Posts by Drakkenson

Wow, fancy that. Web ad giant Google to block ad-blockers in Chrome. For safety, apparently

Re: Waterfox, my friend

@DropBear

You may want to try Basilisk, from the developers of Palemoon. It works with the old FF plugins, too...

Make sure your Skype is up to date because FYI there's a nasty hole in it

Re: Well, duh.

I suggest qTox for multi-platform. I don't know if it satisfies your other requirements, but maybe you could take a look and let us know?

George Bush naked selfie hacker Guccifer gets his day in US court

Re: Unequality before justice

And it also does not help that Romanian politicians are all a bunch of corrupt and sniveling bastards that can and will suck up to anyone who would be capable of giving them any advantage, like covering up the political scandal of bribery involving Microsoft, or perhaps something else that we do not know about...

Oracle brews perpetual, all-you-can-eat database licence

Re: PULA

And it is the Romanian word for c**k

LIFE, JIM? Comet probot lander found 'ORGANICS' on far-off iceball

Re: Secret mode?

@ "As for the God angle - really, why do non-religious people assume all religious people are narrow-minded, joyless and doctrinaire?"

Because they really are, by and large?

Even my own family looked at me as if I was sick in the head when I told them i don't believe...

Windows 10 feedback: 'Microsoft, please do a deal with Google to use its browser'

@DaveK ....Abomination that is Australis......

You could try Cyberfox, it has the old interface by default

Innovation creates instability, you say? BLASPHEMY, you SCUM

Re: Italian railways

@ Maty

You should try Romanian trains sometime. I do believe there is nothing worse than those. Besides the filth and the hateful staff, they even refused to sell me a ticket at the station, directing me to effectively bribe the conductor... (it was a local train, but still...)

FROM MY COLD, DEAD HANDS: Microsoft faces prising XP from Big Biz

Re: Win 2000 is still out there

Does it support old Canon scanners too? If not, then there is no use to bother...

400 million Chinese people can't speak Chinese: Official

Re: @ElReg!comments!Pierre - Japanese

@Fruminous Bandersnatch

About politeness, in linguistics this refers to being polite, as in showing deference (and not only, this is called 'positive face), as well as being impolite or rude, or just critical of someone (this is 'negative face"). Of course, you can be polite or impolite towards your superiors as well as inferiors, and you can do that (intentionally or not) by using an inappropriate level of politeness. Imagine,for instance, someone of superior status being excessively polite towards someone of inferior status. The lower status person will be properly insulted, because he or she will interpret excessive politeness as unwarranted irony.

I think you are correct in saying that Japanese is syntactically regular and therefore easy to memorise, but the difficulty of the language lies in things like the politeness aspect, and other aspects outside syntax as such.

For me personally, another difficulty was learning the kanji, because, unlike in Chinese, most of them have more than one reading, so they each have to be learned together with as many contexts as you can remember.

With regard to counters, there are perhaps hundreds of them, but most of them are obscure linguistic curiosities, and in everyday life you can get away with twenty or so.

Re: @ElReg!comments!Pierre - Japanese

@I don't think there are that many

The forms you mentioned (-ru forms and -masu forms) exist for all verbs. However, polite conversation makes extensive use of humble and exalting variants of a few verbs (become, do, go, come, give and a few others) and combines these in idioms that are capable of expressing the six degrees of politeness another poster was mentioning. One never ever speaks in the same way to the Emperor, to one's parent, to one's friend, to one's company president, to one's direct boss, to one's assistant, to one's younger/newer colleague, to one's female colleague, to one's child, or indeed to someone else's child, and so on. If you do use an inappropriate level of politeness people feel offended, because if you are overly polite it is perceived as irony, and if you are insufficiently polite you are being rude. Foreigners get away with some inappropriateness, but past a certain limit you will lose goodwill and business. You will always be treated politely though, and even overly politely, if they want to have a laugh behind your back.

Well, at least that was what I learned while I was there, part of it 'the hard way'.

Torvalds suggests poison and sabotage for ARM SoC designers

Maybe

Just maybe we should humour him for once?

Samsung stakes claim to smartwatch market with Galaxy Gear

Re: Battery lasts a day?!

@ apples and pears

True, but then I don't do facebook and whatnot, but I do want to see what time it is. Also, this was in response to the automatic watch recharging remark, trying to show that you do not need to actually do anything to recharge this watch...

Re: Battery lasts a day?!

@ automatic watches

I've had a Seiko Kinetic Autorelay for close to ten years now, and I've never felt the need to "charge" it. It will continue to show time for two days if you leave it perfectly still, and it will keep time, but not move the hands, for two more years. When you move it after more than two days, the hands will move automatically to the correct hour. My model does not keep the day of month synchronised, but I hear that newer models do. These watches do cost as much as this new Samsung one, and you can find even more expensive models if you have cash to burn. All in all, I like mine very much.

Legal bible Groklaw pulls plug in wake of Lavabit shutdown, NSA firestorm

Re: Intimidation Prepare for rambling

One little correction: you are not a socialist state, and you are nowhere near being one. You do not know what that means, trust me. You are, however, a police state, which is bad enough on its own...

Panasonic claims world's first ReRAM-equipped product

How expensive is it?

Can it be mate into a 1PB HDD? or even 10 TB? How big would one of these be? And how much? And how many times can you rewrite this memory?

Romania chucks €21m at IBM for Bucharest IT project

Re: Oh shit

Indeed we are, but not for the reasons you might imagine.

Rather, all state contracts are given to cronies of the government or MPs, or one has to grease the palms of the said slimeballs with massive sums to get the contract.

I don't know which has happened here, but from where I stand, it doesn't make much of a difference...

Never mind WinRT: Tiny Win8 slabs will ship with free Office, too

Re: Actually, LibreOffice sucks too.

I"m really curious, honest: What do real writers use? I'd like to be a real writer, too _grin_

Hot new battery technologies need a cooling off period

Well, someone in the comments to that article said something about 1 F capacitance for that single foil, I thought that was quite a big deal. I don't know much about electronic devices, though, so it may be you are right and this is not very interesting after all.

@Supercapacitors generally have very high power density...

Yes, I know that is so with usual capacitors, but in the video in the artcle I linked they powered a led for 10 minutes out of a single small foil of those capacitors, so the energy density is there, I am sure. Moreover, discharge intensity can be controlled with clever electronics, so that you can control how fast you use the energy reserve.

I would very much like to see batteries made of these things:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/21/ucla_dvd_burner_supercapacitor/

Stuff windmill pylons full of these and you have grid load balancing and energy when it is not windy. Make car batteries with these things and they will go hundreds of kms on a single charge (anyone willing to do the quick and dirty calculations?). Put these in smartphone batteries and they will go on for weeks with bluetooth and wifi on all the time...

10-day stubble: Men's 'socio-sexual attributes' at their best

@"nations that are run by sexually repressed religious nut bags."

What, like Iran? I, for one, don't remember when I las saw a photo of a freshly shaven Iranian...

Apple's next OS X said to be targeted at 'power users'

Re: best file manager

@ Nate Amsden: The best explorer replacement is Q-dir. It can have up to four file panes and a folder tree pane, and tabs in each folder pane, remembers the last opened folders in each tab, and many other features. It is also free of charge and updated frequently.

Move space junk with laser shots

Re: What happens when a pigeon flies through the beam of a 10kW laser?

Pigeon barbecue?

Linux in 2013: 'Freakishly awesome' – and who needs a fork?

Re: And yet, and yet ...

@could I run a business on purely Linux kit?

If your business is a translation agency, then no. All (well, almost all) computer aided translation tools are on windows, sadly...

US Navy blasts drones with ship-mounted LASER CANNON

Re: Pulse is Infrare, So Silver Paint Probable Won't Make A Difference

That may be the case with paint, but how about the 'cat's eyes' type of microprism reflectors found in traffic sigs and such? It should also work at varuous wavelengths, since it is based on total reflection in highly refractive materials...

Multimillionaire Brit games dev wants your cash for Shroud of the Avatar

Re: multimillionaire seeks funding?

Well, look at what happened to Kingdoms of Amalur. Eric lost his own money as well as other people's, so using only other people's money appears quite sensible, no? Even if it comes across as a little selfish, or whatever...

Huge rock-hard marble erection shocks Japanese kiddies

it's not traditional

I believe there are certain temples/shrines that enshrine giant wooden penises in Japan, so I really don't understand the good burghers... Perhaps those temples are only for the girls? (I could look up some pictures, but I am at work...)

Chinese boffins crack cloaking tech for camouflage

Re: Pink?

Actually, I was going to make some lame pun alluding to invisible pink unicorns and failed to delete 'pink', but your explanation works better. BTW, what do you call a mixture of red and black (as in Communist and Evil, as it were)? I'm not a native English speaker, you see.

Let me be the first to welcome our pink invisible Chinese overlords.

NASA: There are 17 BEEELLION Earth-sized worlds in Milky Way

@earthlike? ...

Well, maybe the stars of these planets are somewhat cooler than the Sun, no?

Kim Dotcom flashes his rack

@Does every half arsed media utterance...

Yes, if only to piss off the Americans/MPAA... :)

AFACT wants ushers to confront pirates

Re: Why do they care?

"Why should they be allowed to get away with it?"

Because it is more trouble than it is worth? Because it inconveniences those who would pay to watch?

Microsoft and Skype to axe world's most popular IM client early 2013

@kill off IM - check

If they do that, I and many others will go elsewhere, (and there will be something, even if there isn't now) because many people, my boss included, will be unwilling to pay for it. After all, if you have to pay for it you may as well use the phone. It's not like phone fees haven't been getting cheaper, after all.

Indian software pirating suspect faces US extradition

It must not be long now before we see some country invaded over copyright infringement of mass destruction...

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Q-dir seconded

I use it exclusively, with three panes and lots of tabs in each pane.

It remembers the last used folder in eache tab, and has lots of other neat features, too.

some alternatives

Synkron for folder mirroring and backup

Notepad2 for notepad

Daum PotPlayer for mediaplayer (it is a Korean free soft, but it is localised in English, lots of options)

SumatraPDF for pdf reader

UK will share passenger data with US in Euro deal

Re: Not getting it

@ dssf

The Japanese were doing the same, with very similar looking kit, in 2009, when I went there.

Intel bags $120m patent hoard from RealNetworks

Daum PotPlayer. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=148745

Plays anything and everything out of the box and is highly configurable. And is being actively developed.

iPhone baby clothes shop mauled by Apple

But why...

Why would anyone want to dress up their baby as a phone? This is what I cannot understand. Apple are dicks, so at least they are not doing something new, but dressing up babies as a phone??

Is Apple nobbling iPhones to avoid more patent misery?

"One might even imagine a company deliberately including a disabled feature, ensuring that enabling it was trivial while avoiding having to pay the patent owners, in the same way that DVD players are sold locked to one region (as required by the DVD standard) but most can be unlocked with minimal effort."

So will we get to the point of buying a phone or other gadget that does nothing out of the box, but cand do all manner of patented crap (like this autocomplete function or maybe one tap to buy) after a bit of tweaking, or applying a patch from the internet?

Actually, that would promote innovation, wouldn't it?

Mozilla updates to Firefox 8, disables add-ons

Well, it gives you the option to select the addons to enable when you install it, so I don't see what's the fuss. EN_GB version here.

And it runs smoothly on this old junk of a computer, a dell from 2004, with 1 gb of ram.

Nude lady recreates Star Wars tauntaun scene in dead horse

Eeewwww!

Windows 8 ribbon entangles Microsoft

Alternative file manager

I know this is not strictlyrelevant to the discussion, but...

There is a very good file manager and it is free, too.

http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Freeware/Q-Dir

Multi-pane, menu/shortcut control, file preview option if you want it...

Sony e-book reader line to get multi-touch screen

already done

@ AC 11:10 gmt

except for point 1) the prs 650, sold in Japan does all that, and has the same display as this unit. It does not have color, but sony also sells a nice cover with LED reading light. It does not have wifi though.

Busted Romanian TV star fingers Bulgarian airbags

The value of pi

...is 1.41 she'll have you know. The band in the background was banging like that every time she spewed some more silliness.

The bimbo is as stupid as her excuse.

I wonder what Paris thinks about the value of pi.

Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway

latest news

The explosion was caused by hydrogen accumulated outside the reactor shield but inside the outer building. How this hydrogen came to be there is as yet unknown.

Now they are pumping seawater inside the shield to cool down the core. The general impression is that the situation is being brought under control.

it is now 2.27 am here in Japan.

@ Mr Phud, I think you have no idea how powerful this earthquake was. Even so, if the emergency generators had not been damaged, none of this would have been news. So, when building the next plant it will be built with even more redundancy than this one.

Texan prof sees big future for graphene storage

good old pencils

So, terabyte storage in a pencil?