Posts by Robinson

Microsoft tempts with WinPho demo on... iPhone

Still interested

Yes, the demo is shite. But I'm still interested in getting one (got an iPhone 3GS at the moment). I definitely want a Windows 8 slate next year, instead of an iPad. So I was thinking about a WP 7 as my iPhone contract ends in March. The main thing I'm thinking is that the Windows phone, slate and my home PC will all be able to interoperate correctly with each other, without me having to buy bolt-on bits of software to help out.

At least that's the theory. Still not 100% sure - perhaps I'll have a play in the shop.

Reg man the most-flamed recruiter in the UK?

My experience....

There are two kinds of recruitment consultants in my experience: those who don't care about their reputation in the industry, either from employers or employees, and those who do. The former you can very quickly recognise by the fact that they don't "interview" you when you call them, or they call you. They simply want to find you a job, and not necessarily the right job for you, or you the right employee for the employer. The latter will usually ask you questions about your CV, to try and find out what kind of a person you are, what kind of an employer would suit, and what your chances of successfully interviewing would be.

I am going through this process at the moment. I've had one god awful recruiter send my CV in for a job with a company without my knowledge (I received a rejection letter direction from the company for this specific job that I would NEVER have applied for as I don't have the skills). That recruiter went straight into the bin. The other two are energetically trying to find me a job. Yes, if I screw up interviews it wouldn't surprise me if they ditch me as a prospect. But why shouldn't they? There's an opportunity cost for them putting time into promoting *you*. If you're not very good at promoting yourself, then that's your problem not theirs.

Apple was OK to fire man for private Facebook comments

The guy who snitched?

What an a-hole.

Does Cameron dare ditch poor-bashing green energy?

Very funny.

Given that wind energy is something like 20% of that advertised, we're going to need about 300,000 turbines to cover our increasing energy needs over the next 25 years. That's INSANE when you could build some coal-fired or nuclear power stations instead at a fraction of the cost.

Oracle seeks 'billions' with Google Android suit

Huh?

Well, Oracle didn't create it either, they bought it at a knock-down price, and now they're patent trolling because Google are making a profit from it and they aren't.

The New C++: Lay down your guns, knives, and clubs

Chicken and Egg

"you also appear not to have heard of self-booting compilers."

You need to read the section entitled, "the chicken and egg problem".

Yea, ok....

And you people who say the world isn't built on C++, but is instead built on Java, Python, Cobol, or whatever. which language do you think was used to create all of those? C/C++ is the foundation stone of pretty much everything IT, even your mobile device.

Slightly incorrect history here...

"The choice of C syntax came about in the early days of the PC, through the need for a language which would deliver satisfactory perfromance on the puny 8086 processors of the day,"

Err no, it didn't. C syntax came from K&R, who got it from Algol-60. They were all described and in use before the 8086 was created and, for all I know, before Intel even existed.

Well, the tools are there already...

"Whilst it's unfair to blame c++ directly there should be a huge focus on blocking the paths programmers can take that introduce such issues"

This is down to choice. For example, I use dependency injection and smart pointers everywhere. Apart from when I have to send something into an OS function or get something out of one. I don't use raw strings or raw arrays (prefer std:: and boost for all my collection needs).

I did have a bug recently that I just couldn't find - but it was due to how I was handling fetching and storing a resource (converting a resource pointer from Windows to a std::string). I was totally blind to it because it never threw an exception in the debugger, or when run from the IDE in release mode even though it was running over memory with reckless abandon. It only threw when run outside of VS (!). Luckily I have colleagues with larger brains, so it was found and corrected in the end.

Brit censor stamps on The Human Centipede

The premise....

The premise is disgusting, so much so that I didn't watch the first and I'm almost certainly (actually definitely) not going to watch the sequel.

Microsoft blows Windows Phone update, again

Good lord!

Do they actually test their updates on all of the devices it's intended for?

Second US 'secret space warplane' to launch tomorrow

Theft

It can nick other people's top secret spy satellites :p.

Boffins hope for dimensional portal event at LHC by 2013!

Plinkings...

Word of the week: Plinkings.

:p.

Google algorithm change squashes code geek 'webspam'

Good.

Great. Love stackoverflow!

Render farming is hot!

Page 2?

I think you must have deleted 1/2 the article, because I was expecting a page 2 but there isn't one.....

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

Oh really?

Is it just me or will something relatively small, travelling at 30km/s, be utterly annihilated the moment it makes contact with a tiny particle of dust travelling in the opposite direction?

New NASA model: Doubled CO₂ means just 1.64°C warming

Yes!

"Who gives a shit when in a hundred years there'll just be concrete and barely anything interesting alive except humans, cockroaches, rats, and algae."

Yes! I would much rather give over £1000,000,000,000 of other people's money to establish no-development zones world-wide than spend £1 trying to get people to reduce CO2 emissions. Unfortunately the AGW meme has all but destroyed sources of funding for these other more important sustainable development objectives and that is why the whole scam has been so utterly idiotic. It's a truly dark period in our so called "rational" modern society.

Telegraph to charge for online news

Typical.

I used to read the Times online but when they went behind the pay-wall, I switched to the Telegraph. I don't really have a strong enough stomach for the Guardian (or the Observer come to think of it) and I'm 100% sure I'm not going to pay for access. It's a real shame but pretty soon I'll only be able to access BBC News!

Sarah Palin calls for US to stand by North Korea

So?

You'd still bang her though, wouldn't you?

Most coders have sleep problems, need 'hygiene and care'

Yes.

Anecdotal (as this study doesn't seem to give any real empirical evidence), I have sleep problems. I agree that night is a good time to code. I don't know why. But the question I have therefore is am I a software developer because I find it easier to concentrate in the evenings/at night, or despite it? It seems to me this study didn't control for that at all. It also seems to me that waking up early in the morning is and always has been a jarring experience. My natural body clock runs from around 2am until 10am. It's always been like this (since I was 17/18 or so) and I've never found 10pm - 7am at all natural.

Maude: Gov contracts 'made my eyes water'

25k

As it's anything over £25,000 at the moment, I'm pretty sure we'll start to see lots of contracts signed for £24,999.99, or, say, two separate contracts, both worth £12, 500. Personally I think this doesn't go far enough.

Will Facebook target ads across the interwebs?

Here's the problem...

Yes, and Microsoft has 2% of the shares in FB (I think it paid $240m for it a few years back).

I'm already annoyed at targeted ads - i.e. ads that follow me around from one website to the next (stalking me). It's very disconcerting and more than a little creepy.

Anyway I don't use FB, although I have an account up there. My old school "friends" were annoying - they got deleted. My current `friends' bragtastic lifestyle updates are annoying, so they got deleted too. I don't want to know what my relatives are getting up to; I mean I can catch up in other ways - and I don't want them to know what I'm getting up to either. So they all got deleted. I don't want my work colleagues knowing what I get up to and I couldn't give a flying **** what they get up to either, so they all got deleted.

Go Facebook!

MS freebie anti-virus scanner auto-downloads provoke more anger

Yes and it's better than the rest.

In terms of use and its minimal footprint on my system, I prefer it anyway. At work I've got McCrapFee and it often slows my system to a crawl. I passionately hate it. On my home system I'm using MS SE and it never gives me any problems at all. To be honest I've got no sympathy with other "security" vendors, because they often pile on a shit-load of bloat for no apparent reason, while charging stupid fees. Their "marketing" practices are also annoying. For example, trying to find the free AVG download is not very easy at all.

US opts out of carbon trading

Stupid

Yes of course the European scheme is hotting up. Companies and individuals are making a killing trading these instruments, at our expense. China is very interested indeed, because we will be effectively paying them to close a factory, whilst they open up a new coal fired power station next door. Our industries are being priced out of the global market by all of this insanity. The US has got it right.

US Army's new $0.5bn British airship will fly 'mid-next summer'

Should be ready...

This thing should be ready around the time we're due to pull out of Afghanistan. I think as an investment the gay bomb would have been better. At least we'd all get a good laugh out of it.

Shut up, Spock! How Battlestar Galactica beat Trek babble

Oh really?

What about in series 1 when they're almost out of ammo, so they go and visit and old abandoned startbase. In the hanger at the base were about 10 boxes of ammunition. Yet whenever they engage the cylons, they fired out what must have been half a mountain side of ammo!

US raygun jumbo fluffs another test missile-blast attempt

Reflection

"Good grief, not the reflection one again"

Thanks David. Your explanation makes perfect sense.

Infrared?

Near or far infrared? AFAIK (as I work with Infrared in my job), plain, clear glass will reflect IR radiation, although I'm not too sure it would survive launch :p.

I still don't understand this.

I still don't understand this at all. I would have thought creating a counter-measure in the form of a missile surface that reflects inbound laser radiation (a surface polished by 1,000 North Korean children with Mr Sheen) would be enough to make the air-born laser obsolete. Or am I missing something here?

Hefty physicist: Global warming is 'pseudoscientific fraud'

No?

"Except that it isn't."

Great argument.

Try reading the critique of it either at Steve McIntyre's website ClimateAudit, or by buying the book The Hockey Stick Illusion, or by reading the Wegman Report, or even the testimony of the NAS, which supported Wegman's findings.

Omg!

"Except for all that pesky evidence, eh?"

There is evidence? That's news to me. There's a graph that shows temperature rising in the 20th century (not the 21st, so far) by a few tenths of a degree and indeed on a rising trend since the end of the little ice age. The only graph I know of showing an acceleration in the trend was the one produced by Prof. Michael Mann. The graph is so discredited as to be a laughing stock to anyone but the most zealous Green.

Everything else is the product of "models". The catastrophic warming? Models. The collapse of the Arctic Ice Sheet? Models. Giant hurricanes? Models. Desertification? Models. Volcanic cones collapsing? Models. Models. Models. Not one of which predicted the recent slight decline in global temperature (since 1995, according to Phil Jones, there has been no statistically significant warming - enough to falsify the hypothesis given CO2 has continued to increase).

So many fallacies, so little time.

"I don't know why the Register has such a one sided editorial policy on climate change"

Because it has an enlightened editorship. None of your points are valid as they are all based on fallacies. The main fallacy you are promoting is that science is done by consensus, or that the gate-keeper of various wikipedia articles doesn't himself have an agenda.

As this scientist points out, it's not possible to argue against the consensus; your attempts to do so will be thwarted by institutional financial self-interest. That is what this article is about. I'm sure you haven't actually read it.

So, given that you cannot argue against the paradigm, just how do you think the consensus has been reached?

Climate change apocalypse NOW

What?

Stern's report was one of misrepresentation, alarmism (unwarranted) and untruth. For example (just the one example of which there are many):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009710.ece

Stern now works for a company engaged in carbon trading. He released an alarmist report the consequences of which he stood to personally benefit from financially. How can you take the man seriously?

Yea right...

"seriously, if you think that an average change of 2.2° is mild"

It's certainly a lot less than the temperature change between day and night, or cloudy and sunny. But it's just a kind-of astrology, because 2.2 is a random, wild guess, based on incomplete information, implausible chains of inference and demonstrably useless computer models. This is all notwithstanding the fact that there's been no statistically significant increase in temperature for the last 15 years (to quote Phil Jones of ClimateGate fame). Make that 16 years. I think he said that last year.

In all other sciences this single fact would falsify the hypothesis. But as we know Climate Science is "special" (as in School) and therefore you're basically allowed to get away with saying absolutely anything as long as it's got "due to man-made global warming" after it. I say global warming, but they changed the term in a very Orwellian way to "climate change". No... wait, they've now changed it again to "climate disruption".

I'll give you disruption; my booted bony foot on all of your backsides.

Gov axes £35bn Severn Barrage tide-energy scheme

Stupid.

"So perhaps the genuine believing GW deniers should setup a competitive home insurance busines"

Yes, because as we know, flooding is caused by man-made Global Warming and is absolutely nothing to do with concreting over entirely natural river flood plains!

Good quality?

"created hundreds of good quality green jobs for Welsh people"

Is there such a thing as a good quality green job? Pretty much all green jobs either need subsidy from the tax-payer or increased utility bills (I believe the Government's wind-power plans could add an extra £880 per year onto mine!).

The idiots running our energy policy (ok, I mean the previous idiots, the jury is still out on the current idiots) seem to be living in cloud cuckoo land - a Green disease. £35,000,000,000 against £5,000,000,000. If Hain can't work out the difference it's no surprise his Government left this country close to bankruptcy.

Provincial outrage over BT's broadband upgrade race

What?

This must be wrong. My exchange (for example), a small town in Cambridgeshire, is already scheduled for an upgrade, so I couldn't vote. I'm not sure what it's all about then...

Much of recent global warming actually caused by Sun

Huh?

"may exercise an influence as powerful as that of greenhouse gases"

You mean not a very powerful one at all?

Craigslist to tell Congress why it cut adult ads

Nothing to see here.

The problem for CL as a business is that every time some John murders a woman he met on CL, or a child gets pimped, it's a bad hair day for their marketing team and by extension their business model. I'm surprised they allowed ads like that in the first place.

Microsoft to embrace and extend HTML 5?

Spot on.

I also develop apps with similar life-cycles. Most of them are C++/MFC/ATL, with the occasional Windows Forms application. You can make these applications look good, usually with 3rd party control libraries.

I think if it's a desktop application, there's really no need for things like WPF/Silverlight, unless you want to include whizzy graphics and stick with .NET rather than using Flash. If its for a browser, HTML 5 is almost certainly going to be better, because it should be platform independent.

As for MS embrace/extend philosophy, that didn't work very well with Java (remember J++?). Nobody wants to develop browser applications/websites that only work on windows, so nobody is going to use your extensions anyway.

Eternal debate..

If you're just starting out, there are a whole lot of things you need to learn before you get started on presentation layers.

Hotmail upgrade finally reaches 350m users

Surprised.

"What's all this shit when I login to Hotmail...? How about you just go straight to my inbox?,"

I couldn't agree more. Also, I discovered my facebook updates were being published to my MSN, for all to see (!) at one point. I managed to disconnect the two after some major ***ing about. I didn't give permission for it to do this and to be honest I have absolutely no idea how the two got connected, apart from the fact I use the hotmail address as my facebook email address. Some bright spark decided one day to connect the two without asking me if I wanted them to. How ****ing rude.

I'm on the verge of deleting my hotmail account.

Researchers: Arctic cooled to pre-industrial levels from 1950-1990

Twaddle.

Excuse my impertinence, but those 3 paragraphs are a complete load of twaddle.

The first paragraph is a load of twaddle because you're effectively saying that scientists, who's job it is to be sceptical and to criticise each other's work, had a "crisis!" and broke the law in response to a few FOI requests and some criticism (justified), which only arrived because they had previously withheld data and methods and made dubious claims based on even more dubious statistical sleights of hand, coupled with badly collected and managed data. Well, AMAZING!

Your second paragraph is a load of twaddle because the "hockey stick" is not well supported by any measurements whatsoever. Or rather I should say, the "hockey stick" is not notable or in any way particularly unusual, and is well within the range of natural variation (and of course is reproducible by simply putting rubbish into the algorithm - i.e. red noise).

Your third paragraph is twaddle because temperature is not increasing as a result of rising CO2 levels. If this theory was correct, we wouldn't have static or falling current temperatures, we would have a mid-tropospheric "hot spot" signal (missing) and previous temperatures would be lead by CO2, rather than it trailing them, as it demonstrably does from looking at ice core data.

In conclusion, you haven't got a clue what you're talking about.

IBM's zEnterprise 196 CPU: Cache is king

Well?

Does it blend?

IT council chiefs ditch Sadville after splurging £36k

Moron?

How many rounding errors can you fit into £500,000,000? Or are you seriously suggesting that this is the one and only rounding error in the entire budget? The very fact it was contemplated an executed, at such cost, tells me a lot about the culture of profligacy with public money at the council. It's indicative, isn't it? It wouldn't surprise me if £100,000,000 of their budget was basically wasted.

Microsoft's .NET at ten: big hits, strange misses

SlimDX

All you need to do to use DX with .NET is wrap the library. If you can't be bothered to do that then use SlimDX because it's already been done for you. I agree it sucks that MS no longer support DX wrappers for .NET, but then their strategy has changed since WPF came online. If you want high performance graphics in LOB applications then that's where you head. If you want to write games, you're probably using C++. The people in the middle, wanting to use .NET and DX are probably hobbyists and the XNA community is a fine enough place for them to be.

Now some other points: .NET is probably one of the major projects MS has pulled off that has actually worked. Sure it might not be a win in all situations, but then is there a language/environment that is? Windows Forms is/was great for LOB applications (the vast majority of applications out there).

C# is ok to use, VB.NET is ok to use. I wouldn't choose between them in terms of readability. It's not the code, it's how you format it. If you don't use whitespace to separate functional units inside methods, then it doesn't mater what language you're using, the developer is going to have to scan. Some people (where I work) like to have ZERO whitespace. For me whitespace encourages you to reduce cyclomatic complexity as well, because you want to keep the braces on a single screen. It's a big win for software quality.

I think the reason so many people prefer C# now is because they don't like the "Basic" in "Visual Basic". They can demand higher pay for seemingly being more skilled, through knowing "if() {}" instead of "if then". To me there's practically no difference. Indeed I prefer the verbosity of VB.NET over C# in certain circumstances.

'Huge airships to carry freight starting 10 years from now'

Interesting point.

So, I read a paper that says vapour trails left by aircraft reflect sunlight and so increase the Earth's albedo (have a cooling effect) and on the other hand that the release of CO2 by aircraft increases the Earth's temperature. Presumably one pretty much cancels out the other, so let's not talk about CO2. CO2 is the word that gets your research funded in the first place, that's all.

I imagine it would cheaper and slower to send goods in an air-ship (compared to an airliner), although we already have a cheap and slow method of sending goods called a Freighter. Otherwise, we could always use, say, Rail.

Can someone point out the business case for airships again?

No penis pumping for Papuan plod

err

In my humble opinion, you've clearly spent too much time thinking about this issue.

Is iFlorist the greatest website in the universe, ever?

Retards.

Just use interflora. I do and they always deliver.

By the way is it me or are there a lot of retarded sounding people writing reviews from the UK? What did Blair say in 1997? Education, education, education.

Mystic Met Office abandons long range forecasts

Turbulence

Well they don't include the effects of turbulence just for starters. Those equations require a fine resolution to make any sense and are probably the biggest, most important factor not currently modelled. In my view the current models and methods are as good as useless for predicting more than 4 or 5 days ahead. It makes you wonder how the hell the models can accurately predict 100 years ahead! We keep being told the long very term forecast has a 90% certainty!