Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Apple slams brakes on orders of (not so cheap) plasticky iPhone 5C

No, they've been crying out for a cheap iPhone. cheaper doesn't cut it.

The 5C is like a reduced-price Rolex, not cheap enough for the people who don't care about image, too cheap for those that do.

Apple's Steve Jobs was a SEX-crazed World War II fighter pilot, says ex

Re: Flawed math of past life

One thing is true for sure, we will all find out eventually.

I won't. I'll be dead.

US parents proclaim 811 'Messiahs'

Alexander. nice and simple and can be abbreviated in a number of ways.

Indeed, Russians would call him Sasha, which seems to have been borrwed only as a girls name in the US.

Americans do have a thing for phonetic pronunciation of names based on anglicized spellings, though. They all seem to think that the Irish name "Caitlin" is pronounced "Kate-lin", and are upset when an Irish person correctly uses "Kathleen". Who knows what 'merkins will do when they see Siobhan, Síle or Aisling in a book somewhere...

Slip your SIM into a plastic sheath, WIPE international call charges

Re: Spelling?!?!

Must be for the ring tone...

Coming soon to Twitter: Inboxes BULGING with DMs from world+dog

Re: Cue vast celebrity twitter exit

You don't really think any of those celebrities that sad nobodies follow actually use Twitter, do you? They pay staff to do that, to keep the fool^H^H^Hans happy, while they're partying with real people. No doubt they'll love this new feature, they'll just hire more PR staff to delete every DM.

EasyJet website crashes and burns

Re: Agreed

Easyjet feel cheap but at least trying to offer reasonable service

Easyjet is a low-cost airline, Ryanair is a cheap airline. There's a big difference.

Let police track you through your mobe - it's for your OWN GOOD

Re: Going back a decade ...

.. some service providers reduced the prices of mobile calls when the call was made from home. The kit back then knew when your phone was at home -

Well, not really. If you read the small print on the contract for those deals it says something like "when the call comes via the cell tower nearest to your home", which is something they already know since they know your address. There's a big difference between triangulating a position on the fly and saying "it's from tower 348A, that's the one nearest to Fred's house"

Re: As other users have said..

Better than synthesised voice, it's a computer network, so use that. If you dial a recognised emergency number the GPS could be activated and an SMS with the location sent to the emergency operators as soon as the position is determined.. It would not be difficult to have that position information linked to the phone number so that the operator dealing with the alert gets it on-screen, even if the call doesn't go through.

That would deal with situations where a signal is too weak to make a voice call, but SMS can get through, and when someone is unable to speak either through injury or a handicap. A child can be taught to dial 112 and help will come, even if they say nothing.

Make it an option in the phone settings for the tinfoil hat brigade.

Re: Sensible approach or is it?

Oh, and if you call emergency services on your mobile, dial 112, not 999. 112 allows for a better triangulation of your position from the cell towers. (That's from the advice from the energency services, by the way).

Well they shouldn't give that advice, because it's nonsense. 112 and 999 both connect to the same operators who have access to the same database. Ofcom is quite clear on that: "999 and 112 should, as far as is reasonably practicable, be given equal treatment within the whole of the UK public telephone network". Any triangulation is done through the phone's identity, and has no relation to the number that was dialled.

They only possble advantage of 112 is that the ability of phones to make emergency calls even when locked, or without a SIM for the available networks, may be implemented for 112 and not for 999, perhaps for a non-UK phone.

BBC's Clangers returns in £5m 'New Age' remake

So, the BBC CAN still sink lower

According to a 'retrospective' I saw a few years back, the original Clangers was scripted, and the dialogue (yes, all the whistling and wooOOooo'ing was a written script) had to get approval. No douby they'll lose all that wit & whimsy with some irrelevant heavy-handed electronic whistles, with voiceover propaganda.

environmental politics at the fore; it;s a KIDS programm, ffs. Stop with the lefty brainwashing in primary school, please.

Thousands! of! Yahoo! Mail! users! driven! crazy! by! revamp!

Re: Let's be practical

imapTools?

Island-hopping Beardy Branson: I'm dodging rain, not taxes

He could just make a donation of some of that excess cash

and fund Ben Ainslie's America's Cup challenger. Income & jobs for the UK, and a potential poke in the eye for Larry Ellison. What's not to like?

Streaming TV Aereo's enemies lob sueball into Supreme Court

There is now a UK company that seems to be doing something similar, you effectively buy your own Freeview STB and put it in their datacentre, from where they stream you the output. See http://www.hostmyuktv.com/ I suppose they assume that they're getting round the copyright rules the same way Aereo is, each user is individually receiving the TV and simply doing a remote display.

Twitter-mad twits trade 14 million shares in BANKRUPT zombie biz

Some people are just too stupid to read what they sign

Remember the upset over the "Literal Democrat" candidate on an election ballot paper, taking votes from the Liberal Democrat.

NHS tears out its Oracle Spine in favour of open source

Re: Consistency, above all

"complete redesign of the hardware, software and code,"

and on a government IT project.

I think we can see where that's heading

Nokia tears devs' hearts out, shutters Symbian and Meego stores early

Re: Commitment?

Prehemptive action is the best course of action in order to avoid divorce!

Fuck 'em and leave 'em? Certainly seems to work for Microsoft.

Oh, shoppin’ HELL: I’m in the supermarket of the DAMNED

Re: Co-Op

Supermarkets round here have dropped the "own bag" option, purchases now have to go into the output tray directly, and it must be empty to begin with. Probably to avoid the "unexpected item" errors.

So, after scanning all your items and placing them into the bagging area, and paying, you then have to pick them all up again, one by one, and transfer them to your bag which has to be on the floor since there's no shelf, and if you set it on the bagging area the alarm will sound, while the person behind you is waiting impatiently to scan their single pint of milk.

Online shopping, it's the only option.

BOFH: Welcome to Helldesk, ma'am, may I take your bags?

summary execution as the preferred method of sorting out paper jams,

Ah, if only...

Feds: Silk Road pirate king tried to SNUFF customer AND employee

Unreal

"proof of death" and asked the undercover agent to try and get a video of the torture and death, and failing that, pictures, the feds allege.

"Pics or it didn't happen". It would almost be funny, if it weren't so unfunny.

Atomic clocks come to your wrist

Re: Love the extended crown

I'd guess that you push it in for the emergency SCRAM for the watch :)

Analyst says Brit rail broadband plan is TRAIN CRAZY

Re: The truth is something else

The way to solve road congestion is to build less roads

It's an interesting theory, but I don't think it's true, at least not phrased like that.

It's essentially a variant of Parkinsons law; if you provide an increase of capacity on any network then the network use will increase until you return to some level of journey-time equilibrium where the inconvenience of congestion balances the convenience of the additional capacity, unless you've over-specified the network to the point where there isn't enough demand to cause congestion anyway (say a 10-lane motorway between, oh, Monmouth and Ross-on-Wye).

Reducing the network size doesn't solve the congestion problem, it simply reduces the scale, the congested roads remain just as congested, since they are again at equilibrium.

It's equally applicable to trains, of course, although the pattern will be different since train travel tends to be point-to-point, not as flexible as road travel. When the London-Ipswich line was electrified in the 1980's there was a big increase in traffic since it brought Ipswich within commute distance of London. It also caused a huge rise in Ipswich housing demand and prices, houses would go on the market at 9am and be sold by noon.

seems to raise a lot more questions than it answers

Tue, not least that McLoughlin was commenting that mobile phone networks need to add more cells to ensure normal 3G coverage along rail lines, so why is Delaney discussing shortcomings of Network Rail's on-train networks, and proposals for some apparently imaginary new network specially for train customers?

If ordinary 3G coverage is OK, there's little need for extra-cost dedicated networks on trains, although WiFi hotspots might be useful for non-phone users with untethered laptops. In any case the "analyst" doesn't seem to be analysing the proposal as made...

Former Microsoftie in AUTOMATIC BEER MAKER funding plea

Re: Only brews beer up to 3.7% ABV

I remember hearing that it wasn't the inflammability of the spirit itself, but that of gunpwder with spirits poured over it. If the liquid was less than "proof" the gunpower wouldn't burn. Why that was a useful test I don't know!

"proof" is 50% by volume in the US, 57.1% in the UK.

Only a country that thinks Starbucks is coffee could come up with the idea of press-button beer. The result will probably be yellow, fizzy & contain alcohol, and served so cold you won't be able to taste it anyway. Defining it as Beer is pushing their luck.

Sorry, no bad MS puns come to mind.

Bang away – just not 'with friends', Zynga tells naughty hookups app

Ripe for blackmail

Wait until Farcebook next has to apologise that it was hacked last weekend, and "among the data the crooks may have accessed were the contents of users' Next Bang wishlists". We'll see some running for cover then, no doubt...

Sysadmins fail to fix NHS IT snafu, HUNDREDS of appointments cancelled

Re: "network problems"

Probably a connectivity issue, as in "it's a public holiday in India today, and we can't reach any of our outsourced IT staff"

Multipath TCP: Siri's new toy isn't a game-changer

Re: @jake

"The OSI model" has been fucking useless for over a quarter century.

Seriously, learn about networking & history before trying to comment on it.

BlackBerry ripped itself apart wooing CIOs AND iPhone fanbois - insiders

BlackBerry had grown because it offered a unique end-to-end bundle of hardware, software and a network. But as newcomers entered the market, the company couldn’t decide which part of this bundle was the most valuable,

A familiar story, Sun went the same way, for the same reasons. It could never decide if it was a hardware company or a software company, and ended up vacillating between them unable to make its mind up where to invest.

Windows 8 fans out-enthuse Apple fanbois

Re: Win8 is a bloated piece of shit.

RSX-11 Was bloated when compared to RT-11

It was bigger, but the extra was useful, not unnecessary bloat. Well, mostly...

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Re: Nobody wants a nuclear reactor close to their homes.

I've heard it does wonders for the tomatoes.

Only problem is, they tend to get up out of their beds and rampage down the street....

So, we're hunter-gatherers, it just requires a change of tactic. Saves on shopping costs as well.

Re: Thorium reactors

The "Big Oil" argument? I don't buy it. Maybe in the US, but not worldwide.

Thorium reactors

Anytime these get mentioned by their proponents it's usually with a subtext of "I can't believe people are so stupid as not to use them". Since the technical folks who work in the power industry are generally not stupid, I have to ask "What's the catch"?

Seriously, if Thorium reactors are the cure, what's the snag? Why aren't we using this cheap wonder fuel?

Re: Methane production?

zero emission methane burning

CH₄ + 2 O₂ → CO₂ + 2 H₂O

Not zero-emission. What the article you linked to proposes is CCS, carbon capture and storage, i.e. burn the fossil fuels, capture the CO₂, and "do something with it". As the article itself points out, There is still the question of what to do with the carbon dioxide, once it has been captured and stored.

It's an expensive stop-gap, punting the problem onto the next generation. It isn't a solution.

SIM card hacker: Bug is either 'a backdoor, gross negligence, or both'

hbring the fun, convenience and excitement of tablets to even more customers.

Tesco is stocking Viagra now?

Revolting peasants force Wikipedia to cut'n'paste Visual Editor into the bin

Re: Bootnote: It's 2013.

But what exactly are "Wikipedophiles"?

People who like webbed feet?

Blighty's great digital radio switchover targets missed AGAIN

Re: Not getting it

no one does a DAB head unit with built in MD player

Does anyone do any head units with MD these days, DAB or not? Most people have progressed to USB and/or SD cards.

California kids win right to delete digital past

"California's children"

If this is a state law, does it only apply to ISPs with servers in California, or to ISPs who offer services to California, or to anyone on the WWW who has users in California, or...

As always with well-meanng internet laws, the proposers have so little clue how the internet works that the laws are generally unworkable and unusable. This one doesn't look to be much different. Kids who want to be wilfully stupid will still find a way to do so, no matter how much they may regret it later.

Disk-pushers, get reel: Even GOOGLE relies on tape

I remember when getting 120Mbyte on a 2400' reel of 6250bps tape was a lot...

Google tentacle slips over YouTube comments: Now YOUR MUM is at the top

Re: You know

poeple who can't spell, like the man said :)

Fan whips out own pair of iPhone 32Cs, 'unlocks' mobe using breasticle

toes, penises, noses and even the paws

Not lips? I can't believe that fanbois (and fangurlz) wouldn't love to be able to kiss their iShiny awake.

Oracle sued over $33,000 bill for SaaS: STRIPPERS as a SERVICE

I'm sure the regular short bursts of exercise are good for the staff.

My staff would certainly enjoy them. It doesn't get enough exercise.

iOS 7 SPANKS Samsung's Android in user-experience rating

They missed a test

Android doesn't make your phone waterproof.

Shopping list for Tesco: Eggs, milk, bread, tablets (the £60 7in Android kind)

Re: @jonathanb @Steve Foster

Not only are Scottish £1 notes legal tender in England,

Legal tender has a very narrow meaning, and Scottish notes are not legal tender anywhere, even in Scotland. See http://www.scotbanks.org.uk/legal_position.php

Re: A bit late to the party arent they?

Or to be really pedantic, 40 fivers + 20 tenners = £400. No-one said the notes were all the same...

F-16 fighter converted to drone

Re: By the time kids today are old enough to be pilots

I have a pilots licence,

But do you fly aircraft where most of your situational awareness comes from high-tech equipment all around you, and the view out the windscreen counts for very little? In that scenario having the pilot remote makes a lot less difference.

The biggest problem I've heard of in that situation is that the remote pilots get "seasick" because their body's sensory input doesn't match what they're seeing via the FR display. Presumably training can help there, at least for some people.

Deep inside the iPhone 5s lurk a few surprises

Re: Low power battery

there isn't the demand from the mainstream purchaser for 5 - 10 year old cars despite the fact that their lifetime should exceed that.

True, my first car (as a student) was 7 years old when I bought it, 10 when I sold it. It gave someone else a few years after that before expiring.

Unfortunately the thing that limits the lifetime of most modern technology is the cost of maintenance. Anything which is in daily use for 5-6 years is likely to have components that fail, especially mechanical ones. Even if the components can be obtained cheaply, the cost of replacing them is disproportionate, usually due to the way everything is shoehorned into the smallest space possible. Just like the iPhone battery, replacing the clucth on a car might cost £100 materials, but £500 labour. That's acceptable (if annoying) on a car that is still worth £10,000 but not on one that's worth £2,000 so it creates a break-point where the used value of the object suddenly drops dramatically. It becomes worth buying only at a price where it can be discarded if it fails, even if it might still seem to be worth more in terms of the quality of service that it can deliver when it works. I do still have, and use, phones that are > 6 years old, but I keep them as PAYG phones with foreign SIMs for use when I travel, nor for daily use.

Lighting bods blind designophiles with LED-powered lounge lamps

Re: I'd like some choice!

It's the power supply that is the problem.

Another advantage to basic incandescent lights. No PSU, cheap, effective, every component recyclable, minimal environmental impact during manufacture. Concentrate on generating the energy cleanly and efficiently and you don't need to worry about fancy gadgets with false environmental credentials at the points of use.

Re: @Duncan Macdonald I'd be happy with ...

If that was the case, colour scanners wouldn't work.

Colour scanners use a white light, and RGB detectors. Not the same thing.

Douglas Adams was RIGHT! TINY ALIENS are invading Earth, say boffins

Re: Moonlighting?

One of those London Rubber Company hazmat suits should do the trick nicely, although depending on where he lands he might have some explaining to do.

New ransomware strain forces hapless users into becoming Bitcoin miners

Locking the users out when the system is infected seems counter-productive, since they'll have to get it fixed. If the process just sat in the background taking maybe 10% of CPU, it could run for years unnoticed. 100,000 PCs all dedicating 10% of their capacity to mining bitcoins could contribute a lot of cycles...