* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Study links dimwits to conservative ideology

The Indomitable Gall

small-c conservative

The article is about "a conservative ideology", not "the Conservative ideology".

Homophobia is by nature a "conservative" trait. In Stalin's time, antisemitism was a "conservative" trait. In Mugabe's case, we have a loosely Christian-based ideology -- conservative.

The only non-conservative trait either of them showed was for self-betterment. The conservative fallacy of blacks as inferior to the white man would never get Bob anywhere. The conservative view of kings, peers and bourgeoisie would never have got Stalin anywhere. But both are pretty much defined by small-c conservatism: keep things the way they've always been.

RIM shot at Android: Free PlayBooks for devs

The Indomitable Gall

Ts&Cs

The Ts & Cs are online now:

http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/terms_conditions2012.jsp

Jackpot: astronomers tag Goldilocks planet

The Indomitable Gall

How about....

How about linking to an article in English, rather than a machine translation of a Dutch one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_classification

Android users more likely to put out

The Indomitable Gall

Loving the jokes, but being serious....

One thing i notice is that they are talking about percentages of "users" -- a single figure.

But one thing we know from surveys of sexual habits is that guys always come out more loose than women. In fact, I don't think there's been a single survey where the amount of sex men have doesn't seriously outweigh the amount of sex woman have. So the question is: is there a gender bias in the samples? Or in other words, do more guys use Android?

Angry Birds boss: Piracy helps us 'get more business'

The Indomitable Gall

Ah, but...

The Photoshop strategy has moved on. When was the last time you bought a camera or scanner that didn't have a copy of Photoshop Elements bundled with it? As they now have another vector to catch the newbie, they don't need piracy any more.

The Indomitable Gall

No clue.

The reason Rovio like it is because it helps "Angry Birds". What helps Angry Birds does not help the software market as a whole. Angry Birds makes money from merchandising, most software does not. Piracy targets popular items, so establishes them further. It supports Rovio's dominant market position, it harms everyone else.

The Pirate Bay torrents printable 3D objects

The Indomitable Gall

An untraceable single use firearm?

Given that it's generally necessary to dispose of a firearm after it has been fired during a crime, the fact that it'll only survive one shot isn't necessarily a bad thing....

Ten... boomboxes

The Indomitable Gall

O wh-i, o wh-i

I really like the look of the Ion Audio one, but if you can't plug in two non-iOS devices, it's limiting its market unnecessarily....

Dizzy: the Ultimate Cartoon Adventure Part Deux

The Indomitable Gall

Particularly noteworthy...

The noteworthy thing about these three is that I believe they're all parts of the NES release "The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy". It had multiple worlds, and a the end of one, Dizzy was made to walk the plank by a pirate, and had to escape from the sea by jumping on bubbles. I don't know what the reason was for the Toobin' clone stage (that became Dizzy Down the Rapids).

Why there's real hope for webOS - if HP is committed

The Indomitable Gall

Not true.

What HP get is the ability to continue to sell WebOS devices, using existing staff expertise, rather than having to "retool" to support WinPhone or Android.

WebOS needs a critical mass that HP can't provide in order to be a success, so they need others to pick it up and make it a viable mass-market option, therefore attracting developers (who will mostly be looking to cross-compile products available on other platforms anyway).

Maybe this isn't "return on investment" -- maybe it's simply "cutting their losses" -- but it's either the most profitable or least loss-making option for the moment.

The Indomitable Gall

The WebOS advantage.

WebOS has to stay pretty tight, hardware-wise. Android's biggest problem is that it's available in too many formats, so the user experience is very much hardware dependent. As WebOS isn't (currently) hardware agnostic, whereas Android is (hence lack of acceleration), WebOS's niche has to be on the user experience. As a commoditised OS, it has a feeling of genericity, but if the hardware is less generic, it will continue to outperform Android (and possibly also WinPhone) making it a candidate for OS of choice for anyone trying to produce an iPhone competitor.

Ebooks must stay fat with VAT, blame the EU, MPs told

The Indomitable Gall

Are school purchases VAT-free...?

The Indomitable Gall

@BristolBachelor,

Plenty of services charge VAT, and an ebook license is a license is issued as part of a service (which includes storing and tracking your ebook library).

Judge Dredd vs Zombies

The Indomitable Gall

"though these days the gameplay takes place in real time and in isometric 3D."

Come, come, now. I see several vanishing points in those screenshots....

Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH

The Indomitable Gall

Dubious history

Fossil remains of the later mammoths show signs of endemic disease -- some scientists feel it's unlikely that human hunting could have made a significant impact on the mammoth population.

There's also no evidence that people ate significant numbers of dodos either -- there are two or three records of people trying and it was reportedly one of the foulest-tasting greasiest meats thay had encountered. Modern thought is that the dodo was actually killed off by white man's eternal travelling companion: the rat. Rats are now well-known for wiping out ground-nesting bird habitats by eating their eggs, and the dodo was a ground-nesting bird....

Snowbound Alaskan survives on frozen beer

The Indomitable Gall

Simply being cold burns a lot of calories...

The TARDIS through the ages

The Indomitable Gall

But wait....

Haven't we seen humans fly it recently...?

Psst, kid... Wanna learn how to hack?

The Indomitable Gall

Using APIs has its benefits...

"I really hope Raspberry Pi is open and we can all get down to the metal on it but if Broadcom is involved, somehow I doubt it will be."

If you look at open-source hardware projects, they usually sink because the specced components aren't available any more, but the Raspberry PI is as damn near generic as you can get. Ethernet controllers and USB controllers are pretty generic. ARM may be a propietary design, but it's licensable and so heavily commoditised. This means that they should be able to revise the hardware as the market changes and use components from other suppliers without invalidating the existing codebase and forking the system (and userbase).

The only truly closed component is the GPU. There really is no such thing as a generic GPU on the market, and GPU technology is changing rapidly. Mandating Open GL makes any GPU generic, and this means that they can change the GPU later when the current model is discontinued or they can negotiate a better price with another supplier.

On the other hand, if the GPU's native APIs were available, you can be damned sure that developers would use them, and software would become irrevocably tied to the current version of the hardware, which would destroy the long-term potential of the project.

The Indomitable Gall

Hopefully some good will come of this.

In the early days of USB it was claimed that USB didn't need to be daisychainable because it's so cheap that every peripheral would include a hub. But that never happened, did it.

In my opinion, the correct place for a USB hub is in the keyboard, which can then become that holiest of holy grails: the universal docking station.

Unfortunately, that was what should have happened years ago. It's unlikely to happen under USB 3 as who in their right mind is going to make a USB3 keyboard?

But still, we should have been at the stage by now where the majority of keyboards had a pass-through port for a mouse, and hopefully devices like this will finally start the creep towards that....

Bone boffins find remains of ancient tuna dinner

The Indomitable Gall

Except that...

The problem is that the fishing technique is called "trawling" in most of the English-speaking world, so you'll see why people get confused.

Lemmings

The Indomitable Gall

C64 version

"C64 version. Sprite limitations mean that the number of lemmings is considerably less than the other 8 bit versions. Shame really."

Not quite true. On the C64 version, they used hardware sprites for the playing field and bitmapped the Lemmings onto the background.

Sprite limitations meant that the visible playing area was only a half-screen wide. The restriction on the number of Lemmings was down to the poor bitmap performance on the C64 (it has an 8x8 tiled layout, not a true cartesian map) and the fact that they had to duplicate the movement onto the sprite-mapped background to drop out pixels.

All the coordinate calculations were computationally intensive.

The Indomitable Gall

I've just got rid of my personal computer museum...

Or should I say I asked my parents to get rid of it for me because I couldn't face doing it myself.

Clooney fingered for Steve Jobs role in Hollywood biopic

The Indomitable Gall

Christian Bale?

I only know one actor who's willing to do the weight gain/loss thing for his roles and that's Christian Bale. And he's a good actor who does a good line in both slick and crazy.

Ten... remastered videogame classics

The Indomitable Gall

"where's my remake of Bullfrog's Syndicate"

It's in 1996: Syndicate Wars.

The Indomitable Gall

Prince of Persia never made it to the C64 as far as I can recall. I too played it on the Gameboy.

The Indomitable Gall

Do you remember...

Do you remember "The Last Ninja Remix"?

Yup, even on the C64 they were doing updates of classics. Nothing new under the sun....

Pass the wine, dear. Yes, that papier-mache thing

The Indomitable Gall

The difference is that this looks and acts like a bottle... including letting air into the wine.

PSP owners must pay to port games to PS Vita

The Indomitable Gall

The difference is that PSN and XBL don't know that you already own the games, so it's sold as a new game purchase and it's left to the purchaser to decide whether the convenience of the format-shifting justifies the price.

In this case, Sony know categorically and beyond doubt that you do indeed own it already, and is setting the price for people who already own it. If it was an invariant £1 token fee, that would be one thing, but £19 as a reissue fee is preposterous.

Valve says credit card data taken

The Indomitable Gall
Mushroom

Can't believe no-one's said this yet...!

Good news. I figured what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Internet with user credit card details, to make me stop flooding the Internet Center with user credit card numbers.

NASA: 2012 solar flares could DEVASTATE CITIES!

The Indomitable Gall

@Ru

" Going back even further, there'd be evidence of planet-toasting solar activity in ice cores ..."

Surely the evidence of planet-toasting solar activity would be a *lack* of ice cores...?

The Indomitable Gall

@ Billy Bob Gascan

" It's actually the "Maya" calendar "

Perhaps in the Mayan language the adjective is "Maya", and indeed in Spanish, too, but there is definitely enough corpus evidence to say that in English, the adjective is Mayan. Just like "French" people aren't "Fronsay" in English, and "Italians" aren't "Italiani". I also don't talk about speaking "català" when discussing Catalan in English, and I like "Spanish omelette", not "tortilla de patatas".

Bloke gets wedding tackle trapped in ring

The Indomitable Gall

A wedding ring?!? Shoorly shum mishtake. I would be very surprised to find anyone with a willy narrower than their fourth finger....

The Indomitable Gall

"Our miniature coverage in full" takes on new meaning in this context....

Comp-sci boffin aims to REPROGRAM LIFE ITSELF

The Indomitable Gall

Gender alignment...?

The article refers to Natalio repeatedly as "she"/"her", but he is, in fact, a bloke, as can be seen in his staff mug shot here: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nxk/

As a rule, if a European or Arabic name ends with an O, it's probably a man's name, and if it ends in -A it's a woman's name.

Compact Disc death foretold for 2012

The Indomitable Gall

Their mark-ups aren't as astronomical, insulting or extortionate as the mark-ups on the digital downloads -- and once again the actual performer gets shafted.

If thine brown eye offend thee, blast it with a laser

The Indomitable Gall

Oblig.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGrmRGw8PZs

Iceberg DEATHMATCH: Berlin vs Manhattan

The Indomitable Gall

Variable standards

The introduction of "the Berlin" is to be resisted -- Berlin, like any urban centre, is constantly growing, and this will lead to an appearance of iceberg shrinkage over time, and may be used in the future to cover up an emerging global catastrophe.

Manhattan, on the other hand, is a cocktail, and you need ice for it. I think the Americans have underestimated the number of drinks they could make from that 'berg, cos you only need 2 or 3 cubes per glass....

Insulin pump hack delivers fatal dosage over the air

The Indomitable Gall

Risk/benefit

You're forgetting the other option. USB. It's pretty damned difficult to plug someone's insulin pump into a USB port without them noticing. Wireless is not the only connection available to device manufacturers!

German boffins BREAK LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Where is the law breaking part?

From TFA:

" No, we’re not /really/ talking about perpetual motion here. "

Was this too subtle for most of you? Remember, when a Reg headline appears in ALL CAPS!!!, it's a good indication the headline is Not Entirely Serious....

5 SECONDS to bypass an iPad 2 password

The Indomitable Gall

Erm... what?

What on Earth is more trivial than being able to wake up a locked device without knowing the password?

Can the iPad save newspapers?

The Indomitable Gall

Editor's proofreading notes.

"The 'quality' of the scoops inevitably falls and the public interest is not piqued"

Surely the quality "increases"? I mean, once we can't buy celebrities' voicemail and medical records, we'll have to go back to reporting *real news*. I agree that the public interest won't be piqued, though... :-(

The Indomitable Gall

@Robert E A Harvey

"I think it is far too late to start a subscription model for web news services."

You are mostly right... if you assume that the goal of web subscriptions is to get web users.

Since News International announced their paywall, I have always maintained that they did so not with a view to getting web subscribers, but iPad subscribers.

Stopping offering free stuff causes resentment among users of the free, but freetard web users are a market NI could afford to use. They needed to have the free out of the way before the start of the slab-fondling fad to ensure that they weren't taking the free stuff away from the executive slab-fondling set, because they are a core demographic for white-top newspapers.

The figures agree with my predictions -- it's a strategy that has worked. Other newspapers now have the problem of part of their slab-fondlers being used to having the free web edition available, and it's going to hard to push that segment to the subscription model.

Gulf of California terrorized by ONE-EYED MUTANT SHARK!

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

Simple explanation

Because it's not where it's supposed to be, it's not properly socketed, hence the exposed white. If shark eyes didn't have whites, I don't think anyone would have bothered x-raying it....

App Store groupthink is bad news for small devs

The Indomitable Gall

@Chris 19

" First, the long tail is of no relevance whatsoever to the problem of marketing and getting your app into that top 10 chart. "

True, but the fact that the top 10 iPhone/Android apps is a bigger proportion of all sales than any top 10 in any luxury goods market before the dawn of the internet is of direct relevance to the importance of being in that top 10.

You have been lucky to get a good living out of app sales, but your personal experience isn't enough to disprove the statistics that show that most app writers get $sq_rt(FA) and that the writers of Angry Birds got $2^shedloads.

Genetics and technology make Columbus Day a fraud

The Indomitable Gall

Not only that...

He was working on a flawed business model based on dodgy figures -- he underestimated the size of the Earth. You know when he was reportedly told by the pope that he'd fall off the edge? It's not true. It's more likely the papal astronomer pointed out that the world was much bigger (based on the ancient Greek calculations) and that he'd be out of food long before reaching the Indies....

Spotify's rising revenues gobbled by royalties blackhole

The Indomitable Gall

Greedy WRT license fees...?

I don't think it's necessarily a question of "greed" with respect to fees -- Spotify's current business model simply isn't profitable for artists.

It has been estimated that an artist (a single singer-songwriter, that is, not a band) has to get over 4 MILLION plays to earn the equivalent of a month's salary at US minimum wage.

(http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/)

Even back in 2009, it was claimed that Lady Gaga received a payment of only $167 for over a million plays of Poker Face.

(reported in 2010: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/357217/songwriters-attack-spotifys-tiny-royalties)

What will kill these legal services is that they are unsustainable.

Like a lot of stuff online, the business model is fixated on the price of bit-juggling, not the value of the content.

Brit boffins' bendy bamboo bike breakthrough

The Indomitable Gall

Fragility of bamboo...?

Before passing judgement on bamboo, I think we'd need more information on the points of failure of these bikes. The thing that jumps out at me is this:

" He said that even the wheel rims were made of bamboo strips. "

A lot of the strength of bamboo comes from its cylindrical structure, which is lost when you cut it. You also lose the benefit of the dense impermeable outer layer if you expose the insides. The wheels certainly sound like the weak link here -- I would expect the rims to be in splinters before you'd even see a split in the tubes.

The Indomitable Gall

Fibrous materials.

You're missing the whole point of using a fibrous medium. The fibres will move to some degree within the medium, but the structure as a whole will appear rigid on the macro scale. Vibration is medium frequency and low power, which will be absorbed in the fibres rather than the structure, preventing in reaching the rider. Bumps are low frequency and high power, and have the potential to damage the structure, but the bamboo is rigid enough relative to these to protect itself (the rider gets a jolt, but it's less than he'd get if the bike split beneath him and he hit the road).

Or to put it another way: bamboo is harder to bend/break than metal pipes, but hit them both with a drumstick and it's the metal pipe that will ring...

Starbucks extends gratis Wi-Fi to UK

The Indomitable Gall

What we need...

The whole Wi-Fi standard was very poorly thought out. The only authentication method specified was a single all-user password, so you can't really blame BT or anyone else for needing a web-based login screen.

What we need is for the successor to WEP and WPA to specify a standard for individual user domain authentication. Until then, we're stuck with the hacks in the current generation.

'Hey, Tories, who knows what a nontrepreneur is?’

The Indomitable Gall

@AC & @Lee

@AC,

"2) as per the CD and cassette tape, there should be MASSIVE, and retrospective compensation to the creative industries (film, music), from the digital businesses which have received money which would have gone on paying for content."

A "tape tax" is a blunt instrument and affects many innocent parties. The argument against it in the physical media space is that the small band that sells their own original material direct to the public finds themselves paying royalties to someone who has nothing to do with their purchase.

If you applied the same principle to internet connections, you end up with old Granny Johnstone, who has a computer to email the grandkids at college paying money to Fox because somewhere else someone else is downloading X-Men 2.

The result of a "download tax" is exactly the opposite to what you want: people cease to respect IP laws because they start to consider the tax as "I've already paid for it".

@Lee,

There's standard pricing across the industry. If the prices of material by the big names came down to the sort of level you seem to be expecting, it would squeeze all the little guys out, because while U2 could live on a hundredth of their current income, your average hopeful couldn't. Even many charting artists aren't that far off the breadline after they pay off their operating costs. And I doubt people would buy anything from an "unknown" at a hundred times the price of a known good artist. Bye-bye variety.