Posts by Wilseus

Huawei: We'll sell a dual-boot Android, Windows 8 smartphone because, well, isn't it obvious?

Re: What gets in my craw...

"I also think that Microsoft is now a different company, but it still leaves a bad taste that the very thing that Microsoft blocked for others is what it is relying on now."

They are still behaving like this. UEFI anyone?

Neil Young touts MP3 player that's no Piece of Crap

I'm not sure they're barking up the right tree here

Lossless audio is all very well, and it's well worth having these days given how cheap storage has become. However the limiting factor in most setups these days isn't the bit depth, sample rate or amount of lossy compression. It's the appalling mastering of many modern albums of the last 20 years. I've found myself responding to that by mostly buying albums that were made in the 1970s and 1980s. Sadly, many of these originally good recordings have been "remastered" and in the process been ruined by dynamic compression and hard limiting which simply robs music of its soul.

There did appear to be a campaign group (http://turnmeup.org/) highlighting this but it doesn't seem to have had much activity over the last few years and besides I had to blacklist their emails ever since they appeared to have turned over my email address to spammers.

The bottom line is, for all MP3's faults I'd rather listen to a decent recording, properly mastered, as a 128Kbps MP3 than a 24/96 FLAC if the latter recording is a distorted wall of mush with absolutely no dynamics.

Neil Young and co. should use their influence to target this first, IMO.

Re: Buy NAIM

'Buy NAIM equipment and then you'll be constantly told -

"Oh it won't sound right until you buy the £700 xyz power supply to go with it!"'

Rubbish.

I read a post on a Naim forum quite recently stating that if a system did not sound right using their cheapest amplifier, moving up to a dearer one would not fix it.

And no, I don't own any Naim kit.

X marks the... They SAID there was a mystery planet there – NASA

Re: 1.49597871 × 10^15m

I was at a meeting of our local astronomical society last night, and one of our esteemed members (who holds a PhD, no less) gave us a PowerPoint presentation entitled "Galaxy's."

Re: I never knew...

It's not, it's an ice giant.

Dell charges £16 TO INSTALL FIREFOX on PCs – Mozilla is miffed

"That's what I was thinking, but then didn't MS accidentally remove that for 18 months and nobody noticed."

Accidentally? I like that :)

Scotland to test mobe signals slammer jammer

Despite it being a criminal offence to take a mobile phone into a prison (even an officer can be sacked for doing so) the prison authorities are surprisingly lax with enforcing this. I know this because my ex who was a prison officer, used a mobile phone detector (yes, they exist) to scan the landings one night when she was bored. She found several cells that night with mobile phones being used, yet they didn't have a member of staff doing this as a matter of course.

BBC, ITV gang up on YouView with 'FreeView Connect'

"I did walk into Curry's and buy one on a humax freesat box a couple of months ago and I like it. Bit peeved if they muck it up now."

That's extremely unlikely. With a couple of exceptions such as Channel 5, Freesat boxes receive exactly the same FTA transmissions from exactly the same satellites as Sky Digital does.

Remember that all the BBC, ITV, "4" channels, "5" channels and many others are free to air on Sky too.

Think British weather is bad? It's nothing to this WOBBLY ALIEN planet

Re: 2300 light years distance.. just 4 years to change anything from here?

What on earth are you talking about?

Google will dodge EU MONSTER FINES by 'promoting' rival search services

Re: Why?

I agree 100%. I was going to ask that question on here but you beat me to it.

If the EU really want to enforce this kind of antitrust thing, why don't they look at stopping things like MS "forcing" PC manufacturers to install Windows on every machine they sell? Surely this is much more anti-competitive than Google's behaviour, not to mention the browser controversy.

Samsung appoints first-ever British head of UK ops

What do they actually do in the UK division?

R&D.

It's Satya! Microsoft VP Nadella named CEO as Bill Gates steps down

"Personally, I'd have nominated Eadon for his enthusiasm alone..."

Hmm, I doubt Eadon could have done a better job at sabotaging the company than Ballmer appears to have done!

It's big, it's expensive and it's an audiophile's dream: The Sonos Sub

Re: Audiophile and Sonos mentioned in the same article?

"Making a fashion statement is the most important part of being an audiophile."

Is it? I'd be very surprised if the average joe on the street has even heard of the companies that made my hifi equipment.

Ditch IE7 and we'll give you a FREE COMPUTER, says incautious US firm

Re: Rare pragmatic response

"I doubt it was really cheaper. More than likely, they designed their new site without proper thought and then realised "oh shit, it doesn't work on IE7 and all our customers use it". And now it's cheaper to do this than rework it all."

Says a person who fairly obviously has never coded even a simple HTML page in his life.

Stephen Fry rewrites computer history again: This time it's serious

Re: Erm, no

verbing weirds syntaxing

Have an upvote, just for the Calvin and Hobbes reference.

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum to LIVE AGAIN!

Re: Promise the world

"Steve Wilcox (owns elite) still owes me about £6k"

I feel for you, Elite/Steve still owe me a four figure redundancy payout, which I don't suppose I will ever see. I always found him to be a very pleasant guy though, when I worked for them they seemed to be suffering from a chronic lack of cash, culminating with their bank saying "no more!" Pretty much the same as nearly every other independent games studio as far as I can see.

Prof Stephen Hawking: 'There are NO black holes' – they're GREY!

Re: "I know absolutely nothing about the black holes...

Wow Jemma, 62 downvotes (as of 14.22 on the 27/1/14) must be a record on here, surely. A well deserved record too!

Amateurs find the 'HOLY GRAIL' supernova – right on our doorstep

Re: Stand well back

"Anybody here know how far away a supernova like this would have to be for the human race to survive it?"

Anything closer than about 10 pc (about 33 ly) would cause problems for us.

Our Milky Way galaxy is INSIDE OUT. Just as we suspected, mutter boffins

Not had Hersheys, then?

No, I've managed to avoid that particular pleasure!

Re: Milky Way

Ugh. Galaxy, probably the worst "chocolate" I have ever tasted, with a flavour that's a cross between wet cardboard and cheap coffee whitener.

Anatomy of a 22-year-old X Window bug: Get root with newly uncovered flaw

Re: When any C/C++ code includes "goto" you know it sucks...

Back in the late 1990s when I worked in the games industry, I helped develop the renderer code for a PlayStation game we were working on. Above all, it needed to be as fast as possible in order to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the console. I optimised the C routine using amongst other things a couple of gotos, which as well as speeding things up greatly, also made the code a lot more readable.

That didn't stop the idiot of a project manager telling me off for "bad programming" though. He didn't even have a background in programming, whereas I grew up in the 1980s and remember first hand all the goto debates in the magazines of the time! Of course in those days the main problem was that the BASIC implementations on many of the 8-bit micros of the time didn't have a line renumber facility, making gotos a necessary evil if you ran out of line numbers to insert!

Speaking in Tech: When will I buy a 4K TV? When they make one that LOOKS COOL

Re: British houses...

The trouble with that is, in a larger room you're sat further from the larger screen, so you're effectively back where you started!

How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

[i]Ever since Tony "quick - make up a reason to bomb Iraq" Blair took power, they have become a pettier and more small minded version of the conservatives.[/i]

Well quite. I'm glad that at least one other person other than me has figured this out!

I want virtualisation on my iPhone, and I want it NOW

your Android phone has Microsoft DRM in it

And Ballmer had the gall to call GNU/Linux "a cancer that infects everything it touches."

Saturn's moon Titan had swamps, say astroboffins

Re: Uh....

Titan maybe could harbour some kind of life, but it would have to be life Jim, but not as we know it.

HUBBLE turns TIME MACHINE: Sees GLINT in the Milk(yway)man's EYE

Recheck your numbers. It'll go red giant far sooner. Fade to black about the same time.

The Sun is very slowly increasing in brightness over the very long term (but far too slowly to be responsible for global warming that we are supposedly seeing) and will indeed make the Earth more and more inhospitable for life over the next billion years or so. It will be far from being a red giant then though, from memory 4 or 5 billion years is a realistic estimate for that.

As for the resulting white dwarf fading to black, that will take much, much longer than a few billion years. There are thought to be no black dwarfs in existence yet, simply because the universe is not old enough for any white dwarfs to have cooled enough to no longer emit any light.

Torvalds suggests poison and sabotage for ARM SoC designers

Poor Linus

He always did get a bit tetchy without his security blanket.

Dear Linus, STOP SHOUTING and play nice - says Linux kernel dev

Re: People have no self respect

If a manager yelled at me I would quit on the spot.

I wouldn't quit. But what I would do is have a quiet little word with him to tell him that under no circumstances will I tolerate being spoken to like that by anyone, and if it happens again I'll be having a little chat with his manager!

Ubuntu 13.10 to ship with Mir instead of X

Re: It is even worse than fragmentation

Well, that's fine if you want to be stuck with OpenOffice

You do realise that OpenOffice was deprecated several years ago?

Run for your (private) lives! Facebook's creepy Graph Search is upon us

No, you're quite wrong. The BNP's policies are primarily left wing. Their policies on housing, protectionism, health etc are considerably to the left of both Labour and the Lib Dems. Yes, they are authoritarian, but that has nothing to do with left/right. Most of their voters are also disaffected ex Labour voters.

By voting me down you've simply shown that you know little about politics.

For example, they can ask "people who like BNP [British National Party] and The Police" and discover that fewer than 100 Facebookers are fans of extreme right wing politics and Sting's band.

Not that it's massively relevant to the article, but the BNP is a party of the far LEFT, not the right.

Can Microsoft's U-turn stop the Xbox 360 becoming another XP?

Re: Fuck them.

all of those who pushed for this braindead, greedy scheme should have been punished by economic failure and bankruptcy. That would send a pretty strong message to anyone even trying to pull this off that its just not worth it.

I agree with everything you have said, except for this last bit. Having worked in the games industry in the past for a number of years, it's the devs and independent studios that would suffer here, not the directors in EA's boardroom.

Not even Comet crashing into Earth can keep Dixons out of the red

Re: Sit back and let the comments roll in

I distinctly remember a few years ago going into the massive Dixons in the Bullring Shopping Centre in Birmingham (so we're not talking about a tiddly little store here) enquiring about KVM switches. The assistant showed me the product they had, which didn't come with leads. I asked him about those and he said that they didn't stock them! I pointed out that the product was completely useless without the leads and he was completely disinterested. I've never gone into a Dixons/Currys or whatever they're calling themselves this week, since.

Reg readers tumesce as they get their tongues round 'podule'

They were called podules on the original Archimedes machines, but Acorn deprecated the term in favour of "expansion cards" long before the Risc PC and A7000 came out.

Who should play the next Doctor? Nominations needed!

Re: Bill Nighy gets the William Hartnell vote

I agree. In fact I suggested him on the Reg ages ago :)

Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE

People are being rather silly here

I can't help but feel a lot of people are cutting off their nose to spite their face here. Sky's BB service is actually pretty good, especially for the money. In the last four years I have had exactly zero problems with it.

Also, just because people state on a poll like that that they are going to jump ship does NOT mean that they actually will, after all, what's more British than moaning about something but not actually doing anything about it?

Bill Gates offends Koreans after sticking hand down trousers

scratching your balls!

...or "playing pocket billiards" as my ex used to call it!

Foxconn must pay Microsoft for EVERY Android thing it makes

Re: Not paying for patents

"If the patents were any good Microsoft would publish them; what they've done is blackmail Foxconn by threatening to tie them up for years in litigation for years."

It seems to me that whether the particular patents in question are any good is moot. If MS were silly enough (or were forced to) disclose them it would be game over since someone at Google would simply remove the offending code from the Linux kernel.

Gates and Allen reshoot historic 1981 Microsoft photo

Re: Who'd have guessed...

"The 68000s didn't have an MMU unlike the 80286."

The ARM in the Acorn Archimedes did though :)

Who'd have guessed...

...in 1981 that those two would go on to do so much damage to the computer industry?

Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL

What?

I run Linux on a variety of machines both at home and at work and have rarely come across any problems of hardware not working and I don't recall ever having to recompile my kernel (not that doing so is remotely hard.)

Official: More than 7 million Brits have NEVER accessed the interwebs

The "poor"

I'm always sceptical when I hear things like "the poor can't afford Internet access." My estranged wife keeps pleading poverty, and yet she still seems to be able to afford things like a brand new iPhone+data on contract...

Microsoft: Office 2013 license is for just one PC, FOREVER

Re: How does this work for upgrades... what's the dentition of a computer...

"So, if I keep everything but buy a new motherboard... is that a new computer? Then a while later. I drop in a new CPU - new computer yet?. a new case the following year? Raid HD fails, so I replace it..."

This is an interesting question, as it's a philosophical one, and is a well known paradox:

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

Interestingly the commonly held answer can be different depending on the local culture. In Japan for instance, a building is considered the same one even if it has been completely destroyed by fire and rebuilt.

The more you tighten your grip, Microsoft...

...the more customers will slip through your fingers.

Earth-like planets abound in red dwarf systems

Re: Tidally locked?

I think there's also the issue that plant life (as we know it) would not be able to survive on a red dwarf planet, due to the star's lack of output in the violet/UV end of the spectrum. (Try growing plants under nothing but halogen lights, which approximate a red dwarf's light quite well.)

BSkyB to flick switch on network-level smut-'n'-violence filters

Re: "full 20Mb"

Yes, I mean 20Mbps. I know ADSL2+ has a maximum of 24Mbps, but for whatever reason Sky doesn't offer that.

But it doesn't matter anyway because all I am really trying to say is that I'm happy with the performance/price ratio of my Sky broadband service, and is more than fast enough for my purposes.

Re: another reason

"Worst ISP in the country by a long way!"

Sorry, but this simply is not true. I realise that people don't like Murdoch, and therefore Sky-bashing is the in thing at the moment, but I'm nothing other than extremely pleased with my Sky broadband. It's cheap, reliable, and I get the full 20Mb pretty much all the time. No, they are not perfect. but their BB service is much better on all counts than Virgin Media's was, and that includes their customer service!

Oh, Sony, you big tease: Mystery PlayStation reveal date set

"Hopefully Sony will have learned their lesson"

Judging by just about every previous example of Sony's behaviour in these matters that I can think of, I wouldn't bet on it!

Greedy Sky admits: We crippled broadband with TOO MANY users

Re: They've always been OK for me

"Where does line length come into this story?"

I only mentioned line length at the end of my main comment because it's the reason why my ADSL modem syncs (or whatever the process is called) at 20Mb, whereas people that are a long way from the exchange, who are paying for Sky's 20Mb "unlimited" service are going to get maximum speeds much lower than that even if their exchange is running way below capacity. That's all I was saying. I'm not saying that Sky haven't screwed up, mind, they have. But I've always been very happy with their broadband and phone service.