I don't know whether or not I have any degree of Autism

What I do know is that I don't understand unwritten social rules. For example, given a choice of writing 'El Reg' or 'The Register', I'll always choose the latter because I fear there may be some unwritten rule regarding use of the former that I'll break. This kind of thing happens to me all the time. Also, I find it impossible to be spontaneous, and am unable to feel a sense of belonging to any group.When surrounded by other people, I tend to listen rather than speak, because if I speak I'll eventually say something that invites quizzical looks. On the other hand, I always remain calm when many others tend to panic.

The most logical explanation is that I have some kind of brain damage (as probably evidenced by this post).

Huh?

"after six years of slog, more or less from 2010 onwards"

I just got up. I had no idea I has slept that long.

Presumably anyone who signs up for this

automatically qualifies for free passage on the 'B' arc.

I don't know if it's just my area

but in the run up to the federal election my suburb has suddenly gone from "Construction commences within one year" to "Construction commenced". Coincidence?

RFC 6238

Other companies that have already introduced multi-factor authentication in the past few years include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Blizzard's Battle.Net, and Valve's Steam.

The app supports a standard protocol — thought to be RFC 6238, according to Ars Technica — and means that Google's 'Google Authenticator' can also be used to generate that code for Microsoft's two-factor system. Dropbox's two-factor authentication also supports the standard.

From this article.

I don't care about Twitter

so in that instance I won't bother, but I take my gmail account seriously and have switched to two factor identification there. It is surprisingly convenient, because you have the option of drastically reducing the number of challenges sent when using your usual PC (monthly, I think). Google also supplies an app that generates a unique code every few seconds, so you can choose to use that instead of SMS if you prefer.

Facebook being sued?

Music to my ears.

I'm Australian

and I'll pronounce it any damn way I like. Usually by sticking an "o" on the end.

This planet is an endless source of amusement

So glad I live here.

XBox One vs PS4

If we make the radical assumption that the purpose of a games console is to play games, then the two systems seem remarkably similar. A bit of investigation, however, reveals a few significant differences:

- the clock speed on the PS4 is 25% faster

- the PS4 uses faster GDDR5 RAM, compared to the DDR3 RAM used in the XBox One

- the PS4 manages 1.84 tflops, compared to 1.2 for the XBox One

Leaving aside such issues as second hand games, online requirements, subscription services, etc., on purely technical grounds the PS4 hardware seems to be better suited to playing games.

It's a shame there is no longer any way to convey secret messages

Incidentally, the yellow dog howls at the new moon. I repeat, the yellow dog howls at the new moon.

Yawn

It looks suspiciously like this, which I has been plugged in to the HDMI port on my monitor for several weeks. Except I paid a lot less for mine on eBay.

Free trade agreements

(especially with the United States) often have clauses that attempt to criminalise things like copyright violation, or allow foreign corporations to sue governments if legislation they enact results in a decline in profits. A notable example is tobacco packaging laws introduced in Australia, which would probably not have been possible had the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (currently under negotiation) been in force.

Well, if Google were to sell its own take on the HHGG

I for one would buy it - but only if it had "Don't Panic" on the cover, and contained the kind of apocryphal misinformation that would make Wikipedia look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Sigh

How many hundreds of billions have been spent on attempting to reduce global CO2 emissions? If it turns out to have been a waste of time, I'll be quite cross. Especially considering the number of lives that could have been saved were the funds to have been directed elsewhere.

Well, you're doing (slightly) better than Australia

We've only had Andy Thomas (Australian citizen) and Paul Scully-Powers (Australian born) venture into space.

Time to wheel in

the giant magnifying glass.

This doesn't make a lot of sense

The most important attribute of a watch is convenience. An important part of that is battery life. Things that are both unnecessary and would kill battery life are:

- any display other than eInk

- a processor with sufficient grunt to run a full sized OS

- sufficient RAM to run a full sized OS

All that is needed is a micro kernel running on a low power microcontroller, E Ink display, wireless comms to let the smartphone do all the processing and the biggest battery you can get away with. Capacitive switches around the edge would be an effective alternative to a touch sensitive display

Why would they build a watch that runs iOS and uses OLED? It would need recharging every day.

I misread the heading as "Bacon Mountain"

after which the rest of the article came as something of a disappointment.

The Wii U is dead

to be followed soon by Nintendo, if they don't lift their game.

iOS-only?

Well there's your first failure in the appropriate application of statistics. Android is the dominant platform.

It's too expensive

to justify as a peripheral, not good enough to replace a PC or one of the coming consoles as a gaming platform, and has insufficient launch titles for it to make sense as a player's only game machine. It looks nice, though.

Unless you believe in magic,

the fact that natural intelligence exists is sufficient reason to assume that one day artificial intelligence will exist. Not any time soon, though.

Some suggestions

- the glasses should flash a red LED when video is being recorded, or photographs taken

- a barcode should be agreed on, which whenever seen by the camera will disable it for five minutes

- an international symbol should be agreed on, which means "no recording devices permitted on premises"

All that trouble

to correctly model the trajectories of various bits of colliding debris, and then they go and ruin it all by having sound propagate in a vacuum.

So, it would appear that

Microsoft doesn't recognise copyright or terms of service. Does that apply to their own products and services?

After translating into Klingon

you can paste it here.

Before Apple unleashed their lawyers

there was a reasonable chance that I might at some stage buy an Apple product, if it suited my needs.

That is no longer the case.

The real villains

are the legislators who continue to further the separation of law and justice.

(@ myself 1:00)

Yes, there is a paradox there. (If I expect to be disappointed, then I won't be disappointed.)

If it follows the long standing traditions of free to air broadcasting

I expect to be disappointed.

Safety critical

Any device that can turn off the power to a home is safety critical. Depending on climate, loss of power may result in hypothermia or heat stress. There are also various types of home medical equipment, such as CPAP, artificial kidney or lung machines, infusion/insulin pumps, etc. that require power. There are specific requirements for the design and construction of both hardware and software for safety critical systems. For example, there are no safety critical systems that have been based on Windows* software. I would be interested to know more about the design of these devices, and their intended use.

Here in Australia, where summers are hot and reverse cycle air conditioning is endemic, our state government wishes to enable targeted load shedding using devices like this. This would save the political embarrassment of shutting down whole suburbs, at the cost of introducing a kind of city wide Russian roulette, while obviating the costly necessity of maintaining infrastructure that is capable of supplying uninterrupted power on the hottest days of the year. It would also reduce the cost to power companies of reading meters. It doesn't really have much to do with allowing individuals to monitor their power usage, although it may be presented as such.

*There are about 35-40 MLoC in Windows XP. If the typical figure of 10 faults per kLoC for commercial software applies, then this is just over one third of a million faults.

Well, on the bright side

it will raise the intellectual content of the average tweet on Twitter.

It's been years since I bought my last graphics card

(dual GPU ATI Radeon HD 5900). I recently looked at what was available, and can't really see much difference in performance between similarly priced Nvidia and AMD offerings. They both make nice kit, but there is nothing on offer in the top of the range that is actually needed by current AAA games. I guess I'll just wait until lack of grunt becomes a problem. That would be good, because it would mean game makers are getting more ambitious in the number of polygons, the resolution of textures and the general level of complexity in their games. Maybe the new consoles will spur things along.

Why do I get the impression

that this whole article was an excuse to write

Many Apple fanbois will remember frantically groping around the rear of an iMac, trying to finger exactly the right spot that would turn their computer on.

Most interesting video for the 55-64 age group

in Milwaukee, WI; New York, NY; Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX; Austin, TX; Denver, CO; Las Vegas, NV; Orlando-Daytona Beach-Melbourne, FL and Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, FL is Grand Theft Auto V: Trevor Trailer.

Rock on, Rock Stars.

Sad

I have two monitors in front of me at the moment, and both are from Acer. Neither has ever given me any trouble.

I also have an Acer Iconia tablet that works well. Why are Acer in such difficulty?