* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

E-car driven from Dover to Calais

The Indomitable Gall

New campaign:

It's high time one of the service tunnels was opened to cyclists. Then we can stop all this John O'Groats to Land's End nonsense and do John O'Groats to Gibraltar!!!!!

MS store staff in spontaneous electric boogie

The Indomitable Gall

I'm a Mac/I'm a PC

The PC guys can dance like that, but the Mac should put on a hat and dance a tango with a gorgeous Argentinian burd.

Dell re-badges Cray for low-end cruncher

The Indomitable Gall

Or it may just be...

It may just be that they can't afford to bring in the volume of Linux support staff required until they've tested the waters.

T-shirt firm hijacks good ship Pirate Bay

The Indomitable Gall

Trademarks and copyrights

There may not be a trademark on it, but it's still copyrighted.

This would leave the wonderful stand-off of one party being the only body able to use it as a brand, yet not actually having the rights to use it at all, while TPB would be able to use it as artwork, but not to actually brand or advertise any service.

A very weird state of affairs....

Religious discrimination law may open door for decent deviants

The Indomitable Gall

I'm confused.

Is political philosophy not philosophy now?

And is my belief that the fortunates (the rich/well-off and the able-bodied) should provide for the unfortunates (poor, disabled etc) a socialist political view, a socialist philosophical view or a Christian religious view?

Even if we can separate this trichotomy and have me as holding separate but identical political, philosophical and religious views, which of these traits is recessive and which dominant in the eyes of the courts? Does having a political view trump the philosophical and religious views and invalidate them in court or is it OK to have a political view that arises from a philosophy and still defend it on philosophical grounds.

Personally, I find the idea of a political policy that is not based on some form of philosophy kind of scary.

"Taxation of the rich -- because providing for the poor is the right thing to do!" is fair enough.

"No extra tax burden on the rich, because they're generating wealth and deserve to be rewarded for it" is also fair enough, although I'd personally vote against it.

But "taxation of the rich -- because... well... I don't know, it just kind of sounds good, doesn't it?" really is quite worrying.

Channel 4 to become Channel 3D tonight

The Indomitable Gall

@zerofool2005

"The polarizing lense ones work a lot better. but Im guessing the picture has to be in HD to work properly..."

The screen also needs to be polarising for it to work properly. Only polarised light will be filtered by polarised lenses, and your average TV emits non-polarised light.

Sun's Facebook-slapping hits wrong target

The Indomitable Gall

Oh you cynics...

Next you'll be saying that the constant articles relating to Sky television are biased too...

Murdoch admits delays on paywall scheme

The Indomitable Gall

Paying minority vs freetard majority

Murdoch's market is clearly more select than mere webscrapers and freetards:

I confidently predict that any paper that sells itself as Kindle or iPhone subscriptions will make more money than the advertisers give to the current free sites even with all and sundry viewing them.

Brown declines to resign

The Indomitable Gall

"well over"

10/10 for creative English. "well over" makes such a big figure out of... <drum roll> 0.12% of the country's population.

Wow.

Fat Reg slims down for spanking new mobile phone version

The Indomitable Gall

Product suggestion...

"And yes, we are prepping an iPhone app version of The Reg. But apart from the obvious eye candy, we're hard pressed to think of anything unique that we can bring to the party - that is, anything that we would not also add to our "vanilla" mobile version. All suggestions welcome."

Commentard filtering for those who don't want to see their beloved iPaidtoomuch mocked on its own screen...?

Open University talks clouds with MS and Google

The Indomitable Gall

Perfect for the OU.

The OU is the perfect candidate for Cloud computing.

Historically, the OU computer requirements have been Windows-only, for compatibility purposes... but even then, not all Windows systems are equal and message boards are always awash with technical concerns for the first couple of months of any course. As distance students we don't have the option of just popping into the uni library to use the computers there.

Clouds, SAAS, whatever you want to call it, it gives an interface that theoretically should work the same on everything from a Linux eeePC 2G, through a current MacBook Pro to a Sun supercomputer.

Americans promised all you can eat Twittering for $99

The Indomitable Gall

If it's only on Amazon...

If it's only being sold by Amazon, maybe they're piggybacking Whispernet.

Economies of scale, and all that....

Marvel Comics open on iPhone

The Indomitable Gall

And they tell me the iPhone isn't for saddos...

And as I constantly say to one of those same saddos (my long-haired, head-banging, comic reading brother) paper-based comic layouts don't work on screen.

If people want digital comics, they need to design them first and foremost for the screen.

And like Robert E A Harvey, I do think it's a bit much to charge so much for such a substandard delivery/product.

Disclaimer -- yes, I appreciate that there is genuine literature in the "graphic novel" world, but that would be Persepolis, Maus, Arrugas etc... not XMen, Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk. These series continue to exist purely to milk the crowd. Real literature has a beginning, a middle and an end

Charlize Theron to travel Mad Max's Fury Road

The Indomitable Gall

Australia: post-apocalyptic holiday of the stars....

First came the Americans (Tina Turner), and now the English and South Africans.

If the Australian outback is so appealing, I hate to think what happened to London, Cape Town and New York...

Nokia 6303 Classic

The Indomitable Gall

If it's just for talking...

If it's just for talking, why the battery-burning backlit full-colour screen? Give me an old-school reflective monochrome display please.

State attorney nabbed in car with stripper, Viagra and sex toys

The Indomitable Gall

You wot?

" A South Carolina deputy assistant attorney general who claimed he was on his lunch break, but was actually entertaining a stripper in his SUV "

You know, the two are not mutually exclusive. Maybe he was entertaining a stripper in his SUV in his lunch break. And I'm not sure if it's really his bosses' business what he does in his spare time. Given that they're legal eagles I'm guessing they know their rights, but I reckon he's got good grounds to claim he was done in as a personal grudge -- after all, it was a jealous missus what grassed him up.

Government to protect children from zombie paedophiles

The Indomitable Gall

Don't be so hasty....

I can imagine those crafty genius paedos faking their own deaths if it would let them back into our schools....

Atheists smite online God poll

The Indomitable Gall

Re: hahahahahahahaha

@ Dom S

"when are the christian population going to realise that they are slowly reducing in numbers?!"

Erm... did you even check what the "Alpha Course" is...? It's an evangelical program that was established because...

<drum roll>

...the Christian population realised that they were slowly reducing in numbers!!!!

Magpies hold funerals for fallen feathered friends

The Indomitable Gall

Funerals and beliefs

Why does everyone assume that human funeral rites had their origins in religion? If these observations were repeated, we could posit instead that various behaviours contributed to it:

1. Check the bugger's dead.

2. Whee-yoo -- go and do something with that cadaver, it's stinking the place out.

3. Communities that buried or burned their dead lived longer cos of lack of disease.

4. Communities that buried or burned their dead lived longer cos the local predators didn't develop a taste for human flesh.

The religious elements -- providing for the afterlife, appeasing angry gods, showing respect for the spirit -- could have been mere post-facto rationalisation.

(Disclaimer: I am actually religious, it's just that I accept the legitimacy of anthropological inquiry. Knowing the biological or psychological basis for belief neither confirms nor denies that belief.)

Court kicks YouTube rant missus into touch

The Indomitable Gall

Ow my ears

I started the embedded video then accidentally opened two YouTube windows simultaneously. Bizarrely, that turned out to be less of a racket than listening to just one...!

Hands on with Acer's dual-OS netbook

The Indomitable Gall

For the love of God... give us a microkernel

Now that someone's using a full OS as a quick-boot, isn't it more proof of the need for a decent modular microkernel architecture?

Just imagine if this machine booted into a basic SplashTop-like environment then started booting additional modules only when needed. Or let you suffer the boot time of Windows if you preferred.

That's what's called "user experience", that is.

Federal boffins: 'Giant invading snakes' will soon rule USA

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Poor snakes

"Given the ... proven ability of even pre-historic communities to eradicate large animals,"

Name one? The mammoth appears to have been killed by disease according to the fossil record.

Child porn threat to airport's 'virtual strip search' scanners

The Indomitable Gall

Not a photograph? Not an argument.

Wasn't there something saying that even cartoons were covered under the new laws?

Subaru set to show stylish hybrid

The Indomitable Gall

Li-ion batteries under the driver's seat?!?

Surely sticking a highly flammable, potentially explosive cell underneath the driver isn't the best idea in the world?

What's that you say? It's either there, in the fuel-and-air-filled engine or next to a full petrol tank?

Devil, deep-blue sea, rock, hard place, creek, !paddle.

Translation outfit seeks Glaswegian speakers

The Indomitable Gall

"ow bist old butt?"

"ow bist old butt?"

How very Germanic. "Hoe bist du?" an a that.

PC tune-up software: does it really work?

The Indomitable Gall

@Tony Smith

"That'll be the green bar in the chart that you're after."

The one that says "512Mb"? It would have been clearer if it said "unmodified" or something. The article didn't make me really grasp the importance of 512Mb.

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

Wotno control?

Where's the "before" figures? All your graphs show how "good" each item is relative to each other, but there is no measure of improvement in performance from the original base system. So the information tells us what's better from the assumption we're buying one -- the graphs do not tell us whether it's worth buying any in the first place.

Greens more likely thieves and liars, says shock study

The Indomitable Gall

Moral high ground...?

I believe the conclusion, but don't think the method proves it.

The thing with corruption is that it only happens to good people -- bad people are bad, good people can be corrupted.

Altruism is being slowly trained out of us. We spend less time engaged in social interaction and more time starting at the goggle box (with or without a control pad in hand) and we expect a reward for any good thing we do.

It's conditioning -- pure and simple. We do something good, we expect reward.

So charity bosses organise parties for themselves, send themselves on jollies, up their own salaries -- all from the charity budget -- because of all the good they've done.

A councillor, for all his good work for the community, decides to reward himself by diverting the new bypass away from his back garden.

Some soldiers, having liberated a town, proceed to extract their "reward" in the form of looting and raping.

Christianity got at least one thing right: we're all "sinners", and doing good things is just making us "less bad", not "good". Following that line, we would never get to the stage that we assume the right to select our own reward.

Microsoft's browser ballot bodge gets the nod

The Indomitable Gall

@Iggle Piggle

"why does this pettiness only seem to apply to Microsoft?"

Because Microsoft's own browser has long been non-compliant with relevant standards. Their server software has long been non-compliant with relevant standards. Their web-design software has long been non-compliant with relevant standards.

Some have suggested that this is an active policy of "the web is Windows". Meanwhile, Opera is one of the best standards-compliant browsers around, so putting that as the only choice on your Wii doesn't encourage developers to work for a closed system. Safari's not bad either, so your iPhone's OK too.

"The web is Windows" damages us all, because we all want to be freed from our PCs (hence the rise of iPhone, Wii etc browsing).

Microsoft-tested browser prosecution snares tech giants

The Indomitable Gall
WTF?

I still don't understand...

I still don't understand why <embed> doesn't count as prior art....

Google strips Pirate Bay homepage from search results

The Indomitable Gall

Calm down, dear, Google will deal with it.

Google have clearly been cunning.

They've received a DMCA takedown notice for "thepiratebay.org" and they have followed it -- literally.

They've always made it clear that they're never going to blanket ban a site, and now they're taking the path of least resistance (compliance) yet simultaneously engaged in passive resistance (work to rule).

If they receive a further DMCA notice stating that they take the whole site out of the index, they're going to tell the submitter where to go, stating (correctly) that they're overstepping the bounds of the DMCA by requesting takedown of pages that do not relate to their IP, which would be fraudulent, therefore thoroughly illegal. This will then be followed by Google telling the IP owner that they have to specify explicitly ever single *page* (not server) that they want excluded.

The copyright owners give up.

The thieves win.

As do the advertising scum.

Content creators lose.

O2 could impose out-of-contract iPhone lock-in

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

Exclusive contract with Apple...?

Well I'm sorry, the contract of *sale* with the consumer trumps that. It is now well established by precedent that the end-user gets the unlock code at the end of the contract.

Unless O2 want to provide a full refund on purchase price...?

Yank slams El Reg 'zio-fruitcake' Playmobil 'crap'

The Indomitable Gall

Zio

For all those who're wondering, I believe "zio-" is a reference to "zionist".

However, it shows a poor grasp of logic. Zionists are militaristic/security-minded, and the reg hates militaristic security nightmare theatre.

German firm fails to trademark !

The Indomitable Gall

Cue...

Cue thousands of spreadshirt, zazzle, shirtcity etc etc users making Ts with big exclamation marks to thoroughly blast the "distinctive character" thing out of the water.

Autodesk goes after eBay seller - again

The Indomitable Gall

License conditions?

" Autodesk is likely to argue that it can license its own products on any basis it chooses. "

Yes, but the license is inside the box. Were these unopened copies...?

Facebook turns users into web translation engine

The Indomitable Gall

Apples and oranges

Google Translate is designed to translate large texts, where you've got a lot of repeated language, related terminology and redundant information.

Facebook translations are for user interface elements: small messages containing no repeated information and virtually no redundant information.

Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about translation knows that small translations are actually more demanding than long ones.

Gov demand for Governator to terminate PunterNet

The Indomitable Gall

Private Eye...

Do Private Eye have a "RecessionBalls" section yet? If so, expect to see this in the next one:

"Once again, instead of prioritising dealing with rape and other violence, Harman is prioritising censorship and repression. It is women trying to support families in the recession who will be first to suffer."

Home Office declines to detail DNA-for-foreigns trial

The Indomitable Gall

Genetics of nationality

What's got into all you naysayers? Don't you realise how easy it is to trace nationality by DNA?

Once upon a time, there were several great Empires: Spain, Portugal, France, Germany and Great Britain. These powers went to foreign lands and through meticulous surveys of tribal links divided their conquests into racially harmonised territories and protectorates. This as opposed to just drawing lines on a map.

Had they just drawn lines on a map, these days Tutses would have found themselves living in Hutu-majority areas and Hutus would have found themselves living in Hutu-majority areas and there would be big racist massacres and genocide and all that, rather than Africa being the paradisical peace-loving continent it is today.

Had they just drawn lines on a map, this DNA thing would be useless, but as their new countries were ethnically homogenous, that's not the case.

Nation's moral guardians snap over 'shag bands'

The Indomitable Gall

@Lloyd

" Won't somebody please think of the children!!!!! "

I'm sure the Sun will be pleased to tell us that there's lots of people doing so already. And that they're looking for sh@g bands. And that if your kid gets his/her black band snapped by a filthy old perv... well, God help us all.

Flickr!: Now! with! added! Yahoo!

The Indomitable Gall

The irony...!

"we made Flickr! Not Yahoo!"

Complaining about Yahoo! stealing the brand and he calls it "Flickr!" -- he's been synergised!

EU to shout at media player makers over noise levels

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Hang on a second

@Jonas Taylor

I believe that there is legislation in certain countries (France, maybe?). It may be that if Apple had to make changes to the electronics (to prevent simply reflashing the restrictions away) they decided to make this the designated "European model" to minimise retooling at the factory and cope with that pesky "free trade" thingy we've got going on here.

All speculation -- I don't give two hoots about iAnything. I'm more concerned in the general nonsense of limiting sound output on a device that doesn't actually have sound output. As others have said -- the volume of sound from a set of headphones isn't just the result of the electrical output of the device feeding it, but also the efficiency of the driver, the distance between the ear drum and the driver, and whether the driver is working in an enclosed space or there's sound "leakage" around the earphones.

USB 3.0 webcam streams 1080p video

The Indomitable Gall

Re: "webcam"

@TeeCee,

Yes, it's just a video camera, but I for one welcome the day when amateur film-making isn't tied to closed-platform camcorders.

First up: computer-controlled CCD+lens assembly can be synched with any other audio or video device you can connect to a PC. Currently only high-end cameras contain any synch circuitry, meaning editing of multiple sources is unnecessarily complicated as it relies on the old-school technique of clapper-boards and manual synch.

Secondly: camcorders have restricted storage/compression options. A miniDV tape can only store something like 15 minutes at broadcast quality. Solid-state and DVD cams record at compression ratios that leave the picture well below broadcast quality. HDD camcorders vary, and you're never quite sure what you'll get. If the camera provides an uncompressed HD feed, you're getting ever single thing the camera sees, which means you can rescale, recut, re-edit and compress and still end up with a broadcast-quality video.

Finally: reduction of redundant components. On any film shoot you generally have as many storage devices as input devices (audio recorders & cameras. If your software, your drives and your USB controller can handle the throughput, why not let them control more than one device. You're not only reducing bulk, but you're also making it easier to find related material.

US deputies taze traffic dodging rogue emu

The Indomitable Gall

Re:WTF

@AC

Simples: modern hope is injuring traditional human despair. Pigs the world over are trying to help despair recover its natural supremacy by tazing all and sundry, scanning phones and confiscating cameras.

With the filth roaming our streets, the prognosis is looking bright for human despair.

'Buy puke-rays and we'll donate to police widows & orphans'

The Indomitable Gall

For pity's sake.

Diverting public procurement cash to charity is probably against the law in a number of states. Any force considering these will be likely to ask to keep the $25 themselves. This is a headline grab.

Britons warned of plague of the 'supercats'

The Indomitable Gall

All cats should be banned

Domestic cats are a non-native, invasive, destructive species.

They were introduced to these islands as mousers, but your average domestic moggy rarely catches house mice these days, instead prefering to maul outdoor wildlife. Feral broods breed rampantly leading to pockets of undernourished, in-bred mangy bundles of disease, although this is less of a problem in northern climes. (Northern Spanish coastal towns, on the other hand, are festooned with flea-ridden feral felines.)

They serve no useful purpose and are now mere agents of distruction -- ban the buggers.

Street View stalks Swiss data protection bureau

The Indomitable Gall

Not Thür...

According to the Basel driver database that's not his car.

Rich people cannot feel pain, don't care if they're liked

The Indomitable Gall

Richness or stimulation?

I mean, shuffling decorated bits of paper is surely more stimulating than shuffling blank bits?

Maybe bored people feel more pain.

Warning: Showers can seriously damage your health

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Seriously...

Don't they do this in shower gel ads? Maybe we should sue them for setting a bad example....

Swayze death exploited to serve up fake anti-virus

The Indomitable Gall
Unhappy

I'd be more likely...

I'd be more likely to fall for a Keith Floyd one, to be honest.

Japan gets to grips with train-grope websites

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Re: Ok, let's get this straight.

You know what causes that "one small problem"? The low signal-noise ratio on comment threads is self-sustaining.

When you can't find sensible comments, you start to get the feeling that the comment page only exists to list inane mindless witterings.

Furthermore, the speed at which these pages fill puts an urgency on the writer, and even if you intend to write something sensible, you end up in such a rush that you end up sounding like a moron.