Posts by Steven Roper

Re: Lateral thinking

The problem with your suggestion is that if we did use said "biological transport mechanism", we'd all be up to our necks in "bio-degradable waste products"!

No.

This is gaffer tape, the magical fix-everything solution you're talking about here. Gaffer tape does not just "fall off."

The problem with that philosophy is

that if enough sheep do buy it that it becomes a market standard, every other company jumps on the bandwagon, and then we have no choice left.

Consider for example what has happened with IT: Apple enjoyed such massive success with the iPad and iPhone, and their attendant walled-garden and restrictive ownership conditions, that every other company is now emulating it - even Microsoft has now jumped on the walled-garden bandwagon with Windows 8, and for those of us who want to remain free of this paradigm, our options are fast running out.

Likewise with Facebook and Twitter; I'm seeing an awful lot of companies wanting to see your social networking profiles as a condition of application for employment. If you don't have one, your employment options are becoming increasingly limited.

Please note this is not to have a dig at Apple or Windows 8 or Facebook per se, but merely to illustrate the principle of how a restrictive, controlling paradigm can become the norm if enough people buy into it.

In the end, when someone says "If you don't like it, don't buy it", what happens when it gets to the stage where you need some version of it to function in modern society? These days, you can't get by in any first-world country without the Internet or a mobile phone; you may hate them, but you can't just "not buy one", because you'll find yourself unable to access essential services without it. Your only other option in such a situation is to go and join an Amish community.

This is why we complain about these sorts of trends - because we know from painful experience that if it remains unopposed, eventually we'll be forced into adopting it by the sheer momentum of mass-market takeup.

the "open source is automatically better" argument.

And your argument as to why open source isn't better is...?

Re: Styx and Lethe?

Well, I was actually thinking of LV-426 when I said Acheron, but your point is also taken!

Re: now I'm really worried

Like you, I'm also a desktop power user; as a programmer, graphic designer and 3D modeller it's not unusual for me to have Cinema4D, Photoshop, DAZ Studio, Notepad++ and a browser all open on my 4 monitors all at the same time. With the Windows 8 regression to the "one fullscreeen app at a time" interfaces replacing the windowed interface, it looks like I'd lose that capability. And as you can imagine, I also have terabytes of images, 3D models and source files on my hard drives.

No way am I trusting all that work - my life's work - to the cloud, or to a SaaS setup, to start with. But that's where the modern mentality seems to be going: no more once-off payments for your software, and no more bought-and-paid for storage either. In the future, everything is to be stored in the cloud, under the control of others, where you will be forced to pay and pay and pay or lose everything. Your computer is to be remotely controlled and subject to the whims of whichever company runs the OS for it - MS, Google, Apple, whoever. The only software you will be allowed to install is what 's permitted in their walled gardens. It's all abut taking control of your computer, your work, and ultimately your life.

Then there's my music and movie collection, which I've painstakingly built over the years. All this is now to be set up in the cloud and streamed to your system on demand - a set up which makes it really easy to rewrite history, restrict access by country, profile your entertainment tastes, delete an old favourite forever, and enables a pay-per-view/pay-per-listen model, in which nothing is ever really under your own control anymore.

So the way I look at it is this: I've become an upgrade refusenik from here on out. My heels are dug in, and the line has been drawn - THIS far, NO further. The version of Cinema4D I have (R12) is easily capable of photorealistic renders, it can do cloth simulation, hair, grass, trees, character modelling, the works - and it can render a scene so realistically it's indistinguishable from a photograph. The version of Photoshop I have also has more features than I'll ever need. The software I have now is more than capable of anything I'll want to be able to do in future. Consider - if my raytracing software can render to photorealism, why will I ever need anything more? In the past, it always fell short of photorealism, which was the Holy Grail of 3D modelling, but now that's been achieved. And with it's multicore support, this software is now set up handle however many cores I can throw at it in future: 4, 8, 32, whatever becomes available.

Likewise, processor speeds, memory capacities, hard drive sizes, and monitor resolutions have all plateaued. I've been running 3.2 GHz cores for 8 years now, although in that time I've gone from single-core to dual-core to 4-core machines. Drive sizes have stalled in the low TB range for about the same time, and monitors have been running at 1920 x 1200 / 1080 for the same time as well. So it looks to me like the technology has finally matured and stabilised, and improvements are now incremental rather than revolutionary.

Windows 7 x64, which I now have, can handle more than enough hard drive space, processor cores, and RAM to satisfy my requirements for years to come. I can upgrade my hardware, and continue running the same software because the software is now geared to handle the upgrades, and it does all I want.

So I can see myself still using this same software in 10, 20, even 30 years' time. Because I've reached my ideal goals. Because the technology curve has flattened out. Because I WILL NOT hand over control of my life's work to power-crazed corporations hell-bent on raping my wallet with rentism and taking control of every aspect of my data and computing devices.

Re: Dead I suppose

Not just dead, mate. At 10k pints per day we're talking mummified and perfectly preserved here.

Re: Galactic Imposter

Ha, you reminded of when I was a kid back in the 70s and 80s. I used to imagine that my city (Adelaide) was a galaxy and that my parents' car (or my pushbike) was a spaceship, with the streetlights representing stars and the nearby houses being the planets that orbited them. The car was of course capable of Warp 9, while my poor little pushbike was only good for Warp 3 or thereabouts. Sometimes we'd go up to Mt Lofty, where you used to have an awesome view of the whole city (they close the lookout at night these days, sadly), and it certainly looked like a galaxy then to my young eyes!

ELEGANT looking wind farm?!?

Huge, noisy, towering, monstrous eyesores, stretching to the horizon, that blight the landscape for miles around, is your idea of elegant? Mate, I want some of whatever you're smoking! Anything that makes those vile things look good has got to be some awesome weed...

I'd prefer solar farms myself. Round here (Adelaide guy BTW, so right next door to you in terms of Reg demographics ;) ) the sun shines a lot more than the wind blows, plus a solar farm doesn't tower into the sky, visible from miles away, the way a wind farm does. And a solar farm doesn't need to be shut down if the sun shines too brightly either. Nor would it take up as much space to produce the same amount of power, and consider that wind power is basically converted solar energy in the first place.

Except that

not all of us read every article on the Beeb, so the Reg's rebroadcasting of it here means that I for one would never have known about this had they not done so.

Just because a news site doesn't print a story within 5 minutes of it breaking doesn't mean the story is no longer relevant.

Re: Duh.

And that's "offenses". With an "s".

Stop. Take a look at your browser address bar, the bit near the top where you can see the address "http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/02/05/digitally_signed_banking_trojan/".

See that ".co.uk" bit? That means that the site you are reading is based in the United Kingdom, an independent sovereign nation that (arse-reaming extradition treaties notwithstanding) exists outside of the United States of America, and whose citizens speak a language known as English, which is different to American.

In the United Kingdom, and in every other country that speaks English, the word "offence" and its variants are spelt with a "c", not an "s".

Re: Grocer's

That was my thought on reading the headline as well, but it's not necessarily a misplaced apostrophe if we read the line as:

"A scientist's snap is the first video inside a thinking fish's brain"

In which case it becomes an apostrophe of possession (the scientist's snap, where "snap" is a noun, not a verb) and would pass. I realise this interpretation is a bit of a stretch, but an astute journalist could use it as a valid defence!

Or they could just fix it. El Reg?

Re: Steve Dopier What is fair?

I'd respond to your post, Matt, if I believed you capable of understanding the response. But the last time somebody mangled my surname in a pathetic insult like that was when I was 12. Fucking grow up.

He probably said that

because he liekly owns shares in more than a few of them.

Judges and magistrates should not be allowed to own any shares in any company whatsoever, because the obvious conflict of interest becomes very evident when they come out with comments like that. They get paid enough that they don't need to own shares to make themselves even richer.

In fact, the principle of the judiciary not being allowed to own shares shouldn't merely be law; it should be a mainstay of jurisprudence on par with innocence unless proven guilt and freedom of speech.

One small point...

Amiga didn't fail because it "couldn't see the changes coming or couldn't adapt fast enough." The Amiga was cutting-edge technology even after Commodore went bust in 1994. AmigaOS went through several iterations, and several companies continued producing accelerator boards and and hardware for it, well into the late 90s. Amiga adapted and led the changes, it didn't just follow them.

The Amiga died because: 1) mismanagement at Commodore US caused the American branch of the company to fold, depriving the platform of vital advertising and marketing; and 2) more importantly because Gateway bought it and deliberately buried it, hoping to capture the Amiga market and hook them into their line of Windows PCs instead. In a fantastic case of computing karma giving a greedy company what they richly deserved, however, the Amiga fanbase were rabid Wintel/PC haters at the time, and took so long to make the switch that Gateway's purchase of Commodore's assets bankrupted the bastards before they could realise any profit from it.

So while the Amiga's corpse does "litter the landscape" of computing history, it's not for the reason you posit.

Re: 140? I can reply to the Pope in eight characters

Of course, whether the 'three letters more' are O, F and F, or Y, O and U is left up to the individual offering this enlightened and erudite response... both work equally well! ;)

Re: It's own EULA?

That's what got me wondering as well!

I mean, these people are thieves, scammers, and parasitic scum of the lowest order, who don't give a flying fuck about anyone or anything other than their own gain - otherwise they wouldn't be doing what they do. Yet the purveyors of the software these "people" - and I use the term very loosely - use for their activities, expect them to honour an EULA, when they already fork two fingers up at every law on the books? What the hell are they smoking?

I swear, some of these people must be seriously delusional about who they are and what they do. I can't think of any other explanation for it. It reminds me of Sanford "Spamford" Wallace, who actually believed he was doing people a favour by smothering their inboxes with spam, and couldn't understand why people hated him. I can't even begin to fathom what must be going on in the heads of such people.

Re: End of an era (Amiga vs AtariST)

I remember back in the day, I was one of the Amiga lads who hated the Atari ST with a passion, for one reason - game porting.

The Atari ST could display a maximum of 4 bitplanes / 16 colours, while the Amiga could do 5 bitplanes / 32 colours or 6 bitplanes / 64/4096 colours within certain limits, if you used Half-brite or HAM mode (this was before the A1200/4000 with the 8-bitplane AGA chipset.) Both machines used the Motorola 68000 CPU, so code written on one machine could be easily ported to the other - as long as it didn't reference the Amiga's custom hardware.

Now I grant that Half-brite/HAM modes were not practical for most gaming purposes due to the quirkiness of those modes and the limitations of the CPU and graphics hardware - but the Amiga did have the custom chipset, notably Paula and Agnus, the famed Amiga "blitter" and "copper", which allowed smooth scrolling and a lot more moving objects and colours. The Atari did not, and relied solely on the poor old 68000 for its graphics grunt.

Cue games developers coding games for the lowest common denominator - the Atari ST - and then porting them to the Amiga unaltered. So the games were seriously limited to what the ST could handle - 16 colours only, awful jittery scrolling, crappy music and sound (the ST relied on MIDI rather than a good onboard sound chip), and no blitter or copper to speed things up or exploit the Amiga's capabilities.

Most arcade conversions suffered from this, so great arcade games like Space Harrier and Outrun that could have really shone on the Amiga were dragged down to the level of the Atari - which made the Amiga look much less than it was. So many games that could have been awesome simply sucked, and the term "Atari ST port" became a derogatory byword for a game not worth the bother of pirating it, let alone buying it.

The magazines of the day generally concurred on this issue, and I recall some scathing reviews from Amiga Format and Australian Commodore and Amiga Review! This was of course in the days when magazines actually delivered honest reviews, not bought-and-paid-for puff pieces published under threat of advertisement withdrawal like so many of today's mags.

I remember fondly some games that were coded specifically to take advantage of the Amiga's hardware - notably Sword of Sodan, The Settlers and Superfrog - and I played all those games to death during their heyday. The Settlers I particularly remember because the Amiga version simply blew away the PC version in graphics, sound and speed, and so I (erroneously as it turned out) came to believe that the good old Miggy was finally coming into its own, and represented the future of computing.

How wrong I was...

@asdf

Oh please, not the old racism card again...

So the lad has a Middle-Eastern sounding name. That's completely irrelevant to his behaviour, good, bad or indifferent. I personally think he did the right thing by testing to make sure the hole was fixed, and ruining his entire career is indeed excessive punishment in my view.

But his race, creed, culture, religion, ancestry, sexuality, birthplace, you name it, has nothing to do with it, and this kind of over-the-top PC thinking that overuses accusations of racism, every goddamned time someone of non-European descent commits any kind of indiscretion and is punished for it, is doing more to undermine real fairness and tolerance than all the racist bigotry on every Stormfront-esque sinkhole on the Internet combined. It cheapens the concept until the cry of "racist" simply becomes meaningless noise.

So please, spare us the PC bellyaching and look at the issues from a race-neutral perspective: A student attempted, rightly or wrongly, to hack into his college computer system and was expelled for it - rightly or wrongly. No race or religion involved.

Re: Place your bets...

I'll see your bet, and raise you one "When something does 'coincidentally happen' to a plane, and someone posts evidence it was a psyop job to sway public opinion to want these things back with a vengeance - they'll be dismissed as a crazy tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut."

@ Sir Wiggum

"You know you shouldn't, and that no good can come of it, but it feels right for a short while :)"

You reminded me of an old joke I remember from my high school days:

Q: Why is jerking off like going to McDonalds?

A: Because it's always the same and afterwards you always say you'll never do it again.

Ok, ok, I'm going...

Which begs the question

What is El Reg's readership as a percentage of that of the Daily Wail? If it's significant enough it might even restore some of my faith in humanity. Though that might be asking a bit much...

Re: Also, a Brit's idea of an American is to an actual American as...

If I have the choice of being attacked by an Australian Shepherd or Cujo, I'll take Cujo over the shepherd every time, thanks. Those little bastards are more vicious than pit bulls!

As to what that tells me about Americans, the less said the better...! ;)

Re: What has the world come to ...

You should know that it's a simple preprogrammed stock response common to all businesses. The code, hardwired into every PR droid's brain, looks something like this:

Along with similar functions for "We apologise for the inconvenience", "Remedial action has been taken to prevent a recurrence", and other standard PR bumf...

@ AC 23:02

I see the accusation of "strawman" is starting to be overused in these forums. In your case, it is an erroneous accusation: invoking worst case scenario is NOT a strawman argument since that scenario can occur and should be addressed. A strawman is where you describe a specific case in which the argumentative condition is so ludicrous as to destroy the credibility of the argument, which relates back to reductio ad absurdum.

In this case, defining the worst case scenario as being downwind of a volcano or containing toxic emissions from a hot spring is a valid comparison, since both of these conditions do regularly occur on this planet and represent grave hazards to living organisms exposed to them. That's not the bottom line you want defined as the limits imposed on pollution.

@ Alan Brown

Here in Australia we don't have deer, at least not in the wild. What we have instead are kangaroos and wombats. Kangaroos are about the same mass as deer (at least the big grey plains ones are) but, unlike deer, they tend to stand upright, like people. Which means that when you hit them at speed, they are much more likely to bounce over the bonnet and smash through your windscreen than simply mangling your radiator and front end, with obviously deadly consequences.

And wombats are just evil. About the size of a stocky fox terrier, they look deceptively small and vulnerable, but they have the structural solidity of a large house brick. If you hit one, it will rip out your sump, gearbox, tailshaft and/or diff, and walk away without a scratch, leaving you with a written-off car and a very long walk home!