Sign in / up

* Posts by Steve Roper

930 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Feb 2007

Page:

ConLibs to outlaw kiddyprinting without permission

Steve Roper
Big Brother

Fat lot of good legislation will do...

From: [$SCHOOL_NAME]

To: [$STUDENT_GUARDIAN_NAME]

Re: Fingerprinting of [$STUDENT_NAME]

Dear Parent/Guardian,

Due to recent legislation, we are required by law to obtain your permission to make and store a copy of your child's fingerprints. Since without this information, your child will be unable to access the school library, canteen, and other essential school services it is imperative that you grant said permission as soon as possible. Please note that failure to do so may result in your child not being able to access school services or participate in many school activities which will be vital to him/her receiving a passing grade. Please sign the tear-off permission slip below and return per your child at the earliest possible opportunity.

Regards,

[$PRINCIPAL_NAME]

Principal,

[$SCHOOL_NAME]

Legislation requiring permission without legislation enforcing the right of refusal is useless.

0 0

McKinnon campaign urges coalition to block extradition

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Not exactly a small bonus...

Wasn't the amount handed to the bankers on the order of $120 billion or something around there? Well, 1/10000th of that is $12 million, so he wouldn't be doing too badly out of it in that case!

0 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Was also true in the time of Shakespeare...

...that people whose names started with "G" were not liked by the government, as evidenced by this passage from Richard III:

"Yea, Richard, when I know; for I protest

As yet I do not: but, as I can learn,

He hearkens after prophecies and dreams;

And from the cross-row plucks the letter G.

And says a wizard told him that by G

His issue disinherited should be;

And, for my name of George begins with G,

It follows in his thought that I am he.

These, as I learn, and such like toys as these

Have moved his highness to commit me now."

Since my own middle name begins with a G, I suppose I did well to escape from England when I was still a kid!

0 0

Bill Gates backs ball-busting ultrasound

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Which is why

if you want to bonk on a regular basis without risking becoming an "accidental" father, you'd get the treatment with a 50% margin for error; that is, every 3 months.

Given, however, that it is illegal in my country (Australia) for a man to get a vasectomy (even a reversible one) unless he can prove he's fathered at least one child, I'd say the misandrists in the government here will put paid to this ultrasound business pretty quickly, at least here. Unless you're already a father and thus eligible to be milked for child support...

(BTW, interesting to note that Firefox underlines "misandrists" as a spelling error but not "misogynists". I wonder why that is?)

0 0

The Cameregg plan: Who got what?

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

You got that right mate

Liberals here are indeed Conservatives. But Labor are super-conservatives. And Family First are super-super-conservatives. We don't actually have a "liberal" party here; but then, this country WAS founded as a prison, remember?

1 0
Steve Roper
Stop

I'll believe it...

...when I see it.

In the elections in Australia a couple of years ago we were over the moon that Howard and the Liberals were finally ousted from power. 12 years of Liberal rule saw our country devolve into a nanny police state with few if any freedoms left. Labor had always been the working-man's party, and we expected a new era of freedom and prosperity. The $900 cash handout from KRudd's Labour government was a shining start.

Then it just turned and continued down the same despotic slope. Internet censorship, tightening of anti-free speech laws, tightening of anti-terror laws, all the trappings of the police state continued even faster than before.

Sorry to bruise your apples, guys, but the politicians and those behind them insist on a world police state and they will continue to get it. This lot will throw you a few sops but the likes of CEOP and their ilk will continue to erode your civil liberties in the name of protecting children and fighting terrorists. The nanny state will continue apace, despite the best promises the pollies can make.

2 1

Exam board deletes C and PHP from CompSci A-levels

Steve Roper
FAIL

Unbelievable

As a former lecturer in software engineering I agree that C/C++/C# is not a language to teach beginners the basics of programming. Pascal is probably the best language for teaching programming precepts, but only in the first two semesters. Once the students have grasped the basics of programming with it, it ceases to be useful for many purposes.

After that you move the students onto C. A solid knowledge of C sets you up to learn almost any other language, since C's syntax constructs are common to practically all of them - you can see it in Java, Javascript, Perl, PHP, Python, Delphi and a slew of others. Not to mention which any kind of server work - which overwhelmingly uses Linux - requires a good grounding in C. That they are dropping it as a computer science language is absolutely unbelievable.

And yet they're keeping VB? That isn't even a proper programming language! It might be OK for your spreadsheet-designing script monkeys, but it's of no use whatsoever to anyone working at the back end. Seems to me there's going to be a severe shortage of good server programmers in a few years' time.

2 1

Mafia Wars dons deprived of pit bulls

Steve Roper
Flame

The greatest exception

to freedom of speech is speech denying that freedom to others. PETA is a prime example of this in my book. To paraphrase Voltaire: I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend with my life your right to say it. Unless what you say takes away my right to speak. Then I will oppose you to the death.

These fucking fools need to be silenced, by any means necessary. They have abrogated their right of free speech by constantly taking it away from others.

0 0

Twitter bomb joker found guilty

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Big Brother

@Adam Williamson

Er... the whole country IS a jail, in case you hadn't noticed!

4 1
Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Thumb Up

I do hope...

... you were behind 7 proxies and a hushmail address when you posted that.

Otherwise, you do of course realise that, AC or not, El Reg has your IP and email addresses and a simple subpoena from the CPS could well tow you down the same path this guy has gone...?

As the great Z.B. once put it: OK, ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?

0 0

Rogue McAfee update strikes police, hospitals and Intel

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

And if everybody went to Linux

which is what you two are implying, the crooks would soon be working full-time on exploiting it just as they do now with Windows. Bearing in mind that these guys have billions of dollars to pour into circumventing OS security, I doubt it would be long before Linux would be just as aswarm with malware as Windows now is. Bear in mind that most malware gets installed by convincing an ignorant user to do something to install it; e.g. scanning for viruses, looking at a jpeg of some girl's tits, whatever. Right now, these problems don't exist on Linux because the vast majority of it's users are too tech-aware to be phished. But if Jane and Johnny Sixpack start using Linux, how long will it be before some malware site convinces them to sudo some rogue software into their system?

The issue is not Windows or Linux or MacOS, it's the popularity of the platform that determines malware-purveyors' targets.

1 2

Death row inmate claims allergy to lethal injection

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

re: wait

Yes, I live there.

But the way Australia was run as a convict colony wasn't quite what I had in mind in this case. The Australian penal colony was still run as a traditional prison, with guards, cells, and work routines.

What I'm talking about is a place where these murderers can live by their own rules. No guards, no walls, no regulations - just plant them all on an island somewhere and leave them alone to have at it. I wonder how long they'd survive.

0 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon

It's the topic more than the commentards

By her own admission Sarah lets through better than 90% of the comments she gets, rejecting only the most egregiously offensive and idiotic posts. I know I've posted my share of off-colour rants in my time here (I AM an El Reg commentard after all!) and Sarah has published nearly all of them even when she disagrees with them. So assuming she hasn't moderated *any * comments in this thread we're only seeing the extra 10% that would otherwise be rejected; the rest of it is the normal run-of-the-mill you'd see on El Reg any day.

Sarah knows full well that contentious topics like the death penalty will inevitably unleash a shitstorm of commentardery - hence her first post in this thread - and given that she has to moderate dozens of other threads as well, it makes sense that she shouldn't put too much needless effort into this one!

1 0
Steve Roper
Stop

Gulag

Is to my way of thinking the best way to deal with those who don't want to live by the principles of civilised society. Earmark an island in the middle of nowhere, and drop off all these rapists/murderers there to work out and live by their own rules. No guards, no walls, no rules, no free meals, just each other on an island with nowhere to go and nothing to do, Lord of the Flies style. If society's rules don't work for them then put them somewhere they can make up their own. Then we don't live with barbarity of executing people, and it costs us nothing beyond the fuel to drop them off there. I'm sure they'd make a right little paradise for themselves.

0 1

Police send Reg hack CRB check database

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Big Brother

Who upvoted this wanker?

Given that you can't upvote your own posts, it looks like there's at least two goodthinkers here who would manage to last quite a while in Orwell's world, considering most of us here would be in the basement of Miniluv within a week!

1 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Big Brother

The way I see it...

The mere fact the the police are willing to lie and push others to lie (by omission) to promote public confidence on false grounds is reason enough in and of itself not to have any confidence in them - data breaches and procedural fuck-ups notwithstanding.

1 0

Memristors can maybe learn like synapses

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Memories aren't limited to a group of neurons

The human brain (and presumably other animal's brains) stores information such that memories are linked to each other via the various synapse groups. This gives rise to memnonic association; for example, the smell of a particular type of coffee might trigger a memory of meeting your wife for the first time in a coffee shop years ago, the sound of a slamming flyscreen door might remind you of a hot summer's day 20 years ago, or the sight of a particular shade of yellow might remind you of colouring in a particular picture when you were a child. So memory is not in itself limited, but what defines our particular recall and behaviour patterns is the set of associative pathways by which our memories are linked.

0 0

Online retailers cannot deduct delivery fee when making refunds

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Joke

@frymaster

Er... how do you tell if a swimsuit has been tried on over clothes or not? Sniff the crotch?

0 0

French city in pedestrian-powered streetlight plan

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

There's a lot of these

solar-powered lamps here in Australia, where we get a lot of sunshine so the idea actually works quite well. Most of our city and suburban parks in Adelaide are now lit with solar lighting, and some SA country towns are using it on their streetlamps as well.

But it probably wouldn't work as well in places like France (except maybe the Mediterranean part) since it's a lot further from the equator and accordingly gets less sunlight - not to mention the often shitty weather in Europe.

0 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Thumb Up

Slow glass

Yes, that was indeed a classic story (for the uninitiated, the story is "Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw). It's one of my favourites. But when I read it, a few minor problems with slow glass occurred to me.

One is refractive index. Since RI of a substance is the ratio of the speed of light in a vacuum to the speed of light through the substance, the RI of a sheet of slow glass 10 years "thick" and say 1cm physical thickness, would have to be around the 9.47 billion billion mark, which would lead to some pretty way-out optical distortion if you looked at it from any angle other than head-on.... trippy!

Even assuming they got around the RI problem, there's the issue of privacy. See - you buy this stuff from a hillside in Scotland with a lovely view of the glens, and hang it up in your lounge. It lasts for 10 years, after which you are briefly treated to the visuals of the journey from Scotland to your place, and finally a lovely view of your lounge-room wall as it was a decade ago. So you take it back up to Scotland and swap it over for a new piece. Very good, no? Well, considering the sales guy was using it to watch the past of his dead wife and child, there's just one small problem; the OTHER side of the sheet of slow glass is now radiating out the last 10 years' worth of all the goings on in your lounge-room, dumped nicely out on a publicly-viewable hillside in Scotland for the next decade for all comers to see...

And they thought Google Street View was bad! ;)

1 0

Brit science vessel probes hot cleft for weird lifeforms

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Boffin

The problem with silicon-based life

is that it can't exist. Carbon is unique on the periodic table for its ability to form millions of stable compounds and highly complex molecules, such as carbohyrate and protein chains, a property essential for the formation of life. Silicon simply cannot form these complex molecules. Consider the alkane series: CH4 (methane), C2H6 (ethane), C3H8 (propane), C4H10 (butane) and so on. The silicon equivalents are SiH4 (silane) and Si2H6 (di-silane). There is no silicon equivalent of propane and butane because any chains more complex than di-silane immediately break down into silane and di-silane. If silicon can't even form stable molecules in the alkane series, how much less so can it form the equivalents of carbohydrate and protein chains? Therefore, because of this unique property of carbon, all life must by definition be carbon-based, since no other element can form molecule chains complex enough to support the process.

2 0

Google tweaks search results with mystery site speedometer

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Go

You can solve that one

by taking the site offline while backing up, replacing the index.php or whatever with a simple one-page HTML file containing a description of your products and services with all your keywords, along with a message that the site is down for maintenance, for your customers to see what's going on and for the Googlebot to spider, but with no links. Then switch it back once you're done backing up. The Googlebot revisits your site on a regular basis, and the odds of it turning up twice during backup are pretty low. (if your backup takes half an hour then that would be 1 in 48).

I do this with our sites anyway, because we don't want the odd night-owl customer roaming around putting things in their cart, buying things, and changing the databases while we're in the process of backing them up - or having the customer experience a slow and unreliable website while we're doing so!

0 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Thumb Up

Seconded

As a long-time web developer myself my primary emphasis has always been on speed. If a home page doesn't load in less than TEN SECONDS on an average connection it's too slow. So my policy is to avoid the use of Flash, animated GIFs or excessive graphics on the home page. Too many sites have pretty animated Flash header bars and inline objects that do nothing for functionality and just waste the user's time. And any web developer who knows anything about Nielsen stats and the Top Ten Elements of Bad Web Design would have known about the 10-second home page limit for years now.

I'm glad to see Google finally take this into account when rating websites. Speed IS important, and it's gratifying to finally see it'll be reflected in search results.

0 0

Freetard-targeting Trojan seeks to scam scaredycats

Steve Roper
Go

A new defence!

So now if I do get an infringement letter I can safely ignore it, and if questioned as to why I'll just say that as far as I was concerned it was just another scam email trying to extort money. For once there's a set of cybercrooks I DON'T want to hang!

7 0

Microsoft launches iPad-happy website for wimmin

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Thumb Up

Internet Suxplorer

is what we've been calling it around the office for the last six years, so while it may be ridiculous it certainly isn't new! ;)

0 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Gates Horns

143 errors and 48 warnings at W3C

That's because they designed it for Internet Suxplorer, which, as every web developer knows, is compliant with W3C standards to about the same extent that Al-Qaeda is compliant with the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

1 0

How Labour’s Web2.0rhea cockup helped the photographers

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Flame

Not stifling?

A few years ago, I wanted to make a 3-minute 3D animated video to put on YouTube. The video was originally intended to feature a soundtrack from Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene, published by Polydor Records. So I did the right thing and sent an email to Polydor asking for permission to use the track, stating that the video was purely a creative work and in no wise commercial or intended to make me any money.

No reply.

Three repeat emails later, I finally got a terse response stating that if I wished to open negotiations for use of one of their copyrighted tracks, I would need to front up $50,000 US dollars JUST TO OPEN NEGOTIATIONS, let alone what they might want to slug me for actually using the track. For a work I was doing for nothing, from which I intended to make nothing.

So I had to abandon the project.

Now when these big publishers make completely unreasonable demands like that it is VERY clear that the intent is to keep popular culture way out of reach of the casual creator and reserve it only for Big Business.

And you have the gumption to say that copyright being used to stifle creativity is bollocks? Get fucking real.

2 0

Murdoch tells old media to 'stand up' to Google, Bing

Steve Roper
Flame

Do you know what else the fucker said?

In dismissing concerns that readers would go to other news sites Murdoch said:

"I think when they've got nowhere else to go they'll start paying."

FUCK YOU MURDOCH you arrogant fucking pig. You know what? I'd rather get my news from bloggers and nowhere else if that's going to be your fucking attitude. Now I won't ever pay for your online propaganda bullshit on principle. Hopefully some crack will hack past his paywalls and plaster the news all over the torrent sites daily for no other reason than to spit in the pig's face.

And not only that, in discussing how Google and Bing should display his news in their search results he also said:

"We'll be very happy if they just publish our headline or a sentence or two and that's followed by a subscription form."

So basically if this greedy grubbing bastard gets his way, the first five pages of search results on any news issue will display a headline and leader but link only to a "join now" form, effectively making search engines useless.

Still - all the more incentive for me to complete my freesite-only search engine...

3 0

Discovery blasts off to ISS

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
FAIL

The purpose is...

... the advancement of science and our knowledge of the universe, curiosity about which is what makes us what we are. But neanderthals like yourself probably can't get your brain cell around such concepts. Just... go back to your cave and sharpen your spear or something, and leave us members of Homo sapiens to discuss our future.

2 1

UK competition authority probes Amazon

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Alert

Got it in one, mate.

My company DOES run a book sales portal for small publishers and self-published authors to distribute their books online, and this behaviour on Amazon's part could certainly damage our business as you describe.

We did actually look into selling our books on Amazon at one point but quickly abandoned the idea because (the author in the article is wrong about the percentage) Amazon don't charge 15% commission - they charge SIXTY percent commission on book sales. I know this for a fact because when I went to set up our online store with them that's the figure we were given. That's right, Amazon takes 60% of the sale price. My boss took one pop-eyed disbelieving look at that and said "No fucking way!"

There is a way around it, however. If any of our sellers contact us about this Amazon policy, we'll tell them to tell Amazon that they aren't selling the books on our site - we are buying them wholesale, we are selling them at retail and we are setting the price. Amazon cannot reasonably expect a seller to charge the same at wholesale as they do on retail - to force them to do so is to undermine the entire founding principles of commerce!

0 0

Microsoft clutches open source to its corporate heart

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Pint

Actually...

...a valid business case could be made for rape, it just depends on your business. If you think about it, abortion clinics, security and alarm companies, and gun, mace and Taser manufacturers are all examples of companies who would experience an increase of business from having more raped women and their putative criminal offspring!

As for murder, well, I suppose offing a competitor's board members would certainly go some way towards increasing your own market share, no? ;)

0 0
Steve Roper

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

We haven't forgotten this mantra. Microsoft have a LOT of work to do before they can hope to regain the OSS community's trust on this. Many people will simply see this as Microsoft Embracing open source prior to moving on to the Extend and Extinguish phases. It's all very well to toss around the "we've evolved" bonhomie but the OSS community is going to need to see these "actions and behaviours" that Utzschneider is talking about for quite some time before the hostilities of the past can start to be buried.

If he's genuine about this, then good luck to Microsoft. It would certainly be very useful and constructive to improve interoperability between Linux and Windows applications. Just don't expect it to happen overnight - they've got a lot of burned bridges to rebuild.

10 1

MS sees Windows 7 leap, but XP workhorse refuses to die

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Exactly

If, when TV was invented, people had to go out and buy a new TV every 3 years because the TV stations kept changing the PAL / NTSC format they were broadcasting in then there wouldn't be a TV in every home today, because people would have just given up on it after a while. Technology becomes established because a particular standard is set, so that once you've learned to use it you don't need to learn all over again. When a technology achieves its optimal form there's no further need to change it. Why else has (for example) the means of controlling a car always been a steering wheel and stop-go pedals? Because that's how everybody learns to drive.

My Windows XP desktop is set up in Classic configuration with exactly the same layout and colour scheme as I had in Windows 95 12 years ago. In fact it's not substantively different from the layout I was using on my Amiga 20 years ago. It works for me, it's what I'm used to; just a plain, simple, point-and-click GUI. Now by all accounts you don't get this option in Windows 7 - apparently you can't set it to plain classic look and layout. Which for me is reason enough not to upgrade. The desktop is a launch platform for applications - nothing more.

6 0

Weak passwords stored in browsers make hackers happy

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Exactly what I've done

Many of my passwords are place-names from my imaginary world. I have a large and highly detailed map with literally hundreds of places identified on it, along with a load of rendered scenes depicting that world. I then just associate a website in my mind with a place in that world, and bam - unique easily-remembered impossible-to-guess passwords!

0 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon

And also...

When you buy something online, we, er, sort of need to know where to send the goods you've ordered, and to be able to track your order if you contact us with questions. Since you have to enter your contact information *anyway* for us to send the goods to you, we kinda have to store that info in an account. How else exactly are we supposed to process your order?

Buying online isn't like walking into a shop and asking for 2 Mars bars and a litre of milk, that's six fifty thanks, see you later. Be good if you could teleport cash over the internet and we could teleport the goods to your location, but until that technology becomes available, we're stuck with doing it the clumsy old way of storing your order info on a computer so we can process and ship it.

Can't be arsed having yet another username and password to keep track of? Well - what would you prefer? That we just keep that information in the open where anybody can look at it? Or just lock it away so you can't?

0 0

Bank security guru: Sue your bank for refund

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

I don't understand

why companies feel the need to give bad service in the first place. Good customer service isn't rocket science.

Occasionally we might have a glitch on our site that causes a customer to get double-billed or incorrectly billed or something similar. The customer rings up, points out the error, and the staff member on the phone can bring up the suspect transaction on the system, see straight away that something's amiss, and refund the extra money with two mouse clicks while the customer is still on the phone. 5 more seconds to apologise for the problem, log it for recurrence-prevention, job done. If we spot the problem first, we fix it, then ring up the customer to explain what has happened and what they'll see on their bank statement as a result.

So we've had very few dissatisfied customers (admittedly there are some people you just can't please - I'm sure we all know about the customer from hell!) and quite a lot of referrals from existing customers who were impressed enough by our quality of service to put other people on to us. The little bit of extra effort pays for itself many times over. What is it about this simple principle that so many companies don't get?

2 0

British Gas signs Voda so meters can snitch direct

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Flame

Yep... and...

...if this thing turns off my fridge/freezer and ruins $150 worth of food I'm betting I won't have any recourse to sue the bastards for the loss - it'll just be too bad, go buy more food. And yes, they're looking at bringing these things in here in Australia too.

Fuck this shit. The day they put this shit on my house is the day I move into a tent and live in the bush on what I can grow, trap and fish. If I can no longer preserve food supplies what's the point of living in civilisation?

At least living in Australia I've got plenty of places to go where I won't be found...

0 0

Million pound Usenet indexer found guilty

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

Of course the MPA's not

going to go to war against Google, though they were happy to hit Newzbin. For much the same reason that a pack of hyenas might be willing to tackle a gazelle, but know they aren't going to get very far against an elephant...

0 0

Why the Google antitrust complaint is not about Microsoft

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

You'll probably find

That her name is spelt Siobhan on her birth certificate, but she spells it Shivaun these days because she's probably sick and tired of people calling her "See-ob-han"!

0 1

Times websites want £1 a day from June

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Stop

Search results will suffer actually.

As more and more sites disappear behind paywalls, you'll actually get increasingly "irrelevant" search results. You'll type something into Google, and every single result on the first five pages will appear to be relevant to what you typed - but clicking the link will give you yet another "to view this content, please provide your credit card details / join now" page. It's bad enough now as it is. When paywalls are everywhere, they will render the current search engines completely useless.

Because of this increasing and infuriating trend, I'm currently developing a search engine that automatically blacklists paysites and returns only results from free sites. What's more, it will do things like planting cookies, keeping your search history and profiling your search habits (to return more relevant results to you) ONLY if you explicitly tell it to (opt-in, not opt-out), otherwise it will keep no records relating to your searches. It'll take me a few more months to complete development, and a few more to spider up a decent result set, but when it's done I anticipate a lot of interest from people who, like myself, are thoroughly fed up with clicking on a promising search result only to be presented with another fucking paywall.

0 0

The Pirate Party is the shape of things to come

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Flame

OK, here's a comparison

I am a Web developer, which makes me a content creator - I create websites. Now, by the reasoning of the copyright pigs here: I create you a website. I expect you to pay me a royalty every time someone visits that website. For the rest of my life. If it's a big website and you get millions of visitors a day, I don't ever have to work again. Not only that, but you have to continue paying my nieces and nephew (since I have no children of my own they inherit my assets), their children, and THEIR children, for 70 years after I'm dead. So not only do I never have to work again, but my nieces/nephew and their children and grandchildren never need to do an honest day's work in their lives, because their uncle designed a website 100 years earlier.

Can you, honestly, not see the greed and parasitism inherent in this? Are you so blinded by your own gluttony that you actually consider it reasonable that your descendants for at least the next three generations don't need to work at all? Would you really be willing to pay the architect who designed your house every time you invited someone else inside? Or the engineer who designed your car every time you start it? No, I don't think so, and so by NOT lobbying for Web developers, architects and vehicle engineers to be paid over and over again for a century you show us your true hypocrisy.

2 0

MPs criticise government's climate of fear

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Big Brother

That happened in Australia in 1996

After the Port Arthur massacre, which left 35 people dead, our PM John Howard went on TV stating that the government would not indulge in reactionary, knee-jerk responses. A month after that a raft of anti-gun legislation spewed out of parliament, banning semi-automatic rifles, pump-action shotguns, handguns and pretty much anything more substantial than a pea-shooter. I had to give up my trusty Sportco .22 semi-auto which had slain many a bunny in its time.

From that time on, I've watched while our civil liberties have been systematically eroded away to a level that would have been unacceptable in the time of Napoleon Bonaparte. And I think this is just the start of what's coming. We will certainly see even worse police-state atrocities like inter-suburban checkpoints / permits, mandatory in-house surveillance and regulated sexual activity in private homes within the next 15 years.

2 0

Commodore 64 reincarnated as quad-core Ubuntu box

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Stop

Toy machines

Back in the day, I had an argument with my computing teacher in school regarding the merits of various machines. He argued that the school's BBC Micro B computers with 32KB of RAM, 2MHz 6502, 8 colours, no sprites and basic TI (3-channel + noise) sound was a REAL computer, and my Commodore 64, with 64 KB of RAM, 1 MHz 6510, 16 colours, 8 sprites and SID (3-channel + digi) sound was just a toy. I said that the specs of each system were comparable; where the BBC had the faster CPU the C64 had more RAM, and each was effectively capable of solving the same computational problems. Just because the C64 was a third the price of the BBC didn't make it any less powerful a machine.

In later years, the Amiga would suffer the same stigma of being called a "games machine" despite it's vastly superior graphics, sound and computing power compared to the IBM PCs of the time. So to me this business of calling cheap mass-produced computers "toys" simply because they didn't have a 4-digit price tag smacked of techno-snobbery, a problem which ultimately brought about the failure of the Amiga and left us stuck with the cludgy and inefficient Intel x86 architecture we have to endure today, instead of Motorola's beautiful and truly multi-tasking 680x0 and PowerPC processors as the norm. How powerful would these processors have become by now, if the techno-snobs had just gotten over their elitist attitude and gone with Amiga technology, instead of just dismissing it as a toy? 3.4 GHz TRUE 64-bit Quad-core RISC anyone?

4 0
Steve Roper
Go

I want one

Having the entire computer inside the keyboard was a brilliant design decision, and one that I've long lamented the demise of. In the old days I had my C64 on my desk with the 1541 disk drive underneath the monitor and it took up bugger-all space. The Amiga 500 / 1200 wss even better because it had the drive built-in, it was was just that, mouse, and monitor. Even the 90s desktop format PCs were good because you could put the monitor on top of them, too.

And then along came this "tower/upright" bullshit design, where desk space normally allocated to coffee cups, Coke cans, coding notes and magazines now had to be given up for a bloody great upright box you couldn't put anything on top of, and cables snaking from hell to breakfast all over the desk to the monitor, mouse and keyboard instead of decently running under the desktop case.

Would have been nice the see the chicken head keys back, not to mention the keyboard graphics, but I suppose we can't have everything. Definitely interested in this one!

0 0

Penalty for silent calling goes sky high

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
FAIL

Yeah, but...

...since they don't ship to countries outside the U.S., those of us living on that other planet known as Earth, which apparently is not part of the planet of North America, won't get to sample the joys of your little telemarketer zapping gadget.

0 0
Steve Roper
Go

My solution

to telemarketers lies in how I've set up my phone line. It goes into CallCorder on my computer so I can receive faxes or take calls through my computer using my desktop microphone.The auto-answer is set to wait for 4 rings, so I can check the number and if it's someone I know, I can answer. If not, the auto-answer checks to see if it is a fax, if not it responds with this little MP3:

"Hello...(3 sec pause)...Speaking...(5 sec)...Uh huh...(5 sec)...I see...(5 sec)...Uh huh...(7 sec)...Really?...(6 sec)...Sounds interesting...(5 sec)...Uh huh...." etc. It runs for around 15 minutes like this, then tells them (in a different voice) the call has been disconnected due to technical issues and beeps to leave a message.

A few of the smarter droids figure it out in less than a minute, but most take around 2-3 minutes before they get it, and I've had some of them gasbagging on the line for as long as 6-7 minutes before they realise they're talking to a machine. I've yet to nail one for the full 15 minutes, but I'm sure I'll eventually get one as I tweak the recorded message. Much better than just hanging up or even leaving them on the line while you "get the householder", since this method seriously wastes their time and costs their company money!

If you do try this at home, make sure your recorded response does not contain the word "yes" or its variations, or anything sounding like you might be agreeing to accept something. You don't want to be locked into a 3-year unwanted phone contract just because your recorded message said "yes" and signed you up after bad timing in the file. To create an effective recording, I suggest actually taking a few telemarketing calls and recording them so you can practice getting the pauses and responses right. Remember these guys are reading from a script, so if you get the delays and words right you can tail them along for several minutes, and you can have a lot of fun fine-tuning your recording to see how long you can keep them going!

And before you ask, yes, I got this idea from watching "The IT Crowd"!

1 0

Mozilla swats Firefox zero-day bug a week early

Steve Roper
Troll

To those who responded to the anti-FF trolltard AC

Come on guys. It's pretty obvious why he can't put his real name to his posts. After all, the words "Steve Ballmer" in the name column would be a bit of a giveaway, would it not?

3 0

Russia to crack down on abuse of .ru addresses

Steve Roper
Reply Icon

@Paul4: Fair enough

You're right - most of our business is in Australia, and we have dealings with the UK, USA, France, Italy, Spain, Canada and New Zealand. So blocking China and Russia is a non-issue for us. But for those like you who have to deal with them, given the enormous amounts of spam, malware, and hack attacks that pour out of those two countries - all I can say is, I feel your pain!

0 0

Pandora plus Endor: Multi hab-moon motherworld discovered

Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Coat

Your head must have zero mass then

Given that 565,718,840 Brontosauruses/sec is approximately 56.6 times the speed of sheep in a vacuum, the transit time would be closer to 0.0043 Mayan end-of-world cycles rather than the 0.00097 it took to reach Pandora - observer time. And you forgot to factor in relativity; since your ship would be travelling faster than the sheep, it would have infinite mass (unless it, like its pilot's head, had zero mass to begin with) and also be travelling back in time and get there before it left!

1 0
Steve Roper
Reply Icon
Thumb Up

Yeah, Pah!

Minutes? I'll set my hyperdrive to jump in multiples of 655.35 light years and I'll get from Lave to there in SECONDS...

0 0

Page: