Comment Re:Any CNE's out there? (Score 1) 102
FEEDFACE
Comment Any CNE's out there? (Score 2) 102
I was hoping for a Novell Netware reference. No one else remember 3.12? None of your remote server support in those days!
Comment Microsoft Games (Score 1) 158
Microsoft did games on Windows? And people played them? And they were popular?
No, thought not.
Comment Re:Invest (Score 2) 127
This is BT investing in the network and it's a smart investment too. By upgrading the boxes on the end of the old fibre they've shown they can breath new life into it - something which was in doubt when the previous technology ran into problems. These boxes and associated optics are not cheap but it's much better to be spending money there than on a new programme to dig up the roads.
Comment Re:Forced convergence is all the rage. (Score 2) 107
I mostly agree with you and yes, it is depressing but I think there is another reason pushing people onto these locked down devices and it's simply that Microsoft still haven't worked out how to protect their systems from malware & viruses. Now before everyone jumps in and says this isn't just a MS problem, malware attacks 3rd party software too - I know that and I'll gladly put Java and Adobe in the same sin bin.
Let's say that Average Joe buys a nice shiny Windows laptop for $2000 - it's his machine, he can install whatever software he likes and there's no lock down right? But even on day one there is crapware installed by the laptop vendor that has started to slow his machine down (preinstalled AV "trials", desktop gadgets, Troubleshooting "assistants" and of course add-on toolbars). Now lets move on 6 months, the shiny laptop that was pretty fast on day one is now crawling - he's probably got a virus or some other malware by this stage (possibly because his OS updates didn't force 3rd party updates) and to combat this he's now got 2 or 3 always active anti-virus/anti-malware scanners running. It's possible he's also got malware masquerading as Antivirus running too and all these applications are fighting with the system and each other for resources.
But look over there, someone with a crappy netbook isn't having these problems because it's running Linux, or there's someone else with an Apple iThing (which they religiously keep updated and haven't been hit by any unfortunate 0-day exploits) and finally there's someone with a Chromebook who again have no need for multiple AV programs.
I hate that people opt for locked down systems over Linux but I think I hate more being called out to try and fix the crappy mess that Windows has left someone with when they mistakenly clicked that dodgy link on the web.
Comment Apt xkcd today (Score 0) 71
Comment Re:Eh, what is illegal? (Score -1) 377
Where did you get your UK knowledge from?
Sort out the United Kingdom, it is easy, just sort out Ireland, Schotland, Wales and Brittain
The United Kingdom comprises England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The rest of Ireland is the Republic of Ireland (or Eire) and it is not part of the UK; though it could contentiously be included as part of the British Isles. And that's where the trouble starts, so instead of Great Britain it is now the United Kingdom with the Republic of Ireland as a completely seperate entity.
But I'm just being pedantic, there are, as you say, many issues to sort out among these friendly countries before we can even start to hammer out peace in the Middle East.
Submission + - NASA Telescopes Spy Ultra-Distant Galaxy (nasa.gov)
DevotedSkeptic writes: "With the combined power of NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, as well as a cosmic magnification effect, astronomers have spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories first shone when our 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old.
The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called cosmic dark ages. During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens a window onto the deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history.
Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. In other words, the starlight snagged by Hubble and Spitzer left the galaxy when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present age. Technically speaking, the galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6. The term redshift refers to how much an object's light has shifted into longer wavelengths as a result of the expansion of the universe. Astronomers use redshift to describe cosmic distances."
The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called cosmic dark ages. During this period, the universe went from a dark, starless expanse to a recognizable cosmos full of galaxies. The discovery of the faint, small galaxy opens a window onto the deepest, most remote epochs of cosmic history.
Light from the primordial galaxy traveled approximately 13.2 billion light-years before reaching NASA's telescopes. In other words, the starlight snagged by Hubble and Spitzer left the galaxy when the universe was just 3.6 percent of its present age. Technically speaking, the galaxy has a redshift, or "z," of 9.6. The term redshift refers to how much an object's light has shifted into longer wavelengths as a result of the expansion of the universe. Astronomers use redshift to describe cosmic distances."
Comment Your want to read? E-Ink. (Score 1) 415
You stated reading as your primary goal so the only answer is an e-ink e-reader. Tablets are capable of providing reading apps but none of them provide anything like a "printed page" experience. An e-ink e-reader looks and reacts like a printed page; it is non-reflective, non-glossy, non-backlit. The lack of back lighting is a plus not a negative because the lights used to illuminate most tablet screens are in the spectrum that triggers your brain into the "wake up, wake up, dawn is here" state. That's not so good for reading at bedtime. Step outside with a tablet and it's unreadable; you end up looking at a mirror (with smeared fingerprints). Step outside with an e-ink e-reader and you can read naturally.
I've been careful not to push you to a particular brand of e-ink e-reader but I would push for one that supports as many formats as possible especially those that are DRM free. If you get tied down now to Amazon formatted material you may find you regret it in the long run; some of their practices have been Orwellian.
Submission + - Retro: Turn your iPad into an Etch a Sketch (kickstarter.com)
An anonymous reader writes: It was bound to happen: Someone created an Etch a Sketch for the iPad. Looks to work exactly like the original, but the software will be open source so you can hack at will!
Who knows, with a new Etch a Sketch 2.0, perhaps Romney will get his fair "shake" ;-).
Who knows, with a new Etch a Sketch 2.0, perhaps Romney will get his fair "shake"
Submission + - Physicist Bets $200,000 Against Scalable Quantum Computing
quax writes: Fringe theoretical physicist Joy Christian challenges quantum computing luminary Scott Aaronson. He bets double the amount that Scott promised anyone who proves Quantum Computing to be a mirage. Joy has some unconventional ideas and claims his work disproves the famous Bell inequality. Scott blogs about it an hilarity ensues.
If they stand by their bets, one of them will most likely lose a lot of money in the not to distant future.
If they stand by their bets, one of them will most likely lose a lot of money in the not to distant future.
Submission + - Why You Can't Dump Java (Even Though You Want To) (infoworld.com)
snydeq writes: "So many recent exploits have used Java as their attack vector, you might conclude Java should be shown the exit, but the reality is, Java is not the problem, writes Security Advisor's Roger Grimes. 'Sure, I could opt not to use those Java-enabled services or install Java and uninstall when I'm finished. But the core problem isn't necessarily Java's exploitability; nearly all software is exploitable. It's unpatched Java. Few successful Java-related attacks are related to zero-day exploits. Almost all are related to Java security bugs that have been patched for months (or longer),' Grimes writes. 'The bottom line is that we aren't addressing the real problems. It isn't a security bug here and there in a particular piece of software; that's a problem we'll never get rid of. Instead, we allow almost all cyber criminals to get away with their Internet crime without any penalty. They almost never get caught and punished. Until we solve the problem of accountability, we will never get rid of the underlying problem.'"
Submission + - TSA's mm-Wave Body Scanner Breaks Diabetic Teen's $10K Insulin Pump (abc4.com)
OverTheGeicoE writes: Savannah Barry, a Colorado teenager, was returning home from a conference in Salt Lake City. She is a diabetic and wears an insulin pump to control her insulin levels 24/7. She carries documentation of her condition to assist screeners, who usually give her a pat-down search. This time the screeners listened to her story, read her doctor's letter, and forced her to go through a millimeter-wave body scanner anyway. The insulin pump stopped working immediately, and of course, she was subjected to a full invasive manual search. 'My life is pretty much in their hands when I go through a body scan with my insulin pump on,' she says. She wants TSA screeners to have more training. Was this a predictable outcome, considering that no one outside TSA has access to millimeter-wave scanners for testing? How powerful must the body scanner's emitter be to destroy electronic devices? Would oversight from the FDA or FCC prevent similar incidents from happening in the future?
Submission + - The wretched state of GPU transcoding (extremetech.com)
MrSeb writes: "Excerpt from the story (which reportedly turned the writer, Joel Hruska, quite mad): "This story began as an investigation into why Cyberlink’s Media Espresso software produced video files of wildly varying quality and size depending on which GPU was used for the task. It then expanded into a comparison of several alternate solutions. Our goal was to find a program that would encode at a reasonably high quality level (~1GB per hour was the target) and require a minimal level of expertise from the user. The conclusion, after weeks of work and going blind staring at enlarged images, is that the state of "consumer" GPU transcoding is still a long, long way from prime time use. In short, it's simply not worth using the GPU to accelerate your video transcodes; it's much better to simply use Handbrake, which uses your CPU. Read the story for the full analysis, and some hints of some truly awful coding from Cyberlink."
Submission + - The Avengers: Why Pirates Failed To Prevent A Box Office Record (torrentfreak.com)
TheGift73 writes: "Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage."
