Posts by Kubla Cant

UK govt to KILL OFF Directgov within weeks

Tales of online tax

Every quarter I have to pay VAT. In order to do so online (which is now obligatory), I have to have some kind of secret squirrel code to log in. It's so secret that it has to be sent to me in the post. Welcome to the 19th Century.

Actually I can't see why it has to be so secret. If anyone else wants to log in to my account and pay the VAT, you won't find me complaining.

Of course, the code never arrives in time for me to use it, because I do my VAT return at the eleventh hour. By the time I do the next return three months later, I've lost it.

Haynes Build Your Own Computer book review

Warning!

I hope this book contains a warning about the real hazard of building your own computers.

In a few years your house will be filled with bits of obsolescent yet perfectly functional hardware. I recently spent a weekend pulling stuff out of a cupboard and sorrowfully consigning it to the bin. IDE disks, some with capacities up to 500Mb. AGP video cards, and PCI video cards, too. Ethernet cards, some old enough to have coax connectors (when did I last use a motherboard without its own network interface?). CD-ROM drives, usually boasting speeds of 8x and 16x. Fans that fit no known processor. Power supplies that would barely light the LEDs on a modern motherboard. And drifts of motherboards, each with its little tin thing to fit round the ports.

I must resolve not to hoard.

It's not that I'm a bleeding-edge enthusiast. If you build PCs for kids, then sooner or later you succumb to the complaints that the current one won't run any decent games. And now and again I find that I just can't do serious development on a Pentium 4 with 256Mb, so I have to upgrade my own.

Cue replies saying things like "you could install Microbe Linux on that and run your own nuclear power station", or "I develop software using edlin on an IBM PC-XT, and it's never done me any harm".

Re: Not really building a computer, is it?

Like making an Airfix model is "building your own plane".

No, not like that at all. You can't get into an Airfix model and fly. When you've built your computer you can use it.

Re: I'd upvote the both of you, but....

And can we have some sort of SSO while you're at it? I've already logged in to Reg.

I've upvoted one or two posts and posted one of my own, so no question that I'm logged in.

I click the upvote button in Reg Hardware and I have to log in again. Then I get the upvote page, but I have to click a link to upvote the post (I thought I already indicated that I wanted to upvote). Then I have to click another link to return to the forum. That's four or five unnecessary page refreshes.

Humanity facing GLOBAL BACON SHORTAGE

White slime

Slightly off-topic. When I read this I thought "will this make a difference to the price of expensive, dry-cure bacon, or only to the rubbish?"

Then it occurred to me that in the 50% of the bacon sarnie thread that I had the stamina** to read, there was no mention of the horrible white slime emitted by much bacon when it's fried. Will the new bacon rules lead to a reduction in this abomination?

**Need more bacon sandwiches.

Australian tabloid decides to fight trolls ... with trolls

Re: A reference only likely to be significant to people................"

Presumably I attracted downvotes because I included the explanatory gloss. Sorry, people, I only knew the story from a record that was played interminably in my childhood. I didn't know it was a classic of folklore, nor that it was still being played.

Foll-de-roll

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has declared “The time has come for us to build a bridge over the trolls."

The three billy-goats gruff will enjoy that.

(A reference only likely to be significant to people old enough to have listened to BBC radio on Saturday mornings in the 1960s.)

New guide: Bake your own Raspberry Pi Lego-crust cluster

If you don't know what to do...

... here's what looks like an interesting course on the Cambridge Computing Labs site.

I intend to work through it as soon as I have (a) a Raspberry Pi and (b) a lot more free time.

Re: One Pi is Pi

To be pedantic, a bramble is a cluster of blackberries. I suppose a cluster of raspberries is a "cane", but it's not a very inspiring name.

What a card: Brit boffin Alan Turing stars in Monopoly tribute set

Re: Other board games are available...!

Interesting. I've never heard of Carcassonne.

Is it a board game that simulates the extermination of Cathar heretics? As far as I know that's the most notable thing to have taken place at Carcassonne.

Re: To choose to play monopoly...

True, but if you want to go to bed in a murderous, paranoid mood, play Diplomacy. Actually, that's not quite accurate. A game of Diplomacy takes so long that you probably won't go to bed at all.

Everything Everywhere swept away by its own 4G hype tsunami

My experience as an Orange/EE user/victim is that their data network isn't generally fast enough for 3G, never mind 4G. Much of the time it isn't even fast enough for GPRS. So what's the point?

@the-it-slayer

The argument about the higher cost of providing communication services in rural areas isn't a new one. In the past it's been resolved by insisting that suppliers have to take their fair share of the rural lemons, rather than just picking the urban cherries. That's why you can post a letter to any address in the country at the same cost. The alternative viewpoint is the one adopted by Dr Beeching, the man who carved out our magnificent rail network.

Microsoft to comply with Brussels over browser choice gaffe

Illegal software?

So the OEM copy of Windows 7 that was installed on my recently-purchased notebook is illegal*.

Presumably I can now demand that Amazon or Samsung or Microsoft supply me with a legal version. It's not that I care about the browser ballot, I just hate pre-installed OEM Windows and would love to be sent a real install disk.

*If not illegal, it's evidently not "of merchantable quality and fit for the purpose for which it was intended", as the UK Sale of Goods Act has it. One of the purposes for which it was intended, albeit a minor one, was offering browser choice.

Microsoft's new retro-flavoured logo channels Channel 4

Microsoft's red, yellow, green and blue colours

OMG! I've been using red, yellow, green and blue colours for years. I never knew they were Microsoft's. I should have read the EULA.

Are there any colours left for the rest of us?

Re: Cost

@AC 17:32

Quite right. Measuring design effort by the complexity of the result is as misguided as measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs (to coin a phrase). That way lies Victoriana.

Reagan slams webmail providers for liberal bias

Another week, another loony Republican

We've had Romney (The Man With The Magic Underpants) dissing the Olympics and bigging up "Anglo-Saxon heritage". We've had the woman who can see Russia from her house in Alaska. Last week there was a dimwit who thinks women can't get pregnant if they're raped. Son of Gipper is mild by comparison.

What next.

Red hot chilli peppers floor Bristol shoplifter

Eh?

The stolen clarinet was presumably stolen for funds to buy more crack and heroin. But why shoplift chillis?

I don't recollect dodgy geezers in pub car parks saying "Wanna buy some chillis?".

Want a Windows 8 Start Button? Open source to the rescue!

Re: Luddites

Clarification required: is a "whinner" someone who wins, or someone who whines? I can't believe you mean someone who, er, "gorses" (definition of "whin").

Learning how to spell has the inestimable benefit of allowing people to understand you.

Oh, and the word is "disdain".

New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD

Re: The Usual Silliness

@jonathanb "If two horses bump into each other, not much happens; so a lot safer than cars."

In fact, of course, the risk of accidental death and injury in the pre-industrial age was much greater than it is today, especially when applied to the much lower populations of the time. Horses may not cause a lot of damage when they bump into each other, but lorries don't suddenly get scared and bolt when carrying a load of logs.

Disney sitcom says open source is insecure

Disney need to research a BIT harder next time

Their standards have declined lately. Mickey Mouse was always exhaustively researched. Ask any rodent expert.

Re: Follow the Money

Someone paid them to slip this line into the show.

As earlier posts have suggested, cock-up is a more likely explanation than conspiracy. Can you imagine a marketing meeting to approve this payment?

- "We've got this killer plan: we'll pay Disney to portray a 9-year-old denigrating open source software."

- "Wow! How much do we have to pay?"

- "50,000 bucks."

- "When will it go out?"

- "It's a pre-teen sitcom that's usually on in the afternoon."

- "Fantastic! get the purchase order on my desk today. Next step, IPO, after that, world domination."

Zabulon Skipper: Butterfly harbinger of climate biodiversity doom?

I'm not qualified to comment on the veracity or significance of this story. But I find it ironic that the effects of global warming on butterflies is worthy of extensive debate, while the more long-standing and, I suspect greater, effect of pesticides and monoculture farming isn't.

@NomNomNom: there's evolution, which, as you say takes a very long time, and there's selection, which can be relatively quick. The classic story of the peppered moth is a case of short-term population change as a result of selection. (Whether you want to be a pale moth when the industrial revolution comes along is another matter.)

British boffin builds cool maser after argument with wife

Mono-crystalline sapphire doughnut

Scene 1: the breakfast table; wife has just opened the post

wife All right, who is she?

man Who?

wife Your floozie. The one you've bought this mono-crystalline sapphire doughnut for. I must say, I don't think much of her taste in jewellery.

man Oh that... it's, er, part of an experiment. I'm hoping to make Masie, er, a maser. That's it, I'm going to make a maser.

wife You must think I was born yesterday. You'd better make up your mind - her or me!

man I'm just off to the shed to try it out.

wife A likely story!

Scene 2: the shed

man Oh sh*t! What do I do now? I don't suppose there's any chance this maser thing is really possible.

To be continued.

Apple's lone wolf approach to security will bite it in the rear

Re: never understood why there isnt a lot more viruses for macs

"If you're going to call others stupid best not to show ignorance with your grammer and spelling."

If you're going to call other ignorant, best learn how to spell grammar.

Pot, meet kettle.

Fraudsters nick BILLIONS from China's e-commerce Wild West

How do they pay?

As these are online scams, presumably the victims pay by card. Presumably the card companies or banks transfer the payment to the fraudsters, so they have some kind of ongoing relationship with them, and can help to catch them. Or does the Chinese equivalent of Visa just hand over money in a holdall?

Study shows half of all websites use jQuery

Re: javascript is not actaully crap

It's not actually crap; in many ways I like the things it can do. But it does have more worrying features than most languages, such as semicolon insertion and automatic type conversion, not to mention the ease with which global variables can be accidentally created.

Also, some of the syntax used to get around its limitations can be hard to follow. (Modules defined by anonymous functions that execute immediately, anybody?) The fact that it can be done is impressive; the fact that it needs to be done is a disappointment.

It's a shame that Javascript has remained unchanged for so long. OK, it's a standard because it's on everybody's browser, but this hasn't prevented HTML from moving on.

Re: The Register could do with some jQuery / Ajax love

Upvote / Downvote and get sent to a new page

and you get asked to log in again on a random basis - even when you've recently posted a comment.

Brits obey mobile ads, says mobile ad biz

modern smartphones are considerably more secure than the desktop computers

Citation required.

Microsoft: It's not Metro, it's Windows 8

Re: Making a version number part of the name...

It never occurred to me before. The Austin Metro was a successor to the Austin 7!

And the successor to the Austin Metro was... Austin aka BMC aka BL aka Rover going bust.

NHS IT blunder biz CSC wilts as profit bleeds, costs staunched

Stanch, not staunch

"staunch" means "steadfast". To reduce the flow of something is to stanch it.

Greens wage war on clean low-carbon renewable energy

Puritans

According to Macaulay, "The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

In the case of Greens, lower consumption is an end in itself, not a way to conserve resources. The parallel is obvious. Greens are the new Puritans.

Party like it's 1999: CDE Unix desktop REBORN

Re: long time user.

I don't want to be unkind, but are the eccentric line breaks in your post typical of an iMac with Lion?

If so, can I recommend a marvelously powerful editor called Notepad? It's available on Windows 3.1.

Bucks muck chuck muck-up leaks 840 email addresses

Re: guess you didnt read it all

Guess you didn't either; the word is "addresses", with no apostrophe, as the both the article and the previous post made clear.

First full landing site and colour pictures back from Mars

Hyphenated Americans

Odd, really, you never hear of any English-Americans. A less charitable person might suggest that this implies English ancestry is accepted as the default, despite that fact that only a minority have English ancestors.

Then again, I don't recall hearing of French-Americans or Dutch-Americans either, so I suppose hyphenation is only used for ethnic groups that mostly arrived after 1776.

Beer mats to tout tat to mobiles over wireless NFC

So how does this work?

I take my mobile, in my pocket, into a pub and the beer mat starts communicating with it. What happens then?

Does the mobile ring or vibrate or something to let me know that the beer mat has something to say? I can see that feature being turned off pretty quickly.

Or is it that when I look at my mobile on the way home, it tells me that the beer mat had something to tell me but it couldn't attract my attention? A bit sad, really, but then nobody said being a beer mat was a good career choice.

NHS trust: Not buying through NHS IT saved us £7m

Close, and maybe a cigar

@wowfood a system close to what they need but not exact

An interesting and significant phrase. In the commercial world it's been established that it's often a good idea to change your business process to fit an of-the-shelf solution rather than get something tailored to your idiosyncratic requirements. You may even end up with an improved business process as a result - after all, the other users of the system are in comparable businesses. At the very least you get a tested solution that's economical and can be delivered rapidly.

Clearly, health care is not the same as a commercial business, and NHS processes may be very different from processes elsewhere. But a system that is a close fit rather than an exact match could still be the best option.

Console content can cause crime, claims cop

Evidence?

Has this plod cited any evidence? Academically respectable studies, etc? Or are we just supposed to take his word for it because he's an important plod?

I'm fairly sure that several studies have failed to demonstrate a link between video games and violence. That doesn't prove there isn't one, of course, but it makes it less likely.

Airline leaves customer on hold for 15 hours

Music for sore ears

Once upon a time, it used to be possible to ring Microsoft for Windows support. Naturally, this involved hold times of geological proportions.

Unfortunately their hold music was a Jean-Michel Jarre track that consisted mostly of breathy whistlings and rushing-air sounds. It sounded pretty much the same as noise on a disconnected line, with the result that I'd jam the phone harder against my ear to try to tell if I was still on hold. I blame Microsoft for the big red ears I have these days.

Revert to snail-mail

One of the things that companies like about call centres and email correspondence is that it's so much cheaper for them than handling paper correspondence.

So whenever an organisation proves hard to deal with on the phone, I resurrect my inner Luddite and start to send them letters. Obviously it's not suitable for anything time-critical, and there's a cost penalty, but in these days of electronic computing equipment it's wonderfully easy to send the same letter, with minor variations such as "I am disappointed not to have received a reply to my letter of the 3rd inst, of which a copy is enclosed...", and to address it to the Managing Director. Even if it doesn't get a result, it's nice to imagine the trouble and inconvenience caused to a company that thinks it runs a paperless office.

It's also fun to be able to say to somebody on the phone "If you read the letter I sent you last May..." in the hope of sending them scurrying round looking for it. A letter is a ball in the opposition's court.

How one bad algorithm cost traders $440m

Re: Wow!

It's easier than you think. There used to be ISDN modem/routers that "spoofed" the connection - the router made it look like the connection was up, but only dialed when there was traffic. The trouble is, network protocols like NetBEUI used to like to chat to every other node on the network every few milliseconds.

Never mind New York, I've seen a four-figure bill between London and Bristol as a result.

Post-pub nosh deathmatch: Bauernfrühstück v bacon sarnie

Re: That isn't proper bacon

Bacon butties should never be made with back bacon. The fat from streaky bacon is necessary for dipping or frying the bread (no butter involved, either).

Amount of CO2 being sucked away by Earth 'has doubled in 50 years'

Re: Prejudiced wankers

It seems it takes one to know one.

Booth babes banned by Chinese gaming expo

Re: hot pants must worn below the hip

And what part of the hot pants below the hip?

The waistline? Sounds (a) difficult to walk in and (b) rude.

The bottom cuffs? Doesn't sound like hot pants.

The Dragon 32 is 30

@Tony Smith

But you haven't, as far as I can tell, done the Acorn Atom, which must pre-date both. I consider my Atom changed my life.

BT charged rivals 'unjustified' prices to use network – Appeals Court

@AC 08:50 A better cure would be for the government to take full control of it again.

I can only imagine you're not old enough to remember Post Office Telephones. It used to take six months to get a phone installed. The job would be done by three different people who would each come to the house and fiddle about for half an hour, then wander off.

When they eventually finished you'd be the proud possessor of a monstrous plastic phone with a rotary dial (but not the owner - you had to pay every month to rent the thing, and if you terminated the service you had to give it back). You couldn't change it for anything else because the Post Office made it more or less impossible to get equipment certified for connection. For this reason alone, a 300-bps modem used to cost about £500.

Aahh, the good old days!

Lords call for the end of TV transmissions

Re: Prosperity

It's an interesting question. Does broadband make us richer, and if so, how?

Lower online prices make the customer richer, but only at the expense of making somebody else poorer in the context of that transaction. GDP doesn't increase because I buy a book for £10 from Amazon instead of £15 from Waterstones (I don't buy books from W H Smith because I'm not into East Enders Annuals).

Clearly societies become richer when their supply chains become more efficient, but I'm not enough of an economist to understand exactly how.

That said, most of the people who want broadband can now get it. I don't see how faster broadband changes things. I don't think I'll buy more from Amazon if my broadband speed increases.

Freeview EPG revamp set for September

SD->HD

It would be sensible if the HD channels were listed near the SD channels they duplicate. I don't suppose many people watch HD just to see the definition - it's the programme they're after. Every time something that might be worth seeing in HD comes on, say, BBC2, I find I have to page furiously through the EPG to check the BBC HD channels that for some reason share a page with Gay Rabbit etc. The result is that I miss the first five minutes of most programmes.

And wouldn't it be nice if the EPG told us when something is a repeat, especially on BBC4, which seems to recycle content after about a fortnight?

Tesco in unencrypted password email reminder rumble

Re: PCI-DSS anyone?

Peripheral Component Interconnect? What have Tesco got to do with that?

Job ad seeks 'mediocre' developers

In my experience mediocre developers aren't just good developers with a more relaxed attitude and a slower working pace. They're developers who hope to get through to the end of the day without thinking very hard about what they're doing. So what you get isn't reasonable code in a longer time-frame without cutting-edge features, it's bad, lazy code that somebody else has to re-work.

If it makes any difference, I'm not actually an emacs user.

O2 dropped the ball in Olympic cycle race Twitter fiasco

Re: extra base stations

I don't know about O2, but on Nothing Anywhere the problem is rarely shortage of base stations or lack of signal. It's the fact that the base stations apparently use a 300-bps acoustic coupler to access the internet.