Posts by Vociferous

Virtual-reality Dev Kit 2 game goggles by Oculus – now with less vomit!

....aaand it's dead.

Bought by Facebook. Of all embarrassing, humiliating, ways this incredibly promising technology could have died...

Re: Maybe a silly question

> why don't these have a front-mounted camera

I'm sure there will be, perhaps not on the release version but on the version(s) after that. With the flick of a switch you'd be able to jump from the game world to the seeing the desk in front of you, without taking off your goggles, which would obviously be useful.

This would also open for interesting "augmented reality" applications.

Re: Maybe a silly question

> It's far from clear just how big a market VR headsets will actually have

FWIW I would quite happily bet my house on VR headsets becoming huge. If I could buy Oculus VR shares I would pretty much do exactly that -- bet my house. The only time I've ever seen technology with "WIN!" painted on it in such huge fiery letters was the first release of the Geforce cards.

I expect headsets to completely revolutionize gaming. It would surprise me if, in five years, the majority of PC and console games are still played on screens.

Crystal cove

Is it known if the release version will have the positional-tracking infra-red LED's of the Crystal Cove prototype?

As WinXP death looms, Microsoft releases its operating system SOURCE CODE for free

Microsoft is not interested in having the community taking care of XP, and thereby competing with Win8.

Facebook swallows Oculus VR goggle-geeks. Did that really happen?

Re: second life?

Yeah. Second Life meets Teh Social. Streamed. On cell phones.

Re: NOooooOOoooo

> I've tried one of the pre-production prototypes. Cool, yes. Finished, no.

Then you of course know that the recent pre-production versions fixed most of the problems.

> Heading the right way, certainly. Perfectly pitched to reel in the wealthy and compulsive Zuckerberg

You are seriously thinking too small. If it had NOT been bought by Facebook, I would say that within five years a majority of PC gamers would not have been using normal screens any more. By that time there should have started appearing movies for this format. Another ten years and hardly anyone at all would have been using normal screens for entertainment. Now this wont happen. Instead...

> Facebook in 3D from their mobile.

...this is what's going to happen. Shitty 3D, probably streamed, aimed at cellphones, in a browser window.

The technology focus will shift from being PC-only mid-end virtual reality gear, to being a mobile-first ad distribution platform. It'll probably not kill the technology, as Valve, Microsoft and probably also other hardware manufacturers like Asus and Samsung, are working on their own implementations, but it'll slow adoption.

Re: Carmack now works for Zuckerberg

No, this is facebook buying the future very cheaply. The Sony goggles are nowhere near as good as Oculus, and Valve's and Microsoft's are still utter vaporware which only exist as press releases. And are you sure about the "no patents"?

Re: NOooooOOoooo

@bazza: You don't know what Oculus Rift is? Check some Youtube videos and contemplate what almost was.

NONONONOOOOOOOOO! WHY GOD WHY!!!?!?!

FUCK! It's the first technology I've been really excited about for years. It had "win!" painted all over it in huge letters of fire. And now it's dead. Goddamit. Just goddammit. Worst tech news I've heard since ... ever. Even Commodore bankrupting wasn't this bad.

Yeah, two billion dollars, but this was tech that was going to transform gaming, not push ads for facebook in a fucking browser. Well, let's hope they HAVEN'T patented the tech so at least other companies can release 3D headsets.

New WebCL toolkit hooks browser apps into GPUs – and that's not good news for Apple

Hype it till you make it

I remember I was impressed when I first saw a 3D shape reflect the skybox. I think it was in Final Reality demo. An alien chromium spaceship. That was back in 1999, if memory serves.

That browsers, 15 years later, have reached the same capability is in many ways impressive, but "same performance as native code" it clearly is not, and I doubt Apple's app store has much to fear. I understand the need to hype new products such as this or that new cell phone chip which claimed to outperform nVidias baddest offerings, but... seriously. Come on.

The plot to kill Google cloud: We'll rename Windows Azure to MICROSOFT Azure

Re: Ah the wisdom of nerds

Could even the Microsoft marketing department believe that changing the name from Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure (all light on Microsoft!) would actually make the product more popular in the face of superior competitors?

I can't wait for Nigella's press release.

I haven't played Buzzword Bingo for almost a day.

Seriously, though, it makes me a little bit sad seeing Microsoft flail around. The company clearly has no idea where it's going. But just a little bit sad, because then I remember that the reason it's flopping is because it decided to out-Apple Apple at treating users as mildly retarded sheep.

Michelle Obama speaks out against censorship ... in China

Re: @Vociferous - Fuck you all.

> If you are forced to self-censor because Big Brother wants to look at everything you do, then you are still being censored and repressed, just in a different way.

No, it just means that you're either a spy or paranoid. The NSA will not kick down your door and drag you off screaming in the night for calling Obama names or supporting Snowden -- but it seems like a lot of you like to pretend that is the case.

> When something happens - such as how US Navy Seals seized an oil tanker from Libya last week for being sold without US approval, under Obama's authority, there's no special reason to make excuses.

Except that the oil tanker was sold by islamist groups to fund terror, and that the US was asked to intervene by the Libyan government.

Re: Fuck you all.

> I think the thing that annoys many people is the complete arrogance of the US.

Oh the US is incredibly arrogant. The whole "we're God's chosen people and the rest of the world is at best props in our domestic politics" schtick is annoying as fuck. But they are in fact a democracy, and they do in fact have freedom of speech. No ifs or buts. It is dishonest to claim otherwise.

> The words would be far less hollow if they can from the leaders of Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, etc.

Really? Did you know there's less freedom of speech there than in the US? For instance being a nazi or a racist is grounds for prosecution and imprisonment in Sweden.

Re: Fuck you all.

> subtle oppression is far more productive

Yeah, that's exactly the dumbness I'm talking about. Tell you what, you oppress me subtly by, let's say, reading my email without me knowing, and I'll oppress you unsubtly with a claw hammer, and then we'll compare which is more effective.

Re: Standard US policy continues

Speaking of fail: how is the US censoring you?

Here, look at this:

Obama is an idiot, and Snowden is a hero for stealing tons of state secrets. I'll even post a link: http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/everything-we-learned-from-edward-snowden-in-2013-20131231

Now watch this post get deleted, The Register cautioned, National Journal shut down, and me incarceratedreeducated for the next 20 years. Oh wait, that's what would have happened if this had been in China.

Do any of you spoiled fucking children even know what censorship is?

Re: Fuck you all.

> didnt they try to imprison him and now they are trying to get him tried for treason

Snowden is a Chinese spy who stole tons of state secrets and fled the country, of course they'll try to try to catch and imprison him.

Notice that YOU aren't being imprisoned for talking about it. This thread isn't being deleted because we mentioned his name. The Register isn't being shut down because it reported about it. Even the journalists who disseminated the secrets are free to go about their business, feeling the warm glow of having done a good thing, without risking being tortured or spending the nest 20 years doing hard labor.

That's the point. Westerners in general and americans in particular are NOT oppressed. You DO have freedom of expression. That's why I tell you to go fuck yourselves when you try to pretend Clinton is a hypocrite for demanding less oppression in China.

Re: Fuck you all.

> They let him go again but not before going through his stuff.

What? A dude with stolen state secrets in his bags, and they went through his bags to find them???

Help! Help! I'm being oppressed! Come see the violence inherent in the system!

Fuck you all.

Yes, fuck all of you who criticize her for arguing in favor of freedom of speech in an oppressive dictatorship. You're sitting safe in countries where you're not persecuted and imprisoned for saying that it would be nice to be able to criticize the government's policy, and where you can rely on laws, not just bribes and contacts, to protect you from corrupt officials. You bitch about NSA in countries where neither you nor journalists get imprisoned/beaten/murdered for reporting things like the Snowden leak.

It annoys me to no fucking end how spoiled, whiny, and self-centered westerners are. Censorship in China is not about you. Ukraine is not about you. Iran and Syria and Central African Republic are not about you. Most of you clearly are so sheltered that you don't have the slightest inkling of a clue what oppression is.

So fuck you all.

Middle England's allotments become metric battlefield

Re: Metric is easy to do calculations in.

> why is the length of a car specified in mm for manufacturing?

Because of significant digits. The tolerance is a fraction of the unit used.

> Stupid metric/imperial measurement failures that you read about are the result of errors in conversion between metric and imperial measures

Yes, the smart solution is to only pick ONE system, not keep translating back and forth. Metric is considerably easier to use, especially in science and engineering; imperial is traditional.

> On an absolute scale, conversions within the metric system are approximately just as difficult and error prone as converson between systems.

Only when comparing base-10 units. How many grains to 0.17 troy pound?

Re: Measurements

> To have a half allotment you normally divide it in two along its length. Now you will need a whole army of idiots with theodolites trying to calculate a fraction of a square root of 325

Or you could just divide it in two along its length.

Also, and somewhat surprisingly, it's also so practically arranged that one pole can be rounded to five meters (five meters two centimeters).

Yes, this does strike me as something of a first world problem.

What does people-centric IT mean, anyway?

I thought disruptive new paradigms was the new paradigm?

I want you to rest assured that Microsoft is dedicated to excellence, and is on the runway to proactively leverage its noncurrent assets to ensure that you, the rear-end user, calibrate your expectations so you can be empowered by the holistic experience of Windows 9. I mean 8.

Wait, are we playing that drinking game again?

Because if I'm going to take a shot every time I hear a marketing buzzword here, I'm going to have to eat something really fatty and filling first.

EDIT: Spaghetti bolognese. OK, I'm set.

Turkey's farcical Twitter ban leads to SPIKE in tweets

So how, exactly, would that block access via foreign proxies/tor?

AT&T and Netflix get into very public spat over net neutrality

I don't like natural monopolies.

They're guaranteed to result in price gouging and substandard service quality.

So, therefore, the building and upkeep of net infrastructure should be done by the state. Same for electricity and roads.

There. I said it. Nationalize the cable companies.

This changes everything: Microsoft slips WinXP holdouts $100 to buy new Windows 8 PCs

Re: 15% is misleading

I'm not sure why Microsoft is so keen on conflating Desktop, Phone and RT figures: to inflate the acceptance stats for Phone and RT, or to play down the de-facto monopoly of Desktop?

More effective.

I don't understand why Microsoft isn't offering a special "Upgrade From XP" version of Windows 8, with an instance of XP running in a secured hyper-v virtual machine.

Yeah, the upgraders will hate Win8, spend most of their time in the virtual machine, and not use Microsofts future cash cows (Microsoft Store, cloud storage) but that will happen anyway.

IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot

Re: Amiga

I came to Amiga from a background on C64 (didn't we all?) and low-end PCs, and was blown away by, in order of appearance, the graphics, the sound, and the OS. The OS was the most tinkering-friendly OS I've ever seen, and was of a type we'll never see again: all OS's today are designed ground-up to be defensive, to protect data from outside enemies and from the user. AmigaOS wasn't like that, it was instead designed to be configurable and transparent. (For those who do not know what it was like, imagine a streamlined XFCE linux without any multi-user or security features, where everything is wide-open to tinkering, and you're in the ballpark.)

Re: The 6845 is a zero-colour chip

no idea how large a baseball is

It's one shaftment and 9 barleycorns in diameter, about the same size as a large Pomacea snail. HTH.

The Model M keyboard is wonderful, but also INCREDIBLY LOUD. The other people of your household, office, and possibly surrounding countryside, will not thank you for getting a Model M.

Someone suggested it was made that loud to simulate the sound of a typewriter, much like how very early cars were made to look like horse-buggies, but it doesn't really sound like a typewriter. On the other hand he sound is, pretty much literally, iconic. Everyone knows exactly how a Model M sounds: it's the sound of all keyboards in all movies ever.

Microsoft charges the FBI $50 for a copy of your private data, claim 'Redmond hackers'

"Hacktivists apparently loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad"

They're Russian, almost certainly state-sponsored, hackers.

Microsoft exec: I don't know HOW our market share sunk

Re: This, from an Exec?

There is no loss of marketshare. That's the point I made above. There is failure to gain marketshare for two completely new products in two completely new segments.

Madness? This. Is. STATISTICS!

Or not.

Spot the logical flaw: "Microsoft operating systems ran 93 per cent of traditional PC clients in 2013, but the share fell to 58 per cent when tabs were rolled into shipments."

Does anyone here think Microsoft operating systems do not still run on at least 93% of traditional PC clients? You know, the hopeless, dying, platform which sold a measly 270 million units last year?

Hence, this article can be rephrased as follows: "Microsoft is dominant in one class of computing device, but not in two other, different, classes of computing devices. Microsoft is baffled why people do not like Windows RT and Windows Phone as much as they like Windows Desktop."

(And one may add: "...despite Microsoft's best attempts to make Windows Desktop more like Windows RT".)

BLUE BIRD DOWN: Turkey wipes out Twitter 'scourge'

No authoritarian ever liked freedom of speech.

In fact, it's one of the easiest ways to spot them.

NSA 'hunted sysadmins' to find CAT PHOTOS, high-level passwords

I have a folder of cat pictures.

Just saying.

UK.gov! frets! over! Yahoo! exodus! to! RIPA-free! Dublin!

Yahoo has always been the Ryanair of the net

Cheap and nasty, you get what you paid for and no more (also applies to their free services).

Microsoft frisked blogger's Hotmail inbox, IM chat to hunt Windows 8 leaker, court told

Re: You poor wounded people.

Here. Do you see this? It's my privacy. That's where Microsoft hurt me.

Now, do you see this? No? That's where your integrity should have been.

"Microsoft searched the BLOGGER's Hotmail account"

Surely you jest? If that is the case, Microsoft is in deep dodo. That they own the service does NOT mean that they have the right to read users emails at will.

> hey simply took advantage of the fact that they owned the mail server and peeked away

That the system at all allows that is a horrible security and privacy flaw.

> I suppose there might be fine print in the ToS for this scenario.

ToS are not laws, not even in the US.

Microsoft can just read anyone's hotmail account?

Isn't account hacking, I don't know, a tad illegal? And couldn't it, I'm just throwing ideas out here, conceivably hurt user confidence in the service?

But hey, Microsoft OK'd that Microsoft could read his mail, so I guess that's all OK. Right?

Imagination brings real-time hyper-realistic ray tracing to mobile kit

Bull.

Yeah, they've developed a chip for mobile phones which outperform nVidia's flagship cards. My ass.

As for single vs double precision: this chip is aimed at gaming and gaming gear is always optimized for single precision. nVidias and AMDs gaming product lines have crippled double precision to avoid competing with their enterprise product lines.

Apple rakes in 60% of profits in still-surging smartphone market

Massive profit margin.

The graphs show that Apple has a small percentage of the market, but a huge precentage of the profit. That's a typical pattern for prestige brands. When price is jacked up on prestige brands, the sales volumes dip slightly, but the profit margin grows hugely. It's the position every company wants to be in.

This also means that Apple sells on image, not products, and will need to be careful not to tarnish their image. Above all Apple should avoid producing low-cost phones, or, if they do, at least not sell them under the Apple brand.

'Zotob' hacker 'Diabl0' arrested in Bangkok after three-year hunt

State sponsored/spook?

Seems his activities are strangely well-aligned with the views of Iran and Russia. I trust they'll thoroughly investigate his bank accounts and movements.

GRAV WAVE TSUNAMI boffinry BONANZA – the aftershock of the universe's Big Bang

Re: "expansion of space briefly exceeded the speed of light "

> Space does effectively move - we know that the universe is expanding - and that we can see light from distances further away than we should be able to if space was not moving.

No, that's confusing the apparent effects on objects in spacetime with spacetime itself. Spacetime isn't an object, it's the set of coordinates, axles in a graph, we use to describe the position of objects in the universe.

MtGox allows users to see a picture of their money, but not have it

Yes, pointless humiliation was just what this situation needed!

You gotta love a currency run by /b/tards.

Next, make them dance for their money! Tits or no coins!