* Posts by Stevie

7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008

New York cop in alleged love-polyhedron email hack spree

Stevie

Hang on

Why aren't the same penalties waved in front of a certain now deceased MIT hacker being threatened?

'Leccy car biz baron Elon Musk: Thanks for the $500m, taxpayers...

Stevie

Re: Wow-2

"Let me state, just to salvage some small modicum of dignity, that what you Brits may not know..."

Yar, some of we Brits be tax-paying Americans, and yer dignity be already a-languishin' in Davey Jones's locker matey on account of ye be talkin' more like a tw*t than a pirate, so ye be.

Yar!

If ye be truly worried about yer dubloons bein' poured into a bottomless hole, ye need look no further than the tradition oil companies who be a-makin' record profits but still be demandin' enough public subsidy booty to split the bilges of a Spanish treasure galleon. Why, 'tis an open scandal what they be a-perpetratin' on the public purse.

I remain, sir, yer obedient servant so I do,

Twelve Fathom Stevie, scourge o' the Long Island Sound.

Stevie

Re: Note that difference *loan* (with interest) versus old car maker (2nd or 3rd) bailout.

"This is not the same as funding development for mainframe computers or putting a man on the moon or even developing new ways to turn corn or algae into ethanol. This is entirely and totally a toy."

Because the moon landing wasn't just a political stunt, the effort abandoned just as soon as practicable after those gosh-darn rooskies had been put in their place, and ethanol has been such a contention-free addition to the energy diet of the nation and not at all a way for farmers to suck on the public teat while at the same time not be able to accurately state how expensive their crops are to produce so the sums can be done?

Time was a digital watch was a toy for the rich.

FLABBER-JASTED: It's 'jif', NOT '.gif', says man who should know

Stevie

Re: It was always 'jif'

If it annoys Ben Norris, I'm for it. Gif gifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgifgifgifgifgfifgif

Stevie

Re: As a former CompuServe employee...

Compuserve? Didn't that have valves in it when it was relevant?

Stevie

But all these people saying that "Jif" means we have to say "Jraphics" are lunatics.

Says the commentator with a serial number for a name. Wubble, sir (or madam), wubble!

Stevie

SATA is still, definitely, "Sarter" (not "Satter").

Round here it is pronounced "SAY ta". Rules of English. First vowel says its name. (Mrs Shuttleworth, Parkgate Infants Indoctrination Centre and Internment Facility).

Stevie

Are we supposed to call JPEGs Gay-Pejs now as well?

It is my understanding that you can't ask and they aren't obliged to answer if you do.

Stevie

Re: Apologies to Izzard

Alnwick. Leicester. Bicester.

Having read the road signs I couldn't resist. 8oP

Stevie

Bah!

Apparently he invented the Jraphic Interchange Format then. I don't suppose he mentioned that he lifted the encoding algorithm from Unisys without asking? Thought not.

Daft twat.

IBM gives a cloudy outlook for COBOL

Stevie

Re: COBOL ain't going nowhere soon.

Does the job it was designed to do in spades.

Sensible, consistent punctuation rules that are easy to teach and use, so no missing or extra semicolons to f*ck up your week (goes double if you insist on using vi on a console to edit), inbuilt currency compatible data type so no having to watch over the shoulder of the new hire or the systems programmer slumming it in applications to guard against floating point use in the general ledger, and inbuilt intuitive support for overlaid structures.

No fuss, no muss. Write your OS-level stuff in C++, keep your finances straight with Cobol, and do whatever you want with Java but not near me. For everything in between, perl size fits all.

They WANT to EAT YOUR COMPUTER - welcome your ANT overlords

Stevie

Re: Solution???

Cane Toad? *Cane* Toad? Pah! Luxury! I got m' Clever Person Certificate from UEA and the place were overrun wi' Coypus brought in by Victorians frum South America t' manage banks o' Norfolk Broads.

Bloody things were size o' beavers an' med noise like human baby cryin'.

Cane Toad. Pfft! You soft southern hemisphere jessies.

Stevie

Re: Bah!

""Spoofing" that pheromone would mean synthesizing it."

Yeeeees....your point is?

Stevie

Bah!

Okay, here's an El Reg style answer to the problem: Why not spoof this "signal" the ants send out when taking killer-volts up the mandibles?

'I think you DO do evil, using smoke and mirrors to avoid tax'

Stevie

Re: * Set-up

Is "beltup" a word?

Lonely-heart Maltese techie vs Bonnie Tyler for Eurovision crown

Stevie

Good Grief!

Do people still do the Eurovision Song Contest thing? Why? Even in my day it was simply a way to get an otherwise established act to sing the worst song ever recorded in <insert language>, then line 'em up so we could all have a good laugh.

Power to all my friends, to the music that never ends! (No matter how much you beg).

Hey, Teflon Ballmer. Look, isn't it time? You know, time to quit?

Stevie

Bah!

"Second" new Coke moment? Aren't we forgetting Windows Millennium Edition?

IT bloke publishes comprehensive maps of CALL CENTRE menu HELL

Stevie

Re: Wait, hasn't anyone told him this:

Sorry, Tom, but many Computer Assisted Annoyance Machines are now rigged to spot an immediate "0" as an "unrecognized response" here in New York.

I believe National Grid's voicebot was the first I encountered to be so hardened against the customer experience, proving that British firms still have what it takes to lead the way. (NG moves gas in my neck o' the woods).

No doubt coming to a voice navigated menubot near you soon.

Stevie

Egad!

Give that man an OBE at once!

Mobile tech destroys the case for the HS2 £multi-beellion train set

Stevie

Um...

I wonder how long it will take for anyone important to figure out that if printable guns are a problem waiting to happen, a very well-camouflaged cruise missile tootling towards its target at 30 mph looking for all the world like a GPS-guided Fiat 500 (or whatever the then-popular fadmobile will look like) is a much more useful terrorist tool?

I'll bet there's an election in that for someone.

Stevie

Re: Bah!...errr

"To accuse me of not believing that there might be benefits when I'm explaining the system by which we try to decide whether there are benefits is a bit much really...."

Or an indication of how opaque you made the point of your anti-train diatribe. All I brought back from it was "trains bad, internet good".

Perhaps I was misled by your insightful "You know, this lovely train set that the politicians want to plonk down in the middle of England. I've never quite been sure why it is that politicians love such train sets: most of us get over this around the age of 14 when we discover girls."

Or perhaps I failed to find the "but the benefits don't seem to be enough to cover the costs of the project" argument convincing without any sort of quantitative supporting statements.

I apparently did not read closely enough.

Doesn't matter to me anyway. I don't live there any more.

Stevie

Bah!

Wow. Clearly the author does not believe that there might be tangible benefits to be had from a system of moving people from the non-capital area into said area in doublequick time above and beyond those of the weekday business world. I wonder what the London restaurant, theatre, museum and art gallery owners think about that?

For a good example of what happens when you run only a bottom-line evaluation on your infrastructure investment, look no further than New York as typified by the late 80s/early 90s, when bridges used every day for upstate suburb to NYC commuter traffic started falling into the Hudson, cars'n'all. The bridge toll monies were being used "to better effect" instead of paying painters and inspectors, as originally intended.

That was about the time BR got privatized and so many trains went for a high-speed walk in the fields on account of no-one was fixing or upgrading anything because it was too expensive. I saw that on TV.

For a nation of people that spends so much time berating the American Way of Life, you seem to want to stampede into it at every opportunity.

Stevie

Bah!

So what is needed is a bunch of those kiddy trains that go round in circles at about 4 mph, fitted with a secure public WiFi node?

My god, what's that STENCH belching from your iPhone?

Stevie

Egad!

This is right out of one of those John Brunner Consumer Reports from the 1960s.

He has dibs on the term "perfumolator", and I think Harry Harrison has the prior art on "Smellovision".

Android is a mess and needs sprucing up, admits chief

Stevie

Bah! And Double Bah!

Here we go again.

"People use Android in spite of the end user experience, not because of it. "

Here I see the comment of someone filtering real-world sales figures past his own wolrdview and issuing a bewildered conclusion that has never been fact-checked against the sample he is "analyzing" so deftly.

Why do I say that? I don't own an android device (Well, a Kindle but everyone knows that doesn't count). Because if you swap the word "Android" with "Windows" you have the rallying cry of the Linux community trying to explain why ten years in their predictions of a massive inroad into the Microsoft desktop market were still not coming true.

I don't really care about this, but it seems to me that the intelligent way to start trying to overhaul Andriod would be to find out the *real* reasons (plural) why people want to use it now rather than trying to clone the Apple experience so many are walking away from by choice.

Good word that, choice. Having more than one app to do something isn't bad per se, it's having multiple apps that are crap. This is what Nintendo understood to have killed the console game market for Atari - the flood of crap software - and why they defended their brand so viciously in the first days of the NES. This approach coupled with aggressive marketing and vision for what the product should be and what it should provide re-launched the console game market, certainly in America, where it had been dead for over a decade.

Which is the long way of saying that before anyone puts fingers to keyboard they should find out what people would like from their Android devices that they don't get now and form a coherent plan for delivering those things without getting so in love with the cleverness the job balloons outside of the plan boundaries. Put out something that looks like what people want and what you said you were going to do about it. Afterwards, plan to add in the cleverness but only if people want it.

Never happen.

Amazon launches own currency

Stevie

Re: Who owes the company store how much?

"does this not mean that non US customers are in effect subsidising those purchases?"

Probably, but since the costs are spread globally your share would probably be insignificant.

Also, you have to buy stuff before this "subsidy" takes effect and I get the impression that the UK is a hard sell for Amazon, at least, to those would-be UK customers who post in these pages.

Mystery Sony big-screen ereader to sport E Ink bender

Stevie

Nah!

The BIG question is how far you can stress the plastic substrate before the image-making gubbins breaks.

Are we ever going to have a reader that can, for example, be rolled into a case the size of a fat Sharpie pen like a small window blind so it can be carried in a smaller form factor than is best for viewing (this being the conundrum: smaller is better for carrying around but absolute pants for being a useful media consumption terminal)?

Will it be rigid enough to be useful when unrolled (a droopy surface will be useless for real use as modern day newspapers prove every time someone shakes one in your face to stiffen up the page he/she is reading on your commute)?

Will this technology ever be deployed in a manner that takes into account what people need from a portable reading technology, or will it be business as usual in digital tat land?

Why are scribes crying just 'cos Google copied their books? asks judge

Stevie

I say chaps...

Isn't what Google is doing the functional equivalent of gathering one's browsing history and keeping it so they can, for example, "enrich the user experience"?

After all, if authors should be glad their works have been copied without permission, shouldn't we *all* be glad our browsing histories are being stored by the same benevolent, well-meaning organization?

"Accept 3rd Party Cookies" on, lads!

Or are we all feeling a tad two-faced today?

Stevie

Re: As a publisher, Eric Flint has already addressed this issue...

And yet when REM tried an experiment in voluntary pricing they got well and truly reamed - by their fans yet.

Perhaps the issue you are alluding to (the Baen Free Library effect) is not applicable as widely as you (and the Baen stable of authors) would like? (Disclosure: I am a fan of many of those authors and have purchased many of their works, often in hardcover at premium prices partly as a gesture of support).

In any event, the significant point is that the BFL is an OPT-IN affair, and the Project Googlescrape is a "Let's not tell anyone and see how much we can get away with before we are caught" one.

The Fair Use arguments are likely to be lively, since Google isn't using the excerpts themselves (to present an argument or as part of a critical review) but passing them on to others and I'm pretty sure that's a no-no, covered in black letter law. The original Fair Use statutes said I could video a movie but only so I could watch it myself. I couldn't gift it on, as that would be distributing someone else's work.

I wonder how they will filter this for the UK market (where I understand there are no fair use laws and the Googlescrape is absolutely naughty)?

Stevie

Re: S/B class action, but authors should lose

I read your post three times but couldn't get any sense out of it other than free (at other people's expense)=good.

Because you seem to have trouble grasping the point: These authors are probably quite cognizant of how to market their works - since said works are already in libraries we can assume a certain level of expertise in the publishing world - and I'm almost certain they have a very good idea of how much good will accrue from this Googlescrape.

I imagine most of these works are the kind of reference where if one grabs a Google precis of, say, a famous quote, summary of a philosophy or fact of the physical universe, one won't need to buy the book it was scraped from.

This isn't hard to intuit from the subtext of the article. Why is it that supposedly clever people of IT have such a problem working outside their own limited set of interests? Maybe I'll Google the answer from someone's textbook on psychology and save myself the cost of the book.

You should know that "cyberspace" is now considered a clabby term to be avoided at all costs by the clixby set. Coincidentally, it's a term invented by an author who probably has a lot to say on the subject of Googlescraping.

And where on Earth did you get the ridiculous idea that roads, bridges, power grids etc materialized for free so everyone could use them? Do you not understand the concept of taxation?

PLAGUE of SEX CRAZED MONSTER GRASSHOPPERS to hit East Coast

Stevie

Nah...

I've seen two waves of these buggers already. Loud yes, motorbike loud, no.

They actually sound like a lawn sprinkler system, admittedly a big lawn sprinkler system, and that's when they all get going together.

They look more like cockroaches than grasshoppers, mostly black and about the size of a man's thumb, with iridescent wings.

The worst part is in early September when their corpses litter the sidewalks and fall from the trees. Disgusting.

Nature. Ban this filth.

US Army engineer wins Air Assault wings after repairing hi-tech leg twice

Stevie
Thumb Up

8oo

</GOBSMACKED MODE=SPEECHLESS WITH ADMIRATION>

Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only

Stevie

Bah!

So, only works where there's a web connection then?

If anyone DOES come up with an alternative suite, please make it independent of always-on interwebs. That way we can do stuff in a power cut (Long Island occasionally resembles a third world country now; what with hurricanes and super storms and blizzards and people stupidly running their A/C in summer, LIPA can't keep the juice on reliably 365x24x7. I have my own genny for such occasions but it won't make teh webs work when Cablevision, Verizon et al are dark too).

Flat mobe battery? Just light a fire

Stevie

Bah!

I was thinking "why not just use the space that thing would take up to carry spare charged batteries?" when I took another look at the pic and realized the problem with that: iPhone.

We've done it - we've gone and made LONG-LIFE BEER

Stevie

Bah!

Instead of this faffing about after some stupid long-life lager, how about a project to bring back Davenport's Top Brew Deluxe?

Stevie

Bah!

Oh good, margarine beer.

10-day stubble: Men's 'socio-sexual attributes' at their best

Stevie

Bah!

The best thing about beards is other people's reactions when you change them up a bit.

I've worn a beard since I could grow one, typically trimmed back to a number two comb length on a Wahl trimmer, but for a steampunk costume party a couple of years ago I grew the length out for a month and then carved out the chin so I could go all Nigel Green/Colour Sergeant Bourne. A red jacket and a pith helmet and I was done.

The way the younger attendees who knew me freaked out you'd have thought I'd cut off an arm or gouged out an eye.

I won the Best Costume contest, and the wife (a firm beard-lover) thought I should keep it that way "for a bit".

So I did. The shaving is a pain, as my beard hair grows to the right, requiring a sideways sweep of the razor if I need to get a really close shave.

On the downside it had been several years since I last cut off the beard. In the interrim Gillette stopped making the continuous band razor that had been such a joy to use, and for some reason the shaving world has decided if one blade is good, twenty seven are better. It took me quite a while to find a multi-blade razor that worked without carving up my face.

Plans for fully 3D-printed gun go online next week

Stevie

Re: David, you missed the point

" and in the case of cavities, you're probably looking at a two parts that are then glued together."

No, you are looking at something that is rigid under the heat load of the printing but that can be removed later by, say, chemical action. Sugar sand mixed with small amounts of chinaclay with a smidgeon of moisture would be my first choice to experiment with, because it could be dislodged using water.

We've been doing this sort of thing since the early days of sandcasting and jewelry-making. No new concepts to come up with. How do you think they make oilways and the water jacket in an engine block?

Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness

Stevie

Bah!

"largely unsuccessful - but rather crap - Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

There, fixed it for you.

37,000-machine study finds most reliable Windows PC is a Mac

Stevie

What's a BSOD?

Seriously, I haven't seen one in several years. Win XP on an old Compaq since 2001 and Win 7 (64 bit) on a Dell Inspiron 1545 since 2009.

Of course, I haven't got this "agent" on any of those machines...

Google Glass eye-cam to turn us all into right little winkers

Stevie

@Graham Marsden Re: @LinkOfHyrule - Seriously? People think this is all going to be OK?

I fear you are unclear on the concept. No-one is campaigning to prevent you using your Googletat in your own home.

It's what you do when you come outside and join the rest of the world that people are worried about. If you put your doings on Facebook you only have yourself to blame. If someone else puts them up, that is an entirely different matter.

And there should be specific and harsh criminal penalties for using this idiot technology while driving, akin to the drink driving statutes. I was almost killed yesterday crossing a carpark when a woman in an SUV first pulled across my path to park in a firefighter access zone, barely missing me and blocking me from the sidewalk I had been aiming for, then, when I walked around her vehicle she abruptly reversed it for no apparent reason, hitting me. All she had working against her was the iPhone she was holding while driving and a black glass rear windshield. Add Googletat to this scenario and it gets super-dangerous for everyone not in the car.

There's no self-governor on stupid.

Stevie

Hmm...

Is there a law against shining a bright light at the face of a Glasstwat to prevent his or her (but I guarantee it will almost always be a him) filming me?

Stupidest. Idea. Ever.

Star Trek: The original computer game

Stevie

Hmm

I played this at UEA on a 1903 running GEORGE-3 using one of three Tectronix VDUs (the computer centre was mainly Teletypes in those days).

In that environment the Job Description steering lines had been set up so that when you hit BREAK IN to drop out of the game the wretched program would intercept the command and declare ANTIMATTER PODS EXPLODE DUE TO BREAK IN - CONDITION PURPLE, locking you in for the duration. (SWON BITS BREA as I recall, but it has been 36 years).

A plan formed.

Everyone had a limited budget for online computer use, but should the mainframe be taken down while you were "working" your budget for the session would not be tallied, presumably because you had lost the work you were doing.

So.

Start game late at night after work finished, kill all enemies, press BREAK IN and let game idle itself into the maintenance window.

Worked like a charm.

Not cool, Adobe: Give the Ninite guys a job, not the middle finger

Stevie

Flash as it was

I can't answer the question "Why deal with Adobe" but I *can* say with much justification that the design interface for the pre-Adobe Macromedia Flash product (4?) has the most intuitive drawing interface I've encountered before or since.

The other features are a study in ease-of-uptake too.

I needed a quick and simple animation to illustrate a stupid point. During a boring meeting it dawned on me I could maybe use Flash. I hadn't used it in about a decade or so, but it took me only about 45 minutes to relearn how to do motion tweening, draw the stage and actors and produce the animation, without a single use of the help pages. The process was not only painless, it was fun, except for having to use my lappy's trackpad.

My kid started drawing Anime pictures using Flash at a very early age. It just works well with humans.

The Macromedia interface designers Got It Right. Other drawing programs I've tried (and there have been many) have never been able to produce the same ease-of-use and intuitive drawing experience.

'Chinese' attack sucks secrets from US defence contractor

Stevie

Bah!

Well, incompetent and corrupt maybe, but the thing about the secretary's PC made me wonder if this wasn't "just" another aspect of the self-jamming bomber radar fiasco from the 1980s, which was engineered purely from the rather extreme rules on compartmentalization that prevent people from different parts of a large project talking to each other, even the military liaisons assigned to the civilian teams.

Everyone has worked on a project in which different teams did not communicate properly. Now imagine that project if the different teams were prevented form any contact whatsoever other than the original design spec. Now add in modular scope creep and rethinks and stir until there's a loud *snap!* and the smell of frying insulation.

Facebook: Yeah, we'll ban chainsaw beheading vids - when journos call us

Stevie

Hey!

Maybe if there was a concerted effort in the public memespace to get the nickname "Snuffbook" into everyday use....

Weary quid-a-day nosh hack fears colonal mass ejection

Stevie

Bah!

Wow, it's only Thursday and we are treated to an article on the lamentable state of Mr Haines' bowels when fed a diet of egg au egg (duh!).

Slow news week?

I can't wait for the follow up: "How I Lived For A Week On Senokot Powder And Bran".

Lehman Brothers sues Intel over a billion dollar deal

Stevie

Bah!

Presumably as soon as this cash is returned the former executives will pay themselves a bonus from the fund.