This is antique?
Made me feel quite, quite old....
Posts by Jeremy 2
268 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jun 2009
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
AWS CISO needs permission to visit his data centres
Thursday 17th May 2012 12:13 GMT
RIM built a data centre a few miles down the road from me in Georgia a year or two ago. The building is anonymous, bland looking and has no corporate branding or anything of the sort. There's a serious looking guy in a booth at the gate. It's clear that they would rather we mere mortals not know what that building is, although that probably wasn't helped by Google slapping a lovely map marker on top of it (now removed). Whoops.
Tourists follow GPS, drive into sea
New Yorker sues Apple: 'Misleading and deceptive' Siri ads
Raspberry Pi ship date slips
Go back to the future with Red Dwarf
Boffins give chatty robots a creepy human face
Union enraged by secret driverless Tube plan
Tuesday 25th October 2011 19:12 GMT
@AC - ODFO :)
"Bizarrely you think there needs to be an "oh-shit" button, as if a human in the dark is able to see obstructions any better than a (say) radar system."
Reduce operational costs by implementing track-scanning radar on every train? Seriously? What planet are you on where that kind of tech would be cheaper?
Heck it's probably not even possible. There's a thousand bits and pieces that should be down there, how do you pick out the one thing that shouldn't be no margin for error? You can't design something like that to fail-safe without causing mass public inconvenience (stopping every time there's a greater than zero chance that the track is obstructed - you'd never move). That makes it inherently unsuited to the railway.
Tunnels are a non issue (pretty much), as mentioned previously they're inherently more secure. As is the DLR in it's mostly elevated or underground locations, for that matter. Most of the underground is not actually underground and it's those open sections where shit heads with shopping trolleys and lumps of concrete lurk that are the problem.
Tuesday 25th October 2011 14:39 GMT
You've missed something.
The DLR was designed from the start to be driverless. It's a lot slower than the tube and still requires a staff member on each train to drive manually from time to time. The tube and the SSR were not designed to be driverless and all the infrastructure needed to make it so isn't there and especially in the case of the deep-level lines, can't be easily added without great expense.
With today's tech, you just can't have driverless trains that run at 50mph in the open (e.g. basically the entire network outside the city centre) with just a fence between the trains and the outside world. For starters, you need a fleshy thing up front who's able to hit the "Oh shit" button when some yobbo puts a (non-conductive) lump of wood or concrete onto the tracks. Do you trust a computer to see stuff like that quickly enough to stop short? You need staff on a train to be able to safely evacuate passengers if needed in tunnels that are only a few inches wider than the train and the only evacuation route is along the train and out the front/back onto potentially live rails. Either that or you need to re-bore every line with an evacuation/service tunnel, ala the Channel Tunnel. I wonder how much that would cost and who would pay for it. Would you like to sit in a tunnel for 45 minutes in August while somebody walks from the nearest station to reset some safety cut-out when a driver on board could do it in 5? The list goes on and on and on.
The uneducated think 'Oh yeah, driverless trains, that's easy, DLR, right!?'. Well actually, it's not easy. The basic driving and stopping of the train can be handled automatically, yes and has been in use on part of the tube since the '60s. The problem is the edge cases, there are so many and they're so varied that the cheapest and simplest way to deal with them is to pay somebody to sit at the front.
Linehan turns IT Crowd off but NOT on again
Flashback: The Quest for Identity
Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56
Facebook: 'We don't track logged-out users'
F1 2011
Blue Screen of Death gets makeover for Windows 8
Typo-squatting domains can harvest corporate emails
The Reg dips toe into social media ocean
Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO
Thursday 25th August 2011 01:39 GMT
Not really.
He's a seven-year survivor of pancreatic cancer. It really doesn't need to be spelled out, the likely reason he's stepping aside (as if "that day has come." doesn't do exactly that). There's no need to be callous at this time (although this being the internet, some doubtless will be).
Nintendo aims to fill stockings with Wii slim
Sky wins TV riot battle
Tuesday 9th August 2011 14:54 GMT
Re: Not so fail.
It was replaced with a different vid (presumably a copy of the same).
Here's another of note:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXcI-NL3Tro
Thief: "Are you a journalist?"
Stone: "No, I live here. I'm just astounded at what you're doing..."
Theif: "Well we're getting our taxes back, innit?"
Ugh....... She's probably not paid a penny of tax in her life.
Game graphics could be 100,000 times better
Wednesday 3rd August 2011 21:20 GMT
Yeahbut...
Procedural generation would reduce some of the footprint but still the question is how much storage did that scene require with that level of detail? Multiply it by whatever factor you'd need to increase the complexity of the scene by to make it "good enough" for a modern title and... well I still think it's going to be 'rather a lot'...
And anyway, if using procedural generation does circumvent obnoxiously large storage requirements, surely it just shifts it over onto the GPU/CPU load instead...
Wednesday 3rd August 2011 09:06 GMT 
So tell me this...
Aside from "production problems", just how much storage would you need to hold the maps from a typical modern game at a resolution of "64 'atoms' per cubic millimetre"??? Assuming each and every point needs, at bare minimum an RGB colour value and a light level, methinks (without so much as a beermat calculation) that the maps for an average game would probably need more storage than most sizeable research establishments have on hand, as evidenced by their small 'island' demo having 21 TRILLION polygons/data points/whatever.
It's a lovely idea in terms of prettiness but it's totally, totally unrealistic until we have storage devices with many, many thousands of times today's capacities... You don't have to look particularly closely at the example screens/vid to see that, while impressive looking, there's a hell of a lot of object repetition, which is presumably a careful way of skirting around the storage requirements problem. Everything is just a few stock objects rotated which obviously just wouldn't fly in a AAA title.
Thousands of gb.com sites go dark
Monday 1st August 2011 15:10 GMT
Re: Re: Nominet
"if you do have issues getting a domain transferred to another registrar you can simply go direct to Nominet, pay them £10 (again going from memory) and they'll do it direct without involving the troublesome registrar."
Yep, dead easy too. Did this not too long ago to get a domain that 1&1 wouldn't let go of. Moving a site for a friend, they started playing silly buggers for reasons best known to themselves and wouldn't do it. So I paid Nominet their tenner to change the IPS tag, yanked it out from underneath them and instructed the owner to cancel their DD with the company. Job done in 15 minutes & friend freed from crazily overpriced and under-featured hosting account...
Police arrest alleged LulzSec hacker 'topiary' in Scotland
'War texting' hacks car systems and possibly much more
LulzSec says it will partner with media on Murdoch emails
Thursday 21st July 2011 15:16 GMT 
I reckon they've got emails but....
I reckon they have got a trove of emails, which led to them gloating about it initially but on closer inspection, they've found that they're boring as hell and contain nothing juicy... Hence stalling for time and clamouring for a media partner to take some of the slack when they're eventually released with a whimper...
If they had anything worthwhile, they'd have released it by now.
Atlantis computer goes down: Fixed by 'nauts
Apple users complain over MobileMe 'censorware'
Google field tests (yet another) Facebook rival
Accused autistic hacker Ryan Cleary freed on bail
Tuesday 28th June 2011 13:32 GMT
@Sarah Bee
"In this instance I think it counts as mitigation, actually."
Evidently it does... but it bloody well shouldn't.
I have *never* met a person with AS (and I have known many, myself included) who does not know the difference between right and wrong.
Even if he doesn't understand the difference between right and wrong, you can bet your damn life he knows that hacking is illegal.
Using a conveniently rapidly obtained AS diagnosis in mitigation against criminal charges is disgraceful. I say "conveniently rapidly" because it's worth pointing out that it usually takes months or even years for an adult to get a proper DX in the UK.
(let the thumbs-downing commence!)
LulzSec dumps hundreds of Arizona Police documents
Saturday 25th June 2011 17:31 GMT
Your papers, comrade...
The USA does require legal permanent residents (LPRs) to carry their permanent resident card (green card) at all times. To be asked to present it and not have it is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of (I think) up to $500.
In most parts of the USA, it's no big deal. The chance of being asked to show your card is infinitesimally small because in each state, the drivers license is the king of the ID world and is pretty much the only proof of identity you will ever be asked for by a cop or anybody else for that matter. Further, in every state (I think, certainly virtually every state), you have to show proof of either US citizenship or legal immigration status to get a drivers license so possession of a valid license proves legal status in itself.
However, in some parts of the country, being a foreigner and not having proof of legal status that's officially recognised by the immigration status (a green card, a valid visa, etc) can get you in serious trouble. Arizona is one such place, Georgia may very soon (next week) become another and so is any location that is a participant of ICE's 287(g) programme. Any place near the Mexican border, where inland roadblocks/checkpoints are not uncommon is another place where you wouldn't want to be caught without your papers.
If you get in trouble for not having proof of lawful status, you're not going to be deported (assuming you have lawful status, of course) but the process of being hauled off to the local jail while they dig into your history to discover if you are legal or not is likely to be very unpleasant indeed!
Travelodge hacked, investigating
Alleged LulzSec hacker still inside
Wednesday 22nd June 2011 19:18 GMT
Indeed :)
You'll get downvoted for daring to say that of course but it's true.
My family, and later myself, had to fight for damn near a two decades to get my Asperger's diagnosis. Despite a lifetime's history of behavioural and social problems, intelligence but inability to learn in class, special schooling from age 5 until I left compulsory education at 16 including 5 years at a residential special school, a lifetime of bullying and having no real friends, I could not get a diagnosis until well into adulthood.
When I did finally get a piece of paper at the age of 23 that read "In my professional opinion, Jeremy X meets the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's Syndrome in accordance with......." , I FINALLY had the recognition that I needed and a document that said 'this person has these problems and this is why'. It was a huge relief. THAT is what AS diagnoses are for, not for excusing yourself from criminal activity.
Suffice to say, it *really* pisses me off when people wheel out an AS diagnosis (sometimes surprisingly conveniently and rapidly obtained) as a mitigating circumstance when they find themselves in front of the beak.
Refusal to unveil scuppers French refusal-to-unveil trial
A sysadmin's top ten tales of woe
Tuesday 14th June 2011 18:56 GMT
Really?
I'm no expert in server protection stuff but surely there are simple mitigations against the cleaner unplugging stuff, from the simple (a sticker) to the more complex (locking shield over the outlet) not to mention not leaving machines with sensitive data and/or that are mission critical in rooms that the cleaning staff have access to.
Surely any sensible person would take measures to prevent exactly this scenario?
Duke Nukem Forever
LulzSec pwns pron site
Unique imagery of Shuttle docked to ISS released
Microsoft drops Halo 4 hint ahead of E3 keynote
Sony lets slip NGP name change
GCHQ man: Powerline networks do interfere with radio
Tuesday 17th May 2011 18:58 GMT
DA-Notice...
It's a bit late to start playing the DA-Notice card (presumably invoking No.5?) when the document in question is already out on the internet, isn't it? Especially considering it's marked as unclassified in bold letters at the top along with the wording "This statement has been released by [name], [position]".
Perhaps if they wanted the identities of that guy and the guy whose name is at the bottom of it to remain secret, they shouldn't have included them in the document in the first place? Just sayin'
Biting the hand that feeds IT
