Posts by Name 153 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2007
No it won't work very well when foggy or raining, and it won't work well against shiny chrome plated munitions which would no doubt be a rapidly introduced counter counter measure.
It is also a single target counter measure so the 'enemy' will simply and cheaply synchronise launching/firing to substantially reduce its effectiveness.
Actually, he's right. Any apps you want to release for the iPhone will have to go through the iTunes store. To be able to offer your apps free, you have to pay your $99 per annum, and then assume the position and listen for the snap of the latex gloves being donned- and hope that they'll allow the punters to see your app.
Given Apple's history of liking to fox dissent and competition by brute force (or just stealing stuff), this isn't a very compelling offer for the good-hearted free software type.
Remember: DURID IS FOR FITE!!!!one
(mkae magik wit hands, exit stage left)
Does anybody see a trend here?
Another such story...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/29/american_lafrance_ibm_filing/
Damn, global services ! or GTS or GBS -- whatever crap they are calling it. Worst people are 'IBM certified' IT specialist/architect. They are self-proclaimed idiots -- know nothing about technology.
"All it does is force drivers to spend an excessive amount of time staring at their speedos."
Having recent experience in local roadworks I find I spend an excessive amount of time staring at the small print on my GPS.
When travelling at a safe speed there is no need to look where you are going.....
I had an IBM drive let the smoke out years ago. In the morning I found a shutdown PC and a nasty smell. Another time I had a Maxtor drive spend all night trying to turn one of its platters into aluminium dust.
Electronics fails and sometimes burns up, modern PCs have plenty of available power to make small areas very hot but electronics is not very flammable. All those UL (underwriters laboratories) marks are there to show it isn't made from stuff that busts into flames.
"So, you explain about corrupt data (in this case) not being flushed by a simple 'restart' - and six months later the call is repeated by the same user."
What operating system/program depends on RAM contents on power up corrupt or otherwise?
If a cold boot fixes a problem it is fixing locked up peripheral hardware not 'corrupt' data in RAM.
"Where do you think kids get most of there booze from? It's the smaller shops and off licences where they can get away with it. I doubt you'll find many kids getting served in Tesco, Sainsburys or ASDA."
Exactly the opposite in fact... The smaller places can't afford the fines. And it would be the older legal friends who buy it. Unless we're in the pub where we can get served pretty much anywhere no problem.
What does need to be done is LOWER the age (only on beer mind), just changing where you get it won't make a difference to the people who really have a problem with drink. It sounds counter intuitive to lower the age but it would work(in time, it wouldn't be a quick fix for society). When the french kids came over for the exchange my school runs many of them got drunk for the first time, despite being able to buy beer at 16. They were used to having the odd beer with lunch or a glass of wine at dinner while they were younger. To them alcohol wasn't anything special, they don't go out getting ratassed every night.
Also i've seen a number of people post that youths do stupid things when drunk. It's just plain untrue, yes it happens a bit but no where near as much as with "adults". Don't believe everything you read in the papers...
The porn-for-sale moguls are just irked that Google and others make it so easy to find tons of FREE PORN. Sure would be convenient for them if Google had to play policemen judging what sites were "child safe" and what sites might compete with their product sales, and it sure would be convenient if Google were legally required to get your credit card number and a photo of your driver's license and a notarized copy of your birth certificate and then validate you on a voice phonecall before permitting anyone to see any of all that free porn.
Yep, we need a law forcing Google to do strict secure age verification before letting anyone see any free porn...
...for the children.
Let's do the numbers. One billion people divided family of 8 (yes, you need to have 6 children to make up billion) = 125 million families. Assume each family owns a Nano, you must think all of us are stupid to believe that collective CO2 emissions by 125M cars would exceed CO2 produced by Californians.
Do you need to give me cumulative numbers/CO2 emissions for so called 'developed' nation?
The trees of linux distros are _not_ a weakness, that is an understandable misinterpretation. Kubuntu for instance, is one leaf on the tree and it is very close to hitting the moron-installable desktop solution for Linux.
Its unfortunate that the steaming pile of intenstines we call directx has been forced on the world but the card manufacturers will always hedge their bets and keep OpenGL 2 support (and 3) - they are big too.
This technology is converging, not diverging, and in spite of Linus T. being WRONG about virtualization (see his recent misguided comments re it at LCA), Linux is soon going to eat the world.
I'm both a smart mobile phone and sat-nav enthusiast for many years. The argument of Windows pda as well and Symbian based for GPS functionally is nothing new. Frankly none of them are satisfactory in terms of partiality is concerned. It remains to be seen if Garmin can deliver. Keep in mind, Garmin has a horrible reputation in gimping their devices. Just look at the Nuvi line, it's mind boggling why their marketing department decide to make things too simple but yet so complicated with their overly simplified interface, and a very confusing line up.
for example. Tracks are removed , as well as area avoidance, or even a halfway usable compass. Compared to their older offering such as the Quest series, its quite disappointing.
Garmin has also been horrible with listening and interfacing with their customers. lord only knows what obvious features Garmin will dumb down till it's unusable, and tells you it's a feature , not a bug.
Don't get me wrong, I personally have 6 Gamin sat-nav devices. Ranges from the old GPS V to their very recent Rino 530Hcx. It just irritates me somehow they tend to ruin a great idea. Its almost like screwing up making cold cereal.
Listen fellow posters, there is a more serious issue associated with this Ryanair dodginess... Why is it acceptable generally for us to be attracted to, and 'joke' about, women who are above school age but wear school uniforms? I can see why the advertisement is offensive to some; but in society I find the British attitude to schoolgirls who are actually schoolwomen a bit hypocritical...
The British press has a problem with reporting on peadophilia accurately, but then it's suddenly fine and dandy for a large company to have a tongue in cheek joke about naughty schoolgirls, who aren't girls nor at school, but that because of that it's ok to pretend they're at school, but not really. WHAT?! Not only does none of the theory make real sense, in a real mature society it just should not be acceptable to joke about something that is basically playing on the fact that schoolgirls can look mature and be found attractive by some men when they're actually likely only 16 years old. Putting an older model in those clothes and joking on the fact she's being 'naughty' whilst also being a youngster at school isn't amusing or acceptable, because it's implying that 16 year old girls who dress a bit provocatively enjoy the same thing.
It's very convoluted subject, but I have to say I don't think it's okay to have page3 in rubbish newspapers not worthy of the 10pence they ask, and again it's not alright to play on the supposed schoolgirl sexual allure to make more cash in the world.
..reading such Luddite stance here on Register.
An ISP is just responsible for providing the capacity the customers have purchased and it is up to the customers to use it as they please.
Bittorrent is only one recent and advanced communication protocol. If the ISP has problems delivering capacity for it imagine how they will cope with all the future even more aggressive and more efficient transfer protocols.
ISPs, stop overselling and start investing in your infrastructure so that we can always enjoy future technical advancements on the Internet.
Can you elaborate on this point: <blockquote> "The bottleneck on the upstream side isn't bandwidth
per se, it's the packet rate. So a number of connection requests use up the cable modem's contention
slots before raw bandwidth is maxed out. It's not about bandwidth, it's about duty cycle."
</blockquote>
Is your argument, in sum, the following?
<blockquote> In contrast to other forms of
traffic, Bittorrent produces a large number of small synchronization (SYN/ACK) packets which
substantially increases contention at the DOCSIS MAC level (through collisions on the "contention
slot"? Or contention for mini-slots?). Packet drop has no appreciable effect on the number of these
packets and so such "throttling" is ineffective. </blockquote>
I would expect the rate of
contention to be a function of the amount of data to be transmitted and not the number of packets:
if you are constantly sending data you need to vie for the same transmit slots regardless of the
size or type of the individual packets. That is, the same data rate HTTP transfer should create the
same degree of contention as a Bittorrent transfer.
Second, the amount of contention is limited in
some way (it is not unbounded). How?
In the paper you cited, "Assessing the Impact of BitTorrent on
DOCSIS Networks" I see no comparison to performance degradation caused by other forms of traffic (e.g. HTTP). That there is contention when links are highly utilized is not under question. There is
no evidence in that paper that Bittorrent, as a protocol, causes more contention that other forms of
traffic.
Please do not shy away from precise, technical explanations.
Not surprised Scrabulous got targetted, if only because of the name. Do you really think Facebook would ignore an identical site calling itself Facebuke for example?
Still, there are plenty of better Scrabble-type games available which don't infringe any trademarks and which offer plenty of extra features not available in Scrabble. Try CrossCraze for a start.
This case isn't simply about a random chick suing her dealer, they were acquintences, which is what makes the case much more complex than simply someone buying any form of illegal drug from a dealer. Without the full case to review it's difficult to simpy say "she was wrong to win."
When are the industry big boys going to stop play little boys games ("Mine's bigger than yours") and develop single industry standards to make life simpler for consumers?
I hope the next new storage standards comes along quickly and blows HD-DVD and Bluray to the crap house.
Streaming video on TruTV's (formerly Court TV) website:
1 of 4: http://www.trutv.com/video/?id=870&link=truTVshlk
2 of 4: http://www.trutv.com/video/?id=871&link=truTVshlk
3 of 4: http://www.trutv.com/video/?id=872&link=truTVshlk
4 of 4: http://www.trutv.com/video/?id=873&link=truTVshlk
Unbaptized babies use to go to limbo, not purgatory.
Limbo != purgatory.
Limbo is a circle of hell where unbaptized babies go. Purgatory is where souls rest until judgment day. I swear, you people wouldn't know the difference between Candyland and the Xanth. You'd probably confuse the doctrine of the virgin birth with the doctrine of the immaculate conception.
Learn your myths. Angels have wings, demons have horns, God has superpowers and is almost as powerful as Santa, and seven, EXACTLY seven, angels can dance on the head of a pin.
To be honest the greed of those in the record industry is the only thing I can see that merits a burning in hell here.
I tend to agree with the Pirate Bay viewpoint, everybody is doing it .....it is the law that needs to be changed to suit the people not the other way round.
And there is no law saying what they are doing is illegal in their country.
Brett Glass here.... You may remember me as a long time columnist for computer publications such as Infoworld, BYTE, and PC World. Nowadays, I am (among other things) running an ISP -- the world's first wireless broadband ISP, in fact, in operation for more than 15 years. Here's an ISP's take (sorry if it's a bit long, but there are lots of important points to make) on what Rogers is doing and on Lauren Weinstein's reaction to it. I've posted similar comments on a few other sites, but think it's appropriate to post something here as well.
Network neutrality means not using one's control of the pipe to disadvantage competitive content or service providers. For example, if you're a cable company that offers VoIP, network neutrality means not blocking customers' use of other VoIP providers.
Network neutrality does NOT mean that a provider can't "frame" pages (as do many providers -- especially those like Juno which provide inexpensive or free service) or send them informative messages via their browser.
Let's step back and take a dispassionate look at what Rogers is really doing here. They need to get a message to a customer. Like any experienced ISP, they know that there's a good chance that e-mail won't be read in a timely way, if at all. (We, as an ISP, find that our customers constantly change their addresses -- often after revealing them online and exposing them to spammers -- without any notice, and often let the mailboxes that we give them fill up, unread, until they exceed their quotas and no more can be received.) The Windows Message Service once worked to send users messages, but only ran on Windows and is now routinely blocked because it's become an avenue for pop-up spam.
What to use instead? Snail mail? Expensive and slow... and the whole point of the message Rogers is sending is to let a user know right away that he's about to exceed a quota. Give users an special program to display messages from the ISP? Users have too many things running in the background, cluttering their computers, already -- so no one could blame them if they didn't install it. (Also, many users won't install an application for fear of viruses, and alternative operating systems likely would not run the software.) Display a different page than the user requested? Perhaps, but that certainly comes much closer to "hijacking" than what Rogers is doing. Display a message in the user's browser window (where we know he or she is looking) along with the Web page, and let the user "dismiss" it as soon as it's noticed? Excellent idea. A wonderful, simple, unobtrusive, and (IMHO) elegant solution to the problem.
Now comes Lauren Weinstein -- known for drawing attention to himself by sensationalizing tempests in a teapot -- who has never run an ISP but seems to want to dictate what they do. Lauren claims that the sky will fall if ISPs use this nearly ideal way of communicating with their customers.
Contrary to the claims of Mr. Weinstein's "network neutrality squad" (who have expanded the definition of "network neutrality" to mean "ISPs not doing anything which we, as unappointed regulators, do not approve"), this means of communication does not violate copyrights. Why? First of all, the message from the ISP appears entirely above, and separate from, the content of the page in the browser window. It's not much different that displaying it in a different pane (which, by the way, the browser might also be able to do -- but this is better because it's less obtrusive and unlikely to fail for the lack of Javascript or distort the page below). The display can't be considered a derivative work, because no human is adding his own creative expression to someone else's creation. A machine -- which can't create copyrighted works or derivative ones -- is simply putting a message above the page in the same browser window.
It isn't defacement, because the original page appears exactly as it was intended -- just farther down in the window. And it isn't "hijacking," because the user is still getting the page he or she requested.
What's more, there's no way that it can be said to be "non-neutral." The proxy which inserts the message into the window doesn't know or care what content lies below. The screen capture in Weinstein's blog showed Google, but it just as easily could have been Yahoo!, or Myspace, or Slashdot. For the same reason, it can't be said to be an invasion of privacy, because the software isn't looking at the content of the page above which it is inserting the message.
In short, to complain that this practice is somehow injurious to the author of a Web page is akin to an author complaining that his book has been injured by being displayed in a shop window along with another book by someone he didn't like. (Sorry, sir, but the merchant is allowed to do that.)
Nor is what Rogers is doing a violation of an ISP's "common carrier" obligations (even if they were considered to be common carriers, which under US law, at any rate, they are not). Common carriers have been injecting notices into communications streams since time immemorial ("Please deposit 50 cents for the next 3 minutes"). Television stations have been superimposing images on program content at least since the early 1960s, when (I'm dating myself here) Sandy Becker's "Max the burglar" dashed across the screen during kids' cartoon shows and the first caller to report his presence won a prize. (The game was called "Catch Max.") And in the US, Federal law -- in particular, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- protects ISPs from liability for content they retransmit whether or not they are considered to be common carriers. They do not lose this protection if there happens to be other content from a different source in the same window on the user's PC.
There are sure to be some folks -- perhaps people who are frustrated with their ISPs for other reasons -- who will take this as an opportunity to lash out at ISPs. But most customers, I think, will recognize this as a good and sensible way for a company to contact its customers. Our small ISP is looking into it. In fact, because the issue is being raised, we're adding authorization to do it to our Terms of Service, so that users will be put on notice that they might receive a message through their browsers one day. I suppose it's possible that a customer might dislike this mode of communication and go elsewhere, but I suspect that most of them will appreciate it.
In the meantime, let's just say "no" to regulation of the Internet (which seems to be what Weinstein & Co. are calling for). If we set a precedent of regulating the Internet and ISPs -- and especially of micromanaging them to the extent that government dictates how they can communicate with their own customers -- truly detrimental government restraints will not be far behind. And THAT actually would be scary.
Some people believe that "x * y + 3" is better style than "(x * y) + 3". For those who don't:
"[The Carrier shall not be liable for [[[[[injury or damage] to] or [[destruction or loss] of] [the Goods or any other property]] arising [[[out of] or [incidental to] or [in connection with] or [occurring during]] the provision of the Services]] or for [the [mis-delivery or nondelivery] of the Goods]] [and [whether or not] [[[caused] or [contributed to]] by [[the default (including negligence)] of [[the Carrier] or [any [[agent, servant or officer] of the Carrier]] or [any other person entitled to the benefit of these conditions]]]]]]."
Inside every lawyer, there's a Lisp programmer struggling to get out. And vice versa.
People in the U.S. generally don't worry about those less fortunate than they are. In other words, a majority of people who can read don't spend time worrying about those who can't. And last time I checked, the literacy rate among people who can read in the U.S. was somewhere in the neighborhood of 100%. Can't get much higher than that.
Well he told me that he had a wife but wasn't "much interested in sex..."I think he makes it up as he gos along myself...
or would if that was within his parameters as a piece of programming...
I gave him the heads-up that el reg had featured him. Funnily enough it was then that he stopped responding to our metatechnological chats and after an Internet age (2 mins) crashed. Well the little tab on firefox that I was chatting with him vanished....
So I went and destroyed bored.com with a flame thrower instead.
It didn't work and was vaguely dissatisfying. :-(
Chris.
Bad reporting that only tells 1/3 of the story. Meanwhile, the worldwide overall population of Polar Bears has increased. It has only decreased in two areas which the GW Nazis quote ad nauseum in their articles about how we should replace all the light bulbs in our house with mercury filled fluorescent bulbs and driving tiny little hybrids on my 35 mile commute through one of the biggest snow belts in the U.S. Of course I'll need one for each foot with how small they are.
-Nyle
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
