Posts by druck

Apple makes Cocoa with Porridge

Copyright?

Perhaps the writers of Porridge should consider suing apple for copyright infringement.

Tech fault at RBS and Natwest freezes millions of UK bank balances

It would only be reasonable to go through their terms and conditions to find every example of penalties and fees when you late with a payment, and charge them then the same.

Brutal web vice of the People's Republic crushes innovation, growth

“The last thing the internet community wants to see is China breaking away, so it has a lot of leverage,” he said.

Really? There would be hell of a lot of people in internet security who would be happier if the great firewall stopped state sponsored traffic getting out, rather than user content getting in.

Philips 46PFL9706T 46in 3D smart TV

Re: is it 3d

Technically active shutter will work when you are lying down, as the glasses will deliver a different image to each eye, but your brain wont be able to make any sense of it, as Haku says, because stereoscopic images are designed to be viewed with the head vertical. With passive glasses once you tilt your head by more than a few degrees the polarisation no longer prevents both images being seen by each eye, giving a very blurred image.

Top US Senator to Apple, Google: 'Curb your spy planes'

Re: Don't leave BING out of this.

Multi-map had Birds Eye View for years, MS bought them and shoved it in to Bing.

Mad Apple patent: Cloneware to convince trackers you don't like porn

Pointless

It doesn't matter how many clones you are running which aren't looking at porn, the one that is will still be logged.

Microsoft details latest Windows Phone update

Re: 1991 called

As every other phone* has been able to do these things since the dawn of time, maybe Microsoft are waiting for the patents to expire before implementing such basic features. What a joke.

* Except early iPhone's.

So you wanna be a Wall Street techie? Or anyway, get paid a lot

Re: Impossible to answer interview questions

You can do the estimates of estimates, but the easiest way is to google for piano tuners in the city to see how many there are currently, then ring a few up and try to make an appointment. If they can fit you in right away there are too many, if you can't get any one around for 3 months, there probably needs to be at least one more.

Chinese 'nauts reach Heaven after 8-minute coupling

A bit quick?

Anyone think that the docking approach speed was a bit quick? Certainly looked a bit faster than a Soyuz/Progress docking with the ISS.

Office 365 in moving pictures

No

I don't read The Register to look at Microsoft adverts.

Skype launches in-call ads

Unistalled

it.

LG 47LM670T 47in passive 3D smart TV

Re: i bought this over the samsung 8000

not sure how you get cross talk on passive specs?

Tilt your head a couple of degrees.

Fate of dot-word bids decided by ICANN archery shoot-out

Lets object to all of them

As soon as ICANN reveals the public portions of these applications – confidential financial information and some sensitive technical data will be redacted – a 60-day comment period begins. This is every internet user's chance to put their oar in: if you don't like any specific application for whatever reason, you can file an informal objection at no charge.

Lets object to every single last one of them, and try to put an end to the TLD racket which will be used to extort defensive registrations from every business on the internet over and over again.

Code glitch floored Reg reader altimeter

Re: Arcane measurements

Flight levels are in 100s of ft according to the ICAO.

We'll pull the plug on info-leak smart meters, warns UK.gov

Re: mmmmmmm....does the following actually mean

If you have smart meters and smart appliances, unnecessary energy usage can be prevented at times of peak demand - which is when it hurts most.

At the moment during the Coronation Street ad break, or at half time in a big football match, millions of kettles are switched on at the same time. This results in the energy producers having to meet a big demand spike by firing up quick response gas plant, releasing hydro storage, and going cap in hand to the French to get them to send some of their lovely nuclear power over the interconnect. The latter doesn't result in any CO2, but the former does as quick response gas plant is far less efficient than base load, and something has to pump the water back up hill for the hydro storage if the wind isn't blowing.

If instead you had smart appliances, the smart meter could let them know the system was under stress and they could reduce their energy usage. Heating, air con, fridges, freezers, dish washers, washing machines and tumble driers, could all take a break for a couple of minutes until all those kettles have boiled. You wouldn't notice it had happened, but it would shave off a crucial few hundred MW off the top of the peak demand, which uses the most CO2, and costs the highest price per kW/h.

AMD and Nvidia extreme GPUs workout

Re: Found a Heavyweight legend yesterday.

Sounds a bit much to me. Plating to a depth of 2.5um (which I believe is a lot more than is used this days), 1g of gold is enough to plate the entire surface of both sides of of 194 full size PCI cards.

Wealthy Kensington & Chelsea residents reject BT fibre cabinets

Re: Location Location Location

To reward your complete lack of faith in local democracy I'll be recommending the next BT cabinet is positioned right in front of your driveway, and putting your council tax up for the privilege.

Location Location Location

The town council planning committee on which I sit has no objection to the boxes as long as they do not overly restrict access on the pavement or other facilities. However, it is often very difficult for us to determine this given the inaccurate and misleading information provided by BT. Quite often we receive a written description of the location, a photo-shopped picture of the new cabinet showing it further along the street, and on inspecting the site we find the sprayed marks where the engineers intend to put it, somewhere else again!

Dating site eHarmony plays data-breach me-too

Long or short doesn't matter

If it is the password hashes which have been compromised, it doesn't matter if the original password is a long phrase or a random mix of symbols. The attack works by finding a string which gives the same hash value as one in the file, the string doesn't need to be the same as the original, as millions of passwords hash to the same value.

Strong ARM: The Acorn Archimedes is 25

Fantastic machines

Fantastic machines massively ahead of their time. The 8MHz ARM 2 (not 4MHz as in the article) was about 25x faster than the BBC B, 15x faster than an original PC and 6x faster than a PC AT on Byte benchmarks. It came with built in better than VGA colour graphics, and 4 channel sound, no need for graphics and sound cards before it could do even the most basic things. They could also take 4 (not 2) podule expansion cards including one providing all the digital and analogue I/O we enjoyed on the Beeb.

Toshiba America says no to new netbooks

10" old model netbook £249

10" current model netbook £306

10" new model ultrabook £800+ ?

All with the same crappy low res screens and underperforming chipset.

LOHAN starts to feel the barometric pressure

Re: Timer?

Gravity isn't a constant with increasing altitude, although that is only a small factor. A far bigger one is an extremely non constant and turbulent atmosphere the balloon is rising through, which will make timing of the rise highly variable.

Sony NEX-7 24.3Mp APS-C compact system camera

EVF vs LCD power

Battery has a life of 350 shots when shooting using the EVF and 430 when using the LCD.

The OLED viewfinder takes more juice than the bigger LCD screen? Something wrong there.

Gates' Corbis busted again for fraud

Re: Deja Vu Microsoft Stealing Apple QuickTime Code (circa 1998)

And Sendo - Microsoft's masterplan to screw phone partner – full details.

Nvidia's Kepler pushes parallelism up to eleven

DP bad

Why the massive hit on double precision in the K10 compared to the Femi? Is there a technical reason, or is it just to force DP users on to the more expensive K20?

Grab your L-plates, flying cars of sci-fi dreams have landed

Re: Where will you land?

I flew in to Sheffield just before it closed, we had to battle though (or rather around) snow showers, staying under low cloud in icing conditions for hours, before the weather finally cleared a corridor up the M1 and made a left turn in to Sheffield. Where we meet with vicious wind sheer across the runway from the buildings when just about to touch down. Worse than that, after having to do a go around and a second approach the cafe had just closed! As it was a bank holiday Monday, nothing was open for miles,so we had to get a taxi to Sheffield Arena for something eat, before attempting a flight back through the snow showers again. I'm sad it's closed now, but it was a lot of hassle just for somewhere to get lunch.

ARM creators Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber

Re: Star Designer

There was a way to access the ROM behind the I/O areas (called Fred, Jim and Sheila) by writing to &FE34.

LG: We're not walking away from Windows Phone

LG is fully on board the Windows Phone train...

..but the carriages are still at the station because the locomotive is shunting Nokia over the Cassandra Crossing.

Happy 30th Birthday, Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Re: They appear to have fixed it

There are attribute clashes all over that image. A nasty bodge to reduce memory use, the BBC may only have had 8 colours, but every pixel was individually addressable.

Nokia loses $1.7bn in Q1, sales chief falls overboard

Re: blame?

It's going to be one hell of a long season for Nokia!

iPad app that lets mute kids speak menaced by patent lawsuit

"The reason that assistive technology - and other equipment for people with disabilities - tends to be expensive is because the market is small."

And more importantly there are government subsidies, and laws mandating that people with disabilities are given access to this equipment. This allows the manufacturers to raise the price to way beyond what their users would be able to afford themselves, and make a tidy profit from the tax payer.

Some of the assistive technologies such as screen readers for the blind are vastly more complex than speaking when a button is pushed, having to provide full audio navigation of a vast number of off the shelf software packages. Due to the screen reader's low level integration into the OS, they require continuous development to work around changes to the OS every time a service pack or hot fix is released. But even these don't cost as much as the cheapest Prentke devices.

Brush up your Microsoft skills, win date with Ferrari

"The grand prize is the loan of a Ferrari for a weekend of fun, extravagance and top-level posing."

I read that as top-posting, using the abomination that is MS Outlook.

"Five runners-up will win a Nokia Lumia 800,"

And the next 5 will forced to accept two Nokia Lumia 800s?

Dijit

Multiple devices

The Watch TV screen should allow buttons for different devices, as in my case the channel change is done by the set top box and the volume control by the AV receiver. But does it allow a single button to send commands to multiple devices? For example to turn on/off the TV, set top box and AV receiver in one go? Even with a multi-device physical remote, it's 6 button pushes, and something which a bit of kit like this should be able to simplify.

El Reg user forum opens to public, HTML for all (mostly)

Re: So... may those HTML tags have attributes?

You've not noticed the Preview button then?

Privacy worth piffling pennies to polled punters

Figures?

A E0.50 discount, but what was the original price?

That MYSTERY Duqu Trojan language: Plain old C

CFront

It could have been C++ converted to C by CFront, an aberration which we had to go through in the late 80s before native C++ compilers. The C output from that was truly hideous.

Ten... e-cars and hybrids

And the rest

"In Germany, the ED will be sold for around €16,000 (£13,410) while the battery pack will leased for around €60 (£50) per month. Those prices don’t take into account any local government grants, so the Smart should still work out a fair bit cheaper than the Renault Zoe in the UK."

I suspect when it goes on sale in the UK, by pure coincidence, it will be around £5000 more expensive than in Germany.

Number 1 rule of government subsidies; the money goes in to the pockets of the producer, not the consumer.

FCC denies DISH a fast-track waiver for grounded network

Plans?

"Now the plan seems to be (according to the congressional newspaper The Hill) a wholesale removal of the restrictions on the satellite spectrum, rather than case-by-case waivers. That would be a better solution, but will take a year or two to happen and won't solve the GPS problems plaguing LightSquared."

A better solution? Bat-shit crazy would be a more apt description. Satellite frequencies need to stay reserved for satellites. Purely earth based comms pedallers should be bidding on frequencies freed up by analogue TV along with everyone else.

Future car tech

Re: Road trains..,

Anyone happy to sit in a long spaced out queue of traffic behind a lorry on a motorway, really doesn't need to be in a car, they should be on a bus, probably on the way back to their retirement home.

Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

Mantras

If forcing Metro on the desktop is like Mao’s Cultural Revolution, does that make Window's 8 on ARM like Pol Pot's Year Zero?

Hackers print tiny Linux box to net up your home

Power?

I've been thinking of deploying some intelligent sensors round the house, my initial though was battery powered communicating by bluetooth, but if these units are connected via ethernet, why use batteries, power over ethernet would be far more sensible.

Belkin Power Pack 4000

Leakage

The most important factor for one of these devices is the charge leakage rate. It's no good having a backup charging device, if after a week or a month, it's gone flat too.

Tory minister: Let's exploit our rich resource of mud, er, wind

Re: Nonsense article for backward people

"f course wind energy (like most forms of renewable energy) are heavily subsidized, like all newish technologies which only over time improve in efficiency and reliability so that the costs come down. "

No developments in efficiency will make the wind blow at the times when we need electricity the most.

[BS about nuclear safety not even worthy of a reply]

"Here's a chance to become a leader in an industry with probably the highest potential for enormous growth within the next decades."

We don't even make the wind turbines in the UK, we just subsidise them. So let me rearrange your words to make some sense: here's a chance to be leading the table of lowest economic growth for the next few decades.

Microsoft demos 3D desktop with transparent OLED

Awkward

I know it's only a concept, but how awkward does reaching around the bottom of the screen look?

Also why are they using what looks like an Acorn Electron for a keyboard?

Nominet to launch .wales and .cymru

Another drain on the Welsh economy

Where is the business case for this? Almost £400,000 of public money will be going to ICANN to set up the domains, and then countless thousands of pounds of private money from Welsh businesses flowing in to the hands of Nominet every year in order to defensively register in the .wales and .cymru domains. How much of extra business do they think those domains will pull in? Pence?

Dell Latitude E6220 12.5in Core i7 notebook

At least...

...it has FULL SIZED cursor keys!

Rather than the stupid half height ones blighting must other laptops just so the keyboard outline looks pretty.

Fujitsu tempts Europe to splash cash on waterproof mobes

"Still, a phone folks can safely drop in the toilet could well make a splash."

Brilliant pun aside, I'd rather it broke and so I could get replacement on the insurance. I don't fancy pressing something against my face that had been swimming with the turds!

Tesla X e-SUV to sport monster touchscreen on the dash

They've had them for donkeys years

It's nothing new our 2009 Modeo Titianium X has got an LCD dash.

Sinofsky shows off Windows 8 on ARM and Office15

There already is desktop ARM Hardware

"There maybe a good prospect of desktop ARM hardware sooner rather than later."

Sorry, been we've been using desktop ARM hardware continually since 1987 in the RISC OS world.

We've had desktops using ARM2, ARM3, ARM610, ARM710, ARM7500FE, StrongARM, XScale, ARM9 and Cortex A8, with newer ARMv7 based boards on the way.

Samsung Series 7 Chonos 15.6in Core i7 notebook

And yet another keyboard with the stupid half height up and down cursor keys.

I don't care if there is bulge in the outline of the keyboard, as long as some of the most used keys on the keyboard are full sized.