Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Embrace your outsourced future

Usually short-sighted micro-economic crud.

Seriously, this is the same old bollocks.

"Look, the past was like this, so the future will be Exactly The Same."

No it won't. Every change in society offers unique problems.

The whole "service economy" thing was nonsense in the first place, because information is logistically easier to offshore than manufacturing was, and it didn't even protect jobs for a generation.

Our "service economy" is a big old pyramid scheme that's trying to maintain higher wages here than elsewhere, but as a result, we've devalued Real Work so much that we have to subsidise our farmers to stop them all ending up in call centres and leaving us importing all our food.

Sites like Freelancer could shape the future to some extent though, but only because it increases the number of suppliers, therefore increases the competitive pressure, and if eBay and Amazon Marketplace have taught us one thing, it's that once you start an auction, there's always someone daft enough to take the price a couple of quid too far. Various design and coding "competitions" have also shown that this holds for the job market too -- unemployed people will happily complete a full job for the mere possibility of being paid a distinctly average sum at the end of it.

Competition closed

I know...

How about an app that lets company executives induce people to give away marketable ideas for the mere possibility that they might one day win a smartphone?

Just what every penny-pinching BlackBerry-weilding executive needs.

Apple clips publishers' wings

Re: Unbalanced Argument

" "All of the competing vendors are also doing at least one unethical thing, so there's an on balance argument to be made"

The familiar "two wrongs make a right" argument. "

The previous poster was not defending Apple, and his point is valid: if you say "but they're unethical" you will get the answer "everyone is". As he said, you're going to have to present an "on balance" argument to say why Apple's unethical enough that to justify other people giving their money to someone else.

Boots punts over-the-counter paternity test

Sexism!

"The test is available to anyone aged 16 or over and requires signed consent and identification documents from father, child and mother – and from the mother on behalf of the child if the latter is under 16."

Hang on... surely that's discrimination -- "parent or guardian", surely? Why mother specifically?

Panorama stalks alleged stalker's twin brother

Since when...

Since when has the Register comments section been about ignorant ranting following a formula. This is a waste of advertising money. It's a Bulgarian airbag-bursting outrage. Why don't they go and do some real work.

CSC cost-cutting spreads to Europe

Wowzers

So they're artificially messing up next year's figures worse than they're improving this year's then? Clever.

What measures will be open to them to fix it next financial year?

This sort of bodging wouldn't be required if they just aligned the benefits year with the fiscal year. Muppets.

Yuppie cellphone-style iPhone case comes to Blighty

Missed opportunity.

Stuff that thing with Li-ion and you've got one hell of an external battery pack.....

Toshiba intros laptop that CHANGES COLOUR

If the article's right...

The article says

"The trick lies in Toshiba's use of several polyester laminate films, each comprising thousands "nano-technology" layers,"

If this is accurate, this means that unlike interference paints (ChromaFlare and the like) they've not done this with suspended particles, but actually made the case as a polylaminate. This would make the technology fundamentally different in terms of physics, although it is clearly derived from the same principles. (Chromaflare uses particles of laminate to show the surface of different layers at different angles, if this case is a single laminate, it will rely on varying refractive indices and total internal reflection for its colour-changing jiggery-pokery.)

If it's just spraypaint, on the other hand, you're quite right.

Microsoft insists autistic Xboxer is a cheat

"Looks like someone is getting a PS3 for his next birthday"

"Looks like someone is getting a PS3 for his next birthday"

f Sony's marketing team are on the ball, he shouldn't have to wait that long....

Mexican army interdicts dope-slinging catapult

"Back in the day..."

Wow, that there's some creative English. Describing the age of chivalry as "back in the day". How old was the guard, and did he fight in the Crusades? "I remember ole King Richie, now there was a man. You don't get his sort these days -- it's all Playstations and management training meetings now.... not the same at all...."

Facebook offers 500 million users SSL crypto

"Social authentication" - old news

The photo-based authentication has been in place for several months at least -- I was on holiday in November and when I logged on from Cybercaffs it said I'd connected from a new location and had to verify myself.

You're presented with several pics of the same person (I can't recall the exact number), drawn seemingly at random from tagged photos and a selection of several friends' names to chose from. This happens 4 or 5 times, and you're given the option to skip (I think you get 3 chances to skip) just in case the photos are bad or it's someone you don't really "know" know.

It's a sensible system, but there's two little flaws.

1) It seems to select very strongly connected people (one of my brothers or sisters was always included) so if the attacker knows you at all, he's likely to know these people. Of course, this is because they're trying to make it easy for *you* to recognise them, but hey-ho...

2) Judging by the wording of the message, it's about registering the location the first time you connect from there, so if you're in an unscrupulous cybercaff, the same people who sniff your login details will have access to the terminal/subnet/geographic location (whatever it is that Facebook considers a location) you used to connect, which will now (presumably) be whitelisted by Facebook.

It's a step in the right direction, but they've got a very, very long way to go yet....

Cameroonians cleared in 'surreal' dyed banknote scam

Ouch.

As most conmen pick out naive marks of below-average intelligence, doesn't that mean fraud is effectively legal in Spain? Jolín....

PSP 2 'as powerful as PS3'

If it is just a portable PS3...

If it's a portable PS3, there'd better be some way to synch across the games you've already bought and take them on the road.

But as it's Sony, there won't be, will there?

O2 to fling out free Wi-Fi for all

You have to *supply* a phone number.

As you have to supply a phone number, this cannot be fully integrated. It would seem likely that you connect to wifi, get greeted with a login page, enter your phone number and activate. The MAC address and phone number are in different parts of the system, and only seem to be linked by the user's actions., not tech.

Femtocell experts create even tinier porta-base station

Retrofit to Kindle.

If you could retrofit this to a Kindle, you'd bankrupt Whispernet....

Sat-spotters find secret payload launched by giant US rocket

It would be funnier...

It would be funnier if they had actually used the correct verb. The motto makes no sense.

Israelis seize woman packing 44 iPhones

For about six months...

For about six months I was flying, several times a month, without realising that there was still a razor in the bottom of my laptop bag. Nobody ever noticed.

Rescue mission begins for Hitchhiker's Real Guide

Wealth of Nations

The latest edition of "The Wealth of Nations" has been retitled "The Wealth of Formerly Bankrupt Banks" after the events of the last few years.....

iPad propels Apple into top-three PC vendor placement

If tablets are PCs...

If tablets are PCs, then the iPad is not a tablet.

The iPad is a locked-down appliance -- if I'm not allowed to break it by installing duff software, it's not a PC.

Next smartphone tech? Predator style thermal cameras

Does she fancy me? There's an app for that.

Elevated body temperature is a sign of sexual arousal.

That's the only app I can think of.

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.