Posts by Captain Underpants

New music file aims to sink piracy using blogs and Twitter

How is that a benefit?

Couldn't the same thing be achieved by making the album/track artwork a QR code containing the artist's website link? (Because let's face it, all the things they list as "advantages" are things that the artist should be pushing through their web presence).

Quite aside from which, I have no idea why I would want to have my files remotely updated by these fine folk every time I go on the internet. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I'll stick to my download once, listen forever account with emusic, thanks.

Dixons celebrates shiny Christmas

The shops themselves were never the problem

The problem with the DSGi shops has always been that they target people who don't really know what they need, never mind what they should be buying, and thus have them staffed with people who don't know much (if anything) about what they're selling. It's compounded by their nonsensical warranty gubbins.

There will always be a market for a brick & mortar electronics store with up-to-date products in stock and knowledgeable staff - how much profit can be made from such a store, and how viable it is as an international chain, is another question entirely. (Compare Richer Sounds to Dixons and you'll see what I mean).

Official: British telly really is almost all repeats

RE: Ireland

In fairness if you sit and watch any significant amount of RTE's home-made television you'd understand why they import so much of it. There's only so much uniformly fucking awful alleged comedy you can inflict on a viewing audience before you offer them at least the possibility of something that might actually be worth watching.

Research suggests Wii Fit is no flab fighter

Wow, they haven't missed the point at ALL, have they?

Well done those chaps for completely misunderstanding the point of the Wii Fit.

Abridged version:

You lose weight by adjusting your calorific intake:calorific usage ratio such that you burn more than you ingest. You can do this by eating less, working out to burn more, or preferably a combination of both.

Eating 5 times your daily carb requirement then doing ten minutes of Wii Fit will achieve fuck-all. As would the same behaviour with 10 minutes spent in the gym, or anywhere else.

The problem with this is that the researchers have tried to pretend that the Wii Fit either is, or is marketed as, the ONE SINGLE THING THAT WILL SOLVE YOUR WEIGHT PROBLEM. It's not, and Nintendo have never said otherwise. Stop giving morons publicity for moronic statements, for Christ's sake, it'll only encourage them.

Full Disclosure: The GF & I have had a Wii & Wii Fit for about 7 months, and in that time have found it very useful to help change habits. I've lost 2 and a half stone along the way and have gained a very useful morning wakeup routine. The majority of the change was to how often we eat and how much we eat. We could have achieved the same result with a scales, a notebook, some graph paper and a fitness DVD. The Wii Fit succeeds in simplifying the task of being aware of your overall food intake and physical condition, but it still requires people to be able to put the fork down in order to work.

Philip K. Dick's kid howls over Googlephone handle

OH FFS

It's a name consisting of common dictionary words. If Google start marketing it as "the phone Deckard would use" or something similarly retarded, then she might have a case. Until then, I think she's misunderstood how copyright actually works. Aside from anything else she appears to think that names used in a work of fiction get the same kind of protection that trademarked terms get.

Bet you her legal counsel is delighted about how much effectively free money they're bringing in from this.

2009's Top Set-top Media Players

Reasons? Here are a few possible ones:

Because not everyone wants to give Sony their money?

Because they already have a games console they're happy with and don't want to buy a second one they don't need just to use what was originally touted as an ancillary function?

Because £120 for a product that does what you want it to is cheaper than £200 for a product that does what you want and a bunch of other stuff you're not interested in.

If you want a Blu-Ray-capable HD media centre and games console with network access, the PS3's definitely a contender. If you don't need it to play Blu-Ray discs or go online or play games, the PS3 is probably not the best fit to your needs.

Maybe I'm missing a trick here, but...

....I've got the original WD TV without networking and don't see why anyone wants to have a HD-capable media player that then pulls the media over a wireless network. Is home wireless networking good enough to support streaming HD-quality content from your storage to the box?

(As for the "why not buy a PS3/Xbox 360" brigade - maybe, like me, you've already got lots of USB storage around the place and just want your digital files on TV. In which case, something like a WDTV for ~£70 makes more sense than >>£70 for a bigger box with loads of extra functions I neither want nor am likely to use. Mileage may vary, but let's not pretend one size of tech fits all usage patterns, eh?)

Also, including the Apple TV on the basis that it can just about be considered equivalent to the other devices if you hack it is a bit disingenuous. As with most Apple things it's only really a concern if you also use all the other Apple services; I'm surprised that you think it's even worth a look if you don't already use iTunes, because given the choice of "buy any alternative product for less" or "buy functionally-crippled Apple product at more expense, then invalidate your warranty by hacking it"....well, that's not much of a choice at all.

No Freeview HD kit in time for launch, warns telly exec

Big feckin' woopdedo

Is this the same HD-Freeview that the Beeb were trying desperately to riddle with DRM? Yeah, I think I'll pass thanks. I don't care about HD for TV content anyway, since I'm not part of the target audience for the programming that benefits for it (well, maybe some of the documentary stuff, but not the sports broadcasting).

Windows 7 - the Reg reader verdict

re: virtual desktops

I still don't understand why Microsoft haven't introduced some sort of virtual desktop feature in Windows. There's a virtual desktop manager for Vista I've used that seems pretty decent, and on XP there's the powertoy, but why the hell isn't it native?!

(That being said, it's the only gripe I've found with Win7 thus far, having been intermittently using the Enterprise edition on a work machine for the last month or so. Perhaps Vista was actually just a very expensive, lengthy and obscure exercise in expectation management?)

Firefox blocks and backtracks on 'insecure' MS add-ons

@ abigsmurf

To be honest, I see this as a step in the right direction. The plug in wasn't installed via any channel I'd expect it to be, and was specifically set up at the time of being rolled out such that registry editing was needed to remove it. Those are not the actions of someone who wants to offer you the choice of expanding the functionality of a tool (made by someone else) that you use, and Mozilla's response in this regard is correct. It should have come far sooner, but then again I can't exactly demand an SLA since I'm not paying for the product or a support agreement - thus I will take what is offered, with thanks.

In terms of the killswitching - and? It's a free-of-charge web browser. Nobody's making you use it, and I would imagine you're not paying for either the browser or the package. If you as an individual or an agent of a company are allowing yourself to be completely dependent on not only such a package but an add-on within the package whose nature or method of distribution is such that it may suddenly and with no notice be blacklisted such that you cannot work, then the first question to ask is not about Mozilla's strategy, but about your own business continuity provisions.

If it were a product that predominantly works off-line and had a rich market of commercially developed and supported addons (along the lines of the Acrobat plugins for office, say) and this were the case, then I'd be angry. But a web-based product having a remote killswitch used, as far as we can tell, to prevent the continued presence of unauthorised add-ons? I don't really see the threat, tbh...

You appear to be confused about who did something sneaky and stupid to begin with...

@abigsmurf

I'll be honest, I'd much prefer Mozilla react in this way to *any* software/OS developer who, in the process of patching their own product, forcibly installs (without giving the user and warning or choice in the matter) an unwanted/unnecessary "addon" to a product installed by the user.

Maybe MS will learn something about how not to install plugins for other vendor's products as a result of this. I doubt it though...

T-Orange: And then there were four

Great, he mutters to himself under his breath

As an existing T-mobile subscriber who's satisfied with but not exactly astonished by the service they provide, I look forward to this joint venture with Orange with the aplomb and anticipation more commonly reserved for invasive colonic surgery. I have heard nothing but bad accounts of the service and support provided by Orange (which, given the stories about their callcentres being run so poorly that they use IE6 over Firefox, seems to be the rule rather than the exception for the entire company's ethos) and will most likely be migrating to another network in the near future. Can't imagine I'll be the only one either...

Man remanded for extreme porn offences

@AC - it's called "consent"

I would imagine that the case against bestiality porn is that animals, like children, are considered unable to give consent, thus the DVDs feature depictions of real unconsensual sex.

Whether this makes sense or not is another matter, I would imagine you'd need to talk to a collection of biologists and animal psychologists to determine whether such material requires behaviour that is innately abusive towards either the performers or the animals involved. But this is the UK government, it shouldn't be any surprise by now that the decisions being made on any given subject within the law don't require those making decisions to have the faintest idea of what they're talking about...

Microsoft can still sell Word

@seanj: Let's not confuse justice with patent-trolling

From what's been said about this whole situation so far, it seems remarkably convenient that i4i are pursuing Microsoft in particular and not, you know, everyone else who has an application that produces XML-formatted output. So let's not go jumping too swifly on the MS=bastards train; in this case, MS winning might be the better (or perhaps least bad) outcome, since the alternative is to allow i4i to demand payment from any software production company whose products can produce XML-formatted output. Which, given the whole "XML is a standard" thing, is kind of ridiculous and borderline-retarded. (You'll note I haven't specified which side of the border it's close to, either...)

Beware evangelists

The titles will continue until morale improves

On the one hand, I agree with the notion that people should, when dealing with problems, be objective about both the nature & scope of the problem and the various attributes of the possible tools for solving the problem.

On the other hand, it's a sad state of affairs that this fairly simple point can be considered sufficient subject material for a piece like this, because that speaks volumes about the fraction of people who just won't bother checking for the best tool and will use either the first one they find or their personal favourite, regardless of its suitability to the task at hand...

Is there an icon for wanting an improved human species?

Office 2010 to come loaded with WGA's bastard child

@Geoff :You're damn right citation needed

And not just on the figure, but also the hilarious assumption that there's $500 billion just sitting around in the computer-user-population's collective pockets, and that this money will be spent on the day that software piracy finally becomes too difficult or inconvenient. Because, you know, heaven forfend that those people using the pirated versions would just *not use the software at all* if they can't get dodgy copies. (Or even worse, find a legitimately free-of-charge equivalent app on the net and move over to that instead!)

Electropulse weapon fear spreads to UK politicos

Excellent stuff!

So the worry is that we'll be attacked by a nuke and the biggest problem will be the EMP? Great! Because, you know, if I was a hostile foreign nation who'd decided to fire a nuke at ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, I'd make sure to try and use it to fry their infrastructure, instead of, you know, razing their capital city to the bedrock.

Good *Christ*, it boggles the mind.