Posts by web_bod

Programming languages can be hard to grasp for non-English speakers. Step forward, Bato: A Ruby port for Filipinos

Re: I wonder if you can't be bothered to learn

So your argument hinges on the fact that you only have an English keyboard and would be reluctant to learn to use a different one?

Elon Musk invents bus stop, waits for applause, internet LOLs

Re: Quite spectacular how many people (including the article author) have missed the point...

So not even as good as a taxi then?

Night before Xmas and all through American Airlines, not a pilot was flying, thanks to this bug

No Fly Zone

̶P̶l̶a̶n̶e̶s̶, Trains and Automobiles

OnePlus 5 x T + five short months = Some p*ssed off fanboys

Somebody's headed for the naughty step!

Whilst I applaud your integrity, it can't be doing you many favours in the industry.

Don't rely on fitness trackers to track number of calories burned

I hope you washed your hands and cleared your browser history

IT contractors behind IR35 calculator to leave HMRC... because of IR35

The team?!?

Are you serious?, GDS is so inept, that a handful of questions required a team of contractors to deploy?

Apple evacuates European HQ after bomb threat

Re: For budgetary reasons?

... or maybe because a bomb *disposal* team is only useful when you've actually managed to find a bomb - not much use on hoaxes.

Discworld fans stake claim to element 117

Enough with all the petitions already

Lovelace at 200: Celebrating the High Priestess to Babbage's machines

Re: Wonderful Stuff! - buy the book

There's only a few hours reading in the book, but the footnotes are full of references - and as she said Google Books is a mine of information.

The artwork easily trumps "Unicorns are jerks"

Now Ashley Madison hackers reveal 'CEO's emails and source code'

Re: Or the opposite could happen....

Jesus - how fucked-up is your sense of morality?

Marriage equality - is just about that - let anybody marry whoever they want.

If you're not prepared to be monogamous nothing's forcing you to get married.

Marriage is specifically about committing to one person - whoever they are.

There is no genes for for sexual preference just as there are no genes for being a twat.

Global spy system ECHELON confirmed at last – by leaked Snowden files

Why endure such a hard life?

If he'd named and abandoned his sources then he could have retired to a comfy couch in the Ecuadorian embassy and have people venerate his name.

NASA briefing in HOURS: 'We are upon the CUSP of finding ANOTHER EARTH'

YAEP #Yawn

Yet another exoplanet - just what we need, a small warm rock 1,400 light years away and 1.5bn years in the future.

Paper driving licence death day: DVLA website is still TITSUP

I object to the use of the acronym 'TITSUP' - this is business as usual for government websites within 3 months of launch

Apple Watch WRISTJOB SHORTAGE: It's down to BAD VIBES

Re: NTP - to correct "wrong kind of heart"

The interval between my heartbeats varies depending on what I'm up to - is NTP to synchronise a pacemaker to correct this?

If you can explain what 'an API management platform' is, you too can be worth $700m

Does API mean something different now?

Saudi Arabia to flog man 1,000 times for insulting religion on Facebook

Re: What do you expect

You can hardly blame their medieval behaviour - by their reckoning it's 1436

The Shock of the New: The Register redesign update 4

Better

That looks a lot better - the grey border is a lot easier on the eye and the visited link colour makes the site a lot easier to use - thanks!

El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

I never knew about http://www.theregister.co.uk/Week as a way to bypass the homepage - #BookmarkUpdated - cheers!

Re: Awful.

Screw it - you've given me a headache - you've still got your 50 mouths, but you've lost a pair of eyeballs - I used to click the ads.

I don't know why you had to dick around with the article layouts like this - I am not 12 - I come here to read some bile ringed tech news - not gawp at full screen images (ok they're not quite full screen, but on my laptop they are bloody close).

Re: A measureable improvement

But sweetie - this site is targeted at geeks and techies - it's great that you work in publishing - but this isn't a reflective bit of paper - it's a back-lit screen - so in this environment so much brilliant white with a narrow typeface is actually more effort to read and results in more eye train particularly when you look how closely spaced the characters are compared to the line and paragraph spacing.

Re: El Reg Redesign - leave your comment here.

1999 has called they want their fugly portal layout back - seriously WHAT were you thinking - it's an abomination - particularly against the bloody geckos you have plastered all over the background - I thought the Guardian was bad - but Jesus Christ - this layout is so noisy - have you never considered usability?

It's awful.

Hinge: An app that scours Facebook friends for dates banks $12m

What happened to the website?

Were you hacked by the morons that trashed the Guardian site? - it looks a mess

Intel forced to shoot down viral 'Israeli boycott' whopper

Re: This is Sparta

If you feel so strongly about it then why don't you feel the need to post anonymously?

Re: FFS - here's an IT angle

How many IT 'security' products are manufactured by Israeli businesses?

Brit kids match 45-year-old fogies' tech skill level by the age of 6

Waste of space

A survey for the shallow and vapid, if you never shut-up about your shiny then you'll do well.

Play Elite, Pitfall right now: Web TIME PORTAL opens to vintage games, apps

ET Game

Is there a technique for getting out of the hole?

Who's who: 12th Doctor has been chosen, will meet you on Sunday night

I hope he has breasts

- women can be doctors too, it's just everybody will refer to him as he - otherwise it will get all wibbly.

Mystery object falls from sky, area sealed off by military: 'Weather balloon', say officials

Watch the news clip - it looks pretty weather ballooney too me, the payload looks a bit battered though.

I guess "package", "wires" and "strange noises" flagged it as a possible bomb.

Beam me up? Not in the life of this universe

Teleportation could open up a can of legal worms : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lintilla_(clone)#Lintilla

Live or let dial - phones ain’t what they used to be

Body Swapping

Did you just photoshop your head onto that tux - or is that your standard pose?

Things that cost the same as coffee with Tim Cook - and are way more fun

Re: Or...

The price would round up - from $2.45 to $2.50, but you can only buy a full cup so, 610000/2.45 ≈ 248979

Word wonks insist GIFs are really JIFs

Is this *actual* news - as in currently happening in2012?

Who uses Gifs nowadays and what happened to bring them to the attention of the OED?

Apostrophe’s cause problem’s in e-health system’s

cue Dr Bobby Tables

yeah yeah - coat please!

Transit of Venus, live-ish from Australia

Ha Ha! I saw it!

The clouds finally cleared just in time to catch the last couple of minutes of it - back to bed :)

better than nothing

I'm not too fussed about breaks in the feeds am just happy to be able to see anything - it looks like the weather in Coventry will be shite in the morning.

Culture jammers connect Lego clones with 3D printer files

F.U.C.K

Build it an they will cum

yeah, that's mine, the mac with the tissues in the top pocket - cheers!

Analogue switch-off hits London today

Farewell, snow-filled pictures

fat chance it's Easter - haven't you seen the forecast?

Apple drops 'thermonuclear' patent bombshell

I had to go and have a lie down half way through reading this - really lost my rag - feckin' April fools shite should carry a health warning.

Well done though - b**ds!

O2 3G stops giving punters' mobile numbers to websites

At least they listen

Not saying that it shouldn't have happened, but at least they took action.

O2 leaks 3G users' mobile numbers to every website visited

"All our testing happens on the live server"

Developer stupidity

Starship Voyager dumped into skip

Oi Google when was that news?

May 2007 - http://www.trektoday.com/news/310503_03.shtml

I guess the sale fell through.

Teen net addicts pee in bottles to stay glued to WoW

Urine powered games

http://bit.ly/xpyGBN <- Sega debuts the urine powered TOYLET...

Mars attacks! Morocco pelted with rocks from the Red Planet

Meh they're just Nomads

Bit of a turn-up having the natives trading beads for something useful.

But it's not as if they're going to rush down to Phones4U and snaffle an iPad is it? besides they've been trading in meteorites for millennia, I'm sure they know what they are doing.

Wikipedia to shut down Wednesday in SOPA protest

Who's up for a Pub Quiz?

If we time it right we can hit a few and clean-up Mwhahahahahaha!

Cupertino lawyers mull 'driPhone' name ban

Hyphenate it properly

Drip-hone - there you go, problem solved

Apple to appeal Italian warranty fine

Marketing Dept is at the BBC

Auntie loves them apples

Four illegal ways to sort out the Euro finance crisis

down with rates

What would be the consequences of scrapping the idea of a 'national' interest rate - wouldn't local rates encourage money to slosh around between the regions - or is that the idea - to stop speculation at the expense of regional economies?

Apple paid $2.6bn of $4.5bn Nortel patent grab

not so clever now

""The bidding process, as reported by Reuters, was at times surreal, with Google making bids based upon such mathematical concepts as Brun's constant, the Meissel-Mertens constant, and even pi – one Google bid was, yes, $3.14159bn."

I hope Apple & co sue the arse off them - Google need to grow-up

19,000 papers leaked to protest 'war against knowledge'

Missing the point about pricing

Most people don't have a problem with the current set-up:

Imagine two researchers at different points in their work; A is carrying out a literature review and only needs to skim through the paper, B is experiencing a problem that the methodology described in the paper could solve.

How much is the paper worth to A? - it's only one of many - so probably pennines. For B the paper is essential, so they'd probably pay through the nose for it.

A is an undergrad and they can access the material through their University library at minimal personal cost - the University pays a subscription to access the archive, not a per document fee. B works for a pharamaceutical business and his research budget will cover the cost.

A and B would both prefer not to have to pay to read the paper, but considering the cost/benefits they are probably happy enough with the prices they are presented with.

The price of an article from a journal doesn't reflect its value - you can't easily put a dollar amount on knowledge, when prices stop reflecting demand/value there's usually another reason for them.

With a lot of publications you can get unrestricted access to their archive when you take out a longer term subscription - Newspapers do this a lot.

Now consider C - he's interested in the paper for personal reasons - he's not a member of a University and doesn't have a multi-million pound budget. To him $15 to read a paper seems grossly unfair, especially when it would only cost $120 a year to subscribe to the Journal - getting access to everything they've already published for free.

The $15 re-print fee in this case acts as an anchor to make the annual subscription look more attractive.

Journals use re-prints as a marketing tool to sell subscriptions, not as a direct source of income.