* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Giffgaff says some subscribers yakked for 9 days a month

The Indomitable Gall

Better figures...

Why use the worst case? The cost of the tarriff is surely the average?

"the average was over 5,000 minutes (three and a half days). Assuming a termination rate* of four pence a minute (to mobile numbers)"

So 5000 costs giffgaff £200, obviously unsustainable for a £30 bundle.

This way there'll be no talk of a minority of freetards, cos we're actually talking about a majority.

How to make boots on Mars affordable - One way trips

The Indomitable Gall

Yawn...

"to go" is not an infinitive. "go" is an infinitive.

"to" is a pre-infinitival particle. Equivalents exist in practically all Indo-European languages.

It just happens that as English lost the inflections that distinguished infinitives from finite conjugations, we started using the pre-infinitival particle as a substitute wherever we felt the unmarked infinitive would be potentially ambiguous.

Google accused of hard-coding own links in search

The Indomitable Gall

Creative disingenuity...

Yes, this person for one thinks that Edelman is being disingenuous, but I think it is a consciously illustrative act on his part.

Us clever people (you, me and Edelman) all know that Google is a multifunction appliance, but to the rest of the world, Google is a search engine. Edelman is writing his argument based on the point of view of an average punter, because it is the ignorance of the average punter that Google is exploiting.

Edelman's argument specifically avoids going into technical details as he would lose his target audience (remember that most judges aren't clever computer people like you and me).

Google could technically open the APIs to allow third-party access to Universal Search.

If they did this, they could use Pagerank and click-tracking to prioritise results based on usefulness. They chose not to.

Their Universal Search results are presented alongside the results of two other searches:

Pagerank and Adwords.

What's the difference between Pagerank and Adwords search? Adwords is not neutral, and the results sit in their own box marked "Ads".

Now, do Universal Search results look more like Pagerank or Adwords results?

So Google encourage you to associate them with...

Yup.

It IS misleading.

3D printers, one-dimensional enemies

The Indomitable Gall

Well said.

Quite right in everything you say, and for that reason, a future of 3D printing would be an ecological nightmare. Millions of consumers downloading the pattern and printing their own parts at a cost of massively increased electricity requirements and lots of waste printer goop.

Centralisation of production has increased in years, to the point where the world's supply of most goods is now China. The printer won't change that....

Chicago officer beats off dildo-wielding bill-skipper

The Indomitable Gall

Hmmm....

You're right there.

I suspect it's just that Joe will never take a copper's word for anything....

Xbox Kinect costs just £35 to build

The Indomitable Gall

Controller.

Well, maybe they will bring out a controller, but that doesn't stop the Kinect being a truly stonking piece of technology. You will always need a new input system for certain ideas. Ever played Guitar Hero without the guitar?

The controller will appear if and when the games need it, but Microsoft's gambling on speech recognition as the controller killer.

Falklands hero Marine: Save the Harrier, scrap the Tornado

The Indomitable Gall

Sorry, no.

The job of a journalist is to make himself understood by his readers.

Lewis chose to use a word that many of his readers would misunderstand. At best, that's bad writing. At worst, it's dishonest -- was it his intent to lead people into believing the situation was worse than it is, while not "lying" per se?

Lincs authority lets schools decide on Pagan lessons

The Indomitable Gall

Erm....

But didn't that certain Middle Eastern religion come along not only before the united kingdom, but before there was anything approximating Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland...?

'One-trick pony' Zuckerberg yet to prove CEO worth

The Indomitable Gall

But unfortunately...

Unfortunately the übertosser himself, big Z... bitch! ... will still walk away with a nice healthy bank balance for the bits he's sold up to that point. Clever move not going to IPO -- he sells to people desperate to buy and unlikely to sell. That way he remains the sole supplier of snake oil futures on the market and gets ridiculously high prices for it.

Co-op cashier's breasts overcharged for fruit and veg

The Indomitable Gall

Unfortunate misreading

"The assistant concerned was "mortified" by the incident, he said, and is currently receiving support from the Co-op's HR department."

I thought for a moment that "he" here referred to "the assistant concerned". That would indeed be mortifying -- mega-massive-man-melons...!

Two-faced world spends billions on climate help, fossil fuel

The Indomitable Gall

I'm not a muslim but...

"This is essentially because even the mullahs working their economics out of a seventh century holy book have realised that this is absurd."

Twentieth century secular economics books are themselves a blend of faith and superstition backed by dubious science, anecdotal evidence and post facto rationalisation, so what's the difference between that and getting your economics from a 7th c holy book?

Invisible hand of the market... WTF? Is it a pink hand? and is it really a unicorn?

Oz docs prescribed iPads by Premier

The Indomitable Gall

iPads?!?

Some of the clinical software for iOS would be handy, but much of it simply replicates what the doctor has in the office. If they want an iOS device for the average doc, it should be the iPhone. With drug dosing apps, a digital stethoscope and an artificial respiration timer in his pocket, a doctor would be able to respond to any emergency at any time. He's not going to carry the iPad everywhere, though. It'll stay in his medical bag, but it will make it heavier, not lighter.

Steelie Neelie calls for 'every vehicle digital'

The Indomitable Gall

3G?

If every car's connected, who needs 3G? The number of cars on the road suggests a mesh network to me, backed up with a backbone running along motorways and green-signed A roads.

E Ink unwraps colour e-paper reader

The Indomitable Gall

Interesting conundrum.

"Even so, E Ink marketing chief Lawrence Schwartz said that the company doesn't believed Triton is an e-book reader component so much as a technology that will enable e-newspapers."

Presumably the increased complexity means a much lower refresh rate.

Apple are doing their very best to kill E Ink. Look at the "interactive ebooks" you can get from the Open University on iTunes U now. They're basically using webkit as an ebook renderer and slowly making ebooks more and more like locally installed webpages.

As an OU student, I'm all for reducing the reliance on multiple media sources, but by working video into a "book", they're breaking its portability. Audio, yes -- that's great, video no.

So the enewspaper angle seems to be a tacit admission by E Ink that this product falls between two stools: it is not for the paperback junkies who currently devour Amazon's Kindle catalogue, and it's not for people looking for a truly rich experience. Personally, I think the best market for colour e-paper is for posters and information signs, which is a form factor significantly over 7"....

Hacker unshackles Kinect from Xbox

The Indomitable Gall

Exactly.

MS aren't losing any competitive advantage, as it's still their hardware and no-one's going to port this to the PS3. It will be used by a minority of researchers and hobbyists to experiment with various cool, silly and often downright pointless ideas. And on PCs running Windows, to boot.

Let it be.

USB fanboys teased with 16-port hub

The Indomitable Gall

This bugs me.

When USB was first mooted, it was asked "why not make it daisy-chainable?"

The USB consortium said that they'd designed it to make the hub so simple and cheap that every device would have one built in, and it would look like a daisy chain without any of the compromises to the protocols that would have been required in true daisy chain.

What was the last device you saw that was both USB device and USB hub? Medium to high-end keyboards have one, but my scanner doesn't and my printer doesn't. As desk-bound devices with independent power supplies, they're the perfect candidates. But there's more profit in selling us the hubs separately. Joy.

Twitter muggers stab rap star in buttock

The Indomitable Gall

I'm not going to check, but...

I suspect he tweeted more precisely, and that the muggers were following his feed on a smartphone at a safe distance, moving in when ye tweeted "I is goin home, yo!"

The posters and newspaper ads don't tend to give that sort of information.

Netbooks: notebook evolved - or stunted throwback?

The Indomitable Gall

Oh, plus...

People aren't used to the notion of a docking station. Maybe the netbook will make a bit of a comeback as people get used to HDMI and using the same screen for TV and computing. When my parents' PC was on the blink and I hooked my eee up to their keyboard, mouse and big shiny LCD instead, it became an absolute killer browsing appliance.

The Indomitable Gall

The problem...

Sociologically, the netbook was proof that what consumers want and what the industry supplies are very different things.

For most of us, we don't want ever-increasing performance and we don't want stratospheric storage increases.

We can already do most of what we want with our current computers -- what we want is to make them cheaper and lighter.

But the tech industry insists on increasing capacity and power, at the cost that the full-fat PC continues to be the same size and weight, carrying the same price tag as ever.

Unfortunately, the industry cannot supply the demand for netbooks, as the software is still designed for the spiralling resource availability on a standard PC.

The constant upgrade cycle of hardware and OS has trapped program vendors into following the resource trend, and in fact it benefits them by giving them access to the lucrative upgrade market too.

Progress on the desktop is now progress for progress's sake -- only a few specialists and the few remaining console-less gamers care.

The netbook was the majority telling the industry what we want.

The netbook slump is the result of the industry telling us what they want us to buy.

Aircraft bombs may mean end to in-flight Wi-Fi, mobile

The Indomitable Gall

Ah but...

That would only have happened if people had used mobile phones as detonators on the ground. It's not like this has ever been done before. Ever. And certainly no-one has ever built a bomb inside a mobile phone itself to assassination. Nonono. Well, apart from Yahya Ayyash and Mahmoud Hamshari.

DARPA, NASA team on '100-Year Starship' project

The Indomitable Gall

Impossible?

Are you suggesting that capitalism only rewards short term gain?

That's like saying that energy giants won't investigate renewables as long as there's cheap oil underground!!!!

(Heartily sick of people telling me that "Shell will do this, Shell will do that, because they want to stay in business." Well exactly, Shell will continue to pump out and refine cheap oil and make profit from it, precisely because they want to stay in business. Pumping profits into windmills and funny wave schemes would kill their competitivity.)

Stealth Carbon 'efficiency' tax could close UK data centres

The Indomitable Gall

The article misses the point.

Yes, fine, jobs overseas and all that, but even from the environmental angle, this is a Bad Thing.

Discouraging UK data centres encourages individual server rooms for people who want to keep their data close at hand.

The mistake here is thinking of data centres in terms of "one site" or "one company". The data centre is an centralisation, often outsourced, to prevent the need for chillers, extractors, air filtration, back up generators, lighting, on-site security etc etc etc in multiple locations. Consolidation and virtualisation reduces the total number of servers. And that's before we've even looked at virtual desktops and the massive carbon savings involved in switching to solid-state dumb terminals.

Attacking the legislation as sending jobs overseas is all well and good, but surely it's better to undermine the environmental case used to justify it.

Data centres cut carbon emissions, so should be rewarded, not penalised, for their density.

Wales loses 'dot-cum' domain to tax haven

The Indomitable Gall

Well what about English then?

Ambulance -- from French.

Wikipedia -- from Hawai'ian wiki-wiki (quick) and Latin encyclopaedia

Taxi -- from mediaeval Latin via German and French Taxameter/Taximètre.

Coffee -- from Italian "caffè", itself from Turkish "kahveh", which in turn derives from Arabic "qahwah", which possibly derives from the name of the Ethiopian region "Kaffa".

So if tu require a scriver English, solo translate a modicum of the Latin and Greek lexicons into a malformed version peppered with bon mots de francais et un pizza Italiano. A little Deutsh just to upkeepen mit the zeitgeist. If it isn't English now, just give it a few hundred years and it will be once English has properly turned into Pidgin European.

The Indomitable Gall

Things must be very different in Russia.

"It's not difficult to learn a 100 or so words that are being used in computer programs' menues"

Learn, computer programs? Everywhere I've been you're just plonked in front of a computer and expected to pick it up as you go along. The whole point of the menu system is to stop you needing training.

(I do still believe in training personally, it's just the rest of the world with unmaintable hacked-up Excel spreadsheets that could be done in a structured and maintainable way in Access in half the time if they knew what they were doing that believe not being trained is in some way admirable.)

Anyway, if we're going to learn 100 or so foreign words, why use English? If people have to learn foreign words to use computers, why not Chinese? Chinese words take up less screen space, after all, and what with the iPhone and all that, screens are finally starting to get smaller again.

Also, with Chinese characters, you don't even have to learn the Chinese word. If you see the Chinese for "cut" you can tie the ideograph to the English word "cut".

Superior in every way.

But localisation is dead easy, so we don't need one single UI language anyway.

The Indomitable Gall

No, they're not.

Welsh Y is a schwa phoneme. It is not "uh", no matter how many people say it is.

The Indomitable Gall

OK, but...

You'll have to give us our oil-fields back.

Then we'll see who the leeches are.

The Indomitable Gall

By that reasoning...

".uk covers Wales. Why does it need it's own?"

Well, .eu covers the UK too. As do the non-geographic names.

And consider all the registrations in Companies House that include some geographical descriptor. Location is part of brand. And some franchises only operate in certain areas (Hertz Wales is distinct from Hertz UK, for example, or it was last time I tried to return a car across the border).

The TLD can and should be used as part of the brand or it is wasted space, and that means allowing subdivisions of this manner.

And in case you didn't notice, TFA does in fact mention ".london" as a possibility.

The Indomitable Gall

Ah but...

Look at the fuss over Google allowing competitors to bid on trademarks as adwords.

We're talking misrepresentation here. They're saying basically that CYM has an internationally recognised meaning, and selling it to a third party would open people to use it fraudulently.

Imagine you receive a 419 scam letter purporting to come from a banker in the Cayman Islands. And it has a .CYM address.

So ICANN says "it's not for sale". Seems reasonable to me. (Even though I've been learning Welsh and am very supportive of Welsh nationalism.)

The Indomitable Gall

.roma

I bet the Roma Nation guys would be a bit upset if Rome got that one....

Commission to revise rules on rivals' agreements

The Indomitable Gall

The elephant in the room...

I agree that we need a single European market for intellectual property. But why is it that they mention CDs specifically and not videos?

Censorsh^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HFilm classification.

Getting IP laws updated to prevent restriction of trade would be childsplay. There'd be a minor scuffle with the national music royalty collection agencies, but it's hard to argue that they have any rights to border restrictions than any other producer or vendor.

But pushing through a directive to force videos to be sellable across Europe would require one some kind of Europe-wide film classification scheme, which is something which will really set the Daily Mail set on the rampage. Or worse, the abolition of film classification entirely. Won't somebody think of the children?!?

There's a level of nudity in Spanish family drama (Spanish classification 7 yo and above) that would cause Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells to have a cardiac arrest if it was sold in the UK as a PG.

That's where the problems lie.

Shuttle Discovery set for final liftoff tomorrow at 7:52pm

The Indomitable Gall

I always wondered...

I always wondered why there's no such category as "European American"....

PARIS in 89,000 ft climax

The Indomitable Gall

Not a brick.

A brick surely would have been falling much faster and the touchdown would have been messy.

If there was no "glide" involved, it would have come down hard on the nose or tail, and I imagine there would be visible damage to them.

Or to put it another way: imagine a brick falling from space and hitting your head. Now imagine Vulture 1 falling from space and hitting your head. Now imagine a small object with the density of brick but the mass of Vulture 1 falling from space and hitting your head. The only survivable one is Vulture 1....

Dolphin speaks: Ditch the iPad, give me the Toughbook!

The Indomitable Gall

I'm torn...

I'm torn between "wow, this is so cool" and "wow, what the hell have they been smoking".

I'm particularly tickled by the notion of dolphin music, but there's been so many people "interpreting" everything from ancient etchings to unusual rock formations as "music"....

Artificial replacement human livers made in lab

The Indomitable Gall

Johnny 5 need input...

What is the current limiting factor in liver size?

Is it the size of the animal liver used as a scaffold? (In which case why haven't they tried a more human-sized donor animal?)

Does the nutrition in the VAT fail to penetrate beyond a certain thickness of organ?

These are fairly basic questions, in the grand scheme of things.

Israel to join list of 'adequate' data protection nations

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Murder

"You condemn Israel for protecting itself. Maybe it makes you feel morally superior."

No, we condemn Israel for conducting illegal acts. Even if Mabhuh had been a baby-eating demon from the nether regions of hell's sub-basement level, Israel lost the moral high-ground when they nicked other people's passports.

Highest point on the Moon found: Higher than Mount Everest

The Indomitable Gall

Really...?

"Space boffins say they have identified the highest point on the Moon, and that it stands higher above the lunar surface than the summit of Mount Everest does above Earth's."

Last I checked, the summit of Mount Everest was part of the surface of the Earth, and unless there's a sophisticated optical illusion in that photo, this mountain is part of the surface of the moon.

The Indomitable Gall

Physics lesson

Skiing relies on gravity, of which there is little on the moon. The pitiful 3 degree slope won't help either.

Although that said, apparently the fastest man on the moon was an alpine skiier, who found the technique much better than the loopy bouncing everyone else was doing.

Boffins mount campaign against France's official kilogramme

The Indomitable Gall

Er....

Wouldn't you prefer a 0.568 litre...?

The Indomitable Gall

Just as well...

It's just as well the metric system wasn't invented in England. Imagine the Daily Mail's reaction if the kilogramme in question was stored at the Royal Society's headquarters!!!!!!

PARIS launch tomorrow come hell or high water

The Indomitable Gall

¡Qué viva el buitre!

Mucha suerte para mañana.

Ofcom caught between picts and luvvies on 600MHz

The Indomitable Gall

Read what I wrote.

article: "as if the Gaels aren't getting enough of subsidy"

me: "they aren't" = they aren't getting enough.

Yes they get a subsidy, no they don't get enough.

Urdu, Hindi, Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, Polish... whatever language you care to mention, there are channels available on satellite, cable and the internet. The Urdu community don't need a BBC Urdu channel, because they've already got stuff to watch.

There's practically no Gaelic outside of Scotland, so Scotland is the only country producing Gaelic TV.

As for the "bagpipes and shortbread" comment... you clearly haven't watched the channel much. It is not an extended White Heather Club, it is a TV channel for a general audience. Yes, there's a lot of music output, but that's because music TV is relatively cheap. Yes, most of that's Scottish music, but then Scottish music is cheaper than pop particularly when they piggyback onto existing festivals and awards, as BBC Alba currently do. (And Scottish music is also much more likely to be available in Gaelic!)

The BBC's English channels have some great output -- particularly BBC3's Mongrels -- but much of their stuff would be successful commercially (eg Strictly Come Dancing) and isn't really fulfilling a "public service" role.

I love the BBC and have no problem with paying a license fee to maintain it, but if it wasn't for legislation and public money, nobody would be making Gaelic programming. Public service should be about making programmes no-one else would make, and Gaelic programming falls squarely into this category.

The Indomitable Gall

BBC Alba

"BBC Alba reckons the spectrum should be given to BBC Alba, at least in Scotland - as if the Gaels aren't getting enough of subsidy for a Gaelic-language TV station."

Well they aren't. BBC Alba can't afford to make dramas and they only get a couple of hours of original programming a week, and that programming will be on two or three times in a week.

"The Gaels" are quite explicitly not being subsidised as the BBC Trust have set audience targets of about 3 times as many as the number of Gaelic speakers in the world, and the channel can't be received by half of the people who *do* speak Gaelic, because it's still not on cable or Freeview

A friend of mine used to work in Gaelic TV production, but she's now moved to an English-language production house where her colleagues are absolutely stunned by the pitiful budget she had to work with in her last job.

They've done great things with the money they've got, but the channel is still drastically limited.

There's a tendency to talk about budgets as though they should all be proportional -- well they can't be.

Just as children use more of the schools budget than adults, and people with dry skin are more of a burden on NHS dermatology budgets than people with healthy skin, so Gaelic is a more expensive proposition for TV than English, because the market is smaller, and they don't make Gaelic soaps in Australia or Gaelic sitcoms in the USA. BBC Alba is a public service broadcaster, and public service broadcasters live off public money. Simple as that.

The Indomitable Gall

Why would they?

Smartmetering operates perfectly well over existing mobile networks. Dedicating a whole band to smartmetering would mean unnecessary work in repeating the coverage of the existing mobile phone networks.

Wholesale SMS prices are negligible (whereas consumer SMS is the most expensive data delivery mechanism known to man).

Top 10 Kindle books outsell dead-tree versions 2-1

The Indomitable Gall

You're the odd one out then.

Notice that the *top 10* ebooks are outselling physical books.

It's the inverse-long-tail effect all over again. They said mp3 downloads would widen our musical tastes, and that music would have a longer "shelf-life", but in the end, we found that more people were just buying the latest big thing.

Same here with books -- everyone's buying the latest and greatest, and the out-of-print buyers are a minority.

Is it simply that the internet isn't good for (oh irony!) browsing books or is it that the infinite supply means you never pick up an alternative when the item you were looking for isn't in stock?

Either way, freedom seems to mean discovering less.

Judge tosses lawsuit from copyright troll

The Indomitable Gall

No, it doesn't mention that.

It doesn't mention that because it is not a legal argument. I do not have an automatic right to publish unsolicited adverts for anyone.

It's a moral argument, and incidental to the legal one.

Equality Act causes logistics nightmare

The Indomitable Gall

Right, that's it: I'm an ethnically-Irish male lesbian.

And as I sincerely doubt there any ethnically-Irish male lesbians in the majority of public sector organisations, they're all going to have to offer me a job, or they won't be being equal.

Fantastic!!!

EU to lift flight ban on carry-on liquids

The Indomitable Gall

Examples...?

"It is a major step forward in the fight against global terrorism where liquid is increasingly becoming a common tool for terrorist use and we are proud to be able to contribute to the national security."

What terrorist incidents have occurred using liquids?

Genuine question.

US raygun jumbo fluffs another test missile-blast attempt

The Indomitable Gall

Yeah, check it, blud.

Yo man, dis ICBM I has got is da bomb. Check it, it's well blingin -- it like solid gold man. See dat America? She is gonna be like soooooooooo jealous when she sees ma ICBM. She gonna be like "wow, man, you is like cool man".

The Indomitable Gall

Surface melt

Even the best mirror in the world would melt pretty much instantly due to the power of the beam.

The Indomitable Gall

Refractive coating?

If your countermeasure is to block the tracking laser, the question is whether a matt coating (diffuse reflection) is more effective than using a refractive coating simply to disperse the specular reflection.

With a highly specular material (gloss black) the tracking laser would have to hit it damn near perpendicular to get a reflection. A clear, highly refractive coating would narrow the margin for error quite considerably.

An ICBM in flight is going to present a truly perpendicular surface to a jumbo jet for at most a fraction of a second, at only two or three points on its flight path, before the end of the first stage.