Posts by The Indomitable Gall

News of the World TO CLOSE

Real consequences?

Oh yes, real consequences. The poor grunts at ground level are out on the street while the woman in charge of it all is still sitting in her executive post.

Oh yes, real consequences. News International gets an excuse to introduce redundancies and institute cost savings by running fewer newsrooms. There will almost certainly be a Sunday Sun in a couple of weeks' time, and it will save NI thousands.

There haven't been any consequences.

What we need to see is the editorial staff in prison.

We need very heavy fines, amounting to the entire profit of the paper for as long as they were hacking phones.

And we need a court order banning News International from *any* expansion for a substantial time period. No new newspapers, no new Sunday editions, and certainly no new acquisitions. For at least 5 years.

Anything less isn't punishment, because NI will still be up on the deal....

El Reg to unleash rocket-powered spaceplane

LOHAN

Low Oxygen High Altitude.. NNNNnnnthingie.

Anti-PowerPoint Party vows end to death by slides

Re: yes it's true.

"Schools are actually teaching kids to write their talk out in condensed bullet point, 'PowerPoint', format *first*, and then extrapolate the details out *later*, 'on the fly', when they present the talk.

You only need half a brain to know that's backwards. "

Well, I'm doing an Open University degree, and I did another degree ten years ago, and I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and that's basically what I was always told to do -- they called it "writing a plan". The open secret is that no-one writes a plan and no-one writes pseudo-code, and if the teacher demands to see it, we write it *after* finishing the body of the assignment.

My current degree is in languages, and for our spoken assignments, we're asked to write in notes only, and there's no discussion about writing the full speech then summarising it in notes. But everyone on the course writes the full script -- another open secret.

So it would appear that PowerPoint is worse than I thought: it implements the worst flaws of the UK education system in software....

"99 out of 100"

The vast majority of PowerPoint presentations are delivered to small groups in small rooms, so 200+ people isn't relevant in 99% of cases.

That said, interactive whiteboard software can be used to replicate the flipchart experience in larger rooms....

Accountants shouldn't use spreadsheets.

@AC,

Accounts are the very last place we should be seeing spreadsheets, because you are effectively writing a database.

You are coding a database:

A) without documentation

and

B) without any data constraints

and

C) without automated backup strategies.

Spreadsheets give users enough rope to hang themselves... from the moon.

Re: I can't believe I'm about to defend PowerPoint...

AC,

You might want to get a hold of the essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" by Edward Tufte. He demonstrates how PowerPoint itself encourages certain behaviours on the part of the presenter.

If it's a hammer, it's a hammer that comes with the instruction: "also functions as a screwdriver. Hit screwhead several times to drive screws into wood, plastic, rubber or cows."

Top level domain explosion could wreak MAYHEM on NET

It's not a name, it's an identifier.

It's not a name, it's an identifier, and that distinction is more important than it may sound.

The initial plan was for a descriptive identifier -- jones.co.uk = UK Company called Jones.

In China, there's a problem because too many people have the same name. There aren't enough names in the world to go round, so we need identifiers (eg National Insurance number) for official purposes.

Lots and lots of companies have the same "name", so treating URLs as names causes a massive problem.

Reread article

The article points out the high volume of single-word internal names that leak out of corporate LANs and onto the internet every day.

A significant part of the problem (not explicitly mentioned in the article) will be corporate laptops, because a lot of software isn't set up to check whether it's on your WAN or not before attempting to do anything -- it just fires off a request to the server and sees if it gets a response.

While the most common examples won't be sold, that doesn't prevent more targetted attacks.

Imagine you're in a major crime syndicate and you find out that a major global bank uses the name "piggybank" for its main accounts server. What do you do next? You set up a dummy financial services company called "PiggyBank Global Services" and just harvest all the data you can, then pass it on to your black hat IT department who start transferring funds out. And you just so happen to have a financial services company set up and ready to launder that cash. A defaulted loan here, an insurance payout there et voilà, you're several million better off.

Not a "daft" idea...

It's a daft idea, but an inequitable one.

One internet for the rich, with any name you choose, and another for us plebs. It favours the big companies over small ones, the haves over the have nots. It also reaches into the future and sticks its fingers up at nations not yet in existence, because what's going to be left for them as their national TLDs?

Earth orbit for £1,000? You must be joking

Is the cost of reaching the launch site included...?

Cos I'm thinking of launching an expedition to Everest, and I've got a bit of luggage space....

Terrafugia flying car gets road-safety exemptions

Typical Lewis Page article...

Yup, that's Lewis Page all over: whining about yet another aviation project that's behind schedule, doesn't meet the promised spec, and facing spiralling cost increases...

Oh wait....

Landing on two wheels???

If your Skycycle(TM) needs folding wings anyway, there's no reason you couldn't have wing-mounted landing gear. They would double as ballast to stabilise flight.

Glasgow cammer not thrown in slammer

A different IR

There's already an IR scheme in use: some cinemas now have IR LEDs beside or above the screen. This serves the double purpose of reducing image clarity and messing with active autofocus.

IR has the side effect of increasing the temperature of whatever it hits, though, so it degrades the experience for the viewer....

LightSquared admits it will knock out 200,000 sat-navs

Military...?

As I recall, in earlier articles on this topic, it was noted that the GPS system operates on two bands, the second (encrypted) band being for military use only. Anything that cripples the civilian band is no great shakes to the military.

'Dirty' Hari defends radical interview mashup technique

Nomenclature.

Acid comes in "tabs" -- little bits of paper that have been steeped in the drug. These tabs are produced in sheets, and so individual doses are marked out with a little design. Strawberries are a traditional favourite -- Strawberry Fields Forever is thought to refer to a sheet with a grid of strawberries on it. Imagination not required. The "acid man" smiley was a favourite during the acid house movement, but while people often claim the symbol means acid, that's usually denied by the people who were there, saying that the design only ended up on tabs *after* it became popular.

So no, "tab" is not short for "tablet".

But actually, in traditional pharmacology, "pills" and "tablets" were different. A pill is a ball of sugar and an active ingredient, and the pharmacist would roll it on a slab. A tablet was made by placing a similar mixture in a tray and then punching out oblong lozenges. This I learned on the Antiques Roadshow -- I kid you not! Someone brought in a fully-equipped "apothecary's bureau" and got given the full history.

Modern drugs are generally produced by squirting stuff into little molds, so the distinction is irrelevant now

The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?

But attitudes are attitudes...

The problem is that even if you don't consider porn "art", it certainly falls into the category of "cultural artefact", and as such can transmit attitudes.

The problem is, it's not just "porn" that objectifies women, but even the "porn lite" in mainstream cinema. Most films play their rape scenes for titillation, and all too often the women make rather pleasant squealy noises. Compare with the French film "Irreversible", which has (by design) the most distressing rape scene ever to get a general cinema release, where Monica Belluci is screaming and wailing in a very upsetting manner.

So it's hard to make a conclusion from the figures. They don't say conclusively that "porn is good" -- it could simply be that once porn is allowed, you need to saturate the market; it could be that porn moulds the fantasies and desires that lead to sexual violent, and that once this genie is out of the bottle, you've got to keep feeding the beast to make sure it doesn't dine on the villagers....

Bloke ordered to remove offensive numberplate

Poserest plate ever.

BMWs are for posers, right?

4x4s/SUVs are for posers, right?

Personalised number plates are for posers, right?

Sotted in Edinburgh:

BMW X5 with the number plate "X5 CEO".

POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSER!!!!!!

Re: Genuine Licence?

"Whe I needed a permit in Malta the DVLA faxed back their response to the query the same day. Some countries are not as helpful. Having said that the fax did have a typo on it so my Maltese ticket had an extra consonant in my surname."

Anonymous Choward?

Anonymous Cowhard?

Anonymous Cowarde?

Teenager tries to trade virginity for iPhone

It's not lack of interest...

It's not lack of interest, it's just that the Android GUI stops them being able to check the "man" page....

Proper scientists: Old folk should drink more, not less

Re: ... bu t...

"Presumably the shrinks' paper looked at alcohol and the elderly from a psychological point of view"

I'm still baffled as to how drinking more than a single glass of wine a day makes someone an alcoholic from a psychological view....

600 tonne asteroid in low pass above Falkland Islands - TONIGHT

No, you don't have to think.

"Anyone else a little concerned that they only spotted this coming our way a few days ago?

...

You don't have to think hard what would've happened if it was a little bigger..."

No, you don't, do you.

If it was a little bit bigger, if would have been spotted a little bit earlier. This cow is small, those ones are FAR AWAY,

So no, you don't have to "think hard". Maybe just "thinking" would be enough...

Google Chrome extension busts Murdoch paywall

Re: Nice selective quoting

"Murdoch's paywall isn't a paywall. It's a vain hope that everyone's browsers comform to Murdoch's rules. Guess what? They don't!"

Look, some of us have been saying that DRM is a bad thing because it generally degrades the product and breaks it on non-standard systems.

What NI have done is produce a very simple DRM that doesn't

A) install a rootkit

or

B) degrade the quality of the end-product by "watermarking"

or

C) degrade the quality of the end-product by lossy compression

or

D) stop us using the product on anything other than their platform of choice.

We ask the music biz to trust us to stick by the rules (or enough of us that they make money anyway) and we get a decent product as an end result.

Now while I wouldn't call Murdoch's output a "decent product", is it too much to accept that as DRM schemes go, this isn't really that bad or unfair?

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

The paywall isn't about web-browsers, it's about slabfondlers and phone fiddlers. Free internet access to the news was a threat to the marketability of subscription-based apps for the iPhone when the iPhone was really taking off, hence Murdoch killing it.

The standalone app may not be making much money yet, but once the Apple Newstand opens and magazine and newspapers are easier to find, the money's going to start coming in, and soon enough magazines and newspapers will turn a profit off the casual (virtual) coin.

The sad part is that the Reg will probably want in on the action... :-(

Apple strangleholds worldwide battery output

Re: Once more..

Ah, so you've seen one of these non-existant Intel concept designs in the flesh, despite the fact that they only exist in Photoshop?

Yuh-huh.

Wikipedia awash in 'frothy by-product' of US sexual politics

Yes but....

There's a difference between

1) throwing your hands up in righteous indignation and calling someone unfit for public office

and

2) childish playground insults.

Childish playground insults allow you to be stereotyped as being... well... childish. It also suggests you have no valid argument to offer.

So while a small minority pro-gay activists are all congratulating each other on dealing a bloody blow against right-wing, neo-conservative fascism, they're really only fuelling the attacks against themselves.

Clever. Yeah, clever.

Kindle Store awash with auto-generated crap 'books'

Chain of trust...?

Well, why not have people stand up as witnesses for each other?

I mean, many self-publishers will know each other through writers' groups, conventions etc. Any complaints against a crooked publisher would be reflected in the writer's trust rating, which would make it impossible to recommend further friends and in extreme cases could result in loss of chart positions or expulsion from Kindle entirely.

Paperbook spam

Well sadly the spam problem doesn't extend simply to e-books, but also the paper book market.

Take this book for example:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illustrated-Dictionary-Specially-Beginners-Including/dp/1152659359/ref=sr_1_23?ie=UTF8&qid=1308584815&sr=8-23

They've taken the OCRed version of a bilingual dictionary off archive.org and made it a print-on-demand edition.

OCR doesn't cope with dictionaries at the best of times, as they're peppered with abbreviation and there's barely a single complete sentence in them.

Couple that with a relatively minor language like Gaelic, which hasn't received a great deal of attention from the OCR side of things, and you have the recipe for a typographical car-wreck.

So, yeah, paperbacks and hardbacks are in the same situation....

BioWare blows brains with intro cinematics for Star Wars MMO

Expensive is the word...

Yes, I agree that most of that animation is noticeably animation, and not real video. I'd also like suggest that the animation on that short clip is really absolute state-of-the-art to the point that it is so expensive that you couldn't produce a whole animated film/series at that quality without making a mind-blowing loss.

Japanese gov makes Fukushima evac zone compulsory

I'll have a go...

Lewis,

Britannia rules the waves and all that, eh?

Well guess what, India got its independence quite some time ago, and Madras is now called Chennai. What's more, it's not a state, it's a city in the state of Andra Pradesh.

Consider him bashed.

Nokia floats out a collection of cool concepts

That last one...

It looks more like a concept alarm clock. Which would actually be quite cool. But as a phone, no.

The Sun still not shining on Nintendo's 3DS

Worse...

He was playing *while walking* and his heart rate was above resting. That's... normal.

He played it in a car, and felt sick. Ohmygodsomebodythinkofthechildren -- carsickness... in a car! The 3DS is 3v1l incarnate!

And what's this nonsense about a sustained heartrate of 85 causing circulatory problems? My heart rate never drops below 120 during a sustained workout (including half-day cycle rides). This is to be expected.

I think the good^H^H^H^Hcrap doctor is confusing cause and effect. People with certain cardiovascular and/or circulatory problems may have high heartrates, but having a high heart rate at a given time doesn't indicate cardiovascular or circulatory problems.

RSA won't talk? Assume SecurID is broken

Re: That's is truly shocking

@AC

" RSA terminology has a lot to answer for here - tell people to think of a PIN and they immediately think 4-digit number, when in fact it can be alpha numeric and longer than 4 digits - they used the wrong words, they should have called it 'password' which is what it is. "

It's not just that -- long-term SecurID users will remember the limit credit-card sized SecurID tokens with an onboard keypad for PIN entry, and the PINs were therefore restricted to 4-digit numerical PINs.

Even when overhauling technology, there's an attempt to paint it as the same thing -- RSA presumably didn't want to scare people off by changing the process too much and making it seem like something new....

Channel VAT loophole shrunk, not shut

Wait....

"Getting rid of it [LVCR] altogether would only serve to raise money for Royal Mail and parcel carriers who can pass the increased admin costs onto consumers."

Nope, it would cost the parcel carriers business, as people would be less liable to order small packets from overseas.

Extended Lord of the Rings Blu-rays to hit Blighty

Bluray & DVD

"the bonus features will be on DVDs, while only the films themselves are offered on Blu-ray - no surprise, since the extras will all be standard definition anyway."

Well they *could* have put all the SD bonus features on a single Bluray disc, but of course then it would have an impressive N where N = num(discs).

Microsoft Kinect powers DIY Eye of Sauron

Re: Not really

Even if the Kinnect is betterat locating people, they haven't used it in this demo. They don't appear to have calculated depth, only angle. Note how the eye looks out past the cameraman at the extreme angles -- it doesn't even know that it's in a different location from the camera.

Not technically impressive.

Apple 'gay-cure' app severely slapped

Animal homosexuality...

The problem with using animal homosexuality as a justification is that homosexuality occurs differently in every species.

"Lesbian" albatrosses do a lot of "couple" preening as they tend their nests, but have yet to be observed in any attempt at copulation. But they have been seen to mate with males (males who have other female partners) in order to be fertilised and lay eggs.

"Gay" penguins have generally turned out to be more "bisexual".

Male dolphins appear to use sexual behaviour with males as a bullying tactic when protecting territory. Or maybe they can't tell whether a "foreigner" is male of female.

The bonobo use genital contact as a social behaviour -- no climax, so behaviourologists don't generally consider it sexual.

And besides....

There are people who genuinely want to be "cured". Although most people (myself included) find the term "cure" both offensive and impossible, why stand in their way of making their own decisions?

The only valid argument against this app should be that it gives advice that has been shown to cause mental health problems.

IE: people should be free to look for a "cure" if they really, truly want, but at the same time, snake oil merchants should be closed down.

Fukushima situation as of Wednesday

Apples and oranges, Originone

"But more importantly worldwide production of uranium last year was approximately 50,000 tons almost exclusively for power generation, compared to 5,990,000,000 tons of coal in excess of 5 billion of which is for eclectricity generation.

Coal is a naturally occurring mineral deposit. Uranium is found trapped in ores. One of the biggest sources of uranium is (IIRC) granite, and you have to mine a metric sh!tload of granite to extract a useful quantity of uranium.

@Ian Michael Gumby

"Do you not understand that the reactors survived a quake that was upgraded and registered 9.0?

That is beyond the designed rating. And yes, 9.0 is an order of magnitude worse than an 8.0.

"

As has been said several times -- 9.0 at the *epicentre* is different to 9.0 at the site. Most sources claim the quake was within operating margins at the site of the power plant.

The reactors failed as planned.

"The point is that the quake and tsunami combo punch was a disaster beyond what the designers comprehended."

Q. What is the main cause of tsunamis?

A. Earthquakes

If you plan for an earthquake in coastal Japan and don't plan for a subsequent tsunami, you are demonstrating a massive lack of judgement.

Fukushima reactor core battle continues

Mountain nuclear

Nuclear plants in the mountains would be much worse in disasters. Any local fallout of radioactive particles would be carried in the run-off from the mountains and would have the potential to contaminate a massive area. Also, the elevated position would spread any such fallout wider to start off with.

You pays your money, you makes your choice.

Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now!

Radon gas?

"Radioactive material leaks from your cellar into your house every day."

As the inhabitant of a third* floor tenement flat, the radon is vented out the windows of my neighbours and little reaches my flat.

* That would be fourth floor in USese.

Now come on...

"If this – basically nothing – is what happens when decades-old systems are pushed five times and then some beyond their design limits, new plants much safer yet would be able to resist an asteroid strike without problems."

You're ignoring the fact that this is a plant built by the Japanese, and the Japanese have always been meticulous in their nuclear safety.

The fact that the Japanese have built well-protected reactors doesn't change the fact that us pale-faced westerners have an ongoing habit of cutting corners and then when something goes wrong we shrug our shoulders and say "no-one could have anticipated a week of snow, not my fault guvnor."

Hated contractor tax might disappear

@Jim Coleman

" The main reason IR35 is hated is because it forces us to pay a whole bunch of EMPLOYERS NI on top of the EMPLOYEEs NI that permies have to pay. So us contractors end up paying MORE NI than permies do. For permies, the EMPLOYERS NI is paid by your employer, funnily enough.

<snip>

IR35 moves the ball too far into the other court, so we end up paying more than permies. "

I think you may have missed the point of contractor rates.

Contractor rates are higher than "permie" salaries because the contracting party doesn't have to pay for overheads such as bench time, holiday, sick leave and (drum roll) employer's NI contributions.

So paying more than "permies" is a natural consequence of being paid more than permies.

I'm on the verge of giving up the "permie" lifestyle and setting up my own limited company, and I'll try to duck any charging I can, but I'll not kid myself that I'm paying the same as permanent employees when I'm not.

Re: Poor underpaid permies

@NogginTheNog

You might call it "fair reward for fair risk", but as a contractor your reward comes from the people who you work for. As a "permie" (for now), my reward comes from the people who I work for.

It is up to you to set your fees to offer fair reward, just as it is up to me to talk to me boss if I want a raise.

If you're out of work for 2 months between roles, you're not taxed for any income you make in that period, so what is the problem? Tax is calculated on annual earnings after all.

No-one's saying you're rich and should be taxed heavily -- we're saying that you should be taxed *just* *the* *same* *as* *us*.

XBox promo code exploit set Microsoft back $1.2m

Buying stuff...

A lot of the stuff available for points is other people's stuff, and Microsoft have to pay for it. The loss isn't the "buy" value of the points, but it could still be substantial.

Giant 5-year-mission aerial wing-ship to fly in 2011

Airships...?

The main problem with airships is that lighter-than-air is difficult to achieve in the stratosphere. Air pressure is around 1000 mb at sea level (IIRC). The stratosphere is between 1 and 10mb.

So while it can be done, it's not easy. At least an aerodynamic wing relies on the pressure differential of what little air there is.

Apple patent foresees ultra-svelte iDevices

Re: Obvious

"If it's so "fucking obvious" where are all the examples of it?"

It's not needed yet, because no-one's wanted to build something that thin.

It's still an obvious solution that anyone would have come up with when it became an issue....

Not only obvious....

This "invention" is not only obvious, it's actually just how current jacks work.

The locking mechanism on a standard jack socket is a single sprung contact, and the other contacts resist the motion in parallel. Most standard jack sockets would still work perfectly well if you took a saw to them and cut off the top and bottom.

In fact, I have a vague recollection of a gimmicky "credit card" FM radio that worked this way....

iDect iHome Android phone

OK, so....

This is also a wireless hub? No? Why not?

There's no point in convergence if you still need two devices!!!

VMware lets Apple fondleslabs tickle Windows VDI

Read what he wrote.

He said they're forced to "provide" subscriptions, not forced to "purchase" subscriptions.