Posts by Zot

Imagine finding this bad boy in your shower: Brit startup pulls the sheets off Moon spider mech

Please stop saying ‘Brit’ I hate the term so much, all I can hear is an American saying it harshly and tastelessly.

Sorry.

GIMP open source image editor forked to fix 'problematic' name

Sorry, but I stopped using Gimp as soon as I bought Affinity Photo - it's so much better, and only 50 quid for life. It also kicks Photosh*t in the face!

Fresh releases of TypeScript and Visual Studio 2017 for Mac round out November

Roll on to MacOS development because...

Xcode 10 is totally crap at C++!

Intel outside: Apple 'prepping' non-Chipzilla Macs by 2020 (stop us if you're having deja vu)

Re: Why?

“Existing machines won't stop working, nor will their CPUs change the instruction sets they use.“

Haha, not much experience with OSX then? And I’m not just talking about 32 bit.

Telly boffin Professor Heinz Wolff has died

Perhaps you're thinking of Wilf Lunn?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilf_Lunn

Elon Musk finally admits Tesla is building its own custom AI chips

Is it just going to be another graphics card architecture?

i.e. - A massive bank of parallel cores.

I suppose AMD and Nvidia could do with another competitor...

It's a decade since DevOps became a 'thing' – and people still don't know what it means

Re: Having read the article

”Developers?” Yeah, it took me awhile to stop laughing at “engineer” as a term for a programmer, apparently it was because it “sounded better”. Haha, kids hey...

Online outrage makes Logitech drop a brick: Now it will replace slain Harmony Link gizmos

Re: Support from them for me

That's odd, I had the same problem with the 100, and its charge would only lasted a few hours. I had to buy a battery on the net somewhere, didn't cost much though.

Hardware has never been better, but it isn't a licence for code bloat

What Apple and Microsoft seem to teach us is..."throw more resources at it!!!!"

But I started out writing assembler in Hex code on A4 paper, for the ZX81, so what do I know?

Virgin Media customers complain of outages across UK

I routinely reboot the "hub" every week now to stop it slowing down. Is it really so badly coded that it runs out of RAM? And why can't they do POP3 with their email, it's a wonder they are still around.

Speaking in Tech: Do I need some weird thing listening to me in my house all the time?

Someone should plumb that toilet in before, oh...

Booze stats confirm boring Britain is drying

Nah, they are just...

"Skunked outa their minds!"

Forgetful ZX Spectrum reboot firm loses control of its web domains

zxvega.uk is still available, amongst others...

Anyone???? : )

Apple: Don't panic, but your Mac can be pwned via GarageBand .bands

Re: Does it affect Logic Pro X?

Good question. Anybody running it should have the latest OS though, surely.

Putting the 'Port' in Portal: Old-school fan brings game to Apple II

Re: 6502 assembler code

Level 9 adventures?

Beauty is in the AI of the beholder: Young blokes teach computer to judge women by their looks

Re: "pretentious, pompous, arrogant, shallow, frivolous"

Naaa, that's Facebook's modus operandi.

Deliver-oops! Takeaway pusher's customers burger-ed by hijackers

What's wrong with "You have been given a random password, please write this down...." ?

Low-end notebook, rocking horse shit or hen's teeth

Re: News? Or "olds"?

There's no way I'm playing battery swapsies with a Samsung, sorry.

Chirp! Let's hear it for data over audio

Did I say I wanted...

...R2 fucking D2!?

Google may just have silently snuffed the tablet computer

How'bout an HP Spectre x360 13? - it turns into a tablet - woooooh.

Bookmakers William Hill under siege from DDoS internet flood

D) Yanks.

FTFY

Pair programming – you'll never guess what happens next!

If this technique stops programmers obfuscating C++ too much then I'm all for it.

- it's not about the journey guys, it's about actually finishing the product.

Meet Deliveroo's ‘bold and impactful’ new logo. No, really

The register is hardly best placed to take the piss out of logos...

Londoner jailed after refusing to unlock his mobile phones

Re: Hmm

"I have an unregistered gun.

It runs on 4x AA batteries and squirts out hot glue..."

oooOOoo matron!

Milk IN the teapot: Innovation or abomination?

Re: are you

Naa, Yorkshire tea is a little metallic for my taste, whereas Typhoo is the better builder's tea.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

Re: Pulling dick moves has historically worked really well for Apple.

"Simulation-Computer-Graphics-Robert-Bridson/"

Every version of XCode, and OS redacts some more useful things, and prevents old software from working, like 32 bit stuff. And users get to use a 'free' OS update which means that software magically stops working so they have to update it at cost.

You have to pay $100 a year just to be a developer on one OS type, otherwise it warns the user that your software is 'unknown' when installing, even if you paid Apple at the time the software was first sold.

That will make far more than seven but I can't be arsed to detail any of it, because as a developer, I fucking hate Apple, sorry. They've got to be the biggest twats of them all.

Facebook ‘glitch’ that deleted the Philando Castile shooting vid: It was the police – sources

I saw this link yesterday on reddit. The cop sounds completely wired AND nervous - a terrible combination to be carrying a gun!

Re: Guns don't kill people....

*Electricians

Ten years in the clink, file-sharing monsters! (If UK govt gets its way)

Re: LP to Cassette, CD to Cassette, CD to CD....

"So, turns out I've been a (minor) pirate for over 40 years!"

But I bet you weren't making thousands of copies and standing at a global market giving them out for free.

Oh good grief...

...either use free stuff (Gimp / VS Community / 7-zip), or grow up and pay for something for once!

Yes, actually pay for something! And forget the lame excuses to rip - they're just Justification Bias. And your cognitive dissonance knows it! :)

Re: So if you wrote a book...

If I wrote some software and it took me two years to write..oh right, I did. And yes it makes my blood run cold whenever I see it hacked, and the hacker sends me a message to inform me how clever they are at breaking the registration code. Well, yeah, they need to be in prison for as long as I want them to be, but I think they are based in China somewhere so that idea's gone out the window then!

So if you wrote a book...

You wouldn't mind if I nicked it and posted a complete e-book version online for free?

No, because you think it's OK to copy, right? It's advertising right?

It's a very good book. now how many years did it take you to write that book? - A couple of years?

Oh, and you wanted to make a little money from it, just a little bit of holiday money perhaps?

Well, tough, the internet has it now, wuhahahaaaa!!!.

[/devils advocate mode]

Official: Microsoft's 'Get Windows 10' nagware to vanish from PCs in July

That's weird because my iMac nags every time I turn the thing on. My Windows 7 machine has never nagged, for some reason.

Also Apple's OS updates haven't always been free.

I thought the War of the Worlds aliens all died.

Killed by a common virus.

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware storms live TV weather forecast

Re: Oh, yeah...

"So, if this news station had been running an enterprise version of what looks like either Vista or 7, the popup would never have ruined their lovely weather report."

But how would they have known this? They're just meteorologist presenters with a laptop.

Besides, the next day they'll reboot it and it get stuck in crash loop like the last update.

The future of Firefox is … Chrome

What I like about Chrome...

Is the 'find in page...' feature, it's very useful when looking at research.

Also they were the first to introduce the single address bar is a search bar idea.

They were also the first to run WebGL, which is nice...

I find the Firefox UI is quite broken in places, and it's font rendering to start with was truly horrible and pixelated, which they eventually fixed, but it took a while.

Re: I'm in mood for collecting downvotes...

Calls Google 'data thieves' and yet uses OSX?!!

Oh shum-on now!

French mobe repair shop chaps trash customer's phone

It's time to...

...Shave off that beard and dye your head red!

Reverser laments crypto game protection, says wares dead after 2018

Either way..

..buying stuff properly is the grown up thing to do, no matter how many excuses to pirate software people can think of.

Hands on with the BBC's Micro:Bit computer. You know, for kids

Re: So far... in the style of the original BBC Micro error messages

"Mistake in line 6"

Microsoft's equality and diversity: Skimpy schoolgirls dancing for nerds at an Xbox party

Déjà vu?!

You know I'm pretty I've seen this 'mistake/controversy/news item' before from the likes of Microsoft. It was a few years ago now though.

Never mind the patent trolls. Here's a riddle: What about the inventors?

The patent Office - a great big mother cow surround by ravenous lawyers.

They don't protect your invention, look into whether it actually works, or even look to see if it's been done before. They just take the money and make a lot of business for lawyers and patent writers. It all sounds like a scam. And don't get me started on software patents...

2015's horror PC market dropped nine per cent

Who buys from them anyway?

Are places like DinoPC included in this list? Are self builds in this report? Yeah, some people have gone to the dark side that is Apple, but journalists and money wasters don't really count. And some have gone to Linux. But Windows remains the most popular OS out there despite journo efforts to make it go away.

Brit 'naut Peake gears up for spacewalk

According to BBC doc.

NASA blew up his intended space suit in a faulty supply run, so he couldn't actually go on a space walk. I guess he can borrow one then?

Nvidia GPUs give smut viewed incognito a second coming

A couple of lines of C will fix this

Clear back buffer and swap buffers, then clear back buffer and swap buffers. This game should have done that anyway, as it could have been any old crap in the video RAM. It's not down to Nvidia, at the very least, it's Chrome's issue with privacy.

Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens offers a new hope for the franchise

If you're thinking of Dark Forces then

...yes it was excellent. We all knew it was like Doom, but then again what FPS isn't?

Doctor Who: Oh, look! There's a restaurant at the end of the universe in Hell Bent

4.5 billion years?

The trouble is, that the show implied that he'd been waiting that long to get out of the test. But the truth is that he was re-made every time he got caught, and didn't remember what had happened before. So in reality he was only in there a few days or hours or whatever.

Moffat's script's tend to be collections of ideas that don't often make sense, but are there to create emotions in the viewer. The last two were not that bad, but let's hope the Chritmas one doesn't have magic elves or more bad Santa's. It's a scifi programme BBC, not a pantomime, by all means make pantomimes, but please leave the Doctor alone.

Meet ARM1, grandfather of today's mobe, tablet CPUs – watch it crunch code live in a browser

They were just genuine experiences at the time, not opinions born from nothing. And I've seen some bloody awful coding techniques.

Writing ASM in Arm for the Archimedes was great fun, and I could test it instantly.

C++ compilers these days often do a better job at optimising code than using assembly yourself, unless you've got a simple block of intrinsics to do. (I write time critical DSP code now)

But those compilers don't stop coders leaking memory everywhere, needlessly and lazily.

I used to love Arm assembler coding. Each instruction exactly the same size, pipelined in a humanly understandable way. The instruction MLA amazed me at the time - multiply two different registers and add a third, then store it in a forth. RISC made CISC processors look like a joke, with their internal microcode burning away power.

There is a worrying amount of coders out there that couldn't give a shit about that of course, their wasteful programs chomping up resources like it's infinite - and these fucking idiots wonder why things crash after a few hours! ;p