Posts by Leeroy

DARPA: Send limbless troops back to war with robo-arms

I know what the date is...

But the article is still in bad taste....

Google drops Schmidt for Elop, Android for WinPho 7

Whats the date

Very good, thanks for the giggles.

Arkansas governor spanks arse cleavage

WTF

This is why they should be wearing school uniform.

Simple really.

Acer boss quits after board disses his future strategy

Title here

"In addition, we are stepping into the new mobile device market, where we will invest cautiously and aim to become one of the leading players."

Investing cautiously and becoming a leading player do not seem to go together at all. Perhaps this is what Lanci was trying to tell them ?

UK boffins to develop 'Solar Squaddie' electro-uniform

Electrical weapons ?

I hope they do a better job with this than with Bowman.

Mine is the one with the integrated power station.

Megaquake cuts Japan phone lines

Shakey shakey HD

I am surprised the storage systems in the data centers are still working as i thought vibrations were very bad for mechanical disks etc. Apart from the actual movement caused by the quakes, racks falling over would probably be a bad thing.

Would be nice to see some of the systems that they use to reduce the effects of these natural disasters on their infrastructure.

Japanese nuke meltdown may be underway

@ Elmer

You are correct, the Japanese PM made a statement yesterday that everything was under control and while the automatic shutdown did not function correctly the manual override did. Everything seemed OK on the nuclear front.

Today there is an explosion that was not expected and had not (as yet) been explained.

If the pressure vessel fails are we looking at another Chernobyl or worse ? I can't see a huge concrete dome surviving the earthquakes that it would frequently experience.

Microsoft compares Amazon cloud to 'horseless carriage'

Mmmmmm i dont get it.

Where do i draw the line with all this "cloud" / offsite IT stuff ?

Hosted email is the first step, then hosted (Google) apps, then moving your apps to the cloud.

How far is to far ? would you want to run Sage on a cloud instance, what about Photoshop ?

I am worried that if we go down this route we may loose what i think is the most important thig about a PC, its ability to work unconnected to any external network. With Windows 8 apparently connected to the cloud what happenes if i move house and it takes a month to get broadband working ?

Ten... fantasy swords you wish you owned

Final Fantasy

Since when did Final Fantasy have the "patent" on attaching a knife / sword to a gun ?

I am sure if anyone has a case for banning replica weapons it would be H & K for continual use of its weapons in nearly all (semi realistic) FPS and war games.

As far as i am aware most ground troops the world over carry a bayonet for attachment to their rifle during combat, they are also used for cutting barbed wire with the scabbard, ripping out throats with the serrated edge and it even has a blood channel to ease removal from the enemy and they are not even that sharp. Probably a lot more deadly than anything Square Enix can come up with.

Eurofighter Typhoon: It's EVEN WORSE than we thought

When facts are not facts at all.

While I agree that the project looks like a mess and has cost a lot of money, aircraft generally tend to be quite expensive. A few of the presented "facts" seem to be slightly off.

"And the Raptor has third-generation Stealth: the Eurofighter has no stealth features at all.

From the sales brochure

"The Low observability technology is incorporated in the basic design." -snip- "The Eurofighter Typhoon is, by any standard, a low observability aircraft with a fleet effectiveness superior to any other competitor. The airframe is constructed mainly from Carbon Fibre Composites (CFCs), lightweight alloys, titanium and Glass Reinforced Plastics (GRP). "

The pilot can also control the electronic emmissions of the aircraft directly including features such as passive radar etc. This seems to sugest the aircraft does have at least some stealth features.

"The Raptor has thrust vectoring for unbeatable manoeuvrability in a dogfight: the Eurofighter doesn't."

The F22 has thrust vectoring due to its size. The EF is a much smaller plane and uses its foreplane / delta configuration to increase manuverability without sacrificing speed as the F22 does when using thrust vectoring. It is believed that the EF would be superior in a close quarters (less that 20 mile) engagement with an F22.

"The Raptor is a hugely more sophisticated and powerful aircraft"

More sophisticated ? it can not attack ground targets, imagine the outrage if the UK had bought a fleet of "Air dominance fighters" that could not attack ground targets ?

A few more points, EF service ceiling 65'000 ft vs F22 60'000, runway length 2500 ft vs 7000 ft oh and the icing on the cake is that the EF can target an F22 at BVR (beyond visual range) defeating the design goal of its main competitor (if you can rellly call it that). FFS you should be behind the plane and its designers even if the financial side is a complete clusterf?*k, a bit of national pride would not hurt every now and again !

Nvidia revs up CUDA GPU coder toolkit

Missed something

I wsa surprised not to see a mention of OpenCL in the article ? or did i totally miss the point that if GPU computing was to become widespread it would have to run on different hardware from different manufacturers including intels future laughabee and AMD ?

Adobe Flash: 20m phones flip Steve Jobs the bird

Apple dont like flash because of its app store

It really is quite simple......

1. Apple dont like flash because you could play games etc on your iPhone without them having to be approved / paid for via the app store.

2. They have a point about power drain, but all games seem to drain the power on my android and before that my nokia. I am sure that the app store bought games on the iPhone / Pad drain the battery just as much.

3. You can block flash.

4. Let Apple / Oranges do what they like, I have the choice at the end of the day and competition is good for consumers.

5. The 80 / 20 idea will not be "Blown to bits" any time soon.

Disabled dude demands EA improves gaming access

Device Maker ?

It seems to me that his control device works just fine and he has a very valid point about the developer allowing him to customise the input method to suit his needs !

The device maker can only do so much if the developer has hard coded the input method, eg Xbox gaming pad only or no mouse support.

ICO pays through the nose for 'website development'

Fair enough ......

Fair enough if it looked any good but to me it just looks like somone has just typed "ico." and stuck it on a blue background. It is also scaled badly and difficult to read.

A favicon should be part of the overall web design and if it cost £585 for the icon how much did the site cost them in total and why was it not included in that price originally ?

I dont know if i am totally wrong here but if a client asks me to change a favicon or phone number etc i usually do it for nothing, keep them happy, keeping the renewals and hosting fees coming in and me in a tidy honest profit.

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

Alternatives

1. For around £30 a year you could use some cheap web space that could be easily backed up via FTP. You could alternatly use it as your backup destination if you did not mind people seeing all your crap. Your links would never break as you could just upload the entire sets / file structure from your backup or local copy.

2.Or why not host it all yourself on a spare PC + Dyn Dns, its not offsite backup but at least it eliminates one point of failure and you have most of the advantages as above.

Why people expect ANY free or cheap online service to provide a decent service is beyond me. Its up to you to keep your stuff safe and being in IT that guy knows it all to well. The only reason they want your crap is to data mine and then advertise to anyone looking at it, do they REALLY care if it goes missing ?

Icon ? once its in the "cloud" it is out of your control !

Murdoch & Co unveil iPad news rag The Daily

Bad week........

500'000 a week, is probably a low estimate but still ensures profitability in a year. All they have to do is aggreegate the news from all their other sources, a few people could easily do that.

Thanks but no thanks, I try to use multiple news sources from reputable places and form my own opinion. I do not want Ruperts ideology imposed any more than it it with the trash papers and Sky News etc...

Oh and 1 more thing thanks a lot for Buying Virgin 1 the only source of freeview trek with the sole intention of closing it down, tosser and enemy of fair competition in the UK.

(Virgin 1 was bought by bSkyB June - July , rebranded to Channel 1 and axed on 1 Feb without any notification in the UK)

iPhone crashes car stereos, Toyota warns

Feature.......

Toyota should take a leaf out of Apple's book here, in fact why not ask an Apple rep to demostrate the correct "plugging in procedure" for normal use ?

Spamhaus DDoS blamed on shady Russian hosts, not Anonymous

PITA

Spamhaus are a right royal pain in the a**. They seem to have removed the need to pay for removing your static IP's from their block list as they think they are dynamic ? or have they ?

I am sure that they use their position to extort payments from other legitimate mail hosts or force them to use multiple authenticated SMTP relays to work around the issue.

In this day and age of endpoint mail scanning and filtering why do people still use them ?

Electric forcefield space sailing-ship tech gets EU funding

This is a title, There are many like it but this one in mine.

Scientists create the biggest granny knot EVER.

Mozilla showers Firefox, Thunderbird with updates

This is a title, There are many llike it but this one in mine.

The Beta of Firefox is worth trying and a lot better than the current stable release.

I also use Thunderbird with the Google calendar and contact add ons to sync everything with my other devices. Over 5000 emails in local folders and 200 - 300 in IMAP folders without any performance issues at all.

I dont understand what everyone is complaining about.

What is the point of End Point Protection?

Sneaker net is still here

I work with a network that can have up to 100 USB sticks a day inserted to select PC's. These sticks usually belong to sutdents and more often than not are infected. The AV usually deletes most of the junk and its not the users fault if they get an infection as they have to get the data off the sticks to do the work.

Does anyone else have to put up with this soft of crap and is there anything better than Sophos Endpoint Security and Control ?

Beer as i usually need a few after an outbreak :(

FBI top-brass ask Google, Facebook to expand wiretaps

Title goes here

What happenes when the backdoor is discovered by a hostile entity and they are able to bypass all your encryption and security ?

Also my contents insurance is void if i leave my backdoor open, how does this compare :)

Zuckerberg admits fallibility over Gmail block

Facebook is fine

Just use a fake name an email address that you dont care about and never enter any true personal information. Spam Friend requests like there is no tomorrow and you can blend into the background using FB for more useful purposes (like spying / stalking people, collecting email addresses and building a nice "marketing list" etc).

I dont see what the harm is ? if you give your info away then it will get used.

Google Chrome OS: unlike Android, it's open source

Web apps

"The question is how many people really want a machine that runs nothing but web apps."

With data caps appearing on more and more networks and the cost of data / internet access from mobile networks artificially high there needs to be a bit of a shift before i give one of these (or a dumb terminal / slate) serious consideration.

I live just outside a large UK city that is the testbed for most of BT's network design 21CN etc and i can only manage 1600 kbps down with reboots every few days as the connection just stops working. Mobile data access is even worse, intermittent 3G that drops back to GPRS / 2G.

Nominet forgets what the first .uk domain name was

We were not around

To be honest, i dont have much faith in Nominet and why is dealing with .uk names a pain in the ass compared to .com's etc ?

Even if they were around when the first name was registered i am quite sure they would have lost the paperwork years ago.

Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'

POD

Oh no i hope they leave Jenny Frosts POD alone :)

Intel Sandy Bridge many-core secret sauce

Token ring or ATI ringbus

If i remember correctly ATI did something similar in their cards before they merged / got bought by AMD. It might be different but here is a link to an old article i found. http://www.anandtech.com/show/1785

I think it turned out to cost way too much in die space and provided much more bandwidth than the cards could use.

Paul Allen's patent madness not worth single penny

Not all "pop ups" are bad

Email notification with subject is probably counted as a pop- up i know Thunderbird looks a bit like a pop-up, not used Outlook for a while but its probably similar.

Text message notification on a mobile, on my HTC it shows a picture in the top bar and get my attention when im doing something else.

This (and many other) patent is crap , its like saying you can't raise your voice to get somones attention when they are involved in another activity.

Citrix takes bare-metal hypervisor to PCs

Sounds backwards.

I thought we were all moving to "THE CLOUD" ie lower power devices and more power in the server room. This sounds totally backwards for a laptop especially as running a hypervisor will increase power usage and reduce battery time, if the partition is encrypted even more so.

Citrix presentation server was a POS but this seems like using VM's because you can and not because its the best way of doing it.

Microsoft's Apple revenge: the pleasure and the pain

What we need is....

a very simple portable display around A4 size that contains the bare minumum of electronics to do the following.

Connect to a host system via mobile and / or consumer wireless.

Display either the screen of the host via VNC, or a screen generated by an application or service running on the host.

Sound can be provided if required using streaming from the host

The host would be a basic home pc with a network connection

Host resolution can be provided using dynamic DNS or IPv6 when it eventually turns up.

Pros,

Very cheap as only minimum components are required

Very long battery life in comparison to existing tablets as processing requirements are very low.

Long life, system should not become obsolete as the host can be upgraded with new applications etc.

Totally open system, do anything you like with it.

Run your desktop / any application from your host machine.

No need to worry about syncing files to your device

Only 1 security interface to worry about exposing to the internet.

Few updates required as the software is so simple

Cons

Requires network access to function

Has probably been patented

Apple will try to kill it

Network speed may prevent playing of fast moving games

Cost: around £200 - $150

Reasoning, if you can get a 11.3 inch portable dvd palyer for £179 you should be able to make my device for less.

http://www.wedodigital.co.uk/product/2048/meos--11.3-portable-freeview-tv--dvd-player/meos-dvd113b/

Somone please mass market one of these, i dont have money to do it myself as i spend it all on beer.

Inmate-frying microwave pain blaster turret installed in US jail

Protection..

I can see the prison price of baking foil going through the roof. Tin foil hats for all :)

Microsoft Windows glider crashes

Ouch

When are people going to learn that building something up with loud music and dancing around only makes you look like more of a fool when you FAIL.

They should have just used the Vista logon sound, stood still for 60 seconds and then crashed :)

Malware protection for the rest of us

ISP Filtering ?

Do you really want your ISP messing with your traffic any more than they already do ?

Just give me a big dumb pipe and leave it at that, i can soft the rest out without "opting out" of anything !

Acer Liquid E Android smartphone

Acer

I purchased several Acer laptops for service engineers and after about 8 months 50% of the dvd drives had failed. Acer replaced each one within ~3 days and we have had no other issues.

+5 for Acer support, -1 for build quality but these things were dirt cheap :)

If the phone breaks you can trust the warranty, if you break it you have insurance.

Beer, my old phones love diving in.

Apple fans drool over Liquidmetal widget

You need a tool ?

Most sensible phones keep the sim behind the battery and i have never needed a special "tool" to remove one. Then again you need a special set of tools to replace the battery on an iphone, perhaps apple could supply a set of these tools made from the "magical" material as well :)

Hurd snubbed HP board to settle claims

Jodie Fisher

10 Minutes on google images is all you need to see why he was such a naughty boy ;P

Gizmodo editor reunited with seized goods

Bin it....

What else can Chen do but bin the lot when it gets delivered back, there is no way on earth that i would use anything that has been in police hands especially if they were trying to build a case against me.

Robotic cargo spacecraft misses rendezvous with ISS

Backup

I believe that they have an emergency re-entry vehicle docked with the station. If they run out of toilet roll they can all jump in and be back on earth for a beer within an hour or so :)

InfiniBand to outpace Ethernet's unstoppable force

GT/sec?

Giga Transfers per Second

How can UK.gov spend £35m on a website?

Standards across sites.....

.. are also a bit naff. You would think that they could condense a lot of the information in to fewer more useful sites instead of providing small bits of information on each one and making you search for everything you need........ Sounds just like the fragmented gov agencies i have to deal with over the phone that can do bits of what you need but then give you another number or transfer you somewhere else to try and complete your needs.

Very poor showing especially now that VAT returns must be done online, how long till they screw that up :(

HTC posts Android 2.1 update for Hero phone

Strange.....

I bought a cheap white label HTC Tattoo and am using an Orange contract sim originally from a crappy Nokia 6100, also works with 02 and Orange PAYG sims ? I think i might be waiting a while for my update :(

Oh and network branding sucks ass, seriously why to they screw up your nice new phone on purpose. I had it with a Viewty :(

Organofunctional silane Z-6011 gives iPhone 4 bad rap

Not evaporated....

.. then you may want to keep it away from naked flames and sources of heat.

From the material safety sheet.

2. HAZARDS IDENTIFICATION

The principal hazards of the product as supplied are:

Harmful if swallowed.

Causes burns.

Vapours may form explosive mixtures with air.

Odour: Fishy

'Toothed' condom hits rapists where it hurts

Just jump right in ?

I must be the only bloke in the world that has the sense to "warm them up a bit" before going balls deep. I mean going in dry and splitting your banjo would be bad enough without some spikes to totally ruin your day / week/ year / life.

Beer drink enough and it might just save your manhood ;P

Google risks OEM wrath for unified Android UI plan

Make them pointless ?

What exactly is wrong with that ?

If Google make the best interface then HTC and others will probably use it. At the momont HTC's Sense is a lot better than the generic Android UI and is why i chose the phone that i did.

On the other side of the coin it would be nice to have updates to the OS when they are first available, instead of waiting months for HTC to "optimise" their Sense UI to work correctly with the new version. (eg bluetooth file transfer would be nice).

Ubuntu 'more secure' than Windows, says Dell

It will be faster than Windoze

......... but only because they cant fill the thing up with useless tray icons and security suites that you never use.

I personally hate spending hours removing all this surplus cr&p from a new Dell / HP or Acer (not as bad) PC that its the biggest push to use Ubuntu that i can think of.

Well done Dell :)

Finland mulls legalizing use of unsecured Wi-Fi

I wonder .....

how this would stand up in court if the owner of the net connection was accused of sharing copyright material. Would they then start trying to track mac addresses of the infringing pc's (or printers:)

If letting others use your connection is legal then you could use that as an easy excuse. I believe if you do it in the uk you are required to keep records of users etc.

Thousands of 'sexsomniacs' suffering in silence, say profs

Its true........

......... only a few weeks ago can i remember accusing the GF of waking me up at 3am for a bit of action. It turns out that I was the instigator and only woke up half way through. I dont see it as a problem but I think the recent drought has been the catalyst.

I blame the beer (far too frequently)

Facebook boss admits privacy 'errors' and promises revamp

Facebook privacy confusing ?

Straight from Facebook "Privacy settingsApplications and websites"

"If your friend uses an application or website that you do not use, you can control certain types of information the application can access. Please note that applications will be able to access your name, Profile picture and gender, as well as any information that is visible to everyone. They will also be able to access your Connections, except the connections noted with an asterisk below. In those cases, although the information is considered a connection, you can control whether an application can access it.

* Status updates

* Online presence

* Website" etc etc

Its nice that the asterisk's are not shown on the facebook page but you are provided a tick box with no simple explanation to acheive your desired result. A copy and paste as above inserts the tick boxes as asterisk's.

Im glad i am breaking their T&C by using a fake name email etc

Atlantis spacewalkers snapped through shuttle windows

Foam cleaner

They could have got the cleaners to tidy up a bit before taking off, i think i can see a coffee stain in the top left corner .

Paris as she is also dirty.

F*ck you, thunders disgruntled fanboi Apple user

Fanboi

I LOL'd