Posts by Nick Ryan

Re: UHD Blu-ray is already sunk

Add to that the fact that still the vast majority of consumers want to put a "film" into a "player" and have it automatically load, present a menu and then off they go into the menu.

I can't answer for the "vast majority" just a straw poll of everyone I know is that we don't give a flying rat's arse about a menu, we particularly don't care or want to have be forced to endure an indeterminate amount of unskippable adverts for films we are either not interested in or already have and we definitely don't want to have to endure minutes of unskippable lies (or "copyright is theft" shorts and walls of text - copyright violation is copyright violation it is not, and never has been "theft"). We just want to watch the bloody film. Now. Right now. In addition we definitely don't want to have to wait for five minutes (feels like it) for a media player to piss around with DRM (Java VM) and try to synchronise it's arse with the disc so it can start to show the above crap we're not interested before we start to watch the film that we are interested in. Sometimes I swear it feels like it takes 15 minutes from sticking a disc in a BD player and the film starts.

On the other hand a ripped copy of a film will start pretty much instantly and that's what we, as consumers, actually want. While there may always be those that want the tactile feel of disc cases, to admire the artwork on the disc case and whatever is in them but I strongly suspect that the majority really just don't care. They may occasionaly be interested as to who the actors are playing particular roles, the plot synopsis or even the filming locations but any good media centre will have this information automatically and there's always a quick manual search of the Internet (or just IMDB).

Re: Shift to paper?

I haven't spoken to many professional authors (OK, 2) but they'd firstly much rather that what they write is read, and secondly that if somebody owns at least one copy of it they don't really care beyond that. The mentality of authors doesn't always equate with money, or getting much of it in, which possibly explains why most authors really don't have a lot.

Re: Do vat grown brains dream?

I wasn't sure how to feel about this, and I read the article unlike some here and understand the difference between 5 week fetal and 5 week (or old) baby. It is getting a bit creepy. However a few things to remember that appear to be missed:

This proto-brain was not grown from a human egg and sperm. It was grown from a single adult donor's cells. Consider it this way - if an adult agreed to donate some of their functioning brain cells for medical research would we consider this a problem? While different this is not so far removed from that.

Re: "Despite these concerns...

Because Gartmer have always been the paragon of reliable and unbiased information...

Sarcasm or not, that's half true. You pays your money (to Gartner), you gets your reliable information.

As for unbiased... hmm.

Some comments here slag off climate research because it does not achieve a precision that is (and will continue to be) simply beyond the capabilities of scientific research.

Yep, largely because the entire biosphere is extremely complicated with lots of interacting cycles, altering one may not be serious because others may compensate, others may be created (even small, previously unoticed cycles) or the effect may or not be predictable.

The climate modellers can only genuinely prove their models after the event and even then there would be questions as to whether or not they got the correct answer through coincidence or through accurate modelling. It's made worse because if they are predicting something unpleasant that we'd rather didn't happen it's a bit late at that point.

Dumping pollutants into the environment is demonstrably and quantifiably bad in a local area. Somehow there are those who find it in themselves to deny even this. Past the local area it becomes harder and harder to accurately predict and even measure impact because many aspects are cumulative with time based modifiers. Weather forecasting is hard enough (and is largely built from previous recorded experience of weather patterns), biosphere forecasting is next to impossible except for broad generalisations.

Re: Minions

Well it certainly wasn't for him - all ego and no (nice) personality (IMHO).

"Everything is about energy," said the former associate of Mr Blobby.

On the other hand, this is one amazing quote and attribution assasination in one. Can a QOTW come from a staff writer?

Re: Its the mothers fault mostly...

While boys and girls are biologically different and it's been proven that there are differences between male and female brains and how these changes take effect at different points in our lives (puberty, pregnancy / parenthood, etc) these differences are broad generalisations such as "spatial awareness" or "empathy / social skills" and these general traits are usually found to be compensatable through learning.

Such core general traits can usually be attributed to "hunting" compared to "nurturing" activities that are usually segregated in most human societies to males hunting and females nuturing. Some of this just logic as a heavily pregnant female or one tending to a baby just isn't going to be as good at hunting compared to another individual that isn't so encumbered but it's also comes from observation of remote and largely untouched human tribes who still operate this way of segregating male and female duties.

Social learning happens at a very early age and a key aspect of social learning is learning how to interact and how to "fit in" with peers. For example at this age if a lot of girls are pushing prams and playing with dolls then most young girls will do so too because they observe what is expected of them so they can do the same and therefore fit in with them. This doesn't mean that young boys at this age won't be found playing with dolls and pushing prams (I know a few that just love it) but when faced with their peers who don't do this these boys will usually change to fit in.

Re: UK problem

Absolutely. There's no way, whatsoever, that some form of convenient, already extremely well researched and implemented technology could help. Nope, definitely, absolutely not something like canals that could be used to transport water from one part of the country to another while also providing a phenomenally cheap, if slower than road truck, way to transport heavy goods (cheap on fuel). It'll never work.

It's not as if there's another country in the world that's putting this kind of thing in place. Oh, except China.

</sarcasm>

Re: how that could be reliably faked

While such a trick may affect the weight and therefore probability of certain balls being "picked", it's unlikely to also affect the order in which they were picked unless you managed quite a distinction in the weights and therefore quite a high weight at one end of the scale - which ought to be obvious.

Re: Does it work on AMD-compatible motherboards?

The MSI 990FXA board supports NVMe (not sure if there are additional PCIe v3 x4 slots for it though). It's rumoured that much more widespread NVMe support for AMD will arrive with new chipsets in Q4 2015.

Given the price of the buggers I'm happy to wait for 6 months anyway.

Re: Bloody tools

Isn't this video processing? That's not something you'd want to do in anything other than as efficient a way as possible, particularly on a mobile device.

I'm shuddering right now at the thought of a video decoder written in C# with regular pauses in playback when the garbage collector kicks in. Yes, I know that smart coding and a sensible approach from the start can mitigate this but then this is another complication - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973837.aspx.

Re: CAN Bus

CAN Bus is a great implementation given the age of the standard and the fact that it has to operate in an electrically horrible environment with as cheap as possible (e.g. as few a wires as possible and as little heavy duty shielding as possible - and often cheap wire as well). However as noted above, by other posters, it's not designed for security as it's just a relatively low level transport mechanism.

To implement security in a CAN bus network you don't connect anything remotely insecure to the CAN bus network; it's that simple and is a simple method of implementing security. Unfortunately in this instance some numpty brain dead fool decided that a good feature would be "remote start", "remote control of lights" or similar utility functions which while not bad as such, their implementation would have to be extremely well thought out. In this case it's very clear that the implementation wasn't thought out at all and a relatively direct connection between the public Internet and an internal CAN bus device was established, most likely for ease of development and cheapness of implementation. What should have happened is that the public Internet device was connected solely to the CAN bus through a dedicated communication route, i.e. communicating with a CAN IO module that simply fired specific messages across the CAN network in response to the IO signals. The worst that could happen in this case is that the specific remotely enabled functions could be triggered and no more however it's plain that the Internet connected device is directly connected to the CAN bus network and can therefore send whatever CAN network messages it wants. Such as an implementation is flexible (in case UConnect want to add interaction with other systems), cheap to develop, implement and support but utterly, fucking stupid.

(groan).

In general anything that "requires" Sharepoint is bad, very bad. If Microsoft are having to use this kind of tactic to force enterprises to use Sharepoint then this indicates a serious problem.

Because Commodore lost the plot. :(

While it appeared that they languished on their success they were developing some remarkable new systems to replace it with - I had the technical details of some parts and they really were very clever, efficient and way ahead of their time. Unfortunately they struggled with the hardware development including one point where, according to hearsay (I lost my contacts within Amiga HW dev at this time) they had to reverse engineer their own chipsets as they'd "lost" the designs; I still don't understand this or know the truth behind it. One of the more interesting developments that they were apparently attempting was hardware windowing support where each window could have it's own colour palette, colour depth and (possibly, was never sure on this) even DPI resolution. This was an evolutionary change from the multiple screen system where each screen could have its own resolution and could be split vertically (horizontal bands of differing display modes), simultaneously splitting the screens horizontally as well and effectively creating hardware windows would have tasked the chip designers somewhat but the efficiency and performance could have been amazing had they pulled it off.

As a result of Commodore's failure to capitalise on their success they let the (initially) technically inferior PCs overtake them in the market and with the opening up of the PC market by OEMs and the subsequent reduction in costs Amiga's fate was effectively sealed.

Re: Has anybody ever been convicted of format shifting?

Unfortuantely and largely started by the previous bunch of lizards (who to a large degree were either lawyers or closely linked to them) a huge number of what were previously civil offences were changed to become criminal offences. Great for lawyers and marketing-statistician-liars, not so great for everybody else including the police who then got lumbered with a lot of extra, usually petty (jn the schems of things) and quite often unenforceable offences to deal with.

Re: so...

There's quote a lot of unanswered physics questions that aren't particularly answered and are likely to have some significant bearing on the "missing matter" and "missing energy" problems.

For example C is assumed to be a constant therefore the obvious questions are such as why should it be a constant, why should it have the value it has and how to definitively explain why this is a set velocity regardless of the emitter's velocity and if there is such a set velocity, should there not also be a set lack of velocity, e.g. absolute zero velocity. While absolute zero may never be achievable by standard matter in the same way we can't accellerate an atom to C (just very close) but some particles / waves may achieve it in the same manner that EM manages to propogate at C.

Then there's the rather interesting question as to what gravity exactly is and how it's effect is propogated. Similar questions apply to the other fundamental forces which while they've been isolated and identified their mechanisms, or how and why they work, are rather less so.

But then I'm not a physicist... :)

Re: Dear MS, Please put your own house in order

I can't remember where I found it (so don't blame be), but drop these in a batch file - it works for me:

reg delete HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Silverlight /f

reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\D7314F9862C648A4DB8BE2A5B47BE100 /f

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Installer\Products\D7314F9862C648A4DB8BE2A5B47BE100 /f

reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib\{283C8576-0726-4DBC-9609-3F855162009A} /f

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\install.exe /f

reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl /f

reg delete HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl.5.1 /f

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{89F4137D-6C26-4A84-BDB8-2E5A4BB71E00} /f

rmdir /s /q "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Silverlight"

rmdir /s /q "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Silverlight"

Normal disclaimers apply: i.e. use at your own risk, do not apply to first born children, it's not my fault if your system goes up in smoke and triggers the apocalypse, yada yada yada.

You may have to reformat the lines depending on El Reg, and your browser. If you can't do this you probably shouldn't be running them in the first place. I think after this you just need to tell Windows Update exactly where to go with the Silverlight "essential" install and that's it. If some cretinous app installs Silverlight on you, you can re-run these commands (and break the app, no doubt).

Re: Sorry...

Pah! I just try to select the most appropriate tool given the requirements. Once I've managed to disentangle the tool from the requirements of course. Far too many folk out there are too stupid to know the difference and state their solutions in the same breath as their requirements.

If the solution happens to be running Windows because it's easier for them to manage and easier to transition them to that's quite possibly the "correct" tool for the job even if there are slightly better alternatives. Similarly if Linux (or any another OS or platform) can do the job then I'll consider it in the same light as Windows and weigh up the costs vs the benefits and disadvantages - and generally all platforms will have some disadvantages for any given scheme. So whether the decision is to run a file server service on a NAS box (often Linux derived), deploy MS-SQL server because it's what clients and partners are expecting (even if integrating it into a Linux type environment is annoying), then this is what happens - there is no "one size fits all" solution and there is no need to be either. Only muppets attempt to deploy one solution or technology regardless of best fit.

And if a pen and paper is a customer's optimal business process platform... then that's what should be considered.

Re: I applaud this and hope it is clean. However we could have written this in Perl in 1 line.

Maybe you need more imagination? :) The lunatics at The International Obfuscated C Code Contest make this an artform. And a competion.

Re: I'm gonna get flamed for this...

Regarding tweeking the thinkpad ... no. Not unless they sorted out that FN+CTRL mess.

Having the stupid FN key in place of where on every other damn keyboard the CTRL key was the biggest single problem common to the old Lenovo keyboards. It made switching from one keyboard / system to another stupidly awkward because while you could get used to the dumb positioning of the FN key in place of the CTRL key, as soon as you switched to a normal keyboard layout you had to get used to it all over again. I frequently had to switch from thinkpad to normal system so this was a common problem. However as noted elsewhere, at least these could be swapped in the BIOS.

The other major dumb-ass "innovation" was the navigation "back" and "forward" keys sited in such a spot where it was all too easy to mis-press them or to accidentally press them in place of a normal navigation key such as cursor or Page Up / Page Down. I never found a software fix for these cursed keys (the Lenovo remapping tool refused to remap these) so I just popped the keys out and left a hole in the keyboard.

At least there was an option where the function keys weren't mapped to "special" functions by default and to use the function key as a function key you had to press FN and the function key. Oops.. sent the system into hibernate. Again. All I wanted to do was refresh the page...

Maybe there's some money to be made from installing ****ing useless and pointless toolbars that do nothing other than slow down the browser and make it crash more often?

Other than that... yeah. Almost as relevant as AOL.

Re: Guessing games

Is this regarding the MSA business for Win 10 or just Microsoft licensing in general?

Re: A lack

If the governments want a better skilled population, do you think it would be a good idea if they invested in a better skilled population?

Don't be silly. Education should be democratised so any school leaving fuckwit can, and should be encouraged, almost forced, to go to University. It doesn't have anything to do with them being academically capable of it, just as long as the "pass" grades have been manipulated enough that a failing academic system can be statistically proven(*) to be producing better, or at the very least more qualified, students. These bright stars of the future can then join universities up and down the country dragging the level of learning down to such a level that the entire first year of many courses is trying to both teach elementary level aspects of the course that should have been taught at GCSE level and re-programming students to think for themselves and not to just be exam-passing automatons who can't think outside of the narrow range of questions that they'll be guaranteed to be in a paper. Naturally this level of "enhanced" university tuition is expensive and therefore the university grants should be cut, universities allowed to charge "up to" a trivial level to make up for the greater level of cuts they've suffered and the process is complete.

But this is all for the greater good, university level education should be available for everyone, not just the academically gifted. (While the premise that university level education should be available for everyone that is academically gifted and not just those with the cash to fund their education is a good one, somewhere along the line the entire process has gone horribly, horribly, wrong).

/rant :)

(*) http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Lie-Statistics-Penguin-Business/dp/0140136290

Re: The real issue is how cheap you can make it

The difference may be trivial but I thought that the wavelength had an effect on the data transferable on fibre therefore four different wavelengths down one fibre would support slightly different throughputs?

Re: If only IBM had included Rexx at the start

Very capable, very extendable and pretty damn simple to use. Pretty simple to expose Rexx interfaces as well in your applications which allows some very clever automation between applications.

These days though it probably feels like it has a few deficiencies compared to other scripting systems.

Re: Inspections dont work in the UK

Some of us in the UK realized that a while ago and employ a proper structural engineer, the cost is not much more than a bog standard 'survey'

Exactly. I found local surveyors that would deal directly and produce a "limited" guarantee report starting around £800. The "limited" side came from them stating that they would not damage the property while performing the checks but would check everything they could otherwise and clearly state any concerns that they might have if they couldn't check things but had concerns.

Sending somebody into a house you don't own to knock holes in it isn't the most welcome approach. But a good survey will pick up things that while not serious are useful to know anyway, such as misfitting or broken back boxes for electrical sockets. Not a big deal, I could replace those myself with little effort but the kind of thing that's useful to know in advance before you let little children loose.

Re: Will it be like my phone?

And have several apps running in the background for no apparent reason or utility (to me).

No, it'll be like previous versions of windows where there will be lots of apps running in the background for no apparent reason or utility (to you).

Re: simple solution

Close, but in my opinion the problem is more likely that Samsung's software is so utterly appalling that it's unmaintainable in any way, shape or form. This isn't just Samsung's take on standard apps (uninstallable), but their drivers and in particular the worst culprit is Kies. There is not a single redeeming component or feature in Kies, the entire experience is painful at best and just flawed or broken as a baseline.

Samsung are / were in an ideal position to supply real quality software for their phones, genuinely improving the stock android experience (but optionally), adding value with their own applications. However instead we have applications that require inexplicable permissions, are uninstallable or unstoppable and other general crud supplied as "system components" where they plainly aren't.

Re: Amazing!

...and crocodiles. and sharks. and coelacanths. However these could be explained away as swimming in water to which some great flood would likely not have made the worst difference.

Re: They can have my 2003 SBS.....

...because the likelihood of being able to successfully upgrade from 2003 SBS to anything else is so close to zero as to be a mere rounding error in infinity.

Luckily I no longer have any involvement in any of the train wrecks that still use 2003 SBS. Don't get me wrong, it was a fantastic value product and while it had some quite lunatic restrictions was still rather well featured. As long as you don't want to upgrade it. Ever.

Re: If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear.

If you truly have nothing to hide, why are you posting as an Anonymous Coward or are you just trolling?

Otherwise, you sir are the problem. Learn history. It all starts with an erosion of civil liberties, government tracking all manner of information about the people and before you know it what starts out innocently becomes a fascist state determined to, oooh, let me think... how about: invade Europe and factory-murder anybody who isn't of the master race, has an inconvenient ethnic background or to their minds not of the correct sexuality.

As for our "friends in Syria" - you're much more likely to be killed in a motor vehicle accident.

Re: So he didn't really expect massive trolling?

New or not, he was utterly, totally delusional and any even vaguely sane person would have accurately predicted that this would happen. Not just him either as the investors must have been braindead when spunking up that amount of cash for this as well.

Even when Internet users are not especially anonymous, when hidden behind the bravado enhancing Internet (i.e. not face to face with somebody else), they will troll, abuse and generally grief others solely because they can. It's a continuation of talking about somebody when they're not there.

Re: Plenty, though, were disillusioned with politics

A friend has a good retort for the "if you didn't vote then you don't have a right to complain" type of comment: "I'd rather vote for somebody that I want in than the one that I least don't want in".

Re: Balance

I always understood that if T. Rex ran it would have leant forward and raised it's tail, however I've also read that they may have largely been scavengers or opportunists rather than particularly active hunters. No reason why they wouldn't have been both though.

A more normal posture would likely to have been much more upright, possibly with tail down and legs a bit forward (similar to a kangaroo in some ways) allowing it to bend down and eat things at it's feet.