* Posts by David S

293 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Mar 2007

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Ryanair agrees website clarifications with OFT

David S
FAIL

Toothless watchdog gums villain

"See 'em off, Rover!"

(Slobber... Yelp...)

Russian snatches world's strongest 'intimate muscles' crown

David S
Thumb Up

Headline of the Year?

Is that a double entendre in your pocket?

Phorm phading phast

David S
Grenade

@Lupus

Yeah, me too. Been getting about the best broadband service I can remember from VM for a while now, so I'd prefer not to have to leave them 'cos they're K*nt Etrughoul's only remaining friend...

Hey ho. Maybe that's tomorrow's headline, eh?

Ooh look! A new toy for Phorm to play with...

Trading Standards calls for online knife sale ban

David S
Unhappy

And another thing...

When I were a young boy scout (it wasn't all THAT long ago...) our troop had a tradition: every summer we had a two-week camping trip in the middle of nowhere (Scotland) where we'd learn all those useful skills. Building fires, hiking and orienteering, building and sleeping in bivouacs, how to dig and maintain a field latrine, how to turn two pounds of gorgeous minced beef into grey, unappealing yuck with undercooked tatties... You know, useful stuff.

Every one of us was under eighteen, had a knife, and knew how to use it to whittle a replacement tent peg, or sharpen a stick with which to cook sausages, that kind of thing. The really REALLY cool thing was that, each year, the newbie who was judged the best by the patrol leaders and scout leaders (stop sniggering at the back; this isn't that kind of story) was awarded a prize: a particularly fine sheath knife, theirs to keep and use with pride. Competition for this honour was, as I'm sure you can imagine, very stiff indeed.

Seriously. Titter ye not.

Obviously if this happened nowadays the dunghill would hit the windmill. I think that's extremely sad.

David S
Grenade

What Steve Renouf said (re the card thing) and...

If I were a teenager, and I desperately wanted a knife with which to go bother a victim ('cos we all know that's what teenagers do these days) and I found myself forbidden from buying my own online, I'd probably resort to raiding the kitchen drawers and using one of the handy, sharp food-preparation knives that my parents had been old enough to be allowed to buy.

So OBVIOUSLY the next step will be... what? Parents not allowed to buy knives? Parents responsible for keeping paring knives (and scissors? and veg peelers?) securely under lock and key? Kitchen knives outlawed and all food to be provided ready-chopped under controlled conditions in the municipal slicing factories (good employment idea, that...)

Thin end of an extremely silly wedge, I'm afraid. Not to deny the anguish felt by victims of knife crimes, by the way, but there are proportionate responses and then there are silly responses.

Satanic blob beast menaces North Carolina

David S
Welcome

May I be the first...

to welcome our sewer-dwelling slime-chomping underlords...

Was I the only one watching that, half-expecting a sudden cut to some CGI-rendered slavering monster lunging out and tearing the camera to pieces? Too many of those "where's the ghost" youtube efforts, I fear...

Still. Ew.

'First-ever' flight of robotic ornithopter announced

David S

@Richard Stokoe

Yes, but now take your average car off-road and compare its performance up hill and down dale compared to a horse. There's a reason cars do well in that contest: it's 'cos the level playing field we call a road is designed for them to work on.

Nice thing about leggy devices/creatures is that they DON'T need a smooth, flat surface to operate on.

As for the ornithopter/helicopter question, I imagine it has to do with the viscosity of air at smaller scales. Same reason it's easier to fly at the scale of a fly (indeed for really tiny creatures the challenge would be staying on the ground) than it is at the scale of a jumbo (pachederm or jet)

I'm no aeronautical engineer, though, so I couldn't say for sure.

Germans and Swiss snub DAB

David S
FAIL

Not just a solution in search of a problem...

...but a problem in itself. I have several AM/FM radios (around the house, in the car, in the shed, my laptop bag etc) all of which are working perfectly and can be pretty much guaranteed to give me a good signal and decent battery life (for the ones which are battery powered)

My one DAB radio, bought in order to start embracing what seems to be an inevitable new technology and not appear luddite, is a comparative disaster. Bulky, prone to dalek-voice-effects and dropped signals, slow to boot (a radio that has to BOOT???) - I can't see how this can possibly be considered to be progress. Surely when you're going backwards there's a different word for that?

And we're not being given a choice, right? I don't remember agreeing to this. Was I the only one who missed that meeting?

Do. Not. Want.

Chaps: Give up, you'll never understand women

David S
Coat

@sleepy

Well...

A slightly more likely evolutionary model would have women preferring a strong, reliable, dependable and secure (possibly boring, dumpy, bald) man to act as the head of their household / protector / provider.

The chap who actually contributes the genes for the offspring, on the other hand, might be selected on entirely different criteria. Attractiveness, abilities in the sack etc.

Hence, one might assume, the evolution of the bit-of-rough-on-the-side.

(Don't blame me. I got it from some Richard Dawkins tome or another...)

ISPs vs BBC iPlayer: Missing the point?

David S

VM

Does this account for Virgin Media's roll out of 50Mb/s, then? And there was me thinking it was just about striving for ever-higher numbers.

I don't know; I keep thinking back to when my erstwhile employers had ISDN installed in the office, and we were suddenly connected to the internet through super-speedy 128Kb/s link. We thought all our birthdays had come at once.

Jeez, I'm old...

Designer pitches flat-pack power plug

David S
Pint

Nice...

...although I can't say I'm entirely convinced about the safety aspect. Lots of folding seems likely to lead to lots of fatigue in parts which are also carrying lots of current. Okay, so the actual contacts will slide rather than fold, but still.

I liked the placement of the fuse, and the ability to stack plugs was a genius touch. If it could be made safe and reliable, this would win my vote.

One quick point: I'm not sure I can see how I'd rewire it... ;)

(@Kev K: You're kidding, right? Tell me you're kidding.)

Street View projects Woolworths through temporal portal

David S

Blast from the Past

I used to work a couple of blocks down the road from there, towards Marble Arch. Second floor, just above the "Beirut Express" diner.

I used to get a Starlight Express earworm every day en route to work.

Ah, Woolies.

11 Time Lords plan charity shindig

David S

@Andrew Halliwell

This was my concession to my inner child: I'm not writing the Doctor off yet.

Look, as soon as the theme music starts up, my three-and-a-half-year-old son reacts with excitement and anticipation, just as I did when I was a nipper. They're doing SOMETHING right. I just wish they'd have a go at resurrecting the several-episodes-spanning storyline format I miss so badly. I'd hate my kids to grow up thinking everything can be solved in half-an-hour with a sonic screwdriver and a liberal helping of deus ex machina...

David S
Unhappy

Bring back the mop-haired, long-scarved jelly-baby-dispensing one!

"it’s classic Doctor Who – really witty and very sharp."

So Russell T is being kept away with a cattle prod, then?

My inner child really, really hates me for saying this, but I rather fear that the good Doctor might be in danger of jumping the shark soon. Possibly in an episode called "Doctor Who and the Shark of Hubris"...

Che Guevara's granddaughter poses for PETA

David S
Joke

@LuMan

Lettuce, pray?

Underwear obligatory for Florida city workers

David S

The town's public image

I promise this is true: I read "pubic image" in the first paragraph.

Changed the tone of the article, although not the overall meaning.

Boffins: Gigantic crustacean sperm is 'viable strategy'

David S
Joke

@Bill Fresher

The egg's really, really tiny but, get this, there's BILLIONS of them...

Hang on...

Is it circle-with-arrow for girl and circle-with-cross for boy, or the other way round?

Ryanair requires web check-in, shuts down website

David S

Like Em 1 says...

On some routes (and Brno would be my example too, funnily enough...) they're the only game in town. Not that their attitude makes it clear that they KNOW they have a monopoly or anything...

Utter bastards. Dreadful customer service. I avoid them whenever possible, and am disappointed when it's impossible...

Escrow vital for banks choosing cloud computing, says provider

David S
Paris Hilton

Um,

"Escrow very important" says Escrow service provider.

in related news: Car salesman disses public transport; "Mobiles are rad!" opines mobile phone company exec; Paris Hilton more popular than poke in the eye.

Salesforce turns website host

David S
Flame

@Mr Gumby: Yes, sure...

...until you start developing your ecommerce app on those servers, and integrating it with your CRM, and your helpdesk and marketing tools, and tracking clickthroughs and all the rest. These are ALL features that arrive out-of-the-box or as easily bolted-on apps with Salesforce.com, but require significant extra expense and effort when rolling your own solution.

Not to mention the maintenance hassle and expense. Okay, I understand that a lot of the readers here ARE maintenance expense, so they're not going to take kindly to the suggestion that that could be saved on, but there it is. I know a hell of a lot of people who WERE spending all their time and effort maintaining, who are now free to spend more of their time developing. They're happier for it.

Plus that "free" option they're offering is a hell of a good chance to try out developing a web app "in the cloud", and see how well it works for yourself, rather than whinging and backbiting. It's hard to see how an in-house solution could possibly come out cheaper than free; they even pay for the electricity and bandwidth. No outlay whatsoever to start developing, and you only start paying for it once you put it into production and start getting serious numbers of visitors? Sounds like a decent deal to me...

But then, I have drunk deep of their kool-aid, so it's not like my opinion counts, is it? I mean, It's only an informed judgement based on significant experience...

Anyway. Just thought the alternative view ought to be represented. Cue the indignant spluttering from the entrenched nay-sayers. Flame on...

RIP Personal Computer World

David S
Unhappy

Nostalgia trip

Some of the really old covers were genius. From memory there was the one for "The Last One" featuring a computer "programming itself"... And another one with a pun I still use to this day ("The bland leading the blind" - remarkable how useful that can be in my line of work)... And, of course, the Sinclair chimps...

I have such memories of sitting in the attic, thumbing through my Dad's back-issues, looking for code listings for the TRS-80 (including a particular favourite that did a very passable game of Connect-4; the most fruitful afternoon's typing in my young life...)

Oh poop. Okay, I know everyone gets their news from t'internet these days, but PCW made for excellent train/plane reading material... Looks like I'm going to have to resort to PC Pro instead now...

Not happy. Srsly.

David S
Unhappy

You're shitting me.

PCW gone the way of Practical Computing? Say it ain't so, Guy!

Berners-Lee hired as gov internet adviser

David S
Black Helicopters

Zoinks.

Assuming that his role isn't simply as a figurehead, does this mean that we're in danger of a Government-sponsored project actually delivering? Surely that's one of the early signs of the apocalypse...

Futurama back from dead again

David S
Happy

May I be the first...

...to welcome our shiny-metal-assed overlord.

O2 Joggler family organiser

David S
Coat

You forgot to mention...

Does it come with a great big magnet on the back? 'Cos if it did it might be quite useful for holding notes on the fridge...

Texas cop tasers gobby granny

David S
Black Helicopters

GILT

Serves her right, sure enough. As the guy said...

"...she made a very simple interaction with the police a very difficult task."

And heaven knows we ought to make things easy for the guys with the guns.

Apollo 11 - The Owners' Workshop Manual

David S
Coat

Oh cool...

I still have my Haynes Manual for my old '68 Beetle somewhere. Long after I gave the car away (why? why? why did I DO that?) I still get a nostalgic lift from the oily photos and exploded diagrams...

Never had an Apollo 11 lunar module, but I imagine people who do will enjoy this...

The airtight one at the back there. With the helmet.

Phorm gets £15m lifeline

David S

@Gordon Henderson

Well, if they have 140 staff and no income then those £3M / month would average out at roughly £20k per employee. Taking normal business overheads into account, this burn rate could simply be accounted for by operating costs, without assuming that Mr E is skimming.

Bad news is that, at the current rate of burn, they won't die for another five months or so. And no doubt they'll start shedding employees and moving to cheaper premises before the end, postponing what we hope is the inevitable by another few months.

What worries me, as pointed out already by others, is that investors in the current climate are less likely to throw cash away on a shiny prospectus and some fancy words. Kunt may actually have something up his sleeve at this point, dammit...

Cray sells Opteron-Linux super to Swiss boffins

David S
Coat

So. Cut the crap.

What's it's refresh rate in Far Cry?

Jacqui whacks shock jock crock

David S

What Mat said.

Oh, that would be too delicious...

</oddlycamp>

Google Wave - interwebs idealism in real-time

David S

@bws

Um. Wasn't there mention that internal comments and communication happening within a given wave server wouldn't leave that wave server? So if you build your own wave server and use it to host your own internal waves, there need be no communication with the outside world unless it's needed.

And, being open source, you'll be able to check that the server isn't sneakily CCing your internal messages to the Google mothership. Hmm?

Me, I'm with Barney. I've run so many projects which have become a nightmare of split-version documents, people working from the wrong versions, etc etc etc; I understand there's no such thing as a panacea, but this looks like a potentially very powerful tool. The live translation thing? I mean to say, come on. Seriously. How can you not like the look of that, if you've ever done anything across a linguistic divide?

Looking forward to trying it out for real...

IntelliJ's Maia shapes up against Eclipse

David S

Eclipse FTW innit

Well, I mean to say. I've used a couple of IDEs in my time and, while Eclipse has many features which seem obscure and not of immediate use to me (and many confusing corners where I dare not stray) it does have the significant advantages of being open-source and extensible, which means that it can be used as the framework on which to base pretty much any more specific development environment. From Salesforce.com's force.com environment to the Google Web Toolkit. I mean, good luck Maia and all, but don't expect miracles.

Google Oz coders crossbreed email with IM

David S
Coat

Roll up! Roll up!

Get'chore tinfoil hats here. Fiver a pop. Form a line there, gents and ladies...

Irish politico in Facebook jub-rub outrage

David S
Joke

Shock horror?

Politician turns out to be actual person? Golly.

As long as she was buying her own drinks (not at the taxpayer's expense) then I don't see what the problem is.

I really hate to sound shallow*, but I can't help feeling that British politics could stand to have a few more young people involved. Preferably young and attractive; it might help to get more people interested in more than just the sleazy headlines.

Yeah, right.

*Not that I'm going to let that stop me...

BNP pleads for cash after reported DDoS assault

David S
Happy

Chinny Reckon

"BNP website [was] taken offline in largest cyber attack in recorded history"

Mmm. One has to wonder which version of recorded history we're talking about here? Real recorded history, or the version Nick Griffin likes to make up as he goes along, where the holocaust never happened and Hitler was a misunderstood genealogy enthusiast.

My guess would be the latter...

I like to have a little giggle about the antics of these idiots; it's nice to see the terrifying force of right-wing oppression reduced to such grubby scrabbling about the fringes, as long as it stays there. What worries me is that the discrediting of some representatives of the "main" political parties might allow these numpties to gain by default. Frankly, the world could do without that.

Boffins teach football bots how to fall

David S
Black Helicopters

I doubt I'll be the first...

...to welcome our new robo-diving overlords,

Chrome feels the need - the need for speed

David S
Go

Okay, I understand these are Chrome's benchmarks...

...and therefore the results may be skewed a little in their favour, but...

Here are my utterly unscientific results (all run on the same workstation) in descending order of speediness:

Chrome: 2620

SRWare Iron: 1880

Firefox: 201

Opera: 173

IE: 16.9

Please note: There's a decimal point in IE's score. IE was the only browser that said there was a script threatening to hang my computer, and offering to stop processing it, too. Minutes into a task that the other browsers had completed in seconds...

Even allowing for skew, there are orders of magnitude of difference there. Golly.

(sits back and waits for someone to explain just how credulous I'm being...)

YouTube flooded with porn

David S

Youtube unsupervised

My own infant prodigy has been known to enjoy youtube sessions. There was a time when the only guaranteed way to keep him quiet was to plonk him down in front of an episode of Button Moon, Pingu or whatever. The nice thing about Youtube was that he quickly learnt (at two years old) how to click the links for related videos at the end...

I'd recommend against unsupervised browsing, though, because sadly there are an awful lot of peurile jokers with that "snerk! He said bum!" sense of humour who will post a video of Postman Pat with... alternative dialogue.

"Oh fuck. Where's me fuckin cat? Ah, there's the fucker. Get in the van you fuckstick."

Laugh? I almost did.

So yes. Unsupervised play is less safe that supervised play. But then we knew that, didn't we?

Sony eyes smile, smirk-controlled music phone

David S

Ugh.

Okay, when I'm working I'm generally in a fairly good mood. I like background music, and I prefer it pretty varied. Here's the thing, though: when I work, I quite often frown. Not because I'm annoyed or irritable, but because I'm thinking. I don't want my music centre misintepreting my expression and trying to cheer me up, or to play something sombre to match my mood...

Actually, scratch all that. "Ugh" sums it up. Ugh.

Have these people nothing better to do? Seriously? If they really have nothing better to do that sit around having fuck-awful-stupid ideas then give them my number and have them call me. I'll give them something useful to do. There are lawns that need mowing; shopping that needs carrying for old people, that kind of thing. Stuff that'll help people. Jeez.

The Great Spotify Mystery

David S

I shouldn't laugh...

but...

"...or being renamed Heart..."

made me.

David S

@Trevor

Thanks for that. I did have a sneaking suspicion that I'd been over-simplifying matters.

Slightly annoying that Spotify is threatened while some pretty dire spivs get to continue to pump their drivel over the airwaves, but there it is...

David S
Happy

Commercial Radio?

My local commercial radio station(s) seem to be doing okay on advertising revenue. Why should it be impossible to believe that a radio-like-service which allows you to choose your playlist and serves you the occasional, unobtrusive and (key point here) targeted advert shouldn't also be ale to make a go of it? Especially since they don't have to pay that annoying git with the irritating voice to talk over the beginning and end of all the songs?

Okay, nobody in commercial radio is making internet-bubble quantities of virtual money, but they've been going for a while. Might Spotify's model be along similar lines?

I like Spotify. It provides some interesting background audio for my working day (when I'm working from home, natch - wouldn't want to subject colleagues to "Jollity Farm"...) and gives instant gratification to those "what was that tune" moments I get from time to time. I haven't listened to my MP3 collection in ages. They may need to make the adverts a little more obtrusive, in fact, because so far I haven't felt the need to subscribe.

I know. Freetard.

Taking a first bite out of Wolfram Alpha

David S

In case anyone cares,...

... it's been right about the weather in Brno so far. Mrs S tells me it's had the weather spot on in our obscure little home town as well. Quite clever, actually.

David S
Happy

Not all bad

It was very good at telling me tomorrow's weather in Brno. Or rather, collating the weather forecast for the rest of the week in Brno. I'll tell you tomorrow whether it was accurate...

MP expenses leaker may never be found

David S

Hmm...

@ J Ford, I don't think this was likely to have been party political. All the parties seem to have been pretty much equally damaged (although I didn't see an awful lot of hassle for the Lib Dems, other than some piss-taking for claiming on biscuits...) Nevertheless, the "Public Interest" thing was probably extremely salient; given that some of the more egregious fraud would have been covered up in the "edited highlights", I rather think the perpetrator is owed a debt of thanks. Since he was paid for the data, I reckon that's even stevens.

I wonder whether the brown envelope was expensed...

@Cameron, I don't know about that analogy. If I were paying a valet*, then it's no business of mine what he spends his wages on, whatever proportion of my income they may be. But if I were paying my valet to handle my finances and household for me as well, and suddenly discovered that he was living rather significantly beyond the means of the wage I was paying him, and at the same time the household silver was disappearing, a mysterious hidden webcam turned up in my teenage daughter's bedroom and I kept losing my wallet, well then I'd probably start asking questions. And looking for new help...

...And giving serious thought to doing my own washing up for a change...

* slightly more likely than a butler...

US airforce looking at winged-rocket booster 'X-plane'

David S
Black Helicopters

@TeeCee

Can't wait until they find a copy of "Fountains of Paradise" then. There's an idea with legs...

Boffins develop bendy, squishy, foldable display

David S
Happy

This comment has no title.

Very nice. Can't help wondering how easy that's going to be to shift to mass-production, but still. Cute. Can't help thinking this could be one of those things I bore my kids with tales about having seen the arrival of. Like my Dad and Xerography (although that was anything but boring, of course*...)

Side note: I want to be a boffin. Is there a US university I can buy the qualification from?

*The story goes: he was shown a proof-of-concept style demonstration of the technology, involving a charged plate being selectively uncharged with a projected image, then "dipped" in toner and pressed against paper, which was then heated and shown triumphantly. He described it as looking like lithography, only about a million times less efficient, with no obvious chance of being made practical.

This technology eventually became the ubiquitous photocopier and laser printer, of course. D'oh.

Car-prang secretary bites off boss's todger

David S

Reminds me of a movie plot.

Am I thinking of "The World According to Garp"? I think so, but it's been a while...

Virgin Media pilots 200Mbit service

David S

How odd.

I've been on VM for a while now. I have no complaints at all; I work primarily from home, doing a lot of stuff on the internet all day every day, and I've never had a significant issue that didn't turn out to be one of the kids downloading something large at an inappropriate time.

200Mb/s? Can't see the point, frankly. But then I mostly use the internet for work, so blistering download speeds aren't vital.

The exception that proves the rule, perhaps?

Apple power brick sparks lawsuit

David S
Happy

@Francis

"...this is a clear case of Apple leaving an industrial design job that requires experience and engineering knowledge to the crayon brigade."

Heh. This raised a smile. Thanks for that!

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