Posts by YumDogfood

Burger King cooks up Windows 7 Whopper

@AC 10:34 (I see opportunity... )

More like Fail bog.

Would you life some fiber with that?

Liquid electrocar batteries could be replaced at pumps

@AC re: Thirdly water emissions are not necessarilly good. ..

Wow, had a reality dysfunction check there. I could be a real anti-ecowarrior sloshing my bottle of pop all over the roads.

The problem with all these solutions is that the end result is still a car, or even worse, a truck. A vast disaster to force a cultural shift may be required to rethink our whole idea of transport, we are not going to get off our collective arses elsewise. Til then we will be throwing resources at trying to solve problems arising from19th century tech thinking.

Mozilla gets orientation-friendly with Firefox 3.6

@AC 23:35

Furry has gone mainstream - The New Cadbury Bunny makeover. *shiver*

iSnack 2.0 morphs into Cheesybite

Have proper cheese and an apple instead.

Silly people trying to get us to eat some horrific unfood glop evacuated from the bowels of a stainless steel production line. No.

MySpace confession sinks car-death conviction appeal

Murder Confession On Tom Leykis Show

Then there is this utter classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ln4oM1xrwnw

Doh!

Egyptians uptight about 'Artificial Virginity Hymen'

UK != Egypt

On a personal level you comment or even pass judgment on another culture, discussion is fine, but its utter hubris to expect them to be you.

Oh, fun with stats (cue arguments over better information or infection rates?):

Genital warts — Initial visits to physicians’ offices: United States, 1966–2007

http://www.cdc.gov/STD/stats07/figures/44.htm

Genital herpes — Initial visits to physicians’ offices: United States, 1966–2007

http://www.cdc.gov/STD/stats07/figures/45.htm

Artists adds pulsating 'brain' to PC

Bristol Bluetack

With all the air pollution here, I can hawk one up for y'all in no time at all.

/coat, sticky.

Facebook 'fesses to bad hair day

@ An Hero

You know what to do.

/4chan

Microsoft adopts Say-on-Pay measure for shareholders

/coat

Silly to have a pay rise, why would he need more than 640K? (dollars)

How much of the EU's data will the UK lose?

Not quite kosher?

So what timid loon decided to hand the data in rather than; zero out outstanding parking fines, tweak their tax code and any perform any other beneficial data modifications?

Earthquake-squelching, sonar-invisible 'active cloak' unfurled

@grandvizier

> Mine's the one with the subterranean lair and fluffy cat in the pockets....

Pockets? ...Pockets?? You sick kitty mutilator.

Comcast trials Domain Helper service DNS hijacker

@David W

“Does anyone here work in advertising or marketing? Well if you do, when you get home take a gun shoot yourself. No bullshit, I'm not joking just do it. I'm just sowing seeds, one day they may take root.”

- Bill Hicks

The chance for someone to re-evaluate their life and do something worthwhile, or else top themselves. Either way its a win.

Internet Heroes and Villains named by ISPs

Get well soon (pass the paracetamol)

Ah! So the Moderatrix is on "Holiday" after last nights bash. I geddit.

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

Meat fuel

Kill two birds..er...blokes with one stone.

Boffin predicts pee-powered cars

@Max_Normal

Was that caught, or found on the floor screaming "It burns! it burnnssss..."?

BOFH: A spot of bother

Internal phone systems before caller ID were fun

"Battersea dogs home?"

*click*

(for real, in my misspent youth).

Hollywood prepares to battle Asteroids

Defender...

Oh, wait. That was the x files. Nobody mentioned the filum 'Meteor' (RIP Karl Malden) yet?

/The one with the DVD of 'On the Waterfront' in the pocket.

Firefox 3.5 set to land tomorrow

It must be the heat

Nice OSWAR flames, pity as (its been said) FF is cross platform. Just like IE right? ;-)

/nope, too warm for my coat today.

Old guard want to save Nortel

Die! Die! Die!

I wish we had a capitalist economy, not this old boys club semi-feudal statism. If you can't hack it you weren't good enough so just sod off and jump off a building or something. Greedy workshy feckers.

US brain-computer interface gets live human trials

Scratch monkey

Which way round does the connector go again? *Bzzzttt* Oh... Nurse! Code blue!

AMD trumpets HDTV-on-PC chip

marketing

So they are selling a STB chip into the PC space? Genius. Especially as the transcoder is not even in hardware, unlike sling (from the link):

5 Third party software required for video transcoding capabilities.

6 Trans-coding done on the CPU.

Audi working on electric R8?

Focus is still on the car

The public transport system is a joke so here we go, propping up the existing system (problem). We have the technology and the communications infrastructure to create an end to end true public transport system that would meet most needs, but of course we won't do it. What we define as a car, whatever it runs on, is the real problem - a resource hungry underutilized machine that turns us into muffin-topped lazy asocial blobs. My Polish friend groks that public transport its an enabler for society and business, not a profit center, and thinks the UK is crazy. I agree.

My manifesto:

- No emissions. None. Nada. H2O is acceptable for fuel cell vehicles.

- Renew the rail infrastructure for passengers and cargo capacity. Bring it out of the18th century.

- Get the lorries off the road and use shorter range electric delivery vehicles to transport stuff from the railway to wherever.

- Use our communication infrastructure to co-ordinate all public transport in a decentralized way - no 'big system' crash scenario. Downtime, accidents and the unexpected just cause a re-route, WiFi SMS etc. used to keep people up to date about ETA etc.

- Contingency plans for infrastructure or comms failure, that would be nice.

- Public transport to be a 24/7/365 operation.

- No fixed bus routes. You are at the bus stop and get an ETA for your next stop and final destination. The bus GPS routes to pick up passengers so they meet their journey requirements. The bus knows who is getting on and who should get off (no more missed stops), the system adjusts if you are delayed or want to loiter for a bit or go somewhere else while in transit - tells you your options for connections, times etc. Historic data used to refine the system for rush hour etc. If no one is at a bus stop then you get no buses there (ok, maybe an opportunistic route based on historic data) - video and oyster card like tech, late hours priority for females, disabled etc. Using this system the size of the bus dispatched can be determined so you don't get an underutilized huge bus for one person, maybe even down to people carrier sized things.

- Near Door to Door experience, no long hikes unless you want to.

- Space for cycles on the public transport system, people may not want to hire at the src/dest although it would be factored into the travel costs and integrated into the system (possibly drop off hire bikes into the nearest bus stop for collection or at home?).

- More carrot than stick. Its how people work. I am not advocating removing cars or taxing them to hell. Move public transport back into a low cost utility, make the car an unattractive proposition for your daily commute or long trip (bring back sleeper cars!).

- Real cycle paths, pedestrians and cyclists don't really mix well (I do 27mph on the flat, no headwind) and lighted (solar storage, PIR detectors?) , covered pedestrians and cycle ways (like an extend bus stop). Bike racks, disabled carriage storage etc.

</Star Trek>

Twitter suffering chronic banality, diagnoses Dr House

@elderlybloke

> Can't see any point in it, except of a way to fill in time when you can not think of anything useful to do.

Isn't that El Reg?

Doro PhoneEasy 338gsm

At last!

...someone gets the idea that people may just want.... a phone.

DARPA wants 'clandestine' 3D building-interior mapping kit

X-ray specs

A few GigaWatts should be enough.

U2 song whacked my hard drive

causes.

0. The song DRM borked the drive firmware (the conspiracy theory).

1. Electromagnet (speaker) in close proximity (datawipe).

2. PSU fluctuations (how much does a cap cost FFS?).

3. Resonance (specific bouncy bouncy).

4. Vibration (generic bouncy bouncy).

5. Aliens (I'm going with this one).

Some simple experiments should sort this out. Anybody want to sacrifice their lappy in the cause of science?

Mine's the one with the hole in the pocket. Bloody Occam's razor.

Blizzard: Game designers aren't Shakespeare

Green hills?

...Isn't that a JTAG tool?

/Friday

Virgin Media to battle modem hackers

Wondering...

So why can't the CMTS one-time reprogram the CM RSA keys (and encrypt IP transport from then on) so that any cloned modems from that time would get spanked as MAC addr & RSA public key would not match their records?

Green semiconductor advice goes beyond the chip

Don't buy cheap CFLs

I have had one melt down (burning plastic time) and another go s/c taking out the main house breaker. This from a reputable housewares and furniture company (1). The older more expensive (Phillips again) are still working fine. I don't fancy risking a house fire with cheap ones, and they don't last as long either.

Buy cheap, get cheap.

PS: Why no standard fitting for the tube to the starter/main body of the device? Very green to throw it out if only one part is borked (bork, bork, bork #1).

Microsoft says it again - no second beta for Windows 7

Not different enough

The perception of Visa bad, even non-techies are aware of this (not getting into any OS wars here!) and I think MS see Windows 7 as a way to say "look! this is not Visa, its just a new and improved XP, things are back to normal people - Buy! Buy! Buy!".

Unfortunately I think the perception of Win7 outside MS is going to be that its a cynical re-spin of Visa, but not so crap this time around. People will stick with XP unless the corporate world has confidence in it and there is no real reason for the home user to move except the usual push with regard to API lock-in (DirectX et al).

MS need to have a product people want, desire. MS could have backward compatibility via VMs so that all the crufty corporate and home apps run in a compatibility mode (a strong point for MS) and go do something leading edge, or at least modern and trim the bloat down so you have spare cycles to do something new. They won't get out of the habit of locking people into their stuff but at least it could be a clean slate. That would sell, not another nearly identical release.

My 2p worth.

Windows 7 UAC shutoff 'bug' leaves Microsoft unmoved

Windows 7.1 - best ever OS to date!!

Oh look, software with an ole' in it. How rare. I blame the small mammals in SQA:

best ever OS to date == Debases Otter Veto (http://wordsmith.org/anagram/ for the lazy like me)

</Pi**ed out of my mind>

Royal Navy completes Windows for Submarines™ rollout

New rules still needs old skool (paranoia).

Is there cyrypto/authentication on the internal LAN? Could I just plug a laptot in and even bridge it to the totties WiFi? Just because a network is isolated from the rest of the world does not mean its secure, so you have to be there to hack it, or point guns/money at someone who will do the job for you.

Contractors and managers hit in Alcatel-Lucent layoffs

@ Z

> The new management team is committed to rapidly executing this new strategy

Quickly doing what we planned, not that we are telling, until its far, far too late.

> and leveraging the new streamlined organization.

Giving marketing a swift kick in the nuts to go out and find some damn business PDQ or else we are sunk. Our products are world class so we don't need to do anything there, not that we have any engineers left anyway.

> We are focused on delivering results and restoring profitability."

I will only get a fraction of my $$millions$$ if[1] they parachute me for spending all the sales budget on cats[2].

I'm reminded of Reynholm Industries for some reason...

[1] When.

[2] khittenz actually.

Grove: Intel should make electric car batteries

Dodge this!

Forget batteries, I think we need a new grid. An overhead grid. No more heavy batteries, just a lekky' motor and some cable on a stick. It would power street lighting and no more underground cables - power & data over grid everywhere (and nice Faraday shielding from all that satellite TV and alien signals). No more unlit streets, just a hat with a lamp lamp and an extensible probe on the top to tap the power (don't bend down though).

</Friday>

How about trying to do with LESS power? Have the foresight to go without tying ourselves to yet another limited resource.

Apple updates MacBooks

@AC 12:11

Yes, a Windows lappy certainly does ooze summat.

Plod hopes Bluetooth messages will stem drinking

Pants down comms

This is just calling out for some wag to message fake police messages such as "Important Police information! Incident ahead; Park up NOW, all parking fees have been waived, do not keep tickets. You will be messaged when the incident has been cleared. Alternate routes are available through Craigmillar, Granton, Pilton and Burdiehouse."

BOFH: The Christmas party

Hg painballs

That should hurt. Maybe freeze every other ball, just for some variety.

Wireless comms and the end of civilisation

@Eddie Edwards

> And if you think BT's customer service is bad now, wait until they're all dead.

Yes, it would be startling improvement.

Ford cars to gain prang-preventing radar rigs

Only one word for those tailgaters...

Chaff!

'First production-line energy weapon' now shipping

Beam spread

Well boil my bunnies, there are ways for this to be (ab)used as true terror weapon.

US consumers flock to Mac laptops

For day to day stuff my MacBook Pro just WORKS

It is a delight to *use*, rather than as a box to hack upon, but with VMWare loaded as well I have OSX, Linux and XP all running at the same time - very nice to have source files in shared folders and building for cross platform tools (gcc, freepascal+lazarus).

Hubble transmissions cease as computer fails

Yet another for the RISKS digest.

Not a hardware fail.

Wunderkind starts robot-buster weapons firm

Patlabor

Yes, we want to see giant robots fighting, not some EMP device.

The Hadron Collider: What's it all about, then?

The Higgs Bozo

- superheavy, rare and falls apart at the slightest provocation - resulting in massive contamination of any lighter weight elements nearby.

MS beefs up WinXP Pro's anti-piracy nagware

Cac(he) flush

So, pressure by MS to kill off as many XP installs as possible. Unexpected that.

US customs: Yes, we can seize your laptop, iPod

Any spare BIOS FLASH going?

Ways and means. The only inconvenience is to the ordinary traveler, or the really stupid baddy[1].

[1] British education for you.

UK begins probe into aeroplane air quality

organophosphates

Tinfoil hat time:

http://opin.info/op_airback.php

Computer system suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

So this is new?

http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/hise/safety-critical-archive/1995/0007.html

See also the work of Nancy Leveson (http://sunnyday.mit.edu/) on computer (actually human) reliability.