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User: GrahamCox

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Comments · 1,407

  1. Attack of the Mutant Camels FTW! on E3 2015: A Lot of Nostalgia For Old Games · · Score: 2

    Attack of the Mutant Camels FTW! That is all.

  2. London's fantastic... on Jimmy Wales: London Is Better For Tech Than "Dreadful" Silicon Valley · · Score: 3, Informative

    London's fantastic if you're rich, or at least well-off. If you're poor, or simply young, it's awful. Housing is totally unaffordable.

  3. Who'd have thunk it? on Sunday Times Issues DMCA Takedown Notice To the Intercept Over Snowden Article · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A Murdoch mouthpiece, trying to pull strings, push an agenda and suppress free speech? Who'd have thunk it?

  4. Let them not eat cake. on CDC: Americans Getting Heavier, Average Woman Weighs As Much As 1960s Man · · Score: 1

    Seriously, stop eating all the cake. (For various definitions of "cake" which basically all boil down to much the same stuff - starch+fat+sugar).

  5. The brain's other great invention... on Why Our Brains Can't Process the Gravest Threats To Humanity · · Score: 1

    The reason is the brain's other great invention, the tokenisation of value, aka "money". That trumps everything when it comes down to it. That's why people always vote in tax-cutting moronic governments rather than one that acts for the greater good.

  6. Re:Can someone translate "1.4x faster?" on WWDC 2015 Roundup · · Score: 1

    Jeez how to overcomplicate and overthink a simple thing. However they worded it, it's no way 2.4x faster than Yosemite - that's not possible on the same hardware. It's 40% faster than, or 1.4x faster.

    And what exactly is faster? They don't say, but perhaps that's a mix of typical operations (launching, drawing speed, searching and sorting, etc), or perhaps they're just cherry picking a few routines that they've managed to optimise that are low level but will benefit most apps equally (but which won't translate into a 40% speed up to the user in most cases).

  7. Re:Revolution when? on Governments of the World Agree: Encryption Must Die! · · Score: 1

    I'm with you brother! Man the barricades!

    ...just as soon as I've got paid this month so I can make my mortgage payment, queued up for the latest iShiny and watched the new series of XFactor.

  8. Re:How do you "take away" encryption? on Tim Cook: "Weakening Encryption Or Taking It Away Harms Good People" · · Score: 1, Informative

    WTF are you talking about? I can and do write code on my iOS and Mac devices and Mr Cook and his company provide the tools to do it.

  9. Already has on Ask Slashdot: Will Technology Disrupt the Song? · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The "sound" of a badly encoded MP3 is already influencing the way people sing - it's almost as if they think those artefacts and unwanted harmonics are something that makes a voice a good singing voice, because that's what they hear when someone holds a long or high note. Bloody hateful.

  10. Re:You realize... on Galapagos Island Volcano Erupts After 33 Years, Threatening Fragile Ecosystem · · Score: 2

    The premise is that things going extinct is universally bad

    Says who? You realise that >99% of species that have ever lived are extinct? Of course it seems sad when a species goes extinct, especially as it's often because of unnecessary predation by humans (e.g. elephants, rhinos), so let's concentrate on stopping our own species being such arseholes. However, in general extinction is totally natural, and as in this (rare) case when it's not our fault at all, then let it be. I suspect that those Iguanas will be perfectly fine if we just leave it alone for a change.

  11. Good News for Mac users on How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook · · Score: 1

    If this is true, then in the long run it's good news for Mac users - it will spur Apple on to make OS X better. That's what competition is good for - just as Windows users are now reaping the rewards of greater Mac market share in having Windows get better.

    I have never understood why Windows users wanted to "win" by having all competition sink without trace, nor Mac users for that matter. If there's only one game in town, why would anyone ever want to make it any better? Healthier for everyone if there are at least 2 viable systems, preferably 3 or 4.

  12. Re:Make sure your project is ready for the real wo on Turning an Arduino Project Into a Prototype · · Score: 1

    What you're talking about is "productionization" - in other words making a prototype able to be manufactured. That sounds over-the-top for a hobbyist project, especially a one-off, but I think it's often worth doing for several reasons: those you state, i.e. for reliability, longevity, but also a) because it gives you some insight into what's needed to create a real product not just a hobby project, b) it adds greatly to the satisfaction you get from the finished article. If (b) isn't a consideration for you, then you're probably pursuing the wrong hobby, for the wrong reasons.

  13. Re:Nice little tutorial... on Turning an Arduino Project Into a Prototype · · Score: 1

    I have to agree with you - Eagle is downright obstructive. Maybe you can get used to it, plenty seem to, and that perhaps blinds them to how awkward it is for occasional, casual users. Even the dedicated Racal CAD minicomputer system we used in the 80s was a lot easier to use than Eagle, and that's saying something.

  14. The Golden Age on What Happens To Our Musical Taste As We Age? · · Score: 1

    The Golden Age of popular music was 1955 - 1995. It's over. That's not to say that all modern music is rubbish, or that there won't be another equally phenomenal period in future, but that particular seam has been mined out.

  15. Manual Quantization on The Decline of Pixel Art · · Score: 1

    Pixels are a quantized version of whatever it is you want to portray. Pixel art is doing that quantization manually, when the computer could do it for you, rasterizing to whatever resolution it needs. Therefore the artwork should all be in vector form. They've been doing it that way for Fonts since the late 1980s, it's really about time all other graphics caught up.

  16. Re: No thank you on Critics Say It's Time To Close La Guardia Airport · · Score: 1

    The problem with LGW, STN and LTN is that they are not in London. Not even close. It's a bit of a joke that they even have the audacity to put London in their names. There are of course road and rail connections, but that just makes the journey more complicated and stressful.

    Heathrow's "classic" terminals are dilapidated and badly laid out, requiring miles of walking through nasty corridors and passageways to and from the gates - the newer terminals are better but the entire airport is completely space constrained. In fact the whole south-east is completely space-constrained, so there's never going to be a new, fully functional London airport. Crossrail might make it more bearable, but the entire experience of flying in and out of Heathrow is a horrible nightmare. I haven't flown through La Guardia but I have through LAX many times, and that's the only airport worse than Heathrow in my opinion.

  17. Re:Milestone my ass on Global Carbon Dioxide Levels Reach New Monthly Record · · Score: 0

    Any stable oscillator must have a negative feedback

    If it's an oscillator, it must have positive feedback. That's what causes the oscillation. The oscillation itself may be stable, but that doesn't imply negative feedback.

  18. Re:Tautology on Statues of Assange, Snowden and Manning Go Up In Berlin · · Score: 2

    Yes it is.

    Tautology (grammar)

  19. Tautology on Statues of Assange, Snowden and Manning Go Up In Berlin · · Score: 1

    FTA: Alexanderplatz square

    'Platz' means square. It's just Alexanderplatz.

  20. Re:Hi I'm Patrick on Researcher Discloses Methods For Bypassing All OS X Security Protections · · Score: 2

    allows anybody to inject unsigned code into internet downloads. Then, even if the user has set Gatekeeper to only allow code from the Mac App Store, the unsigned code is allowed to run

    Wrong. Anyone can inject code into any data stream trivially. It's getting it to run that's the tricky part. How exactly are you going to do that? If the code that's performing the download is in on the plot, then fine, but a) you would have to get that code past the App Store review, and b) you would have to expect Apple to revoke your signature with maximum prejudice the moment you were caught, and c) you would still have to work around the sandboxing all App Store apps require to do anything truly nasty. Getting an innocent app to run the injected code is another option, but that's back to requiring some other known exploit, such as a buffer overrun.

    The short answer is: injecting the code isn't the problem, getting it to run undetected is.

  21. Tablets not as useful as expected on We'll Be the Last PC Company Standing, Acer CEO Says · · Score: 2

    Anecdotally, I'm hearing a lot of people lately wishing they'd bought a small laptop instead of a tablet. It's the typing that's the main problem it would seem. Sure, you can use a bluetooth keyboard with most tablets, but having it right there built-in is a lot more convenient. Combined with the drop off in sales of tablets, it might suggest that the tablet "era" ends up short-lived and will turn into a resurgence for full-fledged laptops.

    Apple seem to be aware of this as well, with their latest Macbook Air being only slightly larger and heavier than an iPad but with a usable keyboard.

    People are now used to devices with few to no ports, and connecting to everything wirelessly. The days of chunky laptops that have CD burners, ports galore and are nearly an inch-thick are long gone, but lightweight laptops that are really like super tablets seem to be the future.

  22. Re:~1500 App Developers wasted their time on Networking Library Bug Breaks HTTPS In ~1,500 iOS Apps · · Score: 4, Insightful

    iOS 2.0 added NSURLConnection. iOS 7 added NSURLSession. Downloading chunks of data and saving them to a file is trivial with the latter, still pretty easy with the former. I'm not sure what you needed to do prior to iOS 2, but that's ancient history - I doubt anyone is still supporting back that far. Point is, using a 3rd party library today when there are straightforward classes to do it in Foundation that have been debugged already by Apple (and will continue to be so) is the only really sensible option. Even if you're writing cross-platform it's easy enough to create equivalent objects you can interface to that wrap other networking solutions on non-iOS devices.

  23. ~1500 App Developers wasted their time on Networking Library Bug Breaks HTTPS In ~1,500 iOS Apps · · Score: 3, Informative

    iOS has perfectly functional networking libraries and simple objects that provide an API to them. Why anyone would bother linking in a 3rd party library to replicate that functionality I can't understand. If a vulnerability were found in the iOS libraries, Apple could roll out an update and fix it overnight. As it is, that's ~1500 apps need to be revved.

  24. Re:13 Telescopes already at the Summit on Amid Controversy, Construction of Telescope In Hawaii Halted · · Score: 1

    I keep my mouth shut since I fear I will be ostracized for speaking my true opinion.

    Well, shame on you then, you coward. That's how oppression works.

  25. Re:NIMBY strikes again on Amid Controversy, Construction of Telescope In Hawaii Halted · · Score: 2

    Because it's obvious to any thinking person that there was a Creator

    Err, no. The opposite, in fact.