Posts by sisk

Boffins' brilliant plan: CONCRETE COMPUTERS

Whee! Now we have a way to build electronics into the building itself!

(Now who's going to pay to replace the wall in 5 years when the computer built into the cement that forms it inevitably quits working?)

'Catastrophic failure' of 3D-printed gun in Oz Police test

Re: "The point is it has now been shown these things deliver a bullet with lethal speed. "

I'm hardly responsible for the fact criminals have always tended to be pretty dumb lazy and lack the conviction to back up the ease with which it has always been possible to improvise a ballistic weapon.

Having seen guns made in prison, I have to say your point is not valid. Criminals are, and have been for a long, long time, quite capable of improvising projectile weapons. Frankly a prison-made 12 gauge is both deadlier and more reliable than the Liberator. Judging from the examples I saw and being somewhat familiar with 3D printing they probably take a lot less time to make to.

Is the next-gen console war already One?

Re: Deal breaker

Yes, that is how Steam works (except I think most of the games are per user, not per install), but that's on PC games. PC games provide a far better over all experience than console games (in my opinion, of course). And honestly most games on Steam are less expensive than their console counterparts to begin with (or at least the ones I've looked at, with a few notable exceptions).

Deal breaker

This nonsense of having to buy a license on pre-owned games is a deal breaker for me. Unless the person who bought it previously gets to continue playing it after I've bought (which, really, would be an even dumber move on Microsoft's part in my opinion) I would view that as an abusive business practice. You don't get to sell the same disc over and over again. That's just pure greed.

Then again, who the hell has time to sit and play games anymore, and who would want to join in to the fight between the mini-mes for the TV even if I did?

The BOFH is BACK: And it's cloudy with a 90% chance of beatings

Ah, well done. I have my BOFH fix finally.

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

Re: @sisk "football as soccer"

@Jan Actually I've never been to the UK. In fact I've rarely been out of Kansas. I'll have to take your word for it.

Only by Americans. And morons. It's correctly pronounced something much more like 'lay-sir'.

Actually as English lacks a formal body to define such things (unlike some languages) all regional dialects pronounce things correctly within their own dialect. (Granted some regional dialects are more intelligent sounding than others. While it may be correct in the regional dialect 'Ya'll git in the truck. We're goin' ta the fishin' hole.' doesn't exactly make the speaker sound like a PhD candidate.)

Therefore even the rather absurd pronunciation of 'football' as 'soccer' and 'mutant rugby' as 'football' by Americans is correct when in America. Though personally I think 'handegg' is a more appropriate pronunciation for the mutant rugby game they play over here.

COLD FUSION is BACK with 'anomalous heat' claim

Probably snake oil, but...

IF....wait, hold on....IF....nope, still not a big enough if.

Anyway, if he's actually invented ColdFusion in a box he would be wise to keep its inner working secret for as long as possible. If he can prove that it works and start selling it before he has to reveal how it works he stands to make a fortune. If not....well, how much did Tesla make off the radio?

If you've bought DRM'd film files from Acetrax, here's the bad news

So let me get this straight. People have bought the movies - not rented, but bought - with the understanding that they would be able to watch it as often as they wanted for ever. Now the company's saying no only is that no longer the case unless you run Windows and will settle for SD (and really not even then because eventually that machine will need replaced), so these poor sods are out that money.

First, this is why I refuse to buy anything with a DRM scheme that continually checks into a server that might be gone in a few years.

Second, will someone please explain to me why this type if DRM isn't illegal? People sure as hell don't get what they think they're buying with it.

They WANT to EAT YOUR COMPUTER - welcome your ANT overlords

Re: Solution???

After that description I had to look them up. Jack Russell + Tiger Tank indeed, with a bit of cute thrown in.

At the risk of offending the Apple fanbios...

You've got a species that mindlessly flocks to whatever electronic device they hear is the place to be, consequences be damned. Clearly this is a species that prefers Macs (and other Apple devices) over PCs.

AT&T to relax restrictions on FaceTime, video chat

Re: ??

I left Verizon because when I needed a new phone they were going to force a new plan on me with it. This new plan would have had me paying more for 1gb of data than I had previously paid for unlimited. Frankly, I got pissed and walked out of their office after a short conversation wherein I told the sales person that it wasn't right to me more for less and received a barely civil response. In my area the choices are Verizon, AT&T, Westlink, and United Wireless (you can be forgiven not having heard of those last two, which speaks volumes for their coverage -- I was with Westlink at one point. Never again. Roaming charges out the ying yang even in my home town). The one remaining option, which I'll be switching to the next time I need a new phone, is Straight Talk. $45/month prepaid for unlimited everything and they use AT&T's network.

Don't Panic! Google FCC filing reveals mystery media device

H=Hitchhiker

840=a harmonic of 42 by some creative math (8, 4 in the 2nd position [4*2], 0 to indicate the position of the factor in the string)

No doubt it will come with at app, the icon for which will be a thumb, to flag down passing spaceships.

(Yes, yes, I know, I'm trying too hard. My only excuse is it's Monday.)

Marks & Sparks accused of silently bonking punters over the tills

So....

Anyone still thing NFC on credit cards is a good idea?

Mine's the one with the big, red 'Told you so!' sign rolled up in the pocket.

Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans

I'm no lawyer, but I'm fairly certain what Nintendo's done here won't stand up if challenged in a US court. I would think it would fall under the same legal doohickey (technical legal term, I'm sure) that allows reviewers to show scenes from movies they're reviewing. After all, a video of a game offers a very, very small portion of the total experience.

Then again, I'm no lawyer. What do I know?

Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?

I don't know where you're getting your info

I did a paper on the subject for a college class I took a couple years back (no, I'm not that young, this is my second go round in college). In the taste tests they conducted before releasing New Coke it consistently beat out Coke Classic. There were about a dozen Pepsi execs who got a chance to try it just before it was released thanks to their industrial spies, and they commented that it was better than Pepsi, which at the time was trouncing Coke in the Pepsi Challenge. However when it was released the backlash against Coke for changing their product was extreme.

As a child of the 80s I was, at the time, young enough that I drank whatever soda the grown ups would let me have. And I distinctly remember telling my grandmother that that Coke Classic was better because it had a cooler can, so I think we probably shouldn't trust what my taste buds had to say on the matter.

Re: Only the second?

Windows ME? I refuse to acknowledge the existence of any such product. I've been trying to forget that nightmare for over a decade now and the whole world seems determined to make me believe it was more than a bad dream.

I don't think Microsoft has had any New Coke moments. By all accounts, New Coke was better than old Coke (it certainly faired better in taste tests and had PepsiCo worried when the industrial spies managed to get their hands on a couple cans before it hit the market) but old Coke carried a sentimental value that Coke just couldn't get past.

In contrast, Vista and Windows 8 are both train wrecks. Vista's performance was unacceptably terrible, and with Windows 8 Microsoft stupidly threw out 25 years of UI design experience to foist an interface designed for phones and tablets onto PC users. That, to me, qualifies Microsoft as a special kind of stupid.

Life on Mars means subsisting on grim diet of turd-garden spinach

Re: Hmmmm.

Actually it's insurmountable debt caused by Monsanto's monopolistic practices in a lot of the world.

....grown largely in their own excrement.

Growing food this way would make someone very sick. Compared to the animal dung used for fertilizer here on Earth human excrement is loaded with living bacteria, many of which would be extremely hazardous to our health if it came into contact with our food. We make up for this by having sterile urine (most animals do not).

At any rate, I'd have a very low expectation of survival for someone trying to subsist on food grown from their own poo.

Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are way more fun

Re: Or...

@Jediben:

You only drink 2 cups of coffee a day? Good grief man, how have you not throttled your coworkers yet? Mine know to avoid me until I finish at least my third cup.

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Re: " Mexico is one of the best examples of "Gun control doesn't work" in the world" (@ sisk

@Mephistro: Regardless of the other factors, if gun control worked Mexico would have a very low incidence of gun crimes. Guns are almost completely illegal there, yet people are shot in the streets every day. Ditto for Chicago.

And to the AC who made the long, intelligent sounding post about how gun control helps: the statistics are clear on the matter. Violent crime increases when strict gun control is implemented. If you stop focusing on gun crimes (which, of course, are reduced when there are fewer guns around) and focus on all violent crimes that becomes clear. A .05% murder rate with very few gun related deaths is far worse than a .02% murder rate wherein most of the murders are committed with guns.

Re: Won't someone think of

Um....it IS an undisputed fact, the only contradictions in the Supreme Court's rulings have been whether or not states have the ability to regulate firearms (the have consistently ruled that the federal government doesn't in all pertinent cases throughout history), and the most recent ruling on the subject (McDonald v Chicago) holds that no government at any level in the US can deny US citizens the right to own a gun without due process. At no point in history has the Supreme Court ever ruled that individuals do not have the right to bear arms.

As for the notion that this is a quaint law no longer relevant, I happen to believe that a well armed populace is just as necessary today as it was 200 years ago, and for pretty much the same reasons as it was back then.

Eg a series of gun amnesties alongside a law that says firearm possession carries eg 10 years in jail and firearm selling carries 20.

Such a law would immediately trigger the kind of armed rebellion I was talking about in my original post. Or even if it didn't, it would get repealed after the following Congressional election cycle during which, if history is any indication, all the Congressmen who voted for it would be shown the door. It's happened every time a major gun control legislation has been passed.

Re: Anecdotal evidence

Surely Shirley isn't a Darwin Award. Shirley is surely the new office girl that all the surly, assuredly single guys have been bothering, unaware that she surely wants to date none of them. Surely Shirley would resent the comparison to the Darwin Awards.

I'm sure after that I should surely just go.

Re: Won't someone think of

Actually there's a Supreme Court ruling from the 1800s dealing with that. They ruled, specifically, that the right to keep and bear arms was a right of individuals, not just militias. Said ruling is still in effect.

On that note, Mexico is one of the best examples of "Gun control doesn't work" in the world. Right up there with Chicago.

Actually kids have been making DIY guns for a long time. I'll bet if you live in America and ask around most of us know someone who shoved a bullet into a metal pipe (or, in my dad's case, a hollowed out ball-point pen) and whacked the primer with a nail. It's not one of those things that all boys do growing up, but its not at all unheard of either.

Also, in the US you don't need any special license to make a gun provided you intend to keep it for yourself. You need the license to sell or give away said homemade gun, but not to build it. Just a relative little factoid.

I agree with most of what you say. I wouldn't want to be within 100 yards of someone shooting a Liberator but.....

The only thing that will slow them down at all is their desire to avoid killing or hurting you in the process

No, not quite. 1000 assorted shotguns, sport rifles, hunting rifles, and pistols make up a hell of a lot more firepower than 100 proper assault weapons ('proper' assault weapons being the sorts of guns that a real soldier would carry onto the battlefield, not AR-15s, which are sport rifles). That's about the odds that the authorities would be looking at if they ever decided to try to disarm the American population. Even that assumes that the whole of the armed forces followed their orders instead of choosing to keep to their oath to defend the Constitution, which is extremely unlikely. Make no mistake about it. There would be a lot of blood shed on both sides, but in the end the feds wouldn't be able to win that one. They would be simply be too outnumbered. They realize this, which is why I'm not worried about anyone coming for my guns.

Dark blue side of the Force used to quell Star Wars nerd clash

Re: Pretty old news

So the embarrassing article the next day was the Revenge of the Fifth?

Re: Thank God they were Star Wars geeks

I know a guy who can attest to that. Or rather I met him once. When he broke into my house. While I was rearranging my collection of sharp weaponry. Which includes a 1/2 sized replica Bat'leth.

Android is a mess and needs sprucing up, admits chief

Re: Perspective of a recent Android

These are not Sony-related

At least some of them are. I've had 4 Android devices now (2 tablets and 2 phones). They all supported USB mass storage out of the box through the interface built into Android itself. Apps CAN be moved to the SD card with Android, though most manufacturers (or at least Motorola, Samsung, and B&N -- one of my tablets began it's life as a Nook) remove that capability when they build their stock ROMs. Both of my phones, a Motorola Droid and a Galaxy S2, have gotten along quite well with the Bluetooth built into my car, including PBAP, and the music I stream to my car via A2DP is equal to the quality I get from playing a CD. My VoIP calls work just like any other phone call. I can't speak to GSM video calls as basically everyone I know had smart phones already by the time I broke down and got one.

I disagree with this entire article. I happen to love the end user experience offered by Android. Apple's offering is, in my opinion, a pain in the ass. It might be easier to use for the technically inept, but for me trying to get an iOS device, of any size, to do what I want is an exercise in frustration thanks to their locked down nature.

Emergency spacewalk as ISS takes a leak

Re: mmeier strikes again

basically, the evil version of Eadon

There's a scary thought. Eadon's equally zealotous evil twin. We have the makings of a geeky superhero origin story there....

Ok, sorry, I can't keep a straight face. I just had a mental image of Eadon in a penguin shaped Iron Man style suit built from open source hardware diagrams and powered by Debian Wheezy. Yes, it's been that long a week.

Watchdog: Y'know what Bitcoin really needs? A REGULATOR!

The only way they can rule it out is by making possession of a Bitcoin wallet punishable by similar terms as the above.

As I said, slightly more enforceable (emphasis added since people seem to have missed it last time). Trying to tax and/or track Bitcoins is flat out impossible, but they can outlaw them entirely and throw you in jail if you get caught with a Bitcoin wallet, which is a big if.

That's when they'll just outlaw Bitcoin entirely, which is slightly more enforceable.

Good news: Debian 7 is rock solid. Bad news: It's called Wheezy

Re: Have they fixed the bugs from the last stable release?

1) Can't comment on Nautilus. I hate that program to begin with, so I don't use it (Thunar for the win).

2) I haven't seen that issue with my quad core CPU. Could it be you were using a chipset that wasn't fully supported by the kernel Squeeze used? Just a guess.

3) That almost sounds to me like you don't know how to set up your Xorg settings under Debian. That or you're trying to use a GUI to set it up. I've never tried to use two different adapters, but I do custom resolutions with my card (an older Radeon) with no trouble.

Re: What do people do on these OS's?

What do people do on these OS's?

Pretty much the same things you'd do on a Windows PC or a Mac.

You cannot run any industry standard software such as Photoshop.

If you absolutely have to you can through Wine (and, realistically, Photoshop is web based now and shouldn't care about the OS), but honestly if you want to get away from MS and Apple badly enough and don't mind relearning a few things there's not much Photoshop can do that Gimp can't. (Disclaimer: I do prefer Photoshop now that I've finally broken down and bought it, but I used Gimp in a professional capacity as a web developer for many years).

No decent music editing software

I haven't done a lot of music editing, but I do DJ with Mixxx (very similar to VDJ) 5 nights a week. It can do remixes quite well if you have the talent (I don't, and couldn't do a decent remix with any software...I just play the music). Ardour and Muse are supposed to be good music production programs, but as I said I just play the music. For more basic audio editing capabilities, Audacity works quite well.

No real video editing software.

KDenLive. Feature equivalent to Vegas Pro. I've never had a complaint about it. (Not the only one out there for Linux, just the one I use.)

Cannot run VS

And? You act as if Visual Studio is the end-all be-all of IDEs with that statement. Even when working in Windows I prefer to avoid VS if I can.

The "office" equivalents are all flaky.

FUD. LibreOffice is rock solid and I haven't had any trouble opening from or saving to MS Office formats with it in years.

I understand that many of these varieties are free but is this "cost" not offset by all the hassle?

Fair enough question. There is a degree of hassle involved with learning a new system and having to learn new programs with it. Is it worth it? For some, yes. For others, no.

Why go through all the fuss one reads about getting basic stuff like audio and wifi working? In one post here someone said " I managed to burn a DVD".

I often wonder about that myself. Put simply, there is no fuss for me with that sort of thing. Audio, wifi, DVD burning, and all that sort of stuff just works for me in Debian. It has for years across probably a dozen different machines, from laptops to rackmount servers. I don't understand why people have those kinds of issues.

Re: Good news: Stable; Bad news: Name

Actually when you consider that Debian takes it's names from Toy Story characters, Wheezy is a very good name. At last we have a release of Linux that's named after a penguin.

Mine's the one with the spare squeaker in the pocket.

Re: I think I'll wait for a while...

Meh, I've been running Wheezy for ages as the testing branch. It's stable, no worries there. If you stick to stable with Debian you'll never be an early adopter. You have to run testing at least and maybe even unstable or (getting really scary here) experimental for that.

Re: But what can it do?

There is a measurable "cost" in terms of the hours taken to to a major software install - even if no money changes hands.

Hours? I think not. This is Debian we're talking about.

user@machine >su

Enter password

root@machine >apt-get dist-upgrade

(You can walk away now. You're done. The machine can finish updating itself without your help.)

Re: Debian Flavours

I used to run Sid, but after completely hosing my system with apt-get dist-upgrade (Sid was midway through the transition from hotplug to udev at the time) I went back to the relative sanity of testing. My servers, on the other hand, run stable. Actually oldstable now I guess....and I suppose I need to dist-upgrade the one that's still running Lenny now that it's not even oldstable anymore. Anyway, I don't have to touch those servers. The only downtime any of them have had in years were power outage's.

Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only

Uh huh. Nice Adobe. Have fun with that.

Tell me when you find a way for me to use it when I'm offline. Till then I'll be over here using Gimp. It may be a pain in the arse, but it's less so than having to be online to edit my graphics.

Plans for fully 3D-printed gun go online next week

Cue hysteria

These things will be good for a half dozen shots, max, and even if they survive the first shot you won't get a second off. Extreme short range to, with a barrel that size and probably not rifled. If you can get close enough to accurately aim this thing you can probably get close enough to spit in your target's eye.

All in all, I think a shiv carved from a toothbrush would be more dangerous. With it you don't disarm yourself for bystanders to take you down after your first victim.

Not only that, but criminals have been making guns in prison by hand for a very long time now. I've seen some of them with my own eyes (courtesy of a friend of mine who, in the course of guard duty, confiscated them --and if you're wondering he got the warden's permission to show me the confiscation pile before they were destroyed because he thought I might find them interesting, which I did). They're much scarier than this thing in my opinion, and they probably took less time to make.

All it takes to make a gun is a tube and a nail on a sufficiently strong spring or rubber band. My dad used to tell me about the time he made a 1 shot .22 out of a ball point pen. He was 12 at the time (and not a criminal....it was one of those 'neat idea at the time' sorts of stupidity that kids sometimes do).

But OMG IT'S GUN! IT MUST BE EVIL! Bah, I expect better from this crowd than that type of mindless melodramatic hysteria.

Re: Be careful for what you ask for, you might get it!

The NRA may not be a branch of the US Government, but they seem to be able to wield a staggering amount of power over the senate.

As they should, if you understand how the American Government is supposed to work and how many people the NRA represents. As a lobby group they probably represent a larger proportion of American citizens than any two other lobby groups combined (I'm guessing, I don't know the exact numbers, but I know that the NRA has a freaking HUGE membership). They are not like the corporate lobby groups who represent small numbers of people (and non-people -- I don't care what the Supreme Court says about corporate personhood) with large financial stores. They represent vast numbers of 'little guys'. American politicians understand that to piss them off is to piss off a not-insignificant base of voters across both major political parties as well as scores of independents.

Thousands rally behind teen girl cuffed, expelled in harmless 'explosion'

REALLY? We're going to ruin the life of a promising young student over tinfoil and toilet cleaner in a soda bottle? May I please have a plane ticket to Florida to slap some sense into an assistant principal, some cops, and a state prosecutor?

Also, for the record, many of the "capacious prisons of the USA" are already terribly overcrowded. No comment on the reasons other than to say we have a lot of people in prison whom we, as a society, would be better served to put someplace else. (Rehab centers for drug addicts, house arrest for non-violent offenders, and mental hospitals for the just plain disturbed come to mind.)

Fanbois vs fandroids: Punters display 'tribal loyalty'

They've been saying that Apple's going to reclaim the top spot every quarter since they lost it. It hasn't happened yet. Sprinkle salt liberally on this forecast.

Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson

@LilCricket: You're wrong. Your entire post is wrong. I usually try to be less blunt, but there's no getting around it. The only thing you said that's not wrong is 'Stealing is wrong'.

Piracy happens at all income levels and ages. I don't know where you got that silly idea that only rich people pirate games, but get that nonsense out of your head.

While wrong, piracy is not theft. Call it what it is and maybe, just maybe, we can start to make some progress on convincing people that it's wrong. Keep trying to say that it's theft and the people pirating games are going to keep laughing at your sensational attempts to vilify them.

The music industry dug half their grave themselves. They had plenty of studies showing that if you gave people a legal way to buy DRM-free music online they'd do it over downloading them illegally and it still took them the better part of a decade to do it after Napster. When your own research says that people resent DRM to the point of refusing to pay for it but you ignore the research and start chasing away your own customers with it, you have no one but yourself to blame (Aside: are you paying attention Hollywood? You're repeating the music industry's mistakes here). (And for the record, my music collection had 0 growth during that time, aside from a couple CDs I got for Christmas one year). Some DRM is acceptable. CD keys, for instance, are non-intrusive enough that no one minds them. But this new crap of having to be online? I should dang well be able to play my games in single player mode when my ISP has an outage (which happens several times a year...my ISP is crap, but it's the only one in the area able to offer the kind of bandwidth I've become accustomed to).

There is no such thing as an uncrackable system. There never has been nor will there ever be a system that can't be fooled by someone clever enough.

Is this the first ever web page? If not, CERN would like to know

Um....duh....

<html>

<head>

<title>Hello World<title>

<head>

<body>

<p>Hello world</p>

</body>

</html>

Cat ladies turned brand-squatters poke fun at religious right

Re: Deities

Hey AC, leave your politics out of our cat convo! The only politics I want to hear about here is the Basement Kitteh-Grumpy Cat Presidential campaign.