Posts by Robinson

STEVE BALLMER KILLS WINDOWS

Stack ranking.

It'll make little difference if management as still "stack ranking" their employees.

Snowden: US and Israel did create Stuxnet attack code

Err

So, Snowden is sitting in Russia, a mafia state where journalists are regularly bumped off, spilling US, UK intelligence secrets.

I hope he gets extradited and spends the rest of his life in prison. He's a massive ****.

NASA to flip ion engine's 'OFF' switch after brilliant 5.5 year burn

Not just...

It's not just about propulsion and the kind of speeds you can reach though, is it. The faster you go, the more energy gets imparted when you impact something. Travel at even small fractions of light speed and a dust particle hitting you could blow your equipment up in a brilliant flash of light.

Ballmer: 'I call it all Windows, all the time'

Public Interest?

"making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest"

Who are these people to decide what's in the public interest? The bloody cheek of it.

NSA PRISM deepthroat VANISHES as pole-dance lover cries into keyboard

"The gutsy whistleblower"

He's not a whistleblower, he's a traitor. He's also a massive douche.

Microsoft SQL Server 14 man: 'Nothing stops a Hekaton transaction'

Re: Question...

Well, that's kind of the answer. This doesn't affect latency of the client/server interaction much if at all, what it does do is improve the parallelism within the server itself when it's managing hundreds or thousands of clients at once.

I see.

Question...

So, as there's a significant lag between committing the transaction in memory and writing it to disk, if your instance crashes, all of those transactions are lost. Sounds more like a method for caching stuff you don't really care about all that much, rather than some important improvement here.

Climate scientists agree: Humans cause global warming

I don't think it does, no. It simply points out how unscientific the study is and how the conclusions and headline in no way match the methodology and data. One could describe it as "marketing", in a way, but I would describe it as a deliberate attempt to hoodwink the public.

I didn't read all of the comments here, but has anyone read the rebuttal to it? Cook's paper is a load of old bollocks.

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/on-the-consensus/#comment-113199

Google research chief: 'Emergent artificial intelligence? Hogwash!'

He's right. The idea that intelligence/consciousness "emerges" just by crossing some threshold of informational complexity is silly, but it's one that seems to be prevalant in Computer Science (and popular culture).

McAfee all-in-one security suite covers PCs, tablets, and smartphones

Ah.

Full Spectrum Bloatware.

The Germans are coming - Software AG borgs LongJump

CASE

Yea, I remember Case Tools.

What a disaster.

Good luck with that.

Dark matter researchers think they've got a signal

Contradiction

Doesn't this somewhat contradict the recent data showing there's little to no dark matter detectable in our little region of the galaxy. Models say it should be there and that we should be able to detect its presence. But it is absent!

Climate change set to bumpify transatlantic flights, say researchers

Wonderful.

Is there nothing CO2 cannot achieve? What a remarkable trace gas.

SimCity owners get free game, EA will get A NEW CEO

Link dead.

Your link to a list of previous games no longer supported online is dead.

Here's the $4.99 utility that might just have saved Windows 8

I like it.

I actually like Win 8. OK, I don't spend ANY time in Metro, except very occasionally when I have to search for something. But that's rare because all of my stuff is in shortcuts on my task bar (grouped). I've got about 120 items down there.

There are some things in desktop Win 8 that are quite nice, including the new task manager.

Climate scientists link global warming to extreme weather

To be fair, this does sound like a complete load of unmitigated bollocks.

BBC's new bosses - the lawyers - strike out Savile probe testimony

As I understand it, the redactions were for legal reasons, i.e. someone saying things that some other third party might sue over.

US woman cuffed for 'booking strippers for 16th birthday bash'

Morality?

Welcome to 1867!

Hacker faces 105 years inside after FBI 'sexploitation' arrest

Eh?

Am I the only one here who thinks the US Justice system is NUTS? 105 years? Eh? They guy is obviously an arsehole, but 105 years? Really?

Meet قلب, the programming language that uses Arabic script

Lisp

Christ. Since when has Lisp long-since been a favourite of computer scientists? I find it utterly loathsome!

AV-Test boss dismisses Microsoft criticism of malware test results

Huh?

I have McAfee at work, and have used Norton at home. The former is a resource hog and I hate it. The latter is even more of a resource hog and naturally I hate it even more.

I'm prepared to accept a 0.003% risk, assuming I don't often click on dodgy links, if it means I'm able to actually use my machine as I want without the AV getting in the way. That is why I love MSE so much.

So screw the AV test. I don't trust it.

Antarctic discovery: ALIEN LIFE may be FOUND ON MOON of Jupiter

So....

It evolved to cope with the conditions in the lake. Would life have evolved there in the first place? Seems unlikely.

BOSS Bang boffins: DARK ENERGY spreading across the Universe

Re: It's the best theory we have so far

"Dark Matter is pretty well established by observation and detailed computer simulation"

Eh? That isn't true at all. All we know if that certain things deviate from Relativity and that we call what causes this "dark matter". We then tweak our equations to find out what its mass must be, all the time assuming relativity is correct.

There's absolutely no observational evidence for it at all. Indeed, models have shown that it should be fairly evenly spread around our own galaxy, but absolutely no evidence for its effects can be seen in our vicinity. I don't call bullshit on it, but I think it's a bit of a long-shot.

Eh?

How is a quasar a "dying galaxy"? Given that we're seeing them when they were extremely young, I would have thought they should be called new galaxies?

Let me speculate: They spew matter out into the Universe. At some point they become dormant, like ours is.

There. Quackery balance achieved.

Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7in Android tablet review

Re: Hey

I never needed to root a device in my life. Yes, if you need or want to do that, the Fire is almost certainly the wrong product. When it comes to reviewing the device for what it's designed to do and for the kind of people it's designed to be used by however, I think this review is more honest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00tmliWHDZw

Hey

I've bought one of these for my girlfriend for Christmas. She will use it for reading, browsing the web and a few other things (maybe Skype). She's unlikely to want to do anything other than that, ever. For the price it seems excellent value. I have an iPad (the £700 64GB) and I've got to say it was a complete waste of money when I think what I actually use it for compared to what I imagined I'd use it for when I bought it.

It's no good reviewing something as if the target market was a tech-head or nerdy type who comes to El Reg, when it's about as far away from that as possible.

Classic game 'Elite' returns … on Kickstarter

Ah

It's crowd-sourced funding. I kicked in £20, so I can reserve my commander name in-game. No idea if it will be a success but I'm curious to see it. I see all of the £3000 + donation slots were filled (dinner with the Dev team).

So thumbs up to this now. Although I'll probably be in my mid-40's by the time it's released.

Ugh

I hated the flight model in Frontier. I discovered the easiest way to do combat was to set the autopilot to the thing I was wanting to fight and to simply smash into it, provided you have enough shields it's always a win.

Vapourware

Every now and then when Braben wants a bit of publicity for Frontier, he comes out with an interview on how they're working on the next version of Elite. I guarantee you 10 years down the line it still won't have shipped!

You know who else hates Windows 8? Hackers

Re: Anti-virus

The uptime on my work windows 7 PC is measured in weeks (with no UPS and occasional power cuts, it has to go down sometimes). My home PC would be the same or better. Windows 7 and 8 hardly ever need to be re-booted. They aren't much different from Linux in that respect.

Two things:

(1) I've used Microsoft Security Essentials for years now and it's brilliant. Totally non-intrusive. high performance, free and AS GOOD AS the paid for versions (don't trust rankings just from googling). I have McAfee at work and it's TERRIBLE for machine performance. So why does this article say MSE is good for a "free" anti-virus? The only difference I can see between MSE and paid-for is the exchange of money and some processes on your machine that are going to eat the CPU, memory and disk performance.

(2) I've had Windows 8 for a few days now and I can say it's pretty good. I spend 99.9% of my time at the desktop and the experience is almost exactly the same as Windows 7, except for quite a few improvements like the new Task Manager, copy file progress dialog and so on. At £25 for the upgrade it was a bargain.

MULTICOLOURED TARANTULAS found UP TREES in Brazil

Oh well done.

How many times do you use the word "small", "tiny", "smallest" and so on without once giving us an idea of scale. How about you use the unit `dinner plate'. Tell us how small small is for a tarantula as a proportion of a dinner plate. 1 ground dwelling tarantula being one dinner plate, is one of these little critters 1/10th of a dinner plate? 1/1000th? 1/2?

What?

I'm none the wiser.

Climate change threatens to SHRINK FISH AND CHIP SUPPERS

Don't worry...

There's a solution: Simply bring an asteroid into orbit around the Earth to block out the Sun.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2210798/Global-warming-combatted-asteroid-dust-acting-like-sunshade-earth-scientists-say.html

, from exquisitely stupid scientists at the University of Strathclyde. Motto: Doing our best to destroy public trust in Science.

Climate denier bloggers sniff out new conspiracy

Conspiracy...

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, preferring the cock-up/Human Nature theory. However this phrase gave me pause:

"(which means it’s survived the peer-review process)"

The reason it gives me pause is because there's a bit of a myth that peer review is somehow aids progress and guarantees that the study contains an element of truth. This is wrong. All it means is that the study has gained the acceptance of other people who do the same kind of studies, in the same kind of way (the Paradigm).

I find Lehrer instructive in this instance:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer

Why Java would still stink even if it weren't security swiss cheese

Couldn't agree more.

I just missed out on the Java craze at University by a year or so. Our OO Professor was so old fashioned (he wanted to teach us OO concepts, not the Latest Thing) we did all of our OO in a language called Eiffel. Pity that didn't take off.

Anyway, as Win32/MFC/C++ and C#/.NET developer, my most recent experience of Java was trying to do something utterly banal involving generics. I was shocked to see that after over a decade of development, Java still does not properly/correctly support templates/generics. Or rather it tries to, but it's a cack-handed, awful implementation. C++ and C# blow it away.

Why would anyone want to use it?

Ice core shows Antarctic Peninsula warming is nothing unusual

Re: Can I just point out...

You're an idiot if you interpret the graph as "should now go down, rather than sharply up" (not that it is going "sharply up"). As the graph has been on average going up since the Little Ice Age, at what point do you think it suddenly started being about CO2? As far as I can see, it has never been about CO2. Moreover, CO2 is PLANT FOOD, not a pollutant. The biosphere is starved of CO2 at the moment. What a wonderful side-effect this is of Human ingenuity: Feeding plants.

Re: Interesting results but remember it's *one* data point

"Otherwise we're looking at the *one* trees tree rings that "proves" global warming."

A funny and ironic statement, given that Briffa's Yamal paper turned out in fact to hinge on the measurements from a single tree!

Can I just point out...

Can I just point out that there's a MASSIVE BIAS in favour of the AGW hypothesis in the mainstream media and political class in certain countries (mostly Europe and parts of the US). Everywhere else AGW gets the skeptical treatment it deserves, i.e. people think it's a load of old bollocks.

Now here's some bona fide EVIDENCE that it is bollocks, not that we need any because we all know about the Vostok cores, right? Oh, you don't? Well here's a graph that will give you a hard-on:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png

Shocking, isn't it? Skeptics have been saying all along that current temperatures and trends are well within the bounds of natural variation. Well, now you have TWO ACTUAL DATA SETS TO LOOK AT. But I bet you don't. I bet you continue to look at the output of your models, as if they somehow have greater validity than the empirical evidence.

Pathetic.

Climate change blamed for rise of life-draining horrors*

Fungus spreading?

As far as I know, one of the main vectors for the transmission of frog killing fungus spores are frog investigating biologists.

Anonymous takes down UK government websites in Assange attack

What a cock.

Assange, the vainglorious little ****ck, really needs to grow a pair. Yes, Ecuador and all of those other South American countries he's thanked are well known for their various stances on Human Rights, aren't they!

Neurotrash creativity 'expert' created Dylan quotes from thin air

Is this really notable?

The Media is a buzzing hive of activity of people all writing or talking complete bollocks about things they know little. So does this guy stand out? Really?

Hmmmmm.

Climate change behind extreme weather, says NASA

Nutts?

Hansen is nuts. He's also a gigantic prick. Why has he still got his job at NASA? He's an embarrassment to them.

'Ex climate sceptic' Muller's latest BEST stuff is the worst so far

Re: Muller was never a sceptic

I think you misunderstand the "hockey stick". The stick was generated from analysis (incorrect analysis) of proxies through medieval times up until the present day. The last few hundred years were "spliced" onto the graph from thermometer data, not the proxies. Combine the poor analysis with the splicing and you end up with a hockey stick. Muller has not "independently verified it" in any shape or form. All he's done is analyse the surface temperature record, which itself shows NOAA adjustments add 100% to the warming. He totally fails to understand what this means. His paper was rejected in peer review. His arguments about attribution are spurious, because he hasn't done any attribution analysis whatsoever.

Re: Finally some sceptics are doing actual research...

Yes, yes, but let's look at just one proxy here:

http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/screenhunter_43-jul-28-20-17.jpg

How many hockey-sticks do you want? And what does this chart mean to you? Go on... I dare you... interpret it for us.

Gabe Newell: Windows 8 is a 'catastrophe' for PC biz

Switch me to Linux? Here's a list of programs I run on my Windows 7 box:

(1) Steam

(2) Office

(3) Adobe Master Suite

(4) Visual Studio 2010

(5) Google Chrome/Newsleecher/Vuze

(6) 3D Studio 2010

(7) Solidworks

(8) SQL Server 2008

(9) Windows Media Player

I can live without 3, there's a Linux alternative to 2 (although not as shiny), there's a Linux alternative to 4, there are Linux versions of 5, 6 would be hard to live without I think... flaky enough on Windows 7, 7 would be impossible, 8 can be replaced with an OSS alternative, 9 I don't know much about Codecs and what plays on what.

But... I've got over £1,000 worth of games in my Steam library. There's no way I'm switching from 7 if I can't play them in Linux. I wouldn't want to lose out in performance from doing so either (Wine).

So, if Newell can pull this off I don't mind jumping ship. Even though I can't stand Balmer, I think Windows 7 is pretty good.

Forget 'climate convert' Muller: Here's the real warming blockbuster

Re: Simple! Just ignore data you don't like

No. The problem is that the environment does not remain static. You might site a station in a field and 25 years later that station is in the middle of an airport or a large town, and is far hotter. The question is how to adjust the temperature to take this into account?

Surprisingly people like James Hansen have been doing this for a very long time. They mostly revised up recent temperatures and revised down past temperatures, to exaggerate the trend. What Watts et al has done is show using modern techniques that at least half of the warming trend is spurious.

CO₂ warms Earth FASTER than previously thought

Hang on a second...

What is the summary here about? They say CO2 increase LAGS TEMPERATURE BY 400 YEARS. They don't rule out it leading only because they need to pay homage to the paradigm in order to get published and funded.

I mean you say it yourself IT LAGS TEMPERATURE CHANGE!

Windows 8 'bad' for desktop users - Gartner's one-word review

Re: Elephant in the room?

Nope. Not a chance. Why? There are millions (billions) of lines of Windows code out there in the enterprise and on people's desktops. Also, Linux people are arrogant and usually completely arsey with Linux newbies who want support or help.

Well...

I'm aware of people's dislike of change. Something like a PC desktop is kind-of sacred and MS are being VERY brave changing it. They want to eat some of Apple's lunch and that means slate, phone, laptop and the all important APP STORE.

I tried 8 and it sucked to be honest. I'll stick with 7 until I can no longer avoid 8 due to technological change :). Actually that might not be too long as I'm a Software Developer so it's going to be very difficult for me to avoid 8.