Posts by John Carney

Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply

the best bit is ..

if you hook it up to a solar cell, it will power itself

Firefox passive-aggressives adjudicate Nerd Law

I smell an elephant

I'm somewhat surprised that nobody appears to have picked up on the implications of "[interfering] with the internals of Adblock Plus to allow ads." Have we just seen our first firefox extension trojan?

(PS. there should be a "freetards say/do the darndest things" icon)

Microsoft Songsmith ad trumps Seinfeld shocker

OMG

Microsoft has discovered (Andrew Lloyd) Weber 2.0!

Apparently Disney was a beta tester

How else can you explain High School Musical's score?

Linux to spend eternity in shadow of 'little blue E'

actually...

... the thing that is holding linux back is that for key apps, the software is significantly inferior to Windows - Word, Excel, Outlook/Exchange and Photoshop are streets ahead of their Open Source equivalents. It's not familiarity of one over the other, it's that the software is demonstrably less capable.

Palm Pré WebOS: hardware hands-on

Pronounced???

Is pré pronounced as in "pray we got it right this time", as in "hope we're not iPhone prey"?

Mozilla insists Firefox 3.1 won't hit bum note for developers

mixed messages

I'm having trouble reconciling "kickass" with "more of a tweak". From the official proposed feature list, I'd say we're looking at an ass-tweak... perhaps a furtive grope.

Canon EOS 450D digital SLR

Re: well, yeh, maybe... but...

"This camera is aimed at people with too much money who like the thought of becoming a photographer. Canon know full well that the vast majority of users will never take it out of full automatic mode."

Yeah, just like the Reg comments section are aimed at people with too much time who like the thought of becoming a blogger ;-)

Apple update trick triples Safari share

Depends on which market...

The headline intrigued me because until a couple of days ago I was web development manager for a high-traffic website and I didn't notice a sudden jump in Safari traffic. What I did notice was a very rapid adoption rate of Safari 3.1 - far quicker than IE7, which tells us that Safari users are far more willing to accept updates from Apple than IE users are from Microsoft.

The other thing we can deduce is that Safari users spend a lot of their time surfing for pr0n. How so? Well, the aforementioned "high-traffic website" is an adult website and Safari accounts for about 5% of our traffic, which is in stark contrast to the figure given here of 0.21%.

Nokia unwraps bendy nanotech phone

Neat, but...

... will it work with the bluetooth in my hover car?

Oz admits $85m p0rn filtering FAIL

Turnabout ...

I seem to remember that many years ago, it was the Coalition touting filtering at the ISP and Labour trying to shoot it down. At the time, the Coalition was cosying up to a nutjob independent who held the balance of power in the senate. Surprisingly, sanity prevailed then and the plan evolved into NetAlert, which had the advantage that it wouldn't break the internet for everybody.

The 'blem wit' error messages

TRS-80

For terseness nothing beats the TRS-80 error messages, which consisted of: "What?", "How?" and "Sorry".

I bumped into that Alan Sugar on memory lane...

Just confirming - TRS-80 did NOT use the 6502

As Mike Smith points out, the TRS-80 was Z80 based, not 6502.

Kepler telescope primed to search for earth-like planets

more than one way ..

"The only way to detect a planet outside our solar system is to catch it when the planet crosses the path of its parent star."

Rubbish. Radial velocity surveys have been remarkably successful in detecting extrasolar planets. Granted, this method is not much use for detecting earth-like planets, but nulling interferometry has been touted as another possible method for detecting extrasolar planets.