Posts by Phil O'Sophical

HTML is a sexually transmitted disease, say many Americans

Re: OSI

Welcome to Europe, the only place where you compromise between English and French by inventing something that is equally wrong in both languages.

Aargh! My EYEBALLS are MELLLTING! Curse this DEVIL LAPTOP

"in-vitro" studies?

Must have been quite a test-tube if they could get a laptop and a rat into it.

Massive new AIRSHIP to enter commercial service at British dirigible base

Re: Ukraine

So, the LEMV may be resuscitated yet

It does give a whole new meaning to "the charge of the Light Brigade"

German freemail firms defend AdBlock-nobbling campaign

Re: Hmmm...

Mr Rice Davies

She wasn't a Mr, which was rather the point...

Energy firms' security so POOR, insurers REFUSE to take their cash

Re: Typically ignorant management response

"Bad news, Sir, our main finance data centre has burnt down"

"Don't worry, it's insured, we'll just build another one"

Yes, I can see that working.

MtGox boss vows to keep going despite $429m Bitcoin 'theft'

hasn't really ever had a proper position anywhere. His "company" Tibanne Ltd is apparently him + a website.

Worked for Zuckerberg...

Official FACT: Gadgets are giving YOU a wrinkly 'Tech Neck'

Someone should tell Google

They could pitch it as a positive aspect of being a Glasshole...

Steve Jobs statue: Ones and ohs and OH NOES – it's POINTING at us

Re: Inspired by the classics

It's a Herma.

An iHerma ?

China in the grip of a 'NUCLEAR WINTER': Smog threat to crops

Re: One Thing Leads to Another

send them some more coal so they can make power for those grow lights

Let them eat coke?

Final LOHAN test flights codenamed 'Punch' and 'Judy'

That's the way to do it

I'm surprised the Spanish are confused about Punch & Judy, don't they also have the tradition of "Guiñol", based on the French Guignol?

Good luck on Saturday 5th. I'll be on a 747 heading into Heathrow around them, nothing personal but I do hope your "west of England" launch is well west...

Google kills copycat TfL congestion charge payment ads

The problem is that many of these sites aren't fradulent, they're just opportunists. If you've ever applied for a business visa you'll know that for some countries it's a complex and expensive process. There are perfecty legitimate companies offering "concierge" type of services to help, and they can be really useful at checking documents and forms, and generally saving time. Their fee of £50 or so is well worth it when you're paying £500 for a visa.

It's not easy to distinguish between them, and the chancers who'll charge £25 "commission" to get you an EHIC card, or an ESTA, both of which are easy to do online and cost far less than £25. Such companies aren't illegal, though, so censoring their position in search results must be a grey area.

Curiosity now going BACKWARDS

Re: Was it made in France?

Reverse is a lower ratio than first in pretty much every car, French or not.

Netflix coughs up to cruise on Comcast

And when *every* suplier has a "preferential" contract

We all go back to square one, but with higher prices all round.

Brit boffins brew up blight-resistant FRANKENSPUD

Re: Mandatory potato famine notice.

Anyone who posts that this spud...or it's patented mates.. would have prevented the Irish Potato Famine is a muppet. The problem then was a sociological/political one.

The potato famine was real, and deprived large sections of the poorest Irish people of their fundamental foodstuff. It is true that the response to the famine was a sociological/political disaster, largely because the absentee landlords simply couldn't imagine that potatoes were the only thing that many people had to eat, but to claim that the base problem was sociological/political is incorrect. Had the potato crop not failed for several successive years the problem would have been far less serious. Far fewer people would have died, or emigrated.

Reports pump fuel into iCar gossip: Apple in 'talks' with Tesla

Re: The loss of efficiency for hydrogen is huge

Exchangeable battery packs will work out much cheaper and more efficient.

Not when you do the maths. Work out how many cars a busy petrol station refuels each day, then look at how many battery packs they need to store, and how much electricity they need to recharge them. It is completely unfeasible, even if you could persaude manufacturers to standardise on a battery form factor.

Re: Please NO

What's the problem. You want a red, shiny thing that occasionally catches fire, they'll offer you a white shiny thing that occasionally catches fire. No big difference.

Why hydrogen? There are certainly better things to do with dwindling oil reserves than just burn them, and the cost, charge time and environmental nastiness of batteries aren't likely to improve as much as required, but H2 isn't much better. It's hard to make, hard to store and requires a whole new fuelling infrastructure. Some form of liquid fuel, such as biodiesel from algae or alcohol, in an Ampera-style series hybrid, seems far more practical all round.

SCRAP the TELLY TAX? Ancient BBC Time Lords mull Beeb's future

The original post asserted that playing the national anthem on TV is government propaganda. It isn't. Closing each day's TV with a party political broadcast by the prime minister would be government propaganda. Broadcasting the national anthem at closedown, although perhaps archaic these days, is not, any more than a US TV station that broadcasts the President's "State of the Union" address would be a "propaganda mouthpiece". The Queen represents the permanent state, not the transient government.

The BBC should be split into two halves.

You mean like a licence-funded BBC for home use, and a commercial arm called BBC Worldwide that sells BBC programmes abroad to raise money? It is.

The Queen is not a member of the Government.

Re: Vastly Overdue

The BBC could fund itself from advertising revenues like any other television network, rather than denying children in poor families a vital source of entertainment.

Are you aware that the average household pays far more for the advertising-funded channels through their weekly shop than they do for the TV licence? How much would you be willing to see prices go up at Asda or Lidl to pay for an advertising-funded BBC? Or are you assuming that existing advertising budgets would just be spread more thinly, so that all the TV stations would have less money to make programmes?

BBC4 is one of the best channels that came out on freeview. Especially when you compare it to the trash that's on BBC3...

Very true, but this is exactly where we used to be with BBC2 v BBC1. BBC3 and 4 were created as "digital" channels, to persuade people to get digital services. New programmes aired first on BBC3/4, as an incentive.

Why not just close BBC3 and BBC4 now, they've done their job. Put the BBC2+BBC4 programmes on BBC2 again, and the BBC3+BBC1 programmes on BBC1. They each repeat so much of their own and the other's programming that there won't be anything that can't be fitted in. Use the money to improve BBC1/2 programming.

'The Mystery of the Martian Doughnut' solved by NASA sleuths

And the question which comes to mind after watching the video is "so, what is the blast radius of an on-the-pad Saturn V explosion?"

LOHAN cops a faceful of Raspberry Pi

Pop-Up Pi Day

On the subject of playing with Pi's, anyone with early-teen kids in the general area of Silicon Valley might find this interesting: http://www.computerhistory.org/events/upcoming/#popup-pi-day-make-learn

pity I'm several thousand km too far away (and don't have kids!) :(

Investors throw cash at affordable 3D scanner

Oh dear, 3D selfies...

I hate to think what's going to happen at office parties now. Sitting on the photocopier and scanning your arse was bad enough...

Bad luck, n00bs: Mozilla to splurge ADS inside empty Firefox tiles

Do you often find all your preferences, history and bookmarks are deleted when upgrading Firefox?

No, but I do find a bunch of stuff labelled "no longer supported" or plain ignored. Just because there's a value in the prefs.js file doesn't require the browser to pay any heed to it.

Not upgrading a browser must be one of the most idiotic things to do, given each new release - from any of the big three browsers - is awash with security updates.

Blindly upgrading any piece of software just because there's a new one is idiotic. New releases may have security fixes that I care about, but they may also have performance issues, bugs, and functional regressions that I care about more. I've lost track of the number of times I've upgraded FF or Thunderbird, only to have a "why the fsck did they do that" moment, followed by a downgrade & restore of all configuration. I'm generally several versions of FF behind the bleeding edge.

I have the browser.newtabpage.enabled config value set to false, so that I don't get that annoying tiles screen. I hope that adding ads to this doesn't mean that they will remove that option.

Yes another reason not to "upgrade" Firefox :(

Scotland to test mobe signals slammer jammer

If such a base station were in the prison there's a good chance that there would be screened areas where the outside main-network base stations had stronger signals and were preferred by the phone. You could probably bulld some suitable screening equipment to create such areas. Making the fake base station signal strong enough to guarantee that all phones inside used it, while preventing phones from outside seeing it, would be challenging, so say the least.

Boffin talks WATER on MARS: Granted, no 'smoking gun', but all clues flow there...

Re: Dark water?

Ir would be truly amazing if they found a pint of the Dark on Mars! They'd never get a decent head on it, though.

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

Sky's is astonishingly good especially since it runs at about 800kb/s - way better decoders?

Sky has the great advantage that they download to disk, and play out locally from there, so maybe they can avoid some of the forward error correction that real-time streaming needs for reliability? If a Sky box gets a corrupt packet it can just ask for a retransmission, no problem if that means a few seconds delay, they don't need all the overhead of data to do "live" correction..

Just a guess, though.

'No, I CAN'T write code myself,' admits woman in charge of teaching our kids to code

Re: PE

Twenty-five years later, the reason I and millions of others avoid exercise and sport like the plague is that we were taught to at school.

I wish I could upvote you more than once.

NYPD dons Google tech specs: Part man. Part machine. All Glasshole

Re: You just can't stop progress

Citizen,!! .,,, you have ten seconds to comply

Or, if they're running Windows

9 seconds remaining

8 seconds remaining

75 minutes remaining

45 seconds remaining

1 minute remaining

...

WHEEE... CRUNCH! iPad Mini tops list of most breakable slabs, mobes

Re: Is this really even a real test?

The office conversation probably went like this:

Marketer: "How can I get my iShiny replaced with this year's model?"

BOFH-alike: "I suppose you could drop it, 'accidentally'-like"

Marketer: "Mmm, no, might be a bit obvious"

"BOFH-alike: I know. Let's do a survey, we can put it on the marketing budget, send it to The Register"

Marketers: "That's Brilliant!" <CRASHTINKLE>

Open MPI hits milestone with FORTRAN-ready 1.7.4 release

Re: @Ian Bush -- Let's get the nomenclature correct. Eh?

Nice rant, but no matter what you learned 25+ years ago, the official Fortran 90 standard redefined the name of the language to have only an initial capital, so FORTRAN as a name has been obsolete for 24 years.

Re: Fortran, indeed

that AND we used Pascal for our initial practicals

You poor man. Pascal has to be one of the worst langauges ever invented as far as actually doing anything practical was concerned. Great for showing the theoretical advantages of structured coding, but try any real-world problem and you ended up with so many hacks and system-specific functions that it rapidly became unmanageable. Worse than Java. I quite liked its successor, Modula-2, though.

Fortran has it's limitations (although I actually like implied do loops and common blocks :) ) but Fortran IV is still probably the world's most portable language. With the exception of the Apple P-system implementation and its 5-byte REALs, they played merry hell with COMMON...

I do remember at least one implementation of PDP11 Fortran that imposed the PDP linker's 6-character namelength limitation on Fortran progarms, that didn't help readability.

Now I'm feeling all nostalgic, I wonder where my ADV.FOR source is?

STRIPPED DOWN and EXPOSED: Business kit from the good old days

a couple of decades worth ... of tat and crap.

Should have sold it to this place: http://www.weirdstuff.com/

they even have a webcam.

A true nostalgia-fest, well worth a vist if you're in the Sunnyvale area anytime.

Google admits 'garbage in, garbage out' translation problem

Re: re. chat(s)

And to add to the fun, I think the reference to "having other cats to whip" in the French refers to the "cat o' nine tails", and not a feline.

CERN outlines plan for new 100km circumference supercollider

Re: Is that really the best place to build these things?

anomalies and gravitational distortions

They have bigger problems with trains. A pre-LHC system at CERN used to display regular but slight variations that no-one could explain, until one day they stopped. Some bright spark realised that there was a train strike in France, and the the cause of the disturbances was the magnetic field created by the earth return currents from the passing 6MW TGV power sets.

Re: Is the overlap of the rings part of the plan?

under or through Lake Geneva

Rapid beam dump, a large plug with a chain labelled "For emergency use only" ?

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

Any purple vegetation??

Or Rigellians?

Life support's ABOUT to be switched off, but XP's suddenly COOL again

Re: A possible explanation

Or lots of people (like me) who've seen the hype have dusted off their old XP laptops to do "one last" round of updates, and while they're downloading they've been surfing, updating social media pages, etc. hence inflating the numbers of apparently active XP systems.

As for the _two_ schools of thought, there is a thrid one. Script Kiddies will get far more kudos for their latest Android or Windows 8 hack, and so very few of them will give a damn about writing new malware for an obsolete OS. How many new viruses for 95 or 98 have appeared recently?

Thundering gas destroys disks during data centre incident

--- Customer support here, good morning. Yessir, bit of an outage. No, nothing serious Sir, just another car bomb. We'll be back online in a few mins, just wiping off the glass shards now.

You may laugh, but the explosion happened at 4pm on a Friday (we were in the pub, the building having been evacuated). The emergency plan went into action, some empty office space was acquired and cabled over the weekend. DEC delivered a lorryload of new equipment at 9am Monday, and by lunchtime everyone in the affected office had a desk with an operational phone & terminal. One customer who phoned expecting that their scheduled meeting was cancelled was more than surprised to be told that everything was still on track.

DR planning works!

Mind you, for weeks afterward we were opening files that had been inside steel filing cabinets, and shaking the broken glass out. Made us realise what that trite BBC phase "some people were cut by flying glass" could really translate to.

Pressure changes can do all sorts of unusual things. In our Belfast office, 30-odd years ago, a car bomb in the street oustide shattered windows and broke internal walls. The offices had a good supply of VT100 and VT220 terminals. All the VT100s survived, all the VT220 screens were OK, but many of the VT220 keyboards didn't work afterwards. We never did identify which component of a keyboard was that pressure sensitive!

London's King of Clamps shuts down numberplate camera site

Re: Just wondering?

surely you could just tell it to drive around the block a few times while you do your shopping?

Exactly, which will play merry hell with traffic congestion schemes. Even allowing for fuel costs it's probably still cheaper to do that than to park in most cities these days.

Private pain: Dell layoff bloodbath to hit over 15,000 staffers – insiders

Painful, but might be the best approach

Laying-off 15000 people now, getting the restructuring right, and being able to hire again in the future may be very painful but it is a lot better than dropping 4-5000 here and there every year, year after year, never really fixing the problem, and destroying morale in the process. Ask HP, or Sun.

El Reg BuzzFelch: 10 Electrical Connectors You CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!

Re: Mumbai Multiway

Probably done by the same people that did some of these:

http://www.wrightsaerials.tv/roguesgallery/

Google Glassholes, GET OFF our ROADS, thunder lawmakers in seven US states

Re: "I don't see the problem..."

And road conditions generally aren't like ice-driving courses...

True, but in that brief terrifying moment when they become like an ice-driving course, and the world all starts to run in slow motion, I don't want to have to wait while my brain takes a page fault and swaps out the video viewer to make room for the "oh FUCK!" handler.

Re: "I don't see the problem..."

the brain, eyes, arms and feet can work pretty well at driving whilst part of your brain is thinking of other things,

Not the case. I took some "ice driving' courses a few years ago, being taught by an ex-rally driver how to drive on snow. One of the exercises was to come down a snowy hill and avoid a trafic cone placed in the middle of the road. Without exception, everyone hit it the first time. We were told that this was because we were all looking at it, and so our brain wasn't getting the necessary info to be able to avoid it. After being told do do the exercise again, but this time to look at our exit path and not the cone, we all avoided it easily, because our brains had the required info as input.

You may think your brain can drive "in the background', but it can't do it well if it is not getting the input it needs to evaluate the surroundings.

BSkyB sees first half pre-tax profit tumble as sales climb

Re: They screw up FTA broadcasters

And without torrents there's cardsharing :)

And with torrents and cardsharing there's not enough money to pay for the series, so they get cancelled. Well done you.

Big tech firms holding wages down? Marx was right all along, I tell ya!

Re: Excellent article - b u t -

(for example) small French farmers could make it. Forcing them to undergo quite a lot of pain and become more efficient, or get out-competed.

Agreed, in principle, but even there we have distortions in legal and social situations that make a truly free agricultural industry difficult, subsidies or not.

For example, in the UK it is fairly traditional for a farmer to pass the whole farm to an eldest son, other children having to make their own way in the world, unless the children decide otherwise (I know one eldest son who preferred to be an IT engineer, and let his kid brother have the farm). This does tend to keep farms together, hence large and productive.

In France, though, such a situation is impossible. It is illegal not to divide ones assets equally among one's children on death, a parent cannot write a will that favours (or disinherits) one child. The result is that farms get subdivided, or end up run jointly, unless all the children decide to sell up & split the cash. That tends to create small inefficient farms, but the very strong family ethic means that there's little appetite for change. It is, of course, one reason that France is so attached to the CAP.