* Posts by Mark 65

3432 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Sussex police try new tactic to relieve snappers of pics

Mark 65

Not as much of a problem

Journalists and paparazzi tend to use jpegs for quicker time to print. You could always wifi to a colleague with a laptop in range of wireless n if it's somewhere where you suspect your gear may get lifted - such as the policing of a G8 summit etc.

Mark 65

Wifi/3G

Pro SLRs are normally WiFi enabled - inbuilt or addon - so I guess that means journalists are covered.

Brits don't want in-flight calling

Mark 65

To be fair

Those annoying kids will often have equally annoying parents - they didn't get that way through chance. Whilst unruly kids can be irritating (the cabin crew can always tell the parents to get control of them), loud mouths are even more so. Nobody likes the use of the "outside voice" in a confined space.

Oz pedestrians fall to 'Death by iPod'

Mark 65

Just about to add

The 20th century certainly bypassed Australia and it's not as if we skipped it and went to the 21st.

Privacy watchdogs challenge laptop seizures at US borders

Mark 65

NSA, err no

They won't be bothering them with the effort involved in breaking encryption unless there's something juicy to be found i.e. you are a known terrorist or have links to etc. They certainly won't be bothering them with cracking the encryption on your truecrypt container containing grumble pics.

Jobs moves to the heavens with Apple TV

Mark 65

Re:Not just rentals

"i don't want to sync a tv show or a movie over wifi to my apple tv to watch, i just want to stream it directly from my imac to my tv

and the new apple tv is perfect for that, and priced reasonably too"

And when TVs have DLNA compliance cut out the shitty extra box under the screen.

Mark 65

@famousringo

"A single TV season could eat up 5 DVDs, and I don't want to wait for them to burn, I don't want to store them, and I don't want to juggle them around when I feel like watching the show again.

Hard drives are a better solution, but they still fill up, they still need backing up, and they're still an extra hardware expense."

A 2TB hard drive will store at least 235 DVDs, assuming 8.7GB dual layer discs. One of these plugged into a WDTV and you're done. Blu-rays aren't worth mentioning as the Apple device will be streaming and that's an awful lot of data required to be of comparable visual quality.

To me devices like the WDTV can offer the same service without the control freakery. The exception is the streamed video, but it makes up for it with the formats it's capable of and there are other similar devices that offer streaming as well if desired.

Apple - late to the party and offering less. They'd be better off adapting the mac mini to have a PVR capability and media streaming etc out of the box by bundling it with some elgato hardware etc.

Greenland ice loss rates 'one-third' of what was thought

Mark 65

Blind leading the blind

"2003 was the hottest summer in France ever recorded."

Not necessarily the hottest it's ever had. The end.

Mark 65
Flame

@L.B

Two centuries of data is fuck all in the timespan of the earth. We like assuming that observed changes can be fitted to Mankind's activity without having knowledge of what has happened throughout the much longer history of this planet.

By all means pay your carbon taxes and generally lower your standard of living to avoid planetary destruction but I think I'll just use common sense and just not be utterly wasteful (given it costs to do so) instead of believing the current paid-for pseudo scientific whim.

Vodafone announces 4G roll-out for Germany

Mark 65

Viability

"That's a high price compared to ADSL, but (coverage allowing) the Vodafone offering makes home broadband redundant, so is better compared to a combination of mobile and fixed broadband."

Does LTE get around the often ridiculous (1-2 seconds+) latency suffered with 3G? If not I'll be sticking with my cheaper home connection + legacy 3G package.

Apple TV: Third time unlucky, Mr Jobs

Mark 65

Photo frame?

"Apple TV also turns your nice big flat screen into an excellent photo frame"

Albeit one that's just pissing through electricity.

Apple states tax take on UK iPod pricing

Mark 65

Adobe

Especially when most of their wares/warez can just be downloaded.

Mark 65

Swiss EU

No, they're not in the EU Mr Dawson but I believe they have implemented most of the free trade and flow of workers rules though meaning they can pick the beneficial parts without the shite.

Sony Oz mod chip dongle ban hearing delayed

Mark 65

@Highlander, car analogy

A suitable car analogy would be modifying the engine management system. It's legal and there's plenty of after market suppliers.

Mark 65

Err, no

I think you'll find that in some jurisdictions that reverse engineering is legal. So the unlicensed SDK stuff is just tough shit. A sale is a sale, take it and move on.

"As for the arguments about backing up game discs. well, yes if BluRay discs were not nearly scratch proof that might be a legitimate argument. However since they are virtually scratch proof, and at very least extremely scratch resistant, that backup argument doesn't hold much water."

Do you really believe that? Optical media is shithouse when it comes to scratches. Just leave them anywhere within reach of an inquisitive child and prepare to be educated.

Mark 65

@Cameron

A-fucking-1. If they want perpetual control then they are selling a license or renting a product, not selling it. You can't have it both ways and they need to understand this. If the product is out of warranty I can turn it into a weather vane if I like - it's got fuck all to do with them. IT companies need to learn to let go. You sold it, it's no longer yours.

Bye-bye to bizarro bye-laws, says UK.gov

Mark 65

@rphjs

Because if the caveat was "within its level of competence" then nothing would ever get done.

Diesels greener than electric cars, says Swiss gov report

Mark 65

@Stevie

It's a CO2 reference. Specifically to do with the considering the entire energy chain...

"Cement is made by heating limestone (calcium carbonate), with small quantities of other materials (such as clay) to 1450 °C in a kiln, in a process known as calcination"

I'd imagine that chucks out a bit.

Mark 65

Quieter

"However unless:

a) diesels can be made as quiet as an electric."

I'm sure that'll be helpful for all the impaired vision people crossing suburban streets (ones with sticks not dogs).

Can just imagine it now - pollution down, pedestrian deaths up. Just saying.

Mark 65

Re:Alternatives

Public transport is only more efficient if a crucial mass of people use it. Just you and the driver on a suburban bus isn't particularly efficient. Likewise for mostly empty trains running during the day. Factor in that most public transport systems outside of major cities are shit, infrequent and seldom take you where you want to go and the diesel/EV alternative looks quite good.

Game-addicted man scores rare win over software lawyers

Mark 65

EULA

Doesn't the US have legislation like the UK - that states that you cannot sign away your statutory rights - which renders most EULAs unenforceable. It's just that you seem to have to go to court to prove it.

Underweight passport pic left traveller stuck in Amsterdam

Mark 65

Re:Major Changes of Appearance

"In August 2006, Agyeman, a British citizen who had been issued with a British passport by the High Commission in Ghana, was returning to the United Kingdom after a weekend away with friends."

I may be reading this incorrectly but, to me, that says he was returning after a weekend away. Hence his passport was ok on the way out but not on the way back. Maybe it's worded badly but if it isn't then they're twats.

Regarding major changes of appearance a child can receive a passport at age 1 that will last them for 5 years. They can still travel on them (admittedly accompanied) but they generally look fuck all like they did when they were 1 when they're over 5. Go figure.

Mark 65

@Richard 31

Not without providing proof of ID, you impostor.

Sony NEX-5 interchangeable lens camera

Mark 65

Second the above

The market for this kind of camera is as a back-up or a safe-to-carry for DSLR users traveling in more suspect areas where you might not want to have your 5d MkII on display. Not quite what I'd be after due to the price and I'd rather just have a G11 form factor with an APS-C sensor. There's definitely the market though.

Twitpic pulls 50 Cent bum burger snap

Mark 65

Fitty

"I should note that, for the record, Mr. Cent got shot nine times at once"

and there was me thinking he'd been "hit with 6 shells but I don't walk widda limp"

Energy-saving LEDs 'will not save energy', say boffins

Mark 65

GDP trend...

"Unless LED lighting manufacturers start building in a shorter lifespan for the LED lights, just the constant cost of replacing lights( or the lack of ) should be enough to change the game. Maybe it's time for a bend in that line( at .72 percent ) to happen."

This is a reference to the percentage of per capita GDP spent on lighting, right? We now have lower wattage lighting producing similar light levels. Cue the never ending rise in electricity prices to fix up any deviation from 0.72%. There may be energy savings but I doubt there'll be any cost savings. In previous periods the fuel type was changing (candle -> gas -> electric) and population levels, and hence resources, were not what they now are - high and constrained respectively.

I've read a few pieces on LED lights now and I recall it takes about 9 years on average for the cost savings of replacing all your incandescents with LED lights (at fixed energy costs I believe). CFLs take about 6 years using the same assumptions. Obviously fixed energy costs are a big but necessary assumption for a starting point and I can't remember the details regarding the number and/or mix of incandescents and halogens - the old "average household" problem. I believe there are still some issues with 240v vs low voltage ones as well - lifetime and quality of light I think. Article also mentioned the CREE brand as being on the money for quality but I've found them bloody expensive where I live.

One thing I have noticed though from browsing the houses for sale locally is that some of the new or renovated ones have kitchen lighting that you could use to land a light aircraft. These aren't as good as some previous examples I've seen but illustrate the point...

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-qld-balmoral-106727770

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-qld-bulimba-106775906

http://www.realestate.com.au/property-house-qld-bulimba-106695126

Intel chief: Obama (still) driving US off cliff

Mark 65

Tax

Maybe China should just up its taxes a bit so he only saves $0.5bn and they bank the rest.

He should remember that taxes can change very quickly when needs suffice but multi-billion dollar factories are a bitch to relocate.

Oracle forms new 'axis of evil' against open source, claims Adobe

Mark 65

Oracle DB and market share

If they want people to switch maybe they should ease up a touch on their licensing costs. Moving to an Oracle backed/supported/enhanced MySQL with less onerous licensing costs would be a start but you'd just have a little inkling as a corporate that you were going to get f***ed somewhere down the line.

Ball player gets Beaver ban after drunken naked tasering

Mark 65

Description

The news article linked to describes him as an "offensive lineman". At 136kg and suitably bemulletted, I should say he is.

Australian Sex Party stands proud

Mark 65

Not just laziness

When you have 84 candidates to put in preferential order, how exactly do you go about this? It's not as simple as you think when considering the knock-on effects that you wish to avoid. Couple this with an unnoticed error meaning the ballot is worthless and it's not hard to see why people put the preferential above the line.

84 is really taking the piss. There is only 6 places up for grabs each election (per state) I believe.

Mark 65

Pun intended?

"So all the sex party has to do to counter it is be entirely reasonable and laid back."

Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash

Mark 65

@AC

"They were running Windows. Not on the plane of course. Those usually have three separate independent embedded (non-windows) systems for fail over purposes.

The plane should however, never have been allowed to take off.

And that decision was made by the central computer of the airline."

From reading the article the pilots should have actually picked up issues and aborted the take-off. A bug-ridden control system is one thing, two complacent pilots in control is another.

Shuttleworth spears Natty Narwhal for Ubuntu 11.04

Mark 65

@AC

Thanks, but I am well aware that Linux is the kernel not the distro. To the average man on the street Linux is what you install and it comes in different distro flavours, but to them it's all "Linux". It may not be technically correct but that's life.

With regards lightweight distros, this kind of ignores the point I was making and that is that people often accuse Windows of bloat but the various distros all seem to be going the same way. It should also be noted that some of the other desktops can be much more of a pain in the arse to use than Gnome or KDE. I certainly found XCFE not to my liking after using Gnome. The "lesser hardware" of which I speak is a 3GHz P4. That is not really a low-spec machine but the slowdown has been noticeable and extra memory required.

The question is not "can I find a distro to work on this box" but rather "why won't the next version of my current distro work or why does it run like shit?"

As I said - and I stand by this statement as a user of Win7, OSX and 10.04LTS - if Linux distros are merely going to emulate the feature bloat of Windows (albeit a step or two behind size-wise) then users may as well just carry on using what they are familiar with. It holds little attraction in this regard especially given the bundling of <latest windows> with new hardware.

It seems that in order to try and attract new users they are treading the fine line of trying to feature match the system they target to attract its users without becoming a mirror of it. Maybe not all distros do this but the more popular ones certainly do.

I believe the Linux ecosystem is fine and doesn't need to mirror the bloat and empty wow-graphics arena as it has it's own unique selling points: the community; the security; the price; the freedom. With the update to 10.04LTS I think the Ubuntu desktop look-and-feel is pretty much there when compared to previous releases. It just needs a more coordinated marketing perhaps - see how eager MS were to keep XP alive when Linux distros were shipped with netbooks? They soon killed off that worthy proposal.

All said, I think Canonical are doing a fine job.

Mark 65

Natty

"Ubuntu 11.04 will take advantage of "modern" graphics to improve the look-and-feel."

As long as the distro doesn't start getting a little more middle-aged spread. With each upgrade my machines get slower and slower. I though that linux was supposed to be good for lesser hardware but if it's just going to follow the Windows model of development albeit with better multi-user model then it's wasting everyone's time.

Woman sues to force exposure of YouTube bullies

Mark 65

In other news

"Someone also posted clips on YouTube that showed her in a small-budget independent movie."

Don't want people seeing it, then don't film it for distribution. Small-budget independent movie sounds like porn.

Electric mass-driver catapults to beat Royal Navy cuts?

Mark 65

@SkippyBing

The other issue is that aircraft carriers only work as a launch platform provided you do not need to traverse foreign uncontrolled airspace. In that case you need to get permission which may not always be granted. In the current context in has been achievable due to Turkey being a friendly and Iraq being controlled.

Mark 65

@JaitcH

"With Cameron trying to out do Thatcher it might come down to catapults OR aircraft."

What a great idea, we could just fling shit from the UK. Old knackered cash for clunkers etc.

"Stop that right now you nasty 3rd-World oppressor with huge hydrocarbon resources or we'll start flinging Austin Princesses at you"

Mark 65
FAIL

Er, no

"We havent been a world power since arguably before the 1900s"

In WWI we had the World's largest navy by far. From a simple internet search...

"By early 1914 the Royal Navy had 18 modern dreadnoughts (6 more under construction), 10 battlecruisers, 20 town cruisers, 15 scout cruisers, 200 destroyers, 29 battleships (pre-dreadnought design) and 150 cruisers built before 1907. "

I'd say that is the armaments of a World power.

Just for the record, w.t.f would the Chinese or Americans invade?

I think you need to calm down a get back to your Greenham Common campsite or wherever it is you "we don't need a military" types hang out these days.

iPad hits Asus Eee PC sales

Mark 65

Me neither

Probably has something to do with them (ASUS) not offering the best spec/price point match compared with other manufacturers. I agree with the previous poster that they ruined it all by stopping linux and using XP then 7 starter. Having the specs hamstrung in terms of RAM doesn't help either - most units I've seen are 1GB. Pointless or what?

Short passwords 'hopelessly inadequate', say boffins

Mark 65

GPU speedups

Just as information about the levels of speedup often quoted by researchers when GPUs rather than CPUs are used I would point readers to this article which contains references to work done by Intel which show, in problems optimised for each platform, a typical speedup of around 3x

Article

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7821

Paper (pdf)

http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1816021&type=pdf&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=11111111&CFTOKEN=2222222

Extract - "kernels" refers to computational problem sets such as FFT, LBM etc.

"In the past few years there have been many studies claiming GPUs deliver substantial speedups (between 10X and 1000X) over multi-core CPUs on these kernels. To understand where such large performance difference comes from, we perform a rigorous performance analysis and find that after applying optimizations appropriate for both CPUs and GPUs the performance gap between an Nvidia GTX280 processor and the Intel Core i7 960 processor narrows to only 2.5x on average. In this paper, we discuss optimization techniques for both CPU and GPU, analyze what architecture features contributed to performance differences

between the two architectures, and recommend a set of architectural features which provide significant improvement in architectural efficiency for throughput kernels."

Mark 65
Black Helicopters

@Bullseyed

"On the other hand, from running a keylogger on my own home computer, I've captured a number of friends email and facebook passwords. Just because I can, not that I do anything with them."

and you've probably broken the law in doing so as I'm sure it'll be capture in some form of interception of communication statute.

Mark 65

and in other news

When someone has a level of access to your machine in order to obtain your password hash they can then crack it. Hardly a leap of faith. Unless I'm missing something, the only use for this would be to obtain access to stored keychains as you already have a root level access to the system.

How does it go when full drive encryption is used?

Wikileaks double dares Pentagon hawks

Mark 65

Maybe I'm missing something

The likelihood of your friends being killed is purely down to the fact they are in the military and on active duty in a combat zone. Unless they are Taliban informants of course, in which case you might have a justifiable grievance against Wikileaks.

Not quite sure how Wikileaks can be getting soldiers killed otherwise with their info. I mean, it's not like the Taliban don't know what the opposition looks like or what combat events they have been party to or even where they're based. The fact that they're probably being helped by factions of a foreign military power means they would likely have access to plenty of information anyhow.

Hackers: 'ColdFusion bug more serious than Adobe says'

Mark 65

Can someone explain

I'm not too cluey in this area but can someone explain to me the circumstances under which you would use ColdFusion rather than any.other software and what it is that it offers you over and above alternatives?

George Lucas names Star Wars Blu-ray release date

Mark 65

Re:Peerless

Just a guess, but maybe he's referring to the master not the compressed retail version

Buxom buttocks bolster Beemer bonnet

Mark 65

Beautiful finish

Nuff said.

Oz greenies rattle politico cage with robocalls

Mark 65

Climate change

The locals are worried about climate change because of recent drought and the fact it gets quite hot for prolonged periods. The cause of this is wholly irrelevant if you can successfully start a bandwagon rolling based on collective ignorance - especially when the country is known as the "land of drought and flood". Might just get a bit wet then a bit hot and dry, no?

If they (especially in places like Queensland) built their houses properly instead of knocking up shitty wooden uninsulated homes that get bloody hot in summer and sodding cold in winter (at least in the south-east) then things might get a little better. I've lived in several and they were all crap - the concept of a breeze flowing through the property is pointless when the breeze is 38 degrees.

As for environmental issues in general, they will never come to the fore as long as the country is utterly reliant on: mining in general; the export of coal; and the use of coal-fired power stations.

Conroy, Family First isolated on Oz internet filter

Mark 65

Ahhh, but

"Note, there were other FREE filtering softwares available AT THE SAME TIME.

For a modest cost, more with a greater range of features available AT THE SAME TIME."

They were probably made by foreigners. If it doesn't have "Australian Made, Australian Owned" plastered over it then you can forget it. Pricey, inept, locally made shite obviously beats out industry leader/standard every time. The joys of national insularity and blinkered xenophobic thinking.

Anti-virus defences even shakier than feared

Mark 65

These days

There is less reason these days to run as an admin in windows as 7 will happily pop up a prompt box for you to escalate your privileges. This means you can run as a pleb and the appearance (note I didn't say the underlying architecture) is much the same as OSX or Linux in this regard. It's more the hang-time of XP that's the issue.

Microsoft to set record with next Patch Tuesday

Mark 65

@AC, regarding MS testing

The reason for so many vulnerabilities comes down to 2 words

Legacy code.