Posts by Oolons

Minecraft coming to Raspberry Pi in hackable edition

Re: USB

I've got a 12GB 1080p file that plays fine over my network, and a 14GB one of the same film that pauses a bit when there are fast moving scenes. Seems there is a limit to what it can manage on xbmc. However I do have hopes the 512Mb Pi will solve some of it as I got the 14GB one to the point where it would only pause once by upping the xbmc pre-buffering to the max. More memory and more buffer will hopefully fix for me... It is all still pretty beta so give it time, also one openelec build seems quite different to another so there is some luck involved.

First eyes EVER SEEN (by definition) appeared 700 million years ago

Re: Evolved from jellyfish?

Err one small point .... "probably share a common ancestor"

No, evolution tells us we DEFINITELY share a common ancestor. In fact ALL life on Earth shares a common ancestor (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Common_descent)

One of the coolest things about evolution, religious nutters get wound up about being 'descended' from monkeys (Related as we share a common ancestor, so we are cousins) . FFS you are a cousin to bacteria, grass, duck billed platypuses and dinosaurs!

Re: But but...

All credit to NomNomNom for not posting anonymously the other cowards are not quite so sure of their beliefs as they profess. But seriously Children are the best arbiters of the validity of a scientific theory? Maybe we should propose Quantum Theory to them vs The Goddidit 'Theory'.... I think if sufficiently young and I wore a serious clerical outfit and threatened them with an eternity of hell they may well go for the Goddidit option. Of course then all computers, phones and other microprocessor powered electronics would stop working cos every fule knows that objective reality is determined by what kids believe. Terry Pratchett says as much in his books, but they are works of fiction and to a degree a satire of religious belief...

Steve Jobs' Apple-powered yacht makes belated first trip

Re: Oops

My server can handle one kilo-hugh, its the new metric for all websites doncha know. Obviously equal to the 356 Kilo Newtons generated by 3 million people clicking their mice at once.

Light ties itself in knots - spontaneously

Re: But...

So why a whelk particularly? .... 42!

Caching outfit Terracotta gives away freebie Java doritos

Bullshit

" A typical Java heap size is on the order of 2GB, with sometimes 4GB or 6GB sizes; beyond that and Java's memory management starts to thrash."

Is this a sponsored story? This is pure weapons grade balonium. First post I could find here, it's old and they happily settled on a 100Gb heap on a large server ->

http://troyjsd.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/holy-shit-100gb-heap-50-new-gen-less.html

Very old JVMs where heap fragmentation was an issue and this would be true (untuned) - I'd guess pretty much any modern JVM and this is simply untrue.

Neil Gaiman’s saucy pop wife agrees to pay her musicians in money

Steve Albini is God

That is all...

New guide: Bake your own Raspberry Pi Lego-crust cluster

Re: Well, crap!

According to the rasberry pi forum one board manages 26 GFLOPS... So 64 would be 1.7 TFLOPS if it scaled perfectly. I also think that is including the GPU horsepower so translating that to real world performance and distributing across a cluster would not be easy.

Raspberry Pi served with Ice Cream Sandwich

Re: Excellent stuff

Or OpenElec - works perfectly as long as you don't play any old mpeg stuff - so far raspbmc has been a bit stuttery for me.

CO₂ warms Earth FASTER than previously thought

Re: What's that bright light in the sky then?

Wow... The stupidity burns bright in this one...

Ocean-seeding experiment re-ignites geo-engineering debate

Re: They'd addressed this concern already, at least for this phase.

Sort of implies its a wasted effort then - if millions of tonnes are already being dumped to no appreciable effect then how much would we have to dump! Keeping it to a reasonable ratio might be 'safe' but if it has little effect then what is the point?

BIG BOOBS banished from Linux kernel

Re: I am gobsmacked at this serious issue being taken as nothing more than harmless fun!

So by your definition then feminazi is a made up construct that almost certainly exists in your head only?

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

Re: Fairly misleading article...

Try reading the blog linked to - perp 1 had a badge that he tried to hide... Plainly da management,

XBMC media player now running on Android, Nexus Q

Re: More like "I can has a fire extinguisher"

I also agree above is bollox - my raspberry pi idles at 50% CPU on a beta openelec xbmc build - since the Pi uses 3.5W max then that is not much of an issue and the CPU is not even warm.

Raspberry Pi sales limits lifted

Re: Rubbish

$117 plus shipping... Hmm depends what you want to do but since the Pi runs xbmc very well there is no advantage for me. Given the number of people developing for the Pi I'd expect support to be better in the long run - for example they are releasing a kernel using hard-float optimisation and ppl are working on gpu accelerated X.

Anonymous vows to wipe web clean of child abuse scum

Re: Oolons and David W.

Hehe White Knighting eh? Methinks someone has rotted their brains reading too many MRA websites. Probably not worth explaining to you but the example of how boys are meant to all want to get it on with older women and all girls are helpless victims is exactly a symptom of the society feminists want to get rid of. It hurts both men and women for us to be pigeon-holed into specific roles, something you seem to think has been accomplished by 30 years of fighting against it!

Male suicide is not sue to feminism - ffs only a total nut-job would make that association.

'Bigoted feminist', nice oxymoron, I'm prejudiced because I'm against prejudice! BTW I doubt I'm a very good feminist myself, I'm against all types of prejudice based on gender, race or whatever as it makes no sense. But I do retain the right to be prejudiced against paranoid morons such as yourself :-)

Re: Mmm...

Toxic institutionalised feminism... You do know what feminism means? A movement whose aims are equal rights for women, so how can that be toxic? Institutionalised?... It absolutely should be - all organisations whether private or public should make removing prejudice against women a core part of their business.

I'm not sure you really thought this through either - "brainwashing the public to believe that all men are filthy paedophile rapists". This attitude, if it exists, is not a widely held belief - surely you see that? If I do see it being pushed then more often than not its the Daily Fail saying that there are pedos everywhere and I doubt many feminists of any type would associate themselves with that lot.

So thanks for the well thought out comment on modern feminism, you appear to be a complete idiot :-)

Android games console scheme nets $2.5m

Re: @ g e

Yup the latest builds of openelec are great - it happily plays 10Gb+ 1080p24 films -- however I needed to plug it into my AV amp for things like 5.1 DTS as the Pi tries to downmix it and that kills the CPU. However pumping straight out to the amp and its as smooth as butter. Hardly use my Windows 7 HTPC now - just the Pi! Won't play ISOs of DVDs etc but then I encode all mine as H264 files anyway so not a big deal for me.

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

Re: Climate BOLLOX

@Matt Bryant -- so science for you is picking a small detail from a scientific paper and twisting it to make an unfounded hypothesis sound credible? DrXym was criticising methods used by some pretty dodgy groups who indulge in pseudo-science and religion... And you stand up for them? It is somehow non-scientific to criticise them and their use of those methods?

I'm not sure there are words to explain how stupid that is... But if there were you probably wouldn't understand anyway.

Re: @Ooloons

@ledswinger - learn to read - I called you a 'denier of climate deniers' not a 'climate denier' you are in a league of stupidity beyond the norm :-)

Re: @Ooloons

Cool @Ledswinger is a denier of climate deniers. I didn't know anyone had theorised they were a figment of our imagination... Maybe some let the twat-o-tron loose and it deed polled itself to Lewis Page :-O

Oh and BTW all historical data is untrustworthy and you use your critical faculties to decide how untrustworthy -hence the 1000's of weather stations vs a few bits of rotten wood in Finland. I'm not saying either are perfect just if I had to bet on it I'd not punt more than a couple of quid on it.

Did Lewis read the same paper?

Thanks to the link below I got to read the actual paper - the standard of reporting on this issue is atrocious. The paper looked at tree data from a small area of Scandinavia. Also pointing out that they have experienced a lot less warming in recent years than other northern areas.... Hmm do you think that may be true 1000's of years ago - it could have been warmer or cooler than the global average we don't know. So for CLIMATE in Lewis's article read WEATHER, i.e. Local effects for which it is extremely inaccurate to extrapolate to the world. Glad my knee jerk feeling that this was a daft extrapolation has been verified by the paper.

So climate deniers say the thousands of weather stations around the world were misreading the increase in global temperature and it does not exists. Then a group funded by climate sceptics and led by a physicist prove that the temperature is going up as the weather stations were saying.... So given the difficulty of measuring global temperature when we have thousands of stations we are supposed to believe this is accurate data? From Roman or Medieval times when they didn't even know the American continent even existed. Historical anecdote indicates it was probably warmer in this part of the world during the Summer months during the Roman and Medieval periods - almost certainly - although vineyards are not that good an indicator given there is a Sheffield vineyard that produces thousands of bottles right now. But extrapolating to the whole World! Even if some Antarctic data also fits your theory that is a massive jump in extrapolation to rival even the most wildly inaccurate climate model.

I don't understand the polarisation in the climate space since it obviously wrecks peoples critical abilities. I suppose the media benefit as they sell more papers or get more clicks - maybe that is the real conspiracy here :-)

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

Re: Epic Fail

I think the creationist comparison is getting even more relevant - btrower seems to think flying off massive posts with large numbers of different poor arguments from multiple sources somehow helps him win the argument. Gish Gallop much? http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

And the AC who said that vanderbudenmayer is more interesting in misunderstanding posts to take the piss is right on the mark. At least btrower is arguing, vanderb lost a long while back and has insulted his way into a big fail.

Re: Epic Fail

I think iamanidiot you are wasting your time, vandenbudenmayer and bthrower are more likely to spend their two brain cells working out a good way of taking the piss out of your handle than reading your post. They are in a dogmatic entrenched position which is why the comparison to creationists was a good one - no amount of reasoning will get through. The difference between them and the scientists they deride (cf vandenbudenmayer telling post in response to discovering the person he is arguing with is probably an order of magnitude more qualified than himself) is that if in 20 years time the ice sheets are still there the scientists will be busy working out why the models and predictions were wrong and fielding nutters who say its all a fake. Of course if things go as we suspect and the ice sheets are gone our two trolls will be hanging onto their beliefs as being *right* and never changing your mind is the primary goal of their existence.

Re: Whaddya expect

All those pesky scientists bigging it up in their Ferraris are obviously getting up your nose

Best and the Rest: ARM Mini PCs

Re: Ras Pi

MPEG2 you are correct as there are no drivers since paying for a licence was too expensive-- Xvid defintely not as I've happily played some XVids on it with little problem. XviD is MPEG-4 ASP / MPEG-4 part 2 (H263) so it is hardware accelerated on the Pi. Same goes for DivX but I've not tried it so cannot say for sure. WMV, MPEG2, MPEG1, AVS, VP6, VP7 and RealVideo are not supported - but who cares I always encode into H264 anyway.

The foundation have spoken about releasing a 'more powerful' version in the future - who knows they may see that a media streamer is a good market and pay for the MPEG2 licence for that bit of hardware.

Re: Of interest to overclockers, and those who don't mind void waranty

Its only 25 quid - I got mine going at 1Ghz straight off with over_voltage at 6 ... 1.35V I think? Need to try overclocking the GPU and memory next. Makes Openelec XBMC work better...

Re: My RasPi should arrive this week...

Get Openelec RPi XBMC - been trying it out on the RPi this week and its pretty good. 1080p and 720p H264 works fine. SD Xvids etc are fine but sometimes a bit choppy - overclocking the CPU to 1Ghz was dead easy and seems to have fixed some of the speed issues on XBMC. There are bugs however but it boots pretty fast on a class 10 SD card so the odd lockup can be fixed with a quick on and off... They are working hard to produce a finished version.

IBM smashes Flash out of Wimbledon, serves up HTML5 app

Re: Disingenuous

IBM do sell SPSS software as they own the company - bought them for 1.2 billion.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPSS

But you are right about flash - not sure how the subject got onto SPSS and flash given its only mentioned in that IBM moved from flash->html5....

Solar quiet spell like the one now looming cooled climate in the past

Re: Sponsorship and journalism

Have a look at pharyngula or any atheist site - they are covered in adverts for prayer lines and miracle cures. All those references to god but no context checking engine in the advert spewing machine... Or maybe you have a point and all the atheist sites are a fake by god to test our faith!

Intelligence a genetic mistake

Re: Since no one else has said it yet...

Not Pinky - Algernon is more relevant, Flowers for Algernon. Reminds me of that great short story anyway.

IBM gets flexible with converged Power, x86 system

Re: Seems like IBM has just redefined the word complexity

Revenue yes but IBMs profit does not come from services - Software Group have a massive margin. IGS is often sold on a cost basis with little or no profit at all just to drive hardware and software sales. So a bit of a flaw in your argument?

Watchdog sniffs David Beckham's wedding tackle

Re: Who are these strange, prudish people?

A pair of tits? I only saw David in the pic not his effervescent wife... Unless she was the stick they used to plump out his package....

Boffins boost fuel-cell future with 'nanowire forest'

Re: yes but (@LarsG)

LarsG - talking absolute bollocks about the Prius... I presume your one source of information is the daft study that decided a Prius cost more in energy than a Hummer. Unfortunately they made some serious errors such as assuming a Prius would only go 100K miles but a Hummer 400K. Hmm that's realistic. Now those incredibly expensive batteries - Nickel ones, very rare metal indeed (sarcasm) - the 'immensely polluting' Canadian mine Toyota got it from have figures that they bought 0.5% of the mines output at peak. Mostly it went into steel and on the chrome trim of luxury cars. Again for the cost - not got some real figures but the incredibly biased study that said a Hummer was better than the Prius costed recycling them at under $100. Now e-cars with Lithium batteries and you may have a bit of a point given its a truly rare earth and harder to recycle.

I'm sure you believe everything that Jeremy Clarkson says as gospel but why not spend 5 mins on Google checking your 'facts' before you brain fart? So enjoy driving your Ferrari but don't feel as smug when you pass a Prius.

Moles say Sony will kill Cell CPU for PlayStation 4

Re: Cell is a dog that is finally getting put down

Hmm IBM sold 13,000 of them for the, at the time, fastest computer on the planet - Roadrunner. Also the first to break the petaflop barrier. Hardly sluggish if used properly - which was and is the problem, SPEs are not easy to code for.

WTF has Cell got to do with Apple moving to Intel? That was due to a lack of Power CPUs with the right power envelope according to Apple - no one was going to put Cell in a Mac.

Re: Re: Remember, Cell is not Power 7

Oops you got it a bit wrong too :-) The SPEs are not Altivecs - there is one with the PPE core but its a different thing. IBM Mainframe is z/Architecture based and while it shares some components with Power its essentially CISC whereas Power is RISC. Decimal Maths is one small bit of weirdness on a z chip where there are nearly a 1000 custom instructions in microcode/hardware. Physical size is incorrect too - the entire MCM complex is big but an individual core at 45nm would be 25mm or so square. Improve the fab and the size is obviously less... IBM would not drop a whole System P Power 7 core in but like ARM they do mix and match so Power 7 less the decimal co-processor, IO channels and other exotic stuff for servers could do nicely. Just look at the architecture of the PowerPC A2 and BlueGene/Q multicore processors - nothing stopping them producing a custom multicore affair like these for the PS4 - unlike AMD IBM know how to stuff lots of cores on a chip and make it work (cf. Bulldozer).

Toy Story: Mystic Met needs swanky new kit, swoon MPs

Re: "consensus"

Oh dear - this comment -> "I've yet to see anyone bother explaining the various hot periods (farming on Greenland during the viking-era e.g.) of the past". Greenland is not the world - climate and weather are two different things etc etc. How many times does it have to be said before the dimwits get it? It is irrelevant if one area of the world was warmer/colder x years ago, the average is a different thing and local effects prove nothing either way.

Although the met office 4C map could be seen as scaremongering when no one knows for sure if/when we get a temp rise that big it is clear that global changes in temperature do not uniformly affect local conditions (Who'd have thought it!) I was surprised by the predicted 16C rise in some areas from a 4C rise overall however. Might help you understand the local/global difference a bit better - but then again you probably think its all a 'conspiracy' and will retreat back inside to put the tinfoil hat on.

Punters hate copyright, says Steelie Neelie

Oh Dear

Google failure - how hard is it to look it up?

"The actus reus of theft is usually defined as an unauthorized taking, keeping or using of another's property which must be accompanied by a mens rea of dishonesty and/or the intent to permanently deprive the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use."

What property has a pirate taken so depriving the owner of their rightful possession of that property or its use? So no while wrong copyright infringement is not theft... I don't really need to prove it as no copyright organisation has prosecuted anyone for anything other than copyright infringement - not theft - not genocide - just copyright infringement!

How do you square your black and white world with my music download example? No one was hurt - no one lost money - but it was illegal and I'm forever branded a thief in your bizarre world. The law is there for our benefit, if it punishes where there is no harm then it will be made an ass of (Look how many millions in the UK alone download) then it will be repealed - that's to come and will take a while given the vested interests of powerful media companies.

So there are lots of nasty un-middle class people in the world who should not be allowed access to the media you and I can afford and who would not be able to enjoy it if DRM actually worked. I already said those who download for free should be of no interest to these companies as (Apart from a vanishingly small minority - sorry that was not clear) they would not buy it in the first place - but why do the media companies therefore punish you and I with DRM and ads on our legally bought media? Cutting own nose off to spite face seems a good analogy.

Nope

Sorry wrong - had an interested conversation with a respected barrister who said the legal definition of theft would not include copyright infringement. You have not deprived anyone of any property so its not theft - so enough with the daft hyperbole already. That does not make it right and I would not want to shock you with my self righteous attitude too much.

An example - I used to download music and listen to it and if I liked it - buy the album. I found lots of new artists I really liked and undoubtedly bought a lot more music as I really hate it when I buy an album and it turns out to be rubbish. Absolutely wrong! I am an evil thief according to you... But now I don't need to do that, the music industry progressed and I can stream music from a number of places, listen to tracks legally and decide if I like the music and buy it with no 'thieving' download needed. Who was hurt by my immoral actions I wonder? Was it therefore immoral? Hard to answer without a philosophy degree.

There are always going to be people who download stuff for free and never pay - but they are vanishingly small compared to those that download and buy. So why do the MPAA etc punish those that buy legitimately to supposedly stop a small majority that probably would not buy the item in the first place if there was no free version? And by punish I mean make it impossible to flick past FBI warning / adverts on your DVD/bluray and add crappy DRM? I always rip mine to HDD to get rid of the crap -- or I download a pirated copy where someone has kindly done that for me - when I actually own the disc so I'll be on the next set of stats for all the 'billions' lost to piracy when I did buy the disc!

I'm not the only one - of all my friends those who buy the most digital media are also the most prolific downloaders. The industry will catch up eventually once they work out they are losing money on this daft witch hunt on their own customers.

How Jobs bent reality with LSD, Apple hype

And 66 cents

So $666.66 is obviously nothing to do with the number of the beast, unless the 666 is more of a rounding error and was always meant to be 667.

Massive study concludes: 'Global warming is real'

Nutty

You get the best nutters on theregisters climate change stories forums.

I for one welcome our 20xx overlords and their alien dating system.

Not convinced

Who ever said AGW was ever purely the 'A' part? In fact a large part of the argument has been the 'A' bit may trigger a large natural release of CO2/methane. Also a number of studies have said man made air borne soot has reduced warming.

Then you proceed to contradict yourself - after saying 'I'm not disputing the fact that global warming is or isn't happening' .... You then say 'The worlds population is contributing to this "global warming" but in such a low percentage that it won't make the end result any different.'

So you are not disputing that global warming is or is not happening but you personally 'know' that the worlds population IS contributing to this warming. Then somehow you also 'know' its so small that the end effect is nil - whatever the 'end' is :-)

I agree we need more efficiency regardless of GW using limited resources efficiently always makes sense. But again there is a large amount of certainty in your assertion that battery cars are not the way forward, but most people make short journeys and we have a means of charging battery cars. Contrast that to hydrogen which is extremely dangerous stuff when not transported properly and anyway there is no distribution network available.

Maybe we need you on the ITER project to kick some ass and get them to 'sort' it asap - those bloody lazy scientists obviously spend all day whining its too hot and need to get down to some serious work.

But then your final comment makes it seem that you are a tin-foil hat wearing nutter as the 'boys' from the AGW or battery car brigade will come and sort you out if you are not anonymous. So maybe not the best person to lead us into a fusion future.

How to go from the IT dept to being a rogue trader

Very good article

I especially liked this quote

"I emphasise this because El Reg readers are mostly well-intentioned IT people who seem to genuinely believe that building a reliable system and making code elegant and bug-free is somehow useful."

SQL survives murder attempt by mutant stepchild

Not a DB

In what way is MapReduce a DB? In most use-cases SQL will be used against a relational datastore to return data in under a second... MapReduce will be ran as a batch job to churn through terabytes/petabytes of data and apply an algorithm to 'reduce' or extract information of interest from semi structured or unstructured data. It will return in the timescale of hours or at most tens of minutes, Hadoop is pretty poor at quickly returning results as it kicks off JVMs to service the job.

Now comparing to Cassandra et al is maybe more of a reasonable stretch given it is a hierarchical key-value store with some ability to emulate relational stores. But pointing out that people who do not need the USP of Cassandra, massive scalability, will not use a 'product' that is only on version 0.8 when they don't need its USP and they can use a number of other open source databases to do what they want and not care about scalability is a total non-story both for the research and for this article.

IBM heaves new System z minis at mainframe shops

@Kebbabert brain fart

Do you not engage your brain before typing out a load of daft anti-IBM propaganda? If even a tiny amount of what is in your post was true then do you not think everyone would move their workloads to x86 servers? Especially given the astronomical costs of the mainframe environment?

Maybe there are a few things you are not considering....

As an aside in the real world (Not a place for a Kebbabert to tread) a large banking group I know have a large chunk of their real estate on x86, IBM Power and IBM Z -- of the three it is quite clear which gives them the best bang for the buck as both the x86 and Power estates are thousands of machines which are an utter nightmare to maintain. Z runs a very large proportion of their critical apps in a single managed environment that is easily distributed using GDPS. I think Kebby would get feck all commission trying to wean them off the 'weak' mainframe CPUs....

€1bn handout from the EU targets ambient nagware and robot pets

Send them into space

You've got it the wrong way around send all the useless pen pushers and telephone sanitisers into space a la Douglas Adams. Of course then we'd all be doomed to die from a fatal virus picked up from an unsanitised phone..... But we'd be happier until that happened.