Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1744 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Previously it was hyped by a development house run by geeks. Now it's being hyped by a published run by businessmen.
3D Realms never gave themselves deadlines, and a dev without a deadline will never finish.
Take Two will have set the deadlines and will be forcing the devs to finish on time.
I mean, public-square trafficking?
Just think about all those poor people, addicted to public-squares, selling themselves into prostitution to buy an eighth of public-square cut with supermarket car park and fragments of low-quality cul-de-sac.
Won't somebody think of the children?!?!?
@AC
"I personally hold Christians responsible for the hate that is spouted in the name of their god. Muslims are no different."
...much in the same way that the Madrid train bombers and the London bus and underground bombers held all Spanish and British people for the violence visited by their countries in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander....
I find it a bit odd that GM are getting away with trademarking something that they claim not to produce (range anxiety).
It seems to me that the point of the exercise is one of the most cynical tactics ever envisioned: trademark a term whose main purpose is to criticise your competitors so that they cannot answer your criticism.
That's screwed up; really, really screwed up.
Hang on -- the guys developed a "mouse" that encourages extension of the wrist and he calls it ergonomic? Last I knew, wrist flexion during dextrous tasks put excessive pressure on the tendons.
It also risks causing over-rotation of the wrist -- for a right-handed moving left, or a left-hander moving right, it means the palm moves beyond parallel to the desk, and parallel is the extreme of comfortable motion.
If you want an ergonomic mouse, buy a joystick.
They don't let *every* bloody moron own a gun.
There are strict licensing laws that ensure that all gun owners are sane and competent. This ensures that no-one ever:
* flips and takes their guns into the office in order to massacre their co-workers;
* leaves their guns in flimsy cabinet that their kids can break into in order to massacre their classmates;
* shoots their cheating spouse, said spouse's lover and then turns the gun on themself;
* goes out drunk and shoots a server.
"We're not sure exactly what technology put paid to big band music, though we understand Glen Miller had his doubts about valve powered amplification,"
3 guys with valve amps can fill a room with sound and will demand less money than a 30-piece band. This led to two things: a proliferation of mid-sized music venues, both building a new audience and discouraging people from travelling further to get to the big-band auditoriums and ball-rooms; big name small acts were able to be put on the bill in the big venues, squeezing the expensive big bands off the bill.
So yes, the valve amp did it.
It's difficult to sell C64 emulators because of the system ROMs -- Commodore Licensing don't own the copyright on them, and no-one knows who does. A few people have sold emulators and no-one has sued yet, but if someone works out who actually owns the copyright a year or two down the line there may be a sudden demand for a thick royalty cheque....
Stuff the measurements, what I want to know is are they just going to throw this water away or are they going to do the sensible thing and bottle it for sale to rich mugs in posh restaurants at an ridiculous rate?
With glaciers now being something of an endangered species, it'd go down a bomb!
<-- Cos I'd rather have one of these to a similar quantity of Glacial meltwater...
"I have a 12W LED that's supposedly equivalent to a 60W bulb, but is not noticeably darker than a 100W incandescent bulb and is certainly brighter than the sunlight through the window. If someone decided that they wanted the room to be lit with 5 of these to make the room painfully bright then that still only adds up to 60 W, 40% less than a single 100W bulb."
I've been waiting ages for cheap LEDs that I can string along behind the picture-rail in my living room in order to have an uplit ceiling with subtle differences in colour and intensity based on mood and time of day. I also have a fairly long L-shaped hall which has funny patterns of light and dark because of where the single light is located.
LEDs will probably end up being used in long strips rather than in single "bulbs".
Think the end of the "lamp post" and instead a great big row of LEDs stretching along the buildings at the side of the street casting uniform light on the pavement rather than a series of amber cones will dull patches in between.
Think aeroplane/cinema-aisle floor-lighting in most offices and public buildings, and think of that being considered a health and safety requirement, hence always on. Think of door-handles that glow constantly in a soft blue, and these being required by health and safety. Think of a stair that has all its edges lit up, and again think about how that ties in with health and safety.
Think of garden ornaments (although they'll probably have their own solar power).
Think of bicycles and motor vehicles with sidelights for added peace-of-mind.
Think of small lights inside all of your kitchen cupboards and appliances, rather than just the fridge and the oven.
Think of a keyboard with LEDs under each key so that the letter glows.
Think of beds with a string of LEDs in the headboard for reading.
Think of some other things that I'm not going to mention cos they might be patentable....
You might say that using a small bookshelf containing multiple ring binders, each divided into multiple themed sections by pieces of coloured card, with multiple poly-pockets in each section, each containing a number of individual pieces of paper is overkill when you can just leave the pieces of paper in a messy heap on your desk.
I would have to say that I normally do the later, but I'll admit that when other people do the former, they generally find the bit of paper they're looking for a lot quicker than I do.
The OS is designed to do certain general functions. Tab grouping and ordering is application-specific. The OS does not do this. It is not the OS's job.
"As for the Scarab and KeyTool, wouldn't you just remove these from your keychain before travelling? I would."
As it's a put-on-your-keyring-and-forget-about-it type of thing, I'd probably put in on my keyring and forget about it.
If they'd pitched it in the den, Bannatyne would have told them this and called it useless. Then Theo Paphitis would have broken it.
I hope Assange offers due congratulations to the prosecutors for leaking the information. After all, he's the poster boy for full disclosure.
I don't believe the dirty tricks claims myself.
It's entirely possible that it was a genuine claim that was genuinely kicked out*, but that whoever leaked it just saw the opportunity for a bit of delicious irony.
* Thinking of another story (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/18/police_online_images_warning/), it's completely plausible that the victim had been raped by someone with a resemblance to Assange, and Assange's current press profile means she saw his face enough that she slowly convinced herself it was him.
You've clearly not seen the document then.
The whole *reason* for the large black hole is to take the piss. Think about it -- with a massive black hole above our heads, we won't even be able to urinate downwards. Our hydrogen and oxygen will be slowly stolen, one toilet break at a time, until we have NONE LEFT!!!
Your joke icon confuses me.
Anyway,
"are they trying to say that recignising anyone in any other way than a police controlled lineup does not count?"
No, they're trying to say staring at a picture for long enough will convince you you know the person in it.
If you see someone in the street and think "that was him", you phone the police and say "I think I saw the guy that did it."
Same with an on-line picture. You see it, you report it. You don't keep going back to the picture, or you overwrite your memory of the attacker with the memory of the picture. Clearly the person looks similar, which means that if it is the wrong person, you're going to end up forgetting what the actual perpetrator looked like.
And a Facebook mugshot is not generally of good enough quality to identify someone.
"Moderate wine consumption was independently associated with better performance on all cognitive tests in both men and women. [...] Alcohol abstention was associated with lower cognitive performance in women."
So drinking wine makes men and women smarter, but abstention only makes women thicker?
This does not compute.
Give that researcher a nice glass of beaujolais.
"He actually has a point though, sheeple do not have the knowledge or understanding of what is possible with a modern smartphone"
There's a slight problem with that statement, I shall try to explain it.
The smartphone was not designed for "the elite", it was designed for "the masses".
What is possible with a modern smartphone should have been led by what "the masses" know -- this is the single most important rule in product design.
Android was written by geeks, as a fork of an OS originally written by geeks, for geeks.
When you talk to these people about UX they only think UI -- they ignore that the whole system is user space, even though to them it is. They think they can hide the system, and that this will be good enough.
No, you need an OS designed ground up from the perspective of "dumb user" -- that really means one of the *proper* mobile OSes, not some hacked-up version of a mail-server OS with a colourful screen on top.
The "access to resources" is pretty obscure, and people will always assume that this is what it needs.
If you want proof, just look at Facebook viruses. They only work because most users don't understand the importance of "send messages on your behalf".
Moreover, even though the program asks for permission, this is not enough to fulfill legal criteria for "informed consent". The permission was gained while withholding the recipient's intent.
And if that wasn't enough, reread the article -- the app doesn't close when you exit. Without warning, it continues running in the background. Even if a user is happy with the GPS information being collected for whatever reason, he still has a reasonable expectation to opt out by closing the app.
I quite often find that when they try to make computers "user friendly", they do so by hiding the underlying logic from the user. However, the end product still requires knowledge of that logic in order to be used efficiently.
The problem is that the guys who program computer programs are computer programmers, and they have a biased concept of what's natural and logical.
The biggest problem with graphical programming interfaces in particular is that rather than make relationships between items more clear, they tend to draw a simple connection and leave it to the user to work out what the connection *means* (see also database schemas in MS SQL Server!).
This is a problem we all faced as spotty undergrads when dealing with arbitrary orders of arguments in C, but by the time we get to develop our own systems, we're so used to it that we forget how much of a problem it was... and still is (incorrect argument order still accounts for a pretty high percentage of code bugs).
The challenge for "layman programming" is to work out a way to make the code logic clear and intuitive, rather than sweeping it under a shiny carpet and saying "ooooh... look at the pretty colours."...
The point of "like" is to allow Facebook to maximise the "interesting quotient" of their feeds. A note with lots of "likes" and comments is clearly interesting, so gets more widely seen.
Now, posts you might want to "dislike" are interesting and newsworthy, and increase the "information benefit" of Facebook, and I don't think Facebook would be opposed in principle to using it as a measure of importance. Instead, I think that the problem is more likely to be that it makes the interface less clean and potentially more confusing.
So I reckon the "Dave has broken his leg" posts are more collateral damage to the Gods of Simplicity and Usability than targets for assassination.
Other demographics fit this profile. The one that springs to mind is illegal immigrants. Didn't they want us to grass them up a wee while ago? It wasn't popular. Another one is benefit cheats and tax dodgers. Didn't they want us to grass them up a wee while ago? That wasn't popular either. I'm sure lots of other criminals are the same.
There was a second advert that mentions a guy who's looking for a new house using Google Maps/Earth, has three lockups full of "his mother's stuff" and bought a flight with cash. Sounds a lot more like a housebreaker and/or fence to me.
So are they just using anti-terror as a way to catch people involved in standard domestic crime?
Would the police do such a thing? No, it's not like they've used anti-terror stop-and-search to catch domestic criminals or anything that bad....
When world+dog are starting to browse by Wii, smartphone and netbook, what posessed Microsoft to decide to make the Hotmail UI more reliant on fancy features? It's getting harder and slower to use on a reasonably current desktop machine, but the internet is no longer simply for the desktop PC!!!!
US bootlegger William S. McCoy reckons there is a "right to free use and access" that could be infringed by countries banning home distillation of hard spirits.
Welsh former drug smuggler Howard "Mr Nice" Marks reckons there is a "right to free use and access" that could be infringed by countries banning narcotic substances.
ElReg flying car correspondent Lewis Page reckons there is a "right to free use and access" that could be infringed by countries banning the export of F22s.
The simple fact of the matter is that every country makes laws that balance security and public health against freedom of choice and privacy.
It's a bit rich to be slagging off Pakistan for supporting terrorists while simultaneously trying to force India into a position where they can't monitor terrorists....
"Because the guy has waited 4 years to make the claim, there is certainly explorable doubt about his motives in producing it now and his reasons for sitting on it beforehand."
You know, even now there are plenty of people in the world who don't know what Facebook is.
It's entirely possible the guy just spotted it in the papers this morning and went "holy sh*t! That's my company!"
Zuckerberg had a duty to pay the guy, the guy didn't have to go asking for payment.
He's lucky that he just being asked for the guys contractual rights and isn't being sued over and above this for failing to report his earnings to his investor -- that would be seriously bad for him....
"I have updated iPhones on both windoze and mac, and have been fine - suspect its just hype like all of the reporting so far."
I suspect it's a problem in tolerance and depends on the quality of the USB controller in your computer. Macs are more expensive than low-end Windows boxes because they use high-end components. Mid-to-high-end PCs use the same components as Macs.
If the iPhone USB slave chipset has a low tolerance to static (either in hardware on in the software config) and drops the connections too easily, it won't be an OS-specific problem but rather a hardware-specific incompatibility.
Many device manufacturers have shot themselves in the foot by taking liberties with the specs and producing items that aren't compatible with other devices operating on the same specification....
The US system is, as you might expect, based on a series of subcontracts that aim to increase efficiency.
Unfortunately, "increase efficiency" is US English for "cut corners and pocket the cash". It was not BP that built the rig and it was not BP that operated the rig. The company that built the rig was American and the company that operated the rig was American. These are the companies that fouled up, and BP's getting a raw deal simply because it's "foreign".
The reason this is less likely to happen in the North Sea is because of our evil "Big Government". The UK has something called "safety regulations" that are backed up by law. On the other hand, the US seems to expect that the invisible hand of the market will sort it out... probably by threat of lawsuit. Aye right -- even paying off the bereaved is generally cheaper than doing it safely in the first place, so everyone's just gambling on not having a big enough accident to wipe them out in one go.
"Holy water" is not the same as "Lourdes water".
Holy water is water that has been blessed by a priest for use in baptisms, blessings and the like.
Lourdes water is water that has been taken from a spring in the foothills of the Pyrenees. If it is to be used in blessings or baptisms, it still needs to go through the same rituals as any other water does in order to become holy water.
