Sigh.

Another AI project.

Call me when it does something useful or unexpected.

This.

Their idea of a changelog is:

Problem description.
Before Screenshot
After Screenshot
Example document that triggered bug.

Best fucking changelogs in the world, because they have one of the best bug-hunting projects in the world.

Just send them the file. See if the fix is in the Changelog for the next one/two small releases they do.

See my post above.

My mother is in retirement. She has owned and completed basically every Nintendo console and Mario game in existence (there's probably some obscure Japanese title somewhere, but if you've heard of it, and it has Mario, she's completed it).

We buy her the console for Christmas, we buy her the games when she completes them. It's an expensive outlay all round, given her gaming abilities. She's had more spent on her than my brother and I (old-school "gamers" from the ZX Spectrum era through to today) have spent on games collectively. She destroyed four Palm Pilots back in the day playing Bookworm.

This is exactly the point the article is making. What you THINK is a gamer and funding the industry isn't. Sure, buying your competitive CS:GO server and getting a huge rig to play it on and playing endlessly and winning championships makes you feel like a gamer. But, actually, the money Valve got from that was, what - a copy of CS:GO and maybe a competition entry that mostly went on marketing and prize money? It's a drop in the fucking ocean compared to a teenage girl or mother dropping a few quid every month for years on new Candy Crush levels or Wii Fit titles.

The industry isn't catering to a HUGE PORTION of its market. And it's stupid not to.

Just clarify your fucking terms.

A "gamer" is someone who plays games.

However, if you are only referring to "serious" gamers who invest hours of training to play a particular game, then specify that. Of course, most of the Candy Crush generation aren't doing that (they have a life for a start).

If you want gamer to distinguish between those who buy hardware for their PC to game properly, even that definition won't help you - I've had two people ask me about desktop PC's capable of playing The Sims 3 for their teenage daughters, and you need a decent graphics card for that.

What you want is to use "gamer" as some undefined term that meets your particular clique of game geek. It doesn't. It never has. To me a gamer is someone who was around in the 80's and will happily fight through 10-minute loading screens, unsuitable hardware, pump money into an arcade machine, for proper 8-bit graphics (not the fake-8-bit-retro OpenGL shite you get now) on a game that's almost, if not actually, fucking impossible to complete.

Sorry, guys, but most of you just aren't "gamers". I enjoy a TF2 jaunt as much as any of the other 800 games on my Steam account, that I've had before some of the gamer kids around now were even born. I've run CS servers from 1.6 to the current day. But I still sit and play Altitude like a demon.

Gamer is not a definition beyond "one who games". If you mean FPS player, say it If you mean professional-level twitch shooter, say it. If you mean someone who plays new titles on new hardware, say it. If you mean someone who plays lots of games, or for a long time, or spends lots of money, say it. If you mean someone the industry can sell games to, say it.

But "gamer" means nothing. My mother has completed every Mario game in existence (up to and including Wii U), used to play Horace Goes Skiing back in the 80's, broke four Palm Pilots playing Bookworm Deluxe so much, played Gin Rummy on our first DOS machine, and has caused more money to be spent on the gaming industry than the rest of her family combined. So the industry will target her. And get money from her. And she will buy stuff. To "ignore" her because she's not the stereotypical gamer playing whatever game is considered "real" at that moment would be insanity for the industry.

Maybe she won't join you in a 32-player CS:GO competitive tournament (though she did used to win at Turok quite a lot). But you can't say she's not a gamer any more than anyone else.

Surely, viewing certain types of illegal pornography is no different.

It's not a "thought" crime if what you're watching (and thereby encouraging the production of) is illegal to view.

It would be a thought crime if, say, the police arrested you for signing up on a website where you COULD have watched the video.

My girlfriend is a PhD geneticist who specialises in cancer studies (leukaemia etc.) and is currently working in hospitals doing genetic test to confirm cancerous tumours and other genetic diseases.

When we talk about it, I can't talk on her level, but the way she explains it, cancer is an inherent factor in living things. There's a reason for that. It's a natural replication mechanism that is based on parts of a cells DNA. DNA is basically damaged ALL DAY LONG in your body. UV does it. All sorts of things do it. And DNA has repair mechanisms not dissimilar to a error-correcting code that runs your RAID array, or your PAR files.

So most of the time, when a cell is damaged, it "fixes itself". If it doesn't fix itself, then there are mechanisms in the body itself to detect and cull damaged cells that get that far (the immune system, basically). If those mechanisms fail against the damage, or the damage is of certain undetectable types, then the cell will replicate. But, crucially, the damage to the cell will mean it will never stop replicating. And all the replicated cells will share the same error. And basically then you end up growing a tumour.

As such "cancer" is inherent in all living things with DNA. The question really is whether you live long enough to be statistically affected by the amount of damage it takes to get a cell that can't be fixed or eradicated by the body, or not. Babies can get cancer. It's pretty much down to chance.

So, I'm not at all sure what we're being told here. It seems like someone is trying to claim that somehow cancer is some kind of "disease" that they've found in an older species so it must have been around for longer. Actually, from what I gather, it's ALWAYS been around. Pretty much since DNA existed, if not before. Because it's a misfiring cell that never gets the "stop" signal when it starts replicating (which happens millions of times a day throughout your body).

It's a "flaw", if you like, in the DNA error correction mechanisms. It's not a disease as such. It's not something you "catch". It's not even something that "evolves". It's a mistake. An error. A bad sector or flipped bit on your cell's hard drive that corrupts the rest of the files on there and, when you then blindly execute those instructions, can lead to writing over your whole hard disk.

SKIPPING BAIL.
RESISTING ARREST.

The bail was with a UK court. The UK are seeking his arrests. It's UK police hung around the embassy waiting for him to come out and arrest him.

What part of that is difficult to understand?

Whether what we was originally in court for (which is now a legally-sound extradition to an EU country that we are legally bound to oblige after SEVERAL TIMES sending the Swedes back to dot their I's and cross their T's more correctly) he is innocent of or not, it doesn't matter. While there, under UK court bail, he fled against his bail conditions, and it currently knowingly resisting arrest.

Game over. Even if all the original allegations are definitively proved false. It's like running out of the police station after being arrested - whether what you were originally arrested for was committed by you or not, it's still illegal to do.

Thus speaks someone who's obviously never used British Rail.

Dunno about the US, but in the UK there aren't 4 lanes. There is one lane, and other overtaking lanes.

Technically, if you have four cars all at the same speed in all four lanes, at least three of them would be breaking the law (dunno about the US, assume it's similar). If they're overtaking, it's not a problem, because they have to pull back in when they've completed the maneouvure and you can overtake them then.

To be honest, robots obeying rules will make the roads I travel on move faster. It's the dickheads who constantly change lanes and try to "beat" the queues when speeds come down that cause most of the slowdowns and "phantom braking waves" that I witness every day.

And, to be honest, I'd rather get somewhere at 65 predictably than 70 unpredictably, in spasms and spurts and with sudden braking.

Diplomatic protocol. We signed an agreement that we'd ask the ambassador first in such a case.

And, never heard of Ronnie Biggs? Fled the country despite being a wanted man, lived 30+ years somewhere else, was wanted for arrest all that time. It's not the petty crooks you have to worry about.

And what he thinks, or the ambassador thinks, or the asylum case (Russian spies who kill people on UK soil and then try to fly via a Russian embassy? Real-world examples exists) is immaterial. You can't have selectively-enforced laws and even if you can you can't SHOW that you have selectively-enforced laws for such a major case.

Er... go have a look. Not saying it's locked down like a fortress, but you'd be hard pressed to get in or out without walking past an officer for the last two years.

The problem is that, actually, it's not news. Nobody really cares that he's in there any more, and any sighs over the expense are aimed at him for wasting police time (can we charge him with that, as well as skipping bail and resisting arrest?). Fact is, if he gets mention on the news it's because he's said something like this. The country sighs and moves on, no big scandal really.

Sorry, but he's just not that important and we can no more stop pursuing him than any other bail-skipping criminal. Or the Ecuadorian embassy would be full to the brim with every minor crook.

Sweden could drop their charges today.

He still skipped bail from a UK court. And it's arguable he's currently resisting arrest.

Game over. You will be arrested and convicted if you leave.

The fact that people conflate "arrest" and "charges" into one is also annoying. You "arrest" someone in order to stop them leaving until you can ascertain whether "charges" are necessary and what charges are suitable (if someone is killed and you arrest someone else for murder, you can't then release them because it actually turned out to be manslaughter, or GBH, or a theft, on their part - they are under arrest until the charges are determined, if any). Sure, you need a reason . But "because an EU nation asked for your detainment" is good enough in the law, and skipping bail is definitely good enough.

So apart from skipping bail, resisting arrest, and everything else, the charges in Sweden mean little at this point. And the UK, whether you think they are in collusion or not, have the right to enforce their law on their soil (and, no, the embassy is NOT Ecuadorian soil, don't make that "old wives' tale" mistake).

Even if the UK couldn't care less about Sweden's demands, they went through the proper channels, offered appeals, it went to the Supreme Court and he ran away from UK bail. Game over. We HAVE to arrest you the second you try to leave or every Tom, Dick and Harry will follow suit thinking it's a "get out of jail free card" to just resist arrest and skip bail.

Nobody says 5GHz is impossible. Read it.

It says that you can't traverse the entire chip while running at 5GHz. Most operations don't - why? Because the chips are small and any one set of instructions tends to operate in a certain smaller-again area.

What they are saying is that chips will no longer be synchronous - if chips get any bigger, your clock signal takes too long to traverse the entire length of the signal and you end up with different parts of the chips needing different clocks.

It's all linked. The size of the chip can get bigger and still pack in the same density, but then the signals get more out of sync, the voltages have to be higher, the traces have to be straighter, the routing becomes more complicated, and the heat will become higher. Oh, and you'll have to have parts of it "go dark" to avoid overheating neighbours, etc. This is exactly what the guy is saying.

At some point, there's a limit at which it's cheaper and easier to just have a bucket load of synchronous-clock chips tied together loosely than one mega-processor trying to keep everything ticking nicely.

And current overclocking records are only around 8GHz. Nobody says you can't make a processor operating at 10THz if you want. The problem is that it has to be TINY and not do very much. Frequency, remember, is high in anything dealing with radio - your wireless router can do some things at 5GHz and, somewhere inside it, is an oscillator doing just that. But not the SAME kinds of things as we expect modern processors to do.

Taking account that most of those overclocking benchmarks probably operate in small areas of the silicon, are run in mineral oil or similar and are the literal speed of a benchmark over a complicated chip that ALREADY takes account that signals take so long that clocks can get out of sync across the chip, we don't have much leeway at all. We hit a huge wall at 2-3GHz and that's where people are tending to stay despite it being - what, a decade or more? - since the first 3GHz Intel chip. We add more processors and more core and more threading but pretty much we haven't got "faster" over the last decade, we're just able to have more processors at that speed.

No doubt we can push it further, but not forever, and not with the kind of on-chip capabilities you expect now.

With current technology (i.e. no quantum leaps of science making their way into our processors), I doubt you'll ever see a commercially available 10GHz chip that'll run Windows. Super-parallel machines running at a fraction of that but performing more gigaflops per second - yeah - but basic core sustainable frequency? No.

I work in schools, preparing for a huge summer deployment, just re-imaged every PC on-site.

Fortunately, although I pushed the updates out over WSUS, my image was taken BEFORE patch Tuesday. Anything that hasn't been out for a least a month is in beta testing, as far as I'm concerned, and after a month it either "works" (for some definition) or something like this will come to my attention.

Have all the PC's imaged in my rooms, but only have a handful actually deployed at the moment while I test. The very first blue-screen I see, any kernel-mode patch this month will be changed to "Declined" so no further PC's get it.

Yet again, those people who get all stroppy about "you should install updates the SECOND they come out".... real life hits you again. And the downtime from a potential "zero-day" that I'll probably never witeness is nothing compared to potentially rolling out faulty updates to hundreds of PC's that would then have to be re-imaged, and/or having a faulty update inside your images forcing you to reverse changes (in my case, to pre-summer images which is a HUGE step backwards) and re-deploy.

https://usikkert.no/blog/the-s...

is a start.

I'm sure there are better around.

You can test particular domain mail servers here:

https://starttls.info/