Posts by Oscar

Streetmap's lawyer: Google High Court win will have 'chilling effect’ on UK digital biz

Yeah its pretty much the only site with public rights of way ...

Fleet of 4.77MHz LCD laptops with 8088 CPUs still alive after 30 years

Re: T1000Xe

Is a Dell Color a model? 'Cos my dad has a Dell 286 from 87 or 88 ...

BACS Bank Holiday BALLS UP borks 275,000 payments

Re: I feel sorry for

The cash left the employers' accounts .. its just that it never arrived at the employee's. Any money given to the employee now will need to be clawed back later ...

EU clears UK to give £50m to SABRE space launcher engine

<cynic>

So how long till reaction engines build their prototype get it working then collapse under massive debt only to be sold to a US corp that makes a massive profit out of the design?

Malware warning

Malware warning

Chrome is giving a malware warning from technojobs.co.uk ...

Britain'll look like rural Albania without fracking – House of Lords report

reliant on Russian gas?

Since when have we been reliant on Russian gas? We even got all smug a few years back when Russia and Ukraine had a spat which resulted in the Russian gas supply being turned off precisely because we AREN'T reliant on it ...

Apple investors fall for CEO Cook's product-presentation prank

Apple TV purchases ...

Given that purchases are shared between all your iDevices (and the macbook) how can you sort Apple TV program sales from iPhone/iPad sales as, pretty much, everyone who has an Apple TV also has an iDevice of some sort ...?

Bonking boffins say bacon biters won't breed

I sometimes wonder how I ever had a child ...

HYPERSONIC METEOR smashes into Russia, injuring hundreds

Re: On the seismograph

Yup that australian has been on the crack .. there was no earthquake around the same time (14 hours earlier)... not to mention that the earthquake in the area he's talking about was really a rather significant distance from where everything is filmed ...

Network boffins say Terabit Ethernet is TOO FAST

I rememebr the day (back in 2002) when my bosses set up a 1Gbps backbone on their network and wired me and my console dev kits directly on to that network ... I was such a happy bunny. Give me an excuse (and the bandwith) and I'm pretty sure I can properly whore 1Tbps too :D

O2, GiffGaff network goes titsup for unlucky punters

Re: Contract fine

Contract is not fine for me Mr Morris ;) Been down for over an hour and was acting weird for the hour prior to that ...

Google lands patent for, um, estimating shipment time

Amazon?

Surely Apple would be the more tactical target?

OCZ joins PCIe flash fray

Re: I agree

Hold on ... since when did flash ever require a battery to back it up? This isn't volatile memory ya know ...

AMD, GlobalFoundries, and the Intel gap

Re: oh dear

Really? My shitty surfing only laptop copes just fine. Perhaps you should try not running windows 7 on a 15 year old laptop?

PS: According to "mavis beacon teaches typing" i can type at 140 words per minute. So don't even go "there" ;)

Phonemakers cry foul on Steve Jobs 'We're all alike' attack

@ Chad H

Well done on your skills! I've had about 5 people do it with my 3GS ... Let alone the 4 ...

Jobs tells iPhone users to get a grip

iPhone 3GS

When I showed my boss the original video he proceeded to show me the exact same issue on 4 iPhone 3GS. You don't fully lose signal but you will drop from 5 to 1 bar. So all those feeling smug about owning a 3GS give it a try ;)

Ten free apps to install on every new Mac

Windows 7

Biggest productivity improving move I've made with the mac mini I've got at work :D

EA imposes used games tax

TBH I think its a good thing...

I don't see anyone defending EA. In fact I'm reticent to defend them. However when faced with the outrageous secondhand sales tactics of companies like gamestop (and many more over here in the UK) they have to do something or they go under.

The problem is when shops take the piss as badly as they do by actively pushing secondhand sales over new sales (including trying to talk people out of buying new) with discounts of around a £1 over the full retail new copy something needs to be done. The companies pay a fraction for the games when taken to them, £10 for a game is not unusual, that they then pass back on to the consumer for up to £44!! How does THAT work? Thats some AMAZING profit right there!!

Ya know what? ... while I'm slightly anti-EA's move I'm far happier to see these retailers taking a kicking for it.

Applesoft, Ogg, and the future of web video

And if the US got rid of software patents ...?

This article would have been a couple of lines long.

I really don't believe the idea that video codecs aren't patentable. I should really get a number of my ideas for wavelet encoding up online as despite having played with such things for years I don't hold any date based evidence of the prior art to invalidate a patent...

Adobe clutches chance to bury Steve Jobs 'hog' insult

Re: You don't need quick time...

You don't need iTunes either but it doesn't stop that and quick time being incredibly poorly programmed.

Adobe to Jobs: 'What the Flash do you know?'

I'm no fan of flash ...

... i'd even go so far as to call it a piece of crap. But isn't it a bit rich of Jobs to diss adobe's products when they release the utter crap that is iTunes and Quicktime?

Venezuela spits out Coke Zero

Re: MDMA

TBH every argument i've heard about relaxing the rules on MDMA are not the long term damage but that "PEOPLE HAVE DIED ON THE STUFF OMFGWTFBBQ WHY DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND??". Or put differently, simply dismissed on Rhetoric rather than for any sound scientific reasons ...

Ford crushes half-price hybrid hoax

Cheers!

Its still ridiculous how cheap it would be to run an efficient modern european PETROL car in the states.

And for Daniel: I really wouldn't call 1.2 times smaller "considerably smaller". It is pretty easy to divide the uk mpg by 1.2 to get us mpg, which if you actually read my message you might have noticed I had done :P

41MPG in city, 35 on highways?

Why is it that my 2004 Ford Focus Estate (Diesel) will do me 65mpg (Thats 54.1 miles per US gallon) on a 150 mile parental visit cruise and yet this vehicle can only do 35 on highways?

Also why is it that in europe cars do better mileage cruising at 50 miles per hour and in the states they do worse?

I know diesel is more efficient than petrol but im pretty sure the european petrol ford focus cars can do better mileage than this "efficient" american hybrid.

Can someone explain to me wtf is going on?

Government flags ID cost increase

Re: At this point

And what political party ever follows through with it's election pledges?

iPhone chip designer trumpets multi-core GPUs

Re: PowerVR?

PowerVR have been making low power chips for years. The bonus of their architecture is that memory bandwidth is saved on a MASSIVE scale. This means that you can use much slower, far less power hungry memory with it.

The newer chips have supported pixel and vertex shaders as well as T&L for a good while now. I'm pretty sure they can even support up to DX10.1 level (ie geometry shaders).

NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution

re: Using PS3s/Teslas to crack AES

I don't know AES so I may be wrong but i'd wager you couldn't crack it using floating point. Too sodding inaccurate.

That makes the SPEs and Shader Units pretty much useless for this task ...

Intel rallies rivals on parallel programming education

Multiple execution units?

Can multi-processor systems not be set up to look like they, simply, have many more execution units to provide the kind of parallelism that most sequential programmers are already used to?

Broadband speed testers fail the test

Good for VM .. shat for others?

Just tried it with O2 ... got 0.7mbps? I was just downloading something at 12Mbps so im not sure how thats a good test.

Mind the test on be internet's hoempage reported me as 3Mbps yesterday and Be are OWNED by O2 ... and again had just been getting far superior download rates ...

Be Unlimited pulls plug on home CCTV service

Re: Don't knock O2

I too have recently signed up to O2 broadband and have found them to be reliable, fast and customer service is the BEST I've ever come across. After BT screwed up our line (They were doing a number transfer from Virgin and got completely screwed about by BT including them managing to connect the OLD line to the O2 exchange, by their admission) I had a good chat with the guy there who was actually an interesting nice chap to talk to. Things got sorted quickly and I was online within 48 hours (Though the guy said that this would "probably" be the case he couldn't guarantee that it would be).

So glad I've left Virgin sodding media.

UK game-development degrees not up to snuff, claims industry

This is news??

Christ ... the quality of graduates has always been shite. I actually quit my degree to enter the "industry". I was told by one of the directors of the company a few years later that I was a good bet as i showed more innate ability than a lot of graduates. To be honest, I wasn't surprised considering some of the graduate interviews i sat in on.

UK developer trio accused of game plagiarism

Original version was ripped off too ...

There is an amusing thread on Neogaf and on there there is talk about the original, Amiga, version that they worked on nearly 15 years ago. Turns out people have found that the artwork in that was ripped off too ...

Totally brilliant ... i just can't believe they thought they'd get away with this one ...

AMD to pair CPUs, GPUs with Intel's physics tech

@Phil Hare

Because Havok has an SPE optimised version. You don't have enough spare processing power on either the 360 or PS3 graphics chips to do physics.

Heaviest Virgin Media downloaders face new daytime go-slow

Bandwidth throttling is not that little ...

I remember downloading the latest version of the DirectX SDK back in march. The download started off nicely at 450KB/sec but about 3/4 the way through the download my download rate dropped to just 16KB/sec. This lasted for the 5 hours stated. Now i fail to see how throttling a 4meg connection by even 75% can cause me to slow down to ISDN (dual linked) speeds ... VM are full of sh*t. I'm off to join O2 when I move in a couple of weeks and VM can sod off.

Alienware ships 'most powerful' 15in laptop to Brits

re: I'm typing this on an m15X

I agree with what you say on the trackpad and the volume control .. they suck goat .. err .. horns.

Totally disagree on the screen though ... i've got the 1920x1200 and its FAT! :D Used to have an acer Ferrari with a 1680x1050 screen and, tbh, it just wasn't high enough res for me. Its not hard to read the text unless you are seriously short sighted ... Even then you can up the size of the fonts. I like having the ability to see small details as well as larger details.

That said i do a lot of software dev and am a total whore for fitting as much info on screen as possible ...

I do have a couple of problems .. one of the laptop speakers has started to sound dangerously like its blown and every time i come out of sleep mode ... MSN hangs good and proper ... Beyond that ... its actually a joy to use Vista on one of these beasts :)

Boffin stacks 16 PS3s to simulate black hole collisions

... imagine if everyone did this ...

Ok ... so Sony sell the PS3 at a loss .. right? So what would happen if EVERYONE bought a PS3 did this with it and didn't buy any games?

/me dreams

US Navy to test fire electric hypercannon

Re: Ye canna change the laws o physics Jim

I thought the whole point of a rail gun was that the projectile is suspended in the EM field and as such never actually touches the edge of the barrel (which is just a set of electric coils). So not sure where the bore of the barrel comes into it ...

BOFH: Beancounter bashing

RE: The real moral to the story

I'm assuming this makes us Brits better programmers then ...? ;)

Slave kids working UK cannabis farms

re: "some people allege it has mental health effects in the long term"

I think you'd be surprised how many heavy regular uses HAVE had mental health problems related to cultivated skunk (and this only, mind ... hash and bush weed appear not to cause the problem). I certainly have. Still spent a weekend over in amsterdam recently and smoked some mind blowing hashes and not once did the schizophrenia kick back in. Note: It ended when i gave up, contrary to what the "system" has been saying, after realising what i was doing to myself. I was a VERY heavy smoker though.

Broadbandit nabbed in Wi-Fi bust

Not true at all ...

"I'd say it's pretty simple to figure out whether it's a public network or not actually. For one thing, public networks have SSIDs like "STARBUCKS" or "BRIGHTONFREEWIFI", rather than "NETGEAR" or "31SMITHSTREET"."

I've seen an ALARMING amount of machines set to accept all incoming Wi-Fi connections with SSID names like "Free public Wifi". Whats that all about? Im fairly sure its some default setting from some manufacturer, though ... cos im seeing it everywhere. Mind anyone in the know can spot the difference between a wireless card and an access point (that little image is handy). The average Joe isn't going to realise this. It would also be a very easy way to hack someone's machine. They connect to YOU and then you hack them. Bet it'd be dead hard to trace as well ...

Employers must spot signs of depression

I have a plan ...

How about not working their staff so hard int he first place? Anyone else see the connection between long working hours and depression?