Ydych chi wedi ceisio ei ddiffodd unwaith eto?
Posts by Chazmon
105 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2011
Bulb smart meters in England wake up from comas miraculously speaking fluent Welsh
The cybercriminal's cash cow and the marketer's machine: Inside the mad sad bad web ad world
Targetted ads are rubbish
You know what I like about El Reg's ads? They actually match the website rather than the cookies from a website I visited earlier in the week.
Particularly with my work computer I don't really buy anything I will however do a certain amount of product research. Even this is an infrequent occurrence so I may have to suffer through the same adds for sticky labels or dust masks for weeks.
Relive your misspent, 8-bit youth on the BBC's reopened Micro archive
8-bit education
One of the underlying problems with the way we teach coding etc. is we don't actually need lots of mediocre programmers. What we actually need is a small number of excellent ones.
Achieving this in a large scale education system is very difficult for any subject. The counterpoint to this is we do need a large chunk of the population to be able to ask the right questions and understand the underlying logic.
I'm the latter never programmed past 'IF' functions in Excel but speak the language sufficiently well to get the most out of those who can.
I say, I say, I say: What's the difference between a king penguin and liquid?

I love how often fluid dynamics can be applied with minimal fudging.
My favourite example is the way Zerglings move in StarCraft 2. Thanks to the dither,* small size and huge numbers they look distinctively liquid like when moving en mass. Ok so not a real example but fun all the same.
*I think its called this but am happy to be corrected.
Zucker for history: What I learnt about Facebook 600 years ago

'Take a ride in his Mercedes'
You owe me a new keyboard
Having read the work recently this phrase goes some distance towards explaining the hundreds of pages of elaborate revenge which this lead to. For a more recent and easier to read work which uses this hacking principle (and others) check out Pratchett's 'Going Postal'.
Aching bad: 'Kingpin Granny' nicked in huge prescription drugs bust
New strife for Strava: Location privacy feature can be made transparent
This feels a bit like the old urban legend (or possibly true) about thieves stealing cars, hitting home on the GPS and robbing the house.
Although I am sceptical that this ever actually happened home on my GPS puts you a few streets away as I don't need it for the last bit anyway.
I am equally sceptical about this application as the alternatives are far simpler. Just watch to see which house your lycra clad target lugs their expensive bike into and rob that one.
Dinosaurs gathered at NASA Goddard site for fatal feeding frenzy
RIP Ursula K Le Guin: The wizard of Earthsea
Another one of my favourite authors is no longer of this world (the way things are going it is only going to be Neil Gaiman left!) The Dispossed is consistently in my top 5 as a book which changes the way you look at the world. Left Hand of Darkness blew my mind and thanks to it short length often one of the first books I hand to a novice reader. A loss to the world.
Scientists think they've found primordial goop whence life first sprang
Cisco's John Chambers: Robot farmers will feed bloated cricket thoraxes to our children
Dyson to build electric car that doesn't suck
Compsci degrees aren't returning on investment for coders – research
The Grad job market sucks
It really does but £3,000 is a big difference in your twenties. I have been jumping between £20k and £25k jobs for the last few years and the difference is huge. On the higher amount I feel comfortably well off, on the lower I worry about the credit card.
It goes a long way when it comes to the 'computer says no' stage of mortgage calculation.
Sci-Fi titan Jerry Pournelle passes,
aged 84
Boffin rediscovers 1960s attempt to write fiction with computers
My current toilet reading is a compilation of Grimms' fairy tales and I have to say they are utterly rubbish. There is a modicum of narrative arc in some of them but it is often a series of random events which happen to the same person (usually royalty).
The Lion story would certainly be in the top half!
Atari shoots sueball at KitKat maker over use of 'Breakout' in ad
'Coke dealer' called us after his stash was stolen – cops
Jodie Who-ttaker? The Doctor is in

Not my opinion!
The finest piece of trolling I have ever seen was performed when the speculation around the 12th doctor was at its height.
Posting in a pro feminist group an acquaintance wrote: 'A female Doctor Who is wrong after all it is 'Doctor Who' not 'Nurse Who.''
The storm of vitriol which followed was a sight to behold.
Nerd Klaxon: Barbican to host Science Fiction exhibition this summer
The first?
Surely if you are looking for the origin of Sci fi it has to be Cyrano de Bergerac's voyage to the moon (and later sun). Some amazing science for the time it was written (1662!) and even some conceptual stuff like beings who communicate through music. Not an easy read though.
In any case, this may actually drag me into London.
Lochs, rifle stocks and two EPIC sea gates: Thomas Telford's Highland waterway
Twitter app pwned by pro-Turkey hackers: Users' accounts sling 'Nazi' slurs
swastika?
I spotted one of these this morning and alerted the account holder.
Am I the only one surprised to see a unicode swastika symbol? I know it is a Hindu symbol cruelly appropriated but I would have thought it would not be supported by the various risk averse organise these sort of standards. I am not sure where I stand on its inclusion just genuinely surprised.
The evil connotations of the symbol are a pain especially when trying to teach rotational symmetry!
Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

Clarification
The quantity of caffeine largely seems to have arisen from an unchecked switch from commercial tablets (probably pro plus) which have other things in them to pure powder possibly from a chemical supplier. The catalogue of errors begins with those devising the experiment not being competent and understanding what they are purchasing right through to whoever authorised the ethics for this experiment in the first place. The phone as a calculator is less of a problem in itself than an indicator of the complete lack of thought which went into this.
My students actually do this experiment as part of applied science btec! The risk assessment however says only commercial products to be used and put a limit on it.
UK National Lottery data breach: Fingers crossed – it might not be you
Loyalty card? Really? Why data-slurping store cards need a reboot
Amazon is way over the line into creepy but their recommendations are not what keeps me loyal. What keeps me loyal is the ease of use of the site and a feeling (not necessarily backed up by facts) that they are more secure than the smaller sites.
That said I have done extremely well out of Nectar points especially on double up events and cinema trips which I consider a fair exchange for knowing what I buy,
AI boffins turn to StarCraft to train future neural networks

What I really want to see with this kind of AI is it being developed and to a certain extent optimised on StarCraft 1 and then ported onto StarCraft 2. This is an easy transition for a human player but I imagine unbelievably difficult for a bot but it would be an amazing test of true machine learning and application.
'Doubly unacceptable' Swiss vegan forces his way into the army
Facebook's AI boss is on a mission to end spoon-fed machine intelligence
Spoon feeding will always be part of learning indeed how many people need to literally taught how to use a spoon? All of them, indeed humans still need to be taught things their entire lives.
Hopefully this will lead to better learning but I think we are still a long way off from true AI. I also hope this goes into something marginally more useful than identifying brands in pictures!
BOFH: The case of the suspicious red icon
Ransomware scum infect Comic Relief server: Internal systems taken down
Password strength meters promote piss-poor paswords
Windows Phone users beg Pokémon Go creators for attention
It sucks to be on the platform with the smallest market share. I have a windows phone because they are cheap, reliable and work well with PCs. I honestly don't expect any apps to appear beyond the standard social media ones. If I wanted that I would have stayed with Android but I found I simply didn't use any.
UK.gov flings £30m at driverless car R'n'D, wants plebs to speek their branes
If your hands are on the wheel it isn't a driverless car. I don't want to be alert when driving I want to be reading a book. Essentially the train experience but actually arrive near my destination and without other people.
That said I am in that rare category of people who know they are not that good at driving and think a computer would probably do a better job!
Thai bloke battles jumbo python in toilet todger thriller
Experian Audience Engine knows almost as much about you as Google
US poised to unleash stadium-sized sandwich bag
FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America

To be honest I slightly see their point. I went on something of a dystopian binge at one point culminating in Stand on Zanzibar by Brunner and I was cross for months! My girlfriend at the time asked what was wrong and I muttered something about being angry about the future people.
In the end I had to find something more cheerful to read (I went for C.S. Lewis' sci fi).
PALE, MALE AND STALE: Apple reveals it has just ONE black exec
BOFH: Why, I LOVE work courses. Please tell me more, o wise one!
ROBOTS in sinister public-relations push ahead of coming WAR ON HUMANS
SAVE THE PLANKTON: So much more than whale food
A couple of scientific distinctions:
Plankton is pretty much anything which cannot make headway against the current so this also includes jellyfish (and really weak swimmers)
Zoo plankton is the microscopic swimmy stuff (technical term)
Phytoplankton are the ones which photosynthesize and start the food chain (and shore up life on earth)
ATTENTION SETI scientists! It's TOO LATE: ALIENS will ATTACK in 2049
First look: Ordnance Survey lifts kimono on next-gen map app

Re: Spotted what's missing?
That bit largely is but by the looks of the bit around Brokenhurst it seems that is a feature. I am curious as how much is available offline as you can get fair battery life for a day's walk in airplane mode for most devices.
Mine is the one with a soon to be neglected map pocket
DARPA: We KNOW WHO YOU ARE... by the WAY you MOVE your MOUSE
The Invisible Library – a playful, timey wimey, spook adventure tale
DEATH by PowerPoint: Microsoft warns of 0-day attack hidden in slides
Behind the Facebook DRAG QUEEN CRACKDOWN: 'Anonymity soon!'
I can see a way this could work fairly easily from their perspective. You can have a pseudonym account so long as it is linked to a real one. The link would only be known to Facebook (and admen and law enforcement) so they still fulfill their legal and monetary obligations whilst allowing you to be anonymous to the rest of the users.
It doesn't help if you want to be anonymous from 'the man' or add brokers but then facebook probably isn't interested in your business. It would however work for those with stage names or those who simply do not want to be found by other members of the public.