* Posts by Tom 7

8318 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009

Euro broadcast industry still in a fug over that 4K-ing UHD telly

Tom 7

Uncanny Valley

TV pictures are good enough. Anything that requires greater resolution needs to be watched on a PC with zoom/ff/rewind etc.

I'm not sure what advantage is to be gained from watching cartoons in 4K but if you are spending your time noticing the address on the letter on the mantelpiece then its time we spend 1/10th of what is spent on TV research on script writing and country based canned laughter timing.

But, when we see what people are happy to watch on phones and tablets, and more importantly what they are watching, I'd say that for 90% of viewers TV's are 'Job Done'.

Linux clockpocalypse in 2038 is looming and there's no 'serious plan'

Tom 7

Re: Nah...

I do worry that there may come a time where AI loads a piece of old code and it hides due to agoraphobia.

Tom 7

I dont think ther will be many 32bit linux OSes still running then

I'd put good money on there being a lot of Cobol banking stuff which has some 32bit time stamps in it.

It might even pay enough to be worth coming back from the afterlife to fix it!

BLOOD STAR of the NEANDERTHALS passed close to our Sun

Tom 7

Re: Alien probes

That's all I need out here in Ohio: Alien probes and ultra-chillies!

'Net neutrality will turn the internet communist – and make Iran's day'

Tom 7

Re: Netizens of the world unite!!

This punishment is OK cos its just 'cruel and unusable'.

Tom 7

A large portion of the UK think the UN is a toy of the US

to be listened to when it does US bidding and ignored when it doesnt.

HOLY SEA SNAILS! Their TEETH are strong enough to build a plane

Tom 7

If some evil scientist can extract the tooth making bits

and engineer them to make a continuous thread what are you going to make the weaving machine out of?

Vodafone didn't have a £6bn tax bill. Sort yourselves out, Lefties

Tom 7

Re: What a load of rubbish...

But Tim, you dont pay it to yourself or bring it back into the country or anywhere near the UK tax regime.

Want a holiday - sorted all on tax free money. Want holiday home/boat etc - sorted all tax free. All you have to do is stay alive in the UK and you can live the life of Riley abroad - and bring a wedge of cash home with you too.

UGH... opposable thumbs are so tiresome! Why not mount your iPhone on your face?

Tom 7

Wrong way round

surely the point is to show others you have the latest - no one uses them for the first few weeks they just wander around showing people they have a computer with phone (sic) capabilities.

PENGUINS are just TASTELESS, say boffins

Tom 7

When you dont get your food from supermarkets

- you chase it down yourself so you dont need any other way of identifying your sushi and krill.

Jaguar F-Type: A beautiful British thoroughbred

Tom 7

Nearly had an XK8 convertible once

bloke used to leave it with the engine running and the top down outside the bakers.

At 6'5 I was never confident enough that I could get the seat back and away before he got his loaf.

Was very tempting tho!

Might sell the kids for one of these - if they do a drop top!

Apple 'hires' the 'A-Team' from car titans, they DO SAY: Let's modify the 'van'!

Tom 7

Put four rounded corners together

and Apple now own the fucking wheel!

HELP! Windows Phone update 8.1 broke my Lumia

Tom 7

Re: Just for the record: My iPhone 6+ still working fine

How would you know - you never get incoming do you?

Over 50? Out of work? Watch out because IT is about to eat itself

Tom 7

In most places I've worked the greybeards are irreplaceable.

But they are replaced. The replacing seems to be done by MBAs who

would have difficulty debugging a revolving door.

Over the years I have done mostly the same things with different languages and different tools but almost always using software design methods which the MBAs would recognise as the whole of the management structure they aspire too but have only a few years experience of.

If I was a conspiracy theorist I would wonder if in the MBA courses its says fire any experienced software developers because they could replace you with code it you stand still long enough for your job to actually be defined in logical terms.

I never wanted to be a manager but other than managing humans* my software jobs seem to have covered every last bit of 'managing'.

*oh and serious arse licking.

Gov.UK begs Google 'n' U.S. tech pals: Forget Ireland, come to Blighty

Tom 7

Elon Musk might be interested

for his porcine space program.

Kanye West: Yo, DNS... Imma let you finish, but this gTLD is one of the best of all time

Tom 7

.arsehole

.thatisall

World's mega-rich tax dodge exposed: Meet the HSBC IT bloke at the heart of damning leak

Tom 7

Re: Politcally created issue

Since you raised Jimmy Carr... at the same time it was known that as Carr avoided £2Million Gary Barlow was avoiding £20Million and yet was not being pilloried by press. Surely it cant have been that Barlow was a tory party donor as that would suggest even greater corruption across the board but why the hell did Carr get attacked and Barlow was 'ignored'?

Boffin the boffin and his boffinry pals in double dwarf super-prang alert

Tom 7

Re: 700 million years!

Popcorn? Planetary kernels to the cognoscenti!

$10,000 Ethernet cable promises BONKERS MP3 audio experience

Tom 7

Re: One born every minute

There may be plausible basis for fancy audio cables but that just means it seems reasonable. To the fuckwits that fall for that this is still plausible - but similarly complete and utter bollocks.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: The Red Dwarf chilli chutney egg sarnie

Tom 7

Re: nom nom nomenclature problem

Thanks for the clarification RIchard 12. It is too late however - I have made a small batch of chilli chutney using some frozen things I grew a while back (home saved seeds with random mutations) and I can say (or write cos I cant speak yet) that when the chutney has matured it should prove ideal for the recipe when diluted with eggs and shit bread.

I must now go melt an ice shelf.

Tom 7

nom nom nomenclature problem

I dont have a copy of the episode to watch but surely its is 'chilli chutney' namely a chutney made with chillis?

TOTAL DARKNESS lasted 550 MILLION years until the first STARS LIT UP

Tom 7

And the lesson is

dont order your fibre from BT.

NASA: Check out this TWIRLY SPACE DWARF – and NEVER moan about our budget

Tom 7

If you look closely theres another white dot on the other side

which means its where the string went through!

This is discarded air freshener from a rather large craft.

'Tech' City hasn't got proper broadband and it's like BT doesn't CARE

Tom 7

Re: Revenue !=Profit...

But in these days you can run at a loss for tax purposes and still buy up large parts of the tropics and boats to cruise there.

First look: Ordnance Survey lifts kimono on next-gen map app

Tom 7

Accessibility?

And I dont mean wheelchairs - it would be a good idea to have some contrast in the colours so you can actually see things. Designer grey/blue might be ok for a room but not a map.

BT coughs £12.5 billion for EE as fourplay frolics pay off

Tom 7

Re: It'll be up for sale in another 10 years

"Fashion is for people who cant afford personalities"

Me!

Tom 7

Re: Well, that's what passes for EE customer support ...

You think EE is bad - you should try BT. Their web interface desperately tries to get you to do anything other than access 'support'. On a rainy day here (when the line gets wet and drops to ~440K both ways) it can take so long to download their shitload of news and gossip that it times out. When you do finally get to click on the appropriate support button it and you get to login there is no longer an option to report a fault! You can sometimes back button and find it if you are lucky, By the time you get to report a fault global warming has dried the line out and all is well again.

There's no LLU here so any other provider still has the BT roadblock and my hindi is coming along beautifully.

RIP Windows RT: Microsoft murders ARM Surface, Nokia tablets

Tom 7

RE: That's the weird one though isn't it

No - its an attempt at marketing. They are hoping there are a new generation coming through that will use the (free I believe?) windows on the Pi and then perhaps want to run it on other licensable machines.

Given that the new Pi seems more than powerful enough for most home use (and most office use too TBH) I can easily see it replacing most devices around as it should be easy to clip onto the back of a screen for keyboard driven use - you can make a decent PC for under £150 and watch telly on it too now!

Most people using the (old) Pi seem very happy with the non-MS software they are running on it - MS are in a huge hole here and seem to being swept down it.

Twin Adam Sandlers shake El Reg's movie unwatchablathon team

Tom 7

When the only redeeming point is having a go at tom cruise

sorry lost the will to ty

Watt the CHIP!? ARM pops out THE most powerful 64-bit Cortex for mobes'n'slabs

Tom 7

Re: I'm wondering

I'd like to see this in a laptop too.

Breaking news: BBC FINALLY spots millions of mugshots on cop database

Tom 7

Re: In other news,

I find a black balaclava keeps you warm - and rapidly inside.

Baklava is nice too and you dont get pains in not normally visible body areas.

UK not-spot deal: When we said '2017’, we meant 1 DAY BEFORE 2018

Tom 7

2017

Anno David Cameron.

DARPA: We KNOW WHO YOU ARE... by the WAY you MOVE your MOUSE

Tom 7

What about when they get clogged with fluff

yes I still have lots of male mice - the ones with balls in them!

Turbocharged quad-core Raspberry Pi 2 unleashed, global geekgasm likely

Tom 7

Re: Some performance figures

Thanks very much James Hughes 1! That isnt compiled for multi-core yet and I bet you haven't got a real-time kernel so it should be OK.

I'll go get one now and chuck me old ones to the local schools!

Tom 7

Re: Some performance figures

As a favour can you load up musescore and see if it will play /usr/share/mscore-1.3/demos/bach-bc2.mscx.

Sounds daft but if it can run that (without re-make -j6) then the Pi can now be used for very serious music projects and will replace about £2000 worth of effects pedals.

The Pirate Bay clambers back online after cop raid sunk site for 7 weeks

Tom 7

Re: The day...

Or you could just claim to have seen it and say how shit it is. That way you dont have to even feel the slightest bit guilty and successfully stop the rip off merchants making a few sales.

Synths of the father: Making some noise at NAMM 2015

Tom 7

Ah thanks

I built a few analogue synths as a youth, midi'ed up the odd piano and spent many happy hours making noises that would attract blue whales and bowls of petunias. But much as I love the smell of (now illegal) flux in the morning I've always been able to bend digital to my will and having £50,000 worth of synth in a laptop has always been quite attractive.

You really ought to see what you can do with a £50 graphics card, csound and a few mouse clicks. I hope someone develops a multi-touch standard for controlling these things cos you can get a lot from a 10" android tab.

Not as much fun as spinning rheostats and pluggin patchleads though so I might need to make a Pi controller...

BYOD is NOT the Next Biggest Thing™: Bring me Ye Olde Lappetoppe

Tom 7

This will turn it around again

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/31/microsoft_tells_large_enterprises_no_free_windows_10_for_you/

Microsoft tells big biz: No free Windows 10 for you, crack wallets open

Tom 7

BYOD

for those monkeys that cant be retrained to browse the web on linux - sorted

Wheeee! BT preps for FIVE HUNDRED MEGABIT broadband trial

Tom 7

Re: Rollout timetable

No - you'll find they'll slip behind schedule and the government will stump up some money and it will slip some more and they'll keep slipping until that stops working. Then they will install some fibre an charge you through the nose for it.

I'd like some evil barrage balloons please.

Charles Townes, inventor of the laser and friend to both science and religion, dies

Tom 7

Re: An astounding inventor and dreamer

I think they've found some natural SER but not light so I guess it still stands...

FCC will vote to cut off 41 million broadband users this Thursday*

Tom 7

Re: people don't need

I ran a system that phoned into a PAD and downloaded at 2400 baud over 1000 orders every morning in 40 minutes - all straight into the ERP system - with only me getting involved occasionally.

Once we got some internet is was deemed useful to have everyone sent in their orders on word documents and by the time I left the company they had over 100 employees printing out the orders and double entrying them into the ERP - saved them £30 a month on the original system.

I'd imagine by now they probably have an employee trying to input 4Gbyte videos of interpretive dance of the orders into the system.

Maybe I'm cynical but the actual noise rate is increasing faster than bandwidth so we are really getting less useful data through. Though the law of the pass of least resistance would suggest I'm right.

Tom 7

Re: Seems they've forgotten what "broadband" actually means

I'm FTTC - at 1.7M - since BT decided the cabinet 2 miles from my house was not a cabinet any more and my cabinet is next to the exchange now.

But at least they got some public money for modifying a DB record!

Windows 10 heralds the Minecraft-isation of Microsoft

Tom 7

Re: So Microsoft are looking for big software to justify big desktop computers...

I guess that should run on most linux computers - not that I can be arsed to try...

Google Translate MEAT GRINDER turns gay into 'faggot', 'poof', 'queen'

Tom 7

Re: Of course the flip side

A faggot can be a bundle of wood. The sort used in the middle ages to burn women of a certain persecution.

Interestingly the worktool used to help form faggots is called a 'boy'.

Tom 7

Re: Google can't win

I find 'ancients' very offensive!

YouTube flushes Flash for future flicks

Tom 7

Re: Flash Bash

Java, Active X, Flash, SilverLight,... the pattern goes on.

But let us not forget why they became so popular in the first place - because of the horrifically broken, limited and outdated HTML specifications, that hamper any attempt to put pixels on the screen at a specific location, due to the people who wrote Java, ActiveX, Flash, SilverLight,... joining in the standardisation of HTML and javascript and trying to stop their development in their tracks so their products could be sold.

FROSTY MISTRESS of the Outer System: Pluto yields to probe snapper

Tom 7

Re: Billion

I have several old Astronomical books where a billion is as it should be and not the short changed american financial boast.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Chickpea stew à la Bureau des Projets Spéciaux

Tom 7

Fusion cooking for one night only

Sweet and sour haggis - brilliant for chinese burns night!

Tom 7

Re: WTF ???

And the panchetta rind - chop into bits and fry before eating the bugger like pork scratchings.

The thing about these kind of ragouts is the more flavourful fat the better.