Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Chronos EZ430: An SDK packing watch for real techies

Hmmm... Can it sync with a smartphone?

Talking to a computer is all well and good, but I quite fancy tying it to a GPS-enabled smartphone and mapping out my running and cycle workouts. Shame there's no heartrate monitor built in....

PCC bares teeth at bloggers

Not wanting to split hairs...

Liddle's assertion was not that people of black African/Carribean origin are more likely to commit violent crime, but that the majority of violent crime is committed by people in that demographic.

The fact is that what he said was a lie. The fact that there is a truth that is as bad as the lie doesn't make the lie true!!!

Pink Floyd remastered for Nintendo Entertainment System

Certainly awesome...

...but neither "nerdiest" or "awesomest". cf Radiohead on Spectrum, printer, hard drives etc.

Trojan poses as Adobe update utility

Number 5 need input!

Does this come in the form of a pop-up advising that an update is available? I've recently updated Reader through popups when opening PDFs....

Is iFlorist the greatest website in the universe, ever?

Vulture is symbol....

Vulture is symbol of picking flesh from dead bones of carrion.

El Reg takes this symbol to its campaign for shaming of moribund iFlorist and delivers with 100% accuracy.

Chattanooga devil dog eats cop cruiser

I think you mean bacon...

I can certainly smell pork products....

Apple's iPad to launch with 30,000-volume free library

Lies, damned lies and international copyright law.

"Not longer after the iPad's January introduction, it emerged that iBooks might not feature on versions of the tablet sold outside the US because of licensing limitations imposed on works still protected by copyright law.

Such restrictions - who is allowed to publish what, and where - don't apply to public domain, out-of-copyright works of the kind digitised and made available by Project Gutenberg."

While this is technically correct, it is more than slightly misleading because it glosses over the simple fact that many of the works made available by Project Gutenberg are still protected by copyright law in many countries.

This is more than a mere technicality -- some companies may shortly find out that it is a rather expensive oversight.

I recently bought an particular model of ereader from a high street bookshop, and it has several eBooks preloaded. One of these was a Beatrix Potter book. Potter died in 43, so by my reckoning that means that her writing is protected in the UK until 2013. The copyright has expired in the US, and Gutenberg states the following:

"Not copyrighted in the United States. If you live elsewhere check the laws of your country before downloading this ebook."

It would appear that the importer of the device failed to carry out due diligence and could get a bit of a nasty surprise when the Potter estate catch onto this.

I'm sure this isn't the only time such things have happened, and the Apple store is a much more visible target than a white-label far eastern device.

'Switch to Century Gothic to save the planet'

Re: Yes, but...

"Presumably someone, somewhere printed off the same several thousand pages of text in umpteen different fonts, carefully measuring the ink use for each run."

Hopefully they used a virtual printer driver to produce bitmaps simulating printouts, because not only would it be greener that way, it would also be much quicker to measure with a little program counting dots....

Roger Boyes probes Vienna Boys’ Choir

You're only against nominative determinism...

...cos you'd get bored making honey all day.

Getting drunk the night before has no effect on exam results

"Killer drug"

Aaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Mephedrone is plant food. Plant Food. If they want people to stop taking it, they should stop calling it a drug and start calling it plant food. PLAAAAAANT FOOOOOOOOOD.

Then we might start comparing it to lighter fluid and glue, which are also sometimes used to get a "legal high" (another term the press should ditch as counterproductive).

Did we ban glue? No, we stopped kids buying it.

Nintendo confirms 3D handheld console coming

How to make the DS more popular...

Have internal storage that we can install games on.

My MP3 player doesn't need different cards for different albums.

My eBook reader doesn't need different cards for different books.

I try to buy PC games that can do a 100% install, no run CD required, because my PC is supposed to be portable.

So give me a games console that lets me carry all my games without some silly pack of cards and I'll think about it. Right now, the only thing that fits the bill is the iPhone/iPod touch, and that has a silly control system.

The market's open if someone wants to jump in....

Bill Gates goes (mini) nuclear

Well....

If it operates as a sealed unit for its lifetime, maybe it can be disposed of as a sealed unit at end-of-life...?

This all goes back to the question: what size is it? Can it be stuck on a (very large) truck and driven to a spent coal-mine for underground disposal without dismantling?

US couple jailed for TV shoplifting brag

The figures...

$3,500 a week for a total of $100,000 mens that they were at it for about 6.5 months before the broadcast.

If they stopped after the TV prog, they would have spent a combined 13 months stealing/fencing, and are due to spend a total of 39 months between them in "chokey".

52 months is 4 1/3 years, $100,000 for that is over 23 grand a year. Not bad.

"It took the police a further year to move against the couple"

...and if they carried on at the previous rate, that's a further $182,000, making $282,000 for 5 1/3 years. Annual wage: clear of 50 grand.

OK, the custodial sentence has very long "work days", but who said crime doesn't pay...?

'Perpetual' software licence doesn't last forever, rules court

Hang on... the media?

Isn't "perpetual" the word recording companies and websites use to tie you into their service...?

As the Plain English Campaign might say...

...use fancy words at your own peril!

I always thought of perpetual as being never-ending. So there you go.

Simple words cannot be reinterpreted this way.

BT ordered to share telegraph poles for fast broadband

Amateur

That's a rubbish troll, as everyone here knows the speed boost of a decent dedicated medium.

Back to class!

<-- Error, can't decide between "FAIL" or "headmaster".

Re: How about...

"The one's in rural Britian pay for it themselves! They don't moan when we get Gas piped to our houses and they have to have it delivered..."

Yes we do, but there's damned little we can do about it.

But let's look at electricity. Imagine if the electricity companies were allowed to skip rural houses just to save a few quid. Imagine if a rural village dweller had to pay thousands in initial setup costs to get the electricity companies to extend the cables out by 5 miles from the nearest town.

Or roads. Imagine if the rural dweller had to pay a grand in road tax to have his road "upgraded" from cracked tarmac to the latest shiny surface, because "it's too far".

That's what we're talking about -- the internet is now a part of essential public infrastructure like roads and electricity. It is now far more important than the land line phone ever was -- just ask the Inland Revenue, they want the farmers to do their tax returns on line.

Chinese gamer survives knife through skull

And our neurosurgeon says...?

Odd that none of the western reports I've read so far have asked a neurosurgeon whether this is remotely plausible....

'Go veggie to save the planet' UN, EU plans debunked

And yet....

The debunking doesn't examine the other, less contentious threat: water.

Whether anthropogenic or merely part of the Earth's natural cycle, the climate is changing and water is becoming harder to get in many parts of the world (just ask a Cypriot). (Of course, a lot of our water use is again for everyday things like washing and healthcare...) Anyhow, the water cost of livestock rearing is higher than the producing the equivalent amount of edible vegetable matter.

I'm not a veggie and I don't intend to turn veggie, but I do recognise that our meat consumption is much higher than in previous generations. Some people now even have meat in every meal -- sausages for breakfast, burger for lunch, lamb curry for dinner. I don't consider it turning "part veggie" if I have a bowl of porridge for breakfast and a pasta salad for lunch. I don't consider it turning "part veggie" if I go for a whole day -- or even two days, or three -- without meat.

Sustainability is not a matter of forcing ourselves to underconsume, but rather a matter of not allowing ourselves to overconsume.

No-one is advocating stopping washing, just not having two or three showers a day.

Very few people advocate not having cars, just not using them to go half-a-mile down the road for a carton of milk or on a route with a perfectly good bus or train service.

Same should apply to meat and dairy.

Council deforests beauty spot to combat dogging

Must have been awful....

It must have been awful for the Daily Mail hacks. How do you report this? Is it a victory against corrupt perversions or is in the wanton destruction of our natural heritage by nanny state gone mad?

They were pulled so hard both ways that they couldn't even bring themselves to write an article and had to resort to stapling a dozen quotes together.

Oh, the humanity!

Won't somebody think of the Daily Mail hacks?

SanDisk flips out 32GB mobile phone card

Are you suggesting...

Are you suggesting this might work in the SDHC slot on my MP3 player or eReader? Heresy!!!

'Racist' job ad sparks investigation

You're not really English!

"Tata... ... as in cheerio, tara, bye etc."

An English person would have laughed at the Anonymous Coward's **joke**.

This day and age...?

" Probably just a poorly thought out job advert, although you would have thought this kind of thing would be picked up before publication in this day and age. "

This is precisely the day and age when this sort of thing *wouldn't* be picked up. The immediacy of technology and the false assurances of spell checkers mean there's far more written material out there that hasn't been through the hands of a professional proof-reader.

In a previous day and age, there would have been some sort of "costumer service" between the advertiser and the press and they might have queried the wording.

Not today. Not this day and age.

Pirate Party UK launches manifesto

Eh what?

"All that means Microsoft could take Linux, GNOME and GIMP and sell it as proprietary software - the GPL is unenforceable without the courts' recognition of copyright. But it's all for the best."

I thought the courts were going to recognise copyright in Pirate Cuckoo land, albeit only up to 10 years?

You confuse me.

Victorinox offers hackers £100,000 challenge

No need to preselect

The terms of the competition are cunning enough that they're protected by the law of averages.

You get to keep the device whatever happens, so there is no disincentive to stop non-hackers turning up. This will effectively crowd out the hardcore crackers, who would have been hampered by the unrealistic restrictions. Real-world hackers get more than two hours, and clearly don't play within the law, after all.

Self-destruct

So you plug it into someone's PC forgetting about the self-destruct. But he's not got an internet connection. What now? Immediate wipe? Grace period?

The "unknown computer" thing is stupid -- if I want to restrict my data to a single "known good" computer, well I'll use the hard drive in my "known good" computer.

And if I was a data courier transferring secure data between two "known good" computers, I don't think I'd need a pen knife. No-one who genuinely needs this level of data security wants it in a penknife.

It's just cynical headline fodder.

Computer glitch prompts 50 raids on elderly couple's home

If his is untitled, why isn't mine?

"To distinguish the the police depts apart , the state appointed police dept wore copper badges . Hence the term coppers ."

No, a large portion of the NYPD were immigrants from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it was at the time) where police were commonly called coppers, and many people still do.

False data.

Neither Jacob nor Wilhelm picked this one up. This was one of Aesop's, so you're about 2 millennia out....

Pandora plus Endor: Multi hab-moon motherworld discovered

Dr Boffin. DR BOFFIN?!?!?!?

Come on guys, it's only the 22nd of March....

And how did this guy rank with Jobs, Gates and Paris?

Tiger Woods' alleged mistress publishes X-rated texts

The ultimatly geeky solution

NSFW++

Massive FBI computer overhaul is put on ice (again)

Don't want to use pigeons...

... they kill their pigeons out there. RIP Martha, 1st Sept 1914

Court bars charges against teen who posed semi-nude

Right to free speech

You misunderstand.

The federal judges didn't uphold that sexting was protected by free speech, but that the DA's deal violated their free speech, as it amounted to a gagging order on protesting their innocence. The judges ruled that as this amounted to coercion to forego their constitutional rights, the entire prosecution was invalid.

Cases get thrown out of court all the time for police procedural errors (failing to read rights, mishandling of evidence etc) and this is the same thing, but with the mishandling at the level of the judiciary.

Hobbit cameras start rolling in July

When the pot is boiling....

...just keep throwing stuff in.

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

Green? You sure?

Last time I saw an IRA man on the telly, he was identifiable by his black trousers, black jumper, black gloves and black balaclava. The British soldier pointing a gun at him was wearing green, though....

Begorrah!

I love how the "Irish" Americans are defining themselves by the same hateful bigotry and mistrust that everyone in Ireland (save a minority) is desperately trying to put behind them.

The deluded lunatics will probably start using car bombs next as a way to express their "ancient Irish culture and heritage". And for full authenticity, their cars will be green and have the ancient blessing "Kiss Me I'm Irish" on a bumper sticker on the back.

And as others have said -- there's orange on the flag. It's a call for unity, not discrimination.

One in four UK schoolkids admits hacking

Disgraceful! In my day...

In my day, kids engaged in totally legal play. We had wholesome games like "plundering apples", "lifting stuff from Woolies", "running on the railway tracks", "crawling under the security fence", "building-site hide-and-seek". Some of my favourite toys were obtained in the course of that last one.

Kids today just don't have the same respect for the law.

'Death knell' for Eye-o-Sauron™ US border stare-towers

Potentially expensive mistake...

"the Obama administration ... intends to fund the first phase of its rollout to the tune of $574m"

I hope that $574m includes a good insurance policy, because damned sure the professional people smugglers will be hiring snipers to take out the cameras....

Study shows gaming can hinder reading, writing progress

Moral maze.

So, they took a bunch of kids who didn't have consoles, gave half of them consoles, that half did worse at school, and they gave the other half consoles at the end.

The problems:

1) It is morally indefensible to conduct a study that has a good chance of having detrimental effects on a child's development. No matter what the results do to better the lot of future generations, harming a child mentally or physically is child abuse. Even assuming they didn't expect to see any obstacles to development, the risk was always there. Morally unacceptable.

2) Having proved the detrimental effects of games console, they still proceeded to issue more free consoles, so they were consciously causing harm to more children. Morally unacceptable.

3) All children entering the study were being offered a console, whether they were the console sample or the control sample. Paying research subjects is considered exploitation as it encourages vulnerable people to subject themselves to harm out of desperation. To a child without a console, a console is the equivalent of a payment of several thousand pounds to an adult. And it gets worse. There are two types of houses without games consoles or gaming PCs: type A is where the parents doesn't want them, and type B is where the parents can't afford them. Type A would not have been agreed to be involved in the experiment... unless the offer of the free console gave the child the leverage to badger the parents into allowing him to take part. The study overturns parental choice and causes harm to the child. Type B are the vulnerable people we're not supposed to pay as it encourages them to put themselves or their children in harm's way. And they have paid them to harm their children. Morally unacceptable.

No child should be allowed to be harmed in the pursuit of knowledge for the greater good, and just because they've not been dissected doesn't mean they haven't been harmed.

Google vows to delete Chrome's unique client ID

Abandon/abort rate

Presumably the main thing they're looking for is the number of downloads that are never installed, as people are likely to ignore a failed install and go back to IE without reporting anything.

Sky to pack pubs with 3D TVs

Passive glasses, dude...

The polarising glasses this tech uses are worth about 20 pence each, not 100 squid...

Dedicated Vi device vies for buyers

Hang on, the loonies!

Surely the real goal here is campfire deathmatch? Network network network! I want to deathmatch!

No networking?!?

Really, this is what I wanted before the eeePC came out, but I wanted it with some kind of network connection. Now I've got an MP3 player with 2" screen, 7" eeePC and 6" Elonex/Hanvon eReader with QWERTY keyboard. If there was a network port, they might just have a sale, but there isn't, so I'll wait for the Openinkpot project to get my Elonex supported (and work out how to use the USB host socket on the top) and I'll use that for my command line needs.

Command line + ePaper = L337.

Sony Bloggie

Why do ElReg camcorder reviews...

Why do the Register's camcorder reviews never discuss compression ratios and the potential for editing and processing?

Telling us it's MP4 is all well and good, but how heavily compressed does it go? Will the video degrade into a hellish series of blocks if we run it through Final Cut and reencode it to any form of MPEG? HD's all well and good, but right now I don't know if any given HD device is going to give me better results than an old SD tape camcorder in terms of final picture quality.

I look at the "pocket" HD camcorders and the handheld HD camcorders and despite the big price difference, they seem to have very similar recording times -- are they using the same compression ratios? Are they *good* compression ratios? I don't want to shell out £500 to get superior optics only to find that the software cheats me out of picture quality so that I'd be as well off with a £100 pocket model.

Enquiring minds need to know!

Lib Dem candidate admits to unnatural vice

In another shocking revelation...

I can exclusively reveal that Winston Churchill was a member of the Liberal Party before joining the Conservatives.

Won't somebody think of the children!

'Twitter gives voice to the voiceless' - eg the US President

In other words...

" In case you have not read a newspaper, listened to the radio or looked at the interwebs for a few years, Twitter is the latest stage in the progression of web formats. It is essentially a type of personal website so easy to update that users are often tempted to do so even when they don't really need to. "

Or in other words, it's like TheRegister, but for people who aren't tech journalists....

What's the Paris Hilton angle?

Giant flying pliers menace West Bromwich

Isn't that...

Isn't this just a publicity shot from the next Doctor Who Christmas Special?!?

'Health and safety killjoys' kill cheese-rolling race

H&S

Health and safety has two problems here:

1) Inherent danger involved in the activity.

Not a biggie. Some people climb hundreds of metres up without safety equipment. Their life, their choice.

2) Overcrowding.

When the event draws too many people, individual risk gives way to collective risk. This event has got so big that one person's slip could hurt a lot of people. This event was originally a small local gathering, and would have happened in many places around the area. It did not evolve for the scale presented now. Marathons have large numbers of participants. Sprints do not. Nature of the game.

If people want to take part in cheese rolling, they should organise their own local event.

Lots of small ones is safer than one big one.

Zero* welcome for 200 Welsh TV shows - in Wales

Myth...?

So what you're saying is "I am Welsh, I don't speak Welsh, therefore Welsh people don't speak Welsh?" I think you'll find that some actually do. No-one in the UK believes all Welsh people speak Welsh.

And as for less languages...

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Agreed.

"The welsh language is a luxury that the country ... can ill afford in these straitened financial times"

I would like to extend this argument to English. The grammatical irregularities, lunatic spelling system and strangulated pronunciation make it a massively inefficient medium of communication, and a luxury we can ill afford. Switching to Esperanto would allow us to get our kids out of school and into the workhouse by the age of 12.

In these straitened financial times, these are the sorts of measures we must take....

Mutated genetic supertrout developed in lab

My God! What have we done?

Some supervillian will now apply this to the Great White, and man will finally be confined to land.

Oh, the humanity!