Posts by Dave 126

Heigh ho, oh no! Politically correct panto dumps Snow White’s dwarfs

Re: I'd have thought

>And sexism - I want to see the lead role played by a man!

Oh c'mon, this is panto - the dame is usually a man, and the young prince (or Peter Pan) is often played by a woman!

Re: Being six foot two

And of course 6'3" Corporal Carrot was a Dwarf, and it wouldn't occur to any Dwarf (of closer to mean height for their demographic group) that he wasn't. (The Fifth Elephant).

[Oh jeeebus, I have read the book twice and only just now whilst writing the above have I twigged that it is an pun on the Fifth Element. Is there a term for when two bits of info exist within the same brain but only collide some time later?]

Re: Political Correctness Lunacy

>Indoctrinating children like this should be an offence in itself.

Whilst I agree with you that the decision of this theatre is idiotic, I have to ask "Isn't indoctrinating children the whole point of fairy tales?"

ARM wants you to jump into mbed with it – IoT open-source OS in beta

Re: Hmm...

>Follow the money.

ARM sell chip licences to ODMs. ARM think that if they put together an OS and whatnot to facilitate IoT projects, more people will buy these devices with ARM-licenced chips from ODMs. Seems pretty straightforward.

The clue is in the cloud service that they provide - free to play around with, but to use it seriously ARM will require your money in exchange for this service- someone has to pay for the servers. Again, that seems fair and straightforward. If you want to sort out your own hosting and pay for it yourself, fine, ARM will supply you with the software tools gratis.

Huge SUPERHENGE erection found near Blighty's Stonehenge

Just a mix up...

over ' feet and " inches.

Still, we can always redo the choreography.

Xiaomi aims to knock Apple off its branch with move into computers

Re: oooooooh!

>Thin and Light alone won't cut it.

They are aiming for thin and light and inexpensive.

Apple will reveal new iPhone on Sept 9 – this is what it may look like

>How about this for a new iPhone? Double the thickness so it doesn't bend in half and give it a battery which can last for 3 days between charges?

Can't you achieve that by putting a standard iPhone in a battery case?

Re: I'm excited about force touch things

>This way the device will know it's in your back pocket and won't magically unlock itself and dial Zimbabwe when you sit on it. No more butt-dialling!

>The future is now.

Damn right - just sew an NFC-tag into each pocket of each of your trousers, and instruct the phone to remain locked when in range of them, and job's a goodun'!

Re: Some exclusive features

>Apple is full of marketing geniuses.

Actually, the message you outlined as "It's much the same as the last iPhone, but ever-so-slightly better in lots of areas" is easy to communicate to would-be customers; no genius required! :-)

Google robo-car suffers brain freeze after seeing hipster cyclist

Re: Track Stand? Bah.

>Sturmey Archer hubs cost a lot more than they used to.

Haha! You should see the price of Rholoff 14 speed hubs.... about £800! However, people who are setting on a 10,000 mile expedition by bike find the reliability and minimal maintenance worth the high asking price and extra weight.

Re: Joined up thinking

Apple owners include some drivers of 10 year-old VW Passat estates, some pedestrians who wear Tricker's brogues, some skateboarders riding Independent decks, some users of the Swindon to Paddington rail line etc etc

Riders of fixie bikes though don't really want an iPhone. They want a WASP T12 SpeechTool: http://trashbat.co.ck/

Re: Crushed nut algorithm

According to Richard's Bicycle Book ( late nineties edition), the only purpose of fixed-wheel bikes was for training - forcing the rider to spin quickly when going down hill and pedal powerfully when going up can help tone their legs.

If I lived in a mostly flat area, I might not bother with gears (one less mechanism to maintain, and a single-speed bike can have thicker, more durable chains and sprockets), but free-wheel hubs are so reliable that there is no practical reason not to fit one.

Each to their own. My personal preference for a flat city would be a BMX (if chained to a fence those small tough wheels present a challenge to any pisshead who wishes to kick them in), but I would respect the choice of anyone riding a cyclocross bike, hybrid, folding Brompton, mountain bike, whatever if it works for them.

Honor 7 – heir apparent to the mid-range Android crown

Re: good article but

Pocket Lint reckon the Honor 7 call quality is "perfectly fine", supporting the assumption that a review will often only touch on this aspect if it is drastically better or worse than average.

>shame about non-removable battery but 99.9% of users won't bother.

Thank you for reminding me to charge my 5200 mAh USB 'power brick' - I'm just packing for a three-day long festival, so It'll be handy. (not that I'm planning on using my phone much, but it's nice to have).

Boffins promise file system that will NEVER lose data

Re: BFS was pretty good in the 90's

>Journaling wont catch silent corruption. Only ZFS does.

And BTFS, though the vibe is that it isn't production ready yet. I guess if 10 billion people used a file system for a year and nobody reported any faults, you wouldn't need a mathematical proof.

Glaring flaw in Apple car hype-gasm: The iGiant likes to make money

Re: Wait a minute....

>Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the roads

Just because you are hopelessly lost doesn't mean that you have to drive dangerously!

Bizarrely, some roads that cross from England to Scotland have signs saying "Drive on the Left". I wonder if there was ever an incident that prompted these signs for the bleedingly obvious?

Something that was never branded Foxconn can't, by definition, be rebranded. Make valid points about Apple's business practices by all means, but please don't talk gibberish in the style of Anna Leach.

Re: But will they put their money where their mouth is?

Apple want to make money, and they have a track record that shows that they know how to do that. Part of Apple's strategy is to investigate potential opportunities, and then to pick the avenues that they predict will work well for them. So, one can assume that Apple pay a lot of very bright people to investigate opportunities. These bright people are then provided with the best information that money can buy, and have the resources to conduct expensive original research themselves.

Will Apple make a conventional car? Probably not. Is this an area that shows signs of being disrupted? Yes (see: Uber, Tesla, car clubs, fuels prices, car automation research). Does Apple have a record of working with outside parties? Yes (iTunes and record labels, iPhones and network operators)

The analyst doesn't know. I don't know. Apple don't know, but they will do due process.

Tens of thousands of Popcorn Time movie streamers menaced by anti-piracy fleet

Re: What are they being (attempted) sued for?

Rule 92 of the internet: Wired.com are clueless.

Re: What are they being (attempted) sued for?

To answer your question:

Popcorn-Time presents torrents with a streaming-style UI. Whilst you are watching content on PopcornTime, you become a Torrent peer, uploading. Indeed, you can even drang n drop a torrent file from a website into PopcornTiime and it will play, after buffering.

PopornTime.io says they send you through a Proxy; Popcorntime.se does not, and in addition it sends your CPU cycles skywards. Wired.com being what it is advertised the latter. Go figure.

FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America

Re: America

>By Third World you mean it should moved to Venus?

Er, Venus is only the Third World from the sun if you still believe in the planet Vulcan... but the observations that hinted at it were later explained by adopting Einstein's theories over Newton's.

Re: America

>ChrisInAStrangeLand

Nice Heinlein-inspired tag!

You saw QI last night then? (Context for other readers: 'Third World' was first used top refer to countries that were aligned with neither the USA or USSR, before later being used to refer to poor countries. We now use 'Developing Nations' for the latter, a loaded phrase itself since it suggests an 'inevitable' direction.)

Re: Corrupting America?

Whoah. Fox News broadcast a terrible obituary of Kurt Vonnegut, so this report of the FBI's attitude towards Bradbury seems entirely plausible.

What's worrying is that Fox were looking to trash Vonnegut and his humanist values in 2007 - that is far less remote than the paranoia of decades ago.

Google: 'youtube fox news kurt vonnegut obituary'

Geeks on quest for world's most pointless YouTube video

Re: But surely...

Quite!

Perhaps there is a way of recording how many views a video has had at the time it is first nominated for the competition.

Re: Why?

>Are their lives so shallow/meaningless that they can't come up with their own pointless drivel?

They have had the gumption to share things that amuse them and enjoy the activity of bringing people together, thus ticking the following boxes: humour, activity, community, celebration.

For all we know this is just what they do for kicks when thy aren't busy curing cancer or whatever.

Leaked images claim to show BlackBerry's first Android phone

Reminded me of the Palm Pre

Whooh, the Palm Pre... it can't have been that long ago, but I'd already nearly forgotten it. Shame, it seemed like a nice device, and the one Pre user I met liked its OS.

Re: yay, now they can join

BB is an OEM, but they are also a provider of services, as Google are.

Re: Why do they need to design new hardware to run a different OS?

To do that would require more testing, and cause confusion amongst some customers. Even for the type of user who likes reading the XDA forums from time to time would find a dual-booting phone a sub-optimal experience. I mean, if you were on a desktop PC and you just needed to use an application on a different OS for five minutes, you'd find it more convenient to use a virtual machine or a WINE-type facility... you wouldn't want to have to restart your machine.

On a Blackberry-class phone, this is even more important - you wouldn't want to risk missing a phone call from a potential client, would you?

Also, how would you synchronise your call logs between your two OSs?

So then BB would have to test the integration between the OSs, as well as testing them separately.

OLPC heir reveals modular laptop design

Project Ara for Laptops

Five days ago The Reg reported that Google is postponing its limited launch of Project Ara - a modular component system for mobile phones. In response to that story, I osted a comment about expanding the Ara concept to laptop/tablet sized components:

As a modular systems for just phones, it may prove to be a bit niche- many users might find that their needs are more simply met by owning a selection of traditional handsets and selecting one for twon and another for the woods.

However, if this modular system is extended to tablet screens, keyboards and more, the possibilities become more interesting. A user could create any of the following:

- 5" clamshell with a Psion 5 - style keyboard...

- ...or candy-bar with Blackberry-style keyboard if that's your thing.

- 12" tablet with pen digister and full size SD-Card slot for working with discreet cameras

- 7" e-ink configuration, with light-weight battery for comfortable reading

- physical controllers for games

- good quality camera modules, akin to Sony's QX-100

- laptop

- desk-bound workstation

- High-end audio interfaces / microphones, for musicians and journalists

Re: Oddly I've alway s thought it's the *processor* that should be upgradeable.

>Decent screen and keyboard should be pretty long lasting.

Then our experiences must differ! In less than ideal environments, keyboards get gummed up or blocked by crumbs, and screens are prone to accidental damage. And that's in the developed world amongst adults, let alone in possibly dustier environments amongst children!

True, you you go the ToughBook route and make them more durable, but it is by no means certain that this would be a more efficient approach than easily swapping out defunct units.

YouTube bloggers told to slap 'advert' stickers on their vid posts

Re: Numpties

@The Axe

You are painting a rosy yet cynical picture in which children get conned over biscuits in order to 'inoculate' them against dodgy pension investments 40 years later.

Yes, I take your point that we learn better from our mistakes. I for one have never gambled money as an adult because I once fed a fruit machine with Franc coins as a child, trying to win back the first Franc I lost.

However, we as adults cannot be expert in all things. I am not a chemist or biologist, so I trust the 'nanny state' to protect me from any water company that would seek to cut corners in their purification processes. Even if I had that expertrise, i probably couldn't be arsed to test every glass I drink. Likewise, in a democracy it stands that if a majority of parents don't want chocolate to be advertised during children's television segments, then the wish of these parents should be expressed through the elected government.

The NBC series '30 Rock' has a message in the credits to the effect of "Commercial consideration provided by Apple", and indeed the show is full of Macbooks, iPhones and iMacs.

NBC used to produce a show called Community. After they cancelled it and Yahoo! picked up it up, all the Macbooks in the show have circular stickers over the Apple logos on the lids.

Of course both shows are a bit 'meta', meaning that refer to their own product placement in a 'knowing' way - much like the product placement skit in Wayne's World 2. The premise of 30 Rock is that Alec Baldwin's character is head of "NBC and General Electrics Microwave Programming" to the detriment of the broadcaster. One episode of Community revolved around a charismatic man who is paid to talk about the positive aspects of his Honda SUV to people in his peer group - and of course Honda paid Yahoo for this.

Re: Government gotta control, and its depth

>I find myself asking who the [REDACTED] is so inversely inpactected by vBlog advertising

Ultimately, it is the vBloggers themselves who stand to benefit from this intervention. If their viewers become jaded and lose trust in them, nobody benefits - not the vLoggers, the viewers or the advertisers.

Take your Windows 8 example - I don't recognise the situation you sketch, but then I only regularly visit tech sites that I trust - or least have a feel for their style.

Were I be the type to watch vBlogs, I imagine that I would get a feel for the individuals, much as I do for film reviewers. Sun Online say the film is AMAZING! = ignore. That contrarian git from the Guardian says the film is RUBBISH! = it's probably pretty good fun.

Re: Numpties

Why do you draw the line? Various territories have attempted to limit advertising for decades.

Without state intervention, the situation you would have is basically this: A whole team of marketeers skilled in the dark arts of psychology Vs a naive individual. And if that individual is too young to have educated themselves about how advertising works, the situation is even more one sided.

"In The Hidden Persuaders, first published in 1957, [Vance] Packard explores the use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including depth psychology and subliminal tactics, by advertisers to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products, particularly in the American postwar era. He identified eight "compelling needs" that advertisers promise products will fulfill. According to Packard these needs are so strong that people are compelled to buy products to satisfy them. The book also explores the manipulative techniques of promoting politicians to the electorate. The book questions the morality of using these techniques."

>some bloggers were paid to post videos featuring Oreo cookies

Most US crosswords feature 'OREO' as an answer fairly often.... I wonder if the clue setters get a free packet?

Joking aside, due to the format of US crosswords the clue setter will often need a word like OREO for its vowels. And yep, the Shortyz crossword app is my chief phone-based time killer at the moment.

My favourite biscuits are Sainsbury's Quadruple Belgian Chocolate All Butter Cookies. I have received no money from Sainsury's for this post.

Linux boss Torvalds: Don't talk to me about containers and other buzzwords

Re: The IoT Crowd

>Could a 'fork' of Linux be developed that went back to the basics of IoT system requirements and thus produced an IoT OS kernel that was small, well understood and had the advantages of years of bug clearouts?

You might, but in many cases you might choose to use an OS that already satisfies your requirements.... QNX, for example, is roughly a tenth of the size of the Linux kernal and has been used in industrial control for decades. VxWorks has been used in aerospace, industrial control and medical applications for a similar period.

So, having been used for decades and being small makes these OSs more likely to be 'better understood'. And, unlike most flavours of Linux, they are also 'Real Time OSs' which is essential for some embedded applications.

Linus was being sensible and honest when he suggested that trying to squash Linux to resemble these existing OSs is largely a waste of time.

[ I have used proprietary OSs as my examples]

Been sleeping well lately? No nightmares? Here's a lumbering Google bigfoot bot

It walks like Bez from the Happy Mondays

The first few seconds of this vid give the idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43eMCobo15c

If Futurama has taught me anything, it's that depriving robots of alcohol makes them 'drunk', and giving them alcohol makes them 'sober'.

Apple: Samsung ripped off our phone patent! USPTO: What patent?

Re: Taketh away

Just to be clear, this dispute is over a Design Patent - what we in the UK would instead call 'Trade Dress', like the shape of branded cola bottle or car radiator grill. What we think of as real, proper patents are referred to in the US as 'Utility Patents'.

This confusion isn't helped that in the US it is the same organisation that registers Patents and Trademarks.... indeed the clue in in the name: United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Has anyone lost 37 dope plants, Bolton cops nonchalantly ask on Facebook

Re: Oh, that's where I misplaced those.

I don't know why, but I up-voted 'jake'. Not because i think all plod are clueless, but because of the circumstances in which they work can make them appear that way. Also, I'm fairly bored of down-voting him.

A removed example: A bent accountant who commits millions of £$ of fraud will be far better incentivised than any official set to prosecute them. They will have spent years of experience and months of planning to commit a crime that the investigating officer might ojnly have weeks to look at - that is, if they even know there has been a crime to begin with.

Boffins dump the fluids to build solid state lithium battery

Re: Another week...

>I used to get eight hours out of four alkaline AA batteries in my Z88, back in the 1990s.

And how many AA cells did a Psion 5 run on? Joking apart, how much "useful human work" can be done on a charge? If the "useful human work" is proofreading a document, it could be accomplished on a e-ink screen. We now have laptops that weigh next to nothing, and will will see us through a full day of spreadsheets, websites and word-processing. The Psion would allow you to write documents for days on end.

Where a new leap in battery tech becomes more interesting is in areas where the physics is harder to cheat - such as electric vehicles and power tools.

Re: Another week...

> Another battery improvement presented which will never reach consumers.

This is a tech NEWS website. If you want to know what is available to buy now, check a retail website like Amazon.

The rest of us here know there is a significant lead time when/if concept leads to market.. it should go without saying.

'Marshmallow' picked as moniker for Android 6.0

Re: "Marshallow"

> "Marshallow" - Bland, soft, cloying, unsubstantial, can't take the heat without falling apart, and easy to poke holes in."

Well, they were thinking of calling it Marathon, but they got Snickered.

Testing times as NASA rattles Mississippi with mighty motor burn

Re: new technology...

>AFAIK the Drake equation is about whether intelligent life exists *on* other planets, not whether they are able to get *off* said planets.

The Drake equation contains this factor:

fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

If a civilisation that cannot reach orbit, the absence of communication satellites might affect the nature of ERM that they emit.

Er, uh ... sorry! Project Ara will not launch this year after all

Re: I can't see an use for this

I've uprated RatFox, but i also agree with pip25.

As a modular systems for just phones, it may prove to be a bit niche- many users might find that their needs are more simply met by owning a selection of traditional handsets and selecting one for twon and another for the woods.

However, if this modular system is extended to tablet screens, keyboards and more, the possibilities become more interesting. A user could create any of the following:

- 5" clamshell with a Psion 5 - style keyboard...

- ...or candy-bar with Blackberry-style keyboard if that's your thing.

- 12" tablet with pen digister and full size SD-Card slot for working with discreet cameras

- 7" e-ink configuration, with light-weight battery for comfortable reading

- physical controllers for games

- good quality camera modules, akin to Sony's QX-100

- laptop

- desk-bound workstation

- High-end audio interfaces / microphones, for musicians and journalists

ANIMALS being CUT UP to make Apple Watch straps

in other news, ursine creatures spotted defecating in arboreal areas.

Big, ugly, heavy laptops are surprise PC sales sweet spot

Re: Why now?

Gamers dont want certified workstations... the graphics drivers are optomised differently, the grahics hardware carries a premium price tag, and ECC ram does nothing for games.

Re/code apologizes for Holocaust 'joke' tweet

Re: Everything is personal in some way, to someone, somewhere.

An epilectic friend of mine has a wicked dark sense of humour - i might try that one out on her next i see her!

You're right, me doing so behind closed doors at people i know is not the same as broadcasting it to world plus dog.

It's enough to get your back up: Eight dual-bay SOHO NAS boxes

Just wondering...

were my computer to fall foul of one of these nasty 'ransom-wares' that encypt my files, would I still be able to access data that was backed-up to one of these NAS drives?

I'm assuming I could, since they run a different OS to my PC, but I'd like a second opinion. Also, does any of this ransom-ware cause my PC to instruct any connected NASs to delete/encrypt data? Cheers!

Windows 10: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE to Microsoft's long apology for Windows 8

I'll be making a system image backup before trying Windows 10.

21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose

I cry foul!

It has been said of cryptic crosswords that the setter's aim is to lose [against the puzzle solver], but to lose slowly and with humour. Since I am not brainy enough for cryptic crosswords, I take some pleasure in deciphering hyperbolic headlines, be those in The Reg or New Scientist. However, I can't parse "21st century malware found in Jane Austen's 19th century prose" in any way that agrees with the actual article.

tl;dr I usually enjoy Reg Headlines, but this one wasn't in the spirit of the game.