Posts by Steven Roper

Red Cross: 600m videogamers may be war criminals

Cross as a trademarked logo

They'd have to run that by Switzerland, Victorinox and a certain widely-spread mainstream religion, all of which predate the Red Cross by some decades or centuries...

Windows Defender Offline: For PCs too hosed to go online

Erm...

Go and have a look at your local public library sometime. I know it's probably been at least a decade or two since you last visited it, and you might be surprised at some of the changes that have taken place since you were last there back in 1992...

There's also these shops called "Internet cafes" that now exist in most cities and towns, you might want to look one up near you and check out what they actually sell besides shitty coffee! ;)

Domesday Book put on touchscreen at Bletchley Park

And in 1000 years' time

Historians will have more surviving records from, and know more about, England in the time of William the Conqueror than they will about England in the 20th/21st centuries.

New account of Flight 447 disaster published

As a web developer

the issue of user interface design comes up for me on a daily basis.

A major problem that any engineer (software, plane design or otherwise) faces, amounts to a direct conflict between customer requirements and ease of use.

That is, a customer tells me, "I want it to do this and this and this and this, and I want it to store that info and that and that and that". Then they complain about complexity and training costs if I present them with a Web form that has 50 input boxes and controls on it for them to set all the parameters and input all the information that they asked for.

There are many ways of solving this problem, but they all have their flaws. I could simplify the form by making assumptions about default settings for certain items and then masking those controls from the user, but this introduces the issue of lack of control if those defaults need to change in a specific case. So then I can create an "easy mode" and "complex mode" to cover this (in the same way Airbus have with their "normal law" and "alternate law" etc modes), but then this introduces the problem of insufficient training of staff to handle the "complex mode" side - since the object of doing this was to reduce training costs and time in the first place.

In the end, the more complex the task you as the end user want the system to accomplish, the exponentially harder it becomes to simplify the inputs required to accomplish that task. Engineers of all stripes are constantly working every day to try to find ways around this problem but we're far from being able to achieve perfection, if ever.

It really does come down to a balance between "How much do want this system to do?" versus "How easy do you want it to be to use?" The two issues are counterpoints by definition, and this finds expression in the famous Murphy's Law corollary, "Build a system that even an idiot can use, and only an idiot will be able to use it."

Man fights felony hacking charge for accessing wife's email

At the weddings I've been to

the marriage oath repeated by the couple contained the conditions "in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse, *until death us do part*" or words to that effect. It's pretty much the standard wedding oath in English-speaking countries (although I don't know if they still say it in the US considering their horrendous divorce rate!).

Albeit that I've seen that oath violated on a number of occasions (maybe divorcing couples who say this at their weddings should be done for perjury) it does also contain the explicit statement of "becoming one flesh" in addition. Which, all things considered, does amount to "your whole life" in effect.

Break it off

and get the hell out of there now while you still can. Any woman who perpetrates the kind of double standards you've just described is a woman who's only going to rape you in the divorce court in a few years' time. I know the symptom - the "I can but you can't" mentality - and I've seen this happen to several mates of mine. Don't say you weren't warned!

ASA upholds customer complaint against eBuyer

Wow

Our xkcd posts are only a minute apart, how's that for synchronicity! Great minds think alike eh? I imagine you remembered that page at the same time I did and see us both frantically panning through xkcd looking for it. One question: did you start at the end of xkcd and work back, or did you start from the beginning and work forward? Me, I scanned from the end back, took me about 15 minutes to find it.

As always

xkcd has a cartoon for the occasion:

http://xkcd.com/937/

EC data protection proposals could open up Zuck's 'social graph'

They really need to think this through first

While I think such legislation is a fantastic idea, and in good keeping with Sir Tim Berners-Lee's views on data silos and walled gardens, as a programmer myself I can see a problem that needs to be addressed if this is to work.

That is, we need an W3C-style standard for exporting or importing this data. Obviously some kind of XML is the way to go, but we need some standardised labelling system within that XML. For example, how do I, as a web developer, know which part of a data block exported from Facebook is the user's first name, last name, phone number, email, post content and so on?

For example, if say Facebook do it like this:

<FirstName>Steven</FirstName>

<LastName>Roper</LastName>

and Google+ do it like this:

<person_Name>Steven Roper</person_Name>

then we're going to have the devil's own time trying to decipher cryptically named XML files from different social networks.

So there really needs to be a defined, global standard for describing social network data. The W3C of course is the best body to address this, but the issue does need to be addressed before any such laws are enacted.

Why are Android anti-virus firms so slow to react on Carrier IQ?

@Michael 36

Obviously you've failed to understand the correct meaning of the term "malware".

Spying, tracking and monitoring software is only "malware" if it's not put there by a multi-billion-dollar corporation or one of their government puppets. Thus, if it had been you or I who rooted millions of people's phones to put the CarrierIQ software on them, THEN it would have been detected as "malware" within 24 hours of its release and we'd be looking at a few years in the blue light hotel. But because it was put on there by big telcos, it wasn't classed as "malware" until it became necessary for the PR machine to cover arse for its discovery.

Bill Gates discusses nuclear development deal with China

The mass media will kill it

with anti-nuclear hype before it gets off the ground.

"Oh noes it's NUKULAR!!1!1one! It MUST BE STOPPED! Remember Three Mile Island, remember Chernobyl, remember Fukushima! We'll all be irradiated and the world turned into a nukular wasteland! Ban it now!"

Someone above mentioned electricity too cheap to meter and perhaps we just haven't achieved it yet. Well, the reason we haven't achieved it yet, and probably never will, is because of Murdoch and Co wanting to make a quick buck with senseless sensationalism.

Although maybe that's why Billy G is going to China with this, since they seem not to be so beset with such bullshit...

Facebook security hole exposes Zuckerberg's privates

To give them their due

they did say "a" top priority, not "the" top priority or "our" top priority...

SSDs choked by crummy disk interfaces

SCSI

Now there's a name I haven't heard for a decade or two, not since the old SCSI interface on my towerified Amiga 1200. Brings back fond memories of huge ribbon cables wide enough to drive a London bus on, that put the piddling little parallel IDE cables to shame. Looking forward to using SCSI again, if only for old times' sake!

No Samsung ban for Apple in US

The thing is

America's judges aren't as bent as Australia's and they probably don't own shares in Apple either.

Windows 8 fondleslabs: Microsoft tip-toes through PC-makers' disaster

I've had a Windows 7 tablet for over a year

and it's become indispensable. I've found that Windows 7 works beautifully as a Touch GUI.

Perhaps you'd care to explain -exactly- what you think is wrong with Windows 7 as a touch GUI. Because I've been using it as such for over a year with no problems whatsoever. Is it because you can't "swipe" or do all that stupidly complex "finger gesture" crap that Android et al requires?

To me, I like how it simply interprets a tap on the screen as a mouse click and dragging your finger across the screen functions perfectly as a click-drag. I also have an Android phone and I've already come to loathe having to "swipe" my finger across the screen (sometimes several times) to answer a bloody phone call. Why can't I just "tap" like in Windows 7.

Sometimes it seems to me like the whole world has gone stark raving mad over this finger-twisting touch-tablet business and I'm the only sane one left!

Dead at 13: Napster 1998-2011

@Handel was a crank

Don't like the pay you make as a artist? Then get a fucking day job like everyone else. Art and music were once forms of expression of emotion and feeling, not a moneymaking enterprise. Art for the heart, not art for the mart. If you're only doing it to make money, then you're doing it for the wrong reason, and you deserve everything you lose when people share artistic culture freely.

Globe slowly warming, insists 'Hansen's Bulldog'

Don't you mean

the climate change believers?

Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH

Pray that they don't

ever solve the DNA decrepitude problem with cloning. Because as soon as they do, the feminists will do away with the entire male sex, as they've been wanting to do for the last 30 years...

NASA probe now closer than ANY OTHER spacecraft to Pluto

If Pluto is a planet

then so are Sedna, Eris, Quaoar, Ixion, Orcus, Varuna and tens of thousands of similar sized Kuitper-belt objects. Care to remember them all for the kids to recite in primary-school science class?

iPhone banned in Steve Jobs' ancestral home

Every once in a great while

these despotic dictators do something right.

Now if only we can get other governments to follow suit, ban all things Apple, and put this greedy, censorious, litigious fucking corporation out of business for good and all...

Assange: 'iPhone, BlackBerry, Gmail users - you're all screwed'

@Is it me

"You should also realise that because there are so many people out there, and so few security people to watch you..."

That argument might have carried water 30 years ago, but not today. With things like face-recognition software, behavioural-analysis software and the massive storage capabilities of today's computers, you don't need "security people" to watch you - the software does all that for them. Effectively, you ARE being watched all the time, and the moment you do or say something that the ruling elite don't like, that software will flag you up and turn you in within a heartbeat.

NASA wants space washing machine for ISS, Mars bases

NOT solved

It might be you on a Virgin Galactic flight in 5 years time when your lovely view of Earth from LEO is rudely interrupted by a pair of shit-stained jcloth style paper kecks smashing through your window and then your skull at 20,000 km/h. It's exactly that kind of "out the airlock" mentality that's starting to make orbiting this planet an exercise in rocket dodgems...

Oz robo-soldiers in US Marines' firing line

T-20, T-40, etc...

I assume by the time they get to T-1000 they'll have perfected the mimetic liquid-metal alloy version...

Revealed: Full specs on Mars rover's nuclear laser heat ray

Actually, if you'd *really* read the book

You'd also know that the Martians only cry "Ulla" when they're dying; when they're in full health and striding around smashing down pine trees and heat-raying everything else, they cry "Aloo"!

If there is life on Mars

then as far as that life is concerned, then certainly our intellects are vast and cool and unsympathetic - especially the moment somebody figures out how to make money from it!

One James Cameron pointed that out quite spectacularly, if a bit Smurfily, a couple of years ago, I believe.

Twitter crypto purchase leaves Egypt dissidents in lurch

Exactly

And this is why "cloud" services suck. they can be taken away, or turned off, without warning. This sort of thing is exactly why my company won't touch public cloud services.

Jarmageddon: Marmite spill sparks biohazard threat

I would have called it *toxic* waste

Marmite, Promite, Vegemite and other similar "black goop" spreads have got to be the foulest-tasting concoctions known to mankind. If I'd seen a spill of that gunk like that, I'd have recommended isolating the spill zone and evacuating the surrounding 5 kilometres!

Malls suspend plan to track shoppers' cellphones

Asking for permission, 21st century style

"It is a condition of entry to this shopping centre that you permit tracking of your movements via your mobile phone signal. Enabling tracking constitutes your voluntary grant of permission to monitor, record and monetise your location. Refusal to do so may result in you being asked to leave the premises."

You know, the same way an Android weather app requires access to your Web history and contacts list as a condition of use, even though it has no need of this information to function as a weather app.

Slip of a lad to play James Bond's Q

They've already done Rupert Murdoch

in Tomorrow Never Dies...

If you're talking about the scene

where the killer chases Bond onto the jib of a dock crane and across rooftops and so on, it's perfectly believable. Google "parkour" if you don't think there's people that can do that shit IRL!

Hybrid clouds 2012: the private cloud myth lives

"Run and owned by someone else"

is why my company won't touch public cloud computing with a 90 foot pole. We already have a remotely-accessible server onsite and two offsite backups where the sales and other field staff can get to their data while on the road / at home / wherever.

If we follow the sheep and start using public cloud facilities, how long would it be before the cloud provider or some other agency a) lost, deleted or tampered with the data; b) sold it to competitors; c) failed to implement security measures to prevent hacking or industrial espionage?

This endless push, push, push, to get our data out under control of other companies is really getting very tiresome. There are NO benefits a public cloud provides that can't be met by a private cloud setup, and a whole lot of things that can go wrong.

What should a sci-fi spaceship REALLY look like?

About the Star Furies...

I heard, back in the 90s, that JPL had actually asked JMS if they could use the Star Fury design as the basis of an actual orbital maneuvering unit prototype, and he told them, yes they could, but only on the proviso that they officially called it a Star Fury. I don't know if they ever went ahead with it or not, or even if it was just an urban myth, but I found it interesting at the time.

Rogue Russian Mars probe communicates - but in gibberish

E.T. Phone Home!

Sounds to me like the telemetry transponder has been modified by a stranded alien to broadcast a 'rescue me!' message to his home planet, and that's why we can't decipher it. Maybe we can use this as a Rosetta stone so we can decipher E.T. Speak!

World population's appetite TO DOUBLE by 2050, boffin warns

It's all very well

to quote 19th-century moral platitudes, but it helps to bear in mind that if the Insects in the dust didn't overbreed so much, there'd be enough leaves for all of them.

Samsung strokes big bulb that'll keep going for decades

Well, I for one

don't miss the 3rd degree burns you get when an incandescent bulb blows and you have to change it right away. I don't miss the bi-monthly light-bulb bill or clambering on chairs to change light bulbs multiple times a year. And I sure as hell don't miss the solid boost the damn things were giving to my leccy bills.

Sorry, but I don't miss the old tungsten-argon bulbs at all. I'm more than happy with CFLs and LEDs and whatever else the lighting industry turns up, as long as it doesn't burn my fingers off when I change it, blow every couple of months and cost me a bomb to run.

I think the author meant

an 1100 lumen *equivalent to a 75W incandescent bulb* light.

Russian diplomat caught driving while 15 TIMES over booze limit

So which is it?

You've got Malta twice - on one hand you say they're 0.0 and on the other you say they're at 0.8. So, can you drive with alcohol in your blood there or not?

I ask because I was considering Malta as one of several possible future homes once Australia has completed its final descent into the police-state pit. Perhaps Malta is following the same path. Is there *any* country left whose politicos actually support freedom and human rights?

Apple sucks porn domain names from squatters

DNS delegation can take a while

to propagate around all the world's ISPs. Typical transition times following a nameserver change can range from an hour to up to 72 hours, depending on the time you redelegate the domain, how often each ISP polls the various NICs for DNS changes, and where you are in the world relative to the domain's host and nameservers. So it's not surprising that in some areas at least, the old sites still remain "intact" - try again tomorrow and see if that's still the case.

In layman's terms: If you change a domain name to point to a different site, the change takes a while to be recognised around the world.

US trade body rejects S3 'Apple nicked our IP' claim

It seems they forgot

that Apple can't be done for infringing anyone's patents because it has the patent on patenting things, and therefore has the sole right to sue other businesses for patent infringement.

BSA marks down SOPA: ‘must try harder’

Wha-wha-what?

A *BSA* boss going on in support of due process, privacy and freedom of speech? Come on, El Reg, you seriously don't think we're *that* gullible, do you?

Manning to get day in court

@AC 22:46

Which traitor? PFC Manning or that vicious little dobber Adrian Lamo who turned him in?

Microsoft seeks patent on employee spy system

Re: Think of the children

Which is exactly why I don't have any.

@Goat Jam

Maybe he has his panties in a twist because Microsoft are using their patent to develop a monitoring system that would make George Orwell blush to SELL to other sociopathic corporations.

The mere fact that they're in the process of inventing such an evil system is enough. Once it exists, they'll sell it to other corporations until everyone is forced to work in this hideous Orwellian nightmare.

Or maybe it's just a reflex response: Patents = Bad and Must Be Opposed!

I'll add that my trust is not given without the person seeking it damn well EARNING it. If any company I work for wants me to trust them then they'll give me a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, without quibbling about it, and without endlessly trying to get as much as they can while giving as little as possible. There's no way I'll EVER trust any employer who tries to force my trust while treating me like a slave, no matter what technology they try to bring to bear on it.

Punters hate copyright, says Steelie Neelie

Thank you, Richard

I've noticed that Orlowski has been on yet another one of his ranting self-righteous comment-disabled copyright crusades lately so it's nice to read a more balanced viewpoint and a have a chance to contribute to the discussion.

The major problems I see with copyright is 1) the obscene length of copyright terms (thanks to Disney's efforts to preserve their control of the Rat) and 2) the greedy excesses of DRM and now cloud services to try to milk even more money out of the punters.

Copyright, at best, doesn't need to exceed the original 14 years provided by the Statute of Anne. If your work hasn't made anything within 14 years of publication it's never going to - give it up already. At the present rate, the extreme and ever-increasing length of copyright simply means a shrinking public domain. Not to mention the exponentially increasing chance that some poor artist will get financially raped because his song inadvertently contains the same sequence of 4 notes as something published 80 years ago, that's still in copyright, even though nobody alive today has heard of it.

Disney particularly need to be called to account for this. Their endless lobbying for ever-increasing copyright terms needs to be silenced, hard, and now. An education campaign needs to be mounted showing the public that the corporation behind all those cutesy-poo kids' cartoons is a rapacious and greedy monster hell-bent on curtailing freedom of expression in the name of copyright. Not to mention their virtual monopoly on children's entertainment - you try raising kids these days without them seeing anything owned by Disney. It's impossible. And governments seriously need to address this, because it gives this unelected and unaccountable corporation inordinate control over how the next generation thinks.

With DRM, while iTunes has dropped DRM from its repertoire, there is still much work to be done. The entire concept of DRM needs to be done away with, since all it does is destroy the quality of the legitimate product. You'd think that after 30 years of failed copy-protection attempts that they'd learned their lesson, but it seems not. The reality is, as long as DRM exists then pirated copies will always be better quality and more convenient for the paying customer. The following image perhaps illustrates this principle more clearly:

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/9451/piratevspay.png

Not only DRM, but this whole business of making parts of DVD/BRs "unskippable" stinks of the whole "corporate remote-control" mentality that has been pervading IT generally of late. It's reaching into our homes and basically acting as a remote control of our appliances.

In the end, copyright has ceased to be about protecting artists and instead has become just another tool in the arsenal of those who seek to restrict our freedom and monitor and control every aspect of our lives. And it is this, what copyright has morphed into, not the idea of protecting artists' incomes, that has people hating copyright. It's no longer a tool of expression, it has become a tool of oppression.

Think your CV is crap? Your interview skills are worse

Re: what animal would I be?

I've been asked this a few times in my careers, both in interviews and in company psych tests, and I have a single stock answer, that generally really throws people. If I could be any animal, what animal would I be?

A cockroach.

The look on people's faces when I say this cannot be described in mere words. When they ask me why I would want to be a cockroach, I also have my answer prepared:

Cockroaches *survive*. That is what they do, and it is what they are best at. They are an ancient species; they have survived through multiple extinction events, including the Permian/Triassic and Cretaceous/Tertiary, and they survive despite anything bigger than them preying on them, and they would survive the worst Man can do to them, including nuclear warfare. And I like to think of myself as a survivor, someone who can hang on despite whatever is thrown at me.

That answer has floored more than one interviewer. And I'm pretty sure it's played a role in getting me a few jobs, too.

Muvizu animation suite

Sounds good

I was interested in this, right up until I saw this in their T & Cs:

"Video content created with the Muvizu application has a Muvizu watermark, which must be retained wherever you choose to publish such content."

No thanks. I hate watermarks splashed all over video. I guess that's why it's "free".

Jobs mulled building own mobile network for iPhones

Re: What's the big deal?

Well, when Apple has sued every other electronics-manufacturing company out of existence for illegally using Apple's patents on the tendency of electrons to carry energy through conductive materials, the only choice you'll have is to buy a Jesus phone (or other Apple product) or go back to living in caves. That's kind of a big deal as far as I'm concerned.

Just trolling: It's OK to poke fun at Christians, says ASA

I still use

BC and AD when such references are required. The reason is because, although I am not a Christian, the year is 2011 years after the *putative* birth of Christ. What else is it supposed to be 2011 years after? I maintain that if people don't want to use the Christian calendar, then instead of burying such use under a mantle of political correctness such the BCE/CE bullshit, that they adopt another calendar altogether.

My vote is for a calendar with the year 0 being the birth year of Nicholaus Copernicus - the first scientist to challenge the Church's Earth-centric universe, thus starting the rise of science in the face of religion. Since Copernicus was born in 1473 AD, that would make this the year 538 ANC, so dates would then be listed as BNC/ANC. Something like that, I'd rather use than a religious calendar thinly veiled in political correctness.

Politicians call for Modern Warfare 3 censure

I'd be willing to bet

substantial money that if your post had said "Bible" instead of "Koran" then the PC bigot who downvoted you would have upvoted you instead.

So you get an upvote from me :)

'Do Not Track' standard edges towards daylight

@ Jim 40

Excuse me? YOU come onto MY site when you type my site's URL into your browser (or click a search result leading to it, and then I PAY for the bandwidth you use accessing it. Since when, and how, do I come onto your internet? YOU make the choice to come to my site. If you don't like the way it's set up, then you can go somewhere else. So go now, please, and shut the door behind you.