* Posts by Steve Knox

1972 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2011

Microsoft Halo 4 launch countdown continues as game leaks online

Steve Knox
Windows

Re: Gah!!

Cassette!? You were lucky. We used t' dream of games on cassette. In my day, games came in magazine form. We spent 27 hours a day typin' in t'code, only to have a syntax error on line 130...

El Reg VULTURE logo FOUND ON MARS

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: "....we have our very own black helicopter fleet..."

because that one's from the alternate universe one of the editors keeps in his office. The ones in the real universe are black.

Foxconn: Worker who lost half his brain in accident must leave hospital

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: "Foxconn and Apple - totally amoral."

Yes, and Apple...

and Acer, Amazon, Cisco , Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft , Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba, and Vizio to name a few more of Foxconn's customers...

and who amongst us have bought from none of these brands? mote, beam, first stone, etc.

Steve Knox
WTF?

Why must the injured travel to the doctors?

According to the firm, Zhang needs to have a disability assessment...

Makes sense.

Employees in China who are disabled ... can get compensation payouts ...once their disability is assessed and graded by a panel of medical experts.

Makes sense.

... but that means that he needs to leave hospital in Shenzhen and travel 70km to Huizhou...

Ah, now here is the part I don't understand.

Why does the assessment have to happen in Huizhou? Are there no medical experts in or around the Shenzhen hospital that are capable of performing this assessment? Failing that, are the panel in Huizhou incapable of travel?

Google updates Street View with 250,000 miles of footage

Steve Knox
Coat

"miles of footage"?

What's that in km of meterage?

Woz labels Apple 'arrogant' over iPhone size inadequacy

Steve Knox
Thumb Up

Rule of Thumb

...Apple maintains a view that a phone's display should be easily navigated with just one thumb...

I don't disagree with this idea -- but I can easily navigate a phone with a display a full inch wider than the iPhone5 with my thumb, due to my hands being larger than average. So, like Woz, I consider the iPhone5 somewhat narrow.

Other companies and industries address human variation by either making multiple sizes (e.g, shoes, gloves, other tablets/phones) or adjustable systems (e.g, car seats), whereas Apple seems to consider it a case of the user not fitting the product, rather than the other way around.

Is lightspeed really a limit?

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: we have yet to understand light

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_spectrum

Steve Knox

Re: ....tnemirepxe thguoht a did tsuj I

@P_0

No, I think he's got the smiley right ( :

Boffins build program to HUNT DOWN CO2 polluters where they LIVE

Steve Knox

Re: "tax assessor information"?

I'm looking for a causal analysis, not one of those Freakonomics statistical soft shoes routines.

If modeling of complex systems depended entirely on causal analyses, we wouldn't have any.

Crazed Microsoft robot accuses BBC kids' channel of Win8 piracy

Steve Knox
Thumb Up

Re: I guess...

I wonder if you could hold MS liable for false accusations when they take down your website based on these fake allegations.

Yes. Filing a false DMCA takedown request is considered perjury. That's one thing the DMCA has got right -- google "dmca penalty false request" for some good examples of what you can lose by filing a false DMCA takedown request.

US trounces UK in climate scepticism jibber-jabber

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: conservative republicans?

The state also has a terrible track record of inefficiencies, vested interests, unintended consequences and sometimes plain corruption in the provision of these services.

Alternatives are organisations such as charities, churches/mosques/temples, friends, families, local groups etc, all of which are closer to the intended recipient so less layers of bureaucracy taking their slice of the pie, better targeted to needs and perhaps more appreciation by the recipient of where this help has come from. There can still be inefficiencies and corruption but less layers of bureaucracy give less scope for these.

You don't need more than one layer of bureaucracy for corruption and/or inefficiency. Furthermore, I can cite examples of all of the types of organizations you mention which have incredibly poor track records. I think you'll find that there hasn't been a study truly comparing the efficiency and honesty of the above social services organizations, states included.

An even more hated (by the left) alternative is that leaving the money that would otherwise be taxed for social services in the pockets of people and business then perhaps they can even fund more JOBS for the poor!!!

That same old trickle-down line has been tried by Conservatives for the past three decades. It hasn't worked yet.

People are by nature corrupt. Those with the money and the power got there either a) by being more corrupt than their competition, or b) by inheriting their position from corrupt family/friends.

This is why pure socialism doesn't work: it doesn't account for corruption. Pure capitalism, on the other hand, rewards corruption. Any social, economic, and/or political system must be a blend of the two to survive.

Steve Knox
Headmaster

They're basic English words, FFS!

Skeptic - someone who doesn't blindly accept what they are told but examines all the evidence available at the time and makes a reasoned decision.

Deniers - someone who does blindly accept refuses to believe what they are told, and reads only the 'evidence' that supports their bias regardless of any evidence.

Your got the first one right; I was rather disappointed to see you get the second one so wrong.

Astroboffins to search for mega-massive alien power plants

Steve Knox
Coat

Re: when it starts going wrong

Could the WOW signal have been a support call going out?

If so, the response was probably "A GM has received your request. We are currently experiencing unexpectedly high request times. Your wait time is approximately 20,000 galactic revolutions."

Steve Knox
Meh

Re: We are

Obvious troll is obvious.

One point for actually getting responses/downvotes. Minus one for shooting fish in a barrel.

4K vs OLED: and the winner is...

Steve Knox

Re: I don't understand the comparison

Comparing OLED to 4K is like comparing carbon fibre to bicycles.

No, it's more like comparing a high-end engine to a 0-60 rating. The first is the technology, the second is the capability.

To see how the comparison works, you need to think like a marketer's image of a stereotypical buyer (i.e, not at all.) Forget what the OLED and 4K are or do or mean, and just think of them as buzzwords. Then you can formulate the proper shyster marketer's question: will enough marks consumers pay an obscene premium for something labeled "4K" over the year or two to make it a de facto standard before the "OLED"-sellers can get a "Full HD" system out the door, thus precluding them from gaining enough market share to make "OLED" the de-facto standard, which would foreclose on "4K" sales?

Google rewrites dot-doc death note

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: Changed their minds?

You don't understand, Fashtas. El Reg is never wrong. So when they originally misread Google's announcement, reality changed so that Google's announcement itself was wrong.

Google then had to change the announcement in order to make it consistent with what they'd actually done, in order to prevent their servers becoming out of sync with the new reality. Since Google's servers are so many and so well distributed, the shear forces would have ripped a hole in the fabric of reality big enough to swallow the planet.

Since The Register's re-mis-interpretation is in line with Google's actual changes, the space-time rupture has been prevented. For now.

Google settles epic US book-scanning battle with 5 publishers

Steve Knox

Re: This is the worrying bit:

I'll agree it's worrying but at the risk of playing devil's advocate here; how many companies do you know of that publish the financial specifics of their licensing deals?

Devil's advocate is quite right. How many companies do you know of that publish the financial specifics of their licensing deals -- vs -- how many should?

'It is absolute b*ll*cks that contractors aren't committed'

Steve Knox
Coat

I love this language!

It is absolute bollocks that contractors aren't committed

It's true. I've worked with dozens of contractors, and every one of them should have been committed!

New science: seas will rise due to CO2 ... but not for centuries

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: Of course this is a *computer* model of the climate.

Real scientists treat *systematic* differences between their models and reality as a clue their model is *incomplete*, and needs revision, not something to add (yet another) fudge factor to.

1. A model is by definition incomplete. If it were complete, it would be the thing it models.

2. Revision is the process of making changes to a model based on evidence that the model is not producing accurate results. This includes, among other things, identifying and including additional relevant factors. Setting aside your unscientific and unfounded pejorative term "fudge", this is indeed what climate scientists do.

3. The most suspect model is the one which always matches physical reality. It means either that the system being modeled is simple enough that a model is not necessary, or that there is a good chance that either the observations or the results are being manipulated to produce the "perfect" match.

PS. Real commentards use HTML.

NIST crowns next-gen hash algorithm Keccak as official SHA-3

Steve Knox
FAIL

NIST != NSA

Paranoid delusions aside.

Hey, Third World! We know what you need: Mmm, patent wars

Steve Knox
Facepalm

I'm sorry, sir.

We've got a patent on "A system of improving average wealth through infrastructure development. The system may include roads, irrigation, telecommunications, or anything else which may actually help a developing nation." You'll have to stop all development until you license under our very Fair and Reasonable terms of 99 percent (of gross) per capita.

Gridiron builds mutant monster using NetApp's 'other' array

Steve Knox
Happy

Flames...

"Flames... In front of my face..."

Windows System Center 2012: The review

Steve Knox
Coat

Hmmm...

Everything else is a "Manager", except System Center App Controller. Now why would MS not name the product System Center App Manager...?

Happy birthday, Compact Disc

Steve Knox
Joke

And he wrote nine of these?

... 74m minutes - sufficient to accomodate the whole of Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

74 million minutes!? that's one heck of a symphony!

Bloke jailed for being unable to use BlackBerry Messenger freed

Steve Knox
Trollface

So..

Ignorance IS an excuse, then?

'Replace crypto-couple Alice and Bob with Sita and Rama'

Steve Knox
Happy

I know our American cousins continue to miss the U from colour and call the letter Z "Zee" when it is obviously "Zed". But we tollerate their wacky ways.

Thanks for that. By the way, we also miss out that second L in "tollerate".

Firefox's birthday present to us: Teaching tech titans about DIY upstarts

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Revisionism

This is Firefox's legacy, and it's too often obscured by the waxing and waning of market share numbers. So today when we use Chrome, Opera or even Safari, we should thank Mozilla and the community that enabled this choice.

So Mozilla enabled my choice of a browser that was developed 8 years before Mozilla existed? (see http://www.opera.com/company/) Since I was already using Opera when Firefox 1.0 came out, I never had a reason to switch.

Intel: Behold the TABLETS of our partners, proof of Win8's MIGHT

Steve Knox
WTF?

Re: BBC reporting that Android Apps will run on AMD Win8 devices

"Microsoft is working hard to convince developers to make apps for Windows 8"? This was probably written by a journalist who thinks "App" is short for Apple...

So you honestly believe that a journalist intended to write that Microsoft wants to convince developers to make apples for Windows?

Politico's locked room mystery Linux install crime solved

Steve Knox
Trollface

Re: Does Richard Stallman have an alibi?

Is this your best answer ?

Hell, no. I tailor my answers to the quality of the questions.

Steve Knox
WTF?

Re: Does Richard Stallman have an alibi?

@AC - Do you have anything in particular against comments in jest by people who don't take IT issues way too seriously? In case you do, we would appreciate it if you'd not share it with us.

Mmmm, delicious new sugar batteries keep gadgets up all night

Steve Knox
Trollface

Re: Is it that time of the month again already?

It's not their fault. Vast improvements in battery power have been made in the last few decades.

But every time your "publicity whore(s)" go and make a better battery, instead of using it properly so it'll last longer, you just go and put more load on it and charge it improperly.

Now, if you took your iPhone battery and hooked it to an actual phone (say a Nokia 3310), the battery would last for about 60 years!

Steve Knox
Coat

Hmmm...

Sodium ions, eh? as in table salt?

Now they're using table sugar for the anode?

Perhaps some flour for the cathode? suspend it all in a little egg white?

Excuse my while I pop off for a little bite to eat.

Apple weekend iPhone 5 sales miss forecasts

Steve Knox
Headmaster

Spelling!

...let alone another bullish prediction of ten million...

You'vegot your i in the wrong place, and you're missing a t.

Fans revolt over Amazon 'adware' in Ubuntu desktop search results

Steve Knox
WTF?

…if a user clicks the item and purchases it, it will generate affiliate revenue that we can invest...

...These are not ads because they are not paid placement...

Wow, his bullshit rationalization meter is pegging!

Verizon CFO: 'Unlimited' data is just a word

Steve Knox
Unhappy

Re: Numbers

Try fighting a battle which wasn't lost over twenty years ago.

The Jupiter Ace: 40 years on

Steve Knox
Facepalm

4E 45 58 54

4 bytes. (Mostly) platform independent.

Steve Knox
Coat

Re: Some Forth:

Shurely NEXT is 4 bytes in any 8-bit code...?

Steve Knox

Page 3 Pics

Typical.

First one typical of any 80s' computer ad - had to include a chess picture.

Other two typical of tabloids -- pics of the model topless.

Samsung chips evicted from iPhone 5, autopsy reveals

Steve Knox

Multiple sources?

Samsung chips evicted...

The unit iFixit acquired contained Flash storage from Hynix, and 1GB of LPDDR 2 memory, built into the A6 CPU package, from Elpida.

Surely Apple sources standard parts such as Flash and DRAM from multiple suppliers? One phone not having Samsung parts doesn't necessarily indicate no phones having any Samsung parts..

Space shuttle to slip surly bonds of Earth one last time over California

Steve Knox
Coat

British Spelling

Actually, we just had a leftover u.

(Okay, it was really an n, but if you turn it upside-down, it looks just like a u! Really!)

Apple iOS 6 review

Steve Knox
Joke

First Maps Pic

should read "Just a stone's throw away!"

Juries: The only reason ANYONE understands patent law AT ALL

Steve Knox
Thumb Down

Translate me a Spaceship

"The goal should be to encourage translation of scientific terms into understandable concepts, rather than to indulge jargon by creating its own forum."

This sentence underlines the assumption in the entire quote in the article, and the wishful thinking in the article itself: that you can translate highly technical information into plain language, which non-experts can absorb and understand within the time span of, e.g, a jury trial lasting less than an year, without losing some important detail.

That is absurd on its face.

Microsoft, RIM ink new licensing agreement

Steve Knox
Joke

Ah-Hah!

Last year, Redmond was reportedly pressuring Samsung to cough up $15 per phone,

So that's where the Korean company got its idea of FRAND licensing terms...

Windows 8: Never mind Office, it's for GAMING

Steve Knox
Happy

@RICHTO

Ah, the standard Microsoft line: "This will come with <insert future release here>"

Usually to be followed by "<The only feature anyone actually wanted> had to be cut from this release due to <insert plausible-sounding excuse here>"

Motorola Razr i hands-on review

Steve Knox
Paris Hilton

Re: Catch a death...

From what does one tear a new vulture? Are there vulture dispensers out there with rolls of vulture-paper?

All you need to know about nano SIMs - before they are EXTERMINATED

Steve Knox
Paris Hilton

Re: Really dumb idea

SIM-less works fine if the consumer is in control. But if the operators are in control then it's a bad idea.

Apple's idea was to let the consumer sign up for network access via iTunes as easily as just buying a song or downloading a movie.

So, that would be moving from the operators being in control to Apple being in control... more of a lateral move than an improvement, methinks...

Office to propel Windows tablets past Android in 2015

Steve Knox

Now I know you're taking the piss

I figured from the incessant use of an inappropriate icon, but this clinches it:

"Windows tablets...run a secure OS...managed without a farm of additional crap"

Nobody in their right mind could honestly type that statement.

New hottest-ever extreme temperature records now easier to achieve

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: Make up your minds

"No evidence has been put forward to suggest that the reading is incorrect, merely supposition.

I think rather the evidence suggesting the reading might be correct has been shown to be suspect.

There is no "benefit of the doubt" clause in scientific measurement. If there's significant reason to believe a measurement is suspect, it's expunged. In this case, we have a single measurement, without corroboration, with known complicating factors.

Dropbox drops JavaScript, brews CoffeeScript

Steve Knox
Mushroom

Re: Sort of makes sense. Possibly.

Less lines of code = less bugs and easier maintenance.

Please stop repeating this bullshit.

In the first place, the complexity of code hasn't been measured in lines since before the first obfuscated C contest.

In the second place, any adequately incompetent coder can code one crap line just as easily as one thousand.