Posts by Graham Bartlett

Muscle pants give girls that skin-stripped look

Those are cool!

Creepy but rather excellent.

Ten... Valentine's Day gifts for him

Guitar junk

Pickmaster plectrum maker? Well since every guitarist has their own preference on pick shape, a one-size-fits-all shape is little use. Plus for the price of that gadget, I bought a bag of as many favourite picks as I'm likely to need for the next 20 years.

Ten... Valentine's Day gifts for her

Tat city

Jeez, if you're going to get her some plastic shite for Valentine's Day, at least make it something she might be interested in. If she's not a geek, gadgets like this will do nothing for her. And if she is a geek, she'll tell you it's all crap and you should buy her something that's actually worth having, or at least is fun. A Hello Kitty USB stick may not be tasteful or particularly functional, but at least it has some amusement value.

Tech! Tech! Teeeeech! Women want gadgets for Valentine's

@Jai

MAybe I'm twisted, but that was my thought too. Especially from the phrasing of "fit in smaller hands and [in] smaller body frames"...

How Zuck wields power over Facebook for a few hundred bucks

@Jemma

Did you have a point, or did you just put your brain on freewheel?

Maybe one is useless - but get a lot of them together...

This is a classic fail, and it's why the idea of "boards are controlled by their shareholders" has become obsolete.

The major shareholders in the big listed companies are usually pension and insurance funds or similar big investors. Individually they can't control the whole company - but if a bunch of pension fund managers got together and said "fuck this, they're killing the company and we're going to lose our investments", they could boot out the current board and replace them with people who'd actually run the place properly.

Trouble is that each fund manager is only looking at their own little pot of shares. So instead of all ganging together and actually doing something about a failing company, instead they're just shuffling shares between each other and playing "pass the hand grenade", with the loser taking the pain when it all eventually blows up.

Royal astro-boffin to MPs: Stop thinking about headlines

Tabloid reporting...

Oh boy, yes. Like that open letter about climate change the other week which El Reg was so pleased with, signed by a bunch of people who don't know anything about it, and in some cases by people whose name has been put to something that wasn't what they agreed to.

Or all the vaccinations which are proven to save lives. Back in the 70s, my mum believed the "controversy" about whooping cough and didn't get me and my sister vaccinated. We caught it (aged 3 and 1 respectively), and we both survived. We were lucky. Plenty of folks say "oh I got that when I was a kid and it didn't do me any harm" - well if it had, you wouldn't be here to spout yer nonsense, would you?!

US Navy preps railgun for tests

@Chemist

"it will just go through like a rifle bullet through paper"

When you're a hundred thousand tons of metalwork, holes all the way through from top to bottom tend to be unhelpful when you want to stay afloat.

Koala food may power US Defence force

Not exactly stealthy

"So how did you know we were there from fifty miles over the horizon?"

"Strewth sport, yer ship stinks like a koala backside - we just needed to follow our noses..."

Laser boffins blast bits onto hard drive at 200Gb/sec

Both fFlash and spinny drives will likely be replaced

Memristor looks like the way forward - solid state *and* no problems with write cycles.

Coke-snorting cop bots to replace sniffer dogs

Bah

Unless it can roll on its back for a tummy-rub or fetch a stick, I'm not interested.

(Yes, the one with the dog biscuits in the pocket.)

Chilli crab scoffing boffins build anti-cancer claw robot

@Jon Green

Dead right. The German language has actually kept this link until today - so "Krebs" means cancer, the Cancer star sign, or a crab.

(Off-topic: The Virgo star-sign is "Jungfrau" in German, which means "virgin". As a lad of 16 or so, I thought things were moving a bit fast when my German girlfriend said "Ich bin Jungfrau". But sadly she was only talking about her star-sign and wasn't initiating hanky-panky...)

Conclusive proof of human activity causing glacier to vanish

Can we rename that area?

To Pratagonia?

Scientists weave battery into clothing

Danger danger! High voltage!

When we touch, when we kiss!

Good old Jack White, eh?

Micron CEO Appleton dies in plane crash

@HeNe

Yeah - there's an old saying that it's better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than to be in the air wishing you were on the ground. The worst thing is to be under pressure, bcos you'll rush your preflight thinking "it was all OK last time", but faults are no respecters of experience. Shortly after I qualified on hang-gliders, my instructor's assistant (early 40s, been flying all his life) did a demo flight for a student but didn't clip in properly. He fell several hundred feet, and was lucky to get away with "only" both legs badly broken and a month or so in hospital. Check it or check out...

BT Vision throws Microsoft Mediaroom under a bus for Linux

@Asiren

Technically yes. However you're assuming you can retrieve the copper scrap without having to reimburse customers for loss of service, which is kind of a problem.

SpaceX successfully tests SuperDraco rescue rockets

@Phil Atkin

Eh? The "Test fire" part clearly *was* real. Bookended by rendered shots of what a capsule using it might look like, sure, but the static test fire was the real thing.

Brit space agency sends up 1st satellite

@Destroy all monsters

Might be confusing your Bonds there, sir - but Grace Jones does kind of stick in the mind! Unless you mean Thumper from "Diamonds are Forever", of course, but the implication there is that Bambi and Thumper are only bedding each other. And Blofeld is pretty short on head hair.

Yes, the coat full of unusual Q-branch devices, thanks...

Android users more likely to put out

@The Indomitable Gall

Assuming the participants are straight, the number of men and women participating in sex is going to be equal, isn't it? How much either party gets from the experience is another matter, of course.

What the stats do say is that the statistical deviation (oh dear) of promiscuity amongst men is greater than amongst women. It's the old "average" problem. For women, the median and mode will both be fairly close, but a few extremely-high outliers on the male side pull the mean value a long way from the (lower) mode.

Boffins out earbuds that sound right when inserted wrong

Why bother?

They're in-ear phones, so they sound shit. Always. And for many wearers, they're only giving you background music for your day anyway. Why pretend you care about whether you're getting instruments panned to the correct side?

MasterCard joins Visa in pushing PINs into America

@Jeff8

Sure a signature is required. But you can sign it "M Mouse" and walk out of there with your groceries. The assistant doesn't check it and the bank doesn't check it, so it doesn't do a damn thing for security. In the US, if someone's got your card then they have full and unrestricted access, which screws over the stores where the card thief uses it. In the UK we need two-point security of something you have (card) and something you know (PIN) for every in-person transaction on a card.

Sure a PIN doesn't work for internet transactions. But if you're ordering something on the internet then the store has a delivery address on file; and if the card is reported stolen then the delay in delivery means the store can probably retrieve the parcel and limit their losses.

World's first bamboo smartphone to enter production

It's not wood

It's grass. (Yeah maaan...)

Death of IE6 still greatly exaggerated, says browser hit squad

Can't believe no-one's done this yet

The cake is a lie.

The Register Comments Guidelines

Free-range?! What about those of us who like our pr0n involving tying up? That's discrimination, that is! And I'll be over to give you a damn good hiding, just as soon as I'm let out of these handcuffs...

Surprise: Neil Young still hates digital music

Compression - which type?

On the one hand we've got MP3 (or Ogg, AAC or WMV), which does to sound what JPEG does to pictures, i.e. throw away detail you might not notice. Low bitrate MP3s certainly do sound awful (particularly on cymbals). Higher bitrate MP3s are much better, and if you're listening in a noisy environment then you may well not notice the difference.

On the one hand we've got dynamic range compression which makes the softer parts louder, which if overdone can kill any light and shade in the music.

Both are problems, but if NY is opposed to digital audio then his beef is almost certainly with the former. A lack of dynamic range in recordings is certainly a modern problem, but it's nothing to do with whether it's digital or not.

Saudi oil minister praises renewable energy

Education? In Saudi?

Yeah right. If you educate them, sooner or later they'll start asking "what's special about those guys at the top?" And the Saudi record on that is pretty clear. In your own country, you send in the secret police to round them up, routinely torture them, and imprison them for any length of time you like without trial. And elsewhere (Bahrain, say) you send troops across to help your fellow plutocrats stay in power through force. And all this is before we've got onto the 50% of citizens who've had the misfortune to be born female.

iPhone 5 rumoured to be packed with pay-by-bonk tech

@AC: API

You've not heard of the adapter/wrapper design pattern then? This bloke could easily write code for a Nokia with NFC and get it working, and then would only need to change the adapter layer (and perhaps the UI layout) for it to work perfectly on an iPhone.

iPhone doc will detect cancer, diabetes - boffins

@The Fuzzy Wotnot

There's a joke about a patient who goes to see his doctor about his tennis elbow, and the doctor shows off his new auto-diagnosis widget. The bloke creates a mixed-up sample from his daughter, his wife, himself, and some engine oil. Punchline is: "Your daughter's up the duff, your wife's got the clap, your car's about to throw a piston, and if you don't stop w*nking your tennis elbow is never going to get better."

Steerable bullet aims for mass army deployment

@AC: fail

I see your point. But the big problem with aiming a sodding great rifle is the sodding-great-ness of it, and hence the extreme skill required to shoot without any kind of tremble in your hands. Laser designators are the size of a camera, mount on a small tripod, and the better ones have all sorts of assists for getting the targetting right. AFAIK they don't currently have ones that can track a target as he walks, but it's almost certainly only a matter of time. So it's going to be easier to do with a separate designator.

Don't forget about the problem of showing yourself to fire, and if you're firing directly at the target then they can see your muzzle flash. With this beastie, you can stay behind cover, bash a round into the air roughly in the right direction, and your mate with the laser designator can steer it onto the target. Hell, your mate can even be behind cover too and use a detachable control panel to drive the designator.

And it's worth pointing out that this will tie in perfectly with the XM25 smart rifle, also a smooth-bore weapon. A smart fused payload on a smart targetting shell is likely to be rather useful - think grenade launcher with sniper-rifle accuracy.

SpaceShipOne man, Nobel boffins: Don't panic on global warming

Quotes

If they're going to run that quote of Trenberth's, it's only fair to also run this one:-

"It is amazing to see this particular quote lambasted so often. It stems from a paper I published this year bemoaning our inability to effectively monitor the energy flows associated with short-term climate variability. It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability"

And any mug can set up a club called the "World Federation of Scientists". I could set up one called "World Federation of Mongolian Lizard Men With Magic Powers". It doesn't make me one. To quote the guy's Wikipedia entry: "Nobel Prize laureate Hans Bethe has been quoted saying about Zichichi "eccellent organizer, mediocre physicist"." So clearly you may well have been mistaken.

It's also interesting to look up the "World Federation of Scientists". They state publicly that their biggest achievement after 15 years of the organisation existing was to have roughly categorised the ways we can screw up the world and to have decided to set up Working Groups to think about it. Anyone else thinking the Golgafrinchams' committee at the end of "Restaurant at the End of the Universe"?

Basically, there's four possibilities when it comes to overwhelming concensus. Either they're all insane, or they've all been bribed, or they don't have the right information, or they're right. Hopefully we can rule out mass insanity. Uni tenure tends to be a bit less profitable (by orders of magnitude) than working for an oil company, which tends to make you wonder about the second one. The unis are making all their research publicly available, and are the only people putting significant funds into actual investigation, which suggests they're the best informed people when it comes to point three. So go figure.

No, climate change will not kill the Earth. It won't even kill all the humans, or make too much of a dent on species generally, especially not in the long run of evolution. But it'll fucking *muller* a large fraction of the Third World which is already well in trouble, and it won't do much good for large portions of our countries either. Whether you think the deaths of billions of people is worth us doing something about or not is your call, of course.

Sony focuses on light with Cyber-shot refresh

Umm...

High ISO ain't the problem. High ISO without a crapload of noise is the problem. Wait and see, I guess.

Soul Calibur V

Ladyboy character?

That character on page 2 in the red hotpants (apparently called Natsu). Anyone else notice that "she" is packing quite a bulge in the underpant department? Even more obvious on another SC5 screenshot.

http://soulcalibur.com/en_GB#/media/soulcalibur5/screen/sc5_screen_52

Star Trek tractor beam to save Earth from asteroid Armageddon

@Gav

I think it's simpler than that, you know. Getting something to an asteroid by definition needs something that can get out of the gravity well, which again by definition means a much bigger rocket than anything in the nuke arsenal. (As you say, if it gets close enough that a regular ICBM could hit it, then we're screwed.) So the easy way to tell if it's a nuke destined for an asteroid is bcos it's sat on top of a sodding great multistage rocket at Baikonur...

Update Facebook by thrusting your hips to, er ... 'Like' things

Frottage alert!

Not so much a solution looking for a problem, as a solution inviting a slap round the chops...

Russian supply ship heads for ISS, space garbage crashes into Pacific

@Richard Boyce

Sounds like a plan. Just imagine the ways it could be used...

"Hey Vassily, we're losing orbit again. Tank up on the vodka and go for a good long piss outside, will ya? And Andrei, you know your momma's sauerkraut you packed - now's the time to dig out that spacesuit with a tube out the ass..."

Starship Voyager dumped into skip

@AC

"his hobby is no harm to anyone else"

Except the person who actually owns the house. He's gone bankrupt and he's not paid into the mortgage for 18 years, so it's almost guaranteed that he no longer has a share in it and can only be renting it. And FWIW, he did the work *after* they'd split up.

If he really wants it, he can always get himself a mortgage and buy it himself. Sure, he'll be paying top whack for having no deposit, and he'll have to work his arse off to cover repayments. If it really mattered to him and he had a shred of maturity, he'd be doing that. But if he had a shred of maturity and not just a gross sense of entitlement, he wouldn't be here in the first place.

How can family sysadmins make a safe internet playground for kids?

@Jake

Bite all you like. But when I particularly say that I'm not too bothered about who sees naked people and your best line is about seeing naked people, then you're biting on the wrong end of the brown sticky stick. ;)

One anecdote does not make for conclusive evidence, sure. Try the National Institute for Mental Health for size instead.

http://www.ehow.com/about_5030719_effects-horror-movies-children.html

Which is why I'm more worried about my son seeing violence than sex.

@Malcolm Boura

"There is strong evidence that prudery results in harm, no good evidence that it provides benefit, and a bunch of neo-puritan politicans using "child protection" to further their own agenda. The causal links may be less obvious than a sexual assault but prudery is every bit as much child sexual abuse."

Define prudery.

I've got a 14-month son, so I know I'm going to be having this problem in a few years time. I don't much mind if he sees pics of naked people on the internet. I got all my pre-experience knowledge of "anatomy" from top-shelf magazines. Whatever.

Thing is though, everyone automatically assumes that's the *only* thing that you'd want to restrict kiddy access to on the internet. Not so. How's about pics of dead, mutilated bodies? Pics of corpses of soldiers burned to death? Excerpts from any 18-rated horror film? or even a fair amount of 12-rated stuff? There's *STRONG* evidence that this *DOES* result in harm if the kid is not equipped to deal with it.

For anecdotal evidence, I submit my own case. My folks didn't have TV when I was small (late 70s/early 80s, British austerity and all that), but I happened to come downstairs and be listening outside the living room door when Radio 4 were doing some Dracula radioplay, and just at the point where there was a pretty detailed description of a post-vampire-attack corpse. I don't know exactly how old I was, but I probably wasn't older than six. I wasn't scared of the dark before - I damn sure was after, and I didn't sleep well for *years* as a result.

So I suggest you fuck off back under your rock and stop bullshitting us that any kind of restriction on what children see is child abuse.

Alcohol DOUBLES LIFESPAN, helps resist stress

@lyngvi

There's plenty of good British beers at 5% or stronger. Speckled Hen, Hobgoblin, Old Peculier, Tanglefoot, Bishop's Finger and Absolution are all great beers. Greene King's Abbot Ale is perfectly acceptable, although most Greene King pubs are incapable of serving a decent pint of beer. With real ale, you don't necessarily need a lot of alcohol for it to taste great though.

The bad rep that American beers have got mostly isn't their alcohol content, it's their complete lack of taste. Better American beers for sure can be OK - I liked Killian Red during my stint in Detroit. But the mass-produced stuff like Coors is all really *really* bad.

Interestingly, brewpubs are a particularly American phenomenon as a reaction to the insanely poor quality of the mass-produced stuff. They never happened in the UK. Partly perhaps it's due to Americans having more disposable income and tending to go out more. Partly though it could also be that the "average" beer in the UK is reasonably OK taste-wise. Or maybe us Brits have just got lazy...

E. coli turns seaweed into ethanol

Tequila!

Ethanol, worms, salt... Job done!

Spam-squirting hole found in McAfee antivirus kit

Bonnet takedowns

It's the sporran takedowns you want to be careful of!

Modeling-clay iPads foisted on unwary Canucks

@AC

Prove to the shop?! If I bought anything else and it was broken or not as described, and *especially* if it had clearly been tampered with, it'd go back to the shop PDQ. And the shop would be doing the "we're really very sorry sir" routine, unless they want the whole shop to know about it

"$695 of clay"

I don't understand. You buy an iPad from a shop and find that there isn't an iPad inside. Why not get the shop to sort it out, instead of whining that you're out $695? Sure it's Canada, but even Newfies could figure that one out.

NHS trust to digitise millions of patient records

Resolution problems

Back in the 90s, I worked at GEC Alsthom in Stafford. When I started, all docs were stored in paper form. You wanted a copy of a spec, you went to the doc store and they made you a copy. You wrote a new spec, you printed it out from WordPerfect (or MS Word, later) and gave it to them.

Then they heard about digitising, so they scanned them all in. Great. Except that to save money on large hard drives (expensive back in those days), they didn't scan them at a particularly high resolution. Text was still readable, but any diagrams were toast. Result was that if you wanted a *useable* version of the spec, you had to look on the front cover to see who wrote it and get them to give you a copy!

Hopefully they won't make the same mistake these days, with storage so cheap now. My maths says that at 600dpi with 8-bit grey-scale and no compression, you can fit 31450 scanned sheets of A4 onto a bog-standard 1TB drive, so the cost of storage is likely to be insignificant compared to the cost of paying people to do the scanning.

First ever private rocket to space station in launch delay

@Poor Coco

Silly boy. They went to the moon to *get* the cheese, so they didn't take any cheese into space with them. Don't make me set Feathers McGraw on you...

Angry Brides lob stilettos in dowry shakedown takedown

@Trygve Henriksen

FWIW, I don't really care if they abort foetuses (foeti?). Better to abort something which is not (yet) a human being, than to treat a human being badly. As the saying goes, the allegedly-"pro-life" lobby stop caring about you once you're born.

Where it gets fun is further down the line. Have as many sons as you like, you'll need a woman to give you grandchildren. And when there's more men looking for a wife than there are women, it becomes a seller's market (if you'll pardon the expression). It's already happening in China.

Oz skeptic offers prize if Rossi’s E-cat works

Wired article

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-11/06/cold-fusion-heating-up?page=1

The really interesting part, as Wired says, is that Rossi isn't asking for random investors to put money in. Instead he's selling them on approval. If the buyers find they don't work, they hand them back and don't pay for them, and all they've lost is some engineering time. This isn't your typical scam behaviour. Of course the early buyers could be shills, or perhaps there are no early buyers at all (we can't see Rossi's bank accounts, after all). Still though, if it's a con then he's working on the scale of global megacorps or national governments, who (a) can afford the losses, and (b) have the resources to nail him to the wall if they find they've been screwed over.

Gridstore shafts rival Overland over a Barrall

Oh the missed opportunity!

How often do you get the chance to use a headline like "Overland shafted over Barrall"?

Billions of potentially populated planets in the galaxy

Having tea right now

Actually it's more like "having tea umpty-tum million years ago", given that what these guys are seeing is light that reflected off their planet (and teacups) umpty-tum million years ago. Perhaps they've discovered coffee by now. Or maybe their civilisation has disintegrated into chaos and ruins, and they're reduced to drinking Horlicks.

X-Dream Rocker wireless gaming chair

What a load of tat

Bah! Give me a 1985 Space Harrier rig, and then I'll be interested. This piece of crap is is just an office chair with cheap-ass multimedia speakers stapled to it.