Posts by Michael Wojcik

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

Re: Sometimes fonts and layout DO matter

Obviously formatting and other aspects of visual presentation can convey information and have rhetorical force.¹ Anyone with a passing understanding of written language acknowledges that.

But that does not mean that conflating content and presentation is a good idea. Cognitive studies have demonstrated the drawbacks of switching between tasks, and composition studies confirm that jumping between content creation and formatting impedes the writing process. For the majority of writers there are very few cases where attempting to deal with both verbal content and visual presentation simultaneously is an effective way to work.

And, of course, The Demolished Man is a relatively late entrant into the field of literature that uses formatting this way, coming as it does at the end of High Modernism. Props to Bester for doing it (ironically, SF as a genre tended to lag in literary innovation, at least until the "New Wave" was firmly established), but the fact that it was published in '53 isn't especially noteworthy.

¹For audiences that can perceive them. Some visual formatting can be transposed, in fairly obvious ways, to other registers for visually-impaired users; with other types it's more difficult. There's scads of research on the topic, of course.

Re: Quiet news day?

Clearly no one found the topic interesting, which is why there are no reader comments.

Really, Reg - can't you find something controversial to publish?

Re: vi + ms + troff (+ tbl + eqn + pic + scripts + sccs + etc. as required)

WYSIWYG was just something a disaster that happened to other people, wasn't it?

FTFY.

WYSIWYG, by yoking content and formatting, did more to harm the composition process than probably any other technical innovation in the history of writing (which is, of course, all of history).

Re: Yes but....,

Passive Voice (consider revising)

Does Word's Style Advice for Idiots feature ever say "Active Voice (do not revise under any circumstances!)"?

Really, "consider revising" is either the most useful or most pointless piece of composition advice possible. For a competent writer, "consider revising" probably constitutes at least nine tenths of the labor of writing.

Kazuo Ishiguro, discussing his writing process in an interview, once mentioned that on one recent day he'd spent the entire morning looking at one passage and eventually adding a comma. Then that afternoon he took the comma back out. Obviously most authors aren't so particular (consider someone like Anthony Trollope, who wrote all his novels to a strict schedule created around his census-taking duties - no days of zero-sum punctuating for him!), but many a composition study has shown that decent writing is mostly revision.

Coincidentally, the same is true of decent programming.

Re: Doubly unusable if he moved the document

I chose to use LaTeX, the first one written straight in LaTeX, and the second one via Emacs in org-mode. And yes, the correction/edition process was painful. They want to use Word, I certainly don't.

Oh yeah. I've been there (except I use LyX as my main LaTeX editor, with some editing in vim) too.

Fortunately my MA thesis - the longest thing I've yet written in LaTeX - was deposited as PDF so there wasn't any back-and-forth with Word. The Graduate School would just send me a list of formatting changes that needed to be made,¹ and let me worry about adjusting the LaTeX.

One of the nice things about submitting to e.g. ACM journals is that they all use LaTeX as their submission format. That seems to be pretty widely true in the sciences. The humanities are mostly stuck on Word.

¹In time-honored tradition, these would be things like "bottom margin on title page is 1.1 inches, must be exactly 1 inch".

Google opens 'Inbox' heir-to-email trial to biz users

Agreed. Automatic PEM, S/MIME, and PGP/GPG support would be about a million times more useful to me than some machine-learning sauce (which I don't want anyway, as I am actually capable of deciding for myself what to do with my email). And they'd be even more useful for users who don't understand them and have better things to do than learn about them. Wide deployment would put a huge dent in phishing, for example.

Linux chaps want to recycle your mobe as a supercomputer

Re: What an amazing idea...

Was it a system with [blah blah blah rubbish]?

It's a system that was purchased by my employer; I didn't choose the specs. I still have computers in use with single-core CPUs and less than 1GB RAM. I don't think I have any with drives smaller than 1GB, simply because such drives typically died a while back and replacements are all larger.

And no, no multiple monitors. As I've noted in other posts, I had a multiheaded system back around 1990. I've not seen any need to return to that configuration.

If you dont believe that more of something is automatically better...

Then you're probably capable of critical thought. And indeed I am. You should try it sometime. (Also, may I suggest learning how to use the apostrophe?)

Vint Cerf: Everything we do will be ERASED! You can't even find last 2 times I said this

Re: Not really much of a problem

You can't quote fairy Tales as a basis for truth....

And no one in this thread has done so.

If you have some free time, could I suggest you learn to read? And then maybe you'd like to study how to write.

Re: The technology exists

Sometimes the problem is physical media. Sometimes its that the data is in a format that no one recognizes, or that was implemented by some obscure software that's nowhere to be found.

Emulators solve some problems, but by no means all of them.

Re: data vs information vs meaning

"view all the web pages, look at all the pictures, read all the documents and emails, and categorize them in a useful manner."

Surely that's what Autonomy was sold for?

There are quite a few companies operating in this area, many of them for specific markets or industries (legal and medical are the big ones). And there's free software you can use to build your own system, from simple stem-and-index systems like the old MIT Savant software to general frameworks for processing unstructured data like UIMA.

Even Windows, in its default configuration, will scan and index all the file formats it recognizes. Similar systems exist for Linux and UNIX.

Re: Not such a new concept

Yeah, Cerf's way behind on this one. The ELO's Acid-Free Bits recommendations predate his "vellum" proposals by ten years, and as you note people have been complaining about losing data due to format and encoding obsolescence since at least the 1980s, and probably before. And as other posters have noted, there's an entire industry around recovering this stuff.

Doesn't make his point less important, of course, but it's certainly not novel.

Re: Not really much of a problem

How many life stories do you have to reconstruct to realize that people then are pretty much people now.

Ah. This sort of story never fails to bring out the sophomores in droves.

"Digital Humanities" research is already turning up all sorts of important historical information using corpora of documents from the past couple millennia, which have been scanned, OCR'd, and corrected.

An example I may have mentioned here before: I saw a presentation some years ago at MLA on identifying the time period of the modal shift in imitatio christi - when people went from saying "what did Jesus do?" as a moral touchstone to "what would Jesus do?". The presenter had done searches through a number of massive corpora of late-medieval and early-modern documents for variations of those phrases in Latin and vernaculars, and found good evidence that the shift occurred relatively rapidly in, if memory serves, the late sixteenth century.

So what? Well, in the Christian-dominated European cultures of the era, the imitatio christi modal shift - which happened among the "organic intellectual" members of the working class, so yes, very much the plebs - is a hallmark of modernity. It happens when Christians no longer see the present day as equivalent to the historical moment of Jesus' life, but instead a new and different milieu. And that's just what "modern" means.

That's a change in the historical episteme that we couldn't track without computer analysis of huge text corpora. The vast majority of content produced online every day may be dross as individual pieces, but in aggregate it can tell us a lot about ourselves.

And anyone who looks at the actual research people are conducting with it now, instead of indulging in idle armchair speculation, would know that.

Superfish: Lenovo? More like Lolnono – until they get real on privacy

Re: It's a chap called Joel Birch I feel sorry for

"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things." (Phil Karlton)

'NSA, GCHQ-ransacked' SIM maker Gemalto takes a $500m stock hit

Re: @Mark 85 - Works For Me

It's simple, Mark, most Americans are voting the same people so they must be OK with whatever they do.

Sure. The lack of alternative viable candidates with different policies has nothing to do with it.

But, hey, simple people will continue to recommend simple solutions.

Horrors of murky TrueCrypt to be probed once more

Re: A social medium solution

Anyone who has any sense and wants to send terrorist information

History suggests this is very nearly the empty set.

Terrorists succeed by dint of brute force (in particular, by recruiting heavily and then making extraordinarily inefficient use of resources), playing the long game, and relying on their opponents to do much of the actual work (viz the "democracies" eagerly ramping up their police states to profit the rich and powerful, and encouraging fear among the populace in the process). They rarely display anything more than a bit of cunning. Research, planning, careful thought - those are not prized in the terrorist communities.

Linux clockpocalypse in 2038 is looming and there's no 'serious plan'

Re: Too late!

> Your bank's central IT system?

Which part exactly?

Please be precise.

Also please keep in mind that some of us have actually worked in banks.

Oh, please. We do bank migrations all the time with source code that's more than ten years old. Twenty isn't particularly unusual. Generally no one knows what half that source code is for, or how much of it represents programs actually in use. And that's when they have source code; at least a couple times a year I see queries about decompiling binaries that no one can find the sources for.

I've seen customers running OS releases that are more than ten years old.

Re: Too late!

"Anything else can be patched by changing time_t to unsigned."

Tried, tested, and proven.

For some applications. Not all. Go read the archives of comp.lang.c from 1999 - people identified many codebases that relied on treating a time_t as a signed int and getting a positive value. Typically that had to do with comparing for <0 rather than (time_t)-1 to check for errors.

But who am I to disagree with the Reg readership hivemind? As usual, it knows all.

Re: Too late!

I cannot think of a single thing I have which relies on time values and is over ten years old, let alone twenty, but that's just me.

Right. It's just you.

I have a 23-year-old HP Laserjet 4m here which I just used today. I have a 22-year-old Panasonic VCR which, alas, is not Y2K-compliant, but fortunately I no longer need it to know the correct date (as I no longer use it to record). I did, though, do some programmed recording with it as recently as 2003; that required a little fudging of the date but fortunately nothing worse.

We did this for Y2K issues with a sliding window

Many applications were adapted for Y2K with a sliding window. Many others could not be.

All you need to do is read RISKS regularly to understand that complex systems fail in complex ways, problems are worse than you think, and there are no silver bullets. But apparently (and unsurprisingly) IT is still full of people who don't get that.

Royal Mail's Colossus move gets ex-WREN's stamp of approval

Re: B-Dienst

Well, you know what they say about people who expect technical accuracy in a Gavin Clarke story: they'll be disappointed 1,600,000,000,000,000 times out of 1,600,000,000,000,001.

Re: Hollywood Angle

don't you notice they always win in Vietnam war films?

Are you sure about that? All of these films depict the US winning the Vietnam War, do they? Or is it perhaps that you are just an idiot?

I suppose if you're going to post something patently stupid, you might as well do it anonymously.

Re: encrypting a message 1,600,000,000,000,000 times

I figured Gavin just meant Lorenz had a great MTBF.

Want a MEEELLION-year data storage? Use DNA of course

Re: You could duplicate it ...

But how do you (or even can you) embed some kind of Rosetta Stone that bridges the gap between this material and the advanced content?

That's not what the Rosetta Stone provides - the analogy isn't apt. The Rosetta Stone is useful because it presented the same message in multiple encodings (languages), some of which were known to the readers. Obviously it's possible to do that with DNA storage.

The larger problem - making the message recognizable to readers who aren't familiar with the encoding - is underspecified. More-complete versions are unsolvable, moderately difficult, or relatively easy, depending on the constraints.

The unsolvable version: Make a message such that arbitrary readers, with just the assumption that they possess technology sufficient to sequence DNA, can with high probability recover a large portion of the message, and interpret it to a meaning that's close (within some epsilon) to the meaning intended by the author. That's simply not achievable. There's no guarantee that such a reader will recognize the DNA structure; that it will have an understanding of communication such that it perceives a message; that it will be capable of comprehending human psychology; etc. It's even conceivable that such a reader wouldn't recognize Reed-Soloman. Any sufficently alien intelligence is ineffable.

The simple version: Make a message that can be decoded by a reader with a good understanding of human communication and the culture of the present moment, and access to a broad corpus of cultural products from the present. Reduce the interpretation requirement to recovering at least a substantial portion of the message with high probability and good accuracy. This is simple: write a message using a straightforward encoding such as ASCII,¹ using one of the dominant natural languages (eg English). Write it using straightforward prose with a lot of redundancy. You can also employ a Rosetta-Stone mechanism by translating it into other natural languages. Here we can safely assume Reed-Soloman² will be recognized. Even if your language(s) of choice is no longer in general use, the corpus of cultural materials should suffice to make the message intelligible.

Between those two you have the moderately difficult versions. You can assume an alien intelligence with relatively little access to human cultural materials, etc. So add information and redundancy to the message, by including more data and by making better use of the channel. For example, if we assume the reader has, or can recognize, some form of visual two-dimensional communication, we can DNA-encode monochrome line drawings with a procedure like this:

- Pick two "flag" sequences for delimiting drawings and rows. Make them clearly artificial and low-information-entropy, such as a thousand adenines (let's call this "AK") and a thousand cytosines ("CK"). Those should attract the attention of anyone sequencing the string.

- Within a picture, use the other two bases (T and G) for your two "colors". (We can assume this is prior to ECC without loss of generality, since we've already assumed the reader recognized and decoded the ECC layer.)

- Start and end the image with AK.

- Sequence a row of (one-bit) "pixels" at a time, delimited by CK. All rows are the same length, so that the reader can recognize the rectangular shape.

Now, this image may be interpreted under various affine transformations. The reader won't know which base is "black" and which is "white" (which is irrelevant), or what the orientation of the "rows" are. So the picture may be reflected in either or both dimension, and so on.³

There are all sorts of ways of increasing the total information entropy and decreasing the entropy density in the message, both of which make it easier to derive an interpretation. Some encodings (pure-binary numbering systems, for example) are more "natural" than others because they don't depend on arbitrary language or cultural features and can be derived from basic mathematical forms, so you use those where feasible. And so on.

¹Even if the requirements for this scenario didn't more or less ensure that ASCII is recognizable, it's easy for a reader with access to print text to decode ASCII by symbol frequency.

²Or any other purely mathematical ECC, such as group codes. We wouldn't want to use an ECC mechanism that depends on features of the input, such as a predictive matcher primed for the language in question (which is how humans correct for typographical errors and the like).

³A perverse reader might start with the assumption that it's written bostrophedon. But I think such a reader would also try a consistent row ordering, and pick the correct one based on preferential edge appearance.

So long, Lenovo, and no thanks for all the super-creepy Superfish

My work laptop is a Dell, and while I could name a few brain-dead design failures it suffers from,¹ it's serviceable.

And Dell's the only manufacturer I know of besides Lenovo that still sells machines with isometric "pointing stick" mice. I hate touchpads, so that's a must-have for me. (If anyone knows offhand of other brands that have 'em I wouldn't mind hearing about it.)

So yes, I expect that when my current Lenovo personal laptop needs replacement, I too will be going with Dell. It's sad; I've had a range of Thinkpads dating from the first year IBM came out with them. And I had some of IBM's earlier laptops and luggables - like the PS/Note - before that.

¹As has every single Dell machine I've ever seen - is there something in the water there? Bizarre case-opening mechanisms. Reset buttons without mollyguards positioned right next to drive-eject buttons. Lousy power connectors. The latest laptop has a blue LED on the power cord that shines with the glare of 1000 suns and isn't affected by the (otherwise very nice) turn-off-every-single-goddamned-light hotkey. Soon I will simply give up and wrap the fucker with electrical tape.

Big Brother in SPAACE: Mars One picks first 100 morons to suffocate, er, settle on Red Planet

Re: DREAMING IN TECHNICOLOR

There isn't a single problem facing the Earth as a whole for which the answer isn't "We need to get out into space as soon as possible".

What utter fucking nonsense.

First, there are very few problems "facing the Earth as a whole", and for most of them "getting into space" doesn't help at all. A supernova in our neighborhood or false vacuum collapse are two obvious examples.

A big chunk of space rock is not a problem for "the Earth as a whole". It could be a problem for a big segment of the biosphere, including us, but the Earth as a whole won't care at all.

And the biggest problem facing humanity as a whole is our general tendency to be lousy to each other. Getting into space isn't going to help that; however much room we have, the alternatives are to be alone or be in groups, and history is pretty conclusive that neither option works very well.

The usual arguments for "getting into space" are access to more resources and resistance to extinction. We have plenty of margin for doing a better job with the resources we have right here, and personally I could not care less if the species disappeared tomorrow. And the only manner in which anyone can is purely imaginary, since - by definition - they wouldn't be around to experience it. It's a philosophical aspiration.

Apple LIGHTSABERS to feature in The Force Awakens

Re: Retrogression of the "Force".

Igniting your lightsaber by pulling a cord could be the first thing a padewan learns in the the temple

Man, I wish lightsabers were pull-start. One of the best things about the rather haphazard¹ Pioneer anime El-Hazard: The Mysterious World (the original series; everything went down from there) was that one of the characters had a pull-start magic weapon.

This might have been an homage to Army of Darkness, which was released a few years earlier, and also features a pull-start hand-heldreplacement weapon. And in the same year we had Dead Alive, with an improvised pull-start weapon - the best thing Peter Jackson ever directed.

¹Wait for it...

Mozilla's Flash-killer 'Shumway' appears in Firefox nightlies

Re: I thought that HTML5

Why do we need summat that plays SWF files now…?

As I've pointed out in the last N stories about Flash, it's hugely important for the existing corpus of electronic literature. No doubt it's still being used by some authors for new work, though even five years ago there was widespread acknowledgement that it was a dangerous medium.

Take Homestuck, for example; while Andrew's transitioned to HTML 5 for later chapters, significant portions of the earlier material are still SWF and likely to be unless and until some enterprising team decides to recreate them in another format. And Homestuck is widely considered the most important hypertext novel yet written, as well as being the longest web comic, and an important cultural phenomenon in its own right. It might not be your cup of tea, but it's quite important to many people, whether fans or scholars (or both).

So who just bought the rights to .blog for $20m? A chap living in Panama

Oooh, I know this one!

Very little is known about Primer Nivel's plans for dot-blog

Sell it at a substantial loss in four years? That's it, right?

Re: re:e-mail validation

any competent web designer must be able to see things from the customer's point of view

Yes, "myhandler" should buy a copy of Dave Platt's Why Software Sucks and learn something about what web application development actually requires.

But based on the tone of his post, I suspect the material would be lost on him anyway.

Re: Is the TLD important?

There is a new blog created every second - or 175.000 per day. Surely .blog will be top of mind, when deciding on a domain name.

Surely? My guess is that most people buying a new domain name will take the first choice, which will likely be .com. Those who decide to buy a .blog will probably do so because the name they want is already registered in .com, and consequently their new blog will see very little traffic.

I'm thinking most of those 175K daily creators won't even know blog is an available gTLD.

WP has a 25% market share of all websites.

Yeah, and there's no way that will ever change. Or will it?

I won't be at all surprised if personal blogs turn out to be a passing fad and the creation rate drops off drastically over the next few years. Already we're seeing a backlash against the "my students made blogs!" crap that infested college-comp classes for a few years.

Ex-NASA boffin dreams of PREDATOR-ish tech in humble microwaves

Re: @Kunari 60% Power

I want a microwave that allows me to vary the power output of the magnetron. Does such a thing exist?

Panasonic sells, or used to sell, an "Inverter" line of microwave ovens that actually reduce the magnetron power. I have one that I've owned since 1999. Still works well, though steam has rusted parts of the inside of the cabinet.

Traditional enterprise workloads on an all-flash array? WHY WOULD I BOTHER?

Re: What's a snowflake application?

One that's fragile and delicate, and melts down at the slightest provocation.

So... a better question would be, what isn't a snowflake application?

On a more serious note, my assumption was the writer meant applications with unique designs and thus unusual requirements, in the sense of "no two snowflakes" and all that. Not that it matters, though, since the overall sense seems to be clear: most applications don't need extremely fast storage access.

Or, more generally, most applications don't need extremely X Y, for any noun Y and adjective X.

Even more generally, most W don't need X Y Z, for nouns W and Z, adjective Y, and adverb X that indicates rarity or exception. That's true by the definition of X. It indicates the case is rare, and so doesn't apply in most instances. So formally the whole claim is a tautology.

Informally, of course, the argument is that AFA is the solution to an extraordinary requirement. Everything else is implied by that. And that seems like a plausible claim to me, based on my experience.

BLAME ENGINEERS: Workstation sales soar by 8.9 per cent a year

That's where unixoid systems shine, they have powerful command processors which enable you to express your intention in very little code.

What, you mean like bash? And the array of SUS text-processing utilities? And scripting languages like Awk, Perl, and Ruby? And fast character-mode editors like vim?

I run all of that on Windows. It's my standard Windows development environment.¹ A little Cygwin installation and presto.

So I guess that means any Windows system can be quickly transformed into a "workstation".

¹When Visual Studio or Eclipse offers significantly more productivity than the entire shell and command set, I'll consider using an IDE. And, of course, using the same tools on Windows, Linux, and UNIX makes cross-platform development simpler; my user experience doesn't differ much these days among those platforms.

Net neutrality: Growing flames of criticism lick FCC chief's secret plans

Re: Net neutrality

Please try to remember that there are TWO kinds of Net Neutrality.

There are far more than that, and most of them are uninformed rubbish. Anyone who thinks "net neutrality" does much of anything to help speaker and audience converge on similar concepts is deluded.

For most people, it seems to mean "I want more / cheaper X online without interference from Y", where X and Y are selected at random from large and growing sets.

Uber: Sorry we're really awesome and all that (oh yeah, and for leaking your personal info)

Re: False Pride

The real issue, I feel these days is, all the innovative start-ups based on IT infra think they are 'IT start-ups' and feel obliged to keep all their internal infrastructure on the edge (connected to the web).

And think that because they have some programmers who know a bit about one area of IT ("I can make an iOS app!"), they don't need actual system administrators, a CIO, data-handling policies, etc.

Skin colour's irrelevant. Just hire competent folk on their merits, FFS

Walter Benn Michaels

While I'll refrain from engaging in the larger debate,¹ I was pleased to see Tim's citation of Michaels' The Trouble with Diversity. I haven't read that one yet myself, and I certainly don't always agree with Michaels². But I've been reading him since the days of "Against Theory" and "The Contracted Heart", I've seen him present a few times, and I had the opportunity to chat with him in person once.³

He's a very smart guy and very rigorous thinker whose career has mostly consisted of making very careful, well-developed arguments against commonplace notions in literary studies. He's always been controversial and certainly is not well-liked by many, but even most of his opponents seem to admit (however grudgingly) that he's a worthy adversary. He's one of my favorite people to disagree with.

¹Because I've heard everything y'all have to say before from my college-composition students, ad nauseum. I'll tune in again when I see some evidence of a discussion informed by the past couple centuries of identity theory.

²Indeed I had a lengthy section arguing against one of his more famous theses in my dissertation.

³At Miami University in the mid-1990s, when Barry Chabot invited him to give a talk, not long after the publication of Our America.

'Worse than I imagined': FCC commish slams chief's net neutrality bid

Sure. Unlikability is not a finite resource.

Personally, I don't expect much good or bad to come out of this whole dust-up, regardless of what happens with Wheeler's proposal. Not saying that it won't, just that I think it's improbable that any great change will be achieved one way or the other. Hegemonic capitalism is pretty robust, and slapping a few more regulations on a large and amorphous sector of it, or failing to do so, generally doesn't seem to make much difference in the medium term.

There are exceptions, but they're just that - exceptions.

ANOTHER US court smacks down EFF's NSA wiretap sueball – but won't say why

Re: Question

What's the point in it if a bunch of judges, who are appointed by politicians, get to overrule it?

There's nothing like a story about US court cases to bring out the naiveté.

The US Constitution does not possess the power to make and enforce decisions itself. Someone has to interpret it. Various gangs claim they have the One True Interpretation, but all such claims are patently spurious, founded on sophomoric intentionalism and a touchingly simplistic understanding of human language.

Tom, upthread, is waving the flag of Strict Construction or Original Intent or one of the other chest-beating schools of narrow constitutional interpretation. Those aren't majority opinions even among the educated US populace, much less constitutional scholars or legal experts. They're not quite fringe beliefs but they certainly don't represent the shared dream of a downtrodden people under the thumb of a tyrannical SCOTUS.

More importantly, no nation-state government actually functions in accord with the theoretical ideal on which it is based. The world is complicated, and complicated problems do not tend to have simple solutions.

IBM drops patent bomb on Priceline.com

Re: Depends on the date

Two of them were filed in 1993, including US5961601, which specifically mentions the web and HTTP. That's pretty early.

US5961601 looks like the really troublesome one, in my quick & dirty analysis. It would appear to cover the REST HATEOAS architectural element in a broad and direct fashion, and it was filed and granted before Fielding's dissertation. That could potentially be very difficult to challenge in court. (Purely in my opinion, and IANAL. And I'm making no claims about its validity or goodness.)

Russian revolution: YotaPhone 2 double-screen JANUS MOBE

Re: English, as taught by a Scot

Grammar; it's really confusing because it's got lots of strange rules hidden up its sleeve.

Usage: It's really confusing, and it's often mistaken for grammar.

Re: Wht's the point really ?

Who in their right mind will be willfully using e-ink screen if you can flip it over and use normal one ?

I was going to ask the same question about the color screen.

I need a color display on my phone just as much as I need color cover illustrations on paperback books: everyone provides one, but I'll be damned if I see any benefit to me.

Re: "nor is it particularly compact..."

With those dimensions, I'd expect a display on all 6 sides!

You can have your phone cube.¹. My Tetrahedron Phone uses 2/3 of the battery power and provides more screens than I can view at once, and it's the envy of Dungeons & Dragons fans the world over.

I admit it's not the most comfortable thing to have in my pocket, but on the plus side everyone I meet thinks I'm happy to see them.

¹OK, fine, "rectangular prism".

Re: It is a pity I recently updated the "fleet"

Well, as soon as I buy a phone, I smash it with a hammer and bury it in the backyard. No battery life problems yet!

Personally, I'd like a phone with just an e-Ink screen, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and removable battery. Must have SD slot. I haven't needed dual-SIM yet, but you never know, so include that too. Give it a full set of Bluetooth capabilities, not this half-assed collection that my current phone has. No crap add-on software from the manufacturer. Might as well make it rugged and waterproof, too.

What, no manufacturer wants to make a phone just for me? Bastards.

Amazing, cool, wow: Humans naturally use POSITIVE words, and that is GOOD

Re: poking holes

Your comment has a small, but fatal, flaw: It has nothing to do with the goal or primary conclusions of the study in question.

Even from the abstract, it's clear they're talking about the unigram model. They identify a positivity bias in the use of individual words. They're not making claims about statements. Everyone doing linguistics research is aware that grammatical structure affects meaning.

Or in other words, from the actual paper, which is freely available from the PNAS site:

our major scientific finding is that when experienced in isolation and weighted properly according to use, words, which are the atoms of human language, present an emotional spectrum with a universal, self-similar positive bias

Now, it is certainly possible to raise issues with their methodology and conclusions. Unfortunately "duh, they don't know that words go together" is not a valid one.

But please feel free to repeat the misinterpretations already proudly displayed by your fellows. Better to be popular than right, eh?

Re: Hmmm.

I can't say I've even heard of any modern stories that can compare to the classic tragedies like Hamlet

What a bizarre thing to say. Not terribly familiar with contemporary literature, then, are you?

but then I suppose it does limit the ability to do sequels with the same cast.

Yes, because there are no TV or film dramas which end with the deaths of major characters.

as they would seem to be neutral on their own but in different contexts could provoke a different response

Shockingly, people who do computational linguistics are already aware of the limitations of unigram models. In a dim sense, I mean - not with the piercing clarity available only to those who post in Reg forums.

Re: Hmmm.

What a pity the Reg commentator horde do not edit PNAS. so they could share their trenchant critiques with researchers.

Re: Note to the first three commentards

Displaying a unique handle means that someone might be biassed to pre-judge your post before they've actually read or digested it.

And in breaking news, AC rediscovers ethos 2400 years after Aristotle. Good job!

(Eternal September is eternal. And we'll never run out of sophomores, clearly.)

Boy, 16, cuffed after posting selfie with body of kid he allegedly killed

Re: under 18 years of age was cruel and unusual punishment

Happy 18th birthday son!

You can now legally get married, gamble, drink alcohol and - best of all - be revenge-murdered by the state.

Legal drinking age¹ is 21 in the US. But 18's the age at which you can legally buy tobacco products, so there's that.

¹Actually, it's the age at which you can legally purchase alcohol or possess it in public. And even that's a hodgepodge of state laws passed under the threat of losing part of their Federal highway funding.

Don't count on antivirus software alone to keep your data safe

TJX hacking mastermind Albert Gonzalez scoffed at antivirus tools. He and his cohorts wrote malware specifically designed to evade their detection.

Ooh, scary. Would malware inadvertently designed to evade detection be scarier? I can't decide.

One can imagine him laughing as his team of hackers broke into corporate networks using SQL injection attacks and gained administrative access.

One can, though one hardly wishes to. And what this has to do with antivirus tools I cannot guess.

Then he probably guffawed, Bond villain-style,

I think this is somewhat less than probable. Yes, the blackhats tend to have poor social skills, but guffawing at your own exploits is taking megalomania a bit far. (And do Bond villains guffaw? I can't recall any doing so. Perhaps a bit of chortling.)

as he uploaded the malware directly into server memory,

Easier than uploading it directly to disk...

and when the corporate networks began happily delivering customer credit card data directly to his servers chuckled all the way to the bank.

Chuckling now? The man runs the gamut of mirthful expression. That bastard!

And, again, the relevance of all this to antivirus software is a bit distant. I know, there's some vague point about Mr Scary Person employing attacks for which AV is not a defense. Surely this could have been expressed with less speculation about his maniacal outbursts?

Re: Yet not a word ..

using a SUBSETMASK hack

That's quite an acronym you have there. What does it stand for?

Or perhaps you meant "subnet mask"? Though why changing the subnet mask on an interface would be a "hack" I do not know.

RIP SPDY, we hardly knew ye: Google to retire next-gen web protocol

Some key features [of HTTP/2] such as multiplexing, header compression, prioritization and protocol negotiation evolved from work done in an earlier open, but non-standard protocol named SPDY.

Yes, and in any number of proprietary protocols before that. None of those ideas are new.