* Posts by Paul Shirley

2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Prysm pitches ultra-green laser telly tech

Paul Shirley

CRT just looks better

Spent the last 5 years looking for a replacement for my 20yr old desktop CRT TV and not yet seen anything that looks right, LCD's just don't do SD video as well as phosphor, don't know why but its plain to see. If the old TV holds out another few years looks like I'll actually have a viable upgrade to HD phosphor.

...and I hope they aren't too flat, that's valuable shelf space on top of my current sets ;)

Google releases Nexus One SDK

Paul Shirley
Flame

@gulfie

Are you trying to compete with the Reg's own biased nonsense? Android Java is compiled down to Java VM ops - the normal Java VM stuff - then converted to much more compact Dalvik instructions. How you think late binding get's lost in that is beyond me, nothing would work. There are nasty incompatibilities if you try mixing base libraries from normal Java environments but that's hardly a surprise.

Apart from using less space than compressed Sun Java ops this appears to be a cunning way around Sun's control of the Java platform, Dalvik is compatible with but is not Java. Bye bye Sun.

Java is crappy enough all by itself without making stuff up! It makes C++ look like childs play...

BTW: want real Java? There's an app for that ;)

Nexus One teardown: 'nicely put together'

Paul Shirley

@Mike Moyle and emergency chargers

I could throw an emergency charger into the jumble in my pocket. But while a spare G1 battery fits easily in my wallet, the one thing I'm never going to forget to pack and barely raises a bump I'll stick with the spare.

Meanwhile my sister in law is still learning to cope with her piss poor iPhone battery life. Next time we're stuck in the middle of nowhere late at night I'll be the one calling the taxi ;)

It's the end of TV as we know it

Paul Shirley

broadcast+PVR

Broadcasting provides a massive effective bandwidth, PVR's provide the on-demand and trick play that's the big benefit of IPTV for that bandwidth. We'd be better off with the BBC subsidizing PVR's in viewers homes instead of a plan to burn bandwidth continously.

IPTV has a minority role filling in the gaps but as the major backbone its just wasteful madness. We worry about the power use of net server farms, iptv would dwarf that and the decoders will be burning just as much power whether recording and playing off air or over ip.

Scientist proposes quantum über-battery

Paul Shirley
Flame

nice little explosive

Lithium cells are already explosive. 10x higher energy density and the possibility of near instant discharge... not sure I want this in my home or pocket!

Department for Transport pours millions into eTicketing

Paul Shirley
FAIL

@It works in London because....

It remains cheaper for me to drive my 27year old Landrover into Leicester than get the bus. If I take my wife that's the parking charge covered as well. Make the damn buses affordable before buggering around with frills like etickets. Right now we're paying a 1st class price for distinctly 3rd class service - some days its actually quicker for me to walk the 3miles than wait for a sodding bus.

'CRU cherrypicked Russian climate data', says Russian

Paul Shirley

model data is being COMPLETELY ignored by the mainstream press

That's because the loudest voices (the denialist's) are having trouble finding anything substantially wrong in the data to spin a story around. They also seem to be having trouble convincing the rest of the world their conspiracy theories have legs - it's a whacko red flag saying 'ignore me' to even Sun readers.

All that's left is the denialist's own creation, years of abusing normal scientific process purely to delay and harass. When denialists are intent on playing the game but ignoring the rules its easy to see why the modellers don't want to play. Easy to paint that as something more sinister.

And those 'dodgy fiddle factors': sadly that's because modelling isn't pure science, its experimental - trial and error looking for the most accurate approximation. And sadly that means the denialists can lie & distort to a public that doesn't understand. And boy have they gone to town on it...

'Steve Jobs' dupes blogosphere with AT&T protest hoax

Paul Shirley
Flame

Denial of service attacks are illegal in the US

Daniel Lyons, rabid supporter of Utah extortionists SCO, in jail for cyberterrorism?

Works for me ;)

HTC rises to challenge after Android struggles in Europe

Paul Shirley

@El Reg needs to redo the Hero review

And perhaps review some of the hacker ROMs for the geekiest of readers. A jailbroken iPhone is still just an iPhone, a rooted Android can be like having a whole new phone. Faster, prettier, more functional. And easier to strip off the crapware the networks insist on installing ;)

Apple kicks prolific developer out of iTunes shop

Paul Shirley
Flame

waiting for Google to get the hint

The Android market is currently being spammed daily with the same sort of shit and I'd dearly love to see it at least hidden in a crapware category. For once Apple do the right thing, now we just need to prod Google into doing it.

Webmasters fume as Google profiles signed-out searchers

Paul Shirley

might enable it

Google searches have been steadily degrading for years now, now damn near useless most of the time. Though I hate the idea of letting Google massage my results it seems clear most of that degradation is from the SEO's that are already massaging my search results with increasing success.

Going to turn on their tracking and see if it helps because the SEO's have made searching like finding a needle in a cesspool.

NHS hurls iPhone into booze abuse fray

Paul Shirley
Pint

could be a great game

Does it let me upload my highscore?

Windows 7 - Microsoft minus the martyrdom

Paul Shirley
FAIL

me too "overwhelming hatred from users who hadn't used it"

Another vote for 'tried it, hated it'. If Win7 is just a fix pack for Vista its going to be less painful moving to Linux. Even the brain dead desktop versions pouring out of Ubuntu ;)

You'd think by now the Microsoft fanbois would have accepted it wasn't a whispering campaign of disinformation that killed Vista, the product really is that bad. They've spent so long astroturfing they assume everyone else is just as corrupt.

Murdoch puffs Microsoft over Google

Paul Shirley
FAIL

legal footshot

In normal times if Google pre-emptively delisted Murdoch's empire the lawsuits would start flying quicker than Ballmer can throw a chair... Murdoch just immunised Google, dump him now and his own statements are their defence, assuming the court stops laughing long enough to let a case even start!

Doubt it will happen, I'm convinced Google simply dont care about this market and will just wait for Murdoch to commit commercial suicide by himself. The idiot will try the courts and end up ordered to use the robots file, Google just won't play the game.

Humax Freeview HD set-top box to debut 'early 2010'

Paul Shirley
FAIL

Human OMFG not again

Humax. Always first to market, last to get the fscking boxes working.

With Humax its wise to follow the Microsoft rules, wait for the 3rd update before leaping in. It will still be chock-full-of-bugs but might work well enough you wont tear every hair out in frustration.

I actually unplugged my 9200 PVR for a couple of months waiting for the 3rd firmware fix (which cut the crashes down to just daily instead of hourly). Parents in law just went through the same with the Humax Freesat box.

If Humax are the only ones claiming to be ready might as well just cancel the HD launch now, no-ones going to be watching.

Dell confirms first Android-based smartphone

Paul Shirley
Pint

@China mobile

24hrs to hack whatever protection they use. 2 days to build and test a vanilla Android image. Then its bye bye untrusted Chinese software, hello untrusted hacker mods ;)

Elgato DTT Deluxe

Paul Shirley

stop reviewing thw shovelware bundled with these things

I don't understand why they supply half assed tuner software with these sticks apart from the obvious need to stop ignorant punters mix&matching tuner hardware. Stop reviewing the software they supply, its ALWAYS crap, test the damn sticks with things like MediaPortal,MythTV, GBPvr or ProgDVB. Software able to use all the capabilities of the hardware and not throw a hissy fit it you use someone else's tuner.

FFS does anyone with a clue actually use the piss poor crap supplied with DVB tuners?

Wikileaks publishes BNP 'member list' (again)

Paul Shirley
WTF?

@DS 1

"the problem with this outlook is that the BNP are not the ones trying to silence debate"

The BNP don't have the power to silence anything right now, like all previous extremist scum they know they need to hide their true aims until they can grab enough power. Then the silencing will begin - silencing with extreme prejudice. They don't need to be silenced, they need their real beliefs to be constantly exposed before they can lie their way into power.

And like all previous fascists/communists that made it to power they will jettison democracy before anyone can vote the bastards out. The BNP must have been having wet dreams about recent terrorism, their best chance of abusing democracy to gain power. Probably didn't realise Labour were having the same wet dreams and a better chance of achieving them :(

SCO boots boss McBride

Paul Shirley

ongoing litigation

Don't read too much into the ongoing litigation, Cahn (the bankruptcy trustee) hasn't finished digging through the huge heap of bullshit Darl created. Until that's complete he'll do nothing to damage any *potential* value in SCO, including the litigation.

Eventually he'll dig down to the truth, realize the threat of continuing litigation isn't even a valuable negotiating tool (IBM sat patiently through the last 6 years after all) and SCO will finally die.

Nvidia halts future Intel chipset development

Paul Shirley

WTF: Nvidia's chipset-integrated GPUs have proved to be rather better than Intel's

I knew Intel chipsets were bad but didn't realise they were that bad! The last 3 generations of Nvidia chipsets taught me to just turn off any 'advanced' feature straight away, rather than waiting for Nvidia to do it in later drivers.

Losing competition is never good but Nvidia hardly pushed Intel to improve their products and only diehard fanbois will notice them quitting the chipset biz.

GE tries to refocus image of holographic storage

Paul Shirley

@Tape and Optical both have no future

Dead right. Until single optical disks can handle domestic system backups there's no real point having one, hard drives do the casual storage thing better. With systems heading well beyond 1Tb, mostly full of incompressible media holographic capacities are just too small, no-one sits around for a couple of hours to swap discs.

Hard to see any mass market being created, these drives are perpetually offering this years HD capacity in a few years time. Bluray seems caught in the same trap.

Ubuntu's Karmic Koala opens its eyes

Paul Shirley

@fast boot

Look up Asrock's Instant Boot, Windows only but it does speed up restarts by setting up a freshly started system snapshot - at the cost of much longer shutdowns, presumably you get to walk away from the PC while that happens. If doesn't persist the state so you pay on every shutdown but that's probably better than the chaos system updates would cause.

Only problem: hibernate needs to work. I've seen exactly one system build here able to restart from hibernate in Linux. It stopped working with the 1st update I ran. Most didn't work under Windows either apart from the laptop and even that fails after 6 or so WinXP restarts.

We need fast booting because its so damn easy to break hibernation/standby support. I'd love to leave my machines in standby most of the time but it's not happening for me.

Nationwide Freeview tune-up takes place today

Paul Shirley
Pint

not just bricking to worry about

2 out of 3 tuners locked up during the scan and needed power cycling, copied the config to the others rather than risk them crashing as well. The STB that did succeed nuked all its channel lists and timers anyway - 30min reprogramming I won't get back. At least I could restore timers on Mediaportal from backup.

This particular retune didn't go remotely smoothly here and if that doesn't cause a flood of complaints tomorrow the odd scattering of anonymous channels in the lineup will confuse a lot of folk.

Still, my precious Dec2000T didn't get bricked. Probably the 1st thing its ever done right ;)

Dual-screen Microsoft 'booklet' uncovered

Paul Shirley
Alien

Nintendo has them worried...

...why else build a grownup DS ;)

Firefox update quells quartet of security vulns

Paul Shirley

another Adobe deceptive install

Using the same peak RAM here (150mb for the same 9 tabs), actual use down about 40mb right now. Does feel like its loading fast but I doubt it ever got flushed out of RAM so I don't trust that impression right now.

Meanwhile, Adobe seem determined to install their download manager, whether I need it or not. Since the flash update installs without it (thanks for giving no hints Adobe) and the bloatware bit can be cancelled in the standalone installer installing the bloatware can be given the heave-ho. Wasn't obvious the recommended 'allow Adobe.com to rape your machine' settings change could complete without allowing this crapware. Just another reason to hate Flash.

Police drag feet following DNA law change

Paul Shirley

faked DNA

It's only a few days since faking DNA evidence was demonstrated. While the standard 'couldn't qualify as a wheelclamper' copper will struggle to pull this off its a timely reminder of why we shouldn't let them have our profiles *before* 'finding' the evidence.

They should have no access to profiles at all, just the comparison result, far too easy to copy the profile completely voiding any efforts to delete them. The police should not be trusted with temptation and if they were honest they'd agree.

SCO sale blocked by court

Paul Shirley
Linux

Darl McBride, delusional and too busy to troll right now

One delightful side effect of the ruling is a total cessation of proSCO spamming on the interwebs, Yahoo,Groklaw,IV and god knows where else are currently 'clean'. Meanwhile, somewhere in Utah, Darl 'Skyline Cowboy with Snow Shoes' McBride is tied up crafting an appeal. Coincidence? We have reason to believe not...

Its well worth reading the BK court transcript, where Darl is shown to be believed delusional by his own employees! Nice to see some sanity breaking out inside SCO.

Clever attack exploits fully-patched Linux kernel

Paul Shirley

context

The core problem here is this is a dangerous optimisation that should only be enabled explicitly, not bundled into -O3. It's dangerous because it assumes the privilege level of the code being compiled and the system behaviour of the target. It should default conservatively and doesn't.

The source itself is strictly correct but inherently dangerous, it assumes knowledge the compiler doesn't automatically have and could have been written more robustly. Its sloppy. being blindsided by gcc gets them off just once, they need to take this much more seriously. I want robust defensive coding in my kernel, not blame shifting.

High spam response powers junk mail economy

Paul Shirley

I'm not running protection and I'm proud

As a user of mail software that resolutely treats almost all content as plain text, validates every image, ignores ALL external links and shows real URL's however well hidden, I feel confident disabling the malware sniffers my antivirus vendor keeps piggybacking onto updates.

Anyone want to bet this survey was carefully worded to not distinguish infection magnets from those of us that simply don't need thebloatware products from the studies sponsors?

3D TV will won't go primetime in 2011

Paul Shirley

3D gaming headache

Let's hope LCD's do a lot better than CRT's did last time 3D gaming sank without trace.

I still remember the wicked headaches and queasiness as little as 10min of 3D gaming caused at 160Hz on a good CRT in the 90's. Pushing the monitor to a punishing 200Hz didn't help.

Most likely the combination of reduced frame rates trying to push out that stereo view and the difficulty tuning the effect for your exact seat position were the cause. With every new game bringing top of the line graphics monsters to their knees this doesn't bode well for 3D gaming to become widespread. Crysis at 30fps may be playable but not while holding a sick bag!

SuperSpeed USB PCs to ship by year-end

Paul Shirley

lightning fast?

Oh dear. Yes, USB3 should break the 30Mb/s (typical) to 40Mb/s (best in class) transfer bottleneck and expose most of the 100Mb/s throughput of drives...

...for a whopping 3x speed improvement. Does that really justify "lightning fast in comparison to today's tortoise-like slowness"?

Meanwhile today's Firewire800 will inevitably deliver higher performance and lower CPU use. It just doesn't deliver 'cheap'.

SuperSpeed USB to be 'successful', enthuses analyst

Paul Shirley

@Henry Wertz

You're right that lots of low end stuff will claim USB3 but the odds are it will be a repeat of the USB1->2 change, where USB1 devices magically became lo or hi speed USB2 overnight, no upgrade involved - just renamed.

Ain't backwards compatibility great, it allows so much lying about specs ;)

So what we do when ID Cards 1.0 finally dies?

Paul Shirley

why do I need one?

Underlying the technical analysis is the assumption I need the card. Sorry, I don't need an ID card to walk the streets and will resist any attempts to impose one. Until the whole concept of a card is 110% irrevocably *voluntary* and run for my benefit not some power mad cretin in government it doesn't need fixing but nuking from orbit.

Beyond that any scheme that allows anyone to see my records without my direct approval is fundamentally unacceptable. In a country that's started electing fascist's to power no sane person wants to give access to them or the BNP infiltrators in the police and civil service. This is power governments should only have in times of dire emergency, not in the years it takes them to manufacture a self sustaining 'emergency'.

Government cannot be trusted to keep the system safe, however hard we work on fixing the problems. They shouldn't be allowed to run or impose it as a point of principle.

Kodak EasyShare Z915

Paul Shirley

cartoon quality seems normal for Kodak

Kodak seem to specialise in higher than average compression ratios and cartoon like processing to help achieve that. It was so bad on the last camera I tried I sent it back the day it arrived. To my eye these pictures are unacceptably smoothed - you certainly wouldn't want to blow them up beyond snapshot size.

Someone needs to whack them around the design department and demand less compression.