Posts by Robinson

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

How the hell is NVIDIA supposed to know what the cards it's customers buy are going to be used for?

'An issue of survival': Why Mozilla welcomes EU attempts to regulate the internet giants

There that word "harmful" again; the funnel through which a crackdown on free speech is going to happen.

Oracle finally responds to wage discrimination claims… by suing US Department of Labor

Really?

Being in the same job with the same title does not imply you're equally skilled or productive, or indeed that you're equally adept at negotiating your remuneration.

US minister invokes Maggie Thatcher, says she would have halted Huawei 5G rollout

He's right.

He's right on this and you're wrong. So who's the bellend?

The government will reverse its idiotic policy eventually.

Microsoft debuts Bosque – a new programming language with no loops, inspired by TypeScript

Developer invents Lambda function syntax for_each?

Head-desk.

And here's Intel's Epyc response: Up-to 56-core, 4GHz 14nm second-gen Xeon SP chips, Agilex FPGAs, persistent mem

Price?

I'm guessing these will be way more expensive than the AMD equivalents.

Scumbag hackers lift $1m from children's charity

Really.

That's not the only theft going on at the charity. Save the Children International's CEO Helle Thorning-Schmidt earned $299,136 in 2017 and presumably a similar amount every other year.

Where to implant my employee microchip? I have the ideal location

Oh...

Alistair, this is brilliant. Thanks for the laugh.

Leaked: The UK's secret blueprint with telcos for mass spying on internet, phones – and backdoors

6,500 isn't enough. There are up to 10,000 Jihadi sympathisers in the UK.

‘Artificial Intelligence’ was 2016's fake news

Wonderful.

Great piece. There's a tsunami of bollocks out there on this and other subjects. It's mostly rent-seekers and/or venture capital seekers filling empty airwaves with unmitigated rubbish. I have no idea why Elon Musk's every fart gets near the top of Reddit. It seems to me he's just a fantasist. No BS I could come out with ridiculous tech ideas every single day just like him. He's basically shaking down the government anyway. I don't think his ventures are actually profitable are they.

I am an AI major by the way and have understood since my undergraduate days that what people call "AI" is actually just a search problem. Expert systems are just directed search algorithms (directed by Humans selecting relevant data). Neural Networks are fuzzy pattern recognition and correlation algorithms. There's no intentionality here. No consciousness. No "thing it is like to be" an "AI" but you wouldn't know that from the media.

So yes I agree. It's all bollocks.

Hello, police, El Reg here. Are we a bunch of terrorists now?

Perhaps not for watching it.

If not arrested for watching it, should certainly be sectioned for wanting to. I imagine they're absolutely revolting to watch.

BBC: We'll give FREE subpar-Raspberry-Pis to a million Brit schoolkids

It's not "free"

We've already paid for these with our licence fee. It's "free" only in the way socialist organisations use the word.

Quantum computers have failed. So now for the science

Re: @ Phil Endecott -- We'll see...

I hate to be a party pooper because you've made a bit of an effort here but what you've described is the distinction in philosophy between "things in themselves" and "things as they appear". Science concerns itself with the latter. The former is unknowable and likely transcends the limits of Human understanding. That's why physicists don't like to discuss it. It's kind-of pointless.

Mathematics is a language used to condense/compress descriptions of the regularities of our experience. I don't believe there's any sense that it "is" what it models. It's just a kind-of shorthand for what we perceive to be the case.

As you can tell I'm not a Logical Positivist.

Chipotle insider trading: Disproving the efficient markets hypothesis

Historical.

This article is kind-of historical, then. Because if they weren't priced in, they certainly are now. I can't imagine a credit card company won't be making use of this information to trade stocks in future.

Elite:Dangerous goes TITSUP

Re: @Robinson - OK but

"If you want to take the analogy to an extreme, people enjoy playing chess and draughts (aka checkers), and they have literally no built-in narrative."

OK so I will conceded the point about narrative in chess and perhaps I'm not the first-person centre of the universe in God games like Sim City (though I am God so I could argue that point if I had the time). What I'm arguing is that these other genres of game do whatever they do a lot better than Elite Dangerous does what it does.

Let me give you some examples. Freelancer had a single player campaign that really engaged the player. That was its "thing" (combat was fun too). X2 had a unique economic model and the ability for the player to run little scripts and remote control his assets. That was its "thing". Eve Online puts the massive into massively multiplayer and has a totally player run economy (some things still get seeded by NPCs of course). That's its "thing". Having a "thing" maintains the player's interest. So, what is Elite Dangerous's "thing"?

As far as I can see it doesn't have one. Perhaps it will in 2 or 5 years. But it doesn't today. Today it's a dreary galaxy simulator. So in 2 or 5 years time we can comment under reviews of expansion packs and we will no doubt say different things. But right now I'm calling it as the empty experience it is.

Re: OK but

I don't give a flying cluck about "offline mode". I'm just telling you that whatever this game does was done far better in games of the genre from 10 years ago. Freelancer was much more fun to play as was (is) X2. Elite Dangerous was good to play for about 2 weeks whilst I got the "wow" factor of the Oculus Rift out of my system. Now it's just a daily grind.

And who cares about the war? I don't. None of any other blocs have done anything to make me sympathetic with them to care who owns what. That's the problem with broad, sweeping narratives. They mean nothing to an individual player and don't make a story that he feels the need to be involved in. The player in a game is the centre of the universe, not an outside observer.

Frontier have been making Kinectimals for so long they forgot how to tell a story, if they ever knew in the first place and given how The Outsider was an utter failure, I think Elite Dangerous is just a cash grab to fend off bankruptcy in any case.

OK but

Yea the game is "great" in a genre of 1. But it's really, really, really boring. People on the forums will tell you to use your imagination. I mean they actually tell you to do that. They say, "if you think Elite Dangerous is boring, switch off your computer, go and lie down on the sofa, close your eyes and imagine you're flying a space ship and getting into lots of really exciting adventures. Games like this don't spoon feed you adventures, you have to imagine them totally by yourself and you don't need a computer for that, duh."

I have a hole in my forehead from smacking it with my hand reading some of the BS people write about this, frankly dull and empty game.

UKIP website TAKES A KIP, but for why?

Re: They arent a serious party..

"Until they are fully stocked with the paedophiles and criminals like the established UK parties!"

Only 3 of the original 20 UKIP MEPs went to prison, so who knows, perhaps they are already.

I need a password to BRAKE? What? No! STOP! Aaaargh!

Haha

This is a wonderful piece Alistair. Thank you.

Origins of SEXUAL INTERCOURSE fished out of SCOTTISH LAKE

What?

The origin of sex goes back a lot further than fish.

You can crunch it all you like, but the answer is NOT always in the data

There were quite a few statisticians who `successfully' mined financial data to price derivatives and other securities.

Turned out really well didn't it.

Linux systemd dev says open source is 'SICK', kernel community 'awful'

Reverse racism

How often recently (over the last few years) have I heard or read the following, "Western, straight, white, male" written or spoken in a derogatory manner. Can you imagine if I'd written something similar about gays or black men? How long would it be before I had a visit from the fuzz?

Western civilisation (created by Western white males) is slowly disappearing up its own behind and people like Lennart Poettering are the reason why.

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

Minister?

This was according to the Minister for Being an Idiot, Ed Davey, was it?

Limits to Growth is a pile of steaming doggy-doo based on total cobblers

Re: Parameter error

" If we are able to survive and maintain that world growth rate, by 2100, there will be 49 billion people on the planet."

Is this the same kind of extrapolation people used to work out how deep the horse manure would be across the entire city of New York by 2000 at current increase in horse ownership (1900)? If it is (and I think it is), you're an idiot. Population is predicted to level off at around 9bn and then start to fall. It falls as populations become wealthier, which totally destroys your stupid thesis.

Answer: It was about head high, by the way.

Re: Enery is the secret

I could think of a few things to do with a machine gun involving Paul Ehrlich.

The agony and ecstasy of SteamOS: WHERE ARE MY GAMES?

sooo..

From the opening paragraphs what I'm getting from this article is that you went ahead and installed it on non-recommended hardware and then you were shocked and disappointed that it was hard work getting it set up.

News at 11?

EVE Online erects mashed-up memorial to biggest space fight in history

Re: False sense of achievement maxed out...

There's only a real money comparison here because you can buy "plex" which give you game time. You can also sell those plex on the market to get in-game currency. The value is therefore based on how many plex you'd need to buy with real money in order to get the equivalent in-game cash to buy all of the ships that were destroyed.

But the main way of getting in-game cash is PvE content, like mining, industry, missions, ratting etc. So the real money comparison is kind-of silly when a large proportion of the asserts that were destroyed almost certainly came from this source, not real money.

Basically, the £300k thing is just marketing bollocks.

Elderly Bletchley Park volunteer sacked for showing Colossus exhibit to visitors

Just so I understand...

So, a group of people have their snouts in the trough of public money (in this case lottery cash) and don't want the other group to get any. Worse, sales at the gift shop will plummet!

I guarantee you those in charge are earning over a £100,000 a year, have never worked for a private organisation in their lives and have gold plated final salary pensions.

Cambs prof scoops $3m Fundamental Physics prize

Prizes?

Scientists are becoming worse than media luvvies, constantly handing out prizes to each other, whilst brushing the terrible state of many of their paradigms under the carpet.

So many physicists working on String Theory for decades and not a single testable prediction. Deserves a prize, does it?

Lead ONTO your pencil: Bill Gates pours cash into graphene condoms

Cancer

It's going to cause cancer of the penis, isn't it.

Study: Arctic warming at 'stunning' rate – highest temps in 44,000 years

Prof Curry after analysing the paper, "simplistic inferences about global warming in the Arctic seem unjustified."

Well, quite.

http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/25/unprecedented-arctic-warming/

Windows 8.1: A bit square, sure, but WAIT! It has a Start button

Start button

If you could possibly think of a more cack-handed way of implementing a start button for the desktop, Microsoft have managed to achieve it already. The situation as I see it is I've upgraded from 8 to 8.1, primarily to get things like the start button back, but now I've got it back it's so utterly crap I want it taken away again.

Snowden: 'I have data on EVERY NSA operation against China'

Re: Traitor

They're the intellectual descendants of the Cambridge 5; they're anti-American elitists.

Re: Stupid

Another idiotic reply. The argument seems to be "we don't want or need SIGINT".

Yes, yes you do. Believe me you need it.

Stupid

The spectacularly short-sighted and, frankly, stupid comments here demonstrate that people born after the fall of the Berlin wall have absolutely no clue whatsoever about the importance of SIGINT to the life of the nation.

Worse, malign regimes like China's, which is currently engaged in a massive State backed industrial, military and corporate espionage campaign against the West, are given a free pass.

What is WRONG with you people?

Double-click? Oh how conventional of you, darling!

Conventions...

These conventions weren't really thought about all that hard, were they, but they're with us now. I wonder if people are thinking hard about conventions for new technologies, like Kinnect or similar. Let's hope so.

Greece ends extra hols for civil servants forced to use hated computers

Re: Bankrupt - No wonder

I don't think Greece is an island. It's mainland, but counts quite a few islands as part of its territory (a bit like the UK).

OK, so we paid a bill late, but did BT have to do this?

BT

I've had BT broadband (ASDL, now BT Infinity) for seven years and the only problems I've ever had related to either the rooter needing a reboot, or the router dying. Both easily fixed and dealt with by BT Customer Services. I've NEVER had a problem with them or their customer services, or billing or anything at all.

In this particular case however, they're definitely over-stepped the mark. In fact this BT pop-up is idiotic and I can't believe someone actually signed off on it. If they don't remove it, I would just change provider.

Snowden journo's boyfriend 'had crypto key for thumb-drive files written down' - cops

Remarkable.

It's remarkable to me that certain people here seem to hate their own countries more than those who are actually despotic, enough to support Snowden in his vainglorious attempt to get recognition. I mean the guy is HIDING IN RUSSIA, a country that tends to shoot awkward journalists rather than hold them at airports for a few hours.

You people DISGUST ME.

Facebook strips away a bit more of your privacy – but won't say why

Why?

Why is anyone still on Facebook?

Acorn’s would-be ZX Spectrum killer, the Electron, is 30

Atom?

Oh jeez, you're talking about the Acorn Atom too. I had one of those. It had 12k of RAM (I think 5k was used for ROM actually, or the screen or something, I can't remember). It also had really annoying "snow" on the screen whenever you did graphics (if you didn't know about interrupts to get the timing right, which I didn't at the time).

I had one...

I had one, mostly used it to play Elite. Elite on the Electron wasn't as good as the BBC B original (wasn't fast enough to do sun twinkling and didn't have colour, for example), but it was OK. Friends with C64's had the best games, the best graphics and the best sound. But I was OK with it. Taught me how to code (BASIC and Assembler) too.

BALLMER TO RETIRE FROM MICROSOFT

Really?

Shares up 9%?

Ahahaha. That's kind of funny.

Snowden journalist's partner gave Brit spooks passwords to seized files

Re: Journalism is dead, long live the Queen

And which newspaper, supported by the fat hypocrite Tom Watson, was at the forefront of legislation to control the Free Press in the UK? Step forward, the Guardian.

Google Glass is high fashion in September Vogue magazine

Glassholes.

Bill Gates's barbed comments pop Google's broadband balloons

Re: Intelligence!

He's one of those self-satisfied sanctimonious people who's made his stack doing precisely what he thinks other people shouldn't, and now wants to lecture everybody else on how they should do something completely different to what he did to get rich in the first place, like helping the poor.

I would take him more seriously if he only had a couple of million in the bank because throughout his wealth accumulation days he actually gave it all away to good causes. But no, he's got a big house and a foundation he can use to lecture everybody else.

So many people like him in the world talking absolute **** it's amazing.

Google scientists rebel over company's support for 'climate-hoax' Senator

Re: Such is the price of food...

"I applaud all who stand up for truth"

So, you'll be applauding Inhofe, then.

Pacemaker hack legend Barnaby Jack dies just before Black Hat revelations

Re: Sounds suspicious to me, better check where the Alphabet Agencies have been

Which is more likely: That this guy died of natural causes because you know sometimes people do, or that he was assassinated by Lizard Theorists for working out a new way to hack an ATM?

Remember, the Bourne movies were fiction and get a grip on yourself.

Raid millions of bank accounts. New easy-to-use tool. Yours for $5,000

So...

Do the anti-virus companies have technology to catch this, then? I mean when I power up my PC this evening, how do I know whether or not it's there?

I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials (or Windows Defender as it's known on Windows 8).

At work we have McCrapFee.

Screw it, says NSA leaker Snowden: I'm applying for asylum in Russia

Haha

This guy is a comedian. Russia? A mafia run state?

He's pathetic.