Lies, damned lies and statistics.
Everyone knows 68.4% of stastistics are made up on the spot.
1902 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2007
...the entire earth would have virtually limitless electricty from the solar panels that have their efficiency boosted about every 6 months
...we'd all be going round in flying cars charged by solar with batteries that have a power/size equivilancy of petrol
...also I'd have file cabinets full of university diplomas, along with a hareem of Russian wives, and a 5 foot penis...
No, you misunderstood what I meant.
There are many 'news' websites that merely copy other sources virtually word-for-word, just so they can fool people into viewing their site (rather than the originating source) which they've laden choc-a-bloc full of revenue adverts, so much so that the actual article text is shoehorned into a small strip in the very middle of the page, and often they split the (short) article into 2 or more pages just to get more pageviews.
I'm not likening The Reg to verbose article stealing but I am likening to how the main article text is getting squeezed in such a manner by adding the related articles to the immediate left of the text.
Too much clutter.
IMHO the layout is gradually going the way of many sites that 'steal' stories from elsewhere just so they can get advert revenue from squeezing in the stories into a site over-laden with adverts :(
What am I on about? The double-wide SPOTLIGHT links on the right, when it used to be just 1 link wide, and the newly added RELATED STORIES links on the immediate left of the article text.
Now it feels like the actual stories are being shoehorned into a bunch of links and adverts, I already run a custom Greasemonkey script to remove things on this site which have zero interest to me, I guess I'll have to further revise it to remove a bunch more crap that gets in the way of reading the actual articles.
Yes the new layout is quite "eww" IMHO, I started a thread on one of the sub-forums, an El Reg bod has replied:
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/07/01/Haku_Eww_What_have_you_done_to_the_layout/
On the subject of video and framerates I've been ripping my Red Dwarf DVDs to mkv but as the first seasons were interlaced it means having to deinterlace it or else it won't look very good on a PC.
Simple deinterlacers will take the interlaced 25fps footage and turn it into progressive 25fps by blending the two fields together (worst way) or discarding one field and scaling the remaining field (better but loses resolution), both of which produce 'ok' looking footage but aren't a patch on the original interlaced footage played on a CRT.
However if you know where to look and how to do some simple AviSynth scripting you can get some seriously good quality deinterlacing happening. Check out this 14mb 1.5minute Red Dwarf clip, 720x540 running at 50fps:
The Hobbit.
When it was announced that the film was to be shot and shown at 48fps there was a practical mass outcry from people (the vast majority who had never seen anything above 24fps on a cinema sized screen) saying it was going to have a "soap opera effect" due to the doubling of the framerate.
I have to admit I was a little worried that the higher framerate would have a detrimental effect to the film but I was actually pleasantly surprised and thoroughly enjoyed the film at the higher framerate on the large screen.
Think about it, when you're watching a 24fps film on a humungus screen then your brain has to fill in more 'gaps' when there's motion than it does when you're watching a 24fps film on a small (sub 30") screen, so doubling the framerate on a humungus screen makes you feel more immersed because your brain doesn't have to fill in so much when there's motion.
"The Cloud providers can't keep adding and expanding their storage indefinitely, it's up to people using it to be sensible."
Oh I don't know, BackBlaze, the online backup service which costs $5/month for unlimited storage seems to be doing pretty well, they're constantly increasing their storage through their custom designed pods, each of which contains up to 180TB through an array of 45 harddrives:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/
Last night's show there was a piece about streaming music, they effectively said CDs were dead and even downloads were going to die soon too because streaming music from the internet will replace all other sources of music.
I always take what they say with a pinch of salt or two, but sometimes even I'm surprised at the unmitigated shite spewed from the mouths of those presenters.
I've seen some posts on slashdot from people claiming to be games developers and they're really pissed that they're not getting a cut of the sale of 2nd hand games, they somehow think they're more special than any other industry that generates products for the general public, who can then sell on those products if they feel they no longer want them (like cars etc.) without having to pay the original manufacturer a cut of that sale.
Given the need for being onllne and the restriction on reselling your old games I'd say they're listening more to the developers who have been bitching like little girls over the 2nd hand games stores, than they have to the people who are actually buying the games at full price in the first place.
If swarms of people turned up looking like him, or he and everyone else wears the exact same mask and style of clothes, the police would have a tough time keeping track of who's who hopefully giving him the chance to escape and save millions more of taxpayers money keeping an eye on the place.
£3m for a year of 24/7 police watch, fucking ludicrus...
Shown on Shark Tank (the US equiv. of Dragon's Den) a year ago, is in pre-order stage: http://www.unikey.com/
Indeedy, they get free advertising from the walkthroughs being put online and viewable by potentially millions without them having to pay a single penny to anyone for hosting/bandwidth/taking the time to do the walkthroughs, but now they want to be paid for those free adverts for their products...
Does anyone else feel like they're Gulliver in Lilliput when using them? I'm only 6'2" and often have to bend right down to be able to see the screen because they appear to be designed for people who are four foot nothing, most cinemas appear to be designed for unusually short people too, where "legroom" is a taboo word (except The Screening Rooms in Cheltenham - highly highly reccomended!)
This laptop has those, a Vostro 1510 with a strip of capacitive touch sensitive media buttons above the keyboard that only light up when you press them - yes that's right, they only light up when your finger is covering the area that lights up!
And in low light conditions the brightness of the screen makes it difficult to see the faint outlines of the flat black non-tactile buttons, so for example instead of increasing the volume you could accidentally eject the DVD...
I used to wear glasses from the age of 5 but in my late 20s I got to the point where I was so fed up of having to deal with those things on a daily basis along looking through two windows at the world which didn't help with peripheral vision I gave up wearing them.
I don't know if I would handle wearing Google Glass after the novelty wears off, I don't even wear sunglasses, but ironically I do own 7 different sets of LCD video glasses... :)
I used to use a Lego 12v transformer to split water into hydrogen & oxygen when I was a kid, at home, collecting the hydrogen in a test tube and lighting it for the 'pop'. Even taking a corked test tube filled with the hydrogen into school once or twice, god knows what the reaction from teachers nowadays would be if a kid did that.
They started noticing 'modern' browsers wouldn't work on the site back in 2006, yet haven't taken steps to resolve this. Well they technically they have, they've been telling everyone to use older browsers...
http://web.archive.org/web/20060427043739/http://www.dwp.gov.uk/eservice/need.asp
This is what pisses me off about companies and thier data retention in relation to customer records and how they'll happily sell your info to other companies - you get situations like this where a company that you have never directly interacted with suddenly emails you out of the blue saying they got hacked and their customer records were copied and your info is in those records.
I am not a product, I am a human being FFS.
I received an email from LivingSocial about the screwup yet I've never had direct dealings with them.
In the last line of the email it says "You are receiving this email because you have an existing relationship with http://www.livingsocial.com/", yet I've never heard of them before or visited their website or signed up to them.
Under-the-radar spamming?
With so many people coming to depend on Google as it slowly seeps out of the digital world and right into the physical world (Android phones/tablets, Google Glass and whatever else they'll make next), will we eventually (centuries down the line) have a global vote to change our little blue marble's name to Planet Google or wil they just announce it one day...