Posts by Nick Ryan

Render farms have been the way to do things for a long while when it comes to video. They were comparitively easy to setup but there were never good reasons to have them cloud based due to the size of the master assets and the time taken to transfer these followed by the subsequent download time. And not forgetting that when renders became quick, they became more common as it was easier to tweak and test.

On the other hand, non-video work is largely exclusively local as this still lends itself to very fast access.

Re: A Better Tomorrow

Not forgetting BlackLivesMatter terrorists. Grrrrrr

Re: Well...

Pretty much I'd guess, although previous experience with fibers it was something that an application largely managed rather than the operating system. This reads like it is moving it towards more of a standard OS feature where the OS can manage them instead. Although as it is something that existed previously, this is an upgrade to existing functionality rather than brand new.

Re: Backups

That would have been a great plan, however with this amazingly designed array the serial numbers were only visible once the drive had been removed.

Re: Failure to compete

Yep. For the last couple of decades or longer it has been obvious to anyone with half a brain the sending all the production for high technology devices to anywhere, China in this case, will mean that the locals will gain knowledge and experience of this. Call this corporate espionage or a necessity to be able to even vaguely sensibly support the production, it happens - and there's no reason that it can't be both. This has been common knowledge but for such a long time that it's still amazing that there's suprise expressed about it.

Also, guess what? The average Chinese person is just as smart as the average Westerner. They aren't knuckle dragging rice paddy botherers as they are often portrayed in Western media. Their scientists and engineers are just as bright as the West's. In some ways, given the dumbing down of education in some countries, they are likely to be more highty educated. What they may lack is decades of experience, however that comes with time. So when Chinese, or other non-Western, based organisations start patenting what will be considered vital technology and using the West's proctionism against itself, don't be surprised.

As for Chinese organisations answering to their government? No real difference to other countries, but when we see others doing this it's considered bad and undemocratic.

It's quite easy to remove unwanted applications from Android phones without having to resort to root access, even the Google ones like Play Music - but especially all the Samsung crud. Tends to improve phone performance and with fewer applications running, a smaller security footprint to worry about too.

Here's a couple of the many guides on how to do this: https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/ or https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/ (I'm not affiliated in any way with this site, it's just pretty useful at times)

Re: Screenshot

Yep. I can't remember how many sprites were possible, but it was a lot compared to the standard maximum of 8 on the Commodore 64 (I think it was 8 anyway). Many very clever things were done involving just these 8, although from memory depending on the display mode of the sprites the number available was halved...

Re: Harry Potter, but with science, instead of magic!

Purely from observation and all that, but I suspect that most successful lizards breathe.

Re: lie detector

What OS is it? Well thats's simple! It's Windows 2019, or Windows 365.

Re: Non AMD compatible

Luckily share prices are artificial valuations that don't necessarily reflect an organisation's performance, more the external artificial market of trying to get the best returns from them: short term, long term or just stock manipulation. Where the share price can cause problems is if the price drops too low and predatory purchases of shares can be made leading to take overs or damaging external board influence.

Sometimes, yes, other times it's the virus hijacking and disrupting too many cells that causes problems.

For example, and a very crude approximation, if the virus infects 20% of your lung cells then your capacity to breathe is down by 20%. Losing lung capacity is normally considered quite a bad thing and from personal experience a few months ago wasn't fun at all.

It's things like this that made it so dangerous for frontline care staff in regimes that didn't give a shit about PPE. Through being heavily exposed to it a front line carer could start with such a high initial infection of the virus that there was barely time for their body's immune response and the natural repairing of damaged cells to allow for normal biological function while their body fought it off. Add in being overworked and stressed as well and it was often a recipe for (fatal) disaster.

Re: My computer, my rules.

DCMA has gotten far too big for its britches.

It's also worth remembering that if, like most of the people on this planet, you are not USAin, the laws of the USA do not apply to you.

It's not a bank, it's a predatory venture capital vehicle out for the largest, shortest term returns possible.

I think given things and the timing, their words were acceptable. Less traumatic for passing readers and until an official report comes out, anything is considered conjecture.

Re: PHP

I quite like PHP. However it also makes me want to pull my teeth out and tear my hair out at times... and that's before I come across some amateur developer's code and smash my head into the table as well. It's not helped by the legacy design decisions and how hard it is to move on from them, but then Microsoft have the same with their Operating Systems so it's not an unknown problem in this industry. Like anything, it's a tool, an imperfect one, but useful in the right circumstances.

On the other hand, I feel the same way about all other languages at various different times. For example, every time I read about a new language feature in C-hash I wonder why it has to be implemented using a non-alphabetic spaghetti of illogical obfuscations. At some point they are going to run out of weird combinations of non-alphabetic characters for edge case functionalities. Maybe they are taking The International Obfuscated C Code Contest too much as a challenge that they feel they could win at the language design level.

Re: So...

While it's not possible to completely remove many shovelware garbage apps without root access, it is quite easy to remove them from a user's profile so they no longer run at all. This can make a staggering difference to the performance and feel of a phone, particularly the mid-range and budget devices.

Here's a couple of the many guides on how to do this: https://www.xda-developers.com/uninstall-carrier-oem-bloatware-without-root-access/ or https://www.xda-developers.com/disable-system-app-bloatware-android/ (I'm not affiliated in any way with this site, it's just pretty useful at times)

Re: DrupLOL

Oh yes, Drupal definitely has some very strange implementation methods, some of which really are strange and unhelpful and use very non-standard features of PHP. As an exercise it's very useful and quite interesting to follow the code from request through to page delivery - it's a bit tortuous but at least it's possible to do this.

On the other hand, WordPress is also host to a horror nightmare set of curious implentation methods, is also inefficient as hell and as for security... Well, largely forgotten about because so many instances of it are "fit and forget" rather than actively maintained and updated. Keeping to the core of WordPress makes life a lot easier, but trying to find a decent module that encompasses of all requirements rather than just 2/3 of them, that is well written and still supported... that's challenging.

Most other CMSs also suffer too, for example Umbraco which has one of the worst designed back end management systems I've come across and always fails at times and has an accessibility score in the high negatives and documentation that is always very out of date and usually just missing. As for some of the popular (i.e. more commonly used) modules, often they are incredibly badly written too.

Basically, they all suck in their own different ways - and have rabid followers who will listen to no criticism of them.

Yep, lack of support is really hard.

For many years as a kid I was only able make vowel sounds. Which is weird but also demonstrates that there is a reason why vowels and consonants are separated. What's particularly weird is that apparently most other people had it the other way, only being able to make consonant sounds. I could read as well as a child many years older, but I couldn't say the words. My teacher only progressed me from the first reading books because I was getting more and more frustrated, i.e. bored with them. One day, suddenly I found myself able to speak (I don't remember this specifically) and I rapidly moved up the various levels of books until I was then frustrated because the teachers wouldn't let me go past the "smart" kids in the class reading ranks even though I could read every single book in the set. A year or two later at the age of 9 I was assessed and found to have the reading capability of a 16 year old, and they didn't assess further than that.

Re: laugh or cry

Yep, typical weasel words. All too common right now. I wonder when "just lie and when caught, lie again" will become an acceptable method of business? These things are bound to trickle down from government eventually.

Re: For goodness sake ...

But then software development companies would have to actually test their software properly, train and manage their developers - particularly training as many lack the most basic of comprehension of elementary security, database and accessibility topics.

They would also have to change the delivery principles of "we are providing software and it may or may not work at all or do what you want or may be heavily flawed but this doesn't matter, just give us some more money to upgrade to the next bug ridden version".

Re: Early optical rodents

That's the ones. I was trying to find a picture of them but couldn't remember who made them.

Re: Worse than that bloody virus

This is because party politics are the opposite of democracy. Rather than vote for what his principles are, vote for what is best for his constituents, he has to vote following the party line and nothing else is acceptable.

Re: Idiots

Unfortunately it's just brute forcing an algorithm to appear to be doing some form of AI. The more images there are the more reliable this algorithm is, hence the need for millions of images.