Posts by Shades

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

Bigger and more accurate Lego models are generally overspecialised to the point of being useless for creative building

I used to love Lego when I was a kid. Lots of standardised blocks and plates, and even "specialised" parts (like plane windows and wings) found their way into multiple sets. Even Technics seemed to be kept intentionally limited, so things looked roughly like what they were supposed to within the confines of standard parts. Now though, as you say, there are so many builds that have parts that apply to one build, and that build only, once the build is done, then what? It's not like you can break them down and build your own thing.

The cynic in me says this is entirely on purpose. If, with a combination of a few different sets, you can make the intended builds (and unlimited other things) then that doesn't make line go up like one-set one-build does.

High Court to grill London cops over live facial recognition creep

We do have legislation on the books that allow police to ask for a means of identifying yourself in public

Only for specific circumstances; someone driving a vehicle and for suspected terrorism offences. Outside of that the police can stop you, and even search you - looking only for specific items ("going equipped") such as those used for burglary - but they cannot demand you identify yourself, look for identification (by checking your wallet for instance), nor have a right to know where you've been or where you're going.

Meant to and do are two totally different things. Do you think if there is an unsolved murder, for which people have been hauled in but not charged, the police are going to destroy DNA taken from suspects?

YouTube now sabotages ad-blocking apps that stream its vids

Re: "I have a hard time believing"

For some reason my combination of browser addons seems to be holding YT adverts at bay for the ever shrinking list of channels with videos that are worth watching, but on devices with only official app support (like the Playstation)... holy hell, how can anybody watch that shit is beyond me?! Pre-stream ads, unskippable ads, 30-god-damn-minute long ads, ads that now have a silent pause after it finishes (which, like the annoying silent car advert on UK terrestrial TV, subconsciously makes you look up at it), all of which seem like every few minutes.

I can't say I've ever used YT less which, and I'm no expert in these matters, seems a little bit counter productive if the whole operation is based on eyeball time. Sure, YT/Alphabet aren't a charity, running a site like YT with all the costs that entails ain't cheap and they have to make money somehow but there has got to be a better balance; at this rate it's not going to be long before we'll have content breaks in the middle of the adverts instead.

Musk, Tesla win securities fraud battle over that 'funding secured' tweet

"I actually don't understand the "$420" bit, the share price then was literally $23 a share. What part was $420? I don't get it, it could only have been a stupid joke."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/420_(cannabis_culture)

ChatGPT has mastered the confidence trick, and that's a terrible look for AI

Quality Control

"it won’t be getting past El Reg’s quality control any time soon"

El Reg has quality control? Now that is news! ;)

Elon Musk to abused Twitter users: Your tormentors are coming back

I, for one...

... am rather glad this is happening. Not because I think Musk is the second coming, or that Twitter should be a free-for-all, but because the moderation team was an absolute f**king joke.

My gaming account got "suspended" after responding to a post, consisting of a screenshot of some awful racist shit some old fart had posted elsewhere on Twitter, with "I can't wait for these racist old bastards to die off". Yes, yes, I must have done other stuff before to get to the point where my my account got suspended but that consisted of telling racists and homophobes to "Go f*ck yourself" or "F*ck off"

Pointing out that I had not contravened their stated rule - "You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. This includes wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm" - completely fell on deaf ears. I hadn't targeted someone, I hadn't incited anyone, nor had I hoped or wished for anything, but apparently being impatient for nature to run its course is very bad.

Then again, being forced into what is essentially "read only" mode has meant that when I peruse Twitter just to see whats going on I much more quickly realise the human race is utterly doomed and close it again sooner rather than getting dragged into pointless arguments with utter morons.

Windows Subsystem for Linux now packaged as a Microsoft Store app

Re: So what's the improvement in the store version?

WTF are you on about?

I don't have a MS account, never had an MS account, and yet, here I am looking at Windows Subsystem for Linux in the MS store app. The "Get" button is active and if I click on it it proceeds as expected. IIRC MS may have expected you to have an MS account for their store app under Windows 8 but they ditched that requirement ages ago.

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

"One laid-off staffer was in charge of managing the system which controls badge access to Twitter's buildings. He was called back in to help regain access to HQ by those who had locked themselves out. "Thanks for helping out. You're a lifesaver," Musk replied on Twitter."

I wonder how much "helping out" cost him? hahahaha

Absolute nozzle.

Musk tells of risk of Twitter bankruptcy as tweeters trash brands

Shh, you'll awaken Dave the Angry Troll!

Twitter employees sue over lack of 60-day layoff notice

Re: The situation in Ireland is perhaps more interesting

Ireland, being a European country with proper social security and universal healthcare, of course has much, much, much less in the way of job protection than even the most 'liberal' American state.

The simple reality is that in the US healthcare is tied to jobs, so getting fired is very, very serious. In Europe, that isn't a thing, so getting fired is not important, so the protections are scanty: as long as it's not discriminatory, you can be fired for any reason or none, with no more than the minimal statutory compensation.

Can't work out if you're just a very bad troll or seriously cracked?

LG makes a TV roughly the size of a queen-sized bed

Re: Parlor Walls

Deadmau5 isn't everyone's cup of tea but...

YouTube: Deadmau5 - The Veldt

Elon Musk 'buying Manchester United' football club

Re: Ignoring his very next tweet

The timestamp for BBC articles update with successive edits.

Report slams UK plan to become 'science superpower' by 2030

Re: thank you

Let's take a little look at that...

AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AND THE GOVERNMENT OF IRELAND

[...]

RIGHTS, SAFEGUARDS AND EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.

Human Rights

1. The parties affirm their commitment to the mutual respect, the civil rights and the religious liberties of everyone in the community. Against the background of the recent history of communal conflict, the parties affirm in particular:

[...]

• the right to freely choose one’s place of residence;

Can't do that with a hard border.

[...]

• the right to equal opportunity in all social and economic activity, regardless of class, creed, disability, gender or ethnicity;

Can't do that with a hard border either.

[...]

Economic, Social and Cultural Issues

[...]

2. Subject to the public consultation currently under way, the British Government will make rapid progress with:

(i) a new regional development strategy for Northern Ireland, for consideration in due course by a the Assembly, tackling the problems of a divided society and social cohesion in urban, rural and border areas

Can't tackle societal division and social cohesion in border areas with a hard border between the two.

SECURITY

1. The participants note that the development of a peaceful environment on the basis of this agreement can and should mean a normalisation of security arrangements and practices.

The normalisation of security arrangements is what it is now. Re-introducing a hard border would now be an "un-normalisation" of security arrangements.

2. The British Government will make progress towards the objective of as early a return as possible to normal security arrangements in Northern Ireland, consistent with the level of threat and with a published overall strategy, dealing with:

[...]

(ii) the removal of security installations;

Any border installation is a de facto "security installation".

Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025

Re: Thanks for the money but your stuffed.

"Or Unreal Tournament"

You mean Unreal Tournament, the 23 year old game that currently, right now, has 473 active servers?

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

Re: Odd

"merely by being the richest man"

With the amount of heavy lifting the word "merely" is doing there its a shame you can't patent it and licence it to Liebherr.

A douche is a douche whether rich or otherwise.

Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

Re: What it will actually get used for

Tell me, is the earth flat too?

Sony Interactive Entertainment pulls PlayStation from Russia

Re: In a word....PR!

Sony eventually turned a profit on PS4 sales and that has, partially, started to happen with the PS5 (disc version).

A Windows 11 tsunami? No, more of a ripple as Microsoft's latest OS hits 5% PC market

Re: What a joke

17 people - at time of posting - don't get the joke.

I do, so have an upvote.

Ecuador shreds Julian Assange's citizenship

He's not going to shag you.

Radioactive hybrid terror pigs have made themselves a home in Fukushima's exclusion zone

Re: With apologies to HG-

OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHH LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

Re: Outrageous.

Isn't there a gun store you should be in, circle-jerking about one of the 239 mass shootings so far this year??

Asus ROG Phone 3: An ugly but refreshing choice – for gaming fans only

WTF has happened to El Reg?

"I almost wish other manufacturers borrowed this approach, particularly Samsung.

Imagine if you could neatly clip a USB-C dock to the side of your phone, touting all the ports you’ll need to connect a display and peripherals. Its DeX mode would start to feel a lot more useful, and less like an also-ran bolted on.

This is an idea Samsung should borrow - neatly clipping a USB-C dock to the side of your phone, touting all the ports you’ll reasonably need to use your phone as a desktop computer in DeX mode,"

The Department of Redundancy Department obviously hasn't been furloughed.

"its 144Hz aspect ratio"

Aspect ratios come in Hz now, do they?

"Colours feel a bit washed out and saturated."

*Bzzzzt*. Contradiction.

Cancelling my subscription, etc, etc.

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

Re: Just....

@Sgt_Oddball: I really wanted to upvote your post but, well... the answer

€13bn wings its way back to Apple after Euro court rules Irish tax deal wasn't 'state aid'

Re: Good

So you want, for instance, all roads to (eventually) return to dirt tracks or become toll roads then, right?

I've got me a stalker! Obsessive downvoter alert!

Downvoted all posts in this thread because of the El Reg tradition of downvoting posts that whinge about downvoting.

UK finds itself almost alone with centralized virus contact-tracing app that probably won't work well, asks for your location, may be illegal

Re: And what about the people ...

"8 thumbs up & 1 thumb down"

Hi Dom.

Re: And what about the people ...

"likely earning crapita (or similar) a fat wad of cash."

For once its not Crapita, but a company called Faculty.

Faculty, formerly ASI Data Science and Advanced Skills Initiative Ltd, was hired to work with Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign and has since, quelle surprise, been awarded at least 7 government contracts in the last 18 months. Want to guess what political party one of its shareholders is associated with?

Further still, Ben Warner, former principle of Faculty and brother of the founder, was hired by Cummings to work at Downing Street, after running the Conservatives private election model and (are you sitting down?) worked closely with Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess the work done for Vote Leave and the Conservatives was pro bono.

Reach for the sky: Pixar founders win Turing Award for pioneering 3D animation – and getting rid of jagged edges

As I posted somewhere above, Catmull-Clark subdivision appears to be making its way into games, even on the current gen consoles.

Re: Interesting article, but...

"It's a technique that allows a single polygon to simulate multiple smaller polygons with a smooth gradation between the joins.

This allows a model to appear to be high-polygon when it is in fact relatively simple and low-polygon.

What's more the technique is open and as such is widely used. Blender includes it as a modifier"

Blender may use Catmull-Clark as a method to decide how to subdivide faces but it doesn't "simulate" the additional smaller polygons to make a model "appear" like it has a high polygon count as your post would suggest; Subdivide a simple cube 4 times with Subdivision Surface and you'll end up with a sphere (of sorts) with 1,536 faces. All those extra faces are there as if you manually created them. Catmull-Clark, or at least it implementation in Blender, isn't some visual trickery, like Smooth Shading, to "simulate" the "appearance" of extra detail. The editable verts/edges/faces do become something more akin to "handles" on curves in vector based image editors but you don't get the look of a high polygon model without the extra CPU/GPU overheads that brings.

What I'm more impressed with is it appears that some games are now using live Catmull-Clark subdivision (slightly edited to keep edges without adjoining faces always sharp) on their models in certain circumstances where there is less going on (like in menus or photomodes) and they can afford to significantly bump up the per-model poly count. It wouldn't surprise, on the next gen of consoles, if we start to see live Catmull-Clark subdivision in many more (playable) areas of games since, as well as making lower poly models look better, it also effectively acts as a form of "compression" in a similar way as vector based images do compared to a bitmap based image for certain types of images.

UK plod could lose access to 79 million criminal alerts in event of a no-deal Brexit

Re: Hmm

Oh look, no response... must not have a pre-programmed response to that one. Quelle surprise!

Leaked EU doc plots €100bn fund to protect European firms against international tech giants

"And half billion pound loans to JLR."

To a company that might otherwise have relocated production entirely outside of the EU.

No doubt it would be the EU's fault it they had of relocated production outside of the EU too.

Re: Nothing to see here

If the guys running the EU had any sense at all they'd shower Trump with love and he wouldn't know what to do with it."

And lets just send drug addicts to Columbia to get straight. There's no flaws in that plan either, right?

"Why is a president of a military dictatorship like North Korea politically and diplomatically smarter that the president of the EU?"

1) Kim isn't but he is smarter than Trump, who handed priceless propaganda to Kim on a silver platter. Tell me, how did that all work out? Of course though its entirely possible the entire world collectively imagined Kim, post-Singapore, "destroying" already destroyed weapons facilities; rebuilding weapons facilities; and resuming missile tests.

2) I see you're another one of those "informed" Brexiteers; There is no such thing as "President of the EU". I'm sure that was an innocent mistake though, not born of deceitfulness or ignorance.

"Same thing with the WA backstop. It costs the EU (and by that I include Ireland) absolutely *nothing* to not have it, and it's a massive cost to having it and they refuse to budge on it, it's utterly nutty."

If you don't think the backstop is necessary then you clearly don't get why its an absolute necessity. Next you'll be telling us that there is no way out of the backstop without the EU's permission, and its all a big trick to keep the UK in the EU, won't you? Spoiler Alert: There is, for both the UK and the EU, but you've read the WA and you knew that? You have read the WA, haven't you?

"It boggles my mind this is the system and people that citizens of the EU actually want to be governed by. Simple problems require simple solutions, not pretending they are or actually making them 5000x more complex than they need to be."

I've got some bad news for you; only one type of person see's everything as simple. I'd love to hear your solution for inserting the square peg into the round hole that is the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit (I need a laugh!)

Re: Nothing to see here

"Trump isn't a protectionist - he wants a fair system"

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha *breathes* Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

You keep telling yourself that buddy.

Microsoft Surface users baffled after investing in kit that throttles itself to the point of passing out

Re: FTFY

"their heat & CPU management is good"

They are not without their issues: The Register: Core blimey! Apple macOS update lifts boot from MacBook Pro neck

Re: Built-in GPU

Yes, I know. But the discrete GPU is a separate chip while the built-in GPU is on the same die as the CPU, and, if you look at the task manager screenshot again, something has been pinning the built-in GPU at 100%.

Built-in GPU

Looks like something is absolutely hammering the built-in GPU too. I wonder if the heat from that is causing something to send the signal to the CPU to slowdown? I've never seen an Intel GPU utilisation that high, especially when there is a discrete GPU there to do the real heavy lifting.

Someone's spreading an MBR-trashing copy of the Christchurch killer's 'manifesto' – and we're OK with this, maybe?

FTFY

Consult your operating system's recovery and repair tools to rebuild the MBR psychologist/psychiatrist if for some reason you're hit with this malware.

FTFY

Buffer overflow flaw in British Airways in-flight entertainment systems will affect other airlines, but why try it in the air?

Re: Entertainment system pen testing

"Car radios are linked to the engine management far more than you would think. The CAN bus is everywhere!"

Theres a hidden function (requiring a finger twisting keypress combination) on my radio that can bring up speed in Kmh on its crappy red dot-matrix LCD screen and my car is not all that far off being 20 years old now. I have absolutely no clue what its purpose is for as its not something mentioned in the cars manual and the car has both Mph and Kmh on the dials.

Age checks for online pr0n? I've never heard of it but it sounds like a good idea – survey

"the majority of the 2,000 respondents, some 60 per cent, thought adults should be required to prove their age to see adult content online

Wankers.

Post-Brexit plan for .EU tweaked: No dot-EU web domains for Europeans in UK, no appeals, etc

Re: Didn't the UK create these rules?

Two people don't understand irony and/or troll-face.

Re: STUPID STUPID STUPID

"The notion that because something was legal or allowed it must always remain as such is utterly ridiculous."

And that is what makes me laugh about people* who think that something that has the word "Amendment" in its title is absolutely set in stone.

*Second Amendment nutjobs.

Re: Didn't the UK create these rules?

Gammoaners can't help themselves.

You like JavaScript! You really like it! Scripting lingo tops dev survey of programming languages

Re: It will not last ...

You know this is not your average tech site, right? You know why I'm asking this, right?

Apple: You can't sue us for slowing down your iPhones because you, er, invited us into, uh, your home... we can explain

Re: "Apple had no duty to disclose the facts regarding software capability and battery capacity."

"They are famous for quoting things like engine power as "adequate" rather than giving actual numbers."

Not actual numbers like page 13 of the Wraith brochure?

Or pages 25, 26, 27 of the Phantom brochure?

How about pages 42, 43 and 44 of the Ghost brochure?

Or maybe page 26 of the Dawn brochure?

More nodding dogs green-light terrible UK.gov pr0n age verification plans

Re: Just like buying a magazine.

Its a shame I can't upvote your comment more than once!

Punkt: A minimalist Android for the paranoid

So its a burner phone for 6 times the price? Bargain. Where do I not get one?

'Incommunicado' Assange anoints new WikiLeaks editor in chief

You seem to be implying that is not true?!

Forget dumping games designers for AI – turns out it takes two to tango

Super who?

"Humans partnered up with bots to come up with new levels in Super Mario, a popular Nintendo platform game."

Super Mario is a game? Never heard of it. Is it a popular game on the Nintendo platform or a popular platform game by Nintendo?

Braking bad: Mitsubishi recalls 68k SUVs over buggy software

Dammit! I more or less just posted the same, then, as the page refreshed, your post was literally the first one I saw.