Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Freeview to be nudged down to clear 5G bands in 2018

Re: The master plan...

The free Sky line up is different from both Freeview and Freesat. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't get their arses sued off for trademark infringement when they called it "Freesat from Sky"....

The master plan...

What they're no doubt hoping for is that we all get so bloody sick of digital terrestrial that we all buy Freesat boxes and they can switch the whole bloody thing off and sell off the bandwidth to some silly startup when the Web 3.0 bubble starts....

Alan Sugar's YouView loses brand judgment in court

Re: I have not been paying attention

Maybe they're not exactly the same, but there is still a fuzzy overlap and the potential for their brand to be cast into shadow. I personally can't believe Microsoft were thick enough to call their remote management suite "SMS". It may be in a different technical domain from text messages, but it didn't mean there wasn't room for confusion. Just try explaining to the non-techie manager that you're going to upgrade the software via SMS. Go on -- I dare you.

So there is the potential for incidental brand damage, even though they're not in direct competition....

'I'm a PIRATE' confessions spew from OED iPhone dictionary

Re: I don't get it... #2 ..

Dictionaries have always been expensive to compile, and a well compiled dictionary is a very valuable thing. And a good dictionary that's *installed* rather than "on the cloud" is a heck of a lot easier to use (and potentially cheaper in the long run, given mobile data price gauging....

UK's planned copyright landgrab will spark US litigation 'firestorm'

Re: Can't wait

If a law is in breach of international laws, I believe that a foreign individual may have recourse to sue the state, rather than just the company....

The GPL self-destruct mechanism that is killing Linux

@Lee Dowling

The Torvalds vs Tanenbaum argument wasn't resolved to say "Linux is better" but "Linux is quicker and easier to produce". I don't think Tanenbaum ever argued against that, but rather suggested that Linux was quicker and easier to write because it was a hack. Ideologically, I'm on the side of the microkernel, but practically, I use Linux because it's there, and because there's stuff for it. And I use Windows more often than Linux, because there's even more stuff for it.

But with the volume of people working on Linux now, I don't see why there isn't a concerted effort to shrink the kernel. It would save a lot of the "roll your own" work required for installing on non-standard or Frankenstein systems. (And it might help get rid of that persistent laptop backlight problem...)

BBC in secret trial to see if you care about thing you plainly don't

Economies of scale...

As DAB sets are effectively UK-only, they don't have the global economy of scale that other consumer electronics benefit from....

Re: RDS

IIRC, Radio 5 was given Radio 1's AM slot when Radio 1 went FM-only.

No radio bandwidth was harmed in the making of this station.

RISC OS comes to Raspberry Pi

Re: And

Yeah.... stuff the Kickstarter project Braben -- just get ArchElite on GOG.com

Classic game 'Elite' returns … on Kickstarter

Re: It is our duty to donate :-)

By the time you could afford the docking computer, you had to have learned the manual way anyway.

After weeks of struggling with the tap-tap-tap method on the C64 (no analogue stick), I reread the manual and spotted a little mention or "inertial dampers" or somesuch, eh voila! Nice, easy, controlled rotation.

Minnesota backpedals from online education ban

Why coursera, not udacity...?

Because for all their bitching about bad university standards, Udacity aren't really trying to be a university. They're turning themselves into a 21st century technology bootcamp. They're getting their next round of courses from all the usual suspects in the computing industry, which means they're going to end up being nothing more than a training camp and outsourced sales department for Microsoft et al.

They're not higher education by any stretch of the imagination.

Asus doubles up phone-slate combo's specs with Padfone 2

Re: Oh Deap Watch Out Asus

You clearly don't know the difference between a right angle and a rounded corner....

Re: interesting but...

Hmm.... but the combining the "brains" bit is important here -- I don't recall ever seeing a non-smart Android phone. A) The software doesn't exist. B) Would you honestly want a non-smart phone with the battery life of a smartphone (cos it's going to have to run off a smartphone processor anyway.

And in the end, why would you really need a dock? You can pick up a non-smart phone for a tenner in carphone warehouse -- the price of the docking mechanism is alone is going to be more than that, so your chosen target audience is going to be better served buying an independent phone+tablet.

The solution that YOU are looking for is a non-smart phone with 3G for modem purposes when coupled with a tablet. It doesn't need to dock, because Bluetooth will reach from your pocket to the table in front....

Unrootable: Mash these bits together to get a CLASSIFIED spyphone

Re: Whoa

Nononono.... if it was an Intel advert it would say "the first ingredient is Intel Inside" rather than the far more balanced "right now, the only available option is Intel". Because that's what it said, right?

Boffins baffled: HUGE EYEBALL washes up on Florida beach

Re: I can tell them.

I thought the difference between vertebrate and invertebrate eyes was immediately visible -- aren't all the nerves on the outside of an invertebrate eye, making it non-spherical, whereas our nerves went inside to make a better curve and therefore make the eye socket possible?

Lancashire man JAILED over April Jones Facebook posts

Well your mother was a...

[This post detailing the deviancy and congenital defects in RICHTO's family has been deleted due to gross indecency and the high risk of causing offence.]

This supercomputing board can be yours for $99. Here's how

Missed point.

Err... you may have missed the point.

1) They're suggesting that the power consumption is a barrier to wider adoption.

2) Also, what the Reg didn't cover was the other barrier to adoption: parallel computing suffers from a lack of skilled programmers. The first computing revolution was powered by self-taught hobbyist programmers on single-processor boards. The developers believe that this has created a generation of single-processor-centric programmers without the skills for parallel work. They want to create a hobbyist scene for parallel processing and foment a skills revolution in the parallel computing sphere, which will then (hopefully) allow genuine parallel processing to become part of mainstream computing, as opposed to the minimalist OS-managed parallelism of current-gen multicore processors.

Cynics viewpoint: what we have is a bunch of clever blokes who developed a clever processor and found that the people who could use it don't want it, and those who might want it couldn't use it, so they're repositioning it as a hobbyist teaching toy.

Optimist's viewpoint: a bunch of clever blokes developed a clever processor that solves a clever problem, and finding that the market couldn't take advantage of it, they decided to try to develop the market by themselves.

Bone-bothering boffins pull TINY fanged dinosaur from drawers

You're reading too far, then.

There's a big red banner there that says clearly what you're reading. The word "boffin" appears significantly below the *red* at the *top* of the page.

Assange movie portrays leaker as teen rebel

Praying on women...

...isn't that the missionary position?

Now Space Station forced to DODGE flying Japanese junk

What about this...?

I read on Slashdot that some artist wanted to throw a disc into orbit for alien archaeologists.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231973/Artist_s_project_to_blast_gold_plated_artifact_disc_into_orbit?taxonomyId=19&pageNumber=1

My first thought was "great, more spacejunk".

Would a NASA cleanup respect moronic arts projects, or would they just sweep them all away?

Dinosaur Killer...?

Are you claiming the dinosaur killer originated in Earth's orbital path? I thought standard theory but it as an object dislodged from one of the planetless orbits called the asteroid belts.

Microsoft: 'To fill 6,000 jobs, we'll pay $10K per visa'

Re: 6000

Why pay that much for a visa when they could just hire them and have them based in other countries? Singapore, India, Europe... wherever. It's a global workforce now.

McFlurry McMisdemeanour costs Welsh lass McJob

Humour fail.

You may have missed the point where they used the cost of fine Ecuadorian after-dinner chocolate as a cheap dig at McDonald's's claim to only use the "finest" ingredients....

Dreaded redback spider's NEMESIS: Forgotten Captain Cook wasps

Red-shift?!?

So which solar system did you take the photograph from, and why do you find spiders and wasps more interesting than human beings?

You also appear to speak human -- do you also speak wasp?

No Scots word for vegetable...?

So do the English have their own, then, or do they all just rely on a mispronunciation of the French...?

Work for beer, Neil Gaiman's wife tells musicians

Re: Enough snark already

You might as well ask "what's the harm in opening a bar and asking for volunteer barmen?"

"You will be paid in free beer, hugs, merch, and the opportunity to chat up good looking young trendies while serving them a professionally-mixed cocktail."

What's wrong with that is that it cuts the bottom out of the market for bar staff, and it has rightly been rendered illegal by UK law (and probably EU law too), except when the bar in question is operating for a genuine community group or registered non-profit.

Which leads to the interesting possibility that the MU could take this muppet to court as a high-profile way of proving that the same labour laws that guarantee a (barely) living minimum wage apply to musicians as well as public lavatory cleaners.

Her response goes on about doing lots for free, because that's the way it's always been in showbusiness.

But that's the way it was in finance, law, etc too, with high profile employers exploiting unpaid workers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "interns" with promises of experience, exposure, and the possibility of a paid job at a later date. The laws that stopped them doing that apply.

Smack your phones up, says Microsoft

Inventive step.

The inventive step here is only switching on the accelerometer when the sound starts. I know. It's... mindblowing. How did they think of that?!?

Going viral 9,500 years ago: 'English descended from ancient Turkey'

@ J 3 (Romance languages as test case)

The problem with using the evolution of Latin into the Romance languages is that:

A) the model of language expansion is totally different -- the Roman Empire was aggressively expansionist, with a settled and well-defended centre.

B) there has been no major invasion or new civilisation in the territories where Romance languages are still spoken.

Meanwhile the Germanic tribes have migrated many many times and encountered several other civilisations (Celts, Romans, Slavs and other unknown extinct ones)

Dubiety...

I'm always a bit dubious when someone comes up with a theory that isn't supported by current evidence, and then finds another way of interpreting the data that "proves" exactly what they claimed before they had any real reason to believe their claims in the first place....

We're raising generations of MUTANT KIDS, says Icelandic study

Re: Random mutation is only one cause of genetic diversity

No, recombination can produce /physical/ traits that neither parent possesses, but the genetic traits are continuations (because they're only going to pass one of each pair to their children, aren't they?)

Everything Everywhere to be Nothing Nowhere in rebrand

False Competition

"False Competition", because that's precisely what it is when a company sells the exact same thing under two different brands.

Or "Cartel Communications".

Or "4GFix".

Lords call for the end of TV transmissions

No use.

If we were just going to end up with multicast IP, are we actually going to get any bandwidth benefits? Giving the commercial value of multiplexes, I don't imagine they're being anything other than frugal with bitrates etc as it stands. A switch to IP multicast would be a change of medium, but wouldn't really free up any space.

Also, while I'm not deep into networking, I do seem to recall that general purpose IP's dropped-packet handling is less suitable for video than video-specific DTV-B's...

Giant idol 'STRUCK DOWN by the Wrath of God' unearthed in Turkey

Re: Interesting stuff

I'm guessing it's a character from a late-80s/early-90s Taito platform game....

Job ad seeks 'mediocre' developers

Yeah, but....

Just like they "cast the net widely" then thin down the herd, there's a lot you can only find out about a potential employer when you reach the interview stage. They'll certainly give you a cup of coffee if you ask for it....

Why one storage admin fears Justin Bieber

Re: Not an as

Maybe its an ad cleverly targeted at the cynical El Reg readership.

It is in the Register, after all.

Girls tricked by STEAMY message: Webcam spyware student jailed

@AC

"Never heard about Lawrence of Arabia and the grand tradition of queued buggering, apparently."

...!!!

That sounds like a NSFW websearch if ever I saw one...!

Droid X360 hybridises PS Vita and Android

Joypads on Android...?

I always thought it was weird that more phones didn't have control pads. I mean, how much more useful does it make things?

BUT...

Is there a standard API in Android for these things? If one device's controllers aren't compatible with another's, it's hardly going to encourage development of decent control-pad games for Android, so what would be the point...?

Ten... PC games you may have missed

Indeed...

It's definitely not a game, and the script is ridiculously flowery and pretentious. The narrative doesn't follow several of the most important principles of short-form fiction.

It's entirely pointless.

Cockfighting Reg hack cursed with cancer

Re: PETA

Eating cockerels? Sorry, too stringy. They're only good for soup.

UK tech biz grinding to halt as Reg space programme sucks in talent

Fawning over sponsors...?

How very un-Reg-like. It's a good enough advert for Escher without the gushing hyperbole, surely?

Native Americans arrived to find natives already there, fossil poo shows

Re: @naked as a JaylikeBird

In fact, the "Celtic" peoples of Britain aren't genetically all that Celtic. Culture is not transmitted through genes, after all....

Re: Hooray! New Textbooks on the Way!

Except part of the evidence for Clovis First theory is the genetic makeup of the First Nations tribes. The Hopi are presumably therefore descendants of the Clovis immigration, meaning that 40,000 figure is probably just myth.

Reg hack bumps into Cockfighter

Indeed, old bean....

One must speak properly, mustn't one?

Dinosaurs on a diet shed tonnes

Re: "He also points out that dinosaurs have been losing weight for years"

Fossils are minerals and therefore subject to erosion like any other rock.

Sean Parker launches Chatroulette killer: For why?

Teaching...?

There's a reasonable market in internet language teaching, and let me tell you it works a lot better as a video conference than voice only. I teach one-on-one using Skype, and I was taking French lessons with the OU in a virtual classroom with no video -- Skype's a million times better.

When either party is trying to deal with an unfamiliar language, visual cues are far more important.

Although you have to learn to nod and shake your head very slowly....

And the worst film NEVER made is...

Re: Highlander II was an epic Failure of a film! Glad to see it on the list

"There can be only one!"?

Someone should have told Matt Newman 1 that before he double-posted!

Online bookie can't scoop £50k losses made by 5-year-old

"People always want someone else to take the blame / pay for THEIR mistakes."

The judge agreed with him. So either he had a legally valid case, or the judge was incompetent. I'll give you a clue: the judge wasn't incompetent.

@AC

"Entering a password before each trade would make the site unusable."

In which case Spreadex's business model is bad. If you can't engineer adequate security and failsafes into your site, your site shouldn't be dealing with large quantities of cash. Or any quantities, for that matter.

Microsoft forbids class actions in new Windows licence

Re: Comming from a World renowned company in Social networking

"Should of" is the result of refusing to accept the correct form -- "should've" -- in writing. "Should've" is the act of the conditional perfect moving to a more synthetic form. No-one ever says "I of been" for "I have been", so it is clearly now a different thing in the native speaker's internal model.

450-year-old football was hard to kick

Re: No wonder...

Hi, I'm the chief executive of Nike, and having read your insightful post, I have decided to divert the millions I give to research on the aerodynamic properties of footballs into the field of cancer research. I see now that knowing the cure for cancer will better allow us to leverage the multi-billion dollar global market for high-grade specialist sports equipment.