Posts by The Indomitable Gall

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!

Human Centipede: the musical

Lead character: the entire cast of hit stage show "Stomp!"

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.

@Graham Wilson

Actually, the reason the state of grammar teaching is so woefully inadequate in the UK is that hardliners like yourself give a very bad impression of what good grammar really is.

Contractions are sloppiness -- they're part of the language and have always been. They are entirely necessary and inevitable in a stress-timed language, and English is a stress-timed language. A sentence such as "I wouldn't've been in the house" gets two natural stresses, and if you try to enunciate every word fully as "I would not have been in the house", you just won't be able to fit it to the natural rhythm and you will end up stressing something that you didn't intend to.

I never hear your sort complaining about French, which has codified the contracted forms as the one and only correct form -- "J'ai" but never "Je ai"; "je n'en ai (pas)" and never "je ne en ai pas" etc. In fact, this may be one of the contributing factors to the failure of English grammar teaching -- the "contracted form" is in reality the base form, and the so-called "full form" is really the *emphatic* form. By trying to claim that the emphatic form is the unmarked form, you fail to connect with the student's internal model, and cause them to reject everything that you're trying to teach them.

With regards to "tsunami", there's several things I could say. The consonant cluster /ts/ only occurs in syllable codas in English -- it is not available in syllable onsets. Consider the word "garage", which is also a borrowing. Do you say "GARage" or "garAGE"? If you compare the two, the -GE ending sounds different in them. How so? Because the the French-like GE of garAGE is only possible in the coda of stressed syllables in English. When the stress shifted to the first syllable (to better match the underlying patterns of English) it naturally resulted in a change of consonant quality. Either way, I bet you don't pronounce it with a French R. Similar, I bet you don't enunciate the first O in the borrowings "potato" and "tomato". And finally, can you tell me the stressed mora in the Japanese word "tsunami" (or even if it has one at all) and do you pronounce it with the correct pitch accent when you say it? I doubt it.

The whole 's/s' thing is another pointless mess, arising from a failure to look at the nature of the genitive in modern English. The "plural possessive" doesn't actually match the internal model of the native speaker, where the possessive suffix/clitic 's is appended to a genitive, and as we all know (or would if we studied grammar properly), the English genitive (aka the "classifier noun") is always singular. For example "bread knife" and "toothbrush". Your "greenhouse" is full of greenS, plural. This is the reason that we only pronounce one S in plural possessive -- because there is only one S: the possessive S, not the plural. The orthographic distinction between s' and 's has no analogue in the native grammar.

It's you sort that convinces people that grammar is valueless, so why not leave the matter to people who actually understand the matter?

(And for the record, I'm a native speaker and I got first class honours in English Language at uni.)

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.

BBC uses lifted Iraq war photo to depict Syrian slaughter

Re: Cock-up indeed, even with disclaimer, but don't blame the teacher

As a (senior) lecturer, you probably have no concept of how unabidably crap the average corporate trainer is. It's a certificate culture out there, and the delegates (I won't demean the term "student" by using it here) are expected to sit, listen, maybe "brainstorm" a bit, then walk away with a piece of paper.

It's really rather disheartening.

Why, oh why...

Why are all of Nick Robinson's articles for the BBC on politics?

Why are all of Murray Walker's TV reports on Formula 1?

Why does Bill Bailey only perform comic music?

It's his job, muppet.

Microsoft will fiddle with prices as euro burns, UK biz fears

Re: People will just import cheaper versions...or even worse.

"The UK wil find ways to get software from the continent... "

"doesn't EU law mean that a person in the UK can purchase from any other EU state anyway?"

Erm... isn't that exactly the point? Microsoft are creating a single price for the single market, hence the Euro pricing....

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

Re: Misnomer

Your onboard computer and their onboard computer talk, and they know when the routes are diverging.

Re: But does it fail safe?

"If this "platoon" is dependent on the lead lorry to provide guidance, what happens when LL fails, breaks, or loses its wifi?"

I don't think it's dependent on any particular vehicle -- I believe the point of such technology is that any vehicle can be the lead, allowing ad hoc roadtrains to be formed with no prior planning.

The reason for a lorry taking point here may be the increased draft/slipstream/windshadow of the larger vehicle, or it maybe that they wanted to use a more powerful (and therefore more reliable) wifi transmitter in the test, just to be safe.

Re: Slight problem

"Who the hell wants to follow a lorry in their car on a motorway??"

It's called slipstreaming/drafting and it means greater fuel economy. If you're worried about the cost of petrol, it's a good thing. If you just want to get there quickly, you wouldn't be joining a road-train.

WTF is... Li-Fi?

Let's speak geek.

"And light isn't affected by the spectrum regulations that govern how radio frequencies can be used."

I think what you mean is that light is in an unregulated frequency band.

Science!

Re: People have been trying this for years. LED's not needed.

"This sound like a gimmick to sell more LED's but I think non domestic lighting has a) a *huge* installed base and b) is fairly efficient. That makes a *lot* of market inertia."

Two possibilities:

1: "Riding the wave". The guys behind this are running on the assumption that once LED pricing hits a certain sweet-spot, there will be a massive changeover, possibly pushed by new legislation on energy efficiency and/or mercury in manufacture and/or the workplace. If they have a mature(ish) technology before that happens, then they have an "in" to the market. They need to have their technology available for when everyone rewires, cos they're not going to rewire twice.

2: "Making the wave". They may feel that the increased efficiency of LEDs isn't going to be enough to convince people to swallow the cost of switching, but that this technology can help push the uptake of LEDs. "Double your office wireless capacity while halving your electricity bill." That's a lot easier to sell....

Greedy LOHAN draining away mankind's vital fluid ... allegedly

You know, when someone's satirically taking the p!ss out of the fundies, you look a bit silly when you jump in to slag him off for being one.

@AC re:inflammable

Well, do you object to the "in" in "inform"? Is "intubating" someone something to do with "no tubes"? And what about a sharp "in"take of breath? Is "in"vestment about not wearing underwear on the upper body? Is "in"fluence a bad thing?

I hope you find this comment "in"sightful.

Chrome spends a week at the top of the browser charts

Avast!

With my last Avast AV update, Chrome got installed and set as default without asking. Whenever the Avast popup gives me a link, the link opens in Chrome, even though it's not my default browser.

I suspect a lot of the recent boost in popularity of Chrome is down to this one piece of software. The fact that it's particularly popular in poorer countries where people aren't likely to allow inertia to keep them paying for a Norton or MacAfee license is quite telling....

Report: SAP exec charged with $1,000 LEGO bar-code caper

Re: LEGO

There seems to be something about childhood memories that makes us specifically reject linguistic variation relating to them. I hate the term "legos" because that's not what I said when I spent hours playing with Lego, and I hate the term "video games" because I grew up playing "computer games".

As for routers, a router routs, and a router routes. I wouldn't want a device that "routs" my network -- I'd prefer one that "routes" traffic any day of the week. Except possibly Friday afternoon, cos if the network falls over then, we can just go to the pub.

Audi proposes PC-packing stunt bikes

Re: Computerised bikes from Audi.

@Dan 10

" I may be wrong, but ISTR that it had more to do with cocky magazine journalists thinking it was so kitted out that... "

AKA "You're holding it wrong" and "Unlimited broadband"....

Resistance is futile? Memristor RAM now cheap as chips

Re: accidental discovery my arse

Erm... that doesn't preclude accidental discovery. Temporary adhesives existed long before the Post-It note, but the specific adhesive in Post-Its was accidentally discovered while 3M were trying to invent a rival to Loctite's SuperGlue.

The point is that the memrister existed, but was expensive to make. This is an apparently cheaper way to make one, and it was discovered by accident.

Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

Remote detonation.

Think about it -- anyone with high enough security requirements *will* *not* *want* a publically available protocol for remote detonation: they'll want a top secret, in-house one. They can roll their own and simply connect it to the appropriate pins on the device.

I mean, imagine if the US army invaded Iran with this stuff in their equipment and the Iranians just started saturating the airwaves with remote destruct signals.

So the manufacturer can't make the remote option as standard.

Scotland considers dishing out more iPads to schoolkids

ICT -> Computers

You can use Logo for geometry. You can use GNU Octave to do some pretty funky maths with automatic graphs.

iPads? A couple of drawings and early onset carpal tunnel syndrome....

US dope farmer in Walmart rattlesnake chomp shock

Re: News of the World 2

And "ho registros" responded to the quote by making a re-enactment of a youth tantrum with clay figurines. And pictures of robots.

'Shame on the register to post wrong informations'

Re: Restriction Of Ideas Is Silly

"If you can make a Ford Fiesta cheaper or better than Ford, then why can’t you? Because Ford came up with the design first?"

No, because Ford spent untold millions on making the design, including simulations, wind-tunnel tests and crash tests. Copying their design gives you immediate commercial advantage cos you haven't had to do all the R&D.

Selectively quoting? Well, at least he's quoting -- {{citation needed}}, Jeebus!

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

Re: Avast!

Same here. It installed Chrome and made it my default browser. That's malware behaviour, that is.

Ten... crowd-funded games from veteran devs

Re: Multiplayer ELITE - where are you?

@CraigRoberts

"I don't want a point and click RPG. I want a real time space-flight-fight sim."

Erm... no. Space flight takes a Very Long Time Indeed, which is why Elite featured the "skip drive" -- it's just dull otherwise.

And even if the observed time is short, remember that time at such velocities is relativistic -- it may seem like seconds to you, but it's years to someone else. Also, the time in a space station is massively truncated -- real trading time would be far higher.

Real-time space flight sims are impossible until and unless you can play them in a simulator that spins at relativistic velocities and you're willing to spend a couple of days just because the fur trader on your destination space station has gone off to a family funeral.....