Posts by BristolBachelor

New Intel flash hardness performs faster for less

Re: meaningless metrics 101

"What is an IOPS?"

Sorry; you typed that question into the wrong tab. This is still The Register. Yes, you did open Ask Jeeves; it's the tab over there →

Canon reaches for stars with DSLR refresh

Re: Good HA filters..

I didn't read it as it having a Halpha filter. I read it that the IR blocking filter now has a better pass characteristic for Halpha. Therefore, the camera is more responsive to Halpha.

I'm afraid that the camera still has a bayer colour filter over the sensor. If you are really into your astronomy, you use a monochrome sensor and take different exposures with a different filter for each exposure.

Apple to take shine off glossy iMacs, say moles

"Using existing anti-reflective tech would reduce the vibrancy of the displays' colours, something Apple is keen to avoid"

That's funny, because the screens we use have an anti-reflective coating and give 98% of the AdobeRGB Colourspace; while the iScreens have around 60% (IIRC) and don't have anti-reflective coatings. Also our cameras have anti-reflective coatings on the optics and have >100% of AdobeRGB, so are even more vibrant.

It seems to me that their screens could be both more vibrant and also actually let you see the picture you want, rather than a reflection of everything around you.

As for the MBP, the anti-shinny screen is very nice, and something similar on the new iPad would be very nice to go with that new screen :)

Apple relents, doubles EU warranty (sort of)

Re: Touch Screen or Touch Box?

"does this mean that taking the phone out of the original packaging invalidates the warranty?..."

Try to keep up at the back. Haven't you been watching? "Holding it wrong", or even worse, living in a cold country are all reasons for having no warranty.

And if you've removed it from the packaging; that's like opening up a Dell laptop, ripping all the ICs off the board and saying that it doesn't work; the packaging is ¾ of an iProduct :)

ALL Visa cards blab punters' names - not just Barclaycards

Re: NOT AMAZON failing - It's Visa failing.

I don't know the full ins and outs of it, but from what I've picked up:

Amazon do not charge your card until they actually dispatch the items to you (I think if they charge you before they do that, then they fall foul of the consumer credit act, which forbits companies from charging you credit for something they haven't done for you yet).

However, the Visa regs say that they are not allowed to store the CVV code. So even if you typed it into their website, they wouldn't still have it when they charge your card, and so couldn't use it.

It seems that some companies get around it; sort of; They either charge you immediately (I think that falls foul of the consumer credit act?) or by telling Visa that they are going to charge your card (but actually not) to verify the CVV code, but then when they actually place the payment, they don't check the CVV code.

As for Amazon failing because they let me buy things for people and get them sent to that person (possibly without even knowing their address), how is that a fail? Or considering the people who have more than 1 "registered" address (e.g. my parents' address, and whatever hotel I happen to be living in this week/month for work).

The COMPLETE AND UTTER fail of the Visa (mastercard/amex/jcb, etc.) system is that I have to give someone the number to buy something, but that same number can be used by anyone an unlimited number of times to buy anything. They then tell us that we should shred our receipts so people don't see the number, but we still have to give the number every time we use the card!

NSA's top spook blames China for RSA hack

Down vote

Has someone let General Keith Alexander register as a comentard to downvote anyone that doesn't toe the (American) party line?

Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it

"I would view "X worked for Y from A till B." as the worst possible reference possible."

Yeah, but that is exactly what the shitheadsHR department at my last company do.

However, I found that you could get either managers who had since left the company, or managers who were still there to give you a "purely personal" reference as a character reference. A manager who was still in the company was told by HR that he wasn't allowed to do that, and he just told them that they lost the right to have a say in the matter when they started treating people the way they did.

Gov IT contractors hire staff in India to work on benefits system

That's got more to do with the fact that the "spec" will be contradictory, not specify everything and change on a repeated basis. More than likely, the "spec" also doesn't really take everyone into account, so that they will find the system doesn't fit what the users need if it actually gets delivered.

Who is the supplier tends to make little difference, although those who have experienced this kind of crap in the past tend to manage better with the daily change requests and poorly written specs.

Amazon boss finds Apollo 11 engines on seabed

Re: If you really have too much money ...

"... why can't you do something worthwhile with it, like funding cures to diseases etc"

I am assuming then that you do not have a television, since that is obviously not worthwile compared to curing diseases, etc. You also therefore spend all the money you earn (except for buying food and renting a room) on said causes?

Apple IP details tech for 'iTV' innards

Re: LCD?

Personally I have a Panasonic plasma as my main TV. Compared to LCD TVs at the time, well there was no comparison (although my production LCD monitor is not bad, but too small, and LCD TVs are getting better).

I've seen 2 different LED TVs from Sony. I was impressed with the 10" one, but it was a bit small. I don't think they've even released the price for their second one. Apart from that, I've only seen LED blocks to build large screens for stadiums. I could be in the market for an LED TV when they are bigger than 10"

OLED TVs? Where can I get one? I heard that someone dreamt about the idea but haven't seen one yet.

100 EARTH-LIKE PLANETS orbit stars WITHIN 30 LIGHT-YEARS!

"and look outward to the other zero-point-nine-recurring of the universe"

<redneck>

...so is this universe place also in Texas or is it in another state anyways?

</redneck>

Sorry, I had to after Lewis went and suggested that we were only inward looking

If I were intellegent life on another planet and saw what's going on here, I might be inclined to hide my existance as much as possible. They probably have installed these heat / light / microwave cloaking devices that everyone is saying are just around the corner (if you count 10 parsecs as just around the corner!)

Sky boffins: The Moon is not Earth's only natural satellite

Re: M O O N that spells moon!

I think that they had a definition of planet. The problem was that once they could see all the small (relatively speaking) rocks that orbit the moon, they realised they would have to upgrade the solar system from having 9 planets to more than 2 thousand.

I guess that it made sense to draw the line somewhere about what constitues a planet, and loosing 1 (and the furthest one out) made more sense than suddenly adding lots of new ones, and the 6th planet out from the sun changing from the huge Saturn to something like the tiny (and catchely named) 303775. (Pedants need not point out that 303775 is probably not in the right location to be the 6th "planet", it's just picked out at random as a dwarf planet.

F1 team wins CAD copyright war, wakes up to £700k hangover

Re: Money for nothing...

It would only be money for nothing if they had paid money. My reading of it is that they didn't pay (so I do wonder how they are still recognised as the owners of the creative works)

Size DOES matter: Nokia snubs Apple's royalty-free nano-SIM

License

The thing with the license, is that Apple can give it away free, with any conditions they want, and it's Fair, Reasonable, etc.

Now image that there is a clause that says the license is not valid if you are in a patent spat with Apple.... Makes it a lot easier for them; they just add "using our patented technology for the critial SIM part of a phone without a license".

Also I am wondering how exactly they managed to patent cutting a little bit off the sides of a SIM ?

Oz regulator to Apple: Don’t call it 4G if you can’t connect

"Apple shouldn't be allowed to advertise the phone as 4G in the UK when there is no 4G network."

Agreed on that point.

"That's akin to car manufacturers advertising that their cars can reach speeds over 150mph, when there's no-where you can drive at that speed.

Now you've gone and lost me. There are plenty of places where you can go at the weekend (or week) to drive at those speeds. It would be like me saying that there are no places to buy bras in England 'cause I've never gone and brought one.

The other issue is that if a car is only capable of 70mph, then it will probably take 10 minutes to reach that speed, and won't be able to hold it going up hills. It's breaking systems could also be on the limit at that speed and so may not be the safest thing to be in. Plus it means that it will be ragging it's guts out if you drive at the motorway speed limit meaning it's life will be severly limited.

Advertising that the car can safely travel at 150mph means that there is sufficient margin for it to be able to accelerate to 70mph on the sliproad, can still drive up hills and will cruise at that speed without causing your ears to bleed, and be able to stop quickly enough from 70mph to stop you becoming a statistic.

Elgato Thunderbolt SSD

Thunderbolt Fail

Again, we see a TB peripheral with only 1 port. So I get to choose; either this SSD drive, or my monitor.... Let me think..... FAIL

Web hosting

Re: Web hosting

Hi Drew

Well really I wanted UK because it would be in English, and since I'm tech support having it hosted over here in Spain would just make things even harder (since I don't really know what I'm doing). Also since about 90% of visitors would be in Spain and 10% UK, I thought that local presence would be easier

I've also heard of people getting screwed over by the US, so was a bit wary. And I don't just mean for hosting DVD rips or selling fake viagra. Almost everyone over here (Spain) is called Jose something or Luis, so closing someone's website because their name was Jose Luis ..... and it is the same name as a suspected terrorist is just plain wrong!

If you (or anyone) can recommend someone in the US / Canada (Trevor?) then I can have a look there too.

Re: Web hosting

Thanks Minty. I'd had a quick look at the Rackspace website already. I had already heard the name, and if they are good enough for El Reg, then obviously they're too good for me worth a look.

It seems that the support people I spoke ill of earlier have realised that the machine hosting my site is doing a RAID rebuild, so might be a little slow, but it appears that they didn't realise until I kept asking what the hell was going on. I suppose that at least something cloudy should be able to at least move to another host if it's hardware is upset, but I'm not sure. I mean what happens if the slowdown is due to a disk outage in the cloudy storage!

I'll have a look at bytemark too, but I am realiseing that I really am at the very cheap end of the wedge and this thing will have to start pulling in money to justify what some of this stuff costs. Oh, and yeah Hetzner's servers are silly prices; although still a bit rich with no income :(

Again thanks for the help. I'm a bit sad that none of the commentards have joined in, but the user forums are still a bit of a backwater compared to discussions about CDs and naked celeb pics!

Web hosting

First off, this was the only area on our forums that I could think to post this.

I am looking for a reasonably reliable web host (UK / Spain / Europe with support in English). I would truely love to have a dedicated server (then I could also run my own webmail and avoid my problems with hostedmail), but I'm not making any money out of it yet; it's early days and the cheapest I've seen is £35 a month, and that's too much (and it's also with the same supplier I have now).

I have my hosting with a well-known company who I won't mention just now because I don't want to antagonise them; I want them to be fixing my bloody hosting :(

My hosting is only with them, because it's the company I bought my first domain from when Demon internet said somthing like £5M to buy a domain name!

Dot Pharmacy: New web weapon in war on duff drug peddlers

I don't understand your point at all. Surely they should just use ".pharmacy.us", and it's nothing to do with the UN ?

Given that their ".pharmacy" TLD is a global one, all attempts to register will fail in at least 1 country... (for example, I believe that there are no allowed online pharm suppliers for the UK; unless you count the funny "memory water" that has been diluted so many times that it can't remember being anything except water)

El Reg user forum opens to public, HTML for all (mostly)

Re: What the fuck is BBCode

"It's what children use instead of HTML."

Where is the hidden Upvote 100 times button?

<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk"></a>

Re: Oh well....

Yeah, I see that they have buggered my space topic (although it didn't get the posters I really wanted to chew the fat with).

It would be nice if they stripped out the HTML instead of just deactivating it.

Intel next-gen netbook chip to sport Ivy Bridge graphics

Re: Stater or

See that little link at the bottom of the article?

Send corrections

Third European supply podule blasts off en route to space station

Re: By now

You mean that you haven't given your transit van it's very own, special name?

Mine is called Conan the Destroyer, but I won't say what it does to inconsiderate gilipollas who just park their car whereever they want; this is a public forum :)

El Reg Forums FAQ

Not on roadmap

"•Log-in via third parties - e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Disqus, Linked-in"

And keep it that way too, thanks Drew.

I've already left a few other sites because of their insistance that I sell my entire personal life to be able to post, plus their article comments are now full of stupid comments by people who have no idea at all about the subject they are posting about (normally physics / space tech). I'd be a shame to have to stop reading El Reg.

Microsoft cuts back on Windows keys after pirates grab booty

Re: Piracy solved

Sort of, but it didn't work with Vista did it? People just pirated XP instead (and in fact were forced to because MS refused to let them buy licenses for XP).

No joke icon here, because it's no joke!

Big Media drags 142,000 through UK's courts in a year

Re: Only compulsory if...

Perhaps you should tell that to Capita.

They seem to think that the license fee is compulsory if you have an address. If you do have an address and don't pay the fee, you have to prove that you don't watch or listen to TV/radio output. Even after that, they will continue to harass you.

If you have any equipment that is capable of recieving broadcasts, it gets even harder (even if you don't have an arial to connect to your laptop which happens to have a receiver built in). In the past there have been people in court having to prove that their VCR had never received TV broadcasts because the receiver had been removed from it.

WD intros 'world's first' 2TB portable HDD

You forgot the WD My Passport badge on the outside.

</joke>

(Although in my opinion that should make the drive practically worthless. Any drive that pretends that it doesn't exist at all for several minutes if it encounters a CRC error reading from the disk is bad in my book. It is fine if they want the drive to try to re-read the sectors to see if the error is recoverable, but for the whole disk to go unservicable for an unlimited number of minutes while it does it is not acceptable)

Apple New iPad Wi-Fi only

Re: must have...?

"There are 3rd party iPad card readers that support CF :)"

Yes, that is true, but unfortunately the iPad can't support enough power to run the bigger cards, so you have to use an external battery, fudged in to make it work, or alternatively put the card into a camera and use a USB cable from an iPad adaptor to the camera to read the card (meaning that the camera can't be taking pictures at the same time).

That said, I'm sure I'll still be drinking the cool-aid if the screen really is as good as I expect.

Re: must have...?

I'm actually comtemplating buying one of these to use as a photographer. Your iPhone 4 may be the bees knees, but how impressed are potential new clients looking at a 2" screen to work out if they like some of your photography style? My principle reason to buy this would be the screen, to have a portable selection of images to show.

I am disappointed that it cannot read images from CF cards, even using the "camera conenction kit" which is supposed to allow for things like this. Also the "camera connection kit" won't allow me to connect it to any of my cameras and do anything with them, although frustraitingly there are a number of Android apps that do allow this (control of camera functions, liveview, focus stacking, etc.) The new 10" Galaxy Note with a similar resolution screen is very tempting, and a proper stylus may make some interactions easier.

In the end though, I've waited too long to buy this one, so I guess I will as soon as it is released in this country (still waiting). I'm told that the Galaxy note will be at least another 6 months here.

Lightsquared cries dyslexic Havoc, unleashes 'gods of law'

@Gordon 10

It's funny, you know those GPS receivers work fine when the band next door marked "For satellite downlink" is used for satellite downlink? The military receivers may be able to get around the problem by using GPS transmissions on another band, but unfortunately you and I are not allowed to use those transmissions (well actually I am, but not for my car sat nav).

It would be a bit like you complaning to your builder that your house isn't insulated well enough and that you get too hot now that you have moved it to the surface of the sun instead of the surface of the Earth.

The FCC were in fact more than fair. They said that if Lighspeed's plan can work without interfering with existing users, then they may re-purpose the downlink-only band for terestrial ground-stations. However, it appears that it wasn't possible, and true to their word, it seems that the FCC are not allowing the re-purposing of the band.

(Oh, and I like the expression so much, can I have a "mad as a box of frogs" icon please?)

Walmart offers $2 digital copies of your DVDs

@AC 14-03-2012 12:19

"As for DRM most people don't care about that as long as they can watch the movie."

Yeah, that is the problem. I tried to watch the Blueray of Sherlock Holms (I didn't buy it; it was a present). The problem was that to watch it, I had to upgrade the player to cope with the new version of the DRM. However, once I did that, some of the old films stopped working and the optical out no longer gave me audio; that meant I had to play the audio out through stupid 2-channel analogue.

Tell me again how wonderful DRM is and how it doesn't get in the way...

@Kyoraki

I think the HD upgrade option means that you get a subscription to the HD version. Sure for old films that may be an upscale, but for all recent films, it should be the HD scan of the film, or a downscale from the 4k original to HD resolution instead of SD resolution.

However as for the quality, who knows? I mean the Blueray disk will be 25G or 50G, but the version you get to watch that you have paid for is probably less than 1G; if you watch fast moving scenes like the gun fight in the entrance lobby in the Matrix, you probably see the tiles falling off the walls and turning into mosaics in front of your eyes.

Thunderbolt to go optical in 2012, says Intel

Fuity only?

I thought that at least one other maker has added TB to their stuff? Isn't there a Sony lappy with a TB port and a docking station that uses it? Also Toshiba uses the same connector for mini-displayport so they probably aren't far behind Apple. (And don't tell me to use Google; it doesn't work where I am right now :(

@ Charles 9

Resistance is always an issue, you just compensate for it (e.g. the longer USB cables use thicker wires for the power than the data)

For example, how far do you live from a power station? :-p

DLNA blesses HomePlug Ethernet-over-mains tech

Re: I just don't get DLNA, what does it actually verify

In my humble experience, I only got my Bravia TV to play stuff using the PS3 server app running on a PC; it wouldn't talk to my DLNA NAS, nor the windows media sharing software, nor a Mac.

However, the PS3 server app refuses to serve content to any other device I have; perhaps the Sony version of DLNA is different? (For the record, Sony refused to help at all unless the TV was streaming from a Sony PC or PS3, nor would they help with USB flashdrive problems, unless it was a Sony USB flashdrive; presumably using the Sony version of USB)

Re: Copper

I´m not sure that copper would help. All my CAT5 cables are copper and happily run Gbit ethernet, but DLNA doesn't work properly over it at all (especially trying to get my DLNA TV to play videos from my DLNA NAS) :-/

</troll>

High Court asked to keep 'cheap DVD' VAT loophole open

Re: The big problem here...

"I think that's why DHL announced a few weeks ago that they are introducing a much lower handling fee for collecting small amounts of VAT - £1.25 when amount to be collected is < £62.50.

I like the sound of that. The last DVD I got from Japan (no not animie pron) cost something like £25 including shipping, but DHL charged me a £35 "admin fee" to collect the VAT on it :(

Apple iPad 3 'retina display' uses Sharp super-high aperture tech

Re: needed?

"waste that computing power blowing everything up to this ridiculous resolution."

You are aware aren't you, that it is already blown up to that 'ridiculous' resolution, rendered and then anti-aliased back down so that the individual pixels are not so visible? This all done to stop the images displayed looking like a ZX Spectrum.

Perhaps now they will be able to just render it for the actual screen pixels, and then no anti-aliasinig down-sampling will be needed, leading to a nicer, crisper image with less processing required?

iPad 3 'first tablet' with Bluetooth 4.0

Re: PCI-e slots on laptops

I think that you'll find that they now call it Thunderbolt, and it's all the rage.

just saying...

Ditto all the time

I move things on and off my phone using bluetooth all the time. I don't have to worry about where it is (not even which room in the house it's in), an dcertainly don't have to go faffing around with cables.

Granted BT is not fast, but for the occasional file, is a lot quicker than routing through a draw for a cable.

Microsoft's Azure cloud down and out for 8 hours

MS Calculations @ Syntax error

Yeah I read the comment. It said something about MS calculating Leap Years using a non-standard method that is wrong, hence their problem.

Then I made a comment that MS also decided that they wanted to make another calculation a different way to the standard, so that too is wrong sometimes (causing problems with British Summer Time).

I'm not an Apple fanboi so I don't see what's wrong with poking fun at MS inability to calculate thing correctly (so we also shouldn't forget their spreadsheet program which has also had problems calculating in the past!)

MS Calculations

I remember that MS have/had their own way or working out which is the last Sunday in October. It's the 4th Sunday. It always is (except for those Octobers with 5 Sundays...). Cue the time being different between desktop wondows machines and back-end servers causing all sorts of headaches.

Navigation

Re: Re: Navigation

Any news on navigation? I still like the crumb-trail approach.

Also will have to think about what to do once a "topic" gets to 20 pages or more? Perhaps at that point the subject should be promoted to sub-forum?

Oh, and we need some new icons. A big question mark would be a good one when someone asked something other than WTF?

Virgin Galactic announces test flight plans

"ex-atmospheric"

That's above 300km no? Below that there's certainly lots of the stuff. Keeps getting in the way of the LEO sats and the ISS.

If they mean appreciable atmosphere, I could go to the top of Everest for that. I'm an unfit bugger and would probably feel weightless for a while and pass-out. Probably cheaper, although probably more dangerous too.

/pedant

<b>SPACE</b> the final frontier

Moving asteroids

I think that the theories about putting an asteroid in orbit just don't allow for their about mass and inertia. The amount of fuel you would need to alter its course to get closer to Earth, and then alter it again so that it is captured by Earth's gravity must be staggering. I think you'd be better off looking at that piece of rock that's already in orbit.

But it doesn't stop there. Just think what you want to build your disco from, then work back from there. You'll start with a mini digger (always fancied one, personally), but then you'll want to sort the rocks, crush them, melt them, mix them, cast them, shape them..... eventually you'll end up with a piece of metal of 5kg that needed 1,000,000kg of stuff on the moon to make :(

I think that for the next 100 years, it's going to be pre-fabricate it on Earth, ship it to orbit and bolt it together there. As for the cost of the ISS, I think a lot of the costs that make up the numbers were the very expensive shuttle launches, and the amount of work performed to work out "how to" rather than actually doing. I think that the repeat orders of living spaces and common equipments will be a lot lower.

The technology I'm waiting for is the one that overcomes inertia. Come on Higgs, where is your Boson, and how does it work?

Epic net outage in Africa as FOUR undersea cables chopped

@James Micallef

"*not to be confused with Apple's new joint venture with Nike, iRan"

I like your style. Do you think Apple will tell the world that they can no longer call the country IRAN?

Price-comparison site: OCZ reviews 'questionable'

"Furthermore OCZ is immediately conducting our own internal investigation to address this and determine why the reviews weren't automatically routed from a group of different IP addresses that are not registered to us if and how this was possible, and will take all necessary actions to resolve this issue. We greatly value our customers and their product satisfaction is our highest priority.

It's funny, when I selected the text, it seems that there was hidden, deleted text also in the pdf...

Blighty's taxman offers smartphone levy refund

Re: Could be worse.....

Yeah, place where my dad used to work suffered from that. During a revenue visit, the revenue man found out that the coffee machine was free; it cost the owner less money to just let everyone have free coffee than to get the machine fixed. He ended up with a huge bill for back tax because they assumed that everyone drank about 20 cups of coffee a day, that it had always been free, and thanks for some extra interest.

Also funnily enough, in my last place the company almost got taken to court because they didn't provide free drinking water...