Posts by defiler

Re: waiting for the video...

Took the lad yesterday. Fiver each, and no discount for a ten-year-old...

Add the inevitable overpriced popcorn and drinks, and I was up to about £23. Typically I wait for movies to come out on BluRay (75" telly and surround sound comes in handy, and I never feel like I'm missing out on anything), but I've seen all of the "main" Star Wars movies since Empire Strikes Back at the cinema, and I was being pestered!

It was okay. Not brilliant. I guess I'm maybe just too old to really get into it. There were a few nice parts in it. It was a bit sad to see the script dance around Princess Leia, feeding her questions and expecting vague replies like some kind of magic 8-ball.

I'd rather watch the original (pre-special-edition) trilogy.

Re: A what USB stick?

Speak for yourself - I'm pretty classy. In fact I'm kind of a big deal. :-P

Re: scram button!

Basically for the things you can't think of ahead of time. But for the love of the drive heads, put a cover on it, or make it a twist-switch or something!!

I have a Wii, PS2, Xbox 360 and Switch sitting vertically. The rest are horizontal.

Planning on how to coax my wife into letting me remove the drawers from that cabinet and for more in.

Re: So, back to the Soviets for a moment...

Well, my understanding (as a gross simplification) is that because there was no real incentive for an individual to excel, the Soviens would just do what the were told to do without significant innovation. Of course they were innovators as well, but only the ones told to *be* innovators. After all, the likes of BP walked in there in the 1990s and were astonished at the lack of modern techniques to extract oil from the Soviet oilfields. There seems to have been a lot of "it's good enough" and no drive to improve, and the improvements are what allowed the capitalist nations to outgrow and outspend them.

Again, this is not borne of experience, but from what I've read on the subject and my interpretation of that - I'm happy to be corrected.

As for the USA, according to Wikipedia (I'm in a hurry, okay?) US military spending exceeds the next 10 countries combined, more than half of which are allies. The US Government just loves to piss money into the military, regardless of President. I'm just sitting back on the other side of the ocean idly wondering "how much is too much" and "when does it become too expensive to sustain"?

Re: I wonder

I don't worship Thor, but here I am using a Thursday!

Re: Ahahaha

Sadly, if one company has marketing then every company must have marketing. Because if Company A says "Company A is brilliant and Company B steals your blood" and Company B says nothing to refute that then Company A is right (in the public perception).

It's stupid and annoying but it's the way things work. People are surprisingly easily herded.

Re: Less bang for your more bucks?

And poetry.

That's why we don't let users write to any location they can execute applications from, and the only exceptions are based on certificate rules. It's just too easy for a user to destroy a lot of stuff by accident otherwise, and Windows has trained us all to click on OK like a pigeon hitting a button for food.

Re: Needlessly powerful

Not saying the processor is too powerful. I'm saying that the camera sensor is unreasonably powerful.

Sure you can do all of the post-processing to pick out details in dark images, and to stabilise the image etc, but when it comes to chromatic aberration you're going to hit a wall. There's some work you can do, and that can be tuned reasonably well to the individual lens, but in the end you're throwing away detail.

On the whole, for high-resolution work you're just better off with a bigger lens. For compact devices, don't over-egg the resolution. Saves power on the sensor too (although I believe they're not as bad as CCDs).

In the end, if you want a hugely powerful sensor it's not my place to stop you. I'm just pointing out that you end up with diminishing returns quite quickly when you're doing it on a small device.

Re: Not actually that surprised

This.

I have performed some terrifyingly rude operations on Linux softRAID, switching drives around, failed SATA controller taking out half the disks and just forcing the damn thing to rebuild, changing the Superblock version of an unmounted RAID set, you name it. It just keeps taking the punches!

A mate of mine used a lot of eBay hardware in an academic environment, and his warranty was basically a pile of servers in a cupboard. He used MD so that he could simply haul drives from one, shove them into another, and they'd always, always boot.

I think the real world tends to talk about compressed streams. HDMI is a different technology, and uncompressed video is very much a niche space. (And if you have bandwidth demands like that, you're going to go wired anyway.)

Re: A bit closer to home

As others have said, Sundog, being the 5th or 6th biggest is no use when you have to deal with the biggest. If you're on level-pegging with them then there's a quid-pro-quo. If they're 10x the size of you then they impose their will.

Scale that down if you will, and maybe we want to deal directly with Mexco - get some tequila in. Sure, by ourselves there's a reasonable option for coming up with a fair deal where both sides are balanced, but (if I may be selfish for a moment) right now we're negotiating from the position of the leviathan. We don't need to put up with anything from a market the size of Mexico that we don't want to. So whilst we could strike a fair deal with them by ourselves, right now we could strike a deal heavily in our favour. So in that event, costs go up, standards go down, or some mix of the two.

No offence to Mexico - I just picked a country with a similar GDP to the UK.

And if you want to say we're the "5th or 6th largest economy", pick one and back it up. My evidence says the 9th, and one of the 8 above us is another EU member.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/208rank.html

Here we can see that the EU is the second biggest after China (10% below, with the USA 10% below that). India, in fourth, is half the size of the US economy. These numbers are pretty close to the CIA ones, so they should be fairly representative of fact.

The UK on that scale is <15% of the USA. If you think we can argue on a level playing field there, you're deluded by the history of Empire.

And if your first kneejerk is to call someone a cretin, bring evidence or fuck off home, you fucking melt. I'm so fucking tired of having this argument with people who seem to think that "belief" is a fungible currency when it comes to trade negotiations, or that the world owes us a favour because we used to own half of it...

Re: At that resolution, I dare you to get 144 Hz on a demanding game.

That's because he had 2x Voodoo 2 cards on SLI! Posh bastard!

Yeah - that's pretty bad.

I like the idea of calling my PC a computress. Just saying.

Re: Definition

I've waded in at the deep end with some topics for my kids.

We've covered orbital mechanics with much success and kerballing. Covalent bonding was pretty good too, using Lego as an analogy. AC vs DC electricity, with voltage vs current was okay too.

Of course, all these are superseded by discussions of Nintendo vs Sega, and why Nintendo were crazy (but ultimately justified) in making the N64 a cartridge console, 13 years before my kids were born. There's only so far you can go before their attention goes elsewhere...

Edit - to be clear, my kids steer the conversation to old consoles, not me!

Re: Vulture taps claws on Reg keyboard for last time

Atari. Is it Atari?

Re: Skylab on a disc?

Ah! I honestly didn't realise it was a download! I just had a nagging suspicion that it would end up being like an iTunes "purchase" where it's DRM'd up the arse and would disappear as soon as there was an argument over licensing.

£8.20 spent. .mp4 will be just fine. Cheers for that!

Re: Nice headline

Ach - loads of their tunes were drug-laden. Like Primal Scream.

With lyrics like "MDMAzing" and "Can you pass the acid test?" it was a bit of a giveaway. :)

Re: Not even a codename

Yeah, I guess, but at the same time that means you're developing against somebody else's speculation. And they're developing at breakneck speed to match a third party's speculation.

It's not unlikely that one group's speculative plans will hit some kind of wall that holds them up, or means they have to change course, so then everyone leaning on them has to respond in kind. I have no doubt that the job gets done, but it's still impressive and must be pretty high-pressure.

Re: lack of political will

I'm going to throw this one on the pile here, because whilst I believe you're wrong on many aspects this is at least one you can verify for yourself.

The President can't "order" NASA to light so much as a firework without getting funding approved by The Senate, let alone "order" them back to the moon.

When it comes to that he's got about as much power as a Junior Disprin.

Re: "It's only a naked body. We've all got one."

Well you read that thoroughly then, didn't you?

I didn't say that it was fine to share them. In fact quite the opposite. These are "personal and private", and people who have their intimate pictures distributed without their consent should be furious about it, and the law should back them up.

I'm saying that they shouldn't be ashamed, and that these cases tend to be elements of society projecting their own shame onto the victim.

Whether you agree with the taking of these pictures is about as relevant as whether you agree with pineapple on pizza - what consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own home is none of your business, and saying that taking the pictures is somehow bad or wrong is pinning the blame on the victim.

Re: Darwin, top bloke.

True, but for a long time even after evolution was (generally) accepted as producing humans, the view has persisted that evolution moves to greater complexity, greater agility, greater intelligence.

That big brain takes energy, though, and if having the brain doesn't equip you with a means to replace that lost energy, you're going to be outbred by those that don't have it.

If you look at natural history books for over a century you'll find some with evolutionary trees putting humans at the top, but with evolution always progressing in roughly the same direction like traffic along a road. In fact, the only way you get to see the path of evolution is to look backwards down the track - never forwards.

tl;dr - you're absolutely right, but many/most people _still_ don't see it that way... Even the humble slug is a badass in its own niche.

Re: Pointing to where Earth will be

They only get about 160bps out of it, but that's still pretty impressive. Especially when it wasn't that long before Voyager 1 was launched that your modem would only get 300bps.

That's the thing about people - there are always new ones.