Posts by disgruntled yank

Whodathunkit? Media barons slit own throats in flawed piracy crackdowns

Numbers

"Over the past three weeks the data has shown that none of the pirates' top picks were available for legal streaming and only 53 per cent were available to buy at all, and only 20 per cent of which were available to rent.."

I don't really see what this proves, except that the pirates want the new stuff, which the the media companies wish to hold on to. If 20th Century Miramax decides that Men in Black XXV will make more money in theaters if the Netflix release is held up, then no, the Netflix option will not be available during the period of most intense interest. If the point is that the motion picture industry can make less money by releasing the streaming stuff earlier, well, they've probably considered and dismissed that option. If the point is that they can make as much or more by releasing it earlier, did this study say how?

And by the way, I find it annoying when 16 out of 30 is given as 53%. Why not "roughly half" or "just over half" or even "16 out of 30"?

MS Word deserves DEATH says Brit SciFi author Charles Stross

Re: Concur with Stross. With a couple caveats.

'BTW: Unicode may look a "text file", but it's not. Unicode is really a binary encoding for text...'

Where ASCII and EBCDIC are?

Excessive wind bothers solar racers' rear ends

measure for measure

You quote the distance in km, the temperatures in centigrade, and the wind speeds in knots? As a primitive American used to miles and Fahrenheit, I'm glad to see the old units hanging on somewhere.

Turkish TV presenter canned for flashing too much cleavage

correct me if I'm wrong

But didn't one of the Spice Girls do some topless work on Turkish TV in unseasoned days?

Google holds its nose, lets the hoi polloi run PHP on its shiny cloud

Re: It's all Greek to me...

Quite. Think of it is a left-recursive expression: run it through Google Translate into German and get "Die the hoi polloi" . But that looks a bit savage--maybe we should go for French and "Les the hoi pollio." With Russian or Latin, though it is idempotent...

DEATH WATCH counts down seconds to wearer's demise

it blesseth twice

It seems to me that anyone giving the watch as a present might find that his down needs to be set drastically forward.

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

Re: Children in supermarkets.

"'m not a tech person..."

With such powers of telepathy, why would you need to be a tech person? The poster to whom you are replying seems to have a due sense of responsibility for his children. They are probably far better mannered and under control than quite a few of the commentariat.

Down with Unicode! Why 16 bits per character is a right pain in the ASCII

Mr. U will not be missed

(see ee cummings).

I must say that Perl makes it not too painful to deal with Unicode.

I am slight disappointed with Ms. Stob, though, for not riffing on The U and the Non-U...

Techno-thriller author and gaming franchise Tom Clancy dies at 66

Re: Read that

Didn't realize they made a movie, not surprised to hear either that they did or that it was bad.

If you are a connoisseur of bad submarine movies, though, you should hunt up "Hellcats of the Navy", starring not only Ronald Reagan but Nancy Davis, later Nancy Reagan.

Saw that

Sorry to see him dead so soon. Sixty-six doesn't look so old from here.

But I quit after Red October. The dialogue was laughable, and the general outlook seemed to be that of a fairly naive and unreflective midshipman. A few years later, I happened on a used copy of the WW II submarine novel Run Silent, Run Deep, written by a man with serious time on the submarines. And guess what--not everything works right: USN personnel screw up, US submarines are attacked by their own torpedos, the enemies (German and Japanese) are at least as smart, at least as technologically able. Clancy struck me as a writer who portrayed the military as it would like to imagine itself, a Kipling without the gifts.

Washington Post officially sold to Amazon's Bezos for quarter of a Tumblr

Umm

This morning's Post arrived with an envelope from the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), presumably a sign-up form, stuffed in with the ads. I couldn't help wonder whether this reflected Bezos's take on the newspaper's demographics generally, or whether they've already revved up their microtargeting.

The NY Times (I think it was) quoted an industry analyst on rich folks buying papers: I can only assume that they have large fortunes they wish to turn into small ones. This is not an uncommon pattern in US journalism. Eugene Meyer, the grandfather of Donald Graham, made a lot of money in banking before he bought the Washington Post. William Randolph Hearst had a lot of mining money.

BOOGIE BALLMER: Steve Dirty Dances at tearful Microsoft leaving do

wow

It's good to hear that there is a major US corporation that does not believe in drug tests.

British Gas robo home remote gets itself into hot water

rules of engagement?

I've never engaged with my thermostat before, either, but I've been turning them up down for something close to half a century.. What exactly does Ms. Bhatia mean?

Greece ends extra hols for civil servants forced to use hated computers

Re: Oh, the irony

Actually California's budget and economy aren't doing too badly just now.

Engine Yard loads Oracle tech into cloud platform

off topic

I trust that The Register's style book will decree that all future articles mentioning Larry Ellison will refer to him as shy and retiring at least once.

New iPhone sells out, millions in hands of lucky fans, Cook cock a hoop ...

Drake

Right, but you're still identifying him as an artist.

F-16 fighter converted to drone

next up

We need to work at time travel to get these in operation 30 years ago, and prevent Top Gun from ever being made.

DARPA: You didn't think we could make a Mach 6 spaceplane, so let us have this MACH TEN job

and why not

the project name "Wretched XS-1"?

Re: Basic questions for DARPA projects

I don't know where the military "train a lot of there" surgeons, but as for the battlefields, they train a lot of surgeons there, who later bring the techniques to big city trauma centers.

Microsoft announces iPad amnesty for fanbois

fencing

This could be good for thieves--do they ordinarily get $200 for stolen iPads?

Five SECRET products Apple won't show today

Excellent

I would definitely buy the iPho tee shirt. Somebody should set up a stand the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, in between the remaining Vietnamese restaurants and the Apple store. Or maybe it should be on the far side of the restaurant, so that one can acquire the appropriate stains first.

And I realize that you're focused on Asia, but let me mention the "iBoard" that I saw for sale in the Tallinn town square a few weeks ago--a cutting board with a familiar emblem embedded in the surface.

400 million Chinese people can't speak Chinese: Official

Re: No wonder

Fortunately for Mongolia, Tibet, Manchuria, etc., China has never undertaken such enterprises

Enterprise storage: A history of paper, rust and flash silicon

Bit size

"Each increase in the bit-size..."

Word size, perhaps?

Data broker Acxiom lifts skirt, reveals your private bits

Wonderful

It sounds splendidly secure. How long before bozos begin logging in as the neighbors they can't stand and damaging their information?

Fancy some BEER ON TOAST? Italy invents spreadable booze

Or, you could just drink it

I'm not (lately) in the habit of having beer with breakfast, but if I don't have to share a road or programming project with you, why I should I care if you do?

This does sound a bit like the alcoholic ice cream in _The Best of Myles_, but that was intended to be comical.

Forget Mars: Let's get someone on the Moon – NASA veteran

Re: Time to get off this planet for survival of the species

I like the way you all think--considered, anyway as colonist material.

I will happily throw in the price of beer or two to assist in the emigration of those who regard the majority of their fellow humans as morons and scum. And if you linger in the doorway after collecting, I'll give you a Kickstarter, too.

Microsoft cans three 'pinnacle' certifications, sparking user fury

cue the music

Why MCA?

Snowden journo's boyfriend 'had crypto key for thumb-drive files written down' - cops

Write me down a mule

Not wise, but it seems a bit much for the intelligence agencies to beef about someone else's security discipline.

Google's Project Glass headman answers most pressing question: 'Why?'

while we're at it.

http://xkcd.com/1251/

Dopey dope-growing dope smoked out by own dope dope-growing vid

Re: I personally consider pot no more dangerous than alcohol.

And the water I used for cooking, drinking, personal hygiene, etc. was probably enough to drown quite a few.

Hell, a policeman in DC died a few summers ago from over-hydration. Yet somehow the menace of the tap goes unregulated.

iPad classes for DOGS offered in New York

Re: Result?

Write trend pieces for the NY newspapers, I'm guessing. It would explain a lot.

Boffins' keyboard ELECTROCUTES Facebook addicts

Re: Must ... say ....it .....

You realize, of course, that the BOFH would regard all this as wimpy.

'Silent' staff stood by as £100m BBC IT project tanked – DG

Eh?

"In the context of the DMI being a complex and cutting edge IT project, the Trust considers this is something of which the BBC should be proud."

You can't fault them for logic, until and unless you can track down that context. But I thought that the British were supposed to write better than that.

Holiday HELL: Pourquoi, monsieur, why is there no merdique Wi-Fi here?

Re: Sad

Well, sure, but then what would he write about this Friday?

Kim Kardashian's bosom pal in bling snatch Instagram unpleasantness

Geography

"in the city's posh Hamptons district"

The Hamptons are at the eastern end of Long Island, quite a trek from New York City, say 90 miles or 150 kilometers.

The more interesting question may be how one could dispose of a stolen watch of that sort. I doubt that the fences would want something that notorious, or care to pay anything like the nominal cost if it didn't make such noise.

Facebook's flush Sheryl Sandberg savaged over unpaid intern advert

definitions

'If you look closely enough, Sandberg's definition of "women" is a pretty narrow one, even if it does float the conceit about the "right to equality at work".'

Surely it is depth of definition, not breadth, that enables it to float a conceit?

But you do interest me. There is no way in the world that I'm going to read Lean In, so can you enlighten me as Sandberg's definition of "women"? Does it vary considerably from (say) the IOC's or the NCAA's?

Possessed baby monitor shouts obscenities at Texas tot

Re: Stunned...

"I'm absolutely stunned that someone would even consider an IP camera in a child's room if there was a possibility of an external network connection being formed."

The world is not The Register. Most people don't have a deep understanding of computers let alone of computer security.

Re: British or European

Well, sure. There was Richard III, for example.

Auntie touts e-babysitting ... and no £15,000 in-app purchase shocks

Re: Digusted

Quite. What will happen to America's Public Broadcasting System with these shows? They'll have to put on more fundraising drives to fill the time.

Indian military pondered attack on Venus and Jupiter

Re: Tactics.

Gathering intelligence with persons easily mistaken for Venus, sure. With aircraft, maybe no.

'Wandering Dago' tuck truck ejected from NY race track

Re: Deemed offensive to Italian Americans, oddly, not Hispanics

"Dago" is just not that much used for Hispanics in the US. You might as well complain about our use of "chips".

Pulleeze

Not water/snow:, but rain/slop.

Man who pulled gun during chess game surrenders to robot cop

Re: Not very impressed

Thank you, sir, for your illustration of discourse as a strong point. Not quite up there with Eben-Emael, but what the hell.

Middle America pulls up sagging pants menace, belts repeat offenders

Re: Bieber?

I thought that the domestic manners of the Americans was a recognized IT angle. We're certainly happy to provide light relief from pressing matters like the impending royal birth etc.

PORNAGEDDON: Sexy bloggrs stung by Tumblr smut smackdown

Re: They are Americans

Actually, I think he has problems with his hard drive.

PRISM scandal: Brit spooks operated within the law, say politicos

Isn't that the problem?

It certainly is Over Here.

Boffins want toilets to become POWER PLANTS

Re: Stop!

http://xkcd.com/1238/

Ex-Microsoftie software hotshot Ozzie joins HP board

McDonalds?

Gee, maybe they could get somebody from Pepsi, too.

US public hate Snowden - but sexpot spy Anna Chapman LOVES him

Re: Dear Mr Snowden

"The people you are trying to enlighten are fickle and mostly stupid."

Ah. I wondered why he had published in a British newspaper.

'The Apprentice' is a load of old codswallop, says biz prof

what next?

Next I suppose you'll tell me that Donald Trump's hair is fake.