Posts by Tom 38

Re: Collateral Damage from all this.

Farmer's markets are good, but you have to live close to the source. Imagine being in, say a London or New York city and trying to find a farmer's market.

I grew up in East Anglian countryside, on a farm, surrounded by farms and farm shops.

Its 50x easier to find a farmers market in London than it is in the countryside, because "farmers" (traders) like to come to areas where there are lots of people, and not lots of farms - its good for the margin.

There are traditional, established markets like Peckham, Walthamstow and South Ken, but there are also irregular artisanal farm traders setting up shop all over the place, eg in Stratford shopping centre on a Sunday, the regular market is replaced by "french"* farmers.

* mostly from Kent.

Re: Are AMD and nVidia on board?

I'm deadly serious about the DirectX API being an open standard. Lots of Microsoft technologies are open standards. Why not this API?

First, take DirectX.

MS has always used DirectX in two ways, as a marketing tool to sell OS licenses (Want DX10? You have to buy Vista, not available on XP, Want DX11? You have to buy 7, not included in Vista), and as a way to lock games makers in to Windows and Xbox. Lock in does not work with an open standard.

Secondly, OpenGL already exists. OpenGL is a real open standard; the development of the standard happens in an open environment where any member of the Khronos group can contribute. Anyone wanting to use a standard graphical library on multiple platforms will use OpenGL.

DirectX has Microsoft behind it. OpenGL has AMD/ATI, Apple Inc., ARM Holdings, Epic Games, Imagination Technologies, Intel Corporation, Nokia, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony Computer Entertainment, Adobe, Amazon.com, Blizzard Entertainment Inc., Codeplay, Ericsson, Google, Huawei Technologies, IBM, LG Electronics, Lucasfilm Ltd., Matrox Graphics, Microsoft Corporation, Mozilla, Oculus VR, Panasonic, Pixar, Renesas Electronics, Synopsys, Texas Instruments, Unity Technologies, Valve corporation, VIA Alliance Semiconductor, VMware....

Re: Spotted what's missing?

I'm hoping that they have all these things as layers that you can drop on as you will. Boom! No more churches or tumuli to distract me!

Re: hmm

ARM SOCs are nothing like what people understand as a PC.

Which is why ARM is getting EUFI.

Re: What purpose?

Don't forget the Police also have access to the DVLA database so they can match your face to your driving licence if they stop you, amongst other things.

They can look at specific records in the DVLA database. They are not allowed to search through each photo on the DVLA database to compare it to CCTV, and then use that as "evidence".

Re: Really?

When they can promise they can stop their countries being filled with spam, hackers and "security" holes then I will care.

According to Spamhaus:

As of 04 February 2015 the world's worst Spam Haven countries for production and export of spam are:

In other words, globally the US is the largest source of spam, and causes the same number of issues as the rest of the top 4 combined.

Re: "If only there was a great, sane and helpful place around me for my local gadgetry needs"

This isn't capitalism working. This is the wrecking of a classic corner store brand just so a few elite can make a killing. The Shack was a sacrificial lamb.

What a load of left wing bollocks. Radio Shack has/will go bust because of two reasons:

1) Consumers don't buy things in components like they used to, they buy entire gadgets.

2) People who do buy components all buy online, rather than go to a store to do so.

To the elite 1% who sucked RS dry. Enjoy your palaces in the Hampton's, your cruise ships in the Caymans, you total C*nts!!!

I know Americans don't get irony, but when you moan about the 1%, you do realise you are the 1%, right?

Re: Thinking about uninstalling flash for good

It makes you wonder what they are doing with all the money that they forcibly extract from the viewers.

The BBC is vastly underfunded for what we ask it to do. All of their awesome tech is delivered on a shoestring budget by people who should really be working elsewhere and making a whole lot more money. I don't like that they spend so much money on slebs and dancing shows, but it seems to be what people want to watch.

PS: Why does their OCSP list got out of date information? Probably because the person who is fixing that is fixing something more important at the minute. Particularly given that OCSP is a dog, doesn't serve its purpose (particularly in this scenario, no client certificates to revoke, so OCSP is controlling revoking the server certificate) and most browsers will silently ignore invalid OCSP information, I'd imagine its fairly low down the list.

Re: you won't defeat the object

But they also couldn't offer me their CORE service of sharing my information with MY friends.

Facebook's business is monetizing identity. Providing tools that you find useful is a side effect of that.

Re: Looks tasty

Er, well, yes. But why deep frying them? Looks like there's half a pint of the golden stuff in there.

Re: I've seen and bypassed this message.

Install the certificate in chrome? Takes about 30 seconds.

Re: 20 years, near enough...

Seemingly, the fact that the grey haired 40 something had been doing the job commercially longer than the fetus interviewing him had been alive counted for nothing.

Perhaps the interviewer picked up on the fact that his potential new hire viewed him as a "foetus" and decided there would not be an effective working environment between the two of them?

Re: Real estate costs

A suitable cooling system means a DC that has enough cooling and power per rack to give you what you are asking. DCs are designed with a specific wattage per rack.

Since everyone wants more power and cooling, if you want more than the average, your DC provider is going to ream you for it.

Re: Static IPs

All of this to satisfy the 0.01% of technically savvy El Reg reading (or writing) customer base. Really?

Nope, not to satisfy that - although it is a wonderful side effect. The main benefit is that you no longer rely on DHCP servers for your users to get service, and therefore your users never have no internet because of an overloaded or poorly configured DHCP server.

Be used to have innumerable issues with their DHCP servers; as a static IP customer paying £2 extra a month these never affected me.

Removing components that can fail provides a better service, and is a good thing.

Just because a kernel is modular does not mean it is not monolithic. Linux is a modular kernel, but it is also a monolithic kernel. You can load a driver for your TV tuner, but it is loaded in to kernel space - ergo, monolithic.

NT is a modular kernel, but it is not a monolithic kernel (its a hybrid, like OS X).

It gets blurred a bit in Linux, where things like the sound system are partially user-mode daemons if you use a sound daemon like esd or pulseaudio. However, the sound daemon will use kernel mode drivers (ALSA) to communicate with the sound hardware; a true microkernel would provide a mechanism for communicating with (almost) any device, with the device specific bits happening in user mode and not kernel mode.

To go back to the TV tuner example, Linux provides a whole raft of TV tuner drivers. They all run in kernel space. BSD doesn't provide any TV tuner drivers, but provides a kernel mode character driver that can be used to communicate with USB devices. The Linux drivers are then run entirely in user space, communicating using this simple kernel driver. Performance + inability for a TV card to oops your system.

Re: Hmmm...

I remember some research being done by the US army on drugs that would help dampen memory formation or emotive context.

Cannabis?

Re: Bullshit

I wouldn't take "The Bible", but perhaps just one edition of it - the King James Bible ("the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language").

More commonly used idioms were penned by the translators of KJ, notably Tyndale, than any other English author, including Shakespeare, eg "feet of clay", "reap the whirlwind", "filthy lucre", "take root", "the powers that be", "the blind leading the blind", "no rest for the wicked" and apparently 250 more.

Re: rvm use build gem bundle install... ARRRGH!!!

There is some good stuff.

However, on some level I do wish they weren't spending money inventing the new ways to be cool. No-one's website fell over because it is hosted in httpd and not unicorn.

Re: Accused or convicted?

Nor for this lady there isn't. Must be devastating to have a child murdered, but I'm not at all sure what she wanted the police to do, or indeed what they could do, to someone who has not been found guilty of anything.

Re: Sweet...

There is definitely something wrong with the interconnect between Virgin and Sky.

I get on average 1mb/s (often lower) downloading movies from Sky while a Steam game will come in at 12mb/s

There are so many reasons for getting a slow speed from a particular provider, it is much more likely to be congestion within Sky's network or capacity of their links rather than the connection between Sky and Virgin.

I'm on synchronous gigabit FTTP (Hyperoptic) in Central London, and can only download from Sky at around 8Mbit/s (1MB/s), whilst Steam and other well connected provider's downloads come down at between 400-700Mbit/s (50-80MB/s).

Re: The origin of patch Tuesday

Technically, a patch that fucks up more than it fixes is not "ready".

Re: No.

Works for me in principle - until it collides with UK political reality, when...

So we can't have nice things, paid for in a sensible way, because in the past we haven't managed to do it? We might as well stick with our current system and just continue to fade in to insignificance, because cynicism?

Seems like a bit of a barrier to progression.

Re: Well..

There is a famous French song 'Dès que le vent soufflera - Scélérats" by an artist called Renaud which has appropriate lyrics

Who came first, "Renaud" or W C Fields?

Re: The end

This is the most concerning part of the whole tale. You'd hope that ICANN staff were a bit more savvy than my grandmother.

You might hope that, but why would it be the case? Because he works for ICANN, the receptionist also knows how to debug BIND?

Re: Not exactly killing

Kim Jong Il was a huge hollywood film fan (over 20,000 DVDs) and, despite being a ruthless dictator crushing his own people, apparently had a sense of humour. He probably enjoyed parts of Team America, given it lampooned America almost as much as the Norks.

Kim Jong Un is a fat spoilt kid in comparison.

Really? The telcos borrowed to buy. The telcos then took the interest charges off their profits, and the tax revenues dropped afterwards.

All Brown did was bring forward taxation

So you're saying that if we had simply given them the spectrum, we would have reaped the same revenue in taxes as we received from the auction? Somehow I doubt it.

Re: Fight the war against terror!

Point went over your head pal. If you have a "terrorist threat" against an event, and as a response you cancel the event as it "may be unsafe", you're not "fighting terror", but publicising it.

The only way to fight terror is to completely ignore it and go about your life as if it does not exist.

Re: @JDX (was: Yet another tens of millions of dollars of programmer-hours ...)

Yes, any other text editor. I used my words so that you can understand my thought process - let me restate it again since it was unclear - no other text editor is better at editing text than vim.

Yes, I am aware of the alternatives. Yes, I have used sublime. It's a really good knock off of many of the best features of vim. It has no features that vim does not have, and has downsides that vim does not have. Hardly compelling, even for my "projects" as you put it.

Re: First job

A monopoly can use its monopolistic position in one industry to increase in size in another industry.

Like, I dunno, using your vast revenues to buy up footie rights and bundling them with your internet.

Re: Two sides to each story....

If you read their list archive, this wonderful reply to Cherie Ellis from Russell Coker:

I think going for #LCAAuckNZ is just a continuation of the problem. Much as "server-hugging" is now discouraged[1] I think we need to start discouraging hashtag-hugging. I mean the very point of a a hash function is to prevent collisions.

as the official hashtag for Linux.conf.au 2015.

Proper geek humour