Posts by Kjetil

Microsoft claims IE8 is 'a leap forward in web standards'

@zenkaon

Opera 10 beta gets 100/100 on the acid3 test

McDonalds to cook up EV charging station network

Currencies..

I'm nut sure what SKr10m is supposed to be, but if you meant "Svenska kronor", it's SEK, not SKr

Want to buy Jacqui Smith's ID?

To quote Douglas Adams...

"It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant --- a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all- purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense."

Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless, 1992

AMD plans 12-core server chip for 2010

@James O'Brien

Those bugs are already fixed. Any Phenom model which ends in 50 is a B3 stepping and doesn't have the TLB bug. I presume the new Barcas are fine as well.

Sharpcast syncs PCs, Macs and mobiles

Re: Re: "PCs"

By looking at the web site?

Tux, because linux runs on PCs too.

Mozilla plugs 10 security holes in Firefox

Re:Alternatives

What do you need RoboForm for? Opera has that function built in.

Windows better off closed, says Microsoft

Hilf said...

Hilf said "most of the knowledgeable people" are actually asking not to be given the source code for Windows,

Well ofcourse, they know the mere sight of it would give them nightmares for years to come ;)

AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 dual-GPU graphics card

Re: X2 in cross fire?

Yes you can, no problem. But unfortunately, you can't hook up four of these for 8 GPUs as each card has only one spare CF connector. Regular cards have two CF connectors and the only thing stopping one from putting 6 or 8 cards in a system is the lack of 16x/8x slots on a motherboard and driver support.

IE's Acid trip back to conflict

Which Acid2?

Knowing Microsoft, they've probably just made their own "improved" version of the Acid2 test which IE8 can pass more or less without a hitch.

Eee PC: better with Windows?

Reading (and writing) NTFS

Try NTFS-3G. I (and many many others as well) have used NTFS-3G to write to NTFS partitions without any problems for a while now.

Is Chernobyl behind academic slump in Sweden?

Statistics...

I remember a story my statistics teacher told us:

Some years ago a disease plagued a certain type of trees, and it spread nation wide. Farmers tried additives in the fertilizer, but this only helped in some places, while the trees were still dying in others. One particulary paranoid farmer though it might be radio waves killing the trees, so he set up huge iron nets around the trees, and it worked; his trees became healthy and all traces of the disease disappeared. "So I was right all along", thought the farmer.

The actual cause was iron deficiency, so setting up iron nets enriched the soil, and the trees survived. The reason for the additives working in some places, was the fact that they used iron buckets, while others used plastic.

So although the statistics match a certain theory, one shouldn't take that for absolute fact.

Governator vows to appeal ruling striking down video game law

Re: Now i'm confused

Well, Dubja made president. I don't think you need to be all that bright to get somewhere in the US. I also don't think you need to be all that clever to win Mr. Universe or Mr. Olympia. As to Hollywood; Tom Cruise and John Travolta. 'Nuff said.

EU and US agree on high-end sat nav standard

@Jasmine Strong

Gigabit ethernet isn't expensive right now. You can pick up a NIC and a switch for a dime and a song these days. Still, got your point though

Skype violates open source licence

Re: Change the license then

"The outrageous part that I see in this case is not whether it's wrong for skype to be taken to court, but that the GPL doesn't allow for inclusion of a URL. In a modern internet world, surely it's good enough? "

I'm believe (although I may be wrong) that GPL v3 allows for source code to be put on a web server, so they *have* changed the license, but that doesn't help if the product in question was distributed with GPL v2.

Alltunes.com claims win in Russian copyright case

Re: Another DRM rant

"The bottom line with alltunes though is that the people who own the rights never agreed to the music being sold on the site - if I sell your car without asking you but give you £100 is that fair?"

Not a very good comparison. A better comparison would be making a perfect replica of my car and selling *that* and then giving me £100. At the moment, I wouldn't mind that one bit as I'm keeping my car for a while, and I could always do with more cash :D

Is your phone free?

Nothing new here...

The Trolltech (the guys behind QT which KDE is built on) has had the Greenphone on the market for a while now. I tested one first, and it was scarily fast. Push a button, and it just did what you wanted, no waiting at all.

http://trolltech.com/products/qtopia/greenphone

iPhone contract charges unveiled

Re: Rates good in the US? Yeah right!

"Of course that also includes voicemail, caller ID, 3-way calling and forwarding."

And why shouldn't it? That stuff is free here in Norway, heck I even had all that when I was on a pay-as-you-go plan. On my plan I pay $5/month and can call anyone (cellphones, landlines, long distance, other providers, etc) for $0.11/minute and pay $0.06 for SMS's (costs nothing to recieve, ofcourse).

Data is a bit of a rip-off at $3.36/MB, but they cap the charge at $8.42/day (anything beyond that is free).

Casio Exilim EX-Z75 and EWC-10 underwater case

A little different?

"How do you sell a seven-megapixel camera when so many rivals are doing the same? You can't rely on the usual features - big LCD, anti-blur tech, slimline metal casing, etc - because everyone else has those too. No, you need something a little different, and in Casio's case that means offering your latest compact camera with an optional underwater kit."

Pentax and Olympus already sell p&s cameras that are waterproof down to a couple of meters, and you can get casings for many other p&s's. Nothing new here then...

Fancy an earful? Click here for tech support

To quote Zaphod Beeblebrox..

"So, ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking"

Red Hat makes a security bundle with Symantec

Wait...

The same Symantec that can't tell system files from viruses?

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

+1 for .co.uk

n/t

US appeals court smacks down FCC obscenity rule

Title

Someone should send these guys a dvd of south park..

Orange simplifies data by capping at 30MB

Impressed..

I really can't see how they can charge this much.

Up here (Norway, which isn't known to be very cheap) I'm with Telenor (not the cheapest telecom, but they have the best coverage). GPRS/UMTS is £1.67/MB, HOWEVER, they have capped the MAX CHARGE per day at £0.83 for WAP and £4.18 for mobile internet. No matter how much you download, they'll never charge more than that. They also have an unlimited package for £46/month, where you can download as much as you can cope with no extra charge whatsoever. No fair usage policy, no cap, no hidden fees, modem use encouraged.

Judges define scope of McKinnon appeal

Re: "McKinnon caused an estimated $700,000 worth of damage"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/26/mckinnon_infosec/

Google acquires 'sandbox' technology for secure browsing

Re: Vista...

Do you really think the Fista implementation work?

I would much rather trust Google at this.

Panasonic premieres 12.2 megapixel compact

All good, but...

Can you take pictures with it without needing 10kW of studio lighting?

My experience is that the noise in a picture is proportionate to the pixel count, and inversely so with sensor size. I tried an 8MP Canon something P&S, and it was just about useless for anything but shooting outdoors on a sunny day. Taking it indoors was hopeless, as there was more noise than picture.

There is a reason why many pro dslr's only have 6 or 8 MP's, while having a sensor several times larger than that of a P&S.

Oz Big Brother in dead dad ding-dong

Re: Meanwhile in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(US_TV_series)

Need I say more?

MS stops hacked hardware accessing Xbox Live

Not just hacked hardware

http://majornelson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!FAB4B8088A70F52!590.entry

According to the comments there, several people have had their 'clean' xbox 360's banned too. Almost looks like the screening software looking for modified consoles are made by the same programmer(s) that made WGA, and surely (as the US Army can testify) noone was falsely accused of having pirated windows copies

GPL to undermine Microsoft's Novell deal?

Re Microsoft claiming to have all those patents...

I think this says it all:

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070517

The FOSS community has the backing of other giants, like IBM, Sun, Google and others. I really don't think Microsoft has any chance of winning this kind of law suit, and they know it.

Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook P1610

If you want one, get it quick

"by the time you read this there will also be a version loaded with Windows Vista Business available too"

"While the P1610 isn't going to win any performance awards, it's up to the job of everyday tasks."

Not with fista on it...

Vote now for 2007's oddest book title

Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

Didn't know Dubja had an autobiography ?