Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch

Re: Tried not to get involved but

Re: no SD on Neuxs or Nexus 7

Yes, Google also fucks up

The way I see it, the lack of an upgrade slot was a deliberate design decision to achieve two things. First, since they're basically subsidising the hardware, they want to keep costs down. Second, they don't want to piss off the other Android suppliers by making a phone or tablet that's too good (again, particularly if they're subsidising the cost). I'm only surmising this, but I feel that they want to produce something that's a pretty good showcase for Android, but want to avoid being accused of "stealing" the market from other Android makers. So I see the lack of an SD slot here as being kind of a middle ground, with the assumption that if users want to upgrade, they'll check out the other android manufacturers.

@Chris Wareham

On a similar (ahem) note, I think someone should do a Lisa Simpson on it. Bring along their saxomophone, do all the rehearsals and then on the night do the signature solo and swiftly exit off stage.

Well, probably not.

Re: This article...

Looks like the "write once, read never" approach. Makes me wonder why I bothered.

And yes, I did use the "send corrections" link.

Re: Graphics

Probably not very good. Ray tracing tends to exercise the I/O an awful lot so even if you assign one pi to a particular section of the screen it'll still end up accessing other parts of the scene in a pretty random access pattern (rays bounce). With only a 100MBit connection (and the fact that the USB and Ethernet share a bus) it's easy to saturate the available data channels--a problem that only gets worse as you scale up (though working with different net topology and having more control nodes could definitely help, to a degree).

On the other hand, having the farm render a typical fractal image would be a perfect application for it since each screen section is typically independent of each other one.

Despite how impractical this thing is, I'd still love to have one. I'm sure it's also a great teaching resource in spite of (nay, even because of) its shortcomings, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

Re: Looks like an iPad

"What is the point ... with Fanboi trolling?"

Maybe because it's easy to get a rise out of Apple fans with it? Low-hanging fruit, you might say.

Re: Kansas state

Well think about ... with that level of bandwidth maybe some kind of immersive virtual reality setup would be possible. Maybe you wouldn't even need to know you're in Kansas?

Re: Junked junk DNA junks ID junking?

proves intelligent design? Really?

I've got this banana over here. It might help to clarify His Pungent Effulgent. (or maybe not)

Re: Minority Report style control: The only way I see 'touch' work on the desktop.

A vibrating ring for haptic feedback might be handy, though. Stop sniggering at the back!

No sniggering here. I do think that memory wire would be a lot nicer than mere buzzing. For "handling" 3d objects, obviously.

@shade82000

There is nothing beyond the edge of the solar system, it's just a big black board with pictures of stars on it.

Reminds me of Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin. On what really happened with the CCCP's space programme.

Re: All this proves is Samsung have more products, its hardly rocket science

the patissier sues the boulanger for using the same oven-based technique for cooking food.

Surely, since this is croissants we're talking about, they'd sue over the method of folding in the edges to make them nice and curved ;-)

Re: "The box only holds 3TB - USB sticks will hold more and you can carry them in your pocket. "

Your welcome!

My what now?

Re: Oracle's behaviour is disgusting.

The current sense of entitlement in IT is shocking.

It's has nothing to do with "our" sense of entitlement and everything to do with Oracle's moral responsibility. Think of Java as being like a teenager going out into the world and Oracle being its guardian. It's up to Oracle to ensure that their brat isn't going to become a public menace. A very large software ecosystem is built around Java and people need to be able to depend on it. At this rate Java is sure to end up hanging around with Flash, and that definitely won't end well.

Re: @AC 23:47GMT - Software patents are inevitable

Math is not patentable so don't try your logic on us.

Shouldn't be, but that didn't stop the patents on RSA encryption, Lempel-Ziv-Welch compression or Arithmetic encoding, not to mention the myriad other patents surrounding video and audio compression and even bloody container formats.

Re: "... thousandths of milliseconds."

Why do they need microsecond timing on graphics generation when the viewable result changes only about every 20 milliseconds (roughly)?

Possibly because more complex games will involve multiple rendering passes, probably with tunable parameters for LOD and the like, and being able to budget accurately can make all the difference between being able to hit your window for accurately syncing to the next frame update or not. Just a little drift and you end up losing frames. You might also have to account for vsync, and being off there will really screw things up.

Re: Not quite

Shenanigans galore smashing doors (via doire, for oak?) into smithereens with a shillelagh after drinking whisky and blathering on with a thick Irish brogue about seeing banshee and leprechauns.

Re: Worm? Virus?

pretends to be something useful in order to trick

Like a giant wooden horse, for example. Someone should surely be able to find a use for that.

Re: Huawei Ascend G300

re: change in ratings, perhaps it's because in this review it's stacked up against other sub-£100 phones. As an android phone it might get 80% overall, but 90% if you're buying on a budget. That's my take on it.

Re: Any one remember...

I might as well recommend looking up John Cooper-Clark's "Evidently Chicken Town." It's probably just as relevant (hint: not).

Re: @Frumious Bandersnatch Rights and Licenses

So you call for citations from AC, in the very same sentence as you say "I think it was Apple and Microsoft spreading FUD about Vorbis infringing on unspecified patents"? Where are your citations?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/30/steve_jobs_claims_ogg_theora_attack/

There. Happy now?

And by the way, if you go back and read what I said again, maybe you'll understand it in the way I intended: there indeed have been rumours of Ogg violating patents. I [thought] it was Apple and Microsoft making those [foundless--hence "FUD"] allegations.

Have a nice day, Mr. AC.

Re: Someone had to do it.

Finally an agreement then that Java requires special* hardware to run it with decent performance?

I can't tell if you're joking or not, but are you aware that some ARM devices have the capability of running Java bytecode (more or less) natively with Jazelle? That's not to say that Java needs special hardware, and it certainly wouldn't be the first time that hardware has been built with support for a particular high-level language in mind--most notably the Lisp Machines of the '80s. The wikipedia page for them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine) also mentions some other languages where special CPUs/computers were built: Prolog, Modula-2, Erlang and, yes, Java.

That certainly doesn't mean that any of these languages need special-purpose hardware. I think it's more a case of "if we can improve performance by building custom CPUs/machines, then why not try?"

Re: HAVING TO CLICKING?

Would you like to change your Internet service providings?

It's 3 times faster than your current providings!

re: Sounds like a fairly standard Kuang Grade Mk 11 penetration program.

Heh. I had to smile reading that, given that Mr. Bontchev has been posting responses here atm. I'm thinking, of course, of his paper "Possible Virus Attacks Against Integrity Programs and How to Prevent Them":

http://www.people.frisk-software.com/~bontchev/papers/attacks.html (search for "Kuang").

As for the concept of multi-partite, oblivious agent-style viruses... super interesting. Even though the concept is very old, there are lots of fairly new techniques that could be applied. Chaffing and Winnowing (perhaps together with an all-or-nothing transform, and/or time-dependent hashing algorithms or cryptographic time servers) looks like one way of approaching it. Secret sharing schemes (Shamir, Rabin) with cryptographic accumulators (to validate a collection of parts as constituting a whole) is another. Then there's homomorphic encryption combined with polymorphic engines, but I don't think that's practical yet, despite recent advances.

It is very interesting to consider how a swarm of agents can combine to become greater than the sum of their parts and survive as a collection even when individual components are being teased apart and eradicated. Mathematically and architecturally, at least. It's equally important to remember, though, that these "perfect" (in some senses of the word) systems are being controlled by external agents, increasingly for nefarious purposes, as opposed to latter-day virus writers who did it purely for the technical challenge. That, in my opinion, is the weakest point. Sure, it would be nice to crack the key in this case, but wouldn't it be even nicer if we could trace the swarm back to its controllers?