* Posts by nintendoeats

692 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2020

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Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

nintendoeats

We already had this story!

WANT NEW STORY! WANT NEW STORY!

*hides under the covers while crying loudly*

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

nintendoeats

The last time I used IDE was yesterday, on a Pentium 1 board. I accept that the penguin cannot support my hobbies forever, if only there were 12 other operating systems I could run on that machine :p

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

nintendoeats

Re: Bring back Concorde - much more impressive.

Given the reasons that Concorde was ultimately shut down, I don't think this is true, unless they can bring down the operating cost significantly. I don't think many airlines want to buy a high-price plane that you can only fly over water.

Uncle Sam sanctions Chinese AI outfits for links to Xinjiang Uyghur human-rights abuses

nintendoeats

Certainly not. In fact, I do not use any program or service that tags my photos, for pretty much this reason. I merely concede that it would be really useful if I did, because tagging photos is deeply tedious.

nintendoeats

Cool uses of machine learning:

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Quality control of difficult to quantify objects

Tagging my photos

Scary uses of machine learning:

Pretty much all the other ones

Focus on the camera, mobile devs: 48MP shooters about to become the sweet spot

nintendoeats

Re: Why the obsession with MP?

The small size of the image sensor and lack of an adjustable aperture are also big problems. The circle of confusion doesn't go away just because you have a lot of pixels, nor does the amount of light hitting the sensor somehow magically increase. There is also a huge restriction on what kinds of photos you can actually take because a phone does not have aperture adjustment; this is of course irrelevent because most phonetographers don't know what that means.

The software seems to be pretty good at giving people "the photo they want, not the photo they took" which is fine if you are not really interesting in photography.

I do wonder if the aperture problem is going to be partially solved using IR cameras. One could judge the depth of each point in the image, then apply blurring to simulate different DoF. I would be surprised if we don't see that soon (or it isn't being done already).

Smuggler caught with 256 Intel Core processors wrapped around him in cling film

nintendoeats

AMD chips have all been PGA for basically ever. Their next gen of chips will be LGA.

UK artists seek 'luvvie levy' on new gadgets to make up for all the media that consumers access online

nintendoeats

Re: What ?

You know, that almost makes me feel better. Wait, no it doesn't.

nintendoeats

Re: redress the balance caused by people accessing ... online without paying for it directly

I completely agree, this is not the solution. I just wanted to acknowledge that capitalism has completely failed to ensure that minor artists get paid.

nintendoeats

Re: What about the people in the software world?

The bridge toll makes perfect sense. Bridge costs f(X) to maintain, where X is the number of cars every year. Unfortunately, f is not a linear function: even if the bridge has nobody going over it, there is still expensive maintenance and inspection that must be done (not to mention recouping the cost of building it, which is completely independent of usage).

It's pretty intuitive that if fewer people are using a fixed-cost resource, the cost to each user must go up.

nintendoeats

Re: redress the balance caused by people accessing ... online without paying for it directly

I mean, the reality is that for music at least streaming has been horrid. It is almost impossible to make money on Spotify.

nintendoeats

I've really had enough of salable products. The world is dramatically improved by the existence of non-salable products. Salability only demonstrates that somebody has convinced somebody else that the thing has value. Quite often, that event is completely independent of the thing's actual value.

This effect is not exclusive to the arts.

nintendoeats

Re: What ?

Crap, so this is why CD-Rs are so expensive here. That is several times the actual cost of manufacture. I can't believe that some of my money has gone to Kanye West because I wanted to install software from companies that no longer exist on computers that are slower than the microcontroller in my fridge.

:(

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

nintendoeats

I'm going to be a horrible person and say that this sounds reasonable. The motives make sense, the implementation is mildly annoying but it's basically SUPPOSED to be, or it wouldn't work (as they demonstrated). I will complain about many Microsoft-related things, but this is not one of them.

GitHub Copilot auto-coder snags emerge, from seemingly spilled secrets to bad code, but some love it

nintendoeats

If this technology matures into something sophisticated and reliable, I might be looking into a new career in 15 years (or at least moving to something like safety-critical systems where this will be a never-ever). Not because I think programmers will become irrelevent, but because it looks incredibly boring. I didn't get into software development so I could glue things together, I did it because I like writing code. If only the computer industry existed purely for my entertainment...

Ransomware-hit law firm gets court order asking crooks not to publish the data they stole

nintendoeats

I agree completely. It's all very funny to go "haha, look et zee loyers unt zer seelee games", but the reality is that people employ lawyers for a reason. They know the ins and outs, the risks and benefits. They don't care if we think it's dumb, clearly this was worth their effort to do and I expect they have a good reason (even if it is not the reason stated).

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web NFT fetches $5.4m at auction while rest of us gaze upon source code for $0

nintendoeats

"The bottom line is that millennials and Gen Z especially have digital lives and it's natural to want to take digital representations of luxury brands, music and art into these worlds – and now they can – and this has value."

What? I have been able to bring digital representations of these things into the digital realm for a very long time. I still can. And that whole thing about equating NFTs to the internet...what an ass.

Yes yes, preaching to the choir, not saying anything new. I am just fablerghasted.

Kubernetes a black hole of unpredictable spend, according to new report

nintendoeats

I want to acknowledge that the photo management software ACDsee put "performance improvements" front and center in their marketing this year. It was really nice to see somebody acknowledging that this is a feature that people will pay for (and one that the software badly needed).

It is much nicer to use now, though there is still room for improvement.

Huawei dev flamed for 'useless' Linux kernel code contributions

nintendoeats

Re: Fortunately I've only suffered that BS once in my career

I think everybody pretty much understands that this is stupid now. I have been working on some very ugly code lately, and generally I am committing files that are several hundred lines shorter. If I didn't refactor out all the cruft, it would have been much harder for me to actually fix/extend the software.

My boss has not complained about this, presumably because she's not a suit.

FYI: There's a human-less, AI robot Mayflower ship sailing from the UK to US right now

nintendoeats

Yes, when I see a boat travelling across the ocean, my first thought is "damn, I need to invest more in IBM technology to help my business identify new challenges on the horizon".

I mean, I know the logic he is using in making that stretch, but the distance he has to reach for it it is almost as long as the journey being made by the boat.

Chinese app binned by Beijing after asking what day it is on anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre

nintendoeats

Re: Blah blah blah

I don't (thank goodness), but any day of the week I would live in the United States instead of Russia or China. There are many bad things about modern western powers, but I could go to the central park right now and start putting up posters that say "Joe Biden is a dick and he eats your babies". I might get a telling off, I might get some individuals who want to pick a fight with me, but I will not be put in prison or assassinated.

Version 8 of open-source code editor Notepad++ brings Dark Mode and an ARM64 build, but bans Bing from web searches

nintendoeats

Re: Censorship? In an editor?

As mentioned above, it's just not in the defaults. Anyway, he is using HIS write of free speech; his right to see somebody pull bullshit and respond "F! you".

The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?

nintendoeats

Note helpful to those who are colourblind >_>

Every time I have to plug in a 3.5mm jack to something with multiple ports, it's like I'm in some kind of quantum hell. It's just random whether I get the right one or not.

But I wouldn't call IT over it.

Arm freezes hiring until Nvidia takeover, cancels everyone's 'wellbeing' allowance

nintendoeats

Re: This always ends well...

One cannot help but feel that this is the point. Is it possible that management know the company is due to be dismantelled, and is basically trying to let everyone down "gently"?

Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world

nintendoeats

Re: Red Button

You live in the sea?

nintendoeats

Re: Replacement hardware?

My understanding is that they literally pack up all of the computing equipment used during design and shove it in a warehouse. Compared to an airplane, a few vaxen are no big deal to store.

Unihertz Titan Pocket: Like asking Mum for a BlackBerry and she tells you 'but we've got a BlackBerry at home'

nintendoeats

Well, I ordered one at the 33%-off price (which was promptly offset by the shipping to Canada). Since in theory I have an fxtec coming, I'm sure I'll wind up with something acceptable (and sell the other). The aspect ratio issue is an...issue.

Nvidia nerfs RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti GPUs to shoo away Ethereum miners

nintendoeats

At least a 1050 is ok for the actual modelling. Renders might take a lot longer, and she might eventually hit limits with scene size due to limited VRAM, but depending on the course she might rarely ever be running ray-traced renders or working with large complex scenes. For just floating around the scene modifying things with the cheaper shader modes, The GPU doesn't usually matter very much.

Source: have done a lot of modelling (including a college course) on both a 1050ti and a 1060.

Samsung shows off rollable and foldable displays, suggests they'll arrive in 2022

nintendoeats

Re: Transparent screens?

I've never understood that for normal usage. Behind my monitor is where the monitor arm, cables and dust go. Why would I want to see that?

I get that there are applications, but not as a replacement for the traditional home or office display.

The future is now, old man: Let the young guns show how to properly cock things up

nintendoeats

Re: Just move some disks...

He wasn't the only one: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

Elon Musk hits the brakes on taking Bitcoin for Tesla purchases

nintendoeats

Re: Fake excuse

If they were worried about a crash, why would they hang on to their bitcoin? They might as well sell ASAP (thereby causing a crash, which would be quite entertaining).

Salesforce fell over so hard today, it took out its own server status page

nintendoeats

We really need to come up with another acronym for either Domain Name Service or Denial of Service. This article wasn't quite what I was expecting :p

‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support

nintendoeats

Re: Indigo?

You should do well, the R8000s are an interesting oddity.

nintendoeats

Re: Indigo?

The SGI community has particularly strong feelings against that sort of thing (but you know, other people ain't yo problem yo)

nintendoeats

I have an R5K O2, it's what got me into SGIs. Unfortunately the cases are made from really brittle plastic that just disintegrates, so using them as a case is basically a nono. I also don't know how people can ship them safely.

I just enjoy mine for the real-time video features. It looks like garbage :/

Actually, I use an Indy as my...daily driver?...SGI. It's easier to keep running because you can easily run it off a SCSI2SD, and hasn't fallen apart.

nintendoeats

I'd be interested in your SGIs...

The swift in-person response is part of the service (and nothing to do with the thing I broke while trying to help you)

nintendoeats

Pedantry detected on radar, incoming, brace for impact

Technically, isn't this really a Who, Me?

Can't get that printer to work? It's not you. It's that sodding cablin.... oh beautiful job with that cabling, boss

nintendoeats

Re: Bloody Developers and memory

A: Keep it under your desk, force them to net into it.

B: If they do that, then for a whole host of reasons they should probably not keep their job (since at that point they are deliberately and knowingly bypassing a fundamental development procedure that is REQUIRED for the programs they write to be useful).

Imagine the conversation:

Me: Why is there 256 MB in the test PC? it was specced at 128 MB.

Dev: My code wouldn't work in 128 MB.

Me: But the user PCs all have 128 MB.

If they continue to argue with you, then they are provably an idiot and you really don't want to keep them around.

nintendoeats

Re: Time was...

That's unfortunate reasoning. If the care home said "We found out about this, we investigated and we turned the nurse in" I wouldn't have thought another thing about it...giving a reference in bad faith on the other hand...

nintendoeats

Re: Time was...

But a 0.02% increase in Q2 profits!

nintendoeats

Re: Printers are the Devil's work

Yet, Point of Sale is fine...

nintendoeats

Re: Bloody Developers and memory

When developing Crysis: Warhead, Crytek built a "target PC" that was kinda low-mid end. The final game had to be playable on that machine. That's what I'm talking about. Before release, the dev is required to run their code on the target machine rather than their dev machine.

nintendoeats

Re: Bloody Developers and memory

Now...that's terrible and everything...but wouldn't this have been solved by buying the devs a single target PC that they had to run their code on before deployment?

nintendoeats

Re: Bloody Developers and memory

I must admit, I did do this to a teacher once. I upgraded to 32GB because I was running out of memory for some vector art. It didn't occur to me that the teacher wouldn't have that much, so he had to bring the file to school to view it...I still got a good grade, which was nice.

nintendoeats

Re: He'll have the small plate of crow

Eh, it sounds like was was basically on the money. I don't think a tech can reasonably be expected to predict "you only have half a board". He was right that the problem was between the mainboard (or whatever an HP minicomputer has) and the printer, just it was a little bit closer to the mainboard than he thought!

nintendoeats

Re: Blame the Cable

This also reminds me of DB13W3. I have a cable for converting it to VGA, which has a set of switches on it for changing which device it supports. I can't find the instructions right now to check, but I think it has something like 12 different "official" modes for different devices. Of course, most commonly you will just use SGI and SUN.

nintendoeats

Re: Blame the Cable

I am a member of a hackerspace. I wanted to get some of the old SGI kit working. I literally went through every single box that might have cables, taking out anything that could possibly be SCSI. This was not an organized space, so that was a lot of boxes.

I did eventually get it going, and have quite a nice collection of very different cables. 50-pin, 53-pin, 80-pin, VHDCI, parallel-> SCSI, internal and external, terminators, double-ended terminators...fak.

nintendoeats

Re: Printers are the Devil's work

We have a MILF1...I'm pretty sure that customers could actually see that acronym if they went looking.

Known software issue grounds Ingenuity Mars copter as it attempted fourth flight

nintendoeats

Re: Ace PFY skills

Press the button...no not like on your shirt...are you from the past?

Not only were half of an AI text adventure generator's sessions NSFW but some involved depictions of sex with children

nintendoeats

Re: Internet Access

Well, the article did say that was an SFW example...I'm sure it gets much worse, but El Reg isn't likely to publish that.

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