Posts by sisk

TEN THINGS Google believes you believe about Glassholes and wishes you didn't

It doesn't seem unreasonable that someone using Glass with prescription lenses be expected to carry ordinary specs for just such occasions

Your lenses must be less expensive than mine. That or your income is significantly more than mine. My glasses cost more than my smart phone (yes, I paid full price, no it's not a cheapy -- It's a Galaxy S2 in case you're curious). I have only one pair and because of my particular eye problems they tend to get replaced every year or two do to my prescription changing. My insurance usually covers them, but I'd pay full price if I wanted a second pair. If I tacked on the extra cost to get Glass on my eyeglasses (which insurance would not cover) I can promise you I'd not be buying a second pair for when I couldn't wear them. My budget couldn't handle it. (Incidently, that's also why I won't be buying Glass any time in the foreseeable future.)

Monkey steals iPod touch, loses interest in minutes

I know a kid by that name. Not THIS kid mind you, unless he was on vacation very far from home. It is spring break in these parts, but I rather doubt that particular family has the finances to vacation in New Zealand since his mother's a widow.

Beastie Boys settle with toy maker over Girls copyright dispute

Let this be a lesson

If you use someone's creation without asking permission and they decide to be nice and politely ask you to stop instead of immediately executing their legal options then the proper response is not to sue them. If you do they're going to countersue and win.

What do I get out of this whole thing? First, the Beasties have a little more respect from me (since they sent a polite letter saying 'please stop infringing our stuff' instead of a DMCA demand). Second, my daughter will never have Goldieblocks.

Flying Toaster screen savers return on GitHub

Re: Burn in was easy to achieve

Exactly.

There was a brief period where CRTs were cheaper than hard drives, I used to use them for backups. Just leave your document open 48 hours then it was permanently stored on the screen.

In the end I found that storing CRTs in the basement was a very cost effective way to manage our backups, and was promoted for saving the company over a million dollars. My replacement was burning CRTs all the way up to 1998. Good times.

You're a couple weeks early for April 1.

I have trouble believing you'd do this rather than just printing the documents in question if you were going to go that route. Funny story though.

Re: Burn in even in LCDs

If I'm not mistaken early LCDs were even worse about burn in than CRTs. That could just be an artifact of my memory though, or possibly the fact that I'm comparing 1st gen LCDs to late gen CRTs.

Re: here's a challenge:

There must be a way to keep CPU and GPU load up during idle periods even in this day and age.

Surely you can think of more useful ways to do that than a screen saver. Mining? Folding? Calculating pi out to 10 billion significant digits?

Re: Burn in was easy to achieve

I was going to say the same thing. Every CRT I've ever seen that was hooked up to a DOS system back in the day had burn in, and a healthy chunk of the ones that were hooked up to Windows 3.x did to. The worst I've seen was a 60 inch big screen set up for public information with that annoying "It is now safe to turn off your computer" notice that Windows 95.

The burn in on my one of old monitors showed me exactly where I was the night I fell asleep playing Nethack.

They accused him of inventing Bitcoin. Now, Nakamoto hires lawyer to clear his name

From what I've seen of the story behind the story it would certainly seem that due diligence was missing and intentional misinterpretation of quotes were abundant in the writing of the article that named him as the Bitcoin creator. I don't have anywhere near the full picture, of course, but from the bit of it I do have it looks like a slam dunk libel case at the very least. No doubt the rest of the picture will come out in court (unless Newsweek settles).

iPhone 6 FEELS your heat, wetness... and it'll TELL Apple – report

Conspiracy?

Pressure and moisture sensors? They're just finding out how many people love their iPhones just a little too much....

Target ignored hacker alarms as crooks took 40m credit cards – claim

Re: Minor correction

If they treat their staff better than Walmart then it's worth paying a bit more, especially if the alternative is to shop at Walmart.

It'd be hard not to, wouldn't it?

Re: Minor correction

Really if you want to be totally accurate, it's were the slightly more affluent white trash go shopping.

Not really. If you want to buy things like cookware or soap or bed sheets or coffee makers in a lot of areas in the US your choices are Wal-Mart, Dollar General, or Target. There's simply nowhere else in town to get these sorts of things and Target is the best choice of the three by far. Unless, of course, you abandon brick and mortar stores entirely and order everything online.

I will say this much in their favor: I gave up on this kind of system a long time ago. Every one I've ever worked with will flood you with false positives to the point that you'd never know it if there was a real one, even on the least paranoid settings. An admin can't be expected to take an intrusion alert seriously when they've been getting 10,000 intrusion alerts every day for a month.

Re: Minor correction

Think of Target as equivalent to Walmart - except with a smaller selection of the same cheap merchandise, and most of it priced 30% to 60% higher than Walmart.

Actually Target generally carries slightly higher end brands than Wal-Mart. Which is not to say it's high quality stuff by any means -- it's not hard to get higher end than the rock bottom garbage Wal-Mart sells. A bit of anecdotal evidence from my experience: the last pair of work khakis I bought from Wal-Mart, at $25, lasted about 4 months before they deteriorated to the point that I was embarrassed to be seen in public in them. The last pair I bought at Target, for $40, have lasted me 2 years so far and show no signs of wearing out any time soon. Where there is direct crossover between the two the prices are comparable, at least for my local stores.

Minor correction

Unless it's an artifact of differing dialects between the US and UK, Target is a department store, not a supermarket. In the US a 'supermarket' is usually a store that primarily sells foodstuffs. While Target does have a little food it's far from their primary product.

Microsoft closing in on Apache's web server crown

Yes like for like IIS is more secure for Apache and is great for things like PCI compliance but IIS will also do more than Apache such as borwser/server interaction like Node.js so depending on the setup is it more secure?

Are you sharing whatever you're smoking? Allow me, as a web developer who uses both IIS and LAMP servers (depending on the exact situation), to correct some of your misconceptions.

First, Apache and IIS can both be locked down very well. It just takes an admin who knows what they're doing. The only way I'd say IIS is more secure than Apache is if we're talking about an admin who doesn't understand Apache's config files. The opposite is also true, at least for modern IIS systems (all bets are off if you're still running IIS 5). Second, it is possible to run Node.js on Apache. Perhaps not as straight forward as getting it up and running on IIS, but it is possible. Third, PCI compliance is an equal headache on either system in my experience.

Boffins demo FIVE MICRON internal combustion engine

Efficiency?

Aren't there already nanometer scale electric 'motors' (using the term loosely here) in existence and wouldn't they be more efficient than this? I just can't imagine that doing electrolysis then burning O2 & H is as efficient as just using the electricity directly would be.

Blurred lines: Android e-ink mobe claims TWO-WEEK battery life

Neat idea

Utterly useless for me, of course. The way I use my smartphone doesn't lend itself to e-ink I'm afraid. Still a neat idea though.

'Mommy got me an UltraVibe Pleasure 2000 for Xmas!' South Park: Stick of Truth

I know it's probably not going to be popular, but....

Am I alone in finding a problem with a franchise that goes out of its way to be as offensive to as many people as possible and counts on dick and fart type jokes for its humor?

Roll up, roll up for the Reg Readers' Ball

Pity

I'm nowhere near London. In fact I've got this great big pond plus half a continent between me and you. I guess I'm just going to have to miss out on this one.

I NEVER DONE BITCOIN, says bloke fingered by new Newsweek

My one encounter with our local journalists involved a massive misquote. It was nothing to write home about as it was just a quote on my opinion of a local event, but what I said and what showed up in the paper weren't even similar. I always just assumed that it was just the local journalists being incompetent.

Your 'funny' cat pics are weighing down the web, so here's a better JPEG encoder from Mozilla

This is huge!

A 10 percent reduction in image sizes without having to make any other changes? Yes please. Now if we could just get HTML5 video standardized and do the same to videos....

HTML is a sexually transmitted disease, say many Americans

Re: Or . . .

I was thinking that I'd more than likely pick some of those responses myself despite knowing what all the correct answers are just because they're funny. Though you are wrong about one thing: I don't think the amusement hit would be 10 seconds. More like 3. Maybe. If I'm REALLY bored.

HTML is definately NOT a STD

If HTML were an STD it would almost certainly not get spread very far.

(Also, if anyone finds this web developer's wife's sex drive lying around, please return it to her.)

Bitcoin bank Flexcoin pulls plug after cyber-robbers nick $610,000

Re: And yet...

Hasn't it been down at $20 within the last 12 months? Or was that a few months before?

Not since I started paying attention to it again, but that hasn't quite been 12 months yet.

One of the problems with Bitcoin is we don't have any figures as to what the economy is.

What are you talking about? We have exact figures available on demand for any point in time going all the way back to when the first one was minted.

So we don't know how much real trade happens in BItcoin, how much it gets used for drugs, and how much it's just being hoarded.

'Drugs' would fall under real trade (being illegal doesn't make it any less real). Most hoarders aren't moving their BTC around from wallet to wallet, so that one's not terribly difficult to figure out either.

Without that it's only guesswork that it's a bubble. But good guesswork when you consider that there are several people who've publicly said they're investing tens of millions of dollars into it, and yet daily turnover rarely gets even close to the million mark.

I've no idea if it's a bubble or not, but I'll say this: every nay sayer to Bitcoin thus far predicting a pop in the bubble has been wrong. The market has dipped a few times, but there hasn't been anything so drastic as to call it a popping bubble, and it has recovered pretty quickly from the few events that have come close.

If everyone who's investing in it leaves at the same time then the values will tank, but isn't the same true of most investments? In that regard the value of Bitcoin is much like the value of fine diamonds. On their own they're worthless, if pretty, rocks. But because people want them (and because a certain company with a near monopoly has spent the last century manipulating the market) they have a much higher value than they otherwise would.

Bitcoin has value because people want them. Whether they want them because its an investment or because its an unregulated currency is irrelevant. If that changes then Bitcoin loses its value. If it remains true then Bitcoin will continue to have value. If the Bitcoin user base can continue to grow as it has the last year or so I'm inclined to say that it will continue to have value.

Am I going to run out and buy some? No, probably not. A volatile market is a high risk market and I don't have the money to blow in high risk markets. Do I think those who do are 'gullible'? Nope, not at all. They understand the risks and they play the game. Do I think less of they people who point and sneer at the people making these high risk investments? Yes, yes I do. Those 'gullible' people who bought Bitcoins a couple weeks ago are looking at a 3:2 return on their investment if they sell today. And if the trend holds it'll be more like 2:1 by the end of the week. That leaves the people calling them gullible looking like they've got a case of sour grapes.

And yet...

Bitcoin values have nearly recovered to what they were before the Mt Gox fiasco. The people who bought Bitcoins a couple weeks ago when they were down under $500 are going to be laughing all the way to the bank. Except for the ones who used Flexcoin, of course.

And then there's me, who let my wife talk me out of spending the money.

Microsoft to get in XP users' faces with one last warning

Re: End of support, not end of life!

Remind me, how long is the support cycle for $linux_of_choice? Are there ANY 13 year old linux distributions receiving security updates and patches from their creators now?

No regular Linux user would let their machine get that out of date. That's the advantage of having a more technically minded user base. You do have a point though.

And no, I don't believe it's possible to do an in-place upgrade from one to a current distribution any more easily than the loops that have to be jumped through getting XP upgraded to 8.1.

I've never done an upgrade on one quite that far out of date, but I've jumped from Sarge (3.1) to Squeeze (6) on Debian (the machine in question had been in storage for several years). All it took was:

su

Password:

apt-get dist-upgrade

Unpaid domestic sysadmin duties??

Forget it. I told all my family years ago that if it takes me more than 5 minutes they can pay me like anyone else would or they can take it somewhere else.

A few of them thought it rude of me at first, till I started asking them to do things related to their professions for me. Funny how quickly someone understands your position when you do that. The only ones left who get gratis computer support are my wife and kids.

X-rated Android antics: Motorola's Moto X puts boot in chunky brother

Is it just me....

...or does that look more like an IPhone than the Galaxy S that Apple had such a hissy fit over?

Relief when urine trouble becomes latest capacity-sharing service

Gotta say...

That had better be one sparklingly clean bathroom for it to be a factor in my vote for any kind of elected office (or a disgustingly dirty one, but I rather doubt he'd be advertising it were that the case).

US gov claims it spent TOO MUCH on wiretaps – and blames SPRINT

Trial by jury?

I can't say I think much of the odds of the government winning a trial by jury over fees they paid for wiretapping. That is unless they get a jury that's been living under a rock or something. By and large the American public is unhappy about the mass data collection. At least the portion of it that pays attention is.

Yes: You CAN use your phone as a satnav while driving – appeals court

Stopped in heavy traffic is still driving

I don't know about California, but in these parts you're still considered to be driving if you're just stuck in traffic. To be (legally) safe you have to actually pull off before you tie up your hands with something.

All things being equal though checking a map on your phone is probably safer than checking a paper map while driving. Remember when people used to do THAT while going down the highway?

Worlds that could support LIFE found among 715 new planets

Not suprised

I've long believed that the odds of our solar system being somehow special were pretty slim. This just gives me a bit of confirmation of what I already suspected.

Also, with all those planets out there that could potentially support life as we know it the odds that we're alone in the universe are getting smaller and smaller all the time. If only the nearest neighbors weren't so far away.

The Sun ERUCTATES huge ball of GAS at 4 MILLION MPH

Re: What does X mean?

He uses goggles, you use a satellite...I'll use Google. Image search that is. (Who can afford a flipping satellite on my salary?)

MtGox boss vows to keep going despite $429m Bitcoin 'theft'

Re: Consider themselves lucky

Considering that the crash is largely a result of Mt Gox's woes, I'd have to say no.

Re: Death threats - WTF?

I say LET'S GET HIM...

....a hairless cat.

MtGox has VANISHED. So where have all the Bitcoins gone?

Re: electricity wasting global ponzi scheme

One might as well criticise paper money, because of having to cut down trees.

Technically I don't think there's any currency in the world that's still printed on paper. They all use some sort of paper-like fabric (the US dollar is printed on something akin to denim for example) or plastic (like the Austrailian dollar).

Re: And yet we're still to believe...

Would you trust a bank with your cash, without a government deposit guarantee?

I don't trust them even WITH the government deposit guarantee, but in the modern world it's pretty hard to get by without at the very least a prepaid debit card, which is, of course, just a checking account that you don't have checks for.

Do I trust the exchanges? Let's put it this way: I have about $4 worth of cryptocurrency, most of it in litecoins. (that was yesterday. It's probably worth less today). That's the most I've ever had. Would I be upset if it all went missing? Probably. Would I really be affected? No.

DARPA wants help to counter counterfeits

SHIELD?

Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division surely.

Yeah, I'm making comic book references in the El Reg comments section. Surely a sign that it's beer o'clock.

Climate change will 'cause huge increase in murder, robbery and rape'

Re: (“Fair” has never been a verb.)

Since you’re speaking as an authority on that subject, which grammar rules did Shakespeare make up, in comparison to the grammatical rules of Elizabethan English?

He basically invented an entire pidgin of Elizabethan English. The differences between what he wrote and the way others spoke and wrote at the time are far too numerous to list.

Re: (“Fair” has never been a verb.)

I suggest that you check Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127 before making that claim.

Consulting Shakespeare on grammar is like consulting Wikipedia on science. He made up his own grammar rules much of the time. As a man with an acting degree that includes two semesters of classes dedicated to Shakespeare and over a dozen Shakespearian shows under my belt* I feel I can speak as an authority on that subject.

*Admittedly the classes and the plays were all about one and a half subjective lifetimes ago. Certainly they were two careers and an entire second run through college ago. On a somewhat related note if anyone ever invents a time machine go slap some sense into my 19 year old self for me so he'll pick a realistic major.

"Lead pollution is the cause of quite a lot of crime, and we have the USA to thank for proving this."

You don't know that and it hasn't been proved.

Playing devils advocate here.

There is more than a casual relationship between lead levels and violent crime. There is the correlation, which of course is weak, but it becomes much stronger when you pair it with the well known fact that one of the most prominent symptoms of lead poisoning is heightened aggression.

So, basically, you take the well known and documented fact that lead poisoning causes aggression, combine it with a chart that shows a strong correlation between violent crime rates and environmental lead, and you have a pretty strong case, even if it's not rock solid proof.

Correlation may be weak, but it's not something to be dismissed entirely, especially in the presence of other supporting evidence.

Re: We'd better start spending the money on adapting...

Radical I know but if the science is settled and you must be mad to deny the catastrophe

If the science is settled then you would never know it from scientific journalism, which is all most of us have to go from. Hate to say it but if there truly is a consensus in the scientific community the public at large has yet to see it. We're still seeing the constant back and forth between the "its natural and nothing to worry about" and the "we've doomed ourselves with fossil fuels" camps in articles like this one. One day, when I'm retired with no kids in the house and have all the time in the world and nothing better to do (about 30-35 years from now probably, and I suspect the debate will still be raging even if the oil reserves have run dry and the effects of climate change have become catastrophically obvious by then) I'll sit down and do the proper research and figure out the truth of the matter.

Re: causes of crime are so opaque?

Correction:

chanceOfGettingAwayWith(crime) > riskThreshhold(self)

I've known some people for whom riskThreshhold is as low as 0.1 and others where the risk threshold is infinity. Just saying.

Re: Difficult to take this serious

See also Sweden, with sky-high rape statistics because of a uniquely victim-friendly justice system

Not to mention that in Sweeden 'rape' includes situations where the 'victim' consents at the time but later changes their mind. At least that's how I understand it.

Nokia launches Euro ANDROID invasion, quips: 'Microsoft knew what they were buying'

Re: Never mind that!

You mean that GUI that runs like crap and is difficult to use even on a desktop machine?

Android succeeded because it isn't KDE or Gnome bodged to work on a phone

Only an utter fool would try to make KDE or Gnome work on a mobile device with a touchscreen. There are MUCH better DEs (or, in some cases, just WMs) out there for that particular application. TWM wouldn't be a terrible option, but I think you could get better yet. Mind you I'm just going off the top of my head. I looked, briefly, at putting Debian on a phone once and decided it would be more effort than it was worth. And I wasn't even planning on still using it as a phone.

You'll NEVER guess who's building the first Ubuntu phones in 2014

Ubuntu's a turd. I rather like Debian, hence why I'd use it. My experience with Ubuntu is that it falls far short of the stability that I get with Debian while at the same time not really making it any easier to use.

Enterprising French chap cranks up €100k 'flying car'

This looks suspiciously like the Parajet Skycar (or Skyrunner now I guess). They've been taking preorders for years. So far as I know that one was the first practical 'flying car' yet no one ever seemed to be talking about it, even after they made a successful trip of over 1k miles in it. That and last time I looked they were taking preorders at half the price of this one.

Friends don't do tech support for friends running Windows XP

Re: WIN 95?

Why is the phrase "backward compatability" such a taboo subject at MS?

It's rare that I come to the defense of MS, but it is my believe that anyone who asks that particular question has never tried to implement backward compatibility. If you think Windows is bloated now just wait till they start trying to support everything that ever ran on any version of Windows.

Microsoft asks pals to help KILL UK gov's Open Document Format dream

Re: Kettle, met pot, pot meet kettle

75% of the server markets

The rest of what you say rings true, but I suspect that 75% of the server market is based on sales. There's a healthy chunk of the server market not reflected in the sales data. I strongly suspect Microsoft's true share of the server market is closer to the 45-50% mark, but that's only a suspicion. I have neither the time nor the resources nor the care to properly research it without a dependence on sales data.

Re: Kettle, met pot, pot meet kettle

I will believe them to be interoperable on the day when libreoffice will successfully read-in a DOCX index and bilbiography and vice versa.

Er....the difficulty in doing just that kind of thing is sort of why OpenXML isn't one of the formats mentioned if I'm not mistaken.

With the practical demise of KDE and Koffice there is no second implementation for ODF anyway so it fails to be an open standard.

Calligra Suite, AbiWord, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, and I'm sure a few I'm not familiar with all fully support ODF. There's 4 implementations right off the top of my head (three if you want to count LibreOffice and OpenOffice as the same one since they have a common ancestrial code base -- a case which could be made). If StarOffice is still around (no idea, haven't look at it in ages) that'd be another one.