Posts by Dave 126 10662 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
...Self Hemogenizing Swarms, as Iain M. Banks dubbed them? He also used the word 'Smatter' (Smart Matter, IIRC). Other people have used the terms 'Grey Goo', or 'Von Neumann Machines'.
I confess, I didn't read the article - I haven't seen the Force Awakens movie yet, and was scared off by the spoiler warning.
To others who haven't seen the movie, you should avoid Wired.com, since they have spoilers in their headlines.
... let's take five minutes and imagine a near future, a speculative fiction. Let us imagine a near-future in which the whole idea of encryption is irrelevant.
A future in which encryption doesn't matter because so much cctv and drone video footage is collected that the location and behaviour of every citizen is known in real time. In such a scenario the authorities would learn very little from reading (broken) encrypted messages over what they already knew by observing subjects directly.
If this fictional authority has a MagicTechnolgyMachine that stopped all bombs from exploding or guns from firing, it wouldn't need to read the emails of any potential terrorist.
>*ANY* door is a problem, since the effect is the same. A door is a door. It doesn't matter if it's a back door, side door or front door.
Eh? What Vimes has just described is indistinguishable from running over your computer with a steam roller then throwing the remains into a volcano. There has to be *one* door, otherwise you are deleting your data instead of encrypting it. Perhaps you mean you just want a single door, but a door to which only you or your intended correspondent have the key?
I say that in a friendly way. If I come across as pedantic, it because the people who are against back-doors ( i.e. broken encryption) largely have facts and accuracy on their side - especially when compared to politicians!
Arm yourself with a working grasp of statistics, and read newspapers from different parts of the political spectrum, as well as more specialised publications (farming, engineering, science, sociology etc). Go to the pub and listen to people of different walks of life in various trades and professions. Remember that not everyone can afford to go the pub.
It's a device to administer electroshock therapy to shell-shocked (post traumatic stress disorder) soldiers in World War One. Other doctors at the time advocated more discipline, or tried placing lit cigarettes on the restrained patient's tongue. Others doctors did try 'talking therapies'.
Today, we have more former servicemen in prison or who have committed suicide than the national average. Promising treatments for PTSD include gardening, and also the use of MDMA ('Ecstasy'), both combined with talking.
Yep, the old 'echo chamber' effect. It can happen anywhere, even on the Reg at times.
I once had a thought pop into my head - a 'Siamese twin' of a newspaper, with two editors (one of a Guardian persuasion, for example, the other more Daily Mail) and two versions of each story, side by side. By being 'joined at the hip', contested issues *might* be thrashed out more intelligently. Maybe. Just an idle idea.
>A white list experience, will probably be the future for many users. With only accredited, script free sites getting onto the list, or perhaps, a heavily censured portal.
"a heavily censured portal." - effectively this describes paid magazine apps, especially on Apple platforms. I haven't been keeping abreast of how well this working financially for publishers.
Generally, the paying consumer gets less trash, but this is by no means guarenteed - 'paid for' dead-tree newspapers like the Telegraph have been naughty in letting their content be influenced by wider business concerns. What is my source for this accusation? Why, Private Eye, a 'paid for' dead tree-only magazine.
@ WillbeIT
> sorry, not a geek
Don't worry! Quantum physics in general has confused and upset our greatest physicists - though real quantum effects have been used in what is now everyday technology. The jury has been out on this D-Wave machine for a little while, because of the difficulty in proving, or devising tests to prove, that it is faster than the 'classical computers' we use everyday. What D-Wave have never claimed is that their machine can perform Shor's Algorithm.... And this is important. Let's pause here a moment.
Quantum systems can exist such that all their particles are both ON and OFF at the same time ( I'm grossly oversimplifying here), so if it has enough 'quantum bits' (qbits) it could calculate every possible answer to a question at the same time, instead of trying one answer at a time like a normal computer would. The implications for breaking encryption are huge.
Our encryption is based on the difficulty of factorising very big numbers, but an algorithm for doining so quickly using (theoretical) quantum computers to do so has existed for years, and it is called Shor's Algorithm.
What D-Wave claim, and what Google believe they have a use for, is that their machine can find optimisations in quadratic equations.
tl;dr A future quantum computer has the potential to massively upset our computer encryption, but not one based on this machine. There has been a lot of debate amongst academics as to what exactly this machine is doing, but Google - the customer- seem happy with it.
>The decision is a move away from the typical Apple approach of tightly controlling all its products
It's hardly unprecedented:
Apple made Webkit, ResearchKit and Darwin OS open source. FireWire used patents owned by quite a few companies, so wasn't Apple's to give away, but was available to any hardware maker that wanted to include it for less than a dollar per device.
>ice theory, but this 'ere really good quality Sony cable will not charge the wife's crackberry, while a skinny, fourpenny fleabay job plugged into the same PSU will.
Is the cheap fleabay cable wired for data? Some devices will charge faster if they spot that the data pins are shorted, i.e they will only draw 500mA if they spot a data cable, since this was the spec for computer USB sockets. The Sony cables will be data cables. The fleabay cable might be power only. Newer devices will happily draw 1-2 A over a data cable, if the power supply is up to it. (Phones power supplies are typically 1.2A - 1.5A, tablet PSs are usually 2A)
Whilst it can be hard to spot which cables are of a decent gauge, short cables are obviously easy to identify.
>IoT is the new cocaine, something for those with far too much disposable income to waste their money on
I'd say that 'IoT' is the new late-1970s home microcomputer. Not really productive, expensive, interesting for some to play with. Those who do play with it might have a head start when it becomes mre mainstream.
As a concept it is mature in industry, in the homes of the stupidly wealthy (the high-end propriety stuff) and even in our cars (sensors and actuators on doors and windows, etc). Okay, these applications often use CANBUS or whatever and not IP, you get the idea... it's still packet-based with addressable modules.
In our homes it is in its infancy - often insecure, and the preserve of hobbyists as denoted by a 'special' aisle in Maplins.
>Butters both sides of both slices of bread.
I reckon if I took my RepRap 3D printer apart, I could probably achieve a good bit of that with the components. Extrude (one stepper motor) butter on the toast in an X-Y grid pattern ( another 2 stepper motors), leaving me one stepper motor left over. The bed of the 3D printer is heated....
Hmmm.... I'll go away and have a think about this.
Or..... Ryobi make a mastic gun that takes a 18v battery*.... could be re-purposed to apply cold butter to bread, methinks. It wouldn't be automatic, but it would be fun.
* Not completely stupid.... applying a long thin bead of a stiff mastic like polyurethane can be tiring.... if it was a job I did a lot I might consider one.
What custard said - you can imagine a company being wary of selling plugs that a user has to wire themselves. I'm sure most of you here are competent at it (Earth wire longer and with more spare than blue, blue longer and more spare than brown etc) but before moulded plugs with new kit was the norm the Consumer Association randomly tested plugs that had been wired by employees of high street retailers.... the results were scary.
Similar concerns about selling 'smart' power sockets to swap for the ones in your wall.
Selling a 'smart' kettle lead as a single unit would sidestep that concern....though it wouldn't make it any more useful.
I don't know, but the nice big picture (link below) shows the PCB marked 'PWR IN' next to one microUSB port, and 'USB' next to the other. My guess is that PWR IN is only for power, but I'm not certain.
- http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-11/26/raspberry-pi-zero-launch
>"Charity as a business" is rarely as clear cut as finding some poor people and giving them some money,
You're right, I'm glad we agree. The Gates Foundation doesn't just dump money on existing charities - it has a very large lump of cash to begin with, so it can act more strategically. Take research into disease; often scientists don't know whether they will have funding one year to the next, so will be looking around for new jobs. If a research project has guaranteed funding for X years, as the Gates Foundation can provide, there is less turn-over of researchers.
I'm not saying it is perfect, or that it doesn't deserve to be criticised where appropriate, but it seems in general to be a good thing.
And yeah, MS products have caused me a silly amount of frustration over the years, through bugs and stupid decisions (and yeah, if I was a competitor to MS like Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net* who was shafted, I'd feel naffed off) but I'm in good health and mostly happy.
*http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net
You're correct, mea culpa, that should of course have been Gates' (possessive plural of Gates, i.e Bill and Melinda) not Gate's. I also made a couple of other typos, too. Ah well.
I was finished, but then I was asked a question, and gave an answer.
Anyway, my original point was merely that Bill Gates isn't going to lose sleep over the lack of Windows on the Pi Zero, as OP had suggested he might. I stand by that. Mine was clearly a comment about how he spends his time (objective), rather than his motives (subjective).
In any case, what is altruism? If one considers the wellbeing of one's children and grandchildren as being 'selfish' (survival of one's genes and all that), then acting to reduce disease and increase education globally is also selfish. It's just not stupid selfish.
>I looked forward to the floppy disk on Computer Shopper
-Oh we used to dream of a floppy disk! We had to to type in our games from the back of a magazine!
-Back of a magazine? Luxury! We had to punch our games into cards, and load them into the steam computer ten hours before we wanted to play, and then it would only run for two minutes before it crashed and burnt our house down.
-Aye, but if you try telling young people that today, they won't believe you.
The easy rule-of-thumb guide to whether a product is over priced is how much advertising they do. Gillette, and thus Gillette's customers, spend a shitload on TV advertising.
Of course, it is spread out over the number of customers....so say you see roughly the same number of glossy adverts for Ford Focus cars and for Alpha Romeos, yet on the road you see ten times as many Fords, you can estimate that a much larger chunk of the Alpha's price tag has been spent on marketing.
I use King of Shaves Azure blades (sadly discontinued and replaced by a much pricier version)- they work better than Gillette, yet are a 1/4 of the price, since they aren't advertised on television. I came to them because I had previously been impressed by King of Shaves shaving gel.
I wouldn't be surprised if Lidl or whoever offered some inexpensive yet just-as-good-as-Gillette razors - I'll have to try some out.
The onion knows it: http://www.theonion.com/blogpost/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-11056
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of shaving in this country. The Gillette Mach3 was the razor to own. Then the other guy came out with a three-blade razor. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the Mach3Turbo. That's three blades and an aloe strip. For moisture. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four blades. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three blades and a strip. Moisture or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five blades.
>Altruist Bill is helping the poor?
That's a moot point AC, since the Mr Gates was only raised in this thread with regard to him being upset at Windows losing sales / market share.
But since you asked, the Gate's intention is give 95% of their wealth to good causes, and they have already donated £28 billion. Further more, the spending of this money can be planned for maximum impact, because unlike charities that ask for donation every year, there is already cash in the bank that be quickly mobilised in the event of a natural disaster.
>putting a sticking plaster on a wound stretching from head to toe is not the same as not wounding them in the first place.
Wow. So by your reasoning, helping millions of people be free of disease and malnutrition is a 'sticking plaster', and the damage to a few thousand engineers in rival software houses (plus frustration to millions of PC users) is a 'wound from head to toe'. Look, go in peace, read up, and reconsider your perspective.
>Plus you have to add the cost of SD card, PSU, keyboard, mouse, USB hub, cables and cable adapters and most likely a WiFi module before you have anything really useful. So that's probably nearer £40 than £4
Informal Reg pole: How many of you here have these doodads already kicking around, taking up space in desk drawers and shoeboxes?
For those who don't, Pi are offering a pack containing a mini-HDMI to HDMI adaptor, micro-B USB to USB A female cable (OTG) and a 2x20 0.1" male GPIO header for a total of £4.
A lot of headless hobbyist* applications are well served by Arduino boards of one flavour or another, whereas this is aimed at cheap coding - hence the HDMI.
I'm no expert, but trying to imagine the headless applications fpr the extra grunt the Pi provides over most Arduino boards.... object recognition for robots, maybe?
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/robot/face_detection/
*headless hobbyist? His past-times included lion taming.
>I'd prefer to spend it on fast cars, booze, and fast women (
If you have billions of dollars, you'd struggle to spend it all that way, even if the cars were high class, the booze high performance, and the women triple-distilled.
You're correct that this didn't make orbit, but then it was never meant to. Still, baby steps and all that.
No, pops, it's too risky! For all we know, there could be cubes in there the size of gorillas!
- The Simpson's Tree House of Horror, Homer3
Paralleling Mr Munroe's career path, a great number of The Simpson's writers hold maths or physics degrees: http://mathsci2.appstate.edu/~sjg/simpsonsmath/degrees.html
NICAM was digital audio that accompanied analogue video broadcasts.
NICAM had an upper frequency limit of "15KHz due to anti-aliasing filters at the encoder" ( http://web.archive.org/web/20111017094248/http://stoneship.org.uk/~steve/nicam.html ), which might be where Richard got his figure from.
Fosters would be unknown in the UK if it wasn't for Barry Humphrey's cartoon strip in Private Eye, and later a film, about Barry McKenzie. Bazza was was a parody of the boorish Australian overseas, particularly those residing in Britain – ignorant, loud, crude, drunk and punchy.
Not only did Humpries give us Fosters, he gave us 'technicolor yawn' and 'point Percy at the porcelain'.
> This stuff goes back at least 20 years
And the rest!
Halloween III (1982) had the plot of a toy maker distributing novelty Halloween masks with a computer chip containing a fragment of Stonehenge. When the Silver Shamrock TV special airs on Halloween night, the chip will activate, killing the one wearing it and unleashing a lethal swarm of insects and snakes to kill those nearby.
"The following exploits are used by ShiftyBug and Shuanet of the mentioned families:
Memexploit
Framaroot
ExynosAbuse
These are not new exploits, in fact, many of them are used in popular root enablers."
From: Lookout discovers new trojanized adware; 20K popular apps caught in the crossfire https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2015/11/04/trojanized-adware/
Basically, don't use third party app stores that you don't trust.
>are instead forced to front up for the dubious pleasure of the £80 white teaplate.
Forced? No, you're not forced, just don't buy an Apple Watch. If you do, the Apple Charger Dock is £65, not £80. And even then the Apple website will sell you a 3rd party dock solution that uses the original charger.
Aye, just when we thought that we could relax with micro-USB, we now have USB-C on the horizon... the one thing to look forward to is that it, like Lightening, can be plugged in either way up. That alone, for me, makes it worth phasing out my micro-USB gubbins.
>Don't forget the chip in the iPod headphones to ensure idiot apple buyers could only use official iPod headphones.
Oh yeah, Apple 'idiot buyers' who enjoy the largest range of 3rd party wired headsets from Sennheiser to Kilpsch... ohhh, the morons!
But seriously, 'Feature phones' from the time of the first iPhone didn't even usually feature a 3.5mm headphone socket. Even left to themselves, Android phones don't have a standard for wired headsets with remote controls... shit, even within brands they mess it up; Sony used two different resistances across Android phone generations (they are better now, the Z series now allow stereo microphones, even). If Android vendors, or even Google bashed their heads together, sorted this nonsense out then yeah, i might have an issue with Apple.
As it is, I'm just an Android user who can't believe the stupidity. Those of us who don't use Apple would do better expressing the things we want done better, instead of lobbing stones.
It's 2015 - where the hell is my one-click whole phone back-up and restore?! (Android does contacts, but apps and SMS messages require more effort)
I'm with Woz on this; market forces prevent the best possible device from being offered to users. That said:
All iWatch owners are iPhone users. Therefore it doesn't bother iWatch owners if their charging matt doesn't charge Samsung phones.
That seems a fairly straightforward logic... the way the article wilfully ignores the idea it comes across like a Daily Express article about Billy Connelly.
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