Posts by janimal 338 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Sep 2007
OK Modern CPUs may or may not be faster for the dedicated tasks the originals were designed for but I wonder how the modern parallel cored GPUs (nVidia et al) stack up against the Cray-1 or Collosus for vector processing? 127+ cores with hardware support for vector & matrix processing, and usually around 1gb dedicated GPU memory...
Any Cuda coders out there want to knock up an app?
I expect a comedian / actor to have about as much authority in the field of technology as a jaded, second rate, technology blogger does in climate change or copyright law personally.
As for DAB radio, we've had one for 4 maybe 5 years alongside some traditional FM radios. Depending where we have lived either one, the other and occasionally both have worked.
However I can't agree more about the power requirements of DAB, we'll never bother trying to run our DAB on batteries after the first time.
I fully concur with your list of badly driven cars, but I think you forgot the sports 4x4s like cayennes etc... There seems to be some sort of special exam to make sure you are qualified to drive one..
1) Do you use mirrors when manouvering your vehicle?
2) Do you occasionally check your mirrors even when not manouvering?
3) Are there any road conditions during which you would consider driving at less than 120mph?
4) Would you ever consider leaving more than a few centimetres between yourself and the motorcyclist ahead of you on a narrow spiral slip-road in the rain?
You answered no to all questions, congratulations here's the keys to your Cayenne Turbo
Mine's the one with the Gixxer 1000 keys in the pocket.
Back in the late 80's when I was learning to play guitar and trying to write my own stuff. I had a mate in a signed band who's bedroom was basically a home recording studio. So every now and then I would trudge up to his house with my guitar to record some of 'my' riffs.
Almost every time I would proudly play my latest piece and he would say "ah that's sleeping with my whore" by some obscure danish rock band etc... - and then get out the album & play me the track.
Obviously it wasn't even unconscious plagiarism as I only listened to floyd, rush, genesis, 70's pop ballards, The Police and classical music! Oh and Hawkwind, but don't tell anyone :/
There's only so many notes & once you limit the time signature & keys to the more popular forms it's very easy to come up with the same idea someone else has. It is only in the whole song, lyrics, melody and production etc... that music begins to have a chance of any originality.
I really liked Men At Work, they were a band with integrity. It's really fecking annoying that these woodlice have crawled from the woodwork to claim a totally unjust cut. Is there any chance of appeal? Hopefully the judge will piss on his 40%-60% claim.
Recommended listening
Blue For You - Men At Work
It's a Mistake - Men At Work
lovely stuff!
Actually despite the inconvenience of packing all those boxes full of very heavy paper everytime we move, I can't ever see myself giving up the practical nature of paperback.
I like to read in the bath, the worst that can happen with a paperback is it ends up all wrinkly after a couple of hours on the radiator. I doubt I can say the same for a kindle, iPad or x2 iTablet. I never need battery charge to read a paperback.
My paperback dropping to the floor from the bed at 2am when I have fallen asleep while reading won't break or scratch the screen. I can buy them for a quid or two from the book exchange or 'borrow' them from friends.
When my book case gets too full we dump a bunch in the charity shops or 'lend' them to friends or exchange a couple at the book exchange.
eBook?? No thanks, not ever!
Is there some reason why almost all these power socket network plugs always extend below the plug rather than above? I currently have four sitting around doing nothing because the new house I have moved into has all the plug sockets too close to the floor to plug any adapter in.
I don't think I have ever seen a plug socket so close to the ceiling that you can't plug something in :/
"Only wanted to share some good points from id with photo and fingerprint" - Benito
"Get an ID card system instead of the present combination of TV-licences, gas bills..." - Marvin
"An ID card *would* be more convenient for European travel than a passport, especially as certain countries (Belgium I believe) require you to have your ID card or passport on your person at almost all times. I'd quite happily have one if the rules and requirements were identical to the current passport." - Cambeltonian
Have you only just joined this ancient debate? The problem is not in having a photo ID card, most of us have one of them, it's called a drving license.
The main problem is the backend central database (National Identity Register) with your biometrics on it, the amount of people who will be able to access that data, the intention to store the time and location of every check made against that ID.
Originally they suggested 250 government departments would be able to access data on the NIR, they then increased that to somewhere around 4000 private & government organisations. Note that's 'organisations' not individuals. There have been several low profile instances recently of police officers and backroom police staff accessing the Police National Computer, also of Health staff innappropriately accessing health records on the NHS systems for their own nefarious purposes.
How secure is your identity going to be when unvetted low paid data clerks from some random organisation have access to everything stored?
In addition I am assuming you all work in IT in some form or other? Unless you are very new to the profession you should know by now that ideals are rarely achieved.
Of course all of the above is kind of moot because they have predictably already strayed far from the ideal. They have no readers, only 30 ID registration centres for the entire country. Now they want to farm out biometrics collection to high street stores (oh how very secure!)
If they ever were to actually get the readers implemented, how will you feel when you are turned away from blockbusters, or your bank, the border, or worse the hospital because the reader is faulty or the network is down?
How are you going to reclaim your identity when your biometrics get inexplicably confused with someone else who registered at WHSmiths on a busy Saturday afternoon?
Then of course we have the invevitable function creep which, many of the government proposals on cards from the last 10 years clearly imply they will be looking for further uses of the card (including commercial considerations to recoup costs). I have already had the joy of having my DVLA data sold to a private firm who are attempting to reclaim a debt that I do not owe.
Finally as No2ID stated, once you are on their you are signed up for life. It is your responsiblity to ensure your data is upto date and current no doubt at your own expense. I live in rented property and there are times when your landlords wish to move back to their property or sell it etc... sometimes we have moved every 6 months for 2 years. What a joy it will be to have to be legally obliged to pay the government whatever fee they decide is appropriate at any given time to have them update my records.
This government (and unfortunately the opposition, regardless of what they say) are obsessed with control. On every level they are determined to create an all encompassing record of every citizens movements on a daily basis. ANPR records, DNA data, ID card check tracking, National Communications Database. They have also repeatedly proposed llinking standard CCTV to the ANPR system, face tracking on public CCTV, Audio surveillance on public CCTV. I'm sure they would happily consider RFID readers on lamposts to track any passing NID cards.
Surely you can see that if they actually managed to get NID cards accepted as the de-facto method of ID, they would then insist they were presented not just for every public service accessed but for voting, job interviews, every financial transaction made etc... It is the data miners dream, when any crime is commited they just check who was in the area, coupled with some pre-crime profiling from all that crap they are holding. Of course the cost of the card & updating your data will have to go up considerably to pay for all the joined up infrastructure but by then it will be your legal responsibility to pay for it.
So yes a photo ID card MIGHT be handy if you are into that kind of thing, unfortunately that bears no relation whatsoever to the government proposals.
You know this, I know this, many statisticians, mathematicians, techies and geeks know this. What we actually need is some trusted (ha!) media organisation, like say the beeb, to explain it to the rest.
It's not enough for newsnight or channel 4 news to ask a few questions. It's not enough for it to be discussed on sites only read by those who already have no faith in the system.
It needs to be broadcast on 'The One Show' (I can't believe people actually watch that crap) or watchdog.
Spending billions on this whole useless system is surely scandalous enough for some primetime TV coverage?
They're all in it together I tell you!
I can see from your impeccable spelling you obviously attended some grand red brick university.
Chatham was screwed when they shut down the naval dockyard and closed the barracks, so yes it has become pretty grubby and depressing. However, historically it was a highly important strategic area for many hundreds of years.
It provides some excellent opportunities to juxtapose the ancient and lacklustre modernity.
It's current state makes an excellent photographic statement for the cancer of our times.
Saying that, I don't live there anymore mind :)
Either you have been lucky regarding the Advent powerline ethernet or I was very unlucky!
I had six of the 200mbs and also bought two 200mbs units for my mum. Her's stopped working and were replaced afer 6 months, now her network has died again, I haven't had the chance to get over there to fix it so it might not be the Advents that failed this time.
of the 6 I bought for myself, four simply stopped working within a year. The two I bought as a pair failed within 3 days of each other. The other two just stopped randomly & never worked again.
I make that an 80% failure rate.
When I switched to the devolo 200mbs I was also suprised to find I get much better performance from them. With the Advents I found I couldn't play HD content across the network which I have no problem with since dumping the advents.
Sorry for going so far off-topic everyone. I'll stop now :/
I too thought the PS3 wifi seemed crap so I connected it up using a devolo homeplug network. Then later, out of interest I tried a wifi laptop in the same position as the PS3. It turns out my lounge has two really bad wifi dead spots - everywhere else in the lounge has a great signal!
If you do hook it up using a powerline network don't whatever you do use those piece of sh*t Advent powerline ethernet products from PC world (as if an enlightened reg reader would!)
You've spent all day battling with MS software, trying to make sure your code is devoid of any proprietary MS 'extensions' and telling WU you don't want it to reboot since you have 10 applications open and are attempting to finish and unit test the component which has to go into the repository by 3pm to get into the nightly build.
You come home and find the kids crying because the XBox has the Red Ring.
Then you notice that your home desktop didn't have anyone to sit there and tell WU not to reboot in the middle of the 12 hour render you started before going to work.
Then you sit down to fix the website your brother has been working on and have to spend an hour or two stripping out all the frontpage tags. During which the missus has had you reboot her vista laptop 3 times already because it is having one of those days where it can't find the wi-fi router even if it is sat next to it, despite the other 5 machines in the house having no problem doing so in any room.
Finally you have to explain to your Dad on the phone that he has to set word 2007 to save in .doc because the publisher he is doing some work for can't read .docx
I don't care if the Zune came in solid gold and cost £1 the last thing I am going to do is buy something from MS by choice.
The only way to sell it is to provide a tall, dark, sinister individual with leather gloves and a gun to your head to accompany each unit.
Your post seems to be an exercise in Idiology. Was that deliberate or did you mean 'ideology'?
Ideology noun (ideologies) - the body of ideas and beliefs which form the basis for a social, economic or political system.
That's what defines democracy, it is an ideology
Democracy relies on someone watching the watchers and hopefully someone watching them in turn. Once it becomes opaque it starts to fail the test for a democracy.
History has fortunately taught (some of us) that an entrenched government sometimes like to defend the citizens from alternative viewpoints, limiting opposition or public scrutiny. Thus with the help of people who ask no further questions than "is there any harm caused by people viewing pornography, particularly child pornography?" a democracy quickly turns into a totalitarian dictatorship.
No doubt stopping and thinking for a bit is the reason the authors achieved their academic status and have people take note of what they publish.
Such people are a large part of the reason we are currently (for a short time) only half way towards a totalitarian state despite our current overlords trying so damn hard to get us there.
Considering the amount of thought you put into your post and your frankly hilarious spelling I have to ask you a personal question?
Do you work for the Daily Mail?
...oh no! I've burnt the toast...tch...tch
Rob beard said...
>Seriously, as quick as it is, they're asking £90,000 for something that is potentially explosive (assuming they are using lithium batteries - TG just said it was laptop batteries in there)
er.. so petrol and hydrogen aren't explosive then?
Mine's the one with the volatile chemical symbol on the back
I submitted the following, I'll post an update if it is accepted.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Trial ID
Cards on Members of Parliament and the House Of Lords before
the general public
I would like the government to demonstrate the practical
implementation and benefits of the National ID card scheme by
being the first compulsory group to have ID cards. Members of
Parliament, the house of lords and all those that work in
Parliament should be the first to demonstrate their commitment
to this technology. The current parliamentary security systems
could be greatly improved if access was authenticated using the
ID card scheme and biometrics. We cannot risk the most
important figures in the country due to terrorism or identity
theft. This action would also demonstrate the faith the
government has in the technology and provide them with concrete
examples of the benefits to silence the sceptics.
I bought a PS3 recently, but then found that some games (GTA IV) were unplayable on our 20" CRT from 2m away. So my gf suggested we get a new TV.
As a result we bought a 40" 1080p LCD tv, which made a hell of a difference to the ps3 games.
Leading on from that I thought - wey hey let's try this blu-ray stuff then.
1) I was gobsmacked at the cost of hollywood releases.
2) Despite scouring the shopping centres in town I was depressed by the lack of decent content.
3) The cost of a blu-ray ranged from £15 (on sale) to £25 - £35 for a recent release.
3) Half of the meagre content is not really HD, but upscaled in a studio.
4) I CAN see the difference and the vibrant colours and sharp resolution look great to me (Planet Earth reccomended) however my gf can't see any difference, suggesting she would have to see them side by side to tell if HD was any better/
5) We got a Sony Bravia KDL-40w4000 and I spent weeks reading reviews and learning more than I wanted to about HD tvs before I bought it, and it actually manages SD content very, very well. However I have seen many other ppl's HD tvs which make a total mess of normal SD content - they are like watching a low resolution internet download.
To sum up: 90% of hollywood output is utter unwatchable crap, the hardware is very expensive and unless you really make an effort will make all your standard TV content look terrible, there is hardly any choice of blu-ray content and if you can find anything you might want to own it is usually £15 on sale or £25 - £35 for a recent release. After all of that unless you are very aware of the quality of what you are watching you may not even notice any real difference after all the expense and trouble.
If someone is considering buying an HD setup at the moment (for watching tv & movies) I'd say don't bother - wait until the prices come down. It's a total luxury item which doesn't provide very much luxury at the moment.
Maybe next year when (hopefully) BBC HD gets a slice of terrestrial digital bandwidth, or the blu-ray library has expanded (a lot) and the prices of BR come down to £10-£15 max for recent releases.
Paris because even she cries when she sees how much it costs to go Blu
Apart from the techno challenged IE lusers most of us are able to switch to alternative stylesheets, if they have been provided - any chance of a variable width alternative stylesheet please?
On a final note I like the way you cleverly removed the fuel from our flame throwers before we could pull the trigger. Damn your military training Lewis!
Support? Now that's really cruel. I tried their support recently (not Vista related), I tried their chat-bot, then turned to the phones after a pointless 1/2 hour of re-attempting all the things I had already tried, as per the script, I was told he couldn't help me.
on to the phones...first of course you have to try to find the appropriate number depending if you are a retail customer, MDSN subscriber, Technet subscriber, volume license thingy, Microsoft Partner...etc... etc... I had to give up and just dial any number and get them to eventually put me on the right line. From that point on support has been three sets of instructions basically telling me to do the same thing that I originally tried before contacting support, followed by an e-mail telling me they'll look into it further. That was three weeks ago.
It's still not resolved BTW so in case you lot have a better clue...
File Transfer Manager fails to open when downloading from MSDN downloads (using IE7 of course). First there is the install activex warning followed by a VBScript error which fails to launch FTM (build 5.032). FTM install and launches fine stand alone. The apparent solution was to remove all traces of FTM, then downoad & install FTM then IE to MSDN & it should work. - nope.
xp pro x64 & IE7 - any help much appreciated!!
..because I and presumably many others never new it existed! Perhaps that's because I stopped using the DivX player and so never went to DivX.com or saw any advertising for Stage6?
I was sick of having multiple players to support all the various codecs.
So I now use only two, BSPLayer - because it has better controls and support for subtitle files and VLC which plays just about every codec out there. Consequently I stopped visiting the Divx site to download the player.
It sounds like those that knew about it appreciated it. Oh Well
I spent a period of time trying to make a living offering IT support to home users. It could have worked if I had charged a reasonable rate, unfortunately I am too much of a hippy to ever be succesful running my own business.
Anyway I about 30% of the my computer is sooo slow and keeps bugging me with pop-ups was a simple removal of Real software. Back then I used to carry a USB with a Real Player v8 install (which was no longer available) but once they changed to RealOne it did little good for a lot of content.
Have you ever read the Real license?? I'm pretty sure satan was involved because
it goes way beyond the usual accepted rights buggery and weasleness of the standard software license.
Happily if you want to view RM files these days (thanks for the access BBC bastards . I complain to them regularly about Real software) you can use Real Alternative avalable here..
http://codecguide.com/about_real.htm
Anybody got a wall, an AK47 and a revolution to hand?
I choose thumbs up because that's what Real like to put up people's bottoms
I know it's been said before, but it is well worth saying again in case one of these RIAsses ever accidentaly reads this.
P2P is as the title - if I can't spend a bit of time listening to a few tracks I will not buy it. The only time I spend money on CDs coincides with the times I spend downloading tunes from e-bay & previously WinMX. Radio just isn't good enough because most of it is pushed by the RIAA dealers - this is who we have spent the money on - this is what you have to sell - this is what yo uhave to buy.
I seek out bands on reccomendation - crucially wehn I have the time and inclination.
80% of my CD collection has been bought because I downloaded unlicensed copies first (or was given a tape - remember those?) - the rest is just stuff I heard as a 3rd brother of 4 as a kid and bought for nostalgic nights nursing the whiskey and complaing about how they don't make music like they did when I were a lad and to remember my first scary trip to beaver land behind the school disco.
The world has changed. 'Consumers' want the choice of what they consume and when they are going to consume it. I am 100% sure that the decline of sales is due to the shit that the record companies push to the market rather than rampant piracy.
As an experiment let's try making cinemas charge when you leave the cinema instead of to enter. Say you had to pay full price for watching 66% or more of the film but upto to then you pay a percentage for how much you could bear. I am pretty sure you would see an instant drop in profits because the crap they serve up is only worth staying for the punishment because you have already paid.
What use are album sales or box office takings except to express how well the public have been deceived by the marketing.
Here's an alternative - the pirate chart. : "Dirty scumbag pirates have downloaded this album or film (at a crappy compression rate) more than any other currently available on the net - get the full quality version here.
Make shit films / music get shit sales. Make a great movie / album - most people will want a high quality version to own.
I can quite happily get my music for free by ripping my mates CD's - DVD's and paying a lot less for a functional browsing level internet connection if they want to go down the route of policing p2p. Even linux distros are avalable for a few quid from a magazine freebie. Although these days I am now happy to pay 40 euros or so for Mandriva with proprietary drivers and support.
fuck the pirates - long live pirate bay
I choose unsmiley because RIAA et al must be on something (but certainly not E, I don't feel the love)
Case 1
When I set up my girlfriend with a new computer and Broadband connection I was flabbergasted when the ISPs broadband installation disk seemed to freeze halfway through and I noticed the network was maxed out. I killed the connection and ran some tools - 7 trojan's installed withing 30 seconds. I ended up going home getting an SP2 disk re-installing the OS adding AV & firewall and reconnecting.
Case 2
I have spent the last 5 years constantly having to re-install my parent's XP system. Usually within two weeks the thing is riddled with spyware & malware rendering it useless until my next visit. In November I decided to install Mandriva 2007 instead. They don't have root access obviously. I showed them how to do the things they used to do on windows. I have not had a single computer support call since apart from what printer cartridge to buy. Looks like a result.
Case 3
A friend has 4 boys aged between 8 - 15. Her Windows PC has never worked properly for more than a couple of days. I installed Mandriva 2007 last October, the kids loved it - especially the compiz fusion eye candy. The machine has been rock solid since.
I guess if everyone in the world switched to linux we would soon start getting many more viruses etc targetting the OS but the locked down paradigm of the OS makes it much harder for the spammers/ scammers to get a foothold - although people will always be prone to social engineering.
finally - I don't currently run a linux OS (although I have in the past & will in the future) - I am using XP pro. I work for a company who writes nothing but windows apps so I need all the dev stuff installed. Then again I won't touch IE (opera & FF) if I intend to do unfettered web surfing I use a VM.
Personally I think your article is totally idiotic but I defend your right to make yourself look a complete twat in public.
PS how would we tie these licences to the person? ID card anyone?
The Idea that you have to learn the principles of computing on any particular platform is just ridiculous. Any word processor has a common functional goal, the same for relational DBs, the same for graphics design packages etc... etc...
The 'they should be taught what they will use in real life' need to think about what they were taught on & what they use now.
I wasn't taught any of the technologies I use now in the 'real world'. The only formal programming lessons I ever had were in Pascal & c++ many years after I had already taught myself procedural basic. Does that mean I can't code in anything else?
I learnt word processing on wordstar ffs.
Whatever products you learn on schools & often universities is usually well out of date by the time you enter employment.
So why should a cash strapped education system bother spending needless millions paying for software when freely available products can just as easily teach transferrable skills?
"I'm sorry I can't buy that vauxhall, I learnt to drive a peugot - oh poo!"
As a Soft Eng, when writing c++ commercially I am constantly plagued by the many non standards MS choose to inflict on developers. There are standards out there for C, C++ and the STL but M$ consistently ignore them or 'extend' them. The bastards.
In my spare time I have been known to create websites for myself and for friends. I'm sure anyone in my position can understand why I absolutely fucking detest M$ and everything they do.
When writing websites I code it up using W3C standards (HTML, XHTML, CSS) and it works on every browser except for IE6 & IE7.
For personal sites I do a bit of browser detection and if they are using MS I give them a bunch of links to standards compliant browsers and tell them to come back once they have some decent software, however if someone has paid me for a site I have to jump through hoops to support both IE6 & IE7 because of their huge market share.
Of course if you un-bundle your browser from the OS the user won't be able to search for another, so there needs to be a choice of browser provided on the first install.
Let's face it MS should just stop bothering with IE, it's shit and IE7 only improved in useability terms by copying the rest - they just didn't bother fixing the bugs that count - rendering, security, & standards compliancy.
There just aren't enough expletives to adequately describe the bunch of sneaky, money grabbing cunts that are Microsoft.
PS if you haven't tried Opera, you really should - very fast, very useful. Oh and it just works!
Personally I run a dual boot, mainly because I still have a few windoze games and for certain graphics progs & for visual studio.
I have however in the last couple of weeks installed Mandriva 2008 free on a friend's machine (a single mum with 3 young boys who used to constantly destroy windows with malware) and on my Mum's machine (also constantly nerfed by malware using MS)
Once I had Mandriva installed & turned on 3d desktop my friend's kids were instantly in love with it, with the eldest vowing to ditch windows on his laptop at the first opportunity. The only game the kids played on the pc was The Sims and they just didn't care that they wouldn't be able to play it anymore, for everything else they use consoles.
My mum only needs it for web browsing and a bit of word processing, how many other people's parents only use the web, word processors and maybe skype?
There is a massive market for Linux desktops out there.
The only thing I have to do is make sure they let me check how easy it is to install drivers for any given hardware they are thinking of buying & make sure they get something we can get working.
So that's two less windows users and potentially 3 more when the kids get their own machines.
Penguins rule
Although not literally like thousands of brown people feeling George, Tony and now Gordon's love.
Thank you al-el-Reg readers these comments are the best advert for Americans I have ever seen. See! Some of them do have a sense of humour!
However I spewed my coffee all over my keyboard while reading them so I take it back, I hate you all!
"From what I have read, Greenland has melted around the edge but interior ice is expanding."
Can you cite your source please?
@Anonymous Coward
"...and drag us all back to the stone age"
Erm, right so Iraq didn't have universities, cars, mobile phones before the cowboys came for their oil?
Didn't George and Tony have to bomb them 'back to the stone age'?
I believe it was the Arabs that dragged us out of the stone age with trivial matters like inventing zero's and agriculture.
oh sorry! I didn't notice your coat before I clambered onto my high horse <blush>
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