Posts by SYNTAX__ERROR

Seeing ads on Wikipedia? Then you're infected

Re: Pah..

+10 internets for an excellent analogy.

Compare The Market can't touch web filth extension - simples

Re: What a crap judgement

Actually, the "Easy-" part goes on the beginning of the term in question. That makes it a PREFIX.

</pedantry>

Virgin straps on phone masts for the flying upper classes

Plane phones

Only time I've seen one being used was in Die Hard 2.

Icon: "I'm not playing chicken with a two hundred ton plane!"

iCloud blows away 15 million users for 90 minutes

Nubilous

Simon, I must congratulate you and give maximum ratings for this article in respect of your excellent and highly apt deployment of the word 'Nubilous'.

Fastest-ever hydrocarb scramjet hits Mach 8, doesn't explode

Re: More information please

I think you are a bit confused. Aviation fuel is not a high explosive.

Therefore the speed of flame propagation < the speed of sound.

Road deaths spark crackdown on jaywalking texter menace

Re: Clearways

A clearway simply designates that no stopping is allowed on a section of highway.

It is NOT an offence to cross or walk on one.

Cameron's F-35 U-turn: BAE Systems still calls the shots at No 10

"Minuscule"

Is the correct spelling of that word. It catches me out as well.

Mozilla and Google blast IE-only Windows on ARM

Re: Serious Question

"MS probably hope that folk will not change the default from Bing"

And they would be right. People will just use Bing to search for Google.

Wi-Fi warping wallpaper hardens homes to hackers

Re: Insulation

Well actually there are quite a few newer houses that use foil-backed plasterboard on the interior walls. I don't know the real reason why they make that stuff but it can cause havoc when you WANT to get a WIFi signal throughout your house.

The exterior walls though: we make those out of slightly more permanent materials like bricks.

Queen unveils draft internet super-snoop bill - with clauses

Re: Nothing to worry about here!!!

You owe me a new sarcasm detector as this one has overloaded and the needle on the meter flew right off.

Re: Problem with that, Alan

The problem is that at some point they will turn up and demand the keys and of course you will not be able to provide them. A court would choose not to believe your explanation so you would get banged up despite committing no crime.

PHP devs lob second patch at super-critical CGI bug

Re: Pick a side!

That's just John Leyden for you. He doesn't know whether he is British or American.

His brain immediately forgets the keys his fingers press as he is typing. If his eyes were ever to move back along the line of text to verify the words he has just written, then his head would immediately explode. Not to mention the implications for the space-time continuum.

Even the sub-editors daren't read his work as it will forever haunt them in their sleep.

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Re: "What is the cost of keeping this plant operating under capacity?"

From TFA:

Alone among British water companies London's Thames Water does actually possess a single desalination plant, at Beckton on the Thames Estuary, but this only has the capacity to produce 150 million litres a day - less than 10 per cent of the city's requirements - and it is run at low output or *completely shut down* most of the time.

"numerically illiterate"

'Innumerate' , Shirley?

Why embossed credit cards are here to stay

Re: "Send Corrections"

There's no point.

You see, what that link doesn't tell you is the destination for said corrections. Which can reasonably be assumed from observed evidence to be a black hole.

Re: It doesn't fix the basic problem..

In cases where fraudulent use is not the direct result of negligence by the card holder, he/she is normally indemnified against any losses.

Re: Never use credit cards.

Section 75 protection is also quite valuable, which is why Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert recommends that any purchases > £100 are made at least partially on a credit card.

That way if anything goes wrong with the sale or subsequently with the product, you are in a better position as the card issuer is jointly liable with the merchant.

See link for more info

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/section75-protect-your-purchases

Apple blocking Dropbox SDK over in-app buying

No

They are not allowed to do that as the laws of Apple state the products must be the same price everywhere.

So either they cripple all non-Apple sales by increasing the price or they just take a loss for the privilege of reaching iThing users. Many businesses work on mark-ups of less than 30%.

Not to mention that the in-app purchasing is an absolute nightmare. You can't implement or test it until your app is approved. And then you have to manually add each product you want to sell to the iTunes store via a web interface. Future maintenance of the product catalogue thus becomes more demanding.

Fanboys excited by ancient Google Qwerty Nexus plan

Android 5?

Jelly Bean?

Can we have 4.0 ICS working properly first please??!!

Everything Everywhere rolls out the 4G astroturf

Video Streaming?

"a five-minute video of dancing cats would download in one minute, rather than four, leaving one three minutes to build an extra widget..."

Not really. The thing is that most people watch video using streaming, which means it doesn't really matter how long it takes to 'download', as it still takes 5 minutes to watch the video.

Not everybody stands about gawping at downloads for however long anyway. Some people might have enough gumption to get on with something else whilst a download completes.

Half of UK smart TV owners don't know what the 'smart' bit is for

I had similar experiences to you

When I used to use a Windows Mobile 6 device.

Now on Android 4.0 and it is very close to everything I expect.

You need to get a new phone, man.

Google to FCC: Protecting Street View coder didn't derail probe

Re: Paranoia justified?

No, your paranoia is not justified.

MAC addresses are used for delivery of frames at the data link layer.

Google do not get to see this information.

No-one outside of your local network can learn of the MAC addresses in use at your site. The frames that carry packets outside your network will be addressed with source and destination MAC addresses of each of the router hops in question.

Downvoted for mentioning testing?

I didn't think *everyone* had succumbed to the eternal beta-program strategy...

@ Flibbertigibbet

Well some people have heard of this thing called TESTING.

Google Drive Issues on Mac

No

Only stuff you put in the Dropbox folder is synced.

Re: Dropbox has had its problems too

Useful information for all:

T R U E C R Y P T

It seems I have far fewer data security worries than many others.

Wind farms create local warming

Re: Humidity?

Heat yes, but the radiators of an air conditioning unit do not release moisture.

Dehumidification happens inside the building, and condensate finds its way to the drains.

Basic instinct: how we used to code

Re: Raspberry Pi?

You have a Raspberry Pi?

'Geek' image scares women away from tech industry

FTFY

Everyone USES technology.

Few people UNDERSTAND it.

Stray SMS leads to aborted landing

Re: Interference

Except for the fact that generally it is wasteful for cellular masts to send their signal up into the atmosphere, so usually they are designed to minimise that.

BT's 'unbeatable' Infinity broadband ads banned by ASA

Not only is it really annoying

that they have to invent snazzy-sounding names for standard well-established products like a router, which confuse both me and nontech users alike;

but every "HomeHub" I have had the misfortune to come across has been flaky as hell.

Re: ASA ruling

The ruling is not that they are not allowed to advertise the product again ever, I'm not sure where you got that idea from.

It just means they can't show those particular adverts again. Their message however has still been communicated to potential customers, and they have probably had their money's worth out of the run already.

So really all they have to do is pay for a new advert to be made.

Met issues mug-shot gallery mobe app to finger wanted crooks

Re: Recording private / public places

Yes, the section 44 reference is relevant if you're a photographer, that is actually doing the recording overtly and in person.

For CCTV things are slightly different. One is obliged to take measures to avoid recording images of other people's private property. If it was just a small corner of the image it's unlikely anyone could object but it is easy to use a bit of masking tape. CCTV images captured for personal use are not subject to the Data Protection Act.

If an organisation wants to record images, they are obliged to do so overtly unless there is a good and specific reason for the surveillance to be covert. Part of being overt about it involves placing signs to draw attention to the monitoring and for what purposes it will be used. Generally, the system must not record audio.

Importantly, if the surveillance is contracted out then the contracting company must obtain a license from the Security Industry Authority.

See http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/topic_guides/cctv.aspx

Trojan sneaks into hotel, slurps guests' credit card data

"Cyberooks"

I suppose that would be how the Librarian from Unseen University communicates when using instant messaging?

Dad sues Apple for pushing cash-draining 'free' games at kids

Re: I'm with Apple on this one

"Or, if you're that stupid, don't have kids."

Unfortunately, stupidity and likelihood of having children are directly proportional.

iPad to reign unchallenged as KING of FONDLESLABS

Re: Transformer...

You say "plug a USB drive into the router" - what do you mean by that exactly?

Do you have a router at home that has a function to host USB storage? That sounds like a really good idea. My curiosity would be sated if you could say what model it is.

BYOD sync 'n share

It's been said before and I'll say it again

Number one thing to remember for Dropbox:

T R U E C R Y P T

T R U E C R Y P T

T R U E C R Y P T

Most anticipated videogames of 2012 revealed

Re: FPS controllers

I second that. Control pads worked really well when I played the Super Mario Bros trilogy on the NES.

In almost all types of game except for platformers, a gamepad is a poor kludge - for FPS it is either impossible or the auto-aiming takes any and all skill out of it. For driving it is also next to useless.

I can honestly say the only recent game that I felt worked well on a gamepad (after a bit of getting used to it) was Red Dead Redemption.

Re: "We'd have a PC games list for a start."

My PC cost about £450, around two and a half years ago. Inexpensive graphics card but room in that budget for RAID.

Plays all the latest games, to an impressive standard. Plus it does lots of things that a console cannot do and many others better. Software is available to make a PC do anything you can imagine and much more.

I can take advantage of things like add-ons, mods and hacks to increase playability of games. When the games haven't been tested properly and I hit a glitch I can open a console prompt and solve the issue rather than have to re-start the game. I can back up my game saves to dropbox. I can go back and discover or re-visit classic titles, usually for next to nothing or free.

When I want it to be better, I can upgrade the graphics card easily and cheaply. Or add more RAM or HDDs. I can connect a huge variety of peripherals.

I do also have a PS3 but mainly as a blu-ray player. Only games I have are those not available on PC. It's worth pointing out that the games themselves cost about 1/3 more on console.

I would have thought that a computer would be fairly essential in a household these days, what with everything being online; so although a console by itself is cheaper I would classify it as more of a luxury item.

UK government says no to turbo e-bike

@ Jemma

Not really sure how your quote is relevant - as it covers vehicles which are adapted for use by disabled people.

I wouldn't see it as a good trade-off to actually become disabled in order to ride one of these bikes!

No

I can definitely achieve 30mph on my general-purpose (freeride) mountain bike.

I'm not as fit as I used to be, so I probably couldn't maintain that for very long on the flat.

I wouldn't like to think there are old ladies that could beat me, they might be rare but some almost certainly exist.

Re: Doesn't seem too unreasonable to me.

In my experience, one can pedal a generic mountain bike to about 30mph and a road bike to about 50.

Of course it depends entirely on the available gear ratios. Your fitness will mainly affect how long you can sustain top speed for.

100 EARTH-LIKE PLANETS orbit stars WITHIN 30 LIGHT-YEARS!

Garth, that was a Haiku!

Whoaaa...

Republicans shoot down proposed ban on Facebook login boss-snoop

Re: "Delete Facebook"

Believe me, if it were that easy, I would be more than pleased to oblige.

@ Jubtastic

You may notice that when one attempts to find the meaning of a three-letter initialism through web search or similar means, one typically finds many potential answers and it can be difficult to determine the correct one.

Although in this case the Google results were unusually helpful, it is accepted convention in writing to explain abbreviations and such when first introducing them. This avoids forcing the reader to go out-of-band in order to understand the intended meaning.

What is "the GOP" ?

Those of us who do not live in the US may not be familiar with your esoteric political terms.

What system builders need to know about solid state drives

Alternatively

RAID can also be said to stand for a Redundant Array of Independent Disks.

Some people prefer to see it as such as it then encompasses the cases where extreme performance and redundancy are both desirable.

As has been said before, horses for courses.

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

"I don't think ... anybody should be looking at it."

So what does he THINK he is using Twitter for then?

Twitter a poor predictor of movie success

@ DAN*tastik

Fear not, Dan. No longer must you fight alone.