Anyway, what's wrong with Westgate St brewery?

Tom 38
Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Greene King IPA?

Personally, I prefer their IPA to Abbots Ale, but I'd prefer either of them to anything by Fuller's. All of them are bested by any Adnam's tipple, which you can find just as easily in London.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: "just Linux"

It's not particularly interesting to BSD really - or at least I've seen no interest from the FreeBSD community. See here:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2011-November/036745.html

The Pi is an ARMv6, which isn't that powerful compared to most other (Cortex based) SoC boards. The video out is controlled by a proprietary, closed source system, with no specifications - so there is zero chance of enabling video on a Pi without using the provided binary blob on Linux.

If you want a cheap ARM on BSD that can't do video out, you buy a sheevaplug, or one of the many derivatives. If you want a powerful SoC, you buy a BeagleBoard or a PandaBoard.

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Used to love my iphone

No, you just can't read. He said adding a larger screen makes Apple evolutionary and not revolutionary.

In other words, the opposite of what you took away.

Tom 38
Silver badge

What a crap judgement

It is clearly a bad faith registration, in fact I'm amazed that they haven't just gone straight for trademark infringement. Stelios can sue anyone using either the word 'Easy' as a suffix or the colour orange, this is far more egregious.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Thumb Down

"iPhones automatically connect to iCloud network and backup their content every time a docked device gets within reach of a Wi-Fi access point"

No they don't, in order to backup to iCloud, your device must be on a charger, on wifi, with the screen locked and off.

I know, because my wifi is being a bit flakey with devices going into power save, and my iphone keeps telling me it hasn't backed up to iCloud in N weeks, and under what circumstances it will backup to iCloud.

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Latency

Do you understand how latency is measured, 'Technical'Ben? I'll give you a hint, 'RTT' does not stand for "Rodent Top Trumps".

Tom 38
Silver badge
Thumb Down

Re: Point 57 of a litre please.

Down my shop (Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons, Asda, corner stores, M&S), you can buy milk in 4 metric sizes, 568ml, 1.134l, 2.268l and 3.40l.

I've never once seen a 4 litre bottle of milk in a country with the Imperial system. In the US you can get a US gallon of milk, which is 3.78l (and sold at that size).

Tom 38
Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: I call bullshit

I agree, but I think we're a minority of gamers. I know several people who use OnLive and love it, but I get pissed off in-game if my ping goes above 20*. Thinking about it, they mainly play single player games, which I guess don't rely on beating another humans reactions/ping.

Most UK players on our UK server have pings between 15ms and 70ms (FTTC/LLU ADSL at one end, certain VM areas (Glasgow in particular) and TalkTalk at the other), most EU players between 40 and 90 (apart from the Dutch, who seem to have the most awesome internet connectivity).

* Some commentard above said they never see pings below 150ms, which I find astonishing. You would get banned from our servers with that sort of ping, fucking HPBs.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: If its wrong most of the time...

It is trivial to calculate the distance between an exchange and a subscribers premises, but it is almost impossible to determine the length of cable used to connect them, the quality of the copper in that cable, the amount of environmental crosstalk in the cable, the quality of wiring in the subscribers premises, and all the other factors involved in determining your synch speed.

So, given a location, all an ISP can do is calculate a 'best case' and a 'worst case' bounds for your line. Obviously, marketing would prefer that the worst case is as understated as possible, so there will be outliers that have worse conditions even than the 'worst case'.

As an example of this, around Albert Dock in docklands there are some very curious routing of cables. Some locations in that area are extremely close to the exchange, but have 2+ miles of cabling, due to the strange way that the cables are routed around the docks.

Another example is my old man, who lives in the wilds of East Anglia. His line, if you check, says he should get 1MB, just about, because of distance from the exchange. He actually gets 3MB, because the line from the exchange is new, high quality, goes in pretty much a straight line across 7km of fields, and he has excellent in house wiring, including a fitted ADSL filter on the master socket.

With ADSL, you get the physical maximum synch that your line can handle. Switching ADSL ISPs searching for synch speed is inane, the ISPs and BT cannot change the laws of physics. Instead, you should either move, or see if you can improve the situation by improving your internal wiring, or STFU.

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

Re: I said it before...

Indeed Barry. HTC simply wave a wand and their shiny things appear, no slaves required!

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: "carrying out an upgrade"

Transport in London is basically semi-organized chaos anyway, on a good day.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: This could bite them in the arse

If you are interested in this, you should read about the Islamic golden age, roughly 750 AD - 1250 AD, during which Islamic scientists where the greatest in the world in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, ophthalmology and physics, discovering things which would only later be 'discovered' by western scientists.

The most important thing that Islam gave us was the scientific method.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: No wonder

Poverty is also endemic in the US, but the suggestion that they spend money on welfare rather than on more efficient ways is offensive to your average merkin.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Sorry, late to the party, but...

Not quite right. MS have built IE10 for WOA, and to make it fast enough to run on WOA, they have used non-public APIs, which they are refusing to make available to 3rd party developers to use.

As a consequence, Mozilla cannot build a browser for WOA that would compete with IE10, since they cannot use the same APIs.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Up and down?

Double-pedant: Their profits may be in the red, but the target of that sentence is the loss, which increased, and therefore should be described as 'up'.

You could say their profits went down from -£2bn to -£3.5bn, but that would be even more confusing.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Joke

Yay!

This has brought the cost of browsing abroad down to a scarcely believable £570/GB!

How can they do it so cheaply?? Surely they will all be bust by being so generous?

Time to catch the Eurostar so I can download some music before they change this bargain rate, huzzah!

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: why the hate?

My Sony-hate derives from an earlier age. Sony used to have a reputation for quality, and you would buy Sony hifi equipment because of the quality.

At some point, they decided to cash in on that reputation, and built some god-awful kit that was cheaper than their regular kit, but way more expensive than equivalent, non Sony kit. Loads of people paid extra for the Sony mark of quality and got ripped off.

I'd rather buy an Onkyo or Wharfedale than Sony these days.

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

Up and down?

"The company reported a net loss of ¥456.7bn ($5.7bn, £3.5bn), down from a loss of ¥259.6bn ($3.3bn, £2bn) in the previous fiscal year"

Surely £3.5bn is up from £2bn?

Tom 38
Silver badge

Thing is, 'Proview' isn't a company, it's a collection of assets owned largely by their creditors, the main one being BoC, who are largely owned by the government, who 100% own the judiciary.

Tom 38
Silver badge

They're not listening

But anyway:

Hi resolution 4:3 screen. Wide screen is useless. I'd take 2048x1536 plz (talk to Samsung).

Full size escape key. We don't all use Visual Studio.

Removable, washable keyboard.

10 hr battery life/ARM powered (same difference)

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Should have applied for .dev

Since when would a server with a ".dev" suffix belong in production?

If its for production, you should be using a domain name you own. If you don't want your domain names resolvable externally, you should be using a split horizon DNS.

If you blithely ignore RFCs when they explicitly tell you you should not do a thing, you should not be surprised when the internet bites you on the ass.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Gimp

Re: Ivybridge

It also has a certain reputation in Devon, being described "as a bit PL21" means you are new-agey, probably have owned a campervan at some point in your life and believe in at least any two of aliens/healing power of crystals/ley lines/King Arthur.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: Should have applied for .dev

<pedantry>

This was specifically warned against in RFC 2606, section 2 - precisely for this scenario.

If you want to be using fake TLDs, you should be using one of the four fake TLDs that ICANN have guaranteed to never be used (.test, .example, .invalid, .localhost).

I don't disagree that this is a colossally stupid idea by ICANN, but the warning was there for a long time that this could happen.

</pedantry>

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Smacks of the old scam

Isn't that a quote from Lock Stock?

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Why would you buy an android?

Can we have a 'Report to a Medical Professional' button please.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: WHAT!

I don't allow Adobe Anything anywhere near my computers, I don't download random executables off the internet and run them, I don't allow plugins in my browser, I only open known media types with trusted programs and the box is firewalled to buggery both ingress and egress.

I've been doing this for 15 years with no virus, trojan or malware. Kaspersky runs at £60/year, so that's a £900 saving. It's a bet, with myself. I bet that I won't fuck up my machine, and so far, I'm winning.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Don't worry

It riles me that certain types of people want to infer everything from my choice of tablet. You're still doing it, for instance.

"""

Look, you're posting in a community populated by Assembly programmers, aeronautical engineers and bearded guys who code using only a magnetised needled and a steady hand.

"""

Indeed, I'm part of that community - that's why I'm posting here - although I prefer vim to a magnetised needle.

It's geeky that I got excited about a software update to a music player. What's your excuse?

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Why is it only for premium users?

Two main reasons:

1) The desktop client uses P2P as well as direct downloads to source media, where as the mobile client only uses direct downloads. Therefore, it does cost more for them to offer access to mobile devices.

2) Mobile access is the USP of the premium account. It is the main feature differentiator between the two account types. If mobile access was allowed on the mid-range package, no-one would buy the premium account. The account type you are in is specifically designed to make you want to upgrade to the premium account.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Don't worry

Let me guess, you have neither an ipad nor spotify, yet felt drawn to read and comment on a story about both.

I don't need to justify my geekiness, it is apparent in every facet of my existence. The ipad doesn't "qualify me for geekdom", it is just my tablet and, unlike you, I don't think I am defined by my choice of tablet made two years ago.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Headmaster

Re: To paraphrase Christine Keeler

Pedant alert: That was Mandy Rice-Davies.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: WHAT!

AV is a con for the stupid. If you aren't stupid, you don't need AV.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of stupid people out there who think they aren't.

Tom 38
Silver badge
Meh

This has made me happy in a way that on reflection makes me feel ashamed of my geekiness.

Having said that, I am now sad that I will almost certainly have to re-synch 16GB of music off the old iphone version of the app and into the ipad version.

Tom 38
Silver badge

Re: Lily's counter eexamples

Facebook have no visible revenue stream? Are you joking? Their ad revenue basically allows them to print money.

Tom 38
Silver badge

"""

While I don't have any data on the total number of tech companies in 1995 versus 2012, I'd hazard a guess...

"""

Why base the entirety of your article on a supposition? You couldn't be arsed to get lists of F500 companies in 1995 and 2012 and categorize them by sector, but are happy to eulogize about what your supposition means?

Tom 38
Silver badge
WTF?

Re: There should be a cynic in the house of Lords

Would you trust 12 randomly selected voters off the street to oversee the country?

Forums

Forgotten password