Posts by J 3 896 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
Giving the previous few years history, IRA's mistake seems to have been not attacking the USA. If they wanted to destroy freedom in the UK, they should have attacked the USA -- that's that the islamofascists have shown, maybe unintended. Then America's copycat (or would that be lapdog?) would do (did) exactly as their masters and go paranoid, etc. etc. etc.
While I mostly enjoy the Yes Men's work, I have to say their tactics DO look a lot like phishing.
"a faux environmental release announcement that fooled even stalwart publications"
The only thing missing is the purpose of stealing personal info, so technically, following your definition of phishing (is it defined in the law at all, by the way, or are the Canucks reinterpreting old laws to deal with it?), they don't do it. But it sure looks very similar, and I guess the people who invite them to give talks and etc. don't feel like laughing after the fact...
A hefty fine for wasting court's time.
A counter suit for the time and effort of the victim (neighbor).
Then lock him away at some prison for the mentally unhealthy (can't recall the correct term for those in English now...) until he is cured, or dead, or can prove EMF really makes him sick (burden of proof is on the claimant, obviously), whichever comes first. Make him pay for his stay, of course.
Ain't I feeling generous today?
All comments above are great points, but forget one thing: the industry will shovel the new thing down people's throats and they won't have a choice.
Of course it will be slow, or the outcry would be huge. But they are watching the trends. As more people have "HDTVs", they will fell more tempted... because selling new players and 25% (here in the US) more expensive disks is what they would love to do instead of keeping the market stagnated as it is. They don't care what is "right", or what you think about the subject. If they stop selling DVDs (alleging that now "everyone" wants BR), the average Joes out there will follow suit soon enough -- after all, their old DVD collection will still play in the new BR-players, which are getting cheaper (you can buy for $100 now, refurbished, will surely fall further). And it is the new disks or nothing, unless Joe wants to bear with the kids endlessly pestering him about the new Disney blockbuster they have to have...
The only thing that indeed throws a spanner in the works of these plans is Internet streaming -- studios are fighting Netflix over licensing exactly because of that...
Even that is not the cure all -- as my gf mentioned yesterday, she loves Netflix (cheap and always available), but there are some movies she likes so much that she wants to own them. And she's got quite a collection. I don't know if a big file in a hard drive (assuming they will start selling these things decently) would satisfy that type of demand, though.
Why the hell is a Portuguese word being used over there? Weird... Now I know why I've seen some commentards using it here this year. Should have guessed it was TV's fault.
Anyway, adding to the choir, epigenome is hardly new for 2009, at least in the relevant technical circles. Maybe I've been spending too much time in said circles... Or have cutesy TV ads in Blighty started using epigenome too? That would be a sight to behold, methinks.
"excellent vision that helps them fly out of nowhere to descend on carcasses"
Why would I want to descend on carcasses is way beyond me... On the other hand, the lottery winning must be quite low to each person there, if a lot of people are doing this. Which kinda defeats the purpose after all, I suppose?
Anyway, ain't religion precious. It makes people believe and do the darndest things. So cute.
"If women aren't generally attracted to tech, let them excel in subjects that really interest them."
Yeah, that's right. They should stay in their places. KKK .
(Kinder, Küche und Kirche, if you're wondering what the hell hooded nuts have to do with all this)
I've heard there were good old times when them wimin weren't attracted to voting, participating in politics or generally working outside of home either. They excelled at what they excelled at, it was great. Why change?
Just the natural way of things, right? Unbelievable...
I'd suspect you would do yourself a favor if you refrained from speaking about things you clearly have no clue about. It's embarrassing. Nothing personal, same goes for most commentards above, by the way.
"Is this actual scientific research?!"
Just because you think you're good at rubbish it does not mean you can do it. You failed even here, for crying out loud. The report is NOT about science. It's psychology. Completely different type of endeavor -- although some psychologists sometimes do try to get the credibility of science by trying to "look scientific". They shouldn't. Hasn't worked so far, because it is too complex. They would do better sticking to what they can do than to pretend being scientists and giving everyone, including them, a bad name.
Second, your insignificant anecdotes or opinions are completely irrelevant. Anyone with a minimum of scientific literacy knows that things like "but I am an X and I don't do Y" is not evidence. It's all about tendencies and general rules. A bell curve, for the sake of example; not everyone falls on the middle, but most do, and those are the one who get the most "votes". Who does not know that does better staying in IT, indeed.
And finally, from what the article says and as I see it this research is valid in its field (which I'm kind of guessing, since I'm a scientist and not a psychologist or sociologist). And it's not necessarily about what is, but how people perceive it to be. THAT's what is the most important sometimes. It does not matter if there is no single place on real-life Earth that looks like the geek environment office described in the article; what matters is how people see it. Changing perceptions can be important, and to change them one has to first identify them. I would expect that something like that would be easy to understand by someone with the amount of schooling needed to be in IT. Maybe I "misoverestimated" you lot?
You guys apparently don't understand humans. Nor do I.
Fun read, but a pedantic point -- or an over-J's-head point, choose.
Kleptomaniac? As far as I know that refers to people who can stop themselves stealing stuff, even when they do have the money to buy it in the first place. I'm no fan of Oracle, but I'd say they bought everything you mention there, or did I miss something (the sarcasm, maybe?). Shopaholic would probably be the more accurate description there, methinks.
"people taking photographs in public should not be stopped and searched unless there is a valid reason"
Er... that says nothing... Unless "valid reason" is defined. Being too tall or having an SLR (you know, to look like the bad guys in the movies) seem to be valid ones, it would appear from past articles here.
As an avid amateur photographer, I'm not feeling like ever visiting the UK to see my friends there.
Reading the article, I finally decided to give it a try on my Ubuntu computer at work. It feels much faster than Firefox so far, even without blocking anything on Chrome yet (I have Flashblock on FF). Pages have loaded very fast, including El Reg which, in FF, always takes a little while even with Flash off. I haven't seen any of my regular sites being rendered any differently from FF, which I guess is good. My own lab's pages all render exactly the same as before, which is great since I don't have to figure out why things are different and/or not working as before.
Quite positively impressed so far, we'll see what further impressions day-to-day use will bring. I might get used to this, yes. If it keeps working. :-)
Still have to try any extensions though. And also have to see if this nice speed boost will be maintained when I install Chrome in my ancient home computer...
While Firefox is far from being a wonder of the software world, I must say your computer seems to be badly broken. Get someone who understands computers to take a look at it for you. Or upgrade from that 486 thing.
I mean, my ancient 1.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM home machine starts Firefox in less than 10 seconds -- not great, but the machine is old as I said. Even faster if Firefox was started already before and is still in cache. My work computer, a much better 2.4 GHz 4 or 5 year old, starts it in about 2 seconds or so from cold.
Oh, and in neither machine does it go above about 200 MB for typical browsing. But then again it might be the OS...
Whatever the merits or faults of GNU and other FOSS groups, and the reasons for them, what you say is ridiculous.
"(Quite why the GNU / FOSS movement *still* can't achieve something Apple managed to pull off with rather fewer resources and a lot less time escapes me, but you don't get to blame Apple for the FOSS community's failings.)"
Rather fewer resources?
Haha.
I don't really know the hard numbers (does anyone?), but I do know marketing is not cheap. And Apple's marketing is everywhere all the time -- I've lost the count of how many times I've seen that stupid iPod nano ad showing its video capabilities ("simulated", as the disclaimer obviously states) on TV last night only, for instance. So I guess it would be safe to assume that Apple spends more money on propaganda in a month than GNU has ever had their hands on for whatever purposes. Same would surely go for other FOSS projects like KDE, *BSDs, etc.
A lot less time?
Well, when you use someone else's free code as the basis of your OS, then I guess it does cut some corners. And anyway, "a lot less time" would be debatable. As I remember hearing, the first version(s) of OS X were quite crappy, and it took Apple some years to get it straightened out. Some might even say they still are trying -- like I feel like doing, every time I use that stupid Mac mini we have here at the lab (the old one we had was the same, so it's not just a bad, er, apple). The thing is quite buggy for a system so highly regarded. But that's propaganda for you.
P.S.: I don't hate Apple, and I think they are probably right in this court case against this particular "company". My girlfriend has a Macbook Pro and is very happy with its workings. Never had a (significant) problem, crashes are quite rare for her machine, and I'm happy I don't ever have to even look at it. What I do hate is the religion people here have, the "free-market" myth (wake up, it's non-existent and impossible) cult, of thinking that companies should be allowed to do whatever they want regardless of any consequences. Just because planned economies are demonstrably bad these people jump to the opposite conclusion with zealot fervor. You know, "drowning kills you, so never touch liquids again and you'll live forever" type of "logic"!
...or is this just an overpriced POS? Apart from the 500 GB hard drive, what makes it any better than a "netbook"? (assuming the large size is not a requirement, of course, in which case there are plenty of better laptops around for less money)
@Stuart Halliday
Well, I suppose long life battery is an attractive to travelers/mobile folks more than anyone else. I myself don't see me in an airplane or subway carrying a monitor along. Which I would have nowhere to plug into, obviously. At home? If I have to use a power outlet and video cable for the monitor, I guess using the power cable for the laptop is much less of a hassle and much more portable...
Lots of knee-jerk from both sides here, it appears.. Lots of black and white but very little gray.
Well, first of all, as far as I know in civilized countries there are rules that forbid the government to force someone to produce evidence against themselves. At least the two countries I am most familiar with (USA and Brazil) have such laws. Not that they are judicial paradises anyway, but at least the protection does exist. I would expect the UK to have the same. I thought the EU only allowed fully democratic countries in the club, but apparently things are a bit more lax than that... So yeah, the libertarian nut crowd have a great point on this one, and I agree.
Second. Yeah, the crimes (felonies? what?) the guy committed were "minor", apparently. I don't know what type of sentence they usually carry for people not suspected of terrorism/pedo/hysteria-du-jour. But as far as I've noticed in other places, trying to get a passport under false pretenses (lying) is pretty serious stuff. Failing to comply with court orders is not taken lightly either. The guy had mental problems, we NOW know. Given general police incompetence most of the time, it's easy to see they should have discovered that much earlier and given the case the right type of treatment. But my question is: aren't terrorists usually mentally deranged anyway, in some form or another? Obviously that does not make people with mental problems automatically suspect, but this guy's behavior was definitely not kosher. Not criminal, of course, unless you count hiding your private stuff and being weird as criminal, but strange nonetheless when you look at the whole picture. Now the Daily Fail crowd has a good point too, if a little less water-tight than the previous paragraph's one.
And finally, as mentioned by others, I'd like to see what your comments above would have looked like if the guy had indeed committed a violent crime after all. How many would instead be howling about how incompetent gov and police were not to see the obvious signs and stop him before it was too late, blah, blah, blah. Damned if you do and damned if you don't, it seems to me. I still think that it's better to live more freely and allow some risks like this than to be in a police state, but many of you guys seem to ignore the shades of gray in the situation.
Or rather, in those days, warm!
Regarding sea-monster and seamen skeletons, I suspect the possibility is strong that we'd find none, even is such entities did exist (which they most likely didn't, given the short time for non-microbial life evolving there). I suspect that Mars' low gravitational strength would make skeletons unnecessary. But who knows, that's not my area of Biology anyway.
"Why do people need to run jailbroken phones anyway?"
What about syncing the phone (or iPod Touch) using a platform that does not run iTunes, or whatever it is? That's the reason I don't have a Touch yet. I can't use it with Linux without some crazy incantations (the old nano still works perfectly too), and even that depends on having the right firmware. I don't want to risk that much money on a device that I might not be able to use.
"people who are smart and energetic enough"
Well... sorta, I suspect. Maybe "people who google 'how to jailbreak iphone' and then blindly follow a recipe with barely a clue what they are doing" might be a more apt description.
Or maybe they all just have bad memory and/or short attention span.
Yeah, as the article says that is pretty bad for a long lens. I was struggling with my Canon (10x zoom, no VF) today to get sharp images, and even when using flash the only way to do it was to get closer to the subject and use less magnification -- might sound like no problem, but the wider the angle, the more distortion in the image. Not to mention that I feel stupid holding the camera like that with my arms extended, but that might be just me... :-)
Re: miniature mode, it does not just blur the periphery of the picture. If my manual fake-tilt-shift adventures are any indication, it also over-saturates the colors and increases the contrast (to look like a painted model). The shot shown in the article does show a bit of increase in the saturation, but not as much as I would apply if doing it manually. Contrast does not look changed though.
Well, not too bad for a (nearly) web-only device. Thing is, such a thing would have to be really cheap for people to risk buying such a limited device. They are trying to make a network appliance. Question is: is there a market for it? If yes, they have a good thing. If not...
@El Reg
"but there's still a fair mount if the Apple in its approach to hardware"
What in hell was that even suppose to mean?
El Reg's read-proofing has been slipping more and more lately. Really throws off a non-native speaker like me, who have to re-read the thing two or three time to try to decipher whether it's my bad understanding or the sentence is mangled. There's rarely an article here nowadays that is lacking typos, missing words, extra words or strange combinations. Hence the pedant icon. :-)
Great, except that, according to the graph, anything else is also much faster than IE 8, which seems to suck royally in that respect. Anyway, it's now time for Wintards everywhere to hope that IE 9 maintains such performance even after all the bloat has been added to finish the thing.
Nice to see poor little Microsoft catching up to the giants of industry though.
"If an adult can be tasered, why not a child?"
If an adult can drink, why not a child?
If an adult can vote, why not a child?
If an adult can drive, why not a child?
If an adult can have 800 mg of ibuprofen, why not a child?
If an adult can consent to sex, why not a child?
If an adult can run for office, why not a child?
Children are not mini-adults. Bloody stupid people who think so are part of the problem... Which also means that "reasoning" with, e.g., a 2 year-old is as stupid as it goes too.
Ubuntu? I don't understand what you are talking about.
You mean they should have had UNR all ready and done as soon as ASUS released the first Eee PCs running Linpus/Xandros/whatever locked down crap (which lots of people maligned, apparently with good reason), so people could upgrade? Or what, exactly, do you mean?
As you probably know, people prefer to have an OS (Win XP) very inadequate for the form factor than to have anything else, be it regular desktop Linux (also inadequate), be it netbook remixes (good). Inertia, ignorance, sometimes even legitimate need, the regular stuff. So even if UNR had been available, and even shipped already installed and configured, from day one, most people would still go back running to mommy. Not to mention the less charitable aspects of the situation... like XP being nearly free just to kill Linux, and other arm-twisting shenanigans we all came to know and love over the decades. But that's a slightly different story.
If ASUS and other pioneers of the now defunct netbook had worked with Canonical from the beginning, I guess I would see your point -- why aren't you also blaming, say, Fedora, by the way? But being control freaks, companies decided each one to create their own crappy, locked down adaptation of the Linux desktops available, so they wouldn't cannibalize their more profitable big machines. It backfired anyway, and that's why we saw the netbook die quite a while ago to be replaced by small, overpriced (for their capabilities) laptops.
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