Posts by Kepler

Microsoft backports data slurp to Windows 7 and 8 via patches

Offensive, sure, but is it actually HARMFUL?

I am deeply offended — though hardly surprised — that those venal idiots in Redmond would install such new functionality without giving me any hint of its existence or notice of its nature beforehand, and even go so far as to activate it without my consent (let alone my informed consent).

All the same, is it actually in my interest to edit my Registry to disable these new "features", and/or to uninstall the three updates, and thereby deprive myself of their attendant "benefits"?

My first impulse is to say Yes, of course. But I do not wish to act rashly, out of spite. Just how harmful to me is the disclosure of the information that will be disclosed to Microsoft without my knowledge or consent? How much connection-bandwidth and how many CPU cycles will this spyware actually eat up, and how likely is it that Microsoft would glean anything I actually might mind having disclosed?

And on the other hand, is it possible that by allowing these three updates to remain in place and continue to operate, I might actually contribute in some small way to making user experiences — including my own — better in the future?

It seems to me that if there's a chance of that, and the CPU toll and risk of genuinely harmful disclosure are both trivial, then perhaps I should calm down, take a stress pill (thank you, HAL!), and just leave the situation alone.

I am not asking rhetorically, as a defender of Microsoft or of these three surreptitious updates. I am genuinely curious and puzzled, but clueless!

(At least in regard to the answers to the questions I pose, if not more generally!)

Seagate births 8TB triplets and a 2TB mobile nipper

Re: Since when is "to birth" a verb?

Since Butterfly McQueen used it in Gone with the Wind?

Oh no, startup Massive Analytic unleashes 'artificial precognition'

"Artificial Precognition" based on Predictive Analytics — just like on Person of Interest!

Just a couple of hours before I read this story, WGN commenced rebroadcasting Season One of one of my favorite TV shows, CBS's hit show Person of Interest. I plan to start watching the first three episodes in about an hour!

(Sadly, I was unaware of the show's existence when its first season was broadcast. I only caught on — and got hooked — during Season Two. I've been waiting several years to see Season One!

The ways in which the show exaggerates the capabilities of computers and AI are obvious to me, but even the things that I consider unrealistic are done in an intelligent and convincing way, grounded in reality. Suspending my disbelief is easy!

Especially since the heroes on the show are all acutely aware of and on guard against the dangers of the technology and the potential for its abuse. While the villains — and especially the chief villain, played so masterfully by the show's creator's uncle! — just can't wait to welcome our new cybernetic overlord. (Just as on Highlander, there can be only one!) I have long conjectured that this show has to be the favorite show of everyone who works at the EFF. If they don't hold weekly viewing parties, something is wrong!

Obviously the point of this entire comment will be utterly lost on anyone who is not familiar with the show.)

So: Just a coincidence? Synchronicity? Kismet?

Google's Chrome to gag noisy tabs until you click on them

Re: It's not really that cool...

Good point, Mike! Even after you click on the tab, auto-play is still evil! And as Eddy Ito pointed out just above, sometimes finding and disabling the embedded item responsible for the disturbance can be surprisingly difficult.

So yes, there's still more to be done!

Re: Why not make it optional?

You make an excellent point, Tristram Shandy, and I quite agree with you. There is no good reason not to let the new behavior remain optional, and I am sure that is the way Google will choose to go.

However, I'm pretty sure that all you need for what you describe is the ability to allow a tab to continue to play music and video after you have first clicked on it and manually commenced the program the rest of your family wants to watch. Having the program start all by itself, without your permission — quite possibly before the members of your family are even seated and ready to begin watching! — is another thing altogether.

I Hate Auto-Play!!!

It's not only inconvenient and annoying, but offensive. I'm a control-freak, and I hate it any time anything happens on my computer without my telling it to, or at least giving it permission. (Scheduled activities are fine, of course, provided I am free to alter the schedule.)

Web developers who code things to start playing without first asking permission (are you listening, AOL?) deserve to burn in Hell, but at least this is a start.

(The thumb-up is for the coming new feature. El Reg's gallery of icons currently contains no image of a hand extending the digit I would need to use to show my feelings about auto-play itself.)

Another chance to win a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive

Microsoft finally takes pop-up "Web advertising" too far

"All right, I'll upgrade to Windows 10! Just PLEASE get that thing off of me!"

What time is it Oxford Dictionaries? How about almost ‘beer o’clock’

Re: Lester

P.S. Lester has proven his merit to me countless times, in countless different ways, over the past 15 years or so that I have been reading El Reg. The two piddling nits I picked above loom as nothing in my sight.

OED, RIP (BFD?)

I was going to make a pedantic little post complaining about Lester's usage and spelling.

(He used usage when use was clearly called for — because his statement was about how frequently and extensively, and for how long, words are used, rather than about how they are used, or whether they are used correctly or incorrectly — and he misspelled it ("useage")!*)

But then I made the mistake of reading the blog article Lester linked to. After I finished throwing up, I knew I had bigger fish to fry.

What an unholy and infantile celebration of vapidity and illiteracy! Celebrating and memorializing usage errors by others while perpetrating several of its own!

But I guess I should no longer expect discrimination or judg(e)ment from a source that mis-defines "cakeage", that doesn't know the difference between "corkage" and a "corkage fee", and that apparently thinks "derogative" is an acceptable alternative to "derogatory"! (Since when?)

("SJW . . . . is used derogatively . . . ." Ex(s)queese me? Derogatorily!)

Today I am crushed. My worldview is shattered.

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* That the OED might accept the spelling Lester used (even though its error-prone Web site does not!) — and not even classify it as variant! (at least according to what I read on line after Googling "useage") — is of no moment at all. The OED ceased to be authoritative in my sight earlier today!

1337

"1337 = 3|_!73, |-|4(|<3|25 (_)53|) 1337 45 |2(_)|3|3!5|-| 3|\\|(|2`/|D7!0|\\| 0|\\| 73|_|\\|37 |304|2|)5"

Although it says below (at the end of the URL that Zmodem included) that "lang=en", it reads more like lan=APL!

(And yes, I do know what the line I quoted actually says — the same thing as the line before it, which I didn't quote — even though I never heard of Leet before today. I'm just saying what it looks like, at first glance.)

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P.S. I agree entirely with Zmodem's point, that if the OED is going to include pwn as a word then it really ought to include 1337 as well.

And it's funny and odd that in its definition of "pwn", the OED mentions gameplay but not hacking.

Re: Glew

Although I strongly favor lit over lighted (evidently both are acceptable, but "lighted" just sounds wrong!) — and certainly favor grew over growed! — I believe I must opt for glowed over glew.

Just my two-cents' worth.

(But your friend/boss certainly has a point!)

Re: Cak[e]age - I disagree

"Cak[e]age . . . . [i]s not similar to corkage.

Cak[e]age is having cake; there being an amount of cake available . . . and lots of it!

I couldn't agree more with Anonymous Coward (AC). I thought the same thing myself when I first saw this new word listed in the OED's blog article. I was sure it would mean exactly what AC said, and stunned to see it instead defined as a serving fee imposed when and where no cake is actually supplied at all!

(Note also that, in regard to "corkage", the word itself only denotes the (modest) service of opening the bottle. The charge for that service is called a "corkage fee". (Duh!) This is not the only nor even the least of the flat-out, unambiguous, elementary errors made/contained in the article/blog entry.)

Cf. signage (an ugly and unnecessary, relatively recent neologism with which I have not yet made my peace — yecch!), babeage, and — speaking of South Park — boobage! (As in the South Park episode "Major Boobage" — a briliant parody of the movie Heavy Metal.)

Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons

What the heck version of Windows 8 did HE use???

"The question of why the public accepted a substantial user interface change in Windows 95, but not in Windows 8, would make a nice topic for someone to research. There are some parallels, with Windows 95 trying to accommodate DOS while moving users to Windows, and Windows 8 trying to accommodate desktop users . . . ."

Evidently the author never actually used Windows 8.

Not only did Windows 8 not try to accommodate desktop users, but it did just the opposite, deliberately and gratuitously removing long- and well-established modes of operation and interaction that were crucial to desktop use, and erecting many gratuitous new obstacles to desktop use (booting to the Start screen instead of the desktop, making Metro/Modern apps unclosable, causing them to reappear and cover the entire screen every time one accidentally glanced in the direction of the upper left corner, and so on).

Windows 95 actually did take away as well as give. Most strikingly, it took away the theretofore traditional mode of mouse-menu interaction (under which an actual click was required for a submenu to open) — which was actually better in Windows 3.0 and 3.1 (and OS/2, and on the Amiga) than on the Mac — and replaced it with a mode in which one must always worry about the precise path the cursor takes from point A to point B, lest one inadvertently open an unintended submenu, because the system was now responding to the mouse's position instead of just to actual clicks. Most of us have long since gotten used to this change, but it did take away the ease with which we could control menu behavior, and put a new and unnecessary premium on the precision with which we moved the mouse across the screen.

But on the whole, Windows 95 preserved previous ways of doing things while making new ways available. Right down to even retaining Program Manager for those who still wanted to use it!

In contrast, Windows 8 deliberately abolished previous ways of doing things, in an undisguised effort to force new ways upon us.

If Tim had actually used Windows 8 himself, he would already know this. He would not have written what he did, nor posed the utterly unpuzzling question he posed, which — as others have pointed out already — requires no research at all.

(And if he had migrated from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, and then to Windows 8.1 Update, he would have seen some of the problems I cited above considerably ameliorated.)

Sony PC owners to get Windows 10 upgrade as early Christmas present

Re: submitted posts being erased by captcha screen

The problem lies with a defective "service" that El Reg uses on its Forums, called "CloudFare". While subjecting users to a captcha test (even when another such test was taken and passed just a moment before!), it discards the full text of their submissions rather than passing it on to the Web site after the test is passed (again), as it is supposed to.

Installing Windows and bringing it up to date really DOES take that long . . . even without Sony!

I just typed a nice, calm, friendly, non-tendentious recounting of how a very recent upgrading of a newly purchased Acer laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 took the better part of two days, by way of corroborating everything that CodySydney and Mahatma Coat had said.

But then, when I had finished composing my missive of some 6 paragraphs or so, and I tried to preview it before posting, El Reg zapped me in the ass with a captcha screen. I entered the text and proceeded, not minding the extra check, only to find that after I had passed the captcha test, the text, title and icon of my post had all disappeared!!!

So I browsed back to the page on which I had composed my message, hoping I could recover all the text I had written and resubmit it. And it was still there!

Until I clicked in the comment-composition box, that is. At that instant, my favorite Web site repaid my loyalty by removing everything I had written and presenting me with a fresh, empty, "Enter your comment" screen ("Type your comment here", etc.). Thank you so very much for that, Vulture Central.

(My original subject line remained, however. How nice of them!)

Naturally I'll be goddamed if I'm gonna try and reconstruct my original message from scratch. But you all would have had a nice little story corroborating everything CodySydney and Mahatma Coat said if our Web site's excessive officiousness hadn't interfered.

Momentarily Angry Kepler

Mozilla-Microsoft spat latest: Firefox yanks Cortana away from Bing

Re: Which British accent

Gert Fröbe did not have a British accent! Or a black cat!

Or any kind of cat at all, for that matter — regardless of color! (Though he did have Pussy Galore in his employ!)

But I like the sentiment and the references anyway, Stuart Elliott. And yours too, kb. (As with Stuart, both the sentiment and the references.) So I up-voted both of you. (So far I'm the only person to have done so for either of you!)

We Yanks being as inattentive and undiscriminating as we are, I am certain that whatever those idiots in Redmond choose will be some kind of hackneyed caricature.

(Be it a female version of Donald Pleasence or Charles Gray — both of whose pussies were white — or Mrs. Slocombe (the color of whose pussy I've long since forgotten!), or someone else altogether.)

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P.S. May all of them rest in peace: Gert Fröbe, Donald Pleasence, Charles Gray, and Mollie Sugden. (Honor Blackman is still alive — thank God!)

Use QuickTime … and become part of the collective

The point of complaining about Flash?

What is the point of complaining about Flash when you are still shipping Quicktime?

FWIW, my effort to scroll down and read that comment, and all comments below the very top of this page, was impeded and delayed for at least 10 minutes by repeated crashes of Flash in Chrome.

Not that I've ever complained about Flash before, here or elsewhere.

Watch out, Tokyo! Samsung readies a 15 terabyte SSD

Re: Unrelated pedant hat on...

Thanks and kudos for pointing that out, BloodBeastTerror. You beat me to it!*

(Though in the spirit of pedantry, four times more would only be 19.2TB, not 20.)

And did you notice that Chris made that elementary and all-too-common mistake immediately after claiming "we're a tad pedantic[,] detail-wise"? Obviously not pedantic enough!

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* I really did come to the comments section on this article just to point that out! But I felt obligated to peruse the existing comments first and see if anyone had already made the same point.

Doomsday Clock says 3 minutes to midnight. Again

Re: Dark matter asteroids?

"Don't be a pussy - dark matter is made of wimps."

At last, a joke I got! My compliments, Vladimir Plouzhnikov.

(No idea what book or letters that fellow way above — Michael H.F. Wilkinson — had in mind when he wrote of his book "with some large, friendly letters on the cover". The best I could come up with was the Hebrew letters corresponding to T, N and K (for the TaNaKh), but I'm sure that's not it, and I'm missing something obvious.)

And yet you adopt such a macho attitude!

Exit the dragon: US govt blows $325m on China-beating 300PFLOPS monster computer

Re: "Blows"???

Well, either that or else El Reg just mis-uses "blows" as a synonym for "spends" or "pays" (or "lays out"). A quick search of El Reg for articles with "blows" in the title suggests this is actually the case:

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Restless PC biz Lenovo blows $100m to gobble 2,500 mobe tech patents

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/21/lenovo_lays_out_100_meeellion_in_patent_buyup/

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Crown Castle blows $4.85 BEEELLION for rights to AT&T's cell towers

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/21/att_to_spend_24bn_leasing_its_own_infrastructure/

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Chinese search giant Baidu blows $1.9 BEELION on app store

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/17/baidu_acquires_mobile_app_91_wireless/

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Big Blue blows big green in SoftLayer public cloud gobble

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/04/ibm_acquires_softlayer_cloud/

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On the other hand, here is an example — the only one I could find* — where it appears that "blows" was actually called for, and the content of the article fully supports its use:

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Carmack blows 'crazy money' on hibernating Armadillo

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/02/armadillo_aerospace_hibernation/

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Carmack himself calls the expenditure he made "crazy" and acknowledges that it was wasted. Which is why he cut it off.

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* Excepting cases in which "blows" was used in some different sense unrelated to the expenditure of money, as where someone blew a deadline, or something was blown across a border.

And my apologies for the ugly, space-wasting kludge I had to use to make this last post readable. An inevitable consequence of El Reg's present policy of inserting an extra line break where none is wanted, yet removing extra lines where the composer has inserted them on purpose.

Re: "Blows"???

Cf. "US blows $174m on new Cray to simulate nukes":

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/13/cray_super_to_help_us_simulate_nuke_tests/

Evidently El Reg has been proclaiming such expenditures intrinsically wasteful for a while. Has the editorial staff finally seen the light of libertarianism? Or at least of public choice theory (a branch of economics that explains, among other things, why bureaucracies and legislatures always tend to overspend)? Is it ready at last to call the scientists at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos "welfare queens in lab coats"?

"Blows"???

"US govt blows $325m on China-beating 300PFLOPS monster computer"

Blows? Why "blows"?

When we say that someone "blew" $X on something, we assert that the expenditure was a complete waste of money, yet there is no discussion in the article at all that suggests that the US government overpaid for the computers, or that expenditures on supercomputers are intrinsically a waste of taxpayer money.

So where is the evidence of wastefulness to back up the claim made in the headline?

Re: One rather significant mistake (plus one or MAYBE two others)

"for 300 is closer to 6 times as fast as 54 than it is to 5 times as fast (= 4 times faster)"

Especially if one mentally treats 54 as roughly 50, and does the entire mental calculation using rounded numbers, since 300 is exactly 6 times as much as 50, and exactly 5 times more than 50.

One rather significant mistake (plus one or MAYBE two others)

"The US's fastest publicly known supercomputer is the Cray-built 27 petaFLOPS Titan at Oak Ridge, which is number two in the world rankings. Number three is the 20 teraFLOPS Sequoia at the Lawrence Livermore."

As the link makes clear, Sequoia turns in just over 20 petaFLOPS, not 20 teraFLOPS; measured in teraFLOPS, its score is just over twenty-thousand ("20,132.7 TFlop/s"), not twenty.

The article also employs curious rounding when ascribing only 54 petaFLOPS to China's Tianhe-2, instead of 55:

"It is designed to peak at 150 to 300 petaFLOPS – that's 300 quadrillion calculations per second, or about five times faster than the 54 PFLOPS Tianhe-2."

The Top 500 site quite clearly reports Tianhe-2's theoretical peak performance as just over 54.9 petaFLOPS ("54,902.4 TFlop/s"), which almost any of us would round up to 55.

On the other hand, this is the first instance I can think of in which someone who wrote something like "about five times faster than" may actually have meant it, for 300 is closer to 6 times as fast as 54 than it is to 5 times as fast (= 4 times faster), which is what people who say "five times faster than" usually mean.

Of course, if we use the more accurate 55 instead of 54, then 300 is slightly closer to 5 times as fast, or 4 times faster, than it is to 6 times as fast, or 5 times faster. The problem with the "__ times faster" usage is that the reader or listener can never tell for sure whether the writer or speaker truly meant it or not. More than 9 times out of 10, the writer or speaker actually only means N times as fast, which is actually N-1 times faster.

(One time faster = 100% faster = twice as fast = two times as fast. Etc.)

Is there ANOTHER UNIVERSE headed BACKWARDS IN TIME?

Re: It all went the other way...

"Hi Kepler!"

Hi to you, too, lorisarvendu!

As I explained just now in my reply to your second recent reply, below* — the one that (implicitly) was more to JeffyPoooh than to me (though obviously to both of us to some degree) — I don't have time to respond on substance right now. But I wanted to take a minute to clarify something I said before.

In my parenthetical final paragraph above (in the comment I posted some 14 hours ago — whoop! make that 15!), although I described a particular notion as silly and not clearly thought-out, and asserted that that other notion is similar (or perhaps even related?) to the conceptualizing difficulty I thought you were having here, I most definitely was not calling what you had said previously silly.

But the structure of the paragraph and the sequence of sentences readily lent themselves to a reader's mistakenly thinking that I had called you or your previous words silly. (Perhaps I should try to avoid constructs that require such careful parsing?)

So I was greatly relieved to find that you obviously did not take me to be saying what I was not. There's one potential unintended insult avoided!

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* These spatial references ("above", "below") are made even more complicated by The Register's current comment nesting mechanics, with only one level of nesting at present. As a consequence of the present setup, even though the comment I am replying to now — the one on whose "Reply" button I clicked — lies immediately above your second recent reply, to which I just replied a few minutes ago, the reply I am posting now will probably end up being placed immediately below the reply I posted a few minutes ago, and thus below both of your most recent replies!

Which, in a way, seems rather fitting and symbolically appropriate in light of the confusion we are having trying to picture the operation of time running in a different "direction".

In any event, that "second recent reply" of yours that lies below the comment I am replying to now (your first recent reply comment) will probably end up lying above this reply I am composing now, even though it appears to be "below" in every meaningful sense as I am writing.

P.S. (now that I finally clicked "Submit" and saw where my reply got put, but still have 10 minutes left to tinker) Yup, exactly as I predicted!

Re: It all went the other way...

"Before Kepler shouts at me, . . . ."

That alone rated an up-vote!

I don't have time to reply to your most recent posts right now; it may even take a day or two. Plus I usually try to think before I speak anyway!

(But unfortunately, not always. And thus the sad state I presently find my life in.)

Re: It all went the other way...

I'll have to think about your questions about the interaction between matter or antimatter and photons, lorisarvendu. But in the meantime, . . .

You still seem to be trying to restate two Big Bangs (or a single Big Bang that sends matter and antimatter out in every direction within 3 spatial dimensions, and in 2 temporal directions) into one Big Bang (mostly for matter) and one Big Crunch (mostly for antimatter). That's not right. Even the hypothesized second, predominantly antimatter universe expands away from the spatial/temporal point of common origin. It does not contract toward this sole point of intersection.

I am not sure why you keep viewing, or trying to view, matters that way — effectively nullifying the reversal of time in the second universe by your words; semantically undoing the fact that "forward" in that universe runs opposite to "forward" in ours by insisting that the second universe runs backward rather than (its own) forward. Time runs forward in each universe, but that universe's forward is the opposite of our universe's.

I thought that JeffyPoooh gave a good and clear explanation of this above, in reply to your previous post and questions, but it doesn't seem to have done the trick yet. And I attempted my own explanation of exactly the same point below, both in my post about the similar theory (to that in the article) of Professor Sokrates Pantelides of Vanderbilt ("Not the first time this notion has been put forward"), and in my reply to zipthegob ("Re: Complementary Worlds").

(See also the brief synopsis below by Martin Budden ("Anti-matter, anti-time?"), which is complementary to JeffyPoooh's and mine.)

I don't know what else to say except that you keep visualizing our universe reversing itself and running backwards, instead of visualizing a parallel or related universe that runs forward (by its lights!), but whose "forward" happens to be oriented in the opposite direction from ours along the same, single, shared temporal axis.

Just go back to a standard number line — as JeffyPoooh tried to get you to do above — and keep on using that as your mental picture. Don't picture either one of these universes running backwards. Neither is moving toward the temporal origin ("0") and contracting in size; each is moving away from it, and expanding.

(As an additional, separate matter, even if there were enough matter or antimatter (plus dark matter?) in either or both of these universes to cause it — due to the operation of gravity — to eventually stop expanding and start contracting, into an eventual "Big Crunch", that would not mean that time would suddenly stop advancing and start running backward in the given universe. The phase of spatial contraction would occur during the further, additional advance of time beyond the point at which maximum size had been reached; the age of that universe upon its return to zero size would not be zero, as though there somehow had been a countdown nullifying its original aging, but rather would be exactly twice whatever that universe's age had been at the point of maximum size. Those who think and suggest otherwise are being silly and just not thinking clearly. And the mistake underlying this not-uncommon view is similar to the difficulty that lorisarvendu has been having.)

Re: Anti-matter, anti-time?

For what it's worth, Martin Budden, I say much the same thing both in my response just above ("Re: Complementary Worlds") and in my post just below ("Not the first time this notion has been put forward"). Except I put the matter a bit differently. I call this to your attention only because I believe your words and those I used are complementary descriptions of the same basic notion.

(A notion I do not necessarily endorse, but that I — like you — attempt to describe. And that I have found intriguing since Professor Pantelides first described it to me, some 11 or 12 years ago.)

Re: Complementary Worlds.

"'Our' Big-Bang was the end-of-time for our complementary Counter-Verse."

Actually, it was the beginning for both universes and the end of neither. And it was the same Big Bang for both universes — a shared origin. The two universes simply separate from each other (temporally if not spatially*) and run in opposite temporal directions from that point on. Just like a number line with positive and negative directions and portions, intersecting at zero.

Each universe would perceive itself to be moving "forward", and would deem the other to be moving "backward" only relative to its own (the first one's) direction of temporal motion. Presumably in the other one (the one that isn't ours), positrons are what orbit most atomic nuclei, and what we call "electrons" are deemed to be "antimatter".

(The article makes no mention of the other universe being composed mainly of antimatter, but that supposition is both (1) consistent with the remarks several have made above about antimatter moving backward in time as per Feynman and Stueckelberg, and (2) a feature of the earlier two-universe hypothesis of Sokrates Pantelides that I post about below. I strongly suspect that mirror-image predominant composition is a feature of this new model from Barbour, Koslowsky and Mercati as well, and that it simply wasn't mentioned in the article.)

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* The two universes would not need to be separated spatially in order to avoid interacting with each other. Even if they occupy the same space, they never interact with each other because they never occupy the same time — except at the instant of creation. Whether the duration of that instant is literally zero or the Planck time, and whether it makes a difference which of these answers is the case, I do not know.

Re: the Flying Spaghetti Monster's machine

"Now if the PDP-8 was the spaghetti monster's machine..."

Chris W, was Edsger Dijkstra an early opponent of Pastafarianism?

And is it merely a coincidence that the initials FSM stand both for "Flying Spaghetti Monster" and "finite-state machine"?

(Cf. bob, mon!'s prescient observation that God's computer is a Turing machine. For isn't what separates us from Him the fact that our memory and number of possible states are finite, while His are infinite?)

Re: God's Own Computer

(Perhaps we can at least agree that God does not use a PDP-11, and that He's still not all that keen even on the VAX?

Though I'm sure He views the demise of the Alpha as the work of haSatan, orchestrated from Satan Clara.)

Re: God's Own Computer

I like your reasoning, Arnaut the less, but surely God's Own Computer is the PDP-10, not the PDP-8. "36 bits forever!", and all that.

Not the first time this notion has been put forward

Sokrates Pantelides of Vanderbilt University put forward a similar notion some 12 years ago (details below); others may have done so even earlier.

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Like so many others, Pantelides finds the Standard Model unsatisfying. He proposed an alternative model in which many fundamental values would be derived rather than merely specified through observation. One incidental consequence of his alternative model is that there are two universes starting from a common beginning but moving in opposite directions in time — one (ours) composed primarily of ordinary matter, and one in which antimatter predominates.

I believe the paper in which he put forward his alternative model is this one:

S.T. Pantelides, “A New Theory of Electromagnetic, Weak and Strong Interactions”, Int’l J. Mod. Phys. E 11, No. 3, pp. 177-210 (2002).

I cannot get access to the full paper on line (without paying), nor do I have my copy of it with me. However, I'm pretty sure this was the paper, and that what I described above is what was referred to in the abstract where it says "The new theory leads to a new interpretation of 'negative energies' with cosmological implications."

Abstract, with links to the full paper:

http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0218301302000806

See also:

http://www.phy.syr.edu/research/relativity/rel-sem-02Fall.html

http://www.phy.syr.edu/calendar/Pantelides.pdf

Yes, Obama has got some things wrong on the internet. But so has the GOP

On-Line Sales Tax Competition?

"If sales taxes were also imposed on online sales, it might even spark competition between states to pass low online-only taxes as a way to drive business to their jurisdictions."

Unfortunately, that only works if the sales tax is imposed by the jurisdiction in which the seller is located. In the United States, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, sales tax is imposed where the buyer lives — even though the transaction took place elsewhere, and therefore is not the buyer's state's to tax. (Sometimes this inconvenient but obvious problem is got 'round by calling it a "use tax" instead of a "sales tax".) We've clearly got it wrong, but we've had it wrong for a long time now, and it will not be easy to switch from doing it wrong to doing it right. Especially since states realize that doing it the right way will undermine their ability to impose onerous levies.

Otherwise, a great suggestion, Kieren (if not exactly a new one).

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

Re: Links still not being marked as read

In Chrome under Windows 8.1, Drew, the difference between not read and read is the difference between black and dark charcoal grey. And this despite your having said somewhere (I forget where, and couldn't find it just now) that the site's being too monochromatic was one of the problems you were trying to address!

The site's previous use of bright red and bright blue was certainly helpful in the visual cue department.

Re: PROPER Time Stamps!!!

The biggest problem with the new temporal labels is that they are only approximate, due to their being rounded. That alone makes them inherently inaccurate, and therefore less useful.

However, because they also are relative (all being followed by an implicit but omitted "ago"), they quickly become obsolete and even more inaccurate with the passage of time!

One can update them by refreshing the page, of course, but then some or all of the stories will disappear from the page (having been bumped off the bottom by newer articles that have been posted above)! If, as I do, one keeps deliberately unrefreshed older versions of the main page open in separate tabs, all of the newfangled* relative times will soon be out of date and seriously inaccurate (saying "3 hrs" when it has now been 12; "20 hrs" when it has now been well over a day; "1 day" when it has actually been 3 days, or 5; and so on).

In contrast, a proper date and time stamp will be as accurate 5 months from now as it was the day the article was posted.

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* Yes, I know the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" view** (http://www.theregister.co.uk/earlier/1/, http://www.theregister.co.uk/earlier/2/, and so on) has been using these relative, approximate date and time indicators for ages, so they're not actually new at all. But that's the main reason why I keep old versions of the main page open, instead of using the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" view, despite its several advantages over the main page's view!*** You should start using proper date and time stamps there as well!

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** The link you click on to get to it says "Older stories", but the heading of the page once you get there reads "MORE STORIES".

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*** Every article listed in the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" view is accompanied by a tailored, article-specific picture and a longer and much more helpful descriptive blurb. But these advantages are offset by the main page's easier-to-use 3-column view, its use (until now) of proper date and time stamps, and the fact that every once in a blue moon a story will appear on the main page but never make it to the "Older stories"/"MORE STORIES" section. Which means you see it on the main page or you never see it at all.

PROPER Time Stamps!!!

Please, at the very least bring back actual date and time stamps!

It's really handy and helpful to be able to see precisely when a story was posted (or modified). Not just in the article itself, once one has opened it, but on El Reg's main page, where all of the most recent articles are listed. A rounded number of hours ago — let alone days — is not nearly so helpful or useful as an actual timestamp (like "11 Dec 03:04").

Microsoft pulls a patch and offers PHANTOM FIX for the mess

"Easy things made difficult for the sake of change"

Microsoft's motto for the past 20 years (but even more so since about 2008), and the slogan of our times. Well said, cornz 1.

Yet another reason . . .

not to allow automatic installation of updates. No matter how many times, and how vociferously, they recommend it.

Automatically check for availability of new updates, sure, and let me know when they are there. But *I* decide whether and when they get installed.

(I have, in the past few months, developed the habit of waiting a week or so after Patch Tuesday for news like this.)

We must SMASH the Democratic Deadlock with MINDFUL EVIDENCE

Re: Rand and Cigarettes — boring, pointy-headed postscript

P.S. I think it only fair to add that we find these stories amusing precisely because the people in them are acting contrary to principles that they do in fact hold dear, and that at times (but not others!) they articulate quite well. Such silliness at a gathering of flaky mystics (say, Gurdjieff-followers, or Theosophists) wouldn't surprise or amuse us nearly so much. And the principles are not invalidated by their adherents' hypocrisy or all-too-human frailty, or even by the reductio ad absurdum of some of the adherents' antics.

(The principles stand or fall on their own, obviously.)

You can disagree — as I do — with her and their conclusions about where reason leads* yet agree with them that reason should be one's touchstone, and you can admire their devotion to reason as not only a guide but a life-organizing principle while laughing at their comical excesses and their departures from rationality.

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* Without getting bogged down in a needlessly detailed digression, I think one can like her epistemology — her first principles — without agreeing with all of her moral, aesthetic or political conclusions. And in regard both to her epistemology and to her moral and political conclusions, I think some of her stuff is very good and some of it is utter shit.**

(The aesthetic stuff — her views on music and dancing — is a joke that I don't even waste my time thinking about.)

So I am not an Objectivist — her term for a subscriber to her philosophy, which she presumed to call "Objectivism" — by any stretch of the imagination. I take great pleasure in pointing out what I see as the deep and stunning flaws in her system. Yet I have found myself surprisingly many times over the years in the odd and uncomfortable position of having to defend her views against unfair and poorly reasoned attacks, selective and out-of-context quotation, etc. I certainly do not agree with her, but I often disagree with her attackers as well.

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** She has some very good ideas about epistemology and the sovereignty of an externally existing reality, but then there is this wacko notion that all truths are somehow logically necessary. "A is A" carries way too much weight for a tautology.

She doesn't understand Kant at all, nor even try to understand him. Yet she appropriates many of his ideas! And calls him "the most evil man in history".

(In this regard she is much like the New Testament, which attributes countless well-documented Pharisaic sayings and teachings to Jesus while giving a wildly unfair and inaccurate portrayal of the Pharisees that essentially lumps them in with the Sadducees.)

She's great on liberty in many ways, but has a burr up her ass when it comes to anarchism, which she simply doesn't understand.

Plus she thinks she somehow invented libertarianism (specifically, the non-aggression principle), which she did not, and views all libertarians as plagiarists. Which is rather ironic in light of her behavior toward Kant.

Moderated, you say?

Having read every single one of the comments above — twice — imagine my surprise just now upon learning that this thread is moderated!

Re: Rand and Cigarettes

Apropos of what Clanger9 wrote above, here are two amusing anecdotes concerning Rand and cigarettes:

(1) In the early years of her group, everyone smoked. Reason and rationality required it! "Fire in the hand is fire in the mind!", they were fond of saying. So if you didn't smoke, you were anti-reason, anti-life, anti-mind, anti-man, etc.

But then the Surgeon General's Report came out, and Rand got wise to the dangers of lung cancer. She finally decided cigarette smoking is bad after all, and it suddenly became rational not to smoke. Somehow the requirements of reason and rationality changed over time!

(2) Back when smoking was still required, a young man who attended one of her gatherings (I've never been told who) pulled out his pack of cigarettes to light one up. Someone gently tugged at the sleeve of his jacket and said to him in a low voice, so as not to draw too much attention from others, "Miss Rand smokes Tareytons." The implication was clear: Reason dictated not only that one smoke, but that one smoke one particular brand!

The degree to which a group of people ostensibly devoted to reason and rationality could embrace argument by appeal to authority was staggering.

CoreOS's Docker-rival Rocket: We drill into new container contender

What about BSD?

"The Docker tech may even one day be OS-agnostic – Microsoft is a Docker partner and . . . has announced that a future version of Windows Server will support running containerized applications based on the Docker protocols – while Rocket is likely to remain Linux-only."

What about the various BSDs? Or the remaining commercial Unixes? (Count Mac OS X in either category.) Might Rocket eventually be able to work with any of them?

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(I understand that even Docker does not presently support any of the BSD variants, nor any other species of Unix, and that FreeBSD and Solaris already have their own counterparts to Docker (Jails and Zones, respectively). (I believe that AIX and HP-UX do as well.)

And of course that CoreOS is, after all, a Linux variant.)

Re: Hmm

"It does seem to as if the developers of both projects have forgotten the Unix way of working. Write a program to do one thing and do it well, and not try to be all things to all men."

Isn't that kind-of or largely the point behind Rocket — the point that Polvi and the other CoreOS people were making?

"What the CoreOS team likes is the idea of a container as a basic building block of application development, where each container provides a 'microservice' that can be combined with other microservices to form distributed applications.

In this development model, Polvi argues, you probably want the software that you use to run your containers to do that and nothing else."

Nematoad, are you saying that even Rocket departs from the Unix way of doing things, or merely that the CoreOS development team has departed from the Unix way of doing things on projects other than Rocket? (Or even on CoreOS itself — for instance, by embracing systemd?)

FCC bigwig grills Netflix: If internet fast lanes are so bad, why did YOU build them?

Advocate FOR???

Twice this article uses the redundant neologism "advocate for":

* "asking him to explain why his company advocates for net neutrality"

* "improve streaming performance while advocating for net neutrality"

For God's sake, it's advocate, not "advocate for"! The "for" is redundant and unnecessary!*

Why is this ridiculous error suddenly burgeoning? Why are even people who (should) know better, and who (presumably) have been using the term correctly for decades,** suddenly succumbing to and perpetuating this ghastly abomination? The mis-usage seems to have arisen only in the past few years, but it appears to be spreading like wildfire.

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* "For" can be used after "advocate" if it is short for and synonymous with "on behalf of". But then the noun that follows "for" does not denote that which is advocated, but instead denotes the person or entity on whose behalf or for whose benefit that thing is advocated. As in "The lobbyist advocated net neutrality for Netflix." That's the only way "for" ever legitimately gets in there.

Likewise, in regard to "against", the Verizon lobbyist does not "advocate against" net neutrality. He opposes net neutrality!

And he does this for Verizon. He opposes net neutrality for Verizon just as the Netflix lobbyist advocates net neutrality for Netflix.

But no one advocates against anything! (Or for anything!)

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** I have in mind in particular not Shaun Nichols — about whom and whose background I know nothing — but the minister of a church I used to attend. But countless others as well.

Under the Iron Sea: YES, tech and science could SAVE the planet

TERRIBLE Pun

(Unfortunately, we do not have a Bad Joke Alert icon. But this story is 100% true.)

About 10 years ago, to combat a bit of anemia, I had to take iron tablets for a few weeks. (Preceded a few minutes by vitamin C and folic acid, as anyone who has been through this will know.) My doctor told me I could reduce the regimen from every day to every other day a week or so in, as my strength recovered. So one Saturday morning, I announced to my live-in girlfriend of the time — with a straight face — that "Today is Ferrous Sulphate's Day Off."

Beyond the genome: YOU'VE BEEN DECODED, again

A rather misleading omission

The article makes no mention of the epigenome and epigenetics, either as carriers of information or as determiners of gene expression. It gives the impression that DNA and proteins* — the genome and the proteome — are all there is.

Since the article is really and mainly just about the proteome, and the discussion of the genome was really just an explanatory lead-in to the discussion of the proteome (which is quite good!), perhaps a digression into the epigenome wasn't really called for. But the impression given by the wording and construction of that set-up is highly misleading. We now know that histones and the epigenome are where a lot of the important action is, and we are only scratching the surface in regard to their role.

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* I.e., the proteins that the nucleic acids code for in general, as distinct from the proteins ("histones") that surround the nucleic acids and — amazingly — turn out to have an important information-coding function as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

More newfangled, illiterate JARGON . . .

"total R&D spend for that period"

What possible purpose is served by writing "spend" when spending obviously was called for?

It does not mark you as cool or hip to wage war on the distinction between nouns and verbs.* It marks you as an indiscriminate, sheep-like follower of fashion.

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* I hope it is clear that I chose the "FAIL" icon instead of the obviously called-for "Pedantic grammar nazi alert" picture for irony's sake. And the irony is actually double, because this particular failure is about as non-epic as an instance of failure can be!

(I shared what I hope is an entertaining illustration of the hyperbolic over-use of "epic" — its application to a pizza box in an American TV commercial — about a month ago:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/10/22/google_opens_inbox/#c_2336502

That post bitched about was prompted by an especially egregious example of using a noun as a verb, whereas in the present instance we have a verb used as a noun. And again, a vastly less outrageous example at that.)

Google opens Inbox – email for people too thick to handle email

Re: "To reminder you"???????

My deepest gratitude to all who have replied. I only just now discovered all your comments.*

It's nice to know I am not the only vox clamantis in deserto!

(And to see a Monty Python reference! My thanks to Midnight for the lovely "remind"!)

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* It would be nice if El Reg were to add a comment-reply notification feature. I believe that's on the list.

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

Re: windscreen wipers?

"still doesn't have anyone to look out the wiped windscreen. So why leave the rain sensors hooked up to the wipers?"

Surely Glen Waverley was being sarcastic when he wrote this, no?* Was his point not, by posing the rhetorical question, to induce everyone to reflect and realize the obvious ridiculousness and unnecessary complication of the alternative — namely, of connecting the passenger-presence sensors to the interface between the vehicle's rain sensors and its windshield-wiper motors, and making the "On" or "Off" status of the latter interface or connection depend on the presence or absence of passengers?

I believe that the several responses his comment received were actually just repeating his point.

(Apropos of which, remember that part of the point of the "Joke Alert" icon and the flashing "Joke Alert" gif is to poke fun at those who make their use necessary. If memory serves, the introduction of the flashing "Joke Alert" gif some 10-14 years ago was accompanied by words from Lester to the effect that "We wouldn't have thought additional words were necessary to make clear that we were joking" — about what, I've long since forgotten — "but obviously we were wrong.")

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* I don't believe he was being sarcastic or insincere in his original post. I believe that post was merely intended to point out the irony of having the windshield wipers on even when no one is in the car. But I honestly do believe his latter post, or at least its second paragraph/final sentence, were intended to be sarcastic. I looked for any follow-up posts in which he might have defended his later assertion, and was relieved to find none.

But obviously I'm kind-of out on a limb here.