* Posts by Steve Knox

1972 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2011

Climate scientists see 'tipping point' ahead

Steve Knox
Coffee/keyboard

Re: I can understand no argument against doing more research

12) Total email spam elimination for $500,000

13) An actual workable replacement for AV software for $500,000

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!

Sorry, but if you're going to put forth hypotheticals, you could at least make them somewhat plausible.....

Techies beg world to join the 1% on IPv6 launch day

Steve Knox

Re: Supporting old kit would show real commitment.

[i]THAT may not be possible with some REAL old kit.[/i]

I agree -- but it should be possible to do for pretty much anything made in at least the past 5 years. If not, then the original kit was poorly designed to begin with. IPv6 has only been a standard for 14 years, FFS.

Steve Knox
Meh

Biggest Little Step

"Home networking kit makers are taking perhaps the biggest step, by shipping IPv6-enabled kit as default."

How about shipping firmware updates to existing kit...?

Shipping new kit just shows a commitment to making money. Supporting old kit would show real commitment.

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

Steve Knox
Boffin

Re: Seriously thought about gettig an A440

You'd only need a 32-bit CPU to natively address 640MB (actually what you'd need is a CPU with an address bus at least 30 bits wide.)

The 80286 did come with an on-chip MMU , which allowed for logical addressing up to 1GB in protected mode, but sadly it was limited to 16MB of physical RAM (24-bit address bus). You could use additional hardware to provide bank switching (a la Expanded Memory), but I don't personally know of this being used to access up to 640MB of RAM.

Facebookers trigger vote to choke Zuck's data suck

Steve Knox
Holmes

Re: Facebook ?

Well, you could follow their advice and read about how they use cookies.

Then you can make an informed decision as to whether to continue using the site or not.

Steve Knox
Black Helicopters

Convenient

Lucky for FaceBook there's this "user vote" clause for them to hide behind anytime a regulator wants them to change their privacy policies...

Windows 8: We kick the tyres on Redmond's new tablet wheels

Steve Knox
Happy

Re: Just not interested

Maybe one day I'll be able to download any arbitrarily selected PC game from Steam and run it successfully under Wine on Linux. If / when that day comes, Wine will have achieved the level of compatibility required for people to seriously consider moving legacy binaries to Linux. Not before.

Maybe -- although Wine may actually not be a prerequisite... http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/26/valve_suggests_steam_for_linux_is_close/

Steve Knox
Joke

Re: I finally get it! It all makes sense now...

I'm laughing -- I just patented concave corners!

'Super-powerful' Flame worm actually boring bloatware

Steve Knox

Re: Would a government require AV vendors based in it to miss malware it created?

WHY would a government require AV vendors based in it[s jurisdiction] to miss malware it created?

Given that there is no jurisdiction that adequately covers all AV vendors, said government would have to make the malware as difficult to detect as possible anyway.

Disclosing the existence of the malware to people in its jurisdiction [especially those most likely to incur financial losses in the event their collusion were discovered] would significantly increase the risk of the malware being detected.

Steve Knox
Holmes

"...most vendors spinning that Flame did not spread very far and that was the reason why it escaped detection for so long."

The real question is when did it first spread to a machine with an active, licensed, up-to-date antivirus/antimalware installation on it. Because that's exactly when this excuse became invalid.

Steve Jobs speaks from beyond grave: 'iPads are toys'

Steve Knox

Where Steve Jobs Got It Wrong

I've marked the salient points in bold in the quote below:

If you've got a bunch of rich guys who can afford their third computer, you know they have a desktop, a portable and now they're going to have a tablet to read with: that's your market.

An average laptop today costs about the same as the average desktop did back when Mr. Jobs said this. Technology has progressed such that an average laptop has about the same power as a high-end desktop did back then (indeed, laptops back then were not better for much more than what people use tablets for now). But user's needs have not grown as fast as the technology (and the portability of a laptop/tablet is seen as a valued feature) so people are opting for a laptop as their primary computer, and a tablet for their low-end computer, where it would have been desktop/laptop before.

So no need for a third computer; just an upgrade cycle.

Universe has more hydrogen than we thought

Steve Knox

Re: @sarev

"Penguin, 'cos everyone knows what they're like."

Not as tasty as ducks?

Depends how you cook 'em.

Firm applies for .sucks domain

Steve Knox
Joke

Re: Why not .bitch?

I believe a certain Mr. Z. has dibs on that one...

Open API lessons for LinkedIn and Facebook

Steve Knox
Holmes

All you need to know about social networking sites

You're not the customer. You're the product.

All of the various social networks' behaviors described in the article derive logically from this simple concept.

Online bookie can't scoop £50k losses made by 5-year-old

Steve Knox

Re: More Red Tape alert!

One of the tenets of the Unfair Contract Terms rules seems to be that you need to be able to negotiate, in order for it to be a fair contract.

Not always. From the article, the requirement to negotiate apparently only applies to terms which might cause "a significant imbalance in the parties' rights and obligations arising under the contract, to the detriment of the consumer". So these Ts&Cs, for example, may be fine if the organization writing them has accepted a reasonable balance of liability.

I'd say a good rule of thumb is "don't draft a contract you wouldn't sign (as a consumer)."

Dot-word bidders in last-minute dash after ICANN reveals timetable

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: Order of application

That would mean an inevitable first-minute rush instead.

Not without time travel -- the first minute was almost six months ago. And with the last minute almost here, there wouldn't be much point of a rush now, would there?

Lenovo plans clip-on physical keyboard for tablets

Steve Knox
WTF?

Lenovo Patents Giant Tablet!?

Based on the size of those hands, I'd estimate the tablet to be approximately 12" x 15" -- with a 3" border around the screen!

Either that, or they expect these to be used by infants and toddlers.

China claims piracy at new low

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Thanks.

You've forced me, early on a Monday morning (and a holiday over here to boot) to ponder one of the great imponderables of our time:

Who is less credible, the Chinese government or the BSA?

LG shows off 'first' full HD LCD for smartphones

Steve Knox
Flame

Finally.

Now can they make a 15" laptop display with this resolution?

Microsoft corrects itself: 'We expect fewer people to use Windows 8'

Steve Knox
Happy

Dworkin, eh?

Good with patterns, is he?

Diablo III dev rolls 12d6, scores PC sales record

Steve Knox
FAIL

Re: Remember...

...do not criticise this game in their forums. You will be banned and lose access to the game.

Never been to Blizzard's forums, then? All they are made up of is users repeatedly criticizing their games -- and not being banned for it.

As for the rest of your post, it's the same drivel from people who've never played a modern PC game. I had way more trouble with the crap CD rootkit DRM they used to include with games than I've had with the online check-in type.

Passwords are for AES-holes

Steve Knox
Mushroom

Re: In fact it is not

"The point, for those thickos who've missed it (which is all of you so far!), is not that I don't know how to type accurately without being able to see what I'm doing -- I'm a sysadmin, of course I can do that. Users mostly can't."

And there's the elitism that our industry is famous for: IT pros are perfect; users are useless. Well, Aaron, fuck you. You're wrong, and you probably know it.

Show me a study. Show me numbers that prove sysadmins are better typists than average users, and I still won't believe you.

I deal with "users" on a daily basis, and the ones I know are better at typing than I am, and I'd have no problem with Correct Horse Battery Staple.

Top Facebook exec begs students: 'Click on an ad or two'

Steve Knox
Headmaster

Re: And my ad is

"Sorry that's how the world got in to its current economic mess, to much credit."

To much credit for whom?

WTF is... Li-Fi?

Steve Knox
Devil

How long...

before someone figures out a long bit pattern which compresses to almost entirely zeroes, leading punters to think the lights have gone out?

Anonymous hacktivists dump 1.7GB load slurped from DoJ site

Steve Knox
Coat

Re: An End to Corruption

Anonymous is just engaging in some post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.

Post hack ergo propter hack?

Steve Knox
WTF?

Re: Worrying...

Since the compromised server was used primarily for the storage and dissemination of public data, I'd hope that they'd be most concerned with verifying that the data was not altered, rather than that it was taken.

I'd also expect the DoJ not to release specific details about what they're actually doing for damage control, and they haven't.

So I'm not sure exactly what you're actually worried about.

NVIDIA VGX VDI: New tech? Or rehashed hash?

Steve Knox

Critical Path

This demo was obviously running on a LAN...

First: nope, the demo wasn’t running on a LAN. Grady Cofer from Industrial Light & Magic actually went out to their server farm and made adjustments to the Avengers and Battleship footage on the fly.

Fair enough. What kind of WAN connection was he using? 100Mb/s? 10Mb/s 5? More importantly, what was the latency?

If you're streaming an FPS* game, the maximum tolerable latency (just for the video) would be 33ms (that would give you 30fps** - a rock-bottom standard in FPS* gaming.) I've seen worse (by an order of magnitude) on 10Mb/s connections. You can't buffer the video, because it's (ostensibly) interactive -- you don't know what the next frame will be until you've processed the user input.

For commercial render farms, yes, this is definitely a game changer. But for online gaming? The GPU->NIC path isn't the critical path.The WAN is.

* first-person shooter (not frames per second).

** frames per second (not first-person shooter).

Noise can improve quantum computing, says ANU scientist

Steve Knox
Thumb Up

"This means, simply, that if a qubit starts in a “1” state, it will eventually emit a photon and fall to a “0” state...

Dr Carvalho’s solution is two-fold: first, to add noise (as photons, using a laser) back into a qubit before the state-decay takes place..."

So, essentially, in this way qubits act similarly to DRAM, requiring a refresh (as opposed to NVRAM). That's probably simplifying a bit, but I'd hope it's a good analogy for this crowd.

Of course, the mechanism to do this refresh, and the second part about the added noise essentially keeping the quantum uncertainty alive is well beyond my mortal ken...

Facebook's Eduardo Saverin: I'm not a tax-dodger

Steve Knox
Joke

Re: Missing 0?

No, that's a decimal comma: $148.00

Times are REALLY tough.

RIM-Moto sketch THIRD nanoSIM design as peace offering

Steve Knox

Software SIMs?

I though Apple et al were trying to get rid of the plastic bits altogether?

Iran threatens to chuck sueball at Google over missing gulf

Steve Knox
Joke

Re: How about "Arabian/Persian Gulf"?

Too long. How 'bout "Perbian Gulf"?

Iran gets 6/7 of what they want, Arabians get 5/7 (albeit not in exact order.)

75,000 Raspberry Pi baked before August

Steve Knox
Headmaster

Re: @ James Hughes

I count 22 s's in James Hughes' post and two apostrophes. One of these is correctly used (it's for it is) and one is incorrectly used (who's for whose).

If you're going to make a snarky grammar-related comment (and trust me, they're generally better received here than on other forums) at least take the time to make it somewhat appropriate, and have the decency to post with a pseudonym rather than AC. We do have some standards.

IMDb

Steve Knox

Re: I uninstalled it ages ago

YOUR LOCATION > COARSE (NETWORK-BASED) LOCATION Well, it needs that for "Here's what's playing near you", obviously.

NETWORK COMMUNICATION > FULL INTERNET ACCESS

NETWORK COMMUNICATION > VIEW NETWORK STATE

NETWORK COMMUNICATION > RECEIVE DATA FROM INTERNET Makes sense for an internet app...

SYSTEM TOOLS >PREVENT TABLET/PHONE FROM SLEEPING Huh? Anyone got a good rationale for it needing this?

HARDWARE CONTROLS > CONTROL VIBRATOR Pull the other one.

Steve Knox
Happy

Re: imdb

I seem to remember having an offline copy of the imdb way back when.

You still can.

http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

Lasers battle cattle farts!

Steve Knox
Coat

Re: Which End of the Apatasaurus?

Shurely the gas end?

'Shame on the register to post wrong informations'

Steve Knox

Re: To the editors of The Registers.

It would be on-topic if you posted it on the following forum instead:

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/03/21/Drewc_New_Forum_Wishlist_-_but_read_roadmap_first/

Steve Knox

Re: Irony

Andrew gets hit panties in a bundle over TPB allegedly attacking sites and deleting content,

Yes, I suppose you could describe his reaction that way -- although it may be a form of thought crime to refer to Andrew Orlowski and panties in a possessive manner...

but isn't that what the authorities do to the likes of MegaUpload?

Ummm....no. The authorities took MegaUpload through a very different mechanism. The technical term is "legal action". I won't go into the details, but look it up sometime. It's a fascinating topic. Furthermore they didn't delete any content. There were some concerns that content would be lost as a side-effect of that legal action, but as far as I know, those concerns have for the most part been answered.

Actions that Andrew supports. Isn't that also hypocritical?

It would be, if an illegal action by a non-authoritative entity is considered the same thing as an act of law enforcement supported by authority. Is that how you see the world?

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: Drivel - As Usual

Unlike Mr orlovski I work in the creative industry...

So you don't consider writing part of "the creative industry", then? Which specific "creative industry" are you talking about? Last I knew there were quite a few industries where creative activity (esp. that which benefits from copyright protection) formed the core of the industry.

But that does not mean I don't get bloody angry when I see copyright being used as nothing more than a tool to restrict freedom, make money and criminalise ordinary people.

I think you've lost me there, friend. What can you do with copyright except restrict what others can you do with your material? Even the open source licenses such as GPL use copyright to set down a list of what can and cannot be done with the creative material.

Yes, often that restriction is used to make money, and if we lived in a society which rewarded creative endeavors with goods in kind, that would not be necessary. But we don't live in such a society at this point in time.

As for criminalising ordinary people, the only person who can "criminalise" one is oneself, either through ignorance of or deliberate breaking of applicable law. If you believe the law is unjust, there are various ways in which you can work to change it. If you believe you must break the law*, that is your option as a free individual, but you should expect to face the consequences.

There are many ways to bring to light issues with and abuses of the current copyright system. Breaching copyright should be the method of last resort. I encourage you to speak up, in this forum and in others, enumerating the flaws you see in the current system. We all know it isn't perfect, so simply reiterating that fact adds nothing to the debate.

*Although why anyone feels they need to do so for the type of material on TPB is beyond me -- none of it is necessary for a healthy, happy life, and much of isn't even worth the time needed to download it.

Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM

Steve Knox

Re: Wow.

"Wow" was just my reaction at the concept. I can't take credit for the unintentional pun, fitting though it is.

As for what we might expect to happen, expectations are not evidence. Mozilla is not claiming that Microsoft is likely to do this, but that it is in fact doing so. For such a definitive claim, I'd like to see definitive evidence.

Steve Knox
WTF?

Wow.

That means that IE on ARM has access to win32 APIs – even when it's running in Metro mode, but no other Metro browser has that same access. Without that access, no other browser has a prayer of being competitive with IE.

That's the first time I've seen anyone call using win32 APIs a competitive advantage.

Seriously, if Microsoft is "porting" IE by bloating WOA with ancient libraries, WOA and IE on it will be dogs.

The technical info I've seen implies that the third mode (so-called "Metro-style-enabled" mode) uses a form of thunking - loading generic code which will then calls platform-specific code based on what libraries are actually available -- meaning that a Metro-style-enabled app on WOA would only have access to Metro mode. This is contrary to what Mozilla is saying.

Has anyone actual evidence that IE on ARM will call win32 APIs in "Classic" mode?

PHP devs lob second patch at super-critical CGI bug

Steve Knox
Joke

Pick a side!

...releasing a new set of patches on Tuesday, 8 May 8.

Now I know El Reg tries to be accommodating to us on this side of the pond, but we can read dates in your format, backwards as it may be. There's no need to try to splice the two formats together.

US TV overlords retreat from White Space invaders

Steve Knox
Coat

but it turns out that's both impossible and impractical

Good thing, too. I was worried for a spell that it might turn out to be impossible but entirely practical and was not looking forward to the ensuing destruction of reality.

Apple's HTML5 bet against Android extermination

Steve Knox
Trollface

Apple? Innovate? Hah!

iPod (innovation) >> Macbook Pro / unibody (innovation) >> iPhone (innovation) >> iPad (innovation)

s/b

iPod (copy of Rio, other existing MP3 players with a bit of flash added) >> Macbook Pro / unibody (standard laptop with a bit of flash added) >> iPhone (Blackberry with a bit of flash added) >> iPad (Tablet PC with a bit of flash added)

The only thing Apple has ever done is put a shiny veneer on existing technology. Yes, there is some value in that, but that's NOT innovation.

Now, I supported an Andrew Orlowski piece yesterday, so if you want to make this my most downvoted comment ever, you'll have to bring quite a few sock puppets to bear.

The Pirate Bay cries foul over Pirate Bay copycats

Steve Knox
Trollface

Whoooooosh

All of those people complaining that Andrew has missed the point have missed the point.

It's not about why The Pirate Bay dislikes these sites.

It's about the fact that TPB is well within their legal rights to get these sites shut down, but they won't because it doesn't fit with their ideology.

It's about the fact that the very attitude towards IP that is the soul of TPB is now being used to take advantage of their users, and the best TPB can do (without being complete hypocrites) are these weak advisories.

Apple 'iTV' looks like Cinema Display, says Throat

Steve Knox
Happy

Re: Deliberate typo to prevent extraditions..

So close.. I'd love to give you credit for that, but since the entire interjection reads:

- most likely rather bigger, given Apple's focus on the US [emphasis mine], where punters have room for enormo sets -

I'm afraid I can't. Nice try though.

Pirate island attracts more than 100 startup tenants

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: Waterworld

I love the idea of this sort of venture and I object to countries making sovereign claims over every damn bit of the world...

Absolutely. So much better if corporations do so, instead.

US gov boffins achieve speeds faster than light

Steve Knox
Headmaster

Parsing

I'm pretty sure the article meant:

"...managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum..."

rather than:

"...managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum..."

which would actually be meaningless because the speed of light is not constant (without respect to the medium through which it is traveling.)

Facebook button triggers tidal wave of human organs

Steve Knox
Happy

Re: Breaking News ....

"Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown..."

Google Street View Wi-Fi data slurper named

Steve Knox
Facepalm

Re: Huh ?

No, AC, you missed the point.

Google always intended and openly admitted to intent to collect SSIDs to build their own database of access points. THAT is the bone of contention between Google and SkyHook. It's a purely business spat which doesn't have serious privacy implications.

But Google denied that it intentionally collected unencrypted payload data. This FCC report belies that position.

It's the payload data, not the SSIDs, which can be used to identify and link individual devices and activities. This is the privacy issue, which Google claimed was the mistake made because of one "rogue engineer', about which this article was ostensibly written.

The SkyHook case is tangential at best to the privacy issue and vice versa.