Posts by Chris Morrison

EE springs Wi-Fi phone calls on not-spot sufferers, Tube riders

"You won’t be able to use it abroad"

"You won’t be able to use it abroad, and the minutes spent nattering away will come out of your monthly allowance"

"Must protect our roaming income."

In pictures: El Reg hooks up with rain-lashed Spanish rocketeers

How many of those rockets were pointed at Gibraltar!?

Amazon: We have great cash flow - it flows straight out of our hands

Re: Cashflow != ignore

I was just about to quote that old maxim. "Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is king"

You can have as big a profit as you like but if your cashflow is crap you're dead.

Goldeneye

How many hours of my life did I spend on this!?

Honestly for me Goldenye has to go down as the best console game ever. You could play it for months and still find it fun. It was a movie game that actually worked. Yes there are better games out now but for me COD or similair in 2012 technology is nowhere near as big an achievment as Godlenye was in 1997 technology.

The one thing perfect dark had that goldenye lacked - the ability to jump.

The Dragon 32 is 30

Duncan Smeed

Without wanting to embarrass him or give him a big head I've got to say Duncan was the best lecturer I had at uni. Whilst the dragon32 was before my time his ancedotes about it's design and his enthusiam were always entertaining. His Computer Architecture and Design class was insightful and a major reason for me seeking a career in the semiconductor industry.

Happy Birthday Dragon32

Reader experts thrash LOHAN's mighty rod

What's the difference between a rubber pad at -60 degrees and a bit of aluminium at -60? I would guess not a lot, therefore I question what the rubber is going to achieve?

Asus Zenbook UX31E

Finally!

I've been waiting for a register review of this laptop. Once Christmas is out of the way I might try and pick one up. Fast SSD, High resolution display, fast processor, small, light, good battery, runs windows, what's not to like!

BOFH: Hordes unleashed... by a RAM upgrade

Surely some mistake?

Surely they would have scrapped the computers and then sold the RAM back to the company for upgrades?

Apple tops Microsoft market cap, revenue, and profits

Errr

I'm struggling to see why apple fans are so happy by this news. Unless you're a shareholder in apple all this means to you is your now getting rogered by apple more than Microsoft users are getting bummed by Microsoft.

Apple's app store policies: What will they provoke?

HTML5

Let me start by saying I am not a web developer so have no real epertise in this field.

Why do people not develop HTML5 applications rather than using the app store? Particularly for things like ebooks or enews. This gets away from apples walled garden and makes apps cross platform.

Diary of a Not-spot – the final chapter

Tonights the first real test

If it survives tonight it will probably survive anything. Gonna be a little breezy up here, particularly if you're on the west coast.

Otherwise this is a really impressive project. My dad's house on harris is miles form the exchange but fortunatley he can still get broadband (albeit at around 1Mb/s). There is also the (expensive option) on harris of hebridies net. www.hebridies.net. Which can give up to 2Mb/s.

Vulture 1 rolls out of fab bunker

Spainish Astronaut

Cosmanuat - Russian,

Taikonaut - China

Astronaut - USA

What will our intrepid first person launched into space by Spain be called? Playmonaut?

Beeb sacks teaboy, hires Press Association

Love the Alt data in the html source

="The BBC's news and current affairs programmes and news website have annual agreements with AP, PA, AFP, Allsport and Getty Images for image use. This image has been changed six times at a cost to the licence-fee payer of a few pence in terms of man-hours, which will be made up for in overtime."

Jobs tells iPhone users to get a grip

Genius

"But it mainly seems to come down to hand size, with the larger span finding an iPhone harder to use (but, if rumour is to be believed, they'll have less need for an iPhone in the first place)."

Absolutely genius line!

The man with the big hands..

Ofcom sets 60GHz free

South Uisit - Pedant

It might matter more in South Uist than you would think. Currently much of Uist, Harris and Lewis get it's broadband over microwave link.

It's quite conceivable that people in south uist might want to relay broadband over a 1km or so as a range extender or to connect up an outhouse.

Cameron condemns Tweeters as tw*ts

Newfound respect

Suddenly I have new found respect for Mr Cameron.

Twiiter users are Twats and too right everyone is pissed off at MP's. Good job.

Wheels come off O2's data network

Openreach

Do openreach engineers use O2? I've been waiting in all day for one to come and customer services say his phone aint working.

TechCrunch dubs Linux a 'big ol’ bag of drivers'

Antitrust

If google supply Chrome browser with this OS will they be subject to an anti trust suit like microsoft? We could have our first browserless browser based os!

NY Stock Exchange cures jitters with Juniper

@Greg Fleming

A 150 ms may be a lot in a real time system. But we're talking about 150uS only a factor of a thousand faster.

Prof: Global windfarm could power entire human race

Steel??

And where exactly would the steel come from to build all these windfarms on every piece of land in the world? And once you've covered all the agricultural areas with windfarms where does the food come from?

In many places in Scotland windfarms can just about pay their way but there aint many countries that are as windy on a fairly regular basis as Scotland is. PLus we would much rather offshroe wind or tidal energy as it doesn't blight our landscape like onshore wind turbines do.

TomTom maps route onto iPhone 3G S

Why 3GS

Why is this only available on the 3GS? I have apps on my i-phone 3G that work out which direction I am travelling in even without the digital compass. Why does this need the new phone to work? -apple trying to shaft current users?

Apple adds 'S' to iPhone 3G

End of iPhone for me

I'm about 6 months in with my 3G i-phone. It's a good phone some nice features that other people dont think of (andmissing some others) but I'm pretty sure it wil be my last i-phone.

The price of the 3G was excessive and I only took it because I got the 30% corporate discount. The new 3Gs is ridiculous, £90 for 16Gb of flash (cost apple £5-£10 max)! £15pm for 3Gb of tethering on O2's crappy network!!!! Anyone who pays that needs their head examined. You can tether for free on pretty much every other phone in the world.

Add that to the 24 month contract. I hate 18 month contracts already, to have to pay for a phone when your giving them nearly £1000 through a contract is robbery!

Think I'l be going back to HTC or moving to Android or Pre when my contracts up. To the apple fanbois it's a failry good phone but it aint God's gift to telecoms.

YouTube blocks music videos in UK

Stupid

The PRS can't win here. Nobody likes them. Google are coming out of this as the good guys and the PRS are again the bad guys. And rightly so as the collection agency for one of the worlds biggest cartels.

As much as I'm ok with freeloading being illegal the PRS and music/video labels need a kick in the arse. Folk will just download illegally if they can't get music cheaply in the knowledge that the recording artists get hee haw anyway.

The music industry could have made an absolute killing from the internet. Instead it has decided to oppose almost everything on the internet with the result that it doesn't stop whinging about falling revenues. How long till the PRS, Motion Picture Ass etc crawl into their holes and die and we might get a fair system. Fair to the consumer first and the provider second like other good service businesses in the world.

Whose notebook is it anyway?

@Bassey

Man you sound like you run the most depressing office in the world. Glad I don't work at your company.

Do you work in telesales or something? I have never worked for any company where the best business solution is to have everyone running the same machine.

As an example my work, the Engineers have fast machines with lots of memory, Factory floor has any old crap as it is just used for viewing pdf's and running test programs, business guys get middle of the road pc's etc etc. They are all Dell though so if a probelm occurs it's pretty easy to fix.

If your internet access is locked down adn so strictly monitored what are you doing on here or are you wanting spanked by the compliance officer..again!?

Slo-mo MoD budget traincrash rolls on

I could save them a few billion or two

Could always scrap the replacement to trident?

Next to noone in Scotland want's it and the English don't want it in their back yard either.

It would save a few billion every year.

Cue flame on job cuts lack of nuclear detterent etc etc etc.

Yahoo! shares tumble as Ballmer shuts coffin on Microhoo

Love it

Yahoo's small shareholders should file a class-action suit on Yang and the whole yahoo board for rejecting microsofts early bid. I can't believe the shares are down to a 1/3 of their previous value.

If you ask me thought the true value of Yahoo is probably nearer $5 a share. How do they plan on providing growth to their shareholders?

Kentucky commandeers world's most popular gambling sites

WTO

Will this get the WTO coming down hard on America again. The whole world could soon be able to copy anything American without fear of retribution (like Antigua can!)

"I'm sorry RIAA you can't sue me because your copyright isn't valid in my country"

Nokia creates Indoor Positioning

Nice

I did this in my final year thesis at uni. Worked pretty well in the royal college building at strathclyde. Didn't work quite as flawlessley as I would ahve liked but then I was just one under grad not quite the same scale as nokia!

Met Office: Global warming sceptics 'have heads in sand'

Another one in support of el reg

Climate change is the biggest swindle since records began. It's the world's most fault science.

I only hope more and mor epeople remove their blinkers and see man made global warming as the big joke that it is.

If not i will offset your carbon footprint by living like an eco person (honest). Just pay me £100 per KG of Carbon to my paypal account please.

What's the cost of global warming?

Good Article

he Global Warming myth goes on and on and on. We waste billions every year tryign to prevent a natural cycle when we could spend those billions actually changing peoples lives.

Down with all envirohippie mentalists.

How green is your supercomputer?

@Fraser

Yep your mythtv box can count. But lets assume (probably optimistically) that your processor in your myth tv can sustain 1.5 GFLOPS at 20Watts (again 20watts is probably average rather than peak performance).

1.5GFLOPS would be a low spec'd celeron at about 1Ghz.

That gives you a rating of 75 MFLOPS/Watt. Again though I doubt you could sustain that at 20 Watts for very long. BUt that would put you around 170th on the list.

Cheers,

Chris

First Android phone to retail for $199

I-Drone

I just checked the car phone warehouse and the i-Drone 8GB is £345.99.

Eco-activist gets tougher with gadget makers

Yawn

Who cares what greenpeace think. This survey just makes me want to go out and buy more Nintendo and Wii stuff. That's sony erricson off my shopping list I guess.

Wish they would crawl into a hole under terminal 5 and die.

Sun's Niagara 3 will have 16-cores and 16 threads per core

Sun Bashing

How many of the bitter people on this forum got bitten by Sun's falling share prices or got laid off by them.

For pretty sensible people your being a bit panicky.

The 128 Threads is obviously not round robin scheduling that would not make it any different to what intel and everyone else has been doing for decades. Instead it's a variation on sueprscalar processes (known as simultaneous multithreading). Each thread can be executed in parallel (up to 128 in total).

I think sun are still pretty innovative but they are getting a beasting by the markets trying to recoup some of what they lost. I dont think it would take much for Sun to return to somewhere near the heights they were at in the mid 90's.

I have observed that those who had shares in Sun and sold in 99 are the ones in electronic and computer company car parks with BMW's and porsches. Those who held on into the 00's are driving 10 year old mondeos. Maybe that's where the bitterness comes from.

*I am in no way, and have never been, affiliated with Sun. By the time I graduated from uni they were already on their knees!

Snail mail goes hi-tech – literally

El Reg in tabloid journalisim shock!

Well done on copying that article from the BBC website. It's only been up there since Monday.

Quality journalism from the reg.

I am disgusted by El Reg and removing you from my bookmarks.

T-Mobile doubles 0870 call costs

T&C's

How exactly are they getting out of people ending there contract? I got a nice new phone from o2 and a reduction on my line rental when they decided to charge for 0870 numbers. Phoned to cancel my contract 3 months in but I got such a good deal I decided to stay.

Charging for 0870 is a change in T&C's to your detriment = get out clause.

Lesbians like straight men, researchers find

@Sarah Bee

I can't think of an Ironic reply to your Ironic reply to my ironic comment about your ironic warning about your irionic headline so you win!

Man I'm ironiced out. I sound like bloody Alanis Morissette.

Sarah I can assure you my small (as proved by my inabillity to generate more ironic statements) normal brain ensures that I am a hetrosexual male so feel free to get in touch! ;-)

Headline

I think your headline is misleading. That'll be me on probation.

This research seems a bit ropey to me. They only sampled 20 people from each sex and each side of the fence. What % were found to be the same? 100%? If not is that because some people were still in the closet or because the research was crap.

Only sampling 20 people and not stating what % their findings are base don makes me think this is a little bit of sensationalisim.

Nvidia blows out Moore’s Law with fresh Tesla

CUDA

I did my masters thesis in High Performance Computing comparing NVIDIAs CUDA with an FPGA based solution for several different applications including Monte Carlo Simulation, FFT, seismic analysis and 3-D Imaging.

All these are ideal applications for parallelisim. The FPGA solution (a big Xilinx V5) outperformed a traditional CPU implementation by between 2x and 300x depending on application (monte carlo 300x, very small FFT 2x). This was quite impressive. I then tried the CUDA implementation (GeForce 8800 Ultra). It wiped the floor with the FPGA on all four applications.

This was a bit of a shock for the FPGA company I was working for as the GPU was about a tenth of the price of their implementation. Their argument was that the FPGA could do double precision arithmetic (very badly). That argument is now blown out of the water if CUDA now supports double precision.

This product will revolutionise the HPC industry. It is ridiculously easy to code in C, costs buttons and outperforms anything else in the industry. If you work in HPC consider this product.

*Note: I am in no way affiliated to Nvidia, I currently work on FPGAs (very small V4's) for consumer electronics so I am nowhere near the HPC industry any more and have never been involved in the graphics industry. This product just amazed me.

NHS orders mass keyboard clean-up

You have to be joking

"The NHS hopes the keyboard order, which is thought to be for 7500 keyboards at a cost of over £1m in total,"

£133 per keyboard. Is the keyboard made of platinum?

That is a disgrace!

Grumble Grunble rant rant, where do our taxes go.

Brits get iTunes movie downloads, rentals

Three quid 50!!

Is it only me that thinks this a real rip off.

The video shop down the road from me charges £3.50 for rentals of new DVD's. Now they have to pay rent and council rates on their property, heating, staff costs etc. The DVD itself costs them money and the DVD needs shipped form a warehouse to their store.

How come then apple can't better the video shops prices substantially given that Apple has none of these costs?

When Sky and NTl first launched pay per view you paid extra for the convience but I don't buy that any more. We are just being ripped off. If amazon didnt beat bookstores prices for just about every book then hardly anyone would use them. Why not so for Saint Jobs' shop?

MPs demand US spooks' guarantees on census data

@Paul Hargreaves

Outsourcing of this sort of thing is most definatley a godo think.

There is one census every 10 years. If the government run this we are left paying people, pensions, NI for a service that only really needs people working for a year or two, whats more it will be late and over budget.

If we give it to a private company we pay maybe 5 years worth of what we would pay (so the corporate company can make some good money), have no NI or pension liability, no common staffing issues (strikes, grievences, etc) and the project will still run late and overbudget.

What needs to change is the governments gravy train contracts. If companies run over budget and late then they should be fined or not paid as much. That works both ways though, the government needs to let them do a project without changing the spec every 5 minutes.

MS bashes Gay(wood) Xbox Live gamer

Gay

I know someone called Gay. She was introduced to my wife recently to which my wife thought she was being a bit forward:

"Hi I'm Gay.."

"I'm Stephanie, and I'm married thank you."

Made me smile for weeks!

Id Dooms gamers to new shoot-'em-up sequel

Wii

Why would the Wii be tricky?

would work pretty well with the wii blaster I reckon. And it would be a lot of fun with the chainsaw!!

Air France pilot in white-knuckle near miss

Don't sack the pilot

This is Air France so the pilot's job is safe.

To sack someone in France takes about a million written warnings. Even if he;s had all his warnings please don't sack him.

Again this is France, the whole country will just go on strike (again)! I'm flying with Air France next Friday and I've just booked a Hol to France in the summer. Please don't make them strike!

Scottish Government scuppers Lewis wind farm plan

@Ian Ferguson

That open mine never went ahead because too many people objected. As with this wind farm proposal.

I'm just back from a week (up home) in Harris (attached to lewis to the south) and having driven past where the farms were going it is the most boring place in the world (not the beaches, hills and blackhouses you see in the postcards and on the rest of the island).

There is a lot of local resentment about these plans being knocked back as there was 10-15 years ago about the super quarry. The people who have retired up there from the south of England or have bought second homes are protesting about these things whilst the indigenious locals are desperate for the jobs and money that the projects will generate. The second home brigade care for noone but themselves and heaven forbid there view of the sea is broken by a windfarm.

This is a clear case where the indigenous local community should ahve been allowed to make the decision (as the council did) and it should have stood.

Bye Bye local cash, bye bye local jobs.

Brain training game aids kids' learning skills, study claims

RE:Brain training = teaching

"Um. Surely that's what teachers are paid to do? I call it an indictment of teachers' skills that they have to get a machine in to interest the kids in what they're supposed to be there for."

Yup, and schools should ban the use of computers, whiteboards, projectors, tv's, dvd's and every other 'machine' that they currently use for teaching.

In my day you just got a sheet of sums and you weren't meant ot be interested.

Tisk Tisk, what has the world come to.

Get a life.

Darling budget fails to paint Brown government green

Labours attempts at a Green budget

/Begin Rant

Labours attempts at a green budget means they now have no chance of my vote at the next election.

This green rubbish is just an excuse to rake in more taxes and to give it to hippies.

When did the Greens suddenly get enough influence to basically dictate what goes on in our country?

I hate the green agenda which is based on absolutely bugger all scientific facts.

/End Rant

IBM's charming smile attracts Hitachi to 32nm research pact

@Erik Aamot

Um IBM were the first company to 45nm, well before intel.

What makes you think intel will be first to 32nm?

IPCC's 'evil twin' launches climate change sceptic's creed

RE:Nullius in Verba

Here Here,

Less of the climate change piffle.

Just a good way for governments to raise more tax. The price of petrol is bloody ridiculous because it's taxed to death by our crappy government.

How I long for an independant Scotland! it's our oil so why dies it cost so much?

Vive la révolution!