* Posts by Phil O'Sophical

6287 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011

Reg Hardware Awards 2012: The Winners...

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: Lemmings

"Oh, No!"

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Happy

Lemmings

Ah, Lemmings. I still have a copy somewhere, must hunt it out for some nostalgia this evening.

One thing that was fun about the Amiga version was that you could plug two mice into the system and play a two-player version, trying to tunnel under the other player's team or block them up, while racing for the exit yourself. Did any other platforms have that option?

New York Times probes China's Premier, gets hacked by Chinese

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

"copied passwords for its reporters and other employees."

Why were they stored in a copyable format?

LOHAN teases with quick flash of spaceplane

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
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Nice

Pointy and barbed. What kind of warhead will it carry?

So: 6,500 Win 8 laptops later, how are BT's field engineers coping?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

signature capture ?

Has anyone ever managed to write something resembling their signature on this sort of screen? And has their bank ever shown signs of caring anyway?

Iran develops working ICBM: Intercontinental Ballistic Monkey

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: Muslims in Space

> is knowing which direction to pray

"Down" should usually cover it.

Huddled immigrant masses face 'British values' quiz

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: It's a "can you read English" test, always was

> Presumably we will be able to call the second largest party "the opposition".

No, you're confusing it with "the back benches". The second-largest party is generally known as "the other lot".

Japan promised Ultra HD TV broadcasts two years early

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
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So what?

It's just a way to persuade people with more money than sense to replace all their new TVs with even newer TVs, to help keep those Sharp factories churning out screens. There's damn-all on TV that really merits HD, let alone Ultra HD.

Helium: Can it prevent the onset of Shingles?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Fill your room with hydrogen?

Tablets aren't killing ereaders, it's clog-popping wrinklies - analyst

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
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> having a single multi function device is more efficient.

Until it breaks, then you lose everything in one go. In my experience that;s when you find that no-one makes an equivalent new single-function device that does exactly what the old one did.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Correlation != Causation

Or show that global warming is caused by a reduction in pirate activity. Where's Cap'n Jack when you need him?

Naked intruder cracks one off in Florida rampage drama

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: "drink the contents from a wet-dry vacuum cleaner"

> masturbating on the floor when she fired her .38?

He obviously got excited. Maybe he was an NRA member?

Microsoft acknowledges the long and winding road ahead

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Touch Screens in the office? Forget it.

> GUI would never take off.

True. I have a great GUI display here, two big monitors side-by-side.

I can get eight "cols 100 rows 50" shell windows open at the same time and see them all.

LOHAN premieres intimate REHAB vid

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

On top of the jetstream

> the jetstream rematch. We fully intend to come out on top this time,

Won't that leave the playmonaut somewhere east of the Urals?

Oh, those crazy Frenchies: Facebook faces family photo tax in France

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: Not As Stupid As Anglosaxons

Culinarily barbaric? We don't have to take that from a Dutchman!

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Stupid, Complex, Over-Theoretic

> Think of Google as an advertising agency who refuses to (seriously) pay tax.

Google has not refused to pay any tax that it is required to do.

If governments create such stupidly complex tax systems that a corporation is able to use them to minimize the tax it pays, that is the fault of the governments, not the corporation. The power to change it is entirely in the hands of the governments. There is NO reason that anyone should pay more tax than they are legally required to. I wouldn't, why should I expect Google to?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: I'm sorry...

"BTW: In reality, if intercity flight routes in France were lucrative, other airlines would have picked them up by now and be making good money. The sad fact is they were only lucrative by shafting the employees and passengers."

Some have, others have gone to heavily subsidized TGV routes, so only the French taxpayer gets shafted.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Great Idea

Absolutely. After all, it's easy to identfy photos of French holidaymakers. Or maybe not...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/9170719/French-tourism-campaign-uses-photographs-of-South-African-beach.html

Waiter! There's a phone in my soup

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Pint

Re: scale it up...

Or add an iPhone dock to these:

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/restaurants-bars/sydney-restaurant-scraps-lips-urinals/story-fn93ypt9-1226493058119

Microsoft blasts PC makers: It's YOUR fault Windows 8 crash landed

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
WTF?

Re: I thought that flogging had been banned...

> it's full screen.

Full screen might have been appropriate 10 years ago, on 640x480 screens, but when I have a twin-head setup with dual 1920x1200 monitors there is no excuse for anything being 'full screen", unless perhaps I request a video to be displayed that way.

Swartz suicide won't change computer crime policy, says prosecutor

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

Re: WTF

> This is why crimes which involve copying cannot be regarded as theft as no-one is deprived,

Bollocks.

If I copy a pre-release of the latest Dan Brown manuscript, print a million copies, and sell them before he gets his book out, then by your definition I haven't deprived him of anything. That is clearly nonsense, since I have deprived him of all the income from the million books he will not be able to sell.

Germany's RTL pulls free-to-air channels off terrestrial TV

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Happy

> and also lets you fastward and rewind live tv

Fastforward live TV? That I'd pay for. Especially during the Grand National.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: what i'd like to know is

Nothing to "get away with". The Télévision sans Frontières" directive forbids member states from preventing citizens from watching any foreign TV that they happen to pick up, i.e. by jamming or banning aerials/dishes. Contrary to popular belief there is nothing in it which requires broadcasters to make their transmissions available even over the whole of their national territory, never mind beyond it.

‘Anonymous’ hacks Oz Uni’s email to protest bulk iPad buy

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: "Pencil and paper? No Spam either."

> Sir, I submit that you have never had someone else doodle in your margins.

What I keep in my margins is my own affair, Sir.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

Re: What's the alternative?

Pencil and paper? It's worked at the best universities for the last 800+ years. No Spam either.

WTF is... Weightless?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

TV replies "sorry but I can't get the remote off the damned cooker, says it's bidding on a vibrating fork"

This week's BBC MELTDOWN: Savile puppet haunts kids' TV

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: What was more shocking was

> You try explaining predatory pedophile to a young 'un

And then wait until he tells the nursery school teacher what Daddy was talking about at breakfast...

Global mercury ban to hit electronics, plastics, power prices

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: As a young 'un

> there was even a kids toy called "Mercury Maze"

I still have one. Looks just like this:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BTfM-hqUwDw/R2rc9Fr73aI/AAAAAAAAAHs/QiNSxMYrqeA/s400/mercury-maze-2.jpg

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: Fluorescents

Sooner or later someone will invent a really safe bulb, perhaps a glass envelope with nothing in it except maybe a bit of wire. It'll probably be cheap, too.

Oz library finds Lance Armstrong books a new home: The fiction section

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: WTF??

> What kind of f**kwittery is that??

Dewey Decimal, I presume.

FAA grounds Boeing's 787 after battery fires on plastic planes

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: You forget the 2009 Hudson River crash

> I can't think of an occasion where anyone's actually tried. I.e. an accident in which full control of the aircraft was maintained and a water landing in an ocean was attempted.

Hard to think of a reason why anyone would try it if they still had full control, though, unless they were in a Short's Sunderland or something like it.

Record numbers of you are reading this headline right now

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: ABC denialists!

> those that deny the deniers

Nobody does that!

McDonalds burger app gives it to you straight from the horse's mouth

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Coat

Re: Beef

> or Irish with no fillers.

Apart from the horsemeat, you mean?

As one commenter on another newspaper put it, the horseburger scandal gives a new slant on "My Lidl Pony" :)

Use your loaf, Europe! Eat more fibre - high-speed web lobbyists

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Fibre my arse ...

> one foot further away than they would extend.

I sympathise with you, but also with Virgin. If they have a rule that says "x feet", but bend it for you to have "x+1" then another neighbour will say "Oh, go on, x+5 won't hurt" and eventually they'll be handing calls from people complaining about how flakey their line is. Replying "well, we told you you were too far away" will of course only result in "well, why did you agree to install it, then?". They can't win.

Have you considered asking your neighbour if you can rent a cupboard in his garage, have Virgin install there, and then run some Cat5 or fibre (or WiFi) under the fence?

'Like most convoluted theories, it was an incorrect one'

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Mushroom

"And anyway, since the Force is the essence of all things, one imagines it would rather resist blowing a planet up..."

Wouldn't that depend on whether one is looking at the light side or the dark side?

What ereader decline? Kobo pumps up the volumes despite grim forecasts

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Paris Hilton

Re: Just a consumer.

> bats an eyelid!

Flutters an eyelash, surely?

eBay's festive sales soar, but what's this? Profit DOWN 62%?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: All that money so little profit

Not revenue, turnover. Most of that 13bn went from one eBay user to another. ebay will just have creamed off a few % as 'commission'.

Fans of dead data 'liberator' Swartz press Obama to sack prosecutor

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

So are defense lawyers, it's what they're paid for after all. The job of a prosecutor is to prosecute, it's up to judge and jury to decide on the right/just issue.

Former CEO John Sculley: Apple must adapt or die

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Why does everyone assume there are only two smartphone price points?

> Apple cannot create a $100 iPhone.

Oh, I'm sure they can, but would anyone buy it? It would be like a $5000 BMW, or a $200 Armani suit. Fashion accessories are only worth buying when everyone else can see that they're expensive.

Capgemini staffers evacuated by cops after London helicopter crash

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Oh nos!

> It sounds to me like it was the fogs fault.

That's like blaming a road for a traffic accident. Pilots (especially one as experienced as this poor guy) are trained to know when not to fly in unsafe conditions. This sort of incident happens either when the pilot ignores his training or when some other, possibly mechanical, problem intervenes. In no way can it be the "fog's fault".

Sheffield ISP: You don't need a whole IPv4 address to yourself, right?

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

> IPv4 and IPv6 can co-exist, be routed between... what is it you actually want to know?

Of course they can be, I've been doing it since before IPv6 was officially published as a protocol.

The point, as was made in a post just above, is that having a host with IPv6 is pointless if the network equipment between it and it's destination can't handle IPv6, and no-one will upgrade the network equipment until there are enough IPv6 hosts to make it worthwhile. My question is what incentive there is to fix that, and no-one has been able to answer me. What do you think it will take for BT/Plusnet/Sky/Virgin etc. to replace every single customer router with an IPv6-compatible one? We've been waiting for businesses to transition "gradually" for 15 years, and despite the huge explosion in connected devices we're now at the staggering level of 1% IPv6 penetration. Now it looks like they're transitioning instead to the lower-cost and less painful alternative, CG NAT. Yuk.

There are ways to add new features to protocols such that existing protocol stacks can still process them, while just ignoring the new features. The IPv6 designers chose not to do so, which may have seemed like a good idea architecturally but is now a severe disincentive to upgrade.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: When the government can't track down an individual twitter user

Well, of course that's the intention, but that was also the intention with IPv4 and it didn't take long for anonymizing services to popup. IPv6 will make that even easier, you'll be looking for a sand grain on a beach instead of a needle in a haystack!

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

Oh, it's at least 15 years too late for any other solution now. CG NAT is what we'll have to get used to as a transition measure, probably as part of a two-speed internet where IPv6 also exists, but isn't widely used for a long time.

It will be very interesting to look back at this in, say, 2020. Barring a killer app that makes IPv6 essential, no matter what the cost, my money is on widespread CG NAT, at least for domestic ISPs. It's a horrible thought, but I can't see a viable alternative. I suppose we might see IPv6 appearing on mobile networks more quickly.

So far nobody has answered my question, though. What is the plan for really achieving migration to IPv6, other than waving our hands in the air and saying "well, somebody should make it happen", while downvoting the doom-mongers :) ??

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: When the government can't track down an individual twitter user

> You can bet that we'll be moving to IPv6 pretty sharpish.

The fun thing there is that with IPv6 you can probably get a new address before every tweet. Good luck tracking that!

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
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Re: No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

> Well you know what they say: "anything is easy if you don't know what you are talking about"

Sorry, my last 20+ years working with comms protocols must have got lost, I suppose.

I didn't suggest expanding the address length, that is of course fixed, but other protocols have worked around this by adding additional extended headers. It makes temporary co-existence possible. Look at some of the original suggestions in RFC 1287, for example.

IPv6 went through many proposals, TUBA, SIP etc. The final one chosen was designed to fix all the perceived problems of IPv4, and direct compatibility was not seen as a requirement.

As for

> Don't blame the IPv6 designers for stupid people who can't see the benefit of spending money on anything that doesn't bring a result before the next quarter.

Why not, as I said they were academic purists who had little practical regard for commercial interests. Let's face in, when IPng work started, the World-Wide Web hadn't even been described outside of CERN!

I'll bet if you made IPv6 vanish, and asked Google to come up with a solution to IPv4 address exhaustion, you have something that was workable in a year. Ugly, but workable.

Downvote away :)

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Unhappy

No surprise, I predict that there will be more to come

I can see this becoming more common. It's a great pity that the IPv6 developers chose a new mechanism that was unable to permit a phased change. I assume that was in part due to the "ivory tower" mentality that pervades academia; only a perfect solution to every problem would be acceptable and anything with extended headers or other compatible hackery would have been beyond the pale, architecturally.

Also, of course, when IPv6 was being developed the internet was a lot smaller, and the idea of switching it all off one night and restarting the next day with new addresses probably wasn't as unthinkable as it is today.

I seriously don't see how we can have even a semi-painless move to IPv6 worldwide. Is there a plan? (serious question)

HP maintains seat atop wheezing, spavined PC market

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Re: Excuse me Reg - your talking cr4p

I'm not being obtuse, you're just saying exactly what I did. If you only need a £250 tablet, why buy a £1000 computer, recession or not? Likewise, if you need £1500 of twin-head processing power then buying a £250 tablet because you've tightened your belt is just £250 wasted, since it won't do the job.

The only difference the recession makes is that people might buy fewer gadgets just for fun. That's going to affect sales of everything.

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
WTF?

Re: Excuse me Reg - your talking cr4p

> In a recession, what are you going to buy - a £250 tablet, or a £500-£1000 PC?

Neither if it's just a plaything. Otherwise I'll buy the one that does the job I need it to. Why, what do you buy in a recession?

Titsup Windows Phone 8 orders user to cram 'boot disc' in mobe

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

Could have been worse

At least it didn't ask him to press F1 to continue...

Hooking offshore wind farms into UK grid will HIKE bills, MPs warn

Phil O'Sophical Silver badge
Stop

Re: Let the madness begin!!!

It's another instance of some naïve bright spark thinking up a cunning plan to get private investors to finance infrastructure, without having the wit to realise that the more complex you make the scheme, the easier it will be for the not-so-naïve investors to find loopholes. This sort of scheme wil only ever attract subsidy farmers.

Ofgem & friends need some lessons in the KISS principle. Let a private company finance and build it, and lease it to the energy suppliers. If someone else builds a cheaper one, they'll get the business. Simple market forces. If they really need these bizarre schemes to convince investors that it's worth sinking their money into such projects, that should be a pretty clear indication that the projects aren't viable in the first place.