Posts by druck

Airport face-scan gate unilaterally imprisons traveller

True positive

Just hold up a 100% scale photograph of your face in front of your face, it's far more likely to get a true positive.

Acer takes on iPad with Android, Flash, own UI

Re: What is the point of a rear camera in these devices?

It's for an app which displays the ground as you walk and use the tablet, preventing you from tripping over stuff.

UK.gov insists e-petitions won't be ditched

I really enjoyed the responses...

I really enjoyed the utterly condescending responses. You'd have a petition which went along the lines of:-

Proposition: We oppose 90 day detention without trial for littering.

Signatures: 10,000,000

Response: We understand your concern, but it really is for your own good.

Nothing like getting an email 6 months later with that in to raise the blood pressure through the roof.

This was Labour's idea of democracy, being something out of a single party state, with the added bonuses of collecting the names and addresses for dissidents for future re-education. Let it die.

Samsung plans to smash Android rivals..what about the iPad?

We've got both

I've got a Galaxy S, the wife has an iPhone4. Each of us loves our own one and thinks the other isn't as easy to use, but objectively it's pretty much a dead heat in terms of hardware and software features. It will be fascinating to see what the next model from Apple and Samsung are like, and if either manages to pull ahead decisively.

Facebook beats Google's block

BBC has the truth

Read the last line of the story on the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11717448

Phosphor World Time Curved E Ink watch

Too big

I'm glad someone has noticed gents watches are too big. I'm looking to replace my £10 Casio (which I've had so long it's cost me about £60 in new straps), but all the modern watches are twice the size of my wrist.

As for that watch, I'd rather have the €40 Breitling knock off I was offered in Bodram last week, even if it did only have one hand working!

Ballmer, Bartz, Schmidt collide in London

Silicon Fen not Silicon roundabout

We don't need a Silicon Roundabout, we've got the Silicon Fen where we've had real British Innovation from Acorn, ARM and host of other Cambridge companies. Although a meeting between Blair and Gates in 97 spelled the end for Acorn's leading position in the education market, so I'd rather Cameron stayed well away from the Ballmer, Bartz and Schmidt.

Ofcom clears deck for re-farming

+1

3 could always start a new company called 4

TVonics DTR-HD500 Freeview HD DVR

Transcoding

There was no mention of transcoding of audio to support surround sound broadcasts.

DARPA orders miracle motor for its flying car

RX-8D

A diesel wankel, just what all us RX-8 owners have been waiting for - not!

Small, light (but not a light as a petrol version) and powerful, but will break records in low mpg from a diesel.

Jobs dubs Google's 'open' Android speak 'disingenuous'

Flash love

"But we love Flash, and Flash has done extremely well on Android."

I think we might reserve judgement on that until the majority of us have received Andriod 2.2 upgrades.

Samsung pushes Galaxy S users a fix of Froyo

Re: pushed out to Samsung's PC software?

It doesn't work with <spit>Vista</spit> too well either. You have to dismount the external SD card before Kies recognises the phone, and the only way of remounting afterwords is either to take the back off and reinsert the card, or reboot the phone.

Margaret Thatcher celebrates 85 years

Sickening commentards

The irrational hate filled comments above are truly sickening. As much as I despise the previous Labour government for what they've put on the statute, some of their hate crime legislation may prove very useful in dealing with the individuals who have posted here.

Intel preps ARM-to-x86 porting tool for iOS apps

@Yarr

"Though I see no technical reason why an x86 or AMD64 design in the same league as the ARM's power efficiency is not possible. The transistor overhead due to the extra instructions should be small at modern manufacturing scales."

An x86 chip has to be several orders of magnitude more complex than an ARM in order to both support translating the hideous legacy x86 instructions in to something a modern processor can execute efficiently, plus the huge amount of baggage from the various instruction set extensions which have built up over the years.

On the same physical process each part of the chip can be just as power efficient as an ARM, but there is always going to be more parts of the x86 to power.

Everyone but Oracle demands Java independence

Re: Another fork in the road[map]

Terry H wrote: "3) Everyone abandons Java. Sadly the closest thing to a replacement is probably C++. But it is a very poor replacement indeed - welcome to 1990."

There's always C# on mono.

I'll get my coat...

Keene USB FM Transmitter

Nothing new

This is nothing new, I used to pick up my Acorn Electron's audio output on an FM radio back in 1984. Admittedly it was due to lack of RF shielding rather than design, but I found it quite amusing at the time.

Marvell intros 1.5GHz tri-core ARM chip

But's it's an XScale

Sounds good, but it's roots are in Intel's XScale line, so it's going to get a lot less done per clock than any other ARM variant, and particularly when compared against the (limited) superscalar Cortex series used in other smartphones and tablets.

Oracle to webify mobile Java against Android

ARM architectures not model numbers

"Java ME is going to be optimized for the ARM7 and ARM9 chipsets"

The ARM7 and ARM9 are two ancient chip model series. What was meant was the ARMv7 and ARMv9 instruction architectures, which are used by the modern Cortex series chips at the heart of modern smartphones.

Super-tough wireless sensors 'to be dropped into volcanoes'

Bring back the fast breader

One of the problems with fast breeder nuclear reactors was the difficulty of instrumenting the primary cooling system, which consisted of liquid sodium (boiling point 883C), so this research sounds idea.

Fast breeder reactors are able to turn the limited stocks of naturally occurring uranium in to vastly more nuclear fuel, which can be used in more conventional reactors. Demand for nuclear power is increasing rapidly to produce CO2 free electricity, and without this technology uranium supplies will limit its potential.

This is an area in which Britain had lead the world, but we've now abandoned, and we are even set to demolish the landmark dome of the pioneering Doonray facility.

Samsung specs up 7in Android tablet

Should have called it the "Universe S"...

...because it look like a larger version of the Galaxy S phone. Just got one myself, and it's great. I'd certainly appreciate the 7" screen over the 4" on the phone, but then it wouldn't fit in my pocket - the Achilles heel of tablets.

Home Office unveils new UK passport

Too bloody much and no bloody tin foil

1) No reduction in price, despite the numerous rises by the last government to fund ID cards, which have been scrapped.

2) No shielding to prevent the chip being read when the passport is closed like US ones have.

'Free' laptop deals compared

Hire purchase costs

I'm not sure everyone expects the bundle cost to be lower, but certainly not as high as you've shown. Some of the attraction is the low up front charge, and paying for it monthly. Although in most cases the hire purchase costs factored in by the operator are more than buying it on a credit card and paying that off over 2 years.

US starts charging for online visa-waiver

£9, why not make it £9 million

Wouldn't matter to me, never going to go there again while they fingerprint everyone.

Defcon speaker calls IPv6 a 'security nightmare'

IPv5

Should have just gone with a small increment to IPv5 and 64 bit addresses, which is plenty until someone discovers more atoms in the universe.

Canadian flyboy prangs CF-18 Hornet

Re: Engine Out

I agree it looks like the starboard engine failed during a high alpha manoeuvre, but strangely there is no obvious control surface movement. The fly-by-wire systems should have automatically intervened to counter the yaw from the asymmetric thrust, and reduce the attitude to prevent stalling as the airspeed decreased, even if ultimately there was no longer enough thrust to save the aircraft at that height.

Intel and Nokia's MeeGo Linux gets car boost

Re: Now I understand....

It's better than car's running Windows, so get behind it, or get a bicycle!

The Register comment guidelines 2010

Report button reason

Would it be possible to have a reason field associated with the report button, so we can say why we are reporting it? It may not always be obvious to a moderator why we are unhappy with a particular comment.

Wales joins supercomputer club

Public sector accounts for 60% of Welsh economy and rising

400 more public sector jobs to sit around a pair of small Windows servers, periodically pressing the reset button.

Asus tackles summer sun with no-gloss netbook screen

Bad photochop

She can't see the screen with the lid at that angle, anti-glare or no anti-glare.

Revealed: Government blows thousands on iPhone apps

What Next, PS3 Games?

What are we going to find the last Government has been wasting money on next? Developing PS3 games to show children how to cross the road?

Strato-droids to mate in upper atmos, exchange vital juices

A win for the meatbag

The Register writes: "Flying robots can more or less do it all. They can take off, navigate, land themselves, shoot missiles at other aircraft while in flight"

No, that was a manned Mig25 shooting down a UAV, a win for the meatbag.

Computer grads can't even get jobs offering personal services

Low quality compsci garduates

Perhaps it has something to do with the abysmal quality of recent computer science graduates.

At my previous job we were recruiting and interviewed the best of the bunch who claimed to have good C, C++ or C# experience on their CV's. We gave them a little puzzle which involved writing some code to solve an anagram given text file dictionary. We weren't expecting a fully debugged program in the language of their choice after half an hour, but at least something to indicate they understood the problem and could break it down in to logical steps. Many of them didn't manage a single line of code, and most didn't have a clue on how to read a word from a one word per line text file. In the end we rejected all the graduates and went for a guy in his late 50's, who might of started on Cobol, but had the thought process of a programmer.

Darkstar One: Broken Alliance

Elite

Bring back Elite!

Domain registrars push back on law enforcement changes

Licence to print money

If you are a domain registrar you have been given a licence to print money, and an ever increasing amount of it as ICAN allows more and more unnecessary top level domains. Anything which makes them examine more carefully who their clients are, can only be a good thing.

ToryDems add up bill for Labour's ID scheme

Self financing

Cost £41m, raised £450k, a factor of a mere 100x out is probably Labour's idea of self financing, given the budget deficit which was always claimed to be "balanced over the economic cycle" but is down by £485bn this cycle. Maths never was their strong point.

Ancient typewriters reborn as USB keyboards

The best bit is...

...you can put a ribbon and some paper in it, and do something useful when your iPad's battery is flat.

Far East fanboi dresses iPad as Mac (Classic)

Almost there!

Now if they could just make the original keyboard and mouse work, you'd have a usable computer!

Clegg promises liberties restoration

Every last law from 97 onwards

Every law from 97 onwards needs to be reviewed and in the majority of cases repealed.

Most were thought up on the spot as a knee jerk reaction to a news story and duplicated existing laws - knife crime was already illegal, it has since been made doubly and even triply illegal. Duplication of laws doesn't reduce crime or make prosecution easier, it gives the defence even more loop holes to exploit.

Even those laws which were planned in advance, where so shoddily drafted that in many cases have been applied to areas they were never claimed to target. We never quite know if this was incompetence or intentional given so many Labour MPs supposedly had a legal background.

Biometric cash machine lands in Europe

Retinal scans stolen

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/8677140.stm

The theft of a laptop containing unencrypted medical records including retinal scans will come in very useful for breaking any security system relying on that biometric which those patients may have to use. What exactly can you do once your eyes are permanently compromised?

Re: Not so sure but

ac wrote: "the biometric reader may rely on blood flow or pressure in order to "read" the finger's vein pattern. Once the finger is severed, won't the veins collapse thereby rendering the finger useless?"

Easily reanimated with a syringe of liquid, just apply at approximately one second intervals to simulate a pulse, that's all it will be looking for.

Maybe it's time for a severed thumb icon.

Norks 'have answer to humanity's greatest problem'

Fusion sucks

Even the fusion reaction in a bomb is endothermic (hence sucks).

It's actually a fission-fusion-fission bomb - a small fission bomb kicks off a fusion reaction which is used to enhance the detonation a much larger second fission bomb.

One day we'll get more energy out (without the bang), but it wont be NorKs that do it.

Asus R101 netbook quietly flies in

Re: eeeeee?

Guess what, the the fiancée has just bought me a new HP210 for my birthday. So I'll have to put the loyal old EEE PC out pasture.

Re: eeeeee?

batfastad wrote: "But did anyone actually buy one of those £150 machines? How's that working out for you?

Battery life still around about 2hrs? Still got those thick black bars either side of the screen and 800x480 resolution? Filled up the 4GB SSD yet?"

Yes still using mine every day. Battery life is fine for the commute of half and hour each way. A higher screen res would be nice, but it still works fine for the vast majority of websites, Firefox 3's scaling helps for some fixed width ones. There is still some space on the 4G despite upgrading some of the software, but that's because any user data is on an 8G card in the slot.

I probably will get a new netbook at some point, but there aren't any which stand out from crowd, they are all too expensive and come with an unwanted infestation of Windows. As long as the original EEE is still going I'm in no rush.

Mobile Broadband Best Buys

Correction

The price of O2's pay as you go 30 day / 3GB is £15 not £35 as in the article.

As for which is best, it all depends on where you are. I have both Vodafone and O2 PAYG dongles, Vodafone seems to work ok just about everywhere except for the Baldock to Cambridge train where it doesn't get any signal most of the time, not even 2G. O2 gives more variable performance in most places, but on that train it gives me HSPDA for the whole journey.

Indo-Mancunian Windows support scammer phones Reg hack

Re: Wow

"How much money can these scammers be making that they can now afford to make long distance international calls to random numbers in the UK in the hope of finding someone stupid enough to trick into doing this?"

They aren't paying, they work in a call centre and do this as a sideline.

Blokes spend 11 months in shed

Re: sometimes

Any decent shed will be full of oily bits of equipment, cobwebs and spiders, no women will venture there - thank gawd!

Mystic Met closed Europe with computer model

Model Accuracy

Lets have a look at the Met Office's

range of products:-

24 Hour weather forecast - maybe 50% correct

5 day weather forecast - probably 20% correct

Seasonal weather forecast - at best 10% correct

50 year climate change forecast - 200% correct, so we are told.

Where do you think the ash prediction model fits in to that league table of mediocrity?

NHS IT misses another deadline

No April Fool

If only this was one of today's multitude of April Fools articles, and billions wasn't being wasted on IT instead of fixing ill people.

Associated Newspapers, GMG to pool newsrooms

The Day Today

Just as The Day Today presented an outlandish parodied version of future TV news broadcasting, which unfortunately now seems to be the template for current shows, I fear today's newspaper April Fool is tomorrow's tabloid reality.