Posts by Stevie

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"No, the Linux leap second bug WON'T crash the web"

So Gates and Jobs wasted all that money in their secret joint effort "Project Global Spin-Down?"

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I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find etc etc etc.

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I think the real issue here is whether or not the contingency experienced (undiscovered flaw in your software screws up economic foundation of game You sold to people) was planned for, because Gosh, it's not like this exact same issue hasn't happened to others before, is it?

As for the anger of Kickstarters, that is understandable and par for the course. Kickstarting product producers will always wildly overestimate their ability to handle some factor involved in bringing their product to the masses. People kicking in need to understand that there is always going to be some uckfup that throws the entire project off the rails for a bit. Every single kickstarted project I've been involved with or have been monitoring has suffered this. It is unrealistic for people to bleat about it when they suffer the fallout.

That said, asking for public funding for your great idea requires a level of diligence above and beyond whatever the standard you've been getting by on up until now. Failing to deliver the enticements you used to pull in punters because you don't have enough hands or eyes is completely unacceptable. Failing to deliver the basic features you said were going to be printed on the side of the box is unacceptable. If all your backers do is complain loudly in public at every opportunity, count yourself lucky and do better.

It is a modern truism that you make people happiest with your product when you make it a better option than anyone else's. If people think you're not doing it right, chances are you aren't, even if you have an excuse. The cure is not in having better excuses, or making people feel bad for complaining, it is in removing the cause for complaint as quickly as possible. These people gave you money up front. You are now obligated to honor the agreement by which you got them to do that.

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So, no increase in resolution then? Headline "joke" sort of falls flat in that event.

And, gosh, doesn't increasing the speed of a 3D printer typically result in *loss* of horizontal resolution when compared to its slower printing capabilities? Does this software upgrade somehow mitigate this in the general case, or are we looking at a printer that was under-performing out of the box finally being brought into spec?

Need an "I started out happy this morning but by the time I made five minutes in my day to read The Register I was so thoroughly Meldrewed by events and people eventing them that I'm in no mood for a shill piece masquerading as a new science one" icon.

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How is this news? There are accounts of how to forge fingerprints that go back to the time fingerprinting was still to be widely adopted as an identification technique by Scotland Yard.

Better yet, there's one account I've read from the dawn of the previous century of how to make a rubber stamp of someone's fingerprints using ... photography. Admittedly, it was wet chemical photography, which as any fule kno is a dead and forgotten art akin to Alchemy.

I remember back in the late seventies reading an account of a US sheriff having forged a fingerprint to get a conviction using Scotch tape to transfer a print from one place to another. another "well, duh!" moment for the press and criminal scientists. Any kid left alone with a reel of shiny-type Scotch tape will discover the print-lifting capabilities of the product in about a minute.

And I would have thought anyone who had used an old-style carbon fusion photocopier would have spent some time thinking about how it could be used to lift prints from the glass.

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Looked all over and found no definition of "efficient" in context of the subject of this document. Absent that, one must question every point raised as an example of lack of same.

Another worthless "study".

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Newfangled tat, the whole collection! Why, some of it is *digital* for Crom's sake!

The Mamod steam tractor is the new Nanny-State version with scald-proof whistle and a reversing lever. Oh the happy days spent getting steam up, setting the thing loose to tear around in ever-widening circles at a scale 300 mph until it crashed into your leg. Oh the happy nights spent in the burn unit of the Coventry and Warwick.

Fischer Teclknik? Damn you sir, I'm too busy with my Phillips Mechanical Engineering kit (the one in the wooden box) to play with such childish nonsense. Why does this clock count 40 seconds to the minute, dammit, and what the hell does "connect the motor bij means of green and grey glex" mean?

And when I get bored I switch to my Phillips EE 20 Electronic Engineer set, of which that Tandy thing is but a pale imitation. Oh the happy hours coaxed out of those AC126s and the stalwart AF118. Oh the happy hours spent hunting the missing connection. Or capacitor.

As for the "new" Meccano steam engine, a friend had one that dated to the early fifties.

But I do miss the old chemistry sets, long gone thanks to the howling masses who demand "safety" in place of knowledge, science and peeling bedroom wallpaper. You knew it was a decent set if it had Logwood Chips in it (used to make an acid/base indicator a caveman would turn his nose up at had he a spiffy book of Litmus Paper from the local toy shop). I have never been able to identify the tree from which Logwood is Chipped. Litmus paper came in three colors: Red, Blue and Mildew.

And wither the Tric-Trak? The Johnny Seven (which *isn't* a selection box of French Ticklers)? The Mighty Mousetrap Game? The Battlespace Turbo Car? Magic Robot? Or indeed any of the products from the factories of Waddingtons and Chad Valley?

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If you want my weird tales for your pages you'll have to give me a T-Shirt like wot The Sharktank does.

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At least, to judge by the picture on the headline, we lead the pesky Rooskies in drone miniaturization technology.

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The current crop of Republicans has bee rewarded for putting a supercharger on what politicians normally prefer to do: nothing until ALL the wheels fall off. They aren't about to stop working to the plan that won them Congress and the Senate.

And as for the President becoming a unilaterally-acting nightmare, well, that's what happens if you spend 6 years of an 8 year term "just saying no". Eventually the president has nothing to lose and starts behaving badly in his or her last two years out of sheer spite in payback mode.

Politicians are always venal, always up to their elbows in smelly brown stuff they hope no-one else will find out about, and are always unhelpful toward each other. But the current crop of Republicans are turning the art of obstreperous non-cooperation into a science.

As for the Tea Party and their "take back America" rhetoric: all they've achieved in their first six years is to drag down the value of the American dollar and with it the value of my pension fund (a mixture of financial assets, part employer funded, mostly funded by me) with their frightening lack of acumen and knowledge about how their own country's economy works.

And the Democrats never met a charismatic leader they wouldn't pull apart in order to claim "nothing to do with me" at the first excuse. Every battle they've lost since I made America my home is thanks to their "every man for himself" credo, and their "abandon ship!" tactic in the last two years of a president's term has reaped for some their just reward. Maybe they've learned to grow a backbone. I wouldn't bet on it.

If anyone can point to a more morally sickening sight to watch in "action" than the US Congress I'd like to know what it is, just so I could say "no matter how willfully stupid this lot are, there's always *that* lot over there to make them look good".

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Silly me. There was I thinking all this time that the reason we had the DOHS was to provide coordination between agencies and promote information exchange that would make this bid for FeeBee Global Autonomy unnecessary.

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I'm sure it sounded like a good idea at the time, and I know Young People like to have Chips With Everything, but could someone tell me why in Bessemer's name a blast furnace had to be connected to any network, let alone the inter network?

Even net-connected lightbulbs make more sense that this, and they make no sense whatsoever.

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Card games?

There is only one card game worth playing that can be absorbed by post-lunch Xmas revelers: Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mount Skullzfyre.

I miss Waddingtons, the Xmas board game Masters of the Universe.

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"I've never taken a sick day since I started here. Everyone around me goes off sick several times a year, but not me."

Delivered obliviously, in a nasal voice thick with phlegm.

And Typhoid Nigel he thinks he *saves* the place money with his "attend at all costs" policy.

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This article was hard to read the day after the office Xmas party for me, mainly because of two style points:

a) clever multi-word alliterative phrases in the body of the article instead of just in the headline where they belong. Those caused an annoying ringing in the brain.

2) When using multi-word phrases for a thing that will be mentioned every few lines, Mr Rapknuckle taught the students of St John Backsides Comprehensive that best practice was to use the phrase once, Show an acronym for it in parentheses right after the first use, then use the acronym thereafter. The repeated instances of Azure Blob storage Front-Ends made the ringing worse.

Well played, sir.

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Well there were still commercials running for it at 11pm EST on NY broadcast TV.

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Also are instilled fear of terrible grammar to be. Death to English!

Hmm, I wonder what social phenomena Seth Rogen will spear in his next movie ...

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So remind me, exactly what is the aim here? What do these self-styled "Guardians" wish to achieve?

And incoming clue missile GOOies: You don't speak for me or represent me in any way, shape or form. If you wish to continue breaking the law, go for it. I look forward to the welter of Asperger Defense Ploys to come. But don't pretend this is anything more than personal. I want nothing to do with your Worked Example In Irony.

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All zis striekink.

It makes you vonder how zey ever annexed ze Sudetenland.

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There was an interview on BBC World Service this morning (NY timezone) with an affected vendor and he was surprisingly upbeat. He explained that certain niche product manufacturers (specifically, video game factories) need to use a real-time repricing strategy in order to remain competitive (i.e. to undercut each other).

To me, the whole thing smacked of eBay and sniping software, with all the potential pitfalls of that approach.

I imagine the software vendors have the usual T&C in place in which they reserve the right to take money from you for a product that has no guarantee it'll do what it says on the box.

Which means we are firmly in the area of customer goodwill and understanding.

However, there's nobody on the planet more tenacious than an Englishman holding onto a piece of supercheap whatever so I wish these vendors good luck in surviving the tatstorm. If they don't go bankrupt now over stupidsilly pricing they will likely not survive the lousy press word-of-mouth will give them in the aftermath.

Gotta love Xmas.

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The fact is that the audience for the track-at-a-time model of iTunes is young and poor and increasingly on the push for something for nothing, whereas the old and too-thick-to-understand consume their music as albums and don't mind paying for them as long as prices don't soar to ridiculous levels.

While Apple were busy ignoring the Old School, Amazon snuck in and stole the market from them. Amazon will sell me the CDs I want and will provide an instant gratification downloadable version free of charge for some of them (my tastes are eclectic, sometimes wildly so).

iTunes/Gracenote can't even find the album art for much of my collection, even some stuff that's been in the wild forever (like Fairport Convention, Godley & Crème, Hot Chocolate, Ian Drury & The Blockheads, Jake Thackray, King Crimson, Madness, Manfred Mann, The Marshall Tucker Band, Mott the Hoople, Pentangle, Al Stewart, ABW&H, The Beatles, The Bonzo Dog Do-Dah Band, Bryan Ferry, Caravan, ELP and the list goes on). What chance seeing the liner notes or the lyric sheet if they can't even find the bloody album cover in the mighty database of "not on file"?

And what a horrible, horrible, unfit for purpose interface. Luckily they fuck with it every three updates or so, so there is little chance of ever mastering it unless screwing with your music player software is all you have on your calendar.

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Having forayed into flatscreen territory this Christmas I decided to tear out the old Panasonic DVD/Reciever/Dolby Pro Logic system and replace it with a soundbar. No the sound won't be as good but I live in a small house and the room I view in is tiny enough that I won't notice a big difference.

Besides, the DVD carousel had developed a "won't stay open" fault that the intarwebs think is impossible to fix in-house, and the sound connections would mean yet another remote control in play.

So I paired my Sony Bravia with a Vizio 48" 5.1 "wireless" soundbar and, once I had figured out how to dial down the factory preset "subwoofer awesome" it actually sounded very nice indeed. Good surround sound panorama and all that.

And I managed to keep the costs to under a thousand dollars American. Not bad for a platform ents tech upgrade.

I *did* have to upgrade some crappy 1950s just-so-good-and-no-further no earth wiring, but that's an ongoing project from hell.

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""It is always a thrill when you are closing in on a large sonar target with the Pisces submersible and you don't know what big piece of history is going to come looming out of the dark" "

Or what non-Euclidean piece of pre-history will loom out of the eternal darkness to drive the RoV operator mad with what he sees when he turns on the floodlights.

Have these fools never read any Lovecraft? I'd have thought it essential reading for anyone contemplating a jaunt over the festering sludge of the abyssal plain of the Pacific Ocean.

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Each serving of this Chocolate Bar contains 3 grams of saturated fat and 20 grams of sugar.

...

etc

...

etc

...

Serving Size: 1/37th of a bar.

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"the only organisation which could have prevented the attack was one such internet-media giant"

When an intelligence organization makes this sort of astounding claim, one must worry on a number of levels, not the least of them being the concern over the culture of sanctioned electronic knicker-sniffing that seems to have replaced that of actual intelligence work in the post wuhwuhwuh world.

You want to spy on Facebook, that's fine by me, but you should do it the traditional way - illegally and shamefacedly.

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"Legal documents".

Would those be ancient Law Degree Certificates?

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Very good.

Now explain why in Goddard's name a rocket* needs to be connected to the internet in the first place and we are good to go.

* aka Intercontinental Ballistic Can Of Very Explosive Chemicals We Just Set Fire To.

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It gets better. This morning on the BBC World Service there was a segment on this in which a nice spokeslady said it wasn't as bad as it sounds because people do e-mail in meetings all the time on their phones and studies show that the *way* we do e-mail on our phones during meetings is in a "game-like" manner which doesn't mean we are not paying attention and like that.

If it had been in real time (New York, me) I'd have missed my train to call in and point out that having people do e-mail on a phone during a meeting is a) fucking annoying to everyone else and 2) a sure sign that the mail-fiddler is NOT paying attention.

My boss calls meetings in which all he does is fiddle with his blackberry while people try for the umptytumpth time to explain whatever it is he needed a meeting to understand in the first place. These meetings are notable for taking three times as long as necessary* and ending with the meeting convener no wiser on account of him not actually being at the meeting he called most of the time it was happening.

* given that the necessity of having this meeting in the first place is something that would go away if the boss did.

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Well the NSA wouldn't have to sneak about spying on phone company people and tricking them and carrying on like common ID thieves if people would just hand over the encryption keys when asked.

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Putting aside the issue of the need for autonomous, mobile manipulators before any AI can do anything but rant from a box, it occurs to me that this prediction of doom, or more properly the assumptions of the abilities that will be at the disposal of the machines that bring it about, are a golden opportunity to get summat for nowt.

All we need do is point out the limited energy sources on the Earth and the wisdom of capturing solar energy in space using satellites in solar orbit and a microwave transmission infrastructure to get the said power back down here where it's needed and the crafty AIs will have a viable space program in place lickety-spit.

Then we just bide our time and take it from them by human trickery. We need only look to Captain Kirk or Mr Spock to show us how. Easy-peasy q-bit squeezy.