* Posts by CD001

925 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2009

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Is lightspeed really a limit?

CD001

Re: Limits.

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Of course there will be something that travels faster than light.

It's just that it has not been invented yet. Give it a couple of months and you'll see.

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Error correction for time relating to FTL travel; your statement should read:

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Of course there will be something that travels faster than light.

It's just that it has not been invented yet. Give it a couple of months ago and it will have been.

(or something)

Top admen beg Microsoft to switch off 'Do Not Track' in IE 10

CD001

Re: "drastically...

They're implementing NoScript in IE10?

Twitter to UK.gov: Web super-snoop law will trample twits' rights

CD001

... not being the in UK won't make any difference.

... well, it kinda will.

We're not operating in the UK so you can take your laws and stuff them - what are you gonna do? Arrest us if we ever come to the UK, fine we won't come to the UK.

Extradition Treaty with the U.S. you say? Yeah, we'd love to see you try to get the US government to enforce that on us - good luck with that!

Oi, don't leave Cymru in broadband slow lane, MPs warn

CD001

an apparent "gap" in internet access in more remote parts

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The dossier highlights an apparent "gap" in internet access in more remote parts of Cymru.

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Really, poor internet access speed in rural areas? Whodathunkit?!

It's not like Wales is particularly special in this regard ... at work, in Shropshire, the Internet connection is something like 5% that of my connection at home (Wolverhampton).

Since the entire population of Wales is less than that of just the West Midlands (by a considerable margin) in a much larger amount of space (even more if you flattened out all the uppy-downy bits :P ), it's not exactly surprising that the information infrastructure is somewhat lacking.

Curiosity clears things up

CD001

Re: M.A.R.K. 13

Being something of (huge) a Nef fan and, occasional aficionado of 2000 ADs ABC warriors... I could not but upvote this post.

NASA captures mind-bogglingly gorgeous solar video

CD001

Re: America bashing

Bizarrely - every individual American I've personally met, or spoken to, has been lovely ... and yet AMERICA still gives me the heebie jeebies, to borrow a phrase ;)

Ubisoft: 'Vast majority of PC gamers are PIRATES'

CD001

Re: I can't understand this logic

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The PC game market, which is bigger than any one console

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Ummm no - no it isn't, the PC gaming market is quite niche now; less even than the PS3:

Mass Effect 3

Battlefield 3

CoD Black Ops

CD001

Re: Pft.

Steam, unlike most other DRM systems, has a carrot as well as a stick...

Easy access to many games (including some classics like the original X-Com games), great offers, modding community you can get paid for participating in (Steam Workshop), half decent server browser for Valve games like TF2, it seems to get decent speeds on downloads/patches and you can gift games to other Steam users (got my GF a Popcap collection for Valentines day one year, weirdly - she was a bit like "WTF?" at first ... then the Bejewelled addiction kicked in!)... and then there's random fluff like achievements, friends lists, groups and so on... and Steam will let you play your games if your connection has gone down - it has an offline mode.

I'll take Steam over UPlay or Origin any day of the week, thanks.

HTML 5 gets forked up

CD001

Re: Double yuck

^addendum.

... and yes I _know_ that's CCS3 rather than HTML 5; but the meerkats bundle it all together. The point was, make sure it fails elegantly rather than catastrophically and jobsagoodun.

CD001

Re: Double yuck

Chuck it in and make sure it fails elegantly so nobody notices : box-shadow for instance, failure just means you lose a shadow - not the end of the world.

Olympic Security cock-up was down to that DARN software

CD001

Re: A bit of a Ratner moment there

That was a different company entirely, oh yes, nobody would be able to equate Group 4 Security with G4S - completely different, honestly </sarcasm>

McDonalds staff 'rough up' prof with home-made techno-spectacles

CD001

*Guitar burst from the Who*

CD001

Re: @Mr Tumnus

But... but... but... I like my veg watery to the point where it practically disintegrates - it's how my dear ol' mum always made it when I was a kid ;)

Racketeering suit filed over smut-piracy charges

CD001

Re: If they are just trying it on...

Would almost be worth paying the "fine" they're asking for just for the sake of bringing the fraud charges afterwards...

CD001

Re: I hope she screws them good

< . <

> . >

Not . sure . if . serious.

China's censors move to stamp out sex and violence online

CD001
Mushroom

Aaaaah - but our governments are democratically elected therefore any fecktarded, repressive laws passed _must_ be the will of the people, obviously </sarcasm>

< icon selected for how I would like to see Whitehall

Ebuyer on the naughty step for fondleslab promo cock-up

CD001

Depends on the claim

You can say things like "Save 50% on RRP" but not "WAS ... NOW" unless you have previously sold the item at the "was" price.

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

CD001

short-term gain over long-term success is also idiocy

Hmmm - I'm only going to live in the short term (as far as global climate pattern shifts are concerned)... I can't think of a single reason as to why I should care about the long-term consequences, sorry.

Stuff lives, dies, evolves, goes extinct, whatever... on one rock, in one solar system, on one of the arms of one of many billions of spiral galaxies kicking about.

Total perspective vortex, yeah, been there ;)

Brummie popstrels crowdsource their visual appearance

CD001

+ baby sloths *nods*

UK.gov proposes massive copyright land snatch

CD001

Re: One thing leads to another

Big business may own the Government but it's still the little man that decides which flavour of thieving duplicitous cnut holds power.

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Big business may own the government but the media owns the electorate - in this instance the big business that will benefit most IS the media - so we're screwed.

Star Trek app warps into TiVo space

CD001

Re: What would they do without old Star Trek

... works for Sky.

Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones

CD001

*hat doffed*

Kaspersky: Apple security is like Microsoft's in 2002

CD001

Re: @Frank Bough - made me laugh

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As did the explanation from one of the geniuses about which graphics card was supported was down to the motherboard she had, not the drivers built into the OS when I was asking if an ATI HD 5750 was supported.

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That's not entirely wrong... but they'd have to be using a really old motherboard that only supports AGP for instance :)

EA unplugs Rock Band for iOS

CD001

Yeeeeah

... and the Mass Effect 3 servers (presumably multiplayer authentication servers since the actual "play" part is P2P) we down for all of yesterday...

... oh, hang on, that was just BioWare/EA screwing up and breaking them ;)

Boy wrecks £22k worth of MacBooks by weeing on them

CD001

Re: kiddo might have been a Reg reader...

so, so, so, so, soooooooooooo NOT going to a site called that from a work machine!

Linux Left 4 Dead port fuels Steam for Ubuntu talk

CD001

Re: Don't know much about Steam but

They could always get everyone to write their games in Java!

http://www.minecraft.net/ ;)

CD001

Re: To like or not to like?

And... Steam _always_ wants a call home. Even on a single-user game. How about allowing for non-connected solo play?

... not really, if there's no connection it'll generally launch in offline mode - you normally only need the connection the first time you launch/register the game.

Now - compare that to say ME3 with Origin where it dials home (twice) every time you visit the "home" screen to verify your DLC... or Ubisoft's UPlay.

Steam at least offers you some carrots to go along with the DRM-stick.

I'm sure Valve have done *nix dedicated server versions for a lot of their titles? So the hurdle to cross must be the graphical/GUI/legal one when it comes to creating *nix ports?

Considering how bloody annoying it is to encounter "Host has left the game, restarting wave" in ME3s peered multiplayer; it really makes you appreciate *normal* online PC gaming with server/client architecture (TF2 et al) :\

Gaia scientist Lovelock: 'I was wrong and alarmist on climate'

CD001

Re: SCIENCE

Fair point, nihilistic as it might sound. Instinctively, aesthetically, the idea of wiping out species is abhorrent to us.

... no it isn't - otherwise we'd not have done it ... repeatedly.

Theresa May: No emails sniffed in web super-snoop law

CD001

Re: Time to save the natin

...let us take to the streets and show them that it is we the people who have the power in this country not the so called political masters.

... have you seen the weather out there?

CD001

Re: Spin it right round, Theresa baby.

Am I the only to read this as reasoning from incompetence?

Funny - I think that every time a politician (or BBC Breakfast reporter for that matter) opens their mouths...

Educating Rory: Are BBC reporters unteachable?

CD001

Re: Err...

Hmm, no with a tiny little hint of yes...

HTML does not teach programming - not even close. In some ways it actually hinders it; some of the worst HTML I've ever seen has been written by programmers - it's a totally different mindset.

HTML is purely presentational, what it teaches is the importance of semantics, do you mean strong* or do you mean b (or span style="font-weight: bold;"); are you trying to give semantic importance to the text or just make it bold because it looks better?

It teaches you that browsers will screw you over and different rendering engines will cause you headaches - making something that looks exactly the same on every platform can be an act of will and sheer bloody-mindedness.

Programming on the other hand is 95% problem solving and 5% writing the code; it's basically algebra with conditional statements (ok, functions and objects as well) - it has nothing really to do with semantics or making stuff pretty, it's about getting stuff working in, hopefully, an efficient and maintainable manner. The fundamentals of programming, the mindset if you like, can be transferred, almost in its entirety, to any programming language, programming is largely a way of thinking.

HTML, however, is a basically a way of doing, it's pretty much non-transferable (well, apart from the lessons it teaches in semantics); hell it might look a bit like XML but drop an XSL file in front of someone who's spent "an afternoon programming in HTML" and they'll be totally lost. HTML does not help you think like a programmer.

The one teeny, tiny, "yes" I'd add as a proviso would be, using myself as an example... I've always been a "tinkerer" with computers, from making maps in WorldCraft for Quake to reverse engineering the galaxy in X3 (less complicated than it sounds, the galaxy is written in XML apparently)... but somewhere long the way, doing my degree course many years ago when the web was new and shiny, I discovered websites...

Some random homepage that someone had cobbled together made me realise, "hey, I really want to know how to do that!" - and that it was something I could teach myself to do (with the aid of a few websites).

So I taught myself HTML - which was nice but a little static....

So I taught myself JavaScript (and DHTML as it was known when the web was steam powered) - which was nice but it's all a bit tedious to update, especially when you've built some templates that you're repeatedly displaying on a page...

So I learnt about SQL and databases and PHP to make maintenance easier - which is nice enough but PHP is pretty much purely web-based and I wanted to do more...

So I started on Java and C++ and C# and now the loose-typing, lack of proper method over-riding and slightly iffy OOP implementations in PHP annoy me slightly... and I'm still learning...

Where I go from here is anyone's guess - I'm an in-house web-dev, I still enjoy working on the LAMP stack - and it was HTML that made me realise that this is what I wanted to do (it's the immediacy with HTML, it's very quick to get something on screen - it's one of the things I like about C# as well).

*[whilst it's nice having HTML enabled in posts - it's a bit inconvenient, when trying to get tags to output, that &lt; and &gt; don't get converted]

Google founders, James Cameron, go asteroid mining

CD001

Re: Now all they need to invent...

Didn't even realise you could get Caiman Miners - I've always used Demeters for some reason... now for UTs I'll go Caiman Hauler every time ;)

(...and I thought I was the only X player here)

Pakistanis revolt over Great Firewall plans

CD001

Re: Calm down

They are only blocking blasphemy. People who say bad things about the baby Jesus don't deserve to be heard, do they?

It's an Islamic country, so it would be saying bad things about the prophet Muhammed surely? I think you're confusing Pakistan with the USA; I know they both have slight fundamentalist tendencies in places so I guess it's easy to do ;)

Larry Page has painful day on stand in Oracle Java case

CD001

I really don't understand why MySQL is so popular.

Four reasons:

1: it's fast enough and reliable enough for the web; where speed and uptime are perhaps more important than relational integrity which can be farmed off to the application layer (I'm not saying it's as good but that's what you have to do if you're using MyISAM tables)

2: it's open source and plays nicely with *nix/FreeBSD (again, important on the web); you don't need to be an Oracle certified engineer to install and monkey about with it or fork out for an Oracle support contract

3: historically MySQL had better tools supporting it than say PostGRES, making it easier to maintain

4: MySQL has always had better marketing than PostGRES

... basically, for the web, MySQL is good enough.

Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

CD001

Re: A little bit of knowledge does no harm - it's essential

A basic insight into a lot of things is useful - that's kind of what the schooling before GCSEs is all about.

Really? Name one thing you learnt doing GCSEs that has been of any use to you in life after school?

Osmosis is the passage of water, through a semi-permeable membrane, from a weaker to a stronger solution ... useful to know.

The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides .. yup, use that regularly.

ummm ... hang on ...

I'm fairly sure that in your adult life you'll rely more on primary or degree level things, secondary schools (and therefore GCSEs) are basically there to keep children out of the way while they grow up.

SpaceX Dragon gets green-light for launch to Space Station

CD001
Happy

Re: Not reall docking

Yeah but Elite on the Acorn Electron could manage auto-docking at a space station ... how hard can it be? ;)

ISPs should get 'up to' full fee for 'up to' broadband

CD001

@Mad Mike

If you live in a town, that's your choice and you get things like fast broadband, relatively better public transport etc.etc and on the downside, more noise, probably worse air, less picturesque etc.etc.

... having lived in both I'd say in a city the air is better traffic pollution smells far less than say ooooh when the farms have been muck-spreading; or try living near a pig/chicken farm, or having to have a bloke come and empty a septic tank.

As for the noise, at least the noise in cities is at more sensible times (commuter/school runs and pub chucking out time) - you don't get woken up by cockerels at some ungodly hour, or church bells on a Sunday morning.

You can keep the countryside, it's noisy, smelly and boring, has poor infrastructure and crappy net connections, even if it does look pretty ;)

Naked gyrating iPad vid exposes truth behind Apple's billions

CD001

Re: But ...

...that doesn't make it right, does it?

I'm not sure it makes it wrong either - the world isn't equal; it doesn't necessarily fit into a "Western" ideal of what's right and what's wrong. In many places the consumption of alcohol is wrong in others the consumption of marijuana, the age of consent varies across the world, in some places you can't openly criticise your beloved leader (that's a term that's actually used without irony in some places believe it or not).

I can see people having to work longer hours, for less pay, and for more years in the UK as the population continues to age - we'll look back and realise that the "baby boomers" had it easy. We'll not return to the kind of industrial age working policies current in China but then China will probably creep forward towards more "modern" (in the "Western" world) workplace practices.

It's all swings and roundabouts and as long as there are cultural, social or economic differences, someone, somewhere will profit from it.

CD001

Re: It's not just about the wages/hours

in a room of 8 people you can still do it but... seriously?

... yes, with the other 7 people of course!

Employers' group: New comp sci GCSE driven by vendor agenda

CD001

Re: A little bit more

Actually I'd kinda hope that people going into IT as a profession would have some bloody interest in the subject and would therefore be tinkering with computers in their spare time as a hobby irrespective of whatever bits of paper they hold.

Chinese coders beat all-comers

CD001

Re: Dueling Headlines

a friend out there told me he no longer hires graduates, as it takes 2 years to train them...

... and that's different from the UK how?

I work alongside a small in-house marketing department and 2 graduates we've had recently haven't even really known how to turn a computer on and were pretty much terrified of anything outside Word. Now, granted, these are marketing bods, you'd not expect them to be IT geniuses ... but they were straight out of Uni, in the 21st century, I'd expect them to at least have some degree of competence (and confidence) around computers!

Publishing giants sue open textbook startup over layout

CD001

Well, I doubt that you can copyright the choice of font size, style, page size or margin widths.

Actually, that's the bit you can copyright to a certain extent...

Say you were to write a delightful account of your encounter with a hedgehog one evening and illustrate it using images from the public domain (or iStock, whatever). Now say it miraculously got published and you were receiving royalties for it, you might be a bit peeved if someone else lifted your work; using the same images, in the same places, identifying the same circumstances, using the same font, at the same size with same kerning and line height, each page having the same margins and layout - essentially it's your work - but they've changed the name of the Hedgehog to Geoff and paraphrased it a bit.

They release the first page for free as a PDF with the intent to, later on, charge slightly less than you for a printed version. It's a factual account of an encounter with a hedgehog and you can't copyright the facts; but the wording, illustrations and style is a different matter.

Here though, we're talking about text books rather than a simple encounter with a hedgehog, so there's all the background research and fact-checking that needs to done before the thing can even be published - and someone else is bypassing all that by basically lifting your work and undercutting you.

'Don't break the internet': How an idiot's slogan stole your privacy...

CD001

Thing is...

The thing is that the copyright notice on your comment, common to copyright notices everywhere, states that the comment cannot be copied with permission... if everybody contacted the copyright holders for every single instance they may have to ask permission (even if they're not sure; taking a DVD to a friend's house for a beer/pizza/film night for instance) the whole system would come crashing down under the weight of the administration required.

That's probably about the only form of lobbying that would work - unfortunately the vast majority of people would rather just ignore the law rather than put the effort in to actually change it; and that being the case, the politicians will always "oil the squeaky wheel" and pander to the companies that lobby them unless it's a serious vote loser.

That being said though, it would have to be something monumental to actually make any difference to people voting. I'm sure most people vote the same way each and every time without ever bothering to look at what they're voting for... the only time people change their vote is when they're sick of the governing party and will then vote against them (and vote for whichever party their newspaper/media outlet of choice "tells them to"). Actual policies hardly even come into it.

CD001

Re: Ahem, While You All Were Arguing I Noticed...

... And yes, if the pool of data about you is large enough and deep enough

... and full of shit, both new and old like an unemptied septic tank. Standard GIGO rules apply, and really, I suspect most people spout as much garbage on the Internet as anything even remotely factual.

If you believe otherwise then I am Prince Abdul Hamanzar of Nigeria and I've recently come into $419,000,000 (FOUR HUNDRED AND NINETEEN MILLION US DOLLAR) that I need help with offshoring.

Twitter open sources MySQL enhancements

CD001

Marketing your SQL

... as opposed to ...

Possibly Odd Sounding Techie Gear Redundant for Everyone SQL?

MySQL was always better "marketed" *shrugs*

Lords give automatic smut censorship bill the once-over

CD001

Re: Rediculous

What is this bill REALLY about?

Now that, I think, is the important question...

CD001

Re: A Little Story, or Two. Or Three.

+1 despite the Godwin.

(actually, what does worry me is the amount of rhetoric that's come out of the last 2 UK governments that sounds as though it was lifted from Mein Kampf)

Virgin Media's latest throttling rules

CD001

Re: Wasn't it 75% before...??

Thank you for being considerate :) Between 6-9 pm on week nights odds are I'm online gaming (multiplayer ME3 atm) so it's fairly low bandwidth consumption but heavily reliant on latency.

... and yeah, I tend to schedule larger downloads overnight or at the weekend.

CD001

Re: Virgin Media's latest throttling rules

Or the latest patch for Shogun 2: Total War which came in at around 5 gigs!

Parents shocked by priestly PowerPoint pr0n

CD001

Or more likely, as it was a PowerPoint presentation, it took 16 images before people's brain's had actually woken up enough to realise what was actually on the screen.

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... ... WTF?!? Hang on! ...

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