* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Researchers forge secure kernel from maths proofs

The Indomitable Gall

Bartenders (re: 'c' code ?)

@ vincent himpe

What's your point? The bartender's problem is a matter of "blinding with science". It's works by assuming false premises, and expressing them in such a matter-of-fact way that the listener takes them as given.

In fact, I've been asked variations on the bartender's problem without actually knowing the answer themselves. When I explain how it works, I sometimes find they're so trapped in the illusion that they refuse to accept the answer. (Are you one of these...?)

The thing with computers is that yes, they are reliant on valid input, and false premises programmed in can be a stopping point, but if they have all the appropriate information, their lack of a brain means there's no psychological tricks you can employ to convince them not to explore the full search space.

Directgov farms out web content across Europe

The Indomitable Gall

Abroad...

"But the downside for some is that potentially sensitive government data ends up cached abroad. "

How many EU countries have weaker data protection than ours? (genuine question)

Jetpod 'flying taxi' inventor dies in prototype crash

The Indomitable Gall

RIP.

Condolences to family and loved ones.

He had the guts to put himself in the way of danger rather than a test pilot -- that makes him one of the good guys in my book.

Dell boxes VGA cable to within an inch of its life

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Meh

"Who uses VGA cables anyway"

Well at least analogue video has graceful degradation (hence colour changes when he wiggles the cable). Your HDMI cable either works or doesn't. That's digital for you.

Lad passes gruelling 'getting on bus' test

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

This is a train-based syllabus ill-advisedly applied to buses.

Where I come from, you need to start the process of getting off a bus before it comes to a halt. If you were to wait for the bus to stop and *then* get out of your seat, the driver would pull off again before you reached the exit. It's only trains that stop long enough at every stop for you to do that.

EPIC FAIL!!!!!11!!!!!1!!!

Cops taser naked doorbell-ringing giant

The Indomitable Gall
Troll

Tazers

Tazers save lives because they're used where the alternative would be lethal firearms. Like when you're chasing a flasher. With no weapon. And clearly nowhere to conceal one.

God bless the tazer.

When is an operating system not an operating system?

The Indomitable Gall

You want a lean OS, but a standard OS...?

OK, so you want a lean OS for efficiency in operation in a VM, and you want a standardised, non-customised OS for efficiency of support.

To me, that sounds like what you want is a microkernel OS. Microkernels are by nature lean and are dynamically self-optimising, giving you the best of both worlds.

The world and his dog has been crying out for a decent microkernel OS, but no-one has ever been willing to put the time in, instead developing more and more convoluted ways to patch, modify and blu-tack external code onto the major monolithic kernels.

If virtualisation finally provides the impetus for a truly world-class microkernel architecture, then virtualisation is indeed the way of the future.

Report: US planetsmash-asteroid scan running years late

The Indomitable Gall
Dead Vulture

1km in size...?

Oh tut-tut, El Reg, arbiter of all-things accurate, talks about space rocks "bigger than 1km in size." A three-dimensional object measured as a single dimensional scalar? I assume this is "longer than 1km".

I shall be cancelling my subscription etc (cont. p97)

How to hack a Sony Reader

The Indomitable Gall

Oooh... neat...

But it's still the best part of £200 and there's no expansion ports. Boo. :-(

Perseid meteor shower set to dazzle disappoint

The Indomitable Gall
FAIL

Pointless in Scotland

Just before dawn?!? Do you know what time that is up here?!? Are they mad?!?

Boffins test cancer-stinging 'nano-bee' swarms in mice

The Indomitable Gall

No reports of zombie mice?!?!?

All lab rodents have been bred from albinos. What is the most remarkable feature of white/albino mice? Red eyes. What is the most unique feature of zombies? Red eyes.

So these scientists *can't know* that their lab rats aren't already zombies.

Run! Run for your lives!

Vulture 1: Calling all electronics wizards

The Indomitable Gall

So does that mean...

...you won't be using a ZX81 as the flight computer?

That just isn't cricket, old bean!

British boffin named first ever 'doctor of texting'

The Indomitable Gall
Pint

@Michael Miller

There are people who would say the same thing about a PhD in datamining, slightly brighter blue LED etc etc etc.

Just because it doesn't interest *you* doesn't mean it's not useful....

Increase in comms snooping? You ain't seen nothing yet

The Indomitable Gall
Black Helicopters

Re: LoL

@Mark,

Ah, but we're the *good guys* we have to break the rules in order to catch the guys who break the rules. How do I know we're the good guys? Well it's obvious, innit? Ahmadinejad uses a red laser pointer, while Whitehall uses green -- don't the bad guys always have red laser beams?

El Reg space paper plane christened Vulture 1

The Indomitable Gall
Paris Hilton

Re: Diminutive Crew?

@Vulch

"If I was a PlayMobil figure in El Reg's office I'd be getting worried and looking for escape routes about now..."

Why? Doesn't every PlayMobil figure look forward to its One Flight In Paris?

Apple denies censoring App Store swear words

The Indomitable Gall

Precedent...?

I'm quite sure we had dictionaries in my primary school that contained the words "shit" and "fuck". In fact, I distinctly remember looking them up and sniggering. "Bollocks", too.

There has never been age restrictions on buying dictionaries -- why change the status quo?

First success for vulture breeding programme

The Indomitable Gall
Joke

@Steve 70

It's a cycle of evil. You car drivers with your nasty petrol fumes run down bunnies and when the bunnies die the carrion birds come in and you kill them too.

You should be riding around on an organically farmed bicycle with jojoba wheels.

Bunny killer!

Google turns up nose at ebook monopoly claims

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

WTO -- can we have a w00t!?

So as this is clearly against the Berne Convention, can we assume that the EU (in the event of the settlement being cleared) will be raising this as a trade dispute? Can we have a referendum on what remedies we take?

I put my vote down for removing trademark protection on all US goods. Let's make "Coke", "MacDonalds" and "Domino's Pizza" into generic terms. And while we're at it, let's re-establish a geographical origin mark on "Budweiser" and ban Arheuser-Busch's banal brew from Europe.

MIPS open sources living room Android port

The Indomitable Gall
Dead Vulture

I'm confused... "open sourced"?

Hang on, they took an open-source OS and ported it. This means that the port was always open source. All they have done is make the source available independent of any (binary) software product -- the GPL would have been satisfied by simply providing the source to any purchaser of a MIPS Android product. However, as one of the purchasers would have made it publically anyway, that's a purely academic distinction.

So the story isn't "MIPS open sources living room Android port" but simply "MIPS living room Android port now available".

Powered robot suits make debut on Tokyo streets

The Indomitable Gall

@Charles9

But it wasn't the Japanese that got there first -- this very organ was reporting US Army cybersuits not so long ago...

What's Welsh for Orange?

The Indomitable Gall

If I was Welsh....

If I was Welsh I'd be raging, and I'd be considering a boycott of all Samsung products.

Why? Because damned if I'd let some trumped up electronics firm sell *my* language as a marketing ploy to some poxy little telecomms company.

If it's a service to the people, it shouldn't come with strings attached. Particularly given the spotty coverage Orange has in certain parts of rural Wales. To be fair, they're not any worse than the other mobile providers, but it's a bit off to be freezing out people just to try to upsell a few contracts with handsets.

Ah well, at least they didn't have the bare-faced cheek to try to sell them 3G handsets....

The Internet's most evil company?

The Indomitable Gall

To all the naysayers...

Where will we get our news from when the presses stop rolling and all the journos are made redundant? The people? On the internet, no-one can tell the difference between grass and astroturf. Remember that you get what you pay for, and if someone is willing to pay for the news, they'll pay.

Many journos may be lazy or corrupt, but they're held in check by the fact that they're paid for by the public. Once the only source of income comes in a brown paper envelope, whose news will it be...?

Gmail shoves 'on behalf of' feature to one side

The Indomitable Gall
Gates Horns

I'm with Carl W on this one

Google are removing a valuable audit trail not because they want to, but because Microsoft have (once again) buggered up the user experience.

Why did MS bugger up the user experience?

I seem to remember that it was to stop scammers and spammers spoofing other people's addresses. And now they're just encouraging people to hide the originating address. Spoof, in other words.

>sigh<

Company wins US patent for podcasting

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

Overbroadness aplenty

"a method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media"

Hang on... "whereing the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes"... "one or more episodes"... so they're claiming something can be "episodic" if it consists of only one, single "episode"...?

So is Psycho episodic? The Bridges of Madison County? Debbie Does Dallas?

Overbroadness abounds...

Philips Cinema 21:9 56in LCD TV

The Indomitable Gall

Re:On geometric progressions

Your calculations assume that all pixels are created equal.

A hint: pixels have aspect ratios too.

CIOs get £170k but helpdesk staffers settle for £6/hr

The Indomitable Gall

"the" southwest...?

" In the South-West you can expect to do even worse as an IT director "

The southwest of what? England? Scotland? Wales? The UK? It pays to be clear when you're talking stats.

Canadian uni catches the rebranding sniffles

The Indomitable Gall
Headmaster

I'm with the students.

If anyone is tempted to think all that "academic standards" and "professionality" stuff is a bit pretentious, I would ask them to scan their own degree certificate, and replace their university's logo with that laser-light-show-W one.

Then imagine how you would be showing the end result to a prospective employer. The might as well rebrand the whole place as Former Polytechnic of Toytown....

Fujifilm confirms 'world's first' 3D stills and films compact

The Indomitable Gall

Bet it'll be heavily compressed

I hold out very little hope that this will allow the recording of video at a low enough compression ratio to allow decent post-processing. Why bother offering the latest whizz-bang technology then crippling it to the level of an upmarket webcam?

ISP redesign unites the web in nausea

The Indomitable Gall
Joke

BBC...?

That looks like a BBC.. BE!

Now all it needs is classic space trading sim Elite and they've got a new customer!

Open source and the cloud: An unbalanced marriage

The Indomitable Gall

Total sales value? Irrelevant.

The total sales figure in dollars is a useless red herring. If "cloud computing" is indeed cheaper than "computer computing" then a low sales figure doesn't say anything about market share....

Toshiba tight-lipped on Blu-ray player plan

The Indomitable Gall

Disection!

If the latest generation of iPods has a suspiciously SD-sized gap on the edge of its PC, consider it confirmed!

Tasered Oz man bursts into flames

The Indomitable Gall

@Alan B

Unfortunately you're falling for the same old trap of "he's not ethnic, I am".

Dave could be making one of two points:

1) Everyone is of *an* ethnic origin. There is no such thing as a human being with no ethnic origin.

2) When talking about the population of the UK, "ethnic" would by default mean "ethnic UK", and anyone else would be "of foreign/overseas ethnic origin".

Of course, the situation is the other way round in Oz where the dark-skinned people *are* the ethnic population.

Using ethnic to mean "non-white" demonstrates a very racially compromised view....

Nissan ponders Pré-like cordless charging for e-cars

The Indomitable Gall

It'd be like...

...you know, the pit lane in F-Zero.

Ah, sweet memories.

EU calls hearing over Google 'orphan' treatment

The Indomitable Gall
Headmaster

What I don't get is...

..as another poster alluded to, the settlement states that members of the USAG and AAP won't sue for orphaned works. However, surely all members of the two stated bodies are known, therefore not the owners of *any* orphaned works.

Furthermore, it then follows that the owner of an orphaned work cannot join the USAG or be printed by a member company of the AAP without foregoing his legal right to sue Google for every penny they're due him.

So the settlement disadvantages all non-member published authors -- they're well and truly forked: sign up (with either USAG or AAP) and write off legitimate intellectual value; don't sign up (with an AAP member company) and not be able to reach a wide enough audience to realise the full intellectual value of your work.

So technically, a non-member author could sue Google not just for the value of the misappropriated intellectual property (the illegally scanned and redistributed book), but for damages against the future loss of earnings induced by not being able to have the work published by an AAP member company....

Apple sued over shrink-wrapped Mafia death threats

The Indomitable Gall

Poor show, El Reg

Let's all laugh at the crazy man, eh?

The least you could have done was remove his name. No legal obligation to do so, you say? So what? The story would have been as funny/disgustingly tasteless (delete as appropriate) but it would have at least been easier for the guy to get over it when this has all been resolved one way or the other.

Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles

The Indomitable Gall
Go

If you don't want to buy a whole stack of physical books, I have one word for you.

Library.

Lawyers claim ringtones are public performance

The Indomitable Gall

Loons?

I don't think so.

A ringtone is designed to be played in public ("mobile" phone). There's a hole in the legal coverage, and the sad fact is that these gaps are never plugged proactively -- it takes a lawsuit for them to be sorted.

There will be a settlement, and it'll mean that royalties are divided differently.

Hopefully it'll make music ringtones expensive enough that people opt for "bring bring" in future.

Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation

The Indomitable Gall

I have just...

...made cannabis legal in the UK. I will take a printout of the wiki page to court with me as proof.

Yesssssssss! Off the hook!

UK DVD sales plunge...

The Indomitable Gall

Ban the Wii!

Clearly it's families playing Wii Sports that's killing movie sales.

I mean, a Wii game costs the same as two films, but two films last 3 hours. A Wii game lasts weeks!!!

Ban the Wii so that George Clooney can earn an honest crust!

Trading Standards calls for online knife sale ban

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Under-age Credit Card holders?

Erm... you can now pay on-line with "prepay" payment cards and some accounts for minors issue debit cards. Not to mention PayPal credit, which I'm told the hip kids get their pocket money in these days.

Russian's Bulgarian airbags burst mid-flight

The Indomitable Gall

Myth...

..."bust"ed.

Rogue Atlantis knob removed by hand

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Unbelievable

@JC 2

"As for the American car joke, it's a few decades too late for that misinformed stereotype. Americans cars are now BETTER than the average European car"

What, you mean the quality has improved now that the US car companies are all bankrupt and have ceased production?

No Dr No rights for Bond owners

The Indomitable Gall

Glad to hear it.

As far as I knew, the standing convention in most of the EU has always been that a series title can be a trademark, but not a film or episode title. Losing that to a new precedent would have been a disaster for the public domain.

Just imagine if the original publisher of a book trademarked the title just before copyright expired: how would the public be able to exploit the now public domain work if they weren't allowed to use the title?

As I understand it, US law, as always, is one stage of weird ahead of us. The original Wizard of Oz book (and Baum's own sequels) is out of copyright, but the world of Oz is a trademark. This means that Baum's books can be distributed for free, but no-one can write new books except the trademark holder.

Joost gives up the ghoost

The Indomitable Gall

Inevitability

Everything was always going to end up in-house -- surely the head guys in Joost knew that the time would come when every TV-station and his dog would be serving their own video.

I submit to the jury that Joost was essentially a massive self-funding public beta with the aim of produce a stable licensable platform.

Pirate Bay website sinks as 'sell out' accusations fly

The Indomitable Gall

6 years of free work

7.7million, minus fine, split between four...

that's still $195 000 (US) a year. I'd hardly call that "free work".

Dutch clotheshorse menaces plastic surgeon

The Indomitable Gall
Stop

The wonders of modern medicine

Cosmetic surgery is unnecessary. It's invasive and it distorts the self-image. Operating on anyone is morally dubious -- operating on someone with a documented emotional disorder is negligent.

Eurostar tunnels through UK border ring of steel

The Indomitable Gall

So what he's saying is...

So the advance passenger information scheme for flights going to the USA is illegal for flights departing from Paris and Brussels then? Interesting....

Copyfraud: Poisoning the public domain

The Indomitable Gall
Dead Vulture

Re: This is why you need the GPL...

@AC

No, the point of the public domain is that anyone can use it in any way they want, including producing a "closed"/"proprietary" derivative product -- eg the film version of Sleepy Hollow with Johnny Depp. Just because it's based on a public domain work, doesn't make it a public domain work.

Eicher's article falls on its face when it chastises the small publisher for profiting from public domain works -- isn't the point of the public domain that anyone can do what they like from it -- and as others have said, many of these books have actually been retypeset to provide a clean, modern, legible version rather than the grubby scans and flaky OCR coming off Google's virtual presses. The high price is not just about having a monopoly, but is an attempt to offset the cost of that typesetting against the small number of customers.

Brit firm stops anti-tank warheads with cloth

The Indomitable Gall

@Wolf

"is it just me or is a simple work-around to this just to fire an incendiary round first to burn the shit out of the cloth layer, and THEN hit it with an RPG?"

One might imagine that an armament manufacturer might base such a technology on a non-flammable textile...

Opiate-crazed wallabies create crop circles

The Indomitable Gall

Ah, now I see.

So a developed country grows 50% of the world's medicinal opium, a non-indigenous crop (or so I am led to believe) which is having a notable effect on the local fauna

Meanwhile, impoverished, underdeveloped nations where opium poppies *are* indigenous are quota'ed into a small corner of the market and impoverished farmers turn to the black market.

Middle-east: lower labour costs, lower transport costs.

Australia: higher labour costs, higher transport costs.

Smells like protectionism to me.