Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Toshiba shows second-gen tablet

Hmmm....

"Anyone who thinks the iPad is too big isn't going to take to this one."

Anyone who thinks the iPad is too big really isn't in the market for a tablet....

IPTV UK: failure to launch?

For once, self-interest == consumer choice

" Virgin portrays its beef with YouView as an attempt to stand up for consumer choice, but it is clearly motivated by self-interest too. If catch-up services remain separate and incompatible, Virgin's ability to combine them for a price is more attractive than it would be if there were an alternative, free-to-access unified service. "

To be fair, Virgin are in the right here. Virgin's On Demand system is vastly superior to broadband iPlayer, and people currently find that a service worth paying for. The lack of stuttering alone is worth paying for, and the difference in video quality is night and day.

Capitalism is build on consumer choice, and YouView does threaten to take picture quality out of the equation, commoditising video on a compromised, compressed quality level.

As everyone's investing so heavily in SD, now seems a bit of a silly time to start throttling the video bandwidth unnecessarily.

Big new wind turbines too close together, says top boffin

Slowing the winds, slowing the tides

Well, as we've already built massive amounts of buildings on land and many causeways and walls at sea, and as we've razed mountains and while raising other land, not to mention the dozens of aircraft stealing disrupting the high-altitude air currents, we're already interrupting the winds and waters more than a few turbines can.

Man killed by own cock

iShall be cancelling my subscription.

Where's the IT angle?

I mean, seriously, razors are so clearly analogue technology....

Boffins sex pterodactyls at last

Silly boffins...

" Apart from crestlessness, according to the investigating boffins, another distinctive feature of the lady pterodactyl is wider hips to permit easier passage of eggs. "

Last I checked, all female vertebrates had bigger pelvises for this very reason. (Well, either eggs or live young.) Surely a correlation of crests with relative pelvis size would have given them their answer yonks ago?

Texter who fell in fountain threatens to sue

Nonono.

Put it this way.

The mall has security cameras ostensibly to protect its shoppers. The mall has not asked consent for security footage to be used for entertainment purposes. The mall's security company has therefore violated their agreement, and they have to be held to account.

If behaviour like this goes unchecked, security cameras become a routine invasion of privacy.

Shaun the Sheep shorts to lure kids to Nintendo 3DS

Age bracket

Shaun the Sheep is broadcast on CBeebies, the BBC channel aimed at the 0-6 age bracket.

But it's also broadcast on CBBC, which is aimed at slightly older kids.

Google told me this in about a minute.

Attention Span.

Short attention span is a myth. It's just another "ee, when I were a lad..:" slab of grumpy-old-manism

Heathrow Express treats iPhones as tickets

Battery Life.

Nuff said.

Galileo euro-satnav 'driven by French military', says sacked CEO

Completely Dependent

F111F,

The first Yugoslavia thing was a mess, where a bunch of peace-keepers did sweet FA while being shot at.

The Kosovo thing was an illegal invasion by NATO, not sanctioned by the UN, where a bunch of cowards with big guns stood back and bombed seven shades of sh*t out of civilians and military alike, blowing up a Chinese embassy, the entire civil infrastructure of the capital of Serbia and a fleeing band of the very same Kosovar refugees we said we were there to save.

Well... yeah...

I'm getting the feeling Lewis is a bit dismissive of Galileo. So, what, we're supposed to build our military capacity dependent on the playground bully's tech? No thanks. If satnav is a military tool, we can't rely on someone else's.

But of course, come World War III, the first casualties will be the satellites. Maybe we should be building our infrastructure around something less fragile.....

Microsoft readies official Kinect support for PCs

Homebrewers, do me proud.

I expect to see several versions of Pro Chairthrowing Simulator in the first wave of homebrew games.

A tribute to both Ballmer and to those classic Codemasters games of a more civilised age....

Prisoners cannibalise mice for mobile power

XBox360...?

In prisons, "red ring of death" has unpleasant overtones.

Not a bad idea...

Not a bad idea at all, but the picocells would have to be provided by the phone companies themselves in order not to be classed as phone jammers, which many of the commenters here seem to forget are illegal....

Facebook suspends personal data-sharing feature

FFS...

"However, because many users often click through permission dialogue boxes without paying attention,"

Now now, John, we're all intelligent people here, and you know the problem is much more insidious than that.

The problem is that you have no choice as to what information you share with the app, just share and use or don't share and don't use.

The Facebook interface gives you a very brief summary of what information will be shared, but it doesn't make the app developers justify the data gathering.

Facebook holds its hands up and claims its between user and app developer, but they allow people to write silly little games and then demand whatever information they like in exchange, without ever properly informing the user what they're up to.

The problem is NOT that users don't read the small print, the problem is Facebook.

Susan Boyle joins Lads from Lagos

Why...?

Why do Microsoft have a US flag in their UK award centre.

OK, maybe it's cos they're an American company.

But then why do they have a sign up saying "Michigan Lottery"...?

Nine per cent of gamer kids are 'addicted'

Compulsion, certainly.

I get the same compulsion to sit in front of the internet as I used to get to shove tapes in my old C64 as a kid. Is it "just" a compulsion or an addiction? What's the difference?

California's green-leccy price system will stifle plug-in cars

DCMA takedown notification...

"there's no need to suffer the "range anxiety" which bedevils battery-only drivers"

Isn't "range anxiety" a trademark of somebody or other now?

DUP website translated into Irish by mischievous hacktivist

And by the same token...

can I just point out, that "English" is not actually any kind of a language as far as I can tell......it just means you speak French corrupted Dutch really REALLY badly and pronounce everything like a chav!

Good for the goose....

Re:yes and no

@Paul 135

" The same goes for the "Irish language" (based on the Connaught dialect might I add) . Would probably cause less trouble if they just called it "Irish Gaelic". (or just gaelic as its essentially the same as Scots Gaelic, the latter of which is nearly as close to the old Gaelic dialect in Ulster). "

Well that's an overstatement if ever I heard one.

Gaelic (aka Scottish Gaelic) and Irish are about as different as Spanish and Portuguese or Spanish and Italian.

Within both Gaelic and Irish there is a range of dialects, and yes, Ulster Irish is quite similar to Islay Gaelic, but there are some major fundamental differences that come into play when you hit the sea. At best you could call Islay Gaelic a transitional dialect -- not one thing or the other -- but most people agree that it's Gaelic, not Irish, and not merely on grounds of geography or politics, but in terms of grammar.

Spain grovels to penguins over 'Linux' anti-terror plot

Learn YOUR history

John Sanders:

" ETA never killed for democracy nor anybody's rights, they killed because they believe in their mythical country that was invaded by the Spaniards. An invasion that of course only happened in their imaginations. "

ETA did originally kill for democracy. Unfortunately, direct action of this kind ends up attracting the wrong kind of person. The internal politicking in the film "El Lobo" isn't too far from the truth, by all accounts.

OK, so Navarre wasn't invaded by Spain -- it was allied by marriage -- but the historical Basque nation is far from a "mythical" country.

You cannot disarm the power of groups like ETA by labelling them with the broad brush term "terrorist". Certainly they *are* terrorists, but that's only part of it.

Whether you are a supporter of Basque independence or not, you have to take into account the very real issues of self-image and collective identity that ETA draws its support from. If you deny the Basque identity, you push people who hold that identity towards those that do recognise it.

Respecting people's personally identity is the only way to undermine secessionist terrorism.

Personally, I say the same thing about both the Basque Country and Scotland. Give us a referendum, then we'll all have to live with the results and stop arguing about what they would be. In both cases, I'm in favour of independence, but in both cases, I believe that's a minority view and that the vote would come out as "no". So just ask us, please....

Sony sues PlayStation 3 'hackers'

Nonsense.

"i can see how about 0.0001% of people who own a ps3 might be interested in linux on it but we all know the vast majority of hacking is purely to run copyritten games, meaning loss of income for sony. in the end we will all end up paying for that."

A) 0.0001% or otherwise is irrelevant. They're Sony's customers.

B) The vast majority of hacking may be to run pirated games. I don't believe it is, but that's irrelevant. The most important hacking always comes from homebrew and/or Linux fans. They break the system to do what they want -- the warez junkies come in as a second phase, picking up what the homebrewers did and extending it. It's always a minor step, just as GeoHot took fail0verflow's hack and modified it to do more than originally intended.

Many people saw the original OtherOS option as a very shrewd move by Sony -- they gave the homebrewers and the Linux crowd an "easy in", which meant they had no reason to break open the OS or firmware.

And it worked pretty well -- without the assistance of the homebrew crowd, the dedicated pirates were on their own and didn't get very far.

With OtherOS still in place, the fail0verflow guys would never have gone to the effort of breaking the encryption.

Microsoft disputes Apple's 'App Store' trademark

Yes, they coined the term, but...

"App store" was an Apple coinage, but it was coined in a generic way.

As others have already stated, "app" and "store" were both generic terms. More importantly, the pattern <something> store is a very common generic pattern.

MS's main argument is that showing a generic word into a generic pattern gives a generic result.

Imagine someone invented a hoverboard (like in Back to the Future 2). What term would you use to describe a place that sells them? "hoverboard store" (US) or "hoverboard shop" (UK). You wouldn't expect the first place that sells hoverboards to get that as a trademark, would you?

That merely leads to goldrushes, not genuine innovation or creativity.

I believe...

I've been told that the UK uses the same criteria for genericity with foreign words as English ones in trademarks.

Which leads me to want to start up a consultancy containing the word "aon" in its title. I mean, seriously, do Aon really think that they can trademark a name that is nothing more than "one"?

Researcher cracks Wi-Fi passwords with Amazon cloud

Very much worth a story.

"Not worth a story in my opinion. It is well-known that one needs an effective keyspace of 2^80 or more (symmetric ciphers) today."

Among those in the know yes. But wider education is required.

The useful angle in this story is that it puts an easily understood metric on security: lucre.

Try giving your average Joe a simple explanation of how weak his wifi security is. Go on, try it. Not easy, is it? Then tell him that it costs less than a fiver to crack. That's a very powerful demonstration, and should get him to listen to your description of how to generate a good key.

Apple refuses frozen iPhone repair

/metoo

I reckon they'll get bitten by the watchdog for this one....

When one oligopoly screws another

Fridges...?

"Of all of these products, the only ones to require significant localization are the refrigerator and vacuum cleaner, which need to be built with a 240V supply to suit Australia (and, of course, other markets that use 240V)."

Vacuums, fine, but aren't American fridges wired into the same 240V appliance ring mains as their cookers, washing machines etc?

Mum arrested for seducing teen on Xbox Live

Nobody said it wasn't...

...but nobody said it *was*, and I think that's his point. While the charges of "molestation" are frequently mentioned in cases like this, the tag "paedo" doesn't tend to stick. But then this isn't the NoTW, so it's not a label that the Reg throws about anyway.

The New Linux: OpenStack aims for the heavens

But don't you understand?!?

If I've given my work for free, everyone else must too!

Yes, if I code for free it is my personal choice. BUT EVERYONE MUST MAKE THE SAME PERSONAL CHOICE. I DEMAND IT!!!!

</sarcasm>

What the GPL junkies don't get is that it IS personal choice, and some people have different priorities.

The GPL is good because it allows coders to demand "quid pro quo", so they give and they get. Personal choice.

Even freer licenses are also good because the allow coders to say that they don't need quid pro quo -- if they are confident that they're getting enough out of the code for their own benefit, they don't need any quid pro quo.

NASA is acting in public benefit, so they don't care about "sharks" -- they're doing what they've always done with their research (cold war secrecy excepted) and making it available to others. It's a public research group, and that's how these things work.

Rackspace is a storage/hosting provider, and to them, the main goal of the software is to get people to use more storage and bandwidth. Widespread availability of the platform facilitates this.

So, yes, both parties CHOSE to go for a "very free" license, because it is in their interests.

I find it interesting that random internet commentards think they know Rackspace and NASA's business better than Rackspace and NASA. How many degrees do these commentards have? Less than the minimum CV for employment at NASA, I'd guess.

Intel: Microsoft's ARM-on-Windows deal no threat

Multiprocessing...

OK, so everyone's talking about multicores, right? How about an asymmetrical multicore? An ARM core runs the operating system, office suite, web browser et al, and legacy apps run on an x86 on the side.

As the x86 is a "hot" chip, it could be powered down when on battery and not required, much like the current tranche of laptops with two graphics chipsets. If the OS isn't on it, there's no problem, surely?

This is how I always envisioned the endgame for x86, but everyone said asymmetrical multiprocessing was too complicated to schedule, but now that GPUs are now fully-fledged computers in their own right rather than highly limited coprocessors, we're working in an asymmetrical environment already. The problem is already solved.

Well of course they'll consider multicore.

I think it's fairly obvious the reason ARM chips don't come in umpteen-core varieties is simply that the current target market (phones, embedded systems) don't need them. Windows on ARM will make a market for more powerful processors.

But I do ask myself why MS is doing this.

Presumably they're aiming for the tablet market, and netbooks, if they get a second wind.

But part of me worries that they're aiming for the embedded market -- remember the Windows 95 cash machines that were down as much as they were up? That could be your next TV....

If you open source an old market, are you doomed to fail?

A restatement of the woeful inadequacy of OSS gaming.

Isn't everything in that article just saying that the problems of open-source gaming are applicable to all open source?

IE. You guys may be good at cloning existing software, but as most of you don't have a clue how to come up with anything new, only like 3 of you will ever amount to a hill of beans?

Nazis 'became obsessed' with piss-taking Finnish dog

An open letter to the Coen Brothers

Dear Joel and Ethan,

This story will very soon be a film. Please make sure that you two write and direct it. You are the only people who could do justice to the farcical nature of it.

Kindle lets users lend e-books to mates via email

Think of it this way...

Libraries have had an effect on book sales, true, but their effect has been limited.

Basically, buying books is massively more convenient, so it's generally worth the extra money.

Libraries are inconvenient not just because of the short loan period, but also because:

* You not only have to go to collect the book, you have to go to give it back. You can collect at your convenience, but you have a hard deadline for returning. Inconvenient.

* Bookshops store loads of copies of popular books. Libraries only have a few. Inconvenient.

* Fines for late returns put people off using libraries. Self-disabling electronic loans save people like me from forgetting to bring the book back and incurring fines.

Electronic book loans drastically increase the utility value of library loans, which damages the comparative value of buying.

Becks offloads Posh Porsche on eBay

mmmiiiiiiiilllllllllliiiiion?

It's just passed the million mark.

When the auction ends, we will be able to identify the one man in the world who is both richer and thicker than St David of Wembley.

Humbug.

Isn't there some old saying along the lines of "to those that have, great gifts shall be given"?

So one of the richest men in sport can make a profit on a car, whereas anyone else who might actually notice the cost gets to watch their wheels depreciate.

Richness is its own reward.

Video games go off quicker than tomatoes

What I want to know....

What I want to know is how the buy-back price compares to the wholesale price -- that's the real value indicator.

MOSSAD SPY VULTURE seized in Saudi Arabia

New angle?

Sorry, all 360 degrees have been spoken for.

But then again, there's always imaginary numbers.

So how about 90i degrees? I call it the "firm-belief-that-you're-right angle". This explains not only the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also the LibDem/Tory coalition; the war in Afghanistan; the Daily Mail....

Doctor Who to marry Doctor Who's daughter

Who said anything about celibacy/abstinence?

They said that they "*CAN'T* wait" until they're married. That means they're *not* abstaining. Keep up!

Which means that...

So let me get this straight: the fifth doctor begat the clone of his tenth incarnation.

But if a clone's a clone, then they are genetically identical, so the fifth doctor must have had relations with someone genetically identical. So far, none of the doctor's regenerations have been female, making the only candidate for mother... the clone herself.

So at some point in the future (or past) there will be (or will have been) a mammoth case where The Doctor divorced The Doctorclone for infidelitous relationship with... The Doctor.

In any divorce, it's the kids that suffer, which in this case is also the wife. I bet she was so desperate for therapy that she will have been inventing the whole profession in a few centuries ago.

Double-clicking patent takes on world

Fairly valid point....

All the aforementioned double-clicks are previous-status-agnostic, aren't they? IE it doesn't matter whether it's an already-selected component or not, hence non-infringing....

Enormous 1km ice-cube machine fashioned at South Pole

An ice cube...?

Really, I'm stunned.

In among all that random ice, someone's hidden a massive ice-cube!

Genius! It's like hiding a house in a pile of bricks!

Pictures? We want video.

Pics are great, but I want to see that thing move....

Microsoft says no to Kinect sex game

Recognising fingers....

The original prototypes had on-board bones processing, and the bones model didn't recognise fingers.

The bones processing was taken out (ostensibly as a cost saving, but more likely cos they knew the device was going to be hackable, and they'd effectively be giving cheap motion capture to ever cartoon and video-game studio in the world) so these guys must be making their own bones from the video feed. The original bones model didn't follow fingers because of size and processing speed, but in this game the hand appears to be held closer to the camera than usual, and the software is only tracking the hand, so it's not having to do any more work than the basic bones model used in the dance sim, for example.

Hacker warning over internet-connected HDTVs

Potentially perfect zombies...

How many people ever turn off their TVs? You switch off your PC, and many people switch off games consoles, but how often do you actually physically remove power from your telly?

You don't. You point a box at it and press a red button. So you're relying on software to switch it off. And if the software is hacked, then it can keep DDoSing websites, cracking captchas or whatever it is that the cool botnets are doing this year.

Man caught w*nking over Alan Sugar's autobiography

Anonymous source?

You might want to redact your quotes better...

""It was very bizarre behaviour and our security guys got a hold of him before too many people saw what he was doing.""

Yes, "our security guys". Your anonymous source was... the librarian.

World of Warcraft bot ban ticks off world of critics

WRT your analogy

This bot isn't just capable of breaking the rules, it's incapable of doing anything *but* break the rules. It's analogous to a car that only operates above the speed limit.

Yes, your analogy is valid against the general wording of the DCMA, but not in practice in this specific case.

Is it really that simple?

Remember that this bot actually completes quests, so it has to have some pretty deep hooks into either the code or the quest data. If that code and quest data is protected by any encryption (which it surely is) then the bot has to break that encryption -- the "countermeasures" mentioned in the DCMA are employed and letter of the law is breached.

Are you crazy?

The guy made $3.5 million -- THREE AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS -- from this software. This is a business, not a revolutionary stand. The guy would have to be mad -- that's the goose that laid the golden egg.

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

Not quite.

This only works in a resistive medium. Without an atmosphere, sea or ground friction to slow down the side that isn't receiving the force, the whole mass of the ship would be accelerated equally.