Posts by Grant

Space butterflies invade ISS

video of one flying

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xKzL_jIMdA

Apple nabs 90% of all 'premium PC' dollars

@barth

"- honestly, I find XP pretty much bulletproof too nowadays. My PC runs weeks on end, crashes less than once a month... "

Nothing personal Barth your expectations are a product of your experiance with the piece of shit standards set by consumer OSes (that includes OS X which I use), but it almost makes me cry to read "pretty much bulletproof .... crashes less than once a month"

QNX runs for years without crashing and that can include complete OS upgrades without shutting down.

Nissan to build e-car batteries in Blighty

@Martin - Read twice write once.

"Nissan's investment in the Sunderland battery plant will amount to £200m"

The carpenters rule of measure twice cut once really should be applied to Reg readers.

Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles

@How is it legal?

If you buy stolen properly , even unknowningly, I think the owner of the property can demend it back and if necessary pry it from your cold dead finger (since this is attitude may reg readers seem to want to take). Actually have the police pry it from your cold dead fingers.

Microsoft promises no patent prosecution of open-source .NET

Just because your paranoid doesn't mean....

Stallman generally goes to far for me but he still has a good effect on the industry. It was not clear to me in the article if Community promise is a legally binding document or just PR.

Ecopocalypse causes giant fish ears

@ ElReg!comments!Pierre, Dodgy Geezer, etc

The El reg article, let along the Science article, doesn't even mention global warming. I think your showing your strategy to just deny anything you don't like the sound off without any consideration of facts a little obviously in your comments.

Remembering the true* first portable computer

Good well written and very funny.

This is how black humour is funny, not by swearing every second word.

Scientists: Tasers work, but we don't know how

Water boarding kits, 10% off, order 5 now and get free neck belt.

"He said that if we were to focus on the repressive capabilities of technology, then recent revelations about Guantanamo interrogations would require a prohibition on water exports. Alexander's view is that people, not technology, are to blame when things go wrong."

Self serving BS. if you want a more accurate comparision between waterboarding and tasers it would be. --require a prohibition on exporting waterboarding kits, waterboarding training seminars and marketing of related waterboarding materials to police and detention forces. Which is thankfully the current economic status of waterboarding.

I don't know if Tasers should be more heavly controlled or not but the quote shows Alexander is a self serving twit out to promote a new weapon so he make big consultant fees getting laws changed to make his clients a few more million bucks.

Mozilla invites all comers on post-tab future

Mozilla tabs may suck but Opera tabs don't

I have 26 tabs open now on Opera with now extra addons or hours spent looking at customs skins, and it works well. I can find what I want and it visually obvious what I want . I admit with 50 or 60 tabs in one window it gets cumbersome, but I seldom need 50 or 60 open in one window. Usually it better to open a second window for a new topic and keep 30 tabs open there. When I close and open Opera all window and tab positions are keeps, even on System cashes and restarts.there may a point when more than tabs are needed but first try using well designed tabs.

Plod called in on MPs' expenses leak

Trail by jury...

So if they charge him does he get a trail by jury? Hopefuly a very public trail by jury. I figure he has a good chance to get off.

UK spectrum map uncovers mysterious emissions in Cumbria

£2.11m annually sounds cheap

£2.11m annually to do annual survey, sounds cheap to me, and actaully a reasonable thing to spend gov. money on.

Can you talk and drive?

Well done DoT

Doubt it will stop many people from feeling that anything should interfere with their right to drive in any condition doing what ever they want and if the pedistrian DoT

Man survives death march to display-on-a-chip

Good Piece

I was surised a nice little piece of journalism, with no gratitous swearing or side lines written only to make the article contraverisal so people will post lots BS.

Apple rides fanbois to popularity crown (again)

@Travis

scha⋅den⋅freu⋅de [shahd-n-froi-duh]

–noun satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's misfortune.

Origin:

1890–95; < G, equiv. to Schaden harm + Freude joy

--

written from MacBook Pro, I switch to mac when Vista came out. I am a professional programmer (Not a professional fiddler with my OS al the time to keep it running) and OS X rocks.

Irish ISPs rally against record label anti-piracy threat

@Finally, what the bloody hell were they doing for the last few weeks

Polishing PR value of the statement. Notice the part about jobs, completely irrelevent but great press. It will help put pressure on MPs to tell IRMA where to stick it.

iPhone chip designer trumpets multi-core GPUs

No muss, no fuss.

"In other words, the SGX543 can have any number of cores from two to sixteen with no change in the driver software or the application. All that complex data/pipeline/thread management is done in hardware. No muss, no fuss."

I'll believe it when it is running my code. I d think that it will help and be worth the effort, I just don't believe there will be no effort.

Obama CIO a confessed petty thief

All I can say is... +1

AC in "All I can say is... " pretty much covers my feelings on this.

iPhone inches closer to China

RE:And people wonder why...

Thats right we need fair trade like massive subsidies for farm good in the developed world or maybe textile duties because it's not fair that developing countries have cheap labour. Or maybe a new opium war, that was good trade war on drugs the west won.

The Econmy is F*cked up because American banks got stupid and greedy along with American consumers and now U.S. economy is the toilet. The European econimy got draged alone but is not is bad because they were not a greedy.

U.S. screwed up quit whinning and take some damn responsiblity.

Softbank gives Japan free iPhones

Giving away is the norm here

Don't know about outside Japan but giving away phones with a two year contract is pretty standard here. I paid for my iPhone and Japanese think it looks kinda cool, but it is just not that great a phone here. The Camera is useless, it can't read QR codes printed here (which tend have a lot info in them so you need good camera resolution). It does not integrate with the carrier serices like automatic back of user data over network, it is big, and it is not as nice for speed typing Japanese. Most Japanese use their phones as their main email.

Obama balks at recovery of lost Dubya emails

More press

Hope this get more press in US, It is they only way in 50 years people will know in if Bush was incompenent or willfully incompentent

Mobile money for the masses: Do the numbers add up?

@ Not for me

read the article they already have mobile phones. If you use a basic model and only use it to text not to call your buddies up for a beer at 5:00 everyday it does not use much power. lso if your read the article it is some new thing an MIT grad thinks would be great they 5m accounts out there working already,this is being done by people on the ground.

The only problem I had with the article was that micro fince is not generally govenment run. it usually privately run like www.kiva.com where you can lend $25 dollar over the net to these people

Kaminsky calls for DNSSEC deployment

re: A fake hot potato

"Can you really see Iran and North Korea putting themselves in the position whereby the US can kill their DNS by revoking their certificate?"

or for example countries that that even the US nantionalist may realize are important, China, Russia, India?

Dear Obama: Please consider open-source a waste of your time

Reg please add filter by article

After wasting 2 minutes on this article (you can read articles with no content pretty fast), I really want a way to filter out by byline.

Transmeta IP sold to not-patent troll

Just owning patents does not make you a trol(even technically)l

Although I know it is a strange concept, but there was a time when patents were issued for real inovation and inventions. There still are some people and companies who make use and license real patents. It is possible this is a case . Reg has the right attitude wait and watch.

F1 chiefs ready post-prang battery safety scheme

@William's flywheel

Unless of course it is some how involved in a high speed car accident and black box gets bent, contacting the internal flywheel which may then release all that kinetic energy in the form a single spinning disk or smaller chuncks of flying shrapnel. But all this should happen before the martials can get to the car so from a Marshels point of view not so bad.

(matians know all about flying saucer shapped thingies)

Parallel importer jailed for up to nine months in Microsoft case

bad and good

Original copyright shit is crap but disobeying a couple of court arders, well yeah they put you in stocks.

Apple gets censory on iBoobs'... ass

Sorry no offending Kanji or Roomaji in Wobble

But they mention bouncing breasts in hiragana and katakana. According to their site they were #1 in Japan, despite the ap being only in English and all iTunes store material being English only. (Why am I not suprised)

Glasgow Cops pound Facebook to blunt knife crime

@Oh stop whining

Gotta agree with you Dave.

also don't see how looking through PUBLIC internet images is civil rirghts violation.

@Jason TogneriI

having green 18 year olds going through facebook seems like a pretty effcient use of time. Some inexperianced workers do a first pass through the masses of pages and then more experianced (and valuable) workers do a check on a smaller data set. Sounds like good management and planning. Knowing who in your neighbourhood is trying show how tough he is by posing in pics and going around giving them a scare if they are just "potential" criminals. Community policing, crime prevention. You know doing something before they knife someone. You lot are the same ones who complain that police never reduce crime because they don't even get involved till after the crime is committed.

WTO backs US in Chinese piracy dispute

Remember Antigua!!!

Remember the US responce to WTO finding against US and for Antigua. Almost literaly, WTO finds that we don't like and the other side is not in a position to enforce don't apply to us.

Obama reverses Dubya's tailpipe emissions

@cost of production

Wow you have not read anything on this subject at all have you?

these generally fleet averages so you don't have make different in each state you have sell differentmixes of cars cars in each state. 13 state are all trying to adopt the SAME stadard as California. These Lawa will apply to all companies not just American companies.

But finally yes US car manufactures may go belly up, they have spent 30+ years prefecting their lobbying skills (starting with no seat belts) and short term marketing skills (think fins on cars) instead of engineering good cars, good power pla\nts and good production systems. Hey that the free market playing politics instead doing core business is a igh risk tatic it paid off for a while but if you screw up you've got no product/service in the end.

Google Analytics crippled by autoimmune disease

Maybe just not linked

I know last year I got one of my clients with gmail to see their google analyticts but I had to send them a link google analytics page https://www.google.com/analytics because the analytics link would not appear on their google panels. If the were logged in to their gmail and then went to the link things worked ok.

So does it still work?

Obama gets to keep his BlackBerry

@US Patriot ?

Shhh, don't tell Americans Canada in not part of the US, RIM is going to a have tough enough time already this year.

Yes the current President knows it's not but your averageAmerican is not sure.

China's three-horse mobile bet: Repeating America's mistakes

In Japan people buy by carrier

"The US is the only place in the world where the carrier's (network) brand is more important than the handset. People buy a Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile phone rather than a Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson.", In Japan people buy by Carrier, Docomo, Softbank(Vodafone,Jphone or whatever it called that month) or AU. The iPhone is the only exception, but until v2.2 people mainly complained how its texting support sucked for Japanese emoji (emoticons? not sure what there called outside Japan). They also ask people what carrier their phone is, because texting on same carrier is can be done by phone number, between carriers you need to use an email addresses.

Facebook breastfeeding pic takedown gets backs up

120K+ members now

Just joined. Because, well Americans can be such stupid prudes, you've got to do what you can to bring some reality to them.

And so you cann that joining doesn't mean no sense of humor.

@Not MILFs then

very good :D

@Sarah bee

"Boobs have been sexualised"

Are you trying to imply that breast, the major secondary sexual charteristic of women are not sexual, except as an uncomon fetish?

German beaver escapes from Dartmoor

skinned not eaten

"It seems that once upon a time there was beaver as far as the eye could see here in old Blighty, but they were eaten into extinction by our hungry ancestors."

Our ancestors had different habits, beavers in Briton were driven to extinction by being skinned used to keep one warm. Whereas over in Canada we stil have many wild beaver and given the chance use them to keep us warm, Although many Brits have protests over this, I too would protest if I lived in a country with only few beaver and those keep in zoos where you are only allowed to look but not touch.

Apple wants to swipe your iPhone

US PTO broken so ditch it?

The US PTO is abviously broken so is it possible for the sane patent offices (ie. the rest of the world) to just start chucking the US crap as invalid. Sure you wouldn't be able sell your products directly in the US, but there economy is sinking anyways. You could always let someone else grey market your goods in to the US and make a profit that way. If sane countries shun the US for a while (patnet, random wars, blatently ingnoring WTO rules, CO2, torture)even they will understand they have work with the world not try and run it down to their standards.

Larry Wall on the Zen of Perl 6

@Nano nano

you could move APL from to J. Not the greatest name for googling but they choose it in pre web days. check out jsoftware.com

Germany tests tadpole airship

Sanswire, damn

Wow Reg editorial standards are really slipping first not calling it a giant sperm and then not googling Sanwire and Securities Fraud. This company is well know amoung airship enthusiasts, unforunately not for good reasons.

Microsoft's C# to converse with dynamic languages

Real men use Haskell (F# is for MMM$ weenies)

You want strong typing, code the is readable when doing complex things, get functional. If you want build yet a another UI out of standard buttons C# and VB are great though.

Mines the asbestos lined one with a Lambda on back.

The Tzu Chi Foundation – the world’s largest Buddhist charity

Good article

It is nice to see Reg's desire to publish irreverent articles does not stop it from publishing non-irreverent stuff also.

US utilities moot huge electric vehicle order to boost car biz

10,000 not that big an order

GM stated in congressional hearings they expect to sell 60,000 volts a year, so 10,000 over multilple years is not that much. Also 10,000 x $40,000 = $400,000,000 GM want the largest of a 3 way slice of $25,000,000,000 to stay in business. So revenues of $0.4B over multiple years when they need more than $8B cash now to stay in business, what were you on when you wrote this piece?

My numbers are frm the New York times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/business/22volt.html?em

Parallels 4 users want their money back

Cut'n paste job but usefull

@Gordon Ross I agree it is just a cut'n paste job but I found it usefull anyways.

I am running parrels 4 trail and it is good to know more memory woud not speed things up.

US intelligence predicts EU 'hobbled giant' by 2025

@Seán

Seán pretty much sums it up. The US came out of WWII with a huge lead over the world economically. Americans has this attitude that only they know how to make economic growth and that the rest of the world is dooming themselves by giving medical care and an education to their citizens. Well since the war the EU economic growth has surpassed US growth. For those of you even considering arguing against that fact just compare GDP in 1950 and 2006 of EU and US. Same goes for Japan, although recently (25 years)they have adopted US style personel goals and stuck now.

The report is just another US intelligence report driven by politcs not reality.

NASA celebrates return of the Zeppelin

Nitt being picked

It is not a lighter-than-air vehicle. It flies at a small ( acouple hinderad kilos I think) positive weight and uses airodynamics for lift. When it has forward speed it generates lift and having positive weight makes it easier to land.

Obama inaugurates YouTube-side chats

Vimeo

I have to agree why youtube only. The TV spots of presdential addresses don't go out on only one channel. Well maybe some will fix this by January.

Reg readers in Firefox 3 lovefest

Opera

I use opera. I have 29 tabs open in my general interest window(when I have more open it is hard for me to see the icons and remember what is which tab), and in windows for specific tasks I keep more tabs open that work. When I shut (volentary or not) I re-open opera nad all windows re-open with all tabs intact.This has been the norm for years. I only use FF2 for google docs and to run an addon that gives me mouse over translation of Japanese(not available for FF3 ). I use Safari for plugin testing. But then for me a browser is tool I don't want to spend hunderds of hours installing add-on and answering daily upgrade messages, I just want to use it.

And yes IE6 is eviler than most MS software.

The True Confessions of an Election Official

keep up the good work and good writing

good article and good work, keep it up

Top aero boffin: Green planes will be noisy planes

@Planes aren't essential.

Nice article Mr. Adam Williamson, but a bt too much research for the reg if your writing on an enviromental topic. Also you didn't spend enough space bashing people who give shit about the enviroment, espcially scientists who do research in the area (as opposed who work in complete different fields but whose political view point you agree with). So I'm sorry your chances of getting ublished on this site outside the comments are pretty slim, but it was a good read anyways.

China plans spacewalk by end of the month

A all but amanfromMars

Wow 20+ comments and amanfromMars is the most lucent and relavent. This is just sad.

Police quiz BT on secret Phorm trials

Copyright violation

I've always wondered about this from a copyright point of view. If I run a website whose pages are copyright and user requests a copy of those pages, I send the users a my copyrighted pages. And Phorm/BT alter my copyrighted materail without my consent and then send it to users. It sure sounds like a they taken my copyrighted material altered and presented it for profit.

I agree I want to see crimal charges filed but a massive copyright suit wouldn't hurt. As site owner I don't want some ISP stealing my content and selling it to other advertisors.