Posts by Steve Knox

@Boothy

Well, 40+ hours is less that the 72 hours I mentioned, isn't it?

Color coding didn't exist in Oblivion, either (Black-and white was a stylistic choice -- Oblivion was brown-and-tan) . Nor did categorization. This interface is a progression from the Oblivion interface.

More to the point, you've been playing for over 40 hours and STILL haven't learned to add stuff you use during battle to your favorites and bring it up with the Q key or assign it 1 - 8? I learned that in the first 2 hours!

The author of this article is a troll.

You're on The Register. Get used to it.

@Technophobe -- apt handle!

"Where is this going to come from with company accounts stretched to the limit paying for the more important things?"

Well, if IT staff is not that important to you, don't pay them that much. Pay what you believe is reasonable. Then when nobody wants the job, take a look at what your IT staff actually do and get it through your thick head that you get what you pay for.

All your base are belong to us

@higher base -- well, most modern computers do their processing in 32-bit or 64-bit chunks, but we don't generally call them base 4,294,967,296 or base 18,446,744,073,709,551,616. They commonly have a character width of one byte, but we don't call them base 256.

Think of it this way:

nucleotide = digit (CS equiv = bit)

codon = character (CS equiv = byte)

So base-4 with a 3-digit default character width would be a better *ahem* characterization.

NO.

1. He did use two telescopes: Keck and VLT

2. The two telescopse are in different hemispheres, but they do not face in opposite directions. They are separated by 45 degrees of latitude. This means that their vectors diverge by half of a right angle.

3. While (2) does mean that they observe different areas of the sky, there is some overlap, some of which was used in the study.

4. Both telescopes produced both above- and below-expected measurements.

5. The dipole is not in alignment with the vector of either telescope.

All of this I got from reading the full abstract from arxiv. Pay close attention to fig.5 (supplementary at the end of the pdf) -- it summarizes most of the points above nicely.

Nope!

The first quote is from Timothy, not Jesus. The second is from Paul.

The only statements directly attributed to Jesus are in the Gospels (and possibly Revelations.)

If you'd actually bothered to read even the report's table of contents...

You'd have quickly seen that it's a narrowly-scoped report which deals specifically with economic secrets leaking from the US to other countries. It's not about individual countries and governments being responsible for hacking, but about loss of information of economic value from the US.

Hacking between US entities is outside the scope of this particular report because the information remains within the country. Hacking of foreign entities by US entities is out of scope because it would result in information gain, not loss.

So that's why they're not mentioned (and should not be) in this specific report.

Bit like...

blaming the weatherman for the clouds, isn't that?

We have about as much control over the phenomena that economists measure as we do over the weather. The only problem is that some of us don't understand that (ironically, usually the same people who don't believe how much we affect the weather...)

56k? You were lucky!

All we had was 300baud -- and we had to squeak the handshaking into phone ourselves!

e..e..e..rrrrrrglbfrgalfb

Yes

The way BlackBerry is going, their quality will eventually sink to those depths.

@jtr7670 - : D That's the kind of intelligent discourse I come here for!

@Mike Kamermans ("Humans don't solve Rubic's cube puzzles without knowing the rules for getting colors from one spot to another spot, either.") -- Some of us do. The first solver HAD to.

("But if we're going to talk philosophy, robotics and AI aren't about making robots "intelligent"") You're right about general robotics, but: Expand the acronym "AI", please. Then either change it or GTFO.

("Never mind that on a technical note, intelligence is an a posteriori evaluation, not a guiding quality. The actually useful quality measure is success at a task. Someone or something that has the potential to fail a task but achieves success, is said to be "intelligent", whereas someone or something that fails the task is said to not be intelligent (and someone or something that lacks the ability to fail cannot be rated). So talking about intelligence for robots is nonsense in the first place.")

Well, if you use that horrible definition for intelligence, no wonder you are unable to apply it to anything. Try this one on for size: the ability to learn -- or in more task-oriented language: the ability to 1) create strategies for dealing with a task, 2) test those strategies in a meaningful manner, 3) select and refine the successful strategies for application to the defined task, and 4) generalize those strategies for analogous tasks as well. Most AI nowadays can actually do 2 and 3 quite well, but need human intervention for 1 and 4. On a scientific note, intelligence defined this way IS measurable (although it takes careful testing and long-term observation) and meaningful.

@Richard Wharram ("That's how speed-cubers solve the cube.") I don't care about speed-cubers.

I care about the fact that every time a machine is built to perform a menial task faster than a human can, the mass media (unfortunately including El Reg in this case) use that as a proxy for intelligence, and the people and companies involved are all too happy to perpetuate that misconception, as it gets them some camera time and often lots of colored pieces of paper.

Mike Kamermans is right when he says that modern robotics and software is about optimizing systems to perform menial tasks to allow us to be intelligent, he's just sadly mistaken when he lumps AI theory into those fields.

Oh, and Anonymous Coward down below, as long as you include militant Atheism in your list of fundamentalist religions, I'm right with you on that one!

Loose, v.t.

To shoot, discharge, let fly.

It's what happens when you open the case and spin up the drive. Centifugal force and all that. Bits go all over the place. 40 trillion of them are almost impossible to clean up.

Not So

'"commodity territory, where they’re still amply rewarded"

contradiction in terms but they'll probably want to think so.'

No contradiction. Commodity doesn't depend on price (Gold is a commodity, and it's doing pretty well these days.) A commodity is simply something which is homogeneous across vendors -- something which app code _SHOULD_ have been from day one.

Fixes Something

Well, .bank could definitely fix the corporate issue, as there would be a vetting process.

Part of the vetting process could be a security check (e.g, does your site require TLS 1.1+), which could help fix the technical issues.

So it could fix "anything", but it's certainly not going to fix "everything".

But no, let's piss on partial solutions and wait for a system that fixes everything. That would truly be pointless.

Didn't

SiS try that...?

Yes, you do.

"No, surely not. Large hashes are sufficient; look at how e.g. git works. It uses a 160-bit hash. Presumably you can make arguments about being more likely to be hit by a comet than to suffer a hash collision."

Only an idiot would make such an argument. Even a potential cometary collision is a rare event. Furthermore any cometary collision decreases the chance of a future event, as the comet involved is removed from the roster of collision candidates. Finally a cometary collision is, given the current state of technology, difficult to avoid.

A potential hash collision, on the other hand, is guaranteed to happen every block write after the first. And every block hashed increases the chance that the next block will suffer a collision, as there are more blocks to collide with.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_attack, an ideal hash function would have, on average , roughly one collision for every 1.25 * sqrt (2^160) = 1.25*2^80 unique blocks hashed. 1TB = 2^28 blocks, so on average, you'd see a collision once every 4TB of unique data. (Git uses 160-bit hashes for its objects. Since very few code projects have 2^40, let alone 2^80, objects associated with them (linux kernel 2.6.30 [the latest version for which I could find this statistic] has approximately 28,000 (i.e, less than 2^15) files), and collisions between projects would not be a problem, Git would rarely if ever have a collision issue.)

But since many of the organizations using these dedupe technologies have petabytes of data, (and can write terabytes per hour) and collisions are _100%_AVOIDABLE_ (simply by doing the bitwise comparison you so quickly disparage), dedupe developers have wisely chosen to compare blocks when hashes match rather than assuming that they are the same when there's ever-increasing probability that they are not.

Jobs's birth father was Syrian-born Abdulfattah Jandali -- I'm guessing that's close enough for these morons -- or they just want some more publicity.

Please consider these people the worst that our poor country has to offer, and don't judge the rest of us by their stupidity. And Please, PLEASE, waste no more column space or bits on them.

I believe you'll find the Note has a stylus, but doesn't require a stylus. While a stylus-free touch interface is cool for consuming content, it's very difficult to create content (e.g, taking notes*) well without a precision device like a stylus. People's fingers are just too fat.

* See what I did there? Yeah, I did that thing.

"Chrome behaves in some respects like a trojan. It just happens to be that the users have asked it to behave like that."

A trojan is by definition software that does things that users have specifically NOT asked it to do.

Chrome behaves in some respects like _spyware_.

Android killer?

You can't kill what's deep inside you.

Yeah but no but yeah but..

"don't forget that when these apps were written ie6 was STANDARD."

Except it wasn't. There were established standards and ie6 was deliberately written to be incompatible with them. (Earlier versions were, to give MS the benefit of the doubt, accidentally incompatible with the HTML and CSS standards, but MS made the conscious decision to make IE6 default to IE5 compatibility, rather than standards compatibility.)

"now 10 years later we have the situation that ie6 is still firmly entrenched in businesses because standards have changed and newer browsers dont work in the same way, companies have a few options."

Correction: standards have, for the most part, NOT changed. Microsoft has (to some degree) given up on trying to change them to their (non-standard) way. This isn't entirely one-sided, however. Some good standards changes were actually begun by Microsoft (XMLHTTPRequest, for example).

As for the options companies have, you've missed one:

4. Investigate whether the app is ACTUALLY incompatible with IE7/8/9 -- I've seen quite a few cases where companies read "IE6" in the system requirements line and gave up without even trying.

In most cases, one could write to the standard and not really fall foul of any IE6/standard problems. It was only when writing (then edgy) CSS styles or (then bleeding-edge) AJAX applications or (sadly all-too-common) crappy browser sniffers that would break even when minor versions of IE were changed that problems arose.

But developers being what they are, they wrote to the bleeding edge, and now we're suffering the bloody consequences.

"Lawful"

Actually, it could easily be argued that, without the word "lawful", the FCC rules would be deemed unenforceable as they would be tantamount to government endorsement of crime. While logically absured, that position is legally defensible, and given the deep pockets of many of those opposed to these rules, they'd find a lawyer to do it.

As mentioned above, "lawful" in the US still means (at least at the time of this writing) "not expressly forbidden."

In general, yes, the rules are pretty good. For those upset about the mobile laxity, remember that the US is slightly behind the rest of the world in mobile technology, so over here it's still much slower and more expensive for the operators to implement than fixed data services.

@DZ-Jay

"But nobody is trying. Everybody is too busy patting themselves in the back coming up with random ideas that do not necessarily add value, nor solves any real problem. And when they're not, they're lamenting how "big business" gets in their way."

Virgin tried. They created a value-adding product by working with the existing industry -- and that's what killed their project.

I tried. I created my University's first website in 1994. It was essentially an intranet before that term was even coined. It allowed students to research options, plan their courses with their advisors. Then the head of admissions heard that a website could be used for advertising. We sat down and discussed it, he promised to make sure any changes would keep the useful parts. The resulting site, built by his consultants, was a proprietary abortion which was useless for students, and didn't even work in most versions of Netscape (which it was ostensibly built for.) Access to the course catalog, staff directories, building maps, all the useful bits had been removed.

A lot of people are still trying. The problem is, for each one of us running around getting the necessary approvals and building actual functionality, dozens of hacks are throwing stuff out there without getting anyone's approval. So we get lost in the static. Even when one of us gets through all of the hoops and manages to get something of value out there, there's likely a pirate equivalent that's been there for several years that's crap but free, so people jump on it.