Posts by Andrew Wood

Sniper-aiding app arrives for iPhone

Boom headshot!

Pics and more detail here.

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2009/01/20/ipod-touch-mounted-on-m110-sniper-rifle/

So the would be assassin can also install an eBook reader and carry his own Book Repository with him!!

Holy f**k, Microsoft covers up ‘undesired’ words

Censoring the idiots

Surley it is more likely that this will be employed on XBox Live than on call centers. Right now I have to pretty much not use the voice chat stuff cause of all the fools that cant keep control of there language during online play. I certainly wouldnt even consider letting my younger kids on there.

Holidaymaker gets £31k data roaming bill

Total Idiot

So his defence was he wanted to illegaly download some broadcast TV ?

I hope Fox sue him for illegal downloading too.

Built-in browser expiry proposed to fight botnet menace

An update reminder in IE is all thats needed.

Surley all that would be needed is a popup at IE startup that works independently of the often turned off automatic updates showing an update is available .

So long as it a pain in the ass to turn off for 'normal' users then they will update just to gert rid of the nag screen. Group Policy/registry hack's should be able to turn to the nag of course for the technically savvy whu should know better.

Olympus creates 360° camera lens

The point is obvious.

Stick this on the top of a robot and then project the feed on the inside of a sphere. If you in the middle of the sphere you can see whats up, down, left, right, behind by just looking in that direction!

I should imagine with a little bit of software manipulation you could use two of them to generate 3D all around views.

Estate agents already use this type of thing to make those tours of houses where you can pan all the way around the room but they are limited by the up down field of view atm. Looks like this removes that limitation.

MS would also be able to stick this on top of their round table camera instead of using 5 CCD's.

I could go on.

MokaFive pumps virtual PCs through the cloud

Tenuous Link

What utter garbage.

Did Mr Vance do any research that qualifies him to say "Sadly, the only good bible study software out there resides in the open source realm on the Ubuntu Christian Edition operating system." It seems he missed e-sword and the SWORD project, both excellent and running on Windows, completely.

And exactly how many Bible theologists who are too sloppy in their research (not a trait thay are know for I might add) to find the aforementioned options would think. I know ill run a virtual machine and install Ubuntu Christian Edition on it?

I know the tabloid style of the Register is an essential ingredient to its success but at least try and be accurate and relevant, or even amusing.

New Bond movie is Quantum of Solace

@Spleen

Classic lyrics.

I am still laughing after 5 minutes.

I vote Bill Bailey to perform.

Wii grasses up cheating wife

Its all Mii Mii Mii

Well Mr Plouzhnikov I hope there is no Mrs Plouzhnikov as you clearly have no concept of commitment.

If a man and his wife have no intention of dedicating themselves exclusivley to each other then theres little point in getting married in the first place.

Abstaining from Intercourse for a year really isnt such a big deal (a phone call and some diy stimulation can be a good substitute) and if somobody thinks its more important to 'get it off' than to maintain the relationship they freely entered into then the marrige is probably not worth saving.

Besides its not just the Adultery its the lying about it afterwards.

Show your faith in USB Flash drives

Cool

Been looking for one of these ever since I saw thoose really expensive ones on adam8eve.net. Perfect for keeping e-sword and associated notes on!

BT Vision misses customer targets (by a shedload)

Hardly a failure though either

I think BT may have been a little optomistic in their predictions. With the big switch off for analogue looming though appropriate advertising should see them easily meet their targets.

It wouldnt hurt if they fix a few of the glitches in the BT Vision Box though. It has the annoying habit of skipping back to the begining of the recording buffer (which can be approaching 2 hours) if you rewind live TV past the start of the program that just started and the general slow response times can result in an infuriating time trying to record a series by hitting the record button multiple times to try and get a response only to cancel it instead.

Jordan mulls mamtastic epitaph

Epitaph

( o Y o )

More gnashing of teeth after Microsoft update brings PCs to a standstill

Unexpected but actually quite good

Although I too got caught out by the unexpected install of Windows Desktop Search (I assume it got incorrectly flagged as a Critical Update) and had my infrastructure brought to its knees for a while whilst the indexer ran on all the Desktops I look after it is actually quite useful.

Manhunt 2 leaked by Sony Europe employee

RE: No, YOU'RE missing the point, Andrew...

No your still missing the point. I understand that this is a PS2 game and not next gen. My point was that WITH the next gen consoles the line between fiction and reality is getting thinner.

"You may aswell ban Manic Miner or Mario." you said which highlights the point nicely. I really doubt that anybody is going to confuse Mario with a real plummer or imagine that miners really do have to hack their way through monsters, toilets etc on a daily basis. If you look at tiles like Grand theft Auto and Saints Row the Gang 'n Guns culture is the whole point of the game that mirrors what is really happening in suburbs and inners cities right now. Now you cannot specifically place the blame on the aforementioned titles but I think its naive to be of the opinion it has no effect.

During the Holocaust Thousands of otherwise normal German soldiers were involved in the brutal extermination of millions of Jews. They did this beccause culturaly it became normal and accepted. No it may be an extreme example but the principle still applies. The kinds of Movies and Games we are playing are making brutal violence culturally acceptable to many people and unless we have appropriate measured in place its only going to get worse.

Not an Anonymous Coward.

Re:Silly little bleedin' heart whiners.

I think your entierly missing the point.

Yes it a game but as the graphics and gamelplay on next gen consoles are another step closer to reality the line between a game and reality is getting increasingly thinner.

There are many movies that have high levels of violence in many cases worse than depicted in current gaming titles but there at least you are removed from the action as you are only watching it.

This game in particular positivley encourages you to be a gratuitous as possible when you kill somebody. Is that really entertainment ?

You think theres no link between gaming and reality think again. Lewis Hamilton already knew how the drive around the Interlagos circuit even though he'd never been on it before and that was because hed driven around it hundereds of time in a computer game.

You can see the effect games are having on youth culture right now. Gun and Knife crime is at an all time high and where do you think the idea that its fine to walk around with deadly wepaons comes from ?

Nuke-frying raygun 747 all ready bar the raygun

Shiny missles

Shiny missles may well reduce the impact of lasers but would it not also increase the effectiveness of radar thus making the missiles easier to take out via more conventional means.

The Return of iTuneski

Hurrah

AllOfMP3.com always had by far the best delivery platform, choose your own bit rate, massive array of songs available, easy to navigate and platform/device agnostic.

If the legaility of the site really has been sorted out then its a big win for music fans.

Power gadget set to cut electricity bills

Old News

I bought one of these devices from everyones favorite continental grocers Lidl some years ago. Thankfully it not a horrible garish green colour and is absolutely perfect for enforcing the end of TV time in the kids bedroom.

eBay seller nabs $1500 for Jesus-like garage stain

Pareidolia

Common Reg at list explain a bit about this phenomena. Find out more here at everyones favorite reference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

BT's IPTV aims to lure footie fans

RE:Unfair Practice

Its hardly unfair do you really expect BT to give you access their content over somebody elses network where they have no control over QoS.

As far as reliability goes I have been with BT Broadband since ADSL first rolled out and can count on one hand the amount of times my ADSL has been down and I am not even a business customer.

TBH though I wouldnt recommend BT Vision to anybody yet. The hardware is still too glitchy and the boc often crashed when scrolling up and down the TV Guide. BT's workaround is to scroll slower !!

Once they have these issues Ironed out it will be a pretty slick service though.

Hacking WoW and the pursuit of knowledge

WoWbot was fun

As WoW came out a community built up around a piece of software called InnerSpace. This tool gave anybody the ability to write scripts the control elements within games. Along with an extension for it called ISXWoW that exposed the inner workings of WoW it became possible to automate mundane tasks within the game. Its odd that some elements of a game that meant to be entertainment were mundane but that’s how it usually works. To get better at something you have to practice it again and again and in many cases that was monotonous.

After messing about with these automation scripts it prompted me to think about automating you character entirely and so WoWBot was born.

Its been well over a year since I stopped developing WoWbot. The bot itself didn’t die though other members of the InnerSpace community took up my code and improved upon it, its probably not got much of my original code left in it now but that doesn’t really matter. What matter was during the time I was working on it I had more fun scripting my character in WoW than I did actually playing the game.

I no longer play MMO's myself as the entertainment vs time invested is just not worth the hassle and that seems to be the problem with all MMO's its a tired genre and I dont really expect it to improve until we see some major advances in display and input technology and a massive increase in AI capacity. What we need is something akin to the Holodeck in Star Trek, kinda hard to cheat if your really there!

Until then I am sticking with Pen and Paper rolling playing with a bunch of real people all sat in the same room. Its far more fun to have some face to face interaction.

Body that spawned the internet wants to rebuild it

RE:DARPA?

Your thinking of Tim Berners Lee and crew, they invented the browser and http. ARPA ran the project to connect government and educational networks across the country to provide resilient multiple routes with the idea that it can be used for reliable communication as it wasnt dependent on a single point to point connection.

UK Gov boots intelligent design back into 'religious' margins

Most Christians Would not argue this point !

Creationism and Intelligent Design are not Science and most Intelligent Christians agree to this. They are Theology and should be presented as such.

I think the big problem is Science lessons are presenting Evolutionary Theory as FACT when it clearly isnt. There is no emphasis on the fact that all science is based on theories they just haven’t been disproven yet.

Granted there are many core theories that have stood the test of time so we can be pretty confident about them but many of the theories around evolution are based upon theories based upon theories going back hundreds of years that nobody has any interest in even trying to disprove. In fact students are discouraged from doing this. You could go far as to say that current day scientists theories depend on the faith and belief of those who came before them, sound familiar?

Now Adams point about not teaching religion at all in school is not necessarily a bad one. Being taught a specific religion to the exclusion of others is going to cause a problem for followers of different faiths as would be trying to teach a little bit of it all. I do think it’s important that children know that different religions exist though so we can understand about the different cultures of the world and there still needs to be some coverage on issues of morality as this is often neglected by parents.

Maybe Moral and Theological studies ?

Nvidia to beat AMD to release on-the-fly GPU switching tech?

Why would you want to do it this way?

Surely if you want to do something that needs a GPU then having it switch off beacause your on battery kind of defeats the point of having a laptop.

Now I can see the point of having a chipset that only powers the GPU when its features are being used. If I am logged on and checking my mail then I dont really need my GPU so no need to have it running. However once I have checked my mail and want to game for 20mins or so whilst I'm waiting for my flight then fire up my GPU.

419ers take Kent minister for £12k

Shame on you Rev Nooney

Sad though this situation may be I must say that I found Rev Nooney's comment that it made him 'Question his faith' disturbing. Surley a man in his position is well aware of 'the evils that men do' and that being a Christian does not grant you immunity to any of these evils. The Rev Nooney should take this on the chin and carry on with his life and work knowing his good intentions count for something even if the reality was something different.