Posts by Stuart Van Onselen

Dell offers 'Windows Vista Bonus' to frightened customers

WPA

The truly frustrating thing is, once again, Windows Product Activation, aka "Bill owns your soul, so bend over and take it like a man!"

Ultimately, Redmond can just switch off their XP WPA service, so no new XP licences can be installed, regardless of what Dell or anyone else wants. They can make WPA work only for Vista, or XP only on SCCs, or whatever the hell they want.

You'll be forced to use whatever they say you must use.

Sure, one can argue that they'd never do that, the backlash would be too great. But they still have that ability, which doesn't make me sleep well at night.

Oh wait a second: If I really want to play games (Windows' only attraction) I can get a PS3 or a Wii. And I can do actual computing on Linux. At work I'll have to use Vista, but it'll be the company's problem to pay for and support it.

Windows' share of the home market may well start shrinking much more quickly than their corporate market-share. Home users now have more choice, and aren't as beholden to corporate policies or compatibility with corporate or specialist software.

Congress still afraid to define 'internet gambling'

When a poitician shakes your hand...

...count your fingers afterwards.

There's *always* a conspiracy about. The main purpose of every congress/parliament/whatever is to fleece the voters, and since the best schemes inevitably require the co-operation of multiple senators/congressmen/MPs, you have, by definition, a conspiracy.

CERN declares Large Hadron Collider perfectly safe

Self-congratulations

I shall now pat myself on the back, as I accurately predicted several of the comments that followed: "Are you sure it's exactly the same?" and "Why waste so much time and energy?"

Listen, you bed-wetters: If the LHC does destroy us, it'll just be saving us from a gruesome death at the hands of Alqaida, who are hiding under your beds right now, planning to release ricin in the water-supply, and detonate dirty bombs on Main Street.

Sayeth the caveman...

Ogg, stop that!!!

Don't you know that by rubbing those sticks together, you'll cause the whole world to catch fire, destroying us all?!?!?

Yes, I've heard your arguments that the fires started by lightning don't burn down the whole world. But how can you know, really, really know, that the fire you're trying to start won't somehow be "different"?

And even if it doesn't cause a conflagration, need I remind you that you fools and your "progress" are wasting time that should be spent hunting?

@Frank

Yup, that's a serious weasel word. We can only see ~10 billion light-years in every direction. While micro-black holes, strangelets, and vacuum bubbles have not caused havoc anywhere in that ~4 million trillion trillion cubic light years of space, doesn't mean that it hasn't happened somewhere else...

Leeds thieves target Ford Focus chips

Purpose

But I thought *everyone* already knows that a chip designed to manage a car engine also contains sophisticated decryption functions that unlock encrypted digital video signals.

Engine management, decryption, the link is so obvious. It's not like anyone is being a gullible twit with larcenous tendencies and a brain that would rattle in a flea's skull.

Congress bails out telcos for illegal snooping

Odd...

...I thought that the *Democrats* won the congressional elections of 2006. Seems I was mistaken.

Constitution

I'm no expert, but I seem to recall that retroactive lawmaking is explicitly outlawed by a certain "damned piece of paper."

AMD's new Firestream chip tops 1 teraflop

@JonB

Yer darn tootin' I was thinking of "normal" GPUs. I don't think my budget _quite_ stretches to a rack of high-end nVidia HPC kit (In fact, these days I need bank finance to buy a stick of chewing gum.)

Indeed, what's been getting me excited over the last few years is the thought that a consumer-grade piece of hardware can theoretically outperform a warehouse full of the old Crays. The mind boggles!

Ahh, POVRay!

Wouldn't it be grand if some über-hacker could great a POVRay fork that used nVidia GPUs? (Hint! Hint!)

Of course, that would require that nVidia does actually support double-precision FP. Years ago, when Intel developed the first SSE instruction set, the POVRay maintainers stated that experiments had shown that single-precision FP just couldn't produce renders worth the disk-space they took up.

Anyway, POVRay development seems a bit moribund these days. Come on guys! I demand that you spend all your free hours writing code, free of charge, so that freeloading dilettantes like myself can produce clumsy, amateurish pictures that they never actually finish!

Oh wait, maybe I understand their reluctance, now... :-(

DARPA working on T-ray spyeye spectacle tech

Cancer

Research proves that research causes cancer in rats.

Lesbians like straight men, researchers find

@Solomon Grundy

There are already so many behaviours that are "uncontrollable" - The need for food, the need for sex, the action of running like hell when you see a sabre-tooth...

Now it seems that sexual attraction is just one more of these uncontrollables.

I don't see these findings as being significant for the over-all debate of "free will" vs "determinism", it's just useful in the more narrow context of homosexuality.

Plus, now that I think of it, your example confuses desires and actions. The gay person feels a sexualy *desire* for members of the same sex. But *acting* on those desires is a different matter. The homophobe is *acting* on his twisted desires, and that action fails the broadest social norm: "Do no harm to others".

New Microgeneration report - what it actually says

@Dr Jones

I take it you're either an MD, or your PHD was NOT in mathematics. (Third option, you're a high-school drop-out with delusions of adequacy)

Look up "exponential growth". Look up "super-exponential growth". Look at a logarithmic graph of human population, and shudder as the line curves upwards!

"Something must be done" is not the same as "scare myself shitless". Population and resource consumption must stabilise, or the human race will face a nasty crunch. The question is not "if", the question is "when".

And maybe the "when" is only on a couple of thousand years. Or maybe it's in 50. You can't blithely rely on new technologies solving the problem indefinitely. The universe has limits.

We'll have to leave the planet eventually, if we, as a species, want to survive. The idea is to postpone the "when", by any means necessary, until *after* we gain the technology to leave, not before! And we'll need to postpone it bloody far, 'cos our space technology is still extremely primitive.

Units and measures

Sorry to nitpick the article, but one of my pet peeves is the confusion between power and energy.

Energy is the stuff that does stuff. The energy in a tank of petrol determines the distance your car travels. Energy is measured in joules.

Power is the _rate_ that energy is used up. The power of your car engine determines how fast you car goes. The faster your car is travelling, the more joules of energy are consumed per second. Power is measured in watts, or equivalently, joules per second.

When it comes to electricity consumption, energy is usally measured in kilowatt-hours, that is, the equivalent of energy used by generating 1000 watts, for the period of one hour. That's 1000W * 3600 seconds = 3.6 Megajoules.

So when you say that a power station generates nine terawatt-hours of power, you should actually say "...of energy". Which is meaningless in this discussion. How _quickly_ does it generate that much energy? One day? Five years? One second?

If you meant to say "nine terawatt-hours every hour", then you could just as well have said "nine terawatts" and be done with it.

But when even that pillar of scientific accuracy, "Star Trek the New Generation" talks about "Kilowatts per second" when it's clear they're talking about energy, it's dead-easy to get confused.

Economy of scale

@Anonymous Coward, 09:07 said "If the central generation technologies can double their carbon efficiency ... surely that miracle technology can also be applied to microgeneration scenarios."

Err, no.

If these hypothetical "green" gains come from replacing messy oil, gas and coal stations with nuclear stations, then that improvement will not affect, in any way, the microgeneration industry. You are NOT going to get a nuclear reactor in your back yard.

The biggest efficiency differentiator between central and local energy generation, is economy of scale. A big central plant will always produce more power per unit fuel than a small home system. And some technologies can never be scaled down for home use at all.

Time to move on from Chinook to the real MoD cock-ups

Self-interest?

Lewis's articles always bring out a couple of UK arms industry astro-turfers, don't they?

Windows XP given additional resuscitation

Ultimate non-modular

I agree with ceebee: I'd love to see how Windows 7 is going to support ultra-light PCs any better than Vista does. Or is MS once again hoping that improved technology will allow cheap-and-light machines to handle Vista/Win7 by then?

The problem is that the Windows core is, by design, a huge, ugly, monolithic monstrosity. With no built-in modularity, it becomes damned difficult to make a version "with most of the crap stripped out" without accidentally breaking something else, and making support so much more difficult.

Now even Linux is not a modern* micro-core design, but it's still much more modular and adaptable, stretching from hand-helds to super-computers. If MS keep dropping the ball like they have with Vista, then Linux has a VERY bright future ahead of it.

*) For "modern", read "largely academic and non-commercial". It's such a shame that the "real world" lags so far behind academia, except for "niche" systems like Plan 9. Although the economic prerogatives of backwards-compatibility make this inevitable.

9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster

Just can't shut 'em up, can you?

@Gerard Krupa: You missed "meaningless analogies", see AC@14:15

By the way, AC, I used my real name here. Where is yours, chickenshit? Oh yes, I am a shill for the American govt, so I can use my own name with impunity, whereas you, great knower of The Truth, are a Threat to the Powers That Be, and must hide lest they find you.

Just a pity I've never in my life even visited the US. And the cheques Uncle Sam sends me to shill for him are pure rubber...

You made a lot of utterly baseless assumptions about the actions and motivations of those who dare to use logic, physics, and common sense w.r.t. the 9/11 tragedy.

Our assumptions about your paranoia and credulity are based on the evidence of your own words.

You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.

Get over it.

Thanks, AC

I was confused there. How could there be so many comments, and not one "Truther" in the mix? But at last we got one.

It's clear to me that the medical fraternity is failing a large number of people. There are so many therapies for psychotic paranoia these days, that it's disgraceful that we still have so many Truthers. Come on, WHO, get your act together!

BAE chief exec, director detained at US airports

The Yanks are just bitter...

because they are prohibited by law from doing the same thing.

Not that getting caught by the toothless US regulatory authorities is much of a problem. The problem is when one of your competitors finds out, and squeals on you for purely self-serving purposes. Such as making their own sale when you're disqualified.

Which is the other reason that the Yanks are trying to torpedo the Brits' deal.

All's fair in love, war and commerce. And it gets harder to tell the difference between the last two every year.

SMS costs more than using Hubble Space Telescope

Missing the point.

Does El Reg ever have a bunch of pedantic, nit-picking, humourless whiners amongst its readers??!

Oh FFS people, the Hubble comparison was obviously added to get headlines, capture attention, and add a little dry humour. It wasn't meant to be taken seriously/literally. But that doesn't mean the original article is crap, though: It ALSO includes a comparison to 3G data costs. Now please tell me how that is irrelevant to the discussion, I dare ya.

This is the same as how someone once pointed out that ink-jet ink is 7x more expensive per liter than the most expensive champagne in the world. Cue whiners telling us how you can't compare something you drink to something you use to selectively colour paper. ::roll eyes::

And yes, I know I'm also a whiner (or some other word starting with 'W') - I'm whining about the whiners. But my own hypocrisy has never bothered me much. :-)

Mounties taser bed-ridden octagenarian

Just as deadly?

AC,, it's a KNIFE ffs. Not a gun. So it is NOT as dangerous in the hands of a weak, delirious, convalescent old man, as it would be in the hands of a fit, mobile and determined youth.

Shuttle astronauts: Aliens are definitely out there

Military response to alien invasion?

As I've noted before, the only realistic option, should aliens try to attack earth, is to say "Please Mr Alien! We'll do anything you say. Anything! Just stop dropping rocks on our heads!"

For "rocks" read "10-mile-wide asteroids". After the first few cities have been wiped from the face of the Earth, and absolutely nothing you can do about it, compliance seems the only solution.

When flash mobs go bad

Death sentences...

...for the lot of them.

No, seriously!

The wanton destruction probably only deserves a small fine from each participant. But the stupidity of documenting yourself destroying public property, and then distributing it to the world via Boobtube, is so egregious, that these people can NOT be allowed to breed.

The gene-pool needs some chlorine.

DHS grilled over uber secret cybersecurity plans

@ImaGnuber

I think the problem is, as you alluded, that while government levels of inefficiency, waste, and graft are legendary, the private sector outdoes them!

Private corporations tend to leverage government incompetence so that they can suck the taxpayer dry so much faster, while providing an inferior service.

Just look at the monumental f'up the US army is in, re: healthcare and logistics. Soldiers have been showering in, and drinking, water that is unsanitary. One soldier was actually electrocuted in the shower! (Barracks built, and water supplied, by KBR or its subsidiaries). And when they sick from the water and get taken to hospital, that hospital might just be Walter Reed!

AC #2 misses the point by 1.6 kilometers

AC #1 was not criticising foreign countries for stealing US secrets, he was criticising the US for making it so damned easy for them.

The further irony is that, while accusing #1 of bitterness, #2's post was dripping so much bitterness I had to wipe it off my laptop screen before it dripped onto my keyboard and dissolved the keys!

Intel wants to own the weather prediction business

Precision

I read it as him wanting to increase the *accuracy* of the report, but I got side-tracked on the "length of accurate forcast" angle, so I buried my own point, while missing his.

But we can agree, I'm sure, that whether he was talking about better accuracy, or doing your own, personal prediction, he's still an idiot? :-)

Chaos theory

Add "meteorology" and "advanced mathematics" to the things he knows nothing about. Better weather prediction is not just about throwing computing power at the problem!

To put it simply, chaos theory implies that you would need a near-perfect record of the meteorological conditions to predict the weather accurately beyond a few days from now. Think "what is the temperature, wind speed, wind direction, humidity etc. for every 1m^3 of atmosphere on the planet." And that probably still won't get you predictions that don't break down after two weeks.

Intel has spent the last decade or so trying to find problems for their solutions!

White House admits non-existent email backups

@Steve Evans

Just about everything about US politics amuses me. :-)

Or it would, if they didn't have the largest stockpile of nukes on the planet. And if they didn't have a large army that, although woefully unable to keep the peace, is very good at making war!

Rather give me the Italian politicians. They're lively, colourful and interesting, and they don't have any ability to invade anybody!

Learned their lesson indeed

The lesson from Nixon wasn't "If you do bad things you will get caught!"

The lesson was "The press can bring down a government! So don't do anything naughty until you have the press in your pocket."

Whenever some neanderthal Conservative mutters something about "Liberal Press", you just know that he has a severe Reality Malfunction, and that you'll never get through to him. Modern American Conservatives call anything to the left of Ghengis Khan "liberal".

Eye-o-Sauron™ border beam barrier tech too crap to keep

2nd chance?

Do I understand this correctly? The bunch that created such a FUBAR system that it's not even good enough to be worth improving, is allowed to "try again", from scratch, with yet more govt pork (taxpayer money)? Instead of being barred from ever even *looking* at a Federal building?

Sux to be a Yank taxpayer, don't it?

Scale

Erm, I THINK the US/Mexico border is just a *little* bit longer than the Groom Lake airbase perimeter. If you get a vibration at GL, a MP Hummer can quickly drive past the area and check it out. With something as long as an international border, you need to confirm that you're not dealing with a false alarm (or a deliberate diversion) before you can dispatch your limited border policing force on what might otherwise be a wild goose chase.

US gov may forbid BAE Eurofighter sale to Saudis

Rooivalk

The Yanks have pulled this exact stunt before. They effectively blocked the sale of the South African's indigenously - designed attack helicopter, by refusing to let their Maverick missiles be launched from it. Their excuse was that the SA arms manufacturer had illegally bypassed sanctions during the apartheid years, a decade before. But it was painfully obvious that they really just wanted the sale for themselves.

Penguin goes electronic

DRM

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the DRM landscape for ebooks even more fragmented and immature than the one for music? I see readers having to pack three or four different readers in their backpacks, 'cos each publisher is publishing via only one of the three or more "standards".

(Don't even get me started on the music DRM scene - How can *one* company have *two* incompatible systems, and still ask to be taken seriously? Fortunately, no-one bought the "Zune". :-)

Adobe zooms in on film industry with CinemaDNG

A fix for format proliferation

...because everyone knows that the best way to solve the problems of format proliferation, is to release another new format...

Japan turning itself into Cyberman machine civilisation

April Fools?

No, this is entirely credible - All it says is that some "think-tank" _believes_ that this outcome will come to pass. Opinions are a dime-a-dozen, and the thoughts of think-tanks are worth considerably less.

Mixed Race

Sorry, I don't have a reference (not even Wikipedia) but I have heard a couple of times that mixed-race children are more resistant to disease. This phenomenon certainly occurs with other organisms - Look up "hybrid vigor".

Not that I want to imply that single-race children are a bunch of sickly weaklings, even by comparison. I usually bring up the subject mainly to get under the skin of racists and eugenicists. Tell a neo-nazi that he's just an inbred goon and watch him splutter furiously. :-)

Uniqueness?

Homogenous = Uniqueness = "Racial Purity" = low-level inbreeding with an unhealthy dose of racism thrown into the mix.

(Children of mixed-race couples are, on average, healthier than "racially pure" types, ergo racial purity is nothing more than a kind of inbreeding.)

And it's not just genetics they're missing out on, it's ideas. A homogenous society is (generally) going to lose out in the innovation stakes against a heterogenous society. Historically, America has out-innovated Japan. Of course, these days, maybe not so much...

Naomi Campbell cuffed in Heathrow Terminal 5

Where's the "nit-pick/pedant" icon?

I presume all the characters making lame jokes about the use of the word "suspicion" were being facetious?

If not, let me explain: The general principle of "innocent until proven guilty" still endures (at least in theory). And "proven" means "proven in court". Thus, police cannot simply state outright that the person they detained was guilty, no matter how obvious it is. Especially as, if the detainee is later found not-guilty, even if it is by way of a technicality, they may be able to sue the cops.

From the cop's POV, it's bad enough seeing some scumbag go free, but to have him turn around and sue you is just too much - better to have tight regulations that prevent this.

Official: OOXML approved as international standard

Confused

I am confused. Who exactly is it that represents countries at the ISO?

It's obviously NOT the national standards bodies (NSBs), because the Norwegian NSB voted *against* OOOXML, yet Norway's vote at ISO was *for* OOOOXML.

The British case seems to have been mis-stated in the article. The British NSB happily voted for OOOOOXML, it's an opposition MP who's raising the big stink, IIRC.

Google pink slips 300 Doubleclickers

Variety from Webster?

Now he's into politics, not just Apple-bashing. Although, of course, there has to be a side-swipe at Apple, too.

The basic style is the same, though: Barely-coherent rantings "liberally" sprinkled with factoids and lies. And, I'll bet, a less-than-10% chance of actually replying to any criticisms.

The closest Trolls get to dialogue is "I'm gonna eat you if you try to cross this bridge!"

Steel Cloud servers to power US Navy robo-cannon kit

Easy to avoid

I'm under the impression that they're not trying to supress sustained attack here, but rather individual sniper rounds.

In that case, all you need to do is take one shot, and immediately duck behind a wall. By the time the gun has slewed to your position, you're not visible anymore!

OK, so now snipers are restricted to one shot at a time. How many were they taking before? I suspect Darwinism has long since claimed any sniper foolish enough to take a second pot-shot at a Humvee - There is already a non-zero chance that one of the crew members will spot you before your next shot, and have the gunner unleash a load-a-pain in your direction.

US allows visual inspections of nipple rings

Deadly body-piercings...

"Officers ... were acting to protect the passengers and crews"

Hell yeah, the damage to life and limb that can be done by a nipple piercing is astounding. Err, usually to the wearer, you say? Not much use to attack someone else? What about the teeny-tiny pins? Too short to even reach the carotid, you say?

Anyway, we all know that Muslim terrorists routinely use body modification in their plans... Err, you say they don't? Body modifications are forbidden by the Koran?

OK, so the TSA are bunch of fuckwits. What, this is the first person with piercings to try to board a plane in the last seven friggin' years????

Adobe to remove Photoshop pic pimping clause

Freetard this, freetard that...

El Reg is clearly a firm believer in the maxim that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Several of the self-confessed drunken louts that masquerade as journalists here think it is hi-f'g-larious, getting so many of their readers so incensed.

After all, we're all freetards here, as none of us pays to read this site. And most of us are going to stay, as, in between the crap, they do have some wonderful coverage.

But I do have one question for the "journos": Are you all 12 years old?

Adobe opens Photoshop for freetards

Yawn?

I have far too much crap going on in my life, for me to feel offended by the use of "freetard". And anyway, I'm too goddam lazy to install Linux and OpenOffice, etc, so I guess it doesn't even apply to me in the first place.

However, let me third the suggestion that it's played-out and clichéd by now. It's just puerile, it is. (Oh crap, now The Reg is *never* going to drop it! Puerile is their stock-in-trade!)

And as for the people agitating to add "freetard" to the list of "banned words" - Don't bother. The Reg treats that list less like a "rule" and more like a "suggestion".

HP wants R&D to be serious business

Tough call

You never know when a line of research will lead to something breath-takingly original that can create whole new markets out of nothing. So if you clamp down too hard on innovation and blue-sky thinking, and limit yourself to "buzz-word du jour" conventional wisdom, you may end up missing something hugely profitable.

On the other hand, you don't want to throw money into a pit forever. That's no way to run a business, as the original .bombs discovered too late.

It may be tough to make those calls. In fact, my gut feel is that the ability to make the right decision on research, most of the time, is what separates crap companies from outstanding ones.

Or, you could just copy everyone else's ideas, produce crap, and make people buy it anyway 'cos you're a monopoly. That sure saves on the R&D costs!

Bill Gates chuckles at Google Apps

Too true!

The Reg has gone so ani-Microsoft that it is now hopelessly in love with Open Source, and Google, and Wikipedia, and Web 2.0 in general.

Err, what version of The Reg are *you* reading? Alternatively, wtf are you smoking?

Bill sez

"Google really doesn't understand the special needs of business.

"What business needs, is to pay Microsoft a fortune for our support contract every month. What business needs, is to then pay extra for our next buggy, bloated, restrictive OS release. What business needs, is to pay our friends in the hardware business a nice wad of cash every three years for computer upgrades to run our new release, just so that they can keep doing exactly the same things they were doing before (sending dirty jokes to each other over email, and surfing for porn).

"What business needs, is to realise that they're not there to make money, they're there to make money for US!"

'Googirl' unloads on Google Health

Way off topic, but...

..."Mother Teresa" is actually an even worse appellation than "Googirl". Go behind the adulation, and do some research on everyone's "model of goodness". You will be shocked...

Apple unearths Time Capsule

Good morning Webster

's the weather good over there? It's a lovely sunny day here.

It's good to see you're still in fine form. We should do lunch!