Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Street View spymobile snowmobile prowls Winter Olympics

That last picture...

What do you mean "camera cover" -- that's a screenshot from a new hi-definition version of Descent, isn't it?

El Reg reader assembles own iPad

There's an app for that...

Here, does the iPad support printers via USB breakout? I see a novelty freebie app coming on....

French poised to seize Port of Dover

Best thing for it.

If it's up for sale, it's best off being bought by the French -- Nord-Pas-de-Calais make a phenomenal amount of money off sales taxes at "booze-cruise" hypermarkets and wine warehouses, and the biggest customers of the ferries are tourists heading to France and French haulier Norbert Dentressangle delivering goods to the UK.

A French-owned Calais would be an investment that would be expected to pay off in multiple ways -- sell it to a corporation and it's profit above all else.

I'm not in favour of privatisation, not by any stretch, but this xenophobic "not the froggies" nonsense is risible. If we sell, they're the best buyer.

Drink beer not fizzy pop for pity's sake, say boffins

Well they did mention hops...

There's hops in lager, but you get some really hoppy real ales....

ARM boss forecasts mass migration to netbooks

Re: Photo Editing

Don't know about yours, but my netbook has an external monitor connection.

Once they all move from VGA to HDMI you'll even be able to use an HD telly as a 1920x1080 monitor. At that netbook could quite realistically replace the home PC for a massive percentage of the population.

Does Apple patent claim show iPad with built-in camera?

There will be a camera, but...

Yes, there'll be a camera-equipped model -- it's inevitable.

However, this patent is not evidence of this. Even if they had no plans to make one themselves, it's in Apple's interest to make sure that every patent they make for the iPhone covers as many devices as possible, if only to make sure that anyone who wants to do it has to pay through the nose.

Yes! It's the iPad jacket!

Not convinced...

Even aside from the "large only" thing, looking at the design, the only specific headphone conduit is from the iPod/MP3 pocket, so you can't even use your iPad as an oversized iPod.

Designer pitches iPad gaming wheel

Correct me if I'm wrong....

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't current iPhone/iPod Touch games already work this way, using the device's accelerometers?

The wheel designer hasn't created the problem of visual reference -- that's something the game designer's did. I'm guessing that they compensated for this in the programming of the game....

iPad runs Windows, Nokia runs OSX

Cope with Windows...?

"And surely the iPad is powerful enough to cope [with running Windows]?"

My car won't work on a railway. That's not because it's not powerful enough, it's just not built to run on rails. Windows has never been released for ARM, so it can't be run on the iPhone.

Unless you do what the Finnish Mac phone guy did and emulate an x86 processor in software, but that's something that the iPad is certainly not powerful enough for!

UK moob jobs rocket 80 per cent

What a great idea!

I don't shave often enough, I spend months between haircuts. It's all too much effort, but now I realise that I can get "positive results" from having my nose broken and reset -- all my problems are solved!!!

In all seriousness, saying anything positive about cosmetic surgery (ie non-reconstructive plastic surgery) is effectively talking up dysmorphia, which is a clinically recognised mental disorder.

Anyone who visits the cosmetic surgeon should be considered dysmorphic, and as such incompetent to give consent. And if a surgeon operates on someone incompetent to give consent, he must be struck off.

Yes, all cosmetic surgeons should be struck off.

Vote, vote, vote for Barbie the computer engineer

Actually...

I reckon this is a fit up.

I'm pretty certain the next Barbie will be a computer engineer whichever way the public votes.

Why? Cross-selling: there will be a pink Barbie netbook computer on the shelves by Christmas, you mark my words.

I voted computer engineer

I voted computer engineer, but I only voted at all because I know that if it comes out, Moss and Roy will get their hands on one. I have no idea what they'll do with it, but it ought to be hilarious.

In fact, it probably doesn't matter -- now that the suggestion's out there, it'll probably find its way into the series whether or not it actually exists.

Woman sues rail line for 'exploding' toilet

Ooooooooooh.....

Ooooooh... the Rock Island Line is a mighty good road.

The Rock Island Line is the road to ride

The Rock Island Line is a mighty good road

There's a woman on the shitter,

Pulled the chain came back and hit 'er.

Gonna need a lot more paper

On the Rock Island Line....

California school pulls 'oral sex' dictionary

Shipping report...

...Rockall, Force 4, N by NW; teacup, force 10...

At my primary school, we had kids dictionaries. Bigger print, simpler explanations, fewer rude words. This is not an affront to children's intelligence.

In some other schools, they used "proper" dictionaries, dirty words and all. This was not an affront to decency. (Heck, we even had the "big dictionary" at the front of the class too, and another in the library.)

To me, either policy is acceptable. If a particular school authority wants to change policy, that is acceptable too, and it's acceptable that a transitional period sees both in schools.

What is unreasonable and unacceptable is that both sides make this out to be a major human rights crisis, and that these rights have to be protected on an individual-by-individual basis.

It's not the kids who need to grow up, but everyone else.

(Besides, when does a kid really need a dictionary anyway?)

Mozilla buries heels on un-YouTube open video

Cost of development...?

If it H.264 cost $5,000,000 for browser implementation, and there's now 5 major browsers (IE, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari), that's 25 million dollars.

If we assume that they're going to make the same amount of money from consumer digital video devices, that's another 25 million, totalling 50 million dollars.

Then we take the assumption that they're planning to make more from commercial encoding (broadcast, DVD distribution, VoD sites) we're looking at least another 50 million.

So it would appear that they want over $100,000,000 for a video codec.

Did the spend an inordinate number of man-hours working on this, or are they taking just the pi[NO CARRIER]

Multi-million investment hints at UK battery swap shops

Good point.

OK, so we're not expecting to get a brand-new battery every time, but as battery capacities degrade with age, you have no idea how far you can go after a change. It's like going to a petrol station, asking for a lucky dip on fuel amount and running without a petrol gauge. (My work laptop still shows over 90% charge 30 seconds before it pops up a low battery warning and spontaneously shuts down....)

Only nukes can stop planetsmash asteroids, say US boffins

Hmmm... can I see the odds?

I just have this nasty feeling that an orbital nuclear strike platform is more likely to be used for a military strike than against a catastrophic piece of space debris. Comparing the number of known catastrophic space debris strikes against the number of armed conflicts in human history doesn't leave you with favourable odds....

Linux coders do it for money

But coding is not the whole effort.

Testers and debuggers generate very very few lines of code, but they're not an insignificant part of the dev process.

Can we see a follow-up that examines paid-for testing. If Red Hat et al aren't putting doing their own thorough testing, they're setting themselves up for liability....

RockYou hack reveals easy-to-crack passwords

Old vs New problem

"Persuading users to use stronger passwords is an age-old problem that dates back to the dawn of the PC era."

It's not an old problem, it's a new problem.

In the old days, you had about 3 passwords; you had to convince the user to make them strong. Once they were strong, you could use them for a long time because they were secure. Because you didn't change them, you could remember them.

Now, we all have a dozen or so passwords. If we make them strong, they're hard to remember. The harder they are to remember, the more likely we are to reuse them. Because some people use weak passwords, corporate policies add a layer of security by forcing us to change them every few months.

I can remember every password I had on the computers at uni, because I used them frequently for a long time. My password for the office PC expires so quickly that I've barely learnt it by the time I'm asked to change it. The cognitive load is high, and every time I sit back down and unlock my PC, I have to filter out "noise" from half-a-dozen old and "other system" passwords before I get to log in.

So my passwords are getting weaker all the time as it's the only way to remember them.

It is a new problem -- it just looks similar to an old one.

Google taps Gmail for more clicks with ad tweak

Price rises.

As usual, a bunch of people say "why are you complaining"?

Google has got to the point where it rarely makes life any easier. Googlemail is presumably already turning a massive profit. If Google are increasing profits without improving UX, then it follows that Google are increasing prices (we are paying for Googlemail by our willingness to accept adverts) at no advantage to the user. It's a classic bait-and-switch: get them hooked on something cheap, then start turning the screw.

The cunning part of Google's plan is that the customer doesn't even realise he's paying!

Oz man coughs to DD-jub job advert outrage

Every day I hate my country more.

If this happened here, the ex-boss would be howling in indignation about lack of respect and lack of trust. Seems like in Australia, people are allowed to be human. Well fancy that -- human people.

No World Cup anthem for England football heroes

Next thing we know...

...Simon Cowell will turn this into an X'Factor special.

X-Factor: A Song For South Africa

Pogoplug to hop into Britain next month

Easy...?

So go on, tell us: what's the security like?

LG publishes bendy 19in e-newspaper

Radius...?

Any word on how tightly it can be rolled when not in use?

Peppa Pig told to belt up

Parents, eh?

See, normally parents are all proud and stuff cos their particular little brat is "special". But whenever it suits you, you're willing to take the opposite view -- that your child is 100% identical to every other child, so if anyone claims a child is different from yours it's clearly their fault.

Men more different from chimps than women, say boffins

Not much noise...?

"We hadn't noticed much noise coming from the rest of Christianity wanting to dissociate themselves from those fundies. If you don't wanna be identified with them, better say so publicly."

Well then you weren't paying attention. Both the Vatican and the Archbishopric of Canterbury publicly commemorated the 200/150th Darwin anniversary last year.

The simple fact is that the fundies are obsessed with the idea that evolution is wrong. Most people who believe in natural selection are not "obsessed" with it and as such simply do not devote as much time and energy to the subject as the obsessives.

You may similarly suggest that most vegetarians share PETA's extreme views because "they don't make as much noise" as PETA.

It would be a sad existence indeed if we had to devote our lives to shouting very loudly about what we aren't.

Isn't it obvious?

Think this conclusion was surely to be expected.

Females mammals (all vertebrates?) are born with their ova (eggs) already formed in their ovaries.

Males, on the other hand, produce their reproductive cells by cell division in their testes over the course of their life.

In the case of humans, eggs have a genetic code formed from DNA that's less than a year old, whereas sperm has a code from DNA that's at least 13, and possibly over 70 years old.

The majority of genetic mutations are therefore introduced into the gene pool by the degradation of the DNA in the male reproductive organs.

Any chromosome present in both male and female populations will undergo significant mutation via the male population, but be "normalised" by the less mutated female cells. If the environment does not favour mutation (and populations often prefer the status quo), over generations, the "conservative" female-transmitted gene will be selectively preserved.

The Y chromosome is the only thing not transmissable by females. This means that there is no "conservative" female line and the gene is left to mutate like crazy.

It's a fairly logical outcome, although it's fair enough that people don't think about it before they see the evidence.

World standards body maps out 3D TV generations

Viewer tracking...?

"the ITU said the next generation of the technology will enable just that. It will require the transmission of multiple 3D images in parallel, each view selected as the playback system tracks the motion of the viewer."

What about people who (*gasp*) watch TV with friends and family? Which viewer exactly is the TV expected to track.

UK.gov moves to block Hamas kids site

Re: Eh, no

Man is not descended from the *currently living* great apes, but given our massive genetic similarity to chimps and bonobos, and the relatively big genetic difference between us and orangutangs, our common ancestor with the chimp would have been a member of the ape family, something which had evolved after the split between the African Homonidae (gorillas, chimps) and the Eastern Homonidae (whence modern Orangutans).

Man is descended from apes -- the "missing link" being sought is when man ceased to be an ape and became man.

New Labour bring old Nuremberg Laws to Britain

Only following orders, but admissibility...?

OK, so UK law protects "only following orders", but let me ask you this:

Is it not still the case that evidence illegally procured is inadmissible in court? As such, random stop-and-search is still a very bad idea, because even if by random luck you find a terrorist masterplan, the address book of the entire Al-Qaeda network and a nugget of weapons-grade plutonium, any attempts to prosecute would (or should) get thrown out of court (wrongful arrest, inadmissible evidence etc). Any attempts to get a court-order for surveillance would have to be turned down (again, no admissible evidence).

I don't suppose the Reg could ask the Home Office about that, could you?

E-book readers attract unwanted VAT

Poor rationale..

"How can a Gummint impose that with legal download (Gutenberg)"

VAT is a percentage of sale price ("value" added tax is a misnomer). 17.5% of free = 0. And 0 tax is easy to collect.

"and illegal D/L"

Hmmm... Last time I checked, the plague of drug-fuelled happy-slapping hoodie-shoplifters terrorising our inner cities (as defined by the Daily Mail) hadn't caused the government to abolish VAT on the items most commonly shoplifted....

3D TV gets cold shower from Avatar man

Polarised projection...

I take it that's all they do in the cinema, then. So what's all this gumph about LCDs, plasma etc when projection technology can already solve the problem?

Labour MP experiences nasty video shock horror

Quite right, quite wrong.

* Quite right:

UFC is not suitable for children, so should not be automatically exempt. The sporting exemption should not extend to combat sports. The BBFC should, however, have the right to grant an automatic classification to sporting events carried out under the auspices of a sport's official governing body. The level of violence in competition karate, jiu-jitsu etc is heavily regulated and blood-letting is only ever the result of accidents. PG seems suitable, even without viewing the video. UFC has a predictable amount of blood and injury and it would be safe to say it should always have a mature rating, although I'm not sure whether 15 or 18 is more suitable.

* Quite right:

The modern music video is an entertainment artform, and is often constructed in the manner of a short film (consider the milk cartons in Blur's "Coffee and TV"). The exemption was based on the idea of a performance recording -- a band on stage, an orchestra in the orchestra pit, whatever. A true performance recording maybe should still be exempt, but why should a modern music video by treated differently from any other short film?

* Quite wrong:

That any parliament should introduce wide ranging powers under the justification of preventing the extreme and unarguable case. Publicising the extreme case is nothing more than misleading the public.

Avatar renders this earthly life meaningless

Well said.

Hopefully doctors faced with cases of the "Pandora blues" will have the good sense to recommend things like

* A trip to the Rockies.

* A hike in Yellowstone.

* Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

* A boat journey on the Hudson or Amazon River.

* A trip on an Antarctic icebreaker.

* Crewing a yacht round the Hebrides.

* Sea kayaking in a Norwegian fjord.

* Piloting a river barge on the Canal du Midi.

* River-rafting through Nepal from the foothills of the Andes.

* Snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef.

* Walking the Great Wall of China.

...is there a limit on the size of these text boxes? [cont p.96]

Brown offers free laptops to deprived UK schoolkids

Glad to hear it...

I'm glad to hear the package is good, but since the initial planning stages, there's been a revolution in Small Cheap Computing. The pilot should be reconsidered as a proof of concept, and the nationwide rollout should be based on new SCC/netbook/nettop technology. Preferably with HDMI so that we can go back to the old days of using a single screen as both the TV and computer monitor.

Mozilla tries to silence add-on developers' scream

Lockdown...?

Lockdown, in an open source product? How does that work then?

Dadaist user manuals - a call for submissions

Babelfish?!?

@AC

"Nope, cheaper and quicker to knock it through Babelfish"

Erm... you know Babelfish knows how to spell "you", right? This was written by a human being... who just happened to learn his English via MSN Messenger.

Pico projectors go large in 2010

Pico?

Looking at that Brightboxe, it's not even in the "micro" range. Who are they trying to kid?

Google to mobile industry: ‘F*ck you very much!’

Except...

Unfortunately, if they ever offer a plan without a handset at a discounted price, they can no longer claim that the bundled handset is "free".

That way they fail to sell -- sorry, "give away" -- the latest new device. Not only does that mean lost handset sales -- I mean "giveaways", sorry -- but as the latest phones encourage you to use more data it's a lost opportunity to sell bigger data plans....

Freed Peter Moore will be 'paid in full' for time as Iraq hostage

Advice for the next poor sod to get taken hostage...

If you're ever taken hostage, tell your captors that if they kill you before releasing you, the capitalist dogs won't have to pay your wages, but if they keep you alive for a couple of years you will be able to attack the cold hard of the bourgeoisie with a massive overtime claim.

U2 frontman bitchslapped by TalkTalk

Increased singles sales != Increased sales

The great pick-n-mix of iTunes is killing the album.

Of course, the album's integrity was continually undermined during the nineties and naughties by gimmick marketing: incessant "bonus features" destroyed the experience for the listener.

The "hidden track" was never well hidden and meant your CD would go silent for a minute or three before playing a minute or two of title track reprise. Kind of took the point out of getting a CD multichanger if you couldn't just let your CDs run continuously.

The "rerelease album with extra track that we released as a single" or "now with added bonux tracks" thing almost invariably led to an inconsistent sound across the album (because the tracks were recorded at a different time with different instruments and/or settings and possibly even a different band line-up), a bit like inserting a purple picture into a collection from Picasso's blue period -- similar, maybe; good, again maybe; out of place, definitely.

And then there was remix fever, which meant getting two or three songs from the album repeated at the end in a completely unrecognisable version in a style that fans of the artist's original style probably wouldn't like anyway. This combines the negative effects of deja vu with a rather extreme version of the inconsistency of the "wrong colour" bonus tracks problem above.

The album should be able to be taken as a single work or a collection of works (consider that "opera" is a Latin plural word, yet many purists still hold that a single piece from an opera cannot be fully appreciated outside of the complete opera). Short-sighted sales-chasing by the labels undermined that and now they're taking the hit.

Facebook offs social suicide service

Blocked IP addresses?

Simply solution: client software.

This could be as simply as a sand-boxed browser plugin that connects to Facebook for your and passes through communication between Facebook and DeFacebook or whatever it's called.

BAE Saudi 'corruption' case could go to US Supremes

Establish precedent...?

Maybe the big concern is that this might establish precedent for considering BAE Systems a de facto American company and stop all the ridiculous UK government spending....

Microsoft tosses Windows, Office discounts at XP holdouts

Not quite

The word processing features in Word have been made harder to use by the interference caused by the half-@r$€d implementation of DTP within the application.

There's technical problems (eg the invisible formatting markup for a paragraph sometimes magically disappears when you chose to delete the wrong word or carriage return) and there's user problems (people start focusing on layout too early on and it distracts from the content).

Google Chrome OS goes native (code)

Native codecs...

" With the next preview release of Opera 10.5, it will add support for native video codecs, mirroring what Mozilla has done with Firefox. "

Praytell... will that mean adding in another set of codecs for each video type, or will it happily share the codecs that I installed for VLC?

Homemade airship prang closes highway in Oklahoma

You landed on the road WHY?!?!?

"According to Polzein he was forced to come down on the interstate to avoid an even more dangerous descent into trees."

Descending into trees put one man in danger. Descending on the interstate -- in an unlicensed, illegal vehicle -- puts dozens of lives in danger.

A man who takes risks should learn to accept the consequences.

Google 'open' memo betrays deep corporate delusion

Zero cost of entry

"Google has zero cost of entry if you have a computing device capable of running a web browser and accessing the internet."

Urm... really? You think my Vista PC and Virgin media "L" cable subscription is going to let me crawl, cache and index the entire internet, or even a substantial proportion of it?

In 2005 Google estimated that the internet was 5 exabytes in size, and they'd only just broken the 170 terabyte mark in their indexing.

What happens if we assume that Google's index is about a petabyte?

To get all that data, it would take me 277,777,778 hours assuming maximum throughput and no throttling by Virgin. That's 11,574,074 days, or 31,688 years. And in the meantime, the data keeps changing.

To store it, I'd need one thousand hard-drives, at about 100 quid each -- £100,000! But of course, I'd need some way of connecting them to my Compaq laptop, which doesn't have any external SATA capacity, never mind 1000 ports. That would take a full data centre SAN setup.

The start-up costs are far from zero.

Better user experience, higher price.

Yes, Google has massively increased the user experience, but the price that they charge the user has increased.

The data they take from users is exceptionally valuable, and that value is increasing exponentially as they take more and more.

Google is doing what every good monopoly does: increase its price after capturing the user base.

The thing is, because we don't see the direct cost of the price rise, we disregard it as negligible and don't move to competitors.

So now I just need to type "time" and I get the time in the UK, because Google knows where I am despite connecting from a multinational company network. But that is a cheap function, and certainly not worth the vast amount of potential marketing cash that Google make by knowing where I live. It's not a hardship to have to type "time in UK", certainly, and that's if my PC didn't already have a clock.

Chinese villager jailed for eating tiger

We're no different....

The only thing that stops us Europeans and North Americans killing our wildlife is that we've already done so. Bears, wolves, bison, auroch, beaver, reindeer -- these species have been wiped out completely in parts of Europe and in some cases in their entirety.

I'm not saying we should allow other countries to make the same mistakes as us, just that it is sheer bigotry and hypocrisy to criticise them without acknowledging our own past mistakes. In fact, it borders on racism.

Vatican awards self 'unique copyright' on Pope

Atheist vs atheist...

"Yes atheists have commited mass murder aginst religous groups but you don't see atheist killing atheist because they don't like their version of atheism."

You're clearly not up on the history of the USSR then.

Soviet Communism is a secular, atheistic political philosophy. Much like the religious, theistic philosophy called Christianity, Soviet Communism underwent a significant amount of schism.

In a very real sense, they killed Trotsky because his atheism didn't match Stalin's.