Posts by toby powell-blyth

Microsoft grinches W7 Family Pack in US

Windows Vista? Really?

"that promised the whole family could enjoy the upgrade to Vista."

Amazing marketing, setting up a windows 7 family pack to enable everyone to upgrade to Vista.. No wonder it was pulled in the states

Satellites crash over Siberia: Iridium bird destroyed

@Mark Wills

The weightlessthing is a myth.. Evertything, conceptually, is simply falling at the same speed. (Don't forget that gravity is inverse-square related to distance from the mass * the mass). Weight is a function of Mass and relative gravity, the Mass remains constant even if lofted into space. It wouldn't take much to do serious damage to two solid bits of metal + hydrazine + secret russian military lasers.

This fun link might help explain it.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/weight/

@conspiracy theorists: Maybe the Iridium satellite was doing the ramming?? Maybe the US DOD is interested in the satellites as Ramming weapons, not some space age laser thingummies.

Interflora sues M&S over Google keywords

another way to look at it

Is that Marks and Spencer are seeking to profit by the use (recognition of a user typing in) of someone else's trademark...

So If I put a physical shop front up (lots of woolworths' stores going cheap!) that had Marks And Spencer's logo over the front, people would "search" the high street (by walking down it) until they found one that looked like what they were looking for... preferably my fake one.

However, if the advert simply responded to the "interflora" keyword, but displayed "Marks and Spencers Flowers R gr8", then isn't that similar to putting your own leaflet distributors, or advert on a bus shelter outside the competition's physical store since you're not pretending to be them?

disclaimer: IANAL.

Makes me glad I never went into law... my head hurts now.

Paris because she looks how I feel...

McDonalds survey scam is super-size fraud

what's the old saying?

A Phool and his money are soon parted?

sentiments echoing Sean Foreman, and AC@16:28

Microsoft's Hotmail hybrid struggles to life

I didn't think it was this bad!

"a return to the exiting version of Microsoft's email service."

So. Microsoft WERE going to exit from email service provision, and had produced a final version, then they released this version instead of exiting from the market... Now people are calling for them to go back to the version that was the last version, instead of this "non-last" version???

Or perhaps you meant

"a return to the exciting version of Microsoft's email service."

*sigh*.

Mine's the coat with the straps around the back, and "pedants' corner" written on it.

OMFG, what have you done?

I for one

I, for one, welcome our fixed width overlords.

Srsly though, like it :o) Nice move.

British Columbia stray foot tally hits six

The sixth foot appears to have been _cut_ off

Or so sayeth the woman who found it:

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=f5fb1894-df01-4b58-97d8-b9ee3c88a9ac

"You could see the two bones sticking right above the ankle part of the shoe and it was straight. It didn't look jagged. It looked like it had been cut."

@Andy Gibson:

With a name like Sandra Mallone, I think a character from Grease is right on the mark...

It's electrifying!

Taser gun usage soaring among UK cops

definition of "resisting"

I saw a guy get tasered in Clapham last week (fuzzy on details, but I think it was twice - he was a big guy...)

He was blatantly so drunk / high / something that he probably didn't really understand what was going on... Not so much resisting as not struggling to comprehend..

It seemed a bit harsh to me, as did the 10 police people who sat on him for the next 10 minutes till they could cart him off.

Hope he's ok.

US gov now says Eye-o-Sauron™ border masts are crap

I think I have spotted a flaw in the logic!

"The radar can pick out all human-sized or larger moving objects across a wide stretch of territory."

So all I need to do is cut myself into small less-than-human sized pieces, throw myself over the border and then....

Oh, wait a minute.....

I'll go get my coat.

iPhone auction fakes swindle the impatient

The reason it's 18:02

@Andy Worth

It's dead easy. The company is called O2, therefore launching a product at 18: O2.

Geddit?

Google Maps rolls out the Mesopotamian nil-cubit

More interestingly

Most interestingly, after being pivotally involved with creating the non-standard smoot,

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot)

Oliver Smoot later became Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)[3] and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). [4]

A beautifully poetic circle, IMHO

Boffins develop Terminator-vision goggles

I can see a Matrix mod for this

Someone wrote a codec that turns movies into Matrix style renderings... This would be pretty funky like that. Would save the Wachowski brothers ^H^H^H^H^H^H Brother and sister Loads of money on special effects.

Oyster card evolves into OnePulse

PIN number?

Dave: I think you mean a Personal input PIN number.

this thing was "launched" yesterday, but how many people have actually got one in the wild? I was invited to do the credit card bit of the application yesterday.

I presume this means that oyster readers DEFINITELY don't wipe the magnetic strips of credit cards?

Orange strong-arming ex-customers for imagined debts

I've had similar problems in the past

I started a new contract with Orange then cancelled it within the 14 day money back guarantee period (Due to how rude a CSO was to me).

Anyway, they had already ported my number across and had decided to continue charging me for this period, so I had 2 months or so of line rental to pay, despite having the contract annulled under their guarantee, having no phone, no service and already having re-ported the number back to my next providor (thank you T-Mobile for being dull, but at least consistent).

In the end, after about a week of my having to make stronger and stronger phone calls, they cancelled the bills "Out of goodwill". Note that they never admitted they were at fault.

One can go off companies very easily.. I think I'll be heading to Vodagroan for a while.

Webmail-creating Trojan targets Gmail

Another suggestion

Why not have graphical captchas which require a good understanding of english. Mensa tests have things like:

Hot is to cold as daft is to....

Or, going with the catz thing, how about "How many happy faces are in this picture". Sorry for that small minority among us who cannot recognise emotions.

I don't understand why ISPs cannot, from a centralised authority list, block access to the server that is providing the decryption of the captchas.

Skype violates open source licence

Change the license then

As far as I can see, skype are guilty of not adhering to the license for the operating system used in the phone, and should pay the penalty that the court decides. You and I cannot complain about this.. GPL is a contract and you are bound by it.

The outrageous part that I see in this case is not whether it's wrong for skype to be taken to court, but that the GPL doesn't allow for inclusion of a URL. In a modern internet world, surely it's good enough? After all, some service providers in the UK provide their terms only via websites (sorry, I can't qualify that with a precise example). it would be a huge waste of resources to include an extra CD or Treeware with every piece of linux hardware.

Of course, the phone should have come with some drivers / manuals / integration software, and the source won't take all that disc. It takes as long to press a full CD as a half empty one.

I hope the court's recompense will be along the lines of contacting everyone and telling them they can phone up to have a source CD delivered alongside. And what's the betting they provide it on a blu-ray just to irritate the court :)

Fasthosts hit by severe floods

They have a full scale backup generator

I've seen fasthost's backup generator in action (worked very well, all the servers were fine when I saw them testing it).

The only trouble is that it's in their carpark, at ground level.

With hindsight, this would be a design flaw, seeing as they are nigh on 100 yards away from the dock edge.

Solar-powered ion drive asteroid probe set for launch

hmm, I remember this one well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_Off_Vesta

good thing there's no people there... I think the spaceship in that book was ion powered :S

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

Keep it britishersest

Let's be proud to carry .co.uk to the masses in the US for once. Otherwise we'll be poodling to their ideals of domains, we don't need to pull a Blair for the American audience