Posts by Dick Pountain

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Rent Seeking

Just did a search for 'rent seeking' in this thread, and found none. Privacy is a major issue, but to me Microsoft's extraction of rent for its products is equally big

Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place?

Damn, I thought the answer was Hitler and was about to invoke Godwin's Law

HPE Storage crows: All the array-slingers NVMe for my SCM

I just fed that headline to Google Translate and it detected the language as Chichewa

Indian call centre scammers are targeting BT customers

Re: How on earth can you tell the difference?

Or even during?

Shopper f-bombed PC shop staff, so they mocked her with too-polite tech tutorial

Re: The worst customers...

Or more pithily, "Afraid not, ask your mother whether she knows"

One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass

Re: Confused units

Indeed: a person crueller than I might consider the whole piece innumerate tosh. Thoughts do of course have "physical weight" (what other sort is there? Spiritual, literary I guess). The firing of a neuron occurs through passage of many neurotransmitter molecules across a synaptic gap, and they have a finite molecular weight.

Why a detachable cabin probably won’t save your life in a plane crash

Wheelie bin

Why not put wheels on it and call it the Airport Bus? Seriously though, the chances of it detaching by mistake must surely approach the same as chance of an incident where it would help.

Automated, insight cannot be: Jedi master of statistics was good – but beware the daft side

Re: Rosling and bubbles

Absolutely right - Rosling was one of a *very* small group of experts who knew what's going on, cared about it, and was tremendously effective at conveying it to others. I just heard Jeffrey Sachs talk at UCL this morning, and he's another, still with us.

Lean in and pivot: Even Steve Jobs didn't work alone, startup boy

Twist

Pivoting while Leaning In is likely to twist your ankle

Inside our three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party

Smartie Phone?

Love all the pink and mauve there - just like a big tube of Smarties

Microsoft's Windows Phone folly costs it another billion dollars

Re: I miss those days

Not quite. Microsoft has a large-but-finite amount of money to burn, therefore in a finite time.

Inside Nvidia's Pascal-powered Tesla P100: What's the big deal?

"The Tesla P100 supports up to four 40GB/s bidirectional links which can be used to read and write to memory."

I've always wondered how long it would take for the Americans to reinvent the Transputer. Answer: 30 years

3D printers set for lift off? Yes, yes, yes... at some point in the future

As long as people eat cornflakes we'll always need small plastic objects to go in the packet

Remix OS: China's take on an Android operating system – but for PCs

I once wrote that developing a new operating system was the modern equivalent (in terms of effort) of building a Gothic cathedral. And they eventually stopped building Gothic cathedrals.

Google screening missed hundreds of malicious Android apps, researchers say

Re: Doesn't seem that bad really

"I'd say Google is doing a pretty decent job"

You might say that, but El Reg can't because it believes Google to be the spawn of Satan and bends its knee towards Cupertino

Meet the original Big Data, TED Talk, Thought Shower Futurist

Good article, both parts. As for this this half, about defending individual rights against the "plantations" of Google and Facebook, I'd say that we already have the perfect model in the public road network. A neutral state builds and maintains the infrastructure, paid for by taxation, which individuals are then more or less free (within certain safety regs) to use their cars, cycles, motorbikes, lorries, busses on. The railways, since privatisation show the pitfalls of the other model, where private interests monopolise sections of the infrastructure.

This is why copy'n'paste should be banned from developers' IDEs

Oh Bollox!

I'm in the habit of using "Bollox!" instead of "Hello World!" as my first program example when reviewing a new system (blame my upbringing). Back in PCW days, around 1983, was given Tandy's Model 100, an early handheld computer to review, and time being short had to take it straight to the photographer's studio. Regrettable it still showed "Bollox!" clearly on its small LCD screen, but no-one noticed till after it was printed. Reprinting is surprisingly expensive.

Typo in case-sensitive variable name cooked Google's cloud

Camel-case makes for more readable naming conventions in large programs - eg. significant lower-case prefixes like eFoo, eBar, eZot, sFoo, sBar, sZot. That's a separate issue from whether or not to enforce such distinctions with case-sensitive compilation: there are strong arguments for and against. Either way, a smart IDE ought to warn about variable accesses that differ only in case.

From Zero to hero: Why mini 'puter Oberon should grab Pi's crown

https://sites.google.com/site/dickpountainspages/home/computing/byte-articles/the-oberon-system

Re: Operating system in Pascal for Pascal

https://sites.google.com/site/dickpountainspages/home/computing/byte-articles/the-oberon-system

Hasta la Victoria Siempre, GDS! This is not the end, no way

Re: Stick it

Oh, I thought it was Wi-Fi waves being repelled by a tinfoil hat

Devs, welcome your EVIL ROBOT OVERLORDS from MIT

The Last One. Again.

KRAKKOOM! SpaceX Falcon supply mission to ISS EXPLODES minutes after launch

They say there are no atheists in a foxhole: I'll bet there are about as many Musk fanboiz on the space station

Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?

Sounds pretty sane to me, and the bit about foreign public utilities behaving more efficiently abroad is really interesting. Perhaps every nation should run some *other* nation's utilities, like an economic secret santa...

Why is that idiot Osbo continuing with austerity when we know it doesn't work?

Austerity does work, for what it's really intended to do, which is to demolish the welfare state and employment rights. It's just that you thought it was about "balancing the budget", which indeed doesn't need to be done.

Couple sues estate agent who sold them her mum's snake-infested house

Charge them extra for the snakes - good for keeping away pedants

Microsoft to TAKE OUT THE TRASH in the Windows Store

Re: Crap apps in app stores

"I tells" you, please

Just did a count-up of how many apps I'm using in Windows 8.1 and it's *zero*. Lots of luck in reducing that Microsoft.

Ding-dong, the cloud calling: The Ring Video Doorbell

If the whole thing is wired to the mains then perhaps a relay could be added to electrocute unwelcome callers?

Astroboffins perplexed by QUADRUPLE QUASAR CLUSTER find

May I be the first to use and copyright the name "The God Cluster" for this phenomenon, ready for when the tabloids latch onto it

Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election

If we nuke it from orbit it's very likely we'll miss and hit Belgium. Better a selective campaign from 1000 feet that carefully avoids Camden Town...

Boffins turns landfill WinPhones into microscopes

The Olympus microscope has a lovely smile though

It's the FALKLANDS SYNDROME! Fukushima MELTDOWN to cause '10,000 Chernobyls' in South Atlantic

Take this Lollipop

Google beat you all to the punch by releasing Lollipop a full six months before April Fools' Day

Re: too soon

I assume you meant "tink"

Caption this: CERN needs pic tags. Serious answers only, kids

Photo #1: "Damn it! This is Pentax fit and I *told* them I have a Nikon-fit mouth"

Mono Magic: Photography, Breaking Bad style

Re: It is techno-Luddism

Seconded. Who wants to wait a day and spend a fortune developing rolls of film that only have one worthwhile pic on them, again? Just take your digital SLR (or probably buy an old Sony Alpha as cheap as a film camera), set its P mode to Black & White, then like Novatone says, think about your composition as if you only have three tries.

Quantum computers have failed. So now for the science

Re: nice article....

Carver Mead is the analogue man and he's still alive, but getting on a bit so I'm not sure how active he is in chip design any more. He also did original work on "collective electrodynamics" which has some bearing on the topic of this article.

HELP! Windows Phone update 8.1 broke my Lumia

All the smartphone companies are losing it - I just had the famous Lollipop problem with a Nexus 7 2012, and Apple had a similar debacle a few years back. The complexity of the hardware is running ahead of ability of QR to keep up and breaking the previously friendly remote update model. Only real solution is to provide equally friendly roll-back to stable version (on Android it's a techies-only image download and manual install).

None of them want to do it, because secretly they don't mind these bork-fests, which scare people into buying next gen hardware and thus prevent Windows XP-style log-jams.

Silicene takes on graphene as next transistor wonder-stuff

The only reason we have all the digital gadgets we do is the benign scaling behaviours of CMOS and lithographic fab techniques. Until something equally benign found for graphene, silicene, quantum dots or whatever they won't happen - and it's never certain such methods will exist.

Is it humanly possible to watch Gigli and Battlefield Earth back-to-back?

Walking out of the cinema is the acid test: I've only walked three times in the last 30 years, from "Absolute Beginners", "City of Lost Children" and "Romance and Cigarettes". All from directors I'd loved who crossed a line into the twee...

What gets the internet REALLY excited? Kittens? No. EXPLODING Kittens

This has inspired me to launch my unicorn milking machine Kickstart, and I've got The CornedBeef on board!

Intel offers big bucks for black women

So El Reg finally got a KKK subeditor - no big surprise

OnePlus vs Micromax: Dream of Google-less Android now further away

Or indeed about any firm that opts not to spend a decade writing its own proprietary operating system (or for that matter any citizen who fails to build their own subway or sewage system). Let's all "disrupt" those smelly old common goods!

Robox: How good could a sub-£1k 3D printer be?

Re: Sub-Ed still on holiday?

Pattern, plattern, platter? Try "platen" or "platten"? A little known hazard of 3D printing is its damaging effect on verbal skills: "Tech isn't where we'd hoped, but if you want it now, it's waiting for you."

The Nokia ENIGMA THING and its SECRET, TERRIBLE purpose

It's clearly a secure box to store all your old redundant Rolexes in

Poll trolls' GCHQ script sock puppets manipulate muppets

I'm saving the headline to this article as a test piece for my natural language parsing code efforts: it defeated me so how can a poor computer cope?

Re: AH HA!!!!

And one of the Hoo Haas has a most unsightly hydrocele too. The show is a urologists nightmare...

GOD particle MAY NOT BE GOD particle: Scientists in shock claim

Techno-angels?

I think this a ruse to get us all to stump up for a new pin-head

At last! Now you can STIFLE dull chums you can't really unfriend on Facebook

Indeed it has. I've been doing it for a couple of years. You used to go to the Friends pulldown and untick "Show in Newsfeed": more recently you do it from top right corner arrow. So why is this news?

REVEALED: Apple fanbois are 'MENTALLY UNSTABLE' - iShop staff

Can we blame Steven Fry? Please?