Posts by Ru
1749 posts • joined Wednesday 20th June 2007 09:00 GMT
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Re: GIF ?
Its about the animations. It says something rather depressing about the state of video on the web, that we're still using animgifs after all these years.
"Either the fuse blows, the circuit board tracks melt, or any weak links in the wiring break"
Presumably you're not expecting the whole ensemble to catch fire, with all of the entertainment that entails with nearby unfired rockets?
Re: what happened with .NET ?
You'll have more luck moving a .net application between x86, x64 and ARM than you will with an unmanaged language. If your code is trivial, you can even get it to run on Mono.
Re: Password complexity
I suspect that given a suitably secure office, the old postit-on-monitor approach to security is not nearly as bad as having a lousy password on a device that may be easily stolen or accessed from anywhere on the internet. Cleaning staff are usually the flaw in that approach, however.
I'm a fan of 2-factor stuff, myself... TOTP dongles and smartcard access can reduce the impact of a multitude of sins.
You win a special prize
For the phrase, "the first opportunity to unzip its CGI fly and wave its synthetic jewels in the viewers' faces".
Re: TANSTAAFL, AKA Quids pro quo
"maybe thumb his nose at the US by basing a business there"
Oh come on. He saw a nifty domain name, and registered it. There's no more complex motive than that. This simply acts as a timely reminder that ccTLDs come with all sorts of strings attached.
Re: Quelle surprise...
The US Patent system doesn't even pay attention to anyone's patents either. The whole sorry mess is set up so that the validity of a patent or the non-infringingness of any particular thing is left to the courts to decide.
The sheer volume of obfuscated dross is impossible for anyone to get a handle on.
Posted in Skyrim DLC lets players FLY DRAGONS
So, flying on dragons... I wonder how freeform that is. They ditched levitation magic(and other airborne shenanigans like super high jumping) after Morrowind because of the hacks they had to make to their engine which would be revealed in all their ghastly glitchy glory from the air. Be nice if they brought that sort of thing back. They did manage to implement horseback combat after all this time, at least...
Was the part-regenerating, part-non-regenerating hitpoint system present in other systems, though? The armour/health split was common enough, but both bits tended to be ablative, no? Or if health regenerated, the non-regenerating armour took the damage first, or in parallel.
Re: Wot? No Deus-Ex?
I'd drop Deus Ex into the same category as System Shock.
Re: Pump and Dump Scam - rats leaving a sinking ship
"Goldman Sachs... are a bunch of sharks.
Speaking as a vertebrate, I take offense to that. It has already been observed in the past that Goldman Sachs are in fact a giant vampire squid clamped to the face of humanity.
"Zuck's outfit is still worth... around $60bn"
"Zuck's outfit is still worth roughly about the same as British supermarket giant Tesco at around $60bn"
Lets go for "valued at $60bn" rather than "worth", shall we? What with Tesco having strippable assets, and all. Facebook's value lies largely in its userbase, and users aren't exactly fungible.
Posted in KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds
Re: Every user interface gets this way!
"It's a great excuse for a developer to not work on what needs to be done or finish what he was doing before."
This isn't just about procrastination, and working on easy fun things rather than hard important things.
There's a more deeply seated issue that pops up in any human organisation, especially ones which are committee based. Groupthink is part of it, but any sufficiently cliquey organisation will end up attracting people that reinforce its views and discouraging dissenters to the point where people who object to the idiosyncrasies of a project are simply ignored. I'd raise PHP as an example of this, but any project with an excess of WONTFIX issues is probably guilty too.
I've no idea if this is happeneing at KDE mind you; I'm too lazy to find out, and spend more time on XFCE these days.
One issue for low-level projects in mobile land is the vast amount of relatively young proprietary hardware. Take a look at the phone models you can install Cyanogen upon; its a fairly small subset of available Android phones, because porting to a new phone is likely to be a painful and complex process. The GPL is no help here; I have a custom ROM on my Dell Streak 5, but it is unlikely to ever run anything more modern than Android 2.3, because of the lousy hardware support by Dell.
Posted in We don’t talk any more... on the commute
"Mild horror combined with sarcasm and sexual arousal"
I can't quite picture this myself. Perhaps some example mugshots of some of the Reg's staff forming this expression would help?
I can get behind the excommunication of "grande" and "tall" (especially the latter), but cappuccino? Clearly they don't think much of their customers.
Hmm, iPads?
I'd have put Apple's most recent serious innovation as the iPhone. Whilst it wasn't the first touchscreen smartphone, the UI certainly blew away all the competition, and it has certainly defined the look and style of pretty much all smartphones since. The iPad wasn't anywhere near as interesting by comparison; did it really sell well because it was 'tablet computing done right', or because it was an Apple product?
Re: Ahhh, the French
"boules" (the latter only encountered in Quebec I think).
Sounds like someone has been searching for highly subjective colloquialisms on a certain set of "crowd sourced" websites. A little more reputable than Urban Dictionary, but not by a whole lot.
Re: Ahhh, the French
"Nichon" is the only french mammary colloquialism I've come across. Etymology unknown, and I doubt it has quite the same degree of informality. Maybe it is closer to 'boob' than 'jub'.
I wonder how he feels
about extravagant corporate sponsorship of activities that do little to "save the planet".
"Excellent Hallowe'en vampire makeup, Minister"
I was getting more of a Palpatine vibe, no so much Nosferatu.
Re: Someone needs to mention Thief
I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but this eye... its completely blind.
There's even a map in the article showing where the Rhone enters.
No doubt this outrageous turn of events will be rectified in due course.
Usage caps aren't intrinsically bad things, so long as they aren't stupidly small. I'd always choose a sensible cap over an Unlimited* service which throttles your connection to death or imposes secret fair-use rules. My home DSL has usually been with providers who provide 50-100GB with some form of PAYG or top-up or premium package above that limit; this seems quite reasonable and a good way to keep prices and traffic management down for the majority of customers.
500MB though? What on earth are they thinking? If someone needs that little data, why on earth would they care about 4G?
I don't see any obvious 'incidents' in the sense of dangerous problems, but the 4 Japanese reactors of this type don't seem to have a particularly high uptime compared to other modern designs. Maybe they're hoping that the new builds will have dealt with some of the reliability issues experienced by the early ones.
Re: I don't care
"Why? Because Amazon has 90% of the book market"
Really? Or are you confusing publishing with retail?
Re: Is this a joke?
"I do not know much about the solar sail effect, but"
So what you're saying is, you don't know what you're talking about but you're willing to rubbish work by someone who does on the basis, of, uh, you're from the internet and therefore are an expert in pretty much anything?
And from this lofty position of credibility, you suggest what you feel to be a better plan despite having demonstrated that you know practically nothing about astrophysics and orbital mechanics. Well done.
Inevitable Internet Omniscience Syndrome strikes again.
Re: Called it
"why the extra - unheard of - requirement?"
The requirement for the losing party in a court case to have to make a public apology in the national press might be unheard of by you, but it is by no means a unique occurrence in the UK, let alone the rest of the world.
Re: distance
A 550nm wavelength laser pointed at a target 2000km away and using a 10m reflector has a minimum possible focus spot size of ~10cm diameter. I reckon it'll lose a good 50% of its output energy firing though the atmosphere, and probably won't accomplish a whole lot though cloud or dust storms. Still, if you've got good enough optics to focus the beam down that far, you don't have to throw many tens megawatts out of the business end of your laser to chop holes in even quite tough targets (say, a tank) in a second or two.
It won't, however, be a city razing ravening beam o' death. You'll get results a little more like a precision drone strike... it'll take out a car, or a plane, or a person but it won't level a block of flats. Dropping rocks out of orbit is more appropriate for that.
The technology for this isn't that far off. I kinda hope we'll be using it for laser launch systems to get stuff in to orbit cheaply rather than frying each other, however.
Re: Is the robot getting a medal?
We're still waiting on a software patch, so that robots wounded in the line of duty can be awarded the ability to appreciate awards.
Grace Hopper
could have taken her in a fight.
Re: Oh welll...
I don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that Cryptome gets so little press.
Re: Wait, what did he say?
<Bangs head against wall>
Right, so you're listing a whole bunch of things that were terrible free online services, low quality expensive online services or offline services which aren't comparable at all. Good for you. I am aware that satnav devices and non-navigating mapping GPS handsets have existed for some time... again, neither are comparable to an online PC-based mapping service that required no additional hardware or software or expenditure than you'd already got and provided worldwide mapping at a wide range of scales.
So no, Google Maps did not enter into a mature market full of high quality alternatives.
"they shouldn't bother at all because it's a bit hard and there's already a product on the market."
They shouldn't have bothered getting rid of a working system and replacing it with something demonstrably worse. Every other time Apple have entered a product into a new market, it was if nothing else well engineered. Their maps are not; they are a rush job because they messed up either in their own project planning on they failed to see far enough ahead of time that they'd have differences of opinion with Google and need to replace Google Maps before the terms of its use became too onerous for them.
"Meanwhile, Nokia ships Nokia Maps with most of their phones, it also provides less functionality than GM, but no-one is shouting about that"
Did Nokia remove a pre-existing mapping tool that was better than Nokia Maps in order to push their own product?
Re: Please won't somebody think of the minions?
Certainly this is considered in very Bond-influenced productions. In computergameland, we have HARM in No One Lives Forever, and you get to overhear the staff talking about their jobs quite often. I'm pretty certain that private healthcare is one of the perks, and getting to exercise your murderous tendencies is another.
The armed guards in Jennifer Morgue laugh at the protagonist's feeble attempts to dissuade them from their jobs, pointing out exactly how rich and powerful they're going to be folling the evil organisation's IPO.
Both evil organisations seem to do a much better job of large scale construction projects than most real-world folk seem to. I guess when the penalty for late delivery is for the project managed to be shot or be eaten by a tentacled horror from the depths of time, there's a bit more incentive to bid sensibly and work hard?
Re: Wait, what did he say?
"Google Maps was widely criticized as rubbish when it launched, with numerous hilarious routing problems"
What were the high quality alternatives that were available at the time?
"If you follow that logic then you would never bother bringing a new product to a mature market"
If you're bringing a product into a mature market you're going to have to work hard to convince folk that it is better than the alternatives. Apple aren't offering anything new or different with their service, other than "Its an Apple product!". This is an approach that has served them well in the past, but only when they've brought along a well engineered product, something that does not seem to be the case here.
Ultimately, the big issue here is not that Apple have brought out something that isn't as good as the competition, its the fact that they removed an existing tool which did a better job, resulting in a worse experience for all their users. Maybe Apple will be showing folk the way forward in a few years. That would be nice, but their customers would like them not to show everyone the way backwards in the meantime.
Re: Wait, what did he say?
Search engines before Google were generally rubbish. Smartphones before the iPhone were pretty awful too.
Please contrast that with the state of mobile mapping before the release of Apple's Maps application, where you could find mutiple providers of both decent applications and decent mapping data.
Re: Religion? A pox on ALL your houses
"I seem to recall it was originally a fig tree anyway."
It would be appropriate. God Hates Figs, etc.
Re: Mesh networks would be the future
When I read "mesh" I was thinking a little more along the lines of "trunked", where the last couple of hops might be relayed by handsets rather than base stations.
I wouldn't hold out much hope for your battery life in that sort of architecture, mind you.
Re: Evidently
Does gravity not count as aid?
Horrendously Empurpled?
The correct phrase is of course "Hideously Empurpled", as any fule kno.
(augh, that beforeitsnews.com site was possibly the worst place I coudl have linked. scienceblogs is less awful in almost every single way. Many apologies)
"Thankfully the West is more enlightened"
Have you heard of the US educational publisher, A Beka Book? They're selling to some "schools" in the UK these days. How about Paul Broun? He's on a science and technology panel in Congress, you know.
Just two recent examples for you. I could go on, but frankly the whole thing is depressing. Medieval religion and persecution of heretics is popular everywhere; there's no Islamist monopoly.
Re: Free but for $99.99 worth of crapberries
Trouble is they've run out of gullible fools who are prepared to spend real money on a virtual game, just to speed things up.
I'm fairly certain that's a bottomless well of income even today... its just that they need new ways to tap it. Zynga has demonstrated a singular lack of talent and imagination beyond the friendly cartoony flash face they slapped over a big money-sucking Skinner box when they first started in the "social gaming" racket. Everything they've done since has just been a regurgitation of that same basic design, and it just doesn't have any long term income potential... they need to make new, interesting wrappers for their money machine to keep the punters coming and they just can't do it. The purchase of OMGPOP was clearly desparation, and a demonstration that Zynga have no talent in investment or acquisitions, either.
Their basic business model remains sound, and even if they die an unlamented death there will be plenty of other companies waiting to carry on in the same vein and do well enough.
Posted in Motörheadphönes ears-in review
Re: Heavy metal umlaut
Umlauts ain't tildes. Just ask Spın̈al Tap.
Re: Does this make sense?
"they are fossil teeth: they are made of rock"
As opposed to "living" teeth which are made of what... meat? Hydroxyapatite is a naturally occurring rock, too!
All the organic components of the tooth will likely be long gone, but much of the mineral content may still be present after fossilisation. Given how long the hadrosaurids were in existence and how widespread they were, there will no doubt be many, many fossils to choose in order to find one with a plausible mineral content or even ones which still contain proteins.
Posted in LOHAN plugs into some hot LiPo treatment
First thought involves two metal strips in some sort of conductive grease, inside a close fitting (but not tight) plastic sleeve. Shouldn't have any problems with the conductors freezing together, easy enough to assemble and disassemble, shouldn't impose any undue force when it comes to separation time.
Re: Dont forget
"Well that was a mistake to begin with."
Yes; even coming down from the trees was a bad idea. Personally, I think we should have never left the oceans.
Re: What title?
"Perhaps the people circumventing the rules are making money for the company, unlike the IT departments which are spending it?"
Well, there's a tricky situation. There's and endless parade of disasterous, expensive or embarassing security failures and information leaks by people who didn't want to jump through hoops; everything's easier if you just tell people the password to use, if you don't bother with encryption, if you just take a load of work home with you so you can get it all sorted before some deadline.
In all these cases, if there were byzantine rules, there was no enforcement of them... they were purely discretionary.
So now you want to make this situation even more difficult for your IT staff, who you apparently view as the enemy. Now they not only have to trust that regular money-making valuable employees will not make any mistakes (and history has shown that this is often a bad idea) but now they also have to trust that the devices they bring in run up-to-date, secure operating systems and applications. They have to trust that the OS devs will release timely patches, and that the mobile network operators will push these patches out, and that the users will install them. History has shown that this isn't a great assumption either.
If your IT staff don't realise they're performing a service for the rest of the company, then the company management and HR have made poor recruitment decisions. If you think that data security rules are a pointless obstruction to your valuable work, then I'd say that your management and HR have made another poor recruitment decision, and I rather hope that you're not ever responsible for my personal data and the financial wellbeing of companies in which I have invested.
