Posts by Chris

Debbie Gibson battles Mega Shark and Giant Octopus

Oh god.....

@TeeCee

hehe - good point. I must be losing the tentative grip I <strikethrough>have</strikethrough> HAD on reality.

@Daniel Wilkie

Oh crap. I did, didn't I. That's a pretty poor show. Disregard all of it. As we all know EVERYTHING is wrong on Wiki. NO EXCEPTIONS. In fact the mere act of posting something on Wiki makes it not true - FACT. If anyone posts certain bits of physics on there, the world will shoot off into space, we'll all float away, boiling seas, the works. IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO STOP WIKI.

---

Oh, and BTW - 1 free internets to anyone who can find out the collective noun for a group of octopodes. Or indeed for any cephalopods. There doesn't seem to be one!

(Octopus is technically the collective noun for a load of octopus meat, but that doesn't count)

Octopuses/Octopi

Actually:

"There are three forms of the plural of octopus; namely, octopuses, octopi, and octopodes. Currently, octopuses is the most common form in the US as well as the UK; octopodes is rare, and octopi is often objectionable.[25]

The Oxford English Dictionary (2004 update[26]) lists octopuses, octopi and octopodes (in that order); it labels octopodes "rare", and notes that octopi derives from the mistaken assumption that octōpūs is a second declension Latin noun, which it is not. Rather, it is (Latinized) Greek, from oktṓpous (ὀκτώπους), gender masculine, whose plural is oktṓpodes (ὀκτώποδες). If the word were native to Latin, it would be octōpēs ('eight-foot') and the plural octōpedes, analogous to centipedes and mīllipedes, as the plural form of pēs ('foot') is pedes. The actual Latin word is "polypus," which does render the plural "polypi." In modern Greek, it is called khtapódi (χταπόδι), gender neuter, with plural form khtapódia (χταπόδια).

Chambers 21st Century Dictionary[27] and the Compact Oxford Dictionary[28] list only octopuses, although the latter notes that octopodes is "still occasionally used"; the British National Corpus has 29 instances of octopuses, 11 of octopi and 4 of octopodes. Merriam-Webster 11th Collegiate Dictionary lists octopuses and octopi, in that order; Webster's New World College Dictionary lists octopuses, octopi and octopodes (in that order).

Fowler's Modern English Usage states that "the only acceptable plural in English is octopuses," and that octopi is misconceived and octopodes pedantic."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Terminology

Apple patents all-seeing display

Apples patents electricity, steam, fire.

Is there any existing technolog that apple won't file a patent for?

"1. A method of sending signals corresponding to multiple button functionalities from a unibody mouse to an electronic system having a single movable housing component that cooperates with and is movably coupled with a base housing component that supports the unibody mouse on a surface, comprising: associating the multiple button functionalities with specific portions of the single movable housing component; activating each of the multiple button functionalities by moving the single movable housing component to different positions relative to the base housing component wherein the single movable housing component has at least two degrees of freedom relative to the base housing component; generating a clicking action by moving the movable housing component relative to the base housing component along at least one of the at least two degrees of freedom; and sending a signal to the electronic system based upon the clicking action.

2. A method as recited in claim 1, wherein the clicking action implements a function selected from a group comprising: a single click function, a double click function, and/or a dragging and dropping function.

3. A method as recited in claim 1, wherein the electronic system includes a display screen suitable for displaying images.

4. A method as recited in claim 3 wherein each of the multiple button functionalities corresponds to an action on a display screen. "

That goes on and on and on, but in essence, IS JUST A MOUSE. Virtually every one of these "patents" I see apple put in is for something already existing.

"One merely describes how an iPod - or most any media player, for that matter - can keep status information in nonvolatile memory when switched off."

Rigght. So Apple are patenting solid state memory too?

And when it's not something pre-existing, it's something utterly ridiculous. A zoomable camera with lens PER PIXEL? Course you will.

Why don't Apple just go back to what they do best - releasing mediocre hardware for double what the top end stuff goes for. And please don't quote the "same price as a dell" argument - Dell's are ridiculuosly overpriced too, and even then it's not true:

Macbook Pro 17 inch:

2.66GHz Core 2 Duo

4GB Memory

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M + 9600M GT with 512MB

DVD RW

£1949

Dell XPS M1730 17 inch:

2.6GHz Core 2 Duo

6 GB Memory

NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT + 9800 GT with 512MB

BluRay RW

£1949

And Dells ARE a rip off.

And don't even get me started on pointless models like the air.

</rant>

Google and the Great Wikipedia Feedback Loop

Relevance

I guess the main reason Wiki comes up top for a lot of topics is peoples searching behaviour.

If I'm looking for a subject, say badgers, I'll go to google and first type badgers. If nothing comes up, there's a good chance I'll add wiki to the end, as a strating point at least.

Google probably (and legitimatley) sees my first search found nothing, and therefore links some of the top results of the second to the first search.

Hence wikis page on badgers creeps up and up.

It's not just google anyway. Try those things in Windows Live Search, or any of the others, Wiki always comes up high.

Google Conspiracy (tm), or just a popular site - YOU DECIDE.

BAWWWWWWWWWW

No-one wants to pay several thousand punds for a virtually unreadable encyclopaedia anymore, BAWWWWWWWWWWWW.

My parents have the full thing (My mother got a discount as she was a nurse). I had to rely on it for my GCSE's before the days of there being anything useful on the internet. It's all written in the most uppity convoluted way possible, to the point where (at that age at any rate) I couldn't even tell what topic they were talking about half the time.

There was the cut down micropaedia, which should have been easier, but was in fact written just as confusingly, it was just missing lots of information.

The fact it was written in 8 point script on tracing paper didn't help either.

Brtiannica need to just make virtually all of their content free. Perhaps they could still charge, per subject, for the in depth research papers and such. Either way, no-one other than research scientists will be reaching for thier credit card to find out about basic topics.

Get with the times Britannica, or die.

Study slams brain-training games' mental improvement claims

@Makes sense (lol)

"Another limitation of the DS game is it doesn't provide feedback when the answer is wrong so if you don't know the answer to 6x7 you won't learn it"

Unlike paper, obviously. :/

Pen, paper and stopwatch doesn't really come close. The enforced time limits and automatic scoring make the experience hectic. You can't cheat, and most importantly you can do the same length test, with different questions, and get a standerdised score.

I actually like paper puzzles, but mostly word puzzles. Maths ones don't work as well as on a computer.

Mac malware piggybacks on pirated iWork

RE: RE: But Macs don't get viruses

Any operating system is liable to viruses, as long as people are actually bothering to write them.

The second you do give the rights to actually run something, it could be a virus. The argument of just never giving anything permissions to actually run is invalid as soon as you do use any third party software.

"A trojan is not a virus. At this time, there is no OS X virus in the wild." - see this:

http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2006/02/macosxleap.html

It would seem you are incorrect.

Tesla asks early adopters to cough up more cash

@Oh geez

Put me down for $8000 too, if you're just giving it away.

$8000 is still $8000. Not exactly pocket change.

EU says Microsoft violated law with IE on Windows

Anti Competition

So I take it OSX will no longer be provided with Safari installed, and Ubuntu will have Firefox taken out too?

Really though, this is just bad news for users. The average user couldn't care less if they use IE or Firefox or whatever. Finding a copy of a browser without a browser will just become another thing the end user has to work out how to do. Are we going to go back to ISP CD's? Getting browsers from cover disks on magazines?

They're free products anyway, so who the hell cares? Office 2007 has a RRP of up to £600, so I don't think Micorosft care too much about IE with an RRP of £0. As they're free they're not really stealing anyones money. If MS had bundled, say, an exact Photoshop rip off for free with Windows, then THAT would be anti competition.

This ruling is just nit picking and stupidness. If you want Firefox or Chrome or whatever, you just download them. It only takes a minute. Most probably you'll use IE to do it, so what's the problem?

Maybe they should have a program that lets you pick a browser bundled with windows, like with the Search Providers. At least then you could get a browser over the internet.

(I know there are other ways of getting a browser over the internet without a browser. I don't think any of them are going to be suitable for the average user.)

Fantasy author hired to pen Doom 4 plot

Doom 3

I still don't know if Doom 3's plot or gameplay were any good. Perhaps if they'd remembered to include any light sources in the game I'd have been able to tell.

I still find it hillarious that, in Doom 3, you can either hold your torch, OR your gun. Several times in the game you are reduced to bringing your torch up, finding the slow lumbering zombie in the dark, putting your torch away, pulling out your gun, firing blindly into the darkness, swapping your gun and torch again, only to see the zombie completely unscathed.

Play.com pestered to back up price claims

misleading?

Copypastad from play.com

"£9.99 Free Delivery | RRP: £19.99 | You save: £10.00 (50%)"

How is that misleading? The RRP is what it is. Yes, nowhere actually sells things for the RRP, but what do you expect? Them to list price comparisons with every other retailer?

If you're willing to buy it, you think the price is alright. If you find it somewhere cheaper afterwards, you probably should have checked first.

I think the point the ASA were trying to make was something to do with preorders, where the RRP may be subject to change.

Cryptic formula hints at Metal Gear Solid 4 on Xbox 360

@Iain

Skip the cutscenes. If you don't want to watch the story, then don't.

The game itself in between is truly brilliant, and still very very long.

"The 360's DVD format plain doesn't have room for the 4 hours of pre-rendered HD video in MGS4."

Actually, I imagine a relativley small amount of the 50GB actually goes towards the cutscenes, as the majority of them (by length) are done with the game engine. Most of the 50GB probably goes towards the fact there's loads of huge, varied levels - a lot more than you get in any other game I could think of.

If you play through this whole game, you'll quickly see that the large file size is a LOT more than just videos.

Hackintosh clone surfaces in the Argentine

Anti Competition Laws

And Apple fans laugh at Microsoft for "anti competition".

Why the hell shouldn't you be able to put OSX on any machine, provided it runs, and you have a licence? Oh, because Jobs can't rip you off for top price for 3 year old spec machines.

I actually quite like OSX too. I just hate Apples business style, even more than Microsoft. For the money ALL of their hardware is an absolute joke.

Prof says fatties a bigger menace than bin Laden

Nightmare

I think he's trying to say if we all get too fat we won't be able to run away from terrorists. Or perhaps that Osama Bin Laden will hide just inside a narrow doorway, taunting us.

A harrowing vision of the future, that's for sure.

Mac users urged to ditch Safari

@ AC - "@ Chris"

"interesting, I didn't know that since I delete all mail purporting to be from a bank without looking at the content because my bank only use postal mail, never email to contact customers."

Yeah, I've not heard of a bank that would ever email, or phone, or even ask for you to write any of these details down and post them back. Even if they did have to ask you to change your password, they wouldn't post a link in the email, just tell you to go to the site yourself. As someone else mentioned thought, this can be countered with using a trojan to put a link in the hosts file to a phishing site. The hosts file worries me a bit sometimes. I think IE (or any other browser that uses it) should have a warning icon somewhere if the current page has been redirected through it. Silent redirections are probably not the best idea, right up there with "Hide extensions for known file types".

"Why not go one step further and let browsers block any URL where .com/.net/.org shows up further left than second last position. I can see no reason why legitimate websites would want to use .com/.net/.org in the middle of a URL, again, the only possible application here is fraud, so block them. And this should be turned ON by default."

That sounds like a good idea really. As you say, the only point of doing this is to confuse or defraud.

@Fanbois and *tards

"You have to laugh at the sheer pointlessness of the majority of comments here."

Congratulations on keeping up that 100% pointless comment record.

@displaying a fake URL can only be fraudulent => it should be outlawed

As far as I know most of them don't attempt to mask the URL in any way. From the many (very poorly written - surely they could just run spelling and grammar checks on them before sending them out??) phishing attempts I get in my email, the link is something like:

www.hsbc.com.34fg463fdgt567.nz/online_banking

i.e. the hsbc.com bit is a subdomain to the 34fg463fdgt567.nz bit.

Sounds easy to spot, but at a glance, cetainly for the end user, they see www.hsbc.com and they're fooled.

Still with the amount of money that is lost through this each year, I'm sure they could just ban hsbc.com and any other major banks names as a subdomain at a browser level. At least stick up a great big warning.

Interestingly tho, even though IE's phishing filter doesn't always seems to work very well, Outlook informs me with a big red banner that the email is a phishing attempt. aybe they have some of those kind of checks in there now too...

@Tony Carter-Inman

"most PC users are using Firefox"

Last time I checked, 15% wasn't "most". You'd be thinking of IE there.

AVG update nails down stability bugs

AVG's got too flabby

I stayed with it for a long time. But when I realised that is uses 50-200 meg once loaded, and was covered in features I didn't use I figured it was time to change. I also started to get annoyed with not being able to turn of features such as auto update, without the icon going to alert.

I tried most of the ones I've seen mentioned around but had feature/performance/stability issues with most of them. (Minor, but still not perfect)

Then on a whim I treid PC Tools Antivirus. Pretty basic, but its got real time protection, heuristics, email scanning and all the other basic musts. From a cold start is sits in memory at about 5 meg, going up to 10 after a while (but no higher even after a couple of days)

I noticed it most on my rubbish laptop, which went from solw and dodgy, to useable instantly. I've changed about 7 or 8 PC's over to it now, and they all seem a little happier.

Cuil confesses 'serious file corruption'

Name Origin

Whats the bets that they asked an Irish guy what the Irish word for "Knowledge" was and he told them "Cuil" as a joke?

Sumerians cracked world's oldest joke

Your momma

Your mommas so fat, that when she's asked what clothes size she is, she says "16:9"

Brits terrified of online fraud, but want magic cars, says BT

BT and Phorm

I can see the questionaire now:

1. What annoys you most about the internet?

a) Not enough Goatse

b) Irrelavant advertising

Security shocker: 75% of US bank websites have flaws

@Steven Knox

"set up that way for two years"

So, to be fair, you could have been part of that demographic in 2004. At least it's fixed now. HSBC doesn't seem to use SSL for any of it, even once you've logged in. And all the login information is typed into the boxes, making it easy for keyloggers to catch everything they need. And if you already know the account details you can instantly recover the username on page.

It's not like its hard to setup SSL, or do a redirect if you're in on HTTP. Pretty weak really. You'd have thought the FSA or someone would enforce basic site security.

Drive-by download attacks menace UK.gov

@Tony Hoyle

I think most, if not all, of these attacks were on pages where you could leave comments, using SQL injection. So rather than leaving a comment which says "Hello" you leave one which says "Hello' UPDATE blah blah" and add a script tag with a link to nihal.js or whatever to a field which is written to the screen. A good reason to replace < and > with &lt; and &gt; out of fields before you display them, as well as just when you update them.

Still pretty unforgivable, but perhaps slightly less negligent than actually letting people modify the pages. Just slightly tho..

US PS3 sales surge

Sales per month

As was said here earlier, the 360 was released 17 months earlier than the ps3.

A quick search for sales reveals about 15 million PS3's sold and about 20 million xbox 360's. The PS3 was released 21 months ago, and the 360 38 months ago.

Hence:

PS3 - 15,000,000 / 21 = 714285 units per month

360 - 20,000,000 / 38 = 526315 units per month

Seems pretty obvious and easy to work out which is selling better. (Obviously this is clearly a battle for second place with the Wii being at the top. But I don't really count the Wii, with it's endless library of tennis games and Mario rehashes)

Prius hybrid to get rooftop solar panel

@Waves & all Pious owners

"are there any other cars manufactured today that get 55 mpg?"

Yes, lots. For example the Fiat Panda 1.3 16v Multijet gets 65.7mpg for the diesel, and 76.3mpg for the petrol. OK so it might not be the most exciting car in the world, but at least, unlike the Prius, people don't shout and throw things at you when you drive past.

55mpg, for a smaller-mid size European car is pretty average really. There are plenty on (non-hybrid) cars available with much better mpg. Annoyingly, I can't remember which one it is, but one of the "super minis" gets over 100 (if you're really careful)

I'm still amazed that anyone thinks that by whacking a massive great heavy motor, and an enormous heavy battery in a relativly small car, along with it's norml hulking engine, it gets them magically better performance. All the Prius does is run it's batteries down around town, then the second you get out into the country, the engine has to run twice as hard to charge the batteries back up again. All you do is save your pollution for the countryside. Thanks a lot. You kill baby foxes with your stupid Priuses, choking them to death on your sickening fumes. Jerks.

And if you charge it off the grid, it's even worse. If everyone in the country got a hybrid and charged it up at home, every day at about half past five the entire national grid would fail, not to mention the fact that most of the energy is generated from oil and coal fired power stations.

This new solar panel seems like more of the same. Indulgant crap to keep people who can't be bothered to actually do anything about helping the environment themselves feeling smug about "saving the planet". There's no way in hell a solar panel is going to be worth the extra weight of dragging it around, nor the energy or pollution to make it, for it's pathetic trickle of energy. You don't get solar panels for the environment, you get them so you get cheaper power. They're bad for the environment, and so are huge motors and batteries. All it means is cheaper petrol for you, you cheapskates.

A solar panel to generate the energy for your aircon? If you want to "save the planet" so badly, get a car WITHOUT AIRCON. Better still, walk. It might give you some exercise other than the endless flapping of your jaws about how you "want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem". You'll never be Captian Planet, get over it. Idiots.

'HD TV gas' 17,000 times worse for planet than CO₂, claims boffin

LIES

AL GORE IS LYING TO YOU.

THERE IS NO MANBEARPIG.

AVG disguises fake traffic as IE6

Turning off linkscanner WITHOUT annoying error icon

Nice and easy:

Leave LinkScanner turned on in AVG to prevent the red icon from appearing.

From IE

Tools > Manage Add Ons > Enable or Disable Add Ons

Find AVG Safe Search

Disable

Done.

Linkscanner is a bit pointless though, AVG seems to be doing a Norton. Same with everything, as soon as something gets more popular, and they start making more money, they get more staff, and start doing development that just doesn't need to be done. Looks like it might be time to try and find a new small AV program.

I looked at clamAV, but the site seemed to imply it was just an email scanner for UNIX..? I take it from previous comments it's not just for UNIX, but does it offer proper system protection, or just scan emails?

First public Firefox 3 candidate shoots out the door

w3 standards

I never actually said CSS on scrollbars was part of the w3 specificfation, I said CSS on scrollbars was a basic feature. W3 recognises them, but they are not part of the official standard.

They're in this list here with how to use them

http://www.w3schools.com/HTMLDOM/dom_obj_style.asp

Thats really the thin edge of the wedge for firefox though. Why doesn't the CSS text-align work properly on firefox (definately in the W3 spec) and you have to use align="" in the tag, which has been outdated for a long time. Why does all the text look like a dogs been chewing on it due to a lack of default antialiasing? Why does w3schools have to have warnings like this on it?

"Do NOT start an ID name with a number! It will not work in Mozilla/Firefox."

Why, in javascript, does document.getElementById('') make the id case sensitive, when the id in HTML is NOT (element and Element will be treated as the same id and hence create an element array, but firefox's javascript will treat them as different elements)

It's finickity long past the point that there's any question what you're trying to do, and refusing to support anything thats not in the original strict w3 spec is not a feature.

I never though I'd see the day that so many people stuck up for Netscape Navigator. It's rubbish. I know that, and you know that. Just because IE isn't great, doesn't make this pile any better.

@angus

"Since when did scrollbar colour have anything to do with any CSS specification?"

http://www.iconico.com/CSSScrollbar/

For a very, very long time.

"It scares me that people so clueless can pretend to be IT professionals and get away with it."

I know, it scares me too Angus. Way to prove your own point. Perhaps if you actually spent a bit more time learning about CSS, and a bit less time trolling on the Register, it wouldn't be such a concern.

Typing "Scrollbar CSS" into google is a good start...

Opt Out

"is implemented and enabled by default"

That's opt out. I hate Firefox. I have to have all 4 of the major browsers (IE, Safari, Opera, and Firefox) to test the sites I work on. Out of all of them I get the most problems from Firefox, even more than the frankly dire Safari.

I don't know why anyone like's it. The interface looks like something that was made for a school project in Delphi, and it doesn't support basic features, like CSS on scrollbars.

To be honest, I don't know why anyone bothers switching browsers from IE in the first place. Far more websites render properly in IE anyway, and it's not like you can uninstall IE anyway. (It'd be fun trying to use Windows without it)

With more and more security holes being exposed, and now this data pimping, hopefully this is the first step towards the end of this hateful piece of software, and I'll only have to debug sites for three languages. (Although Opera is generally fine anyway)

Mobiles help UK malls track shoppers' every move

@CCTV

Already done.

In Reading, we trialed, and still have, the 5 point facial recognition software. All the cameras are linked to a central control room, including the ones in the Oracle shopping center and other shops. Many of these are also linked to the tills, so everywhere you go, and everything you buy is stored with an "anonymous" code generated from the ratios and angles of the five points. This is the reason why some shopping centers banned hoods and caps a while back, as they interfered with the system.

If the police want to investigate you, all they have to do is feed the system a photo of you, which can then be matched with the stored logs, and they can bring up all this information. Many of the traffic cameras also now use ANPR, so they know what car you drive to the shops, where you go and what you buy.

They're soon going to be trialing (or possibly have already started) extra sofware that automatically alerts security if you are "acting suspiciously". (quite likely considering how suspicious the police are)

So act a bit shifty in Reading, and be assured that some plod is browsing over your every move in the town for god knows how long. Since the data is "anonymous" I'm not even sure they have to delete the data after a certain amount of time.

Unsuprisingly this phone thingy doesn't really worry me. The technology behind it seems flaky at best, and you can turn your phone off, unlike your face.

GTA IV PS3 fights off resolution woes in the UK

Not lower res

Well the back of the box says it runs in 720p, which then gets upscaled to 1080p.

Also it's obvious why it looks slightly blurier on the PS3 shots. The PS3 version is antialiased, whereas the 360 is not.

I've got the PS3 version, and played a bit of the 360 version, and the PS3 looks slightly better. The LOD range is longer, the lighting is better, and the texture load is quicker (because of the install for PS3)

"For example, one gamer wrote on his blog" - thats your cue to ignore anything else thats written.

Nintendo preparing DS Lite update, pundit claims

Redesign

It will have exactly the same controls and games as the DS and the Lite. It's (if it even exists) just a redesign of the look of the thing.

All I'd be hoping is that the sound can go up a bit louder, everything else already works very well. As for making it smallerm, I think the Lite's already a pretty good size. Any smaller might make it a bit fiddly.

IE8 to follow web standards by default

IE8 - Vista

I don't know why everyone thinks IE8 is Vista only. I'm running the Beta on XP Pro now.

And I don't know what Patrick O'Reilly has done either, but it works pretty well. Time for a virus scan eh? Obviously a few minor problems, (The Reg's very own CSS doesn't render quite right in it) but nothing of any major concern.

I have had it crash a couple of times when trying some complicated (badly made) sites, but unlinke all the others it can and does recover itself, including where you were in all your tabs.

The IE7 compatibility mode does also seem to run everything fine.

If you have coded your site sloppily, it works great. I've checked over my entire site and it renders it all perfectly well.

This seems like exactly what people have been whinging about wanting for years. I don't see the problem with it.

Can't please some people eh?

Terrorist robots dissected - anatomy of a scare

@easyk

"1) Anti-personnel grenades, the sort you might find in a MLRS or ATACMS (steel rain) rocket, are light, easily deployed when the target area is reached, and very very very nasty to flesh. I'm sure there are some you can pick up from the former USSR."

If it's so easy to get grenades into this country for a terrorist attack, why exactly are they using Panini bread mix to make explosives?

US man saved by bulletproof DVD

@stuart byrne

Thats a load of old crap.

It's perfectly legal to record a TV show in the UK. Where the law gets stupid is that this recording can only be watched by the TV Liscence holder once, then must be erased.

If it was illegal to record TV shows completly in the UK, these new DVR TV recorders (Sky+, BT Vision) would have a bit of a hard time wouldn't they?

MS showcases Red Ring of Death Xbox 360 at expo

@Iain

Point taken with some of that. But some of it is slightly misleading.

"Current XBox 360s have one proper HDMI socket on the back, just like the PS3." Well the PS3 has 2, but I'm just being pedantic there.

"Re: Processing power, there is one particular benchmark that gives the PS3 a peak rate of twice the 360"

Yes - Floating Point Operations Per Second. The XBOX 360 performs 1 teraflop, the PS3 performs at 2. This one I think is really quite misleading, because thats the only real true measure of processing power.

"The 360 also has a faster GPU than the PS3, so overall it's a wash"

This one, true, but as bit of a cheat on Microsofts part. A small area of the GPU which can access 10mb of special memory has a speed nearly 10 times that of the PS3. When accessing the other 512mb the speed is about 2/3's that of the PS3.

"both machines have bottlenecks in different places."

Yeah, thats true. I still think the PS3 has less of a bottleneck, but with current games not really stretching either of them, it's very hard to say.

"If you want to play Halo 3 buy a 360, if you want to play GT5, sit on your hands until it comes out; there's bound to be a price cut in the meantime"

Completely true. My mistake, I keep thinking GT5 is out. Yeah you can get prologue, but you don't get much for your money with those half games.

Mostly that was all fair, but some of it IS spin from Microsoft. Despite their terrible track record, I think some of the PS3 was underhyped. With the Bluray drive in, it really is a much better deal.

@Morely Dotes

"Yes, and when the Amiga came along, they continued that practice, selling the Amiga at a loss - apparently they thought they could make it up on volume.

That worked well, didn't it?"

Yeah- it did, for quite a long time. Practically everyone I know had an Amiga, Mac or Archimedies long before they had a PC, because PC's were just useless. Most of them (probably 70%) had an Amiga. You couldn't do anything with the PC with just DOS, and Windows 3.1 really didn't help all that much.

The mistake Commodore made with Amiga (after being really quite sucessful for over 5 years) was placing them firmly as a games machine. As computers started finding there way into offices Commodore desperatly tried to rebrand some of their machines as buisness models, but the damage was done. The public saw the Amiga, with all it's pretty graphics, as a games machine, and the boring display of a PC as a buisness machine.

Who knows where we'd be now if the Amiga had given itself a more buisness based market position? All I know is that my Amiga 1200 with the 030 50MHz accelerator including the FPU and all the other nice little bits FAR outperformed a Pentium II at 10 times the clock speed.

@AC

"The PS3 has far better content, and the 360 really is a bag of crap."

That's maybe a little strong admitedly.

However I just looked now, and the prices add up as such:

XBOX 360 Elite : £279.99

PS3 40GB : £279.99

To be completley fair, considering they are the same price:

The PS3 has a Bluray drive builtin, the XBOX has a optional £130 add on USB, now defunct HD-DVD drive.

The PS3 easily accepts twin HDMI ports, straight in the back of the machine. The XBOX has recently come up with a HDMI cable, but thats with the XBOX end as a non HDMI plug, so you have to use Microsofts cable.

The PS3 is about twice the processing power of the 360 (They might not have laerned exactly how to use it all at the same time yet, but they will)

The XBox 360 has a slightly better online service, available for £40 a year (ish). The PS3 has a very nearly as good online service for free.

Most of the modern games that anyone cares about are on both platforms. If you want Halo 3 get a 360, if you want Gran Turismo 5 get a PS3.

When I weigh it all up, the PS3 is just better value. Even when it was £100 more expensive, it was still better value. It's really rather up to each person to decide. It seems to be more of a social statement than a hardware choice these days.

Rogers wraps 'unlimited' mobile browsing in small print

Pure insanity

The title of this page should have been "Downloading a DVD for $500,000 dollars"

Infinite monkeys would have been cheaper (and faster)

That could get expensive....

5 Canadian cents for 1 kilobyte?

Thats over $50 for 1 megabyte. Woah.. Even on mobile devices it's quite easy to go through 20 megabytes in a short session - at $1000 dollars a pop that's less than good value.

Is it really that expensive, or is that a typo?

Firefox updates, blitzes trio of critical bugs

@Rick Stockton

'"Windows Update" process only once a month' - well to be fair, it's once a week - hence Patch Tueday. And occasionally they do release very important patches outside of this scheme.

People seem to get ridiculously protective over this - it's only a browser. ALL of them have security holes and incompatibilities. The only reason why Firefox was any more secure when it first started was becuase no-one was using it. Why would hackers bother? As it's gained popularity (Just like OS-X) more and more hackers have found ways of exploiting it.

People are very quick to slate Microsoft over these kind of issues, despite the fact that Windows has to cope with an incredible range of software and hardware configurations, and a massivley higher level of hackers turning their attentions to it. Don't get me wrong - I think Windows and Microsoft generaly are pretty pony, but Windows and IE still own a huge majority of the market (80%-90% for windows, 65% ish for IE) and that makes it a lot harder for them.

I'm sure most of us can agree, if nothing else, if you keep your copy of any browser up to date, and don't visit any really dodgy sites (and have some AV etc.) you'll be fine.

P2P uploader hoaxes leading BitTorrent blog

Ahhh... we can dream...

"convince the developers to start releasing for other OSes"

Oh happy day.. I use Windows because I have to. I have to use it for my job, and I don't have the patience to run 2 OS's side by side (Oh where's that file - locked in my Windows Outlook pst file etc)

But on that magical day when developers do start to release a wider range of software on other OS's, I'll be the first to ditch it.

Workbench 3.1 (as well as some of the other OS's you mention there) is still technically superior to Windows in some aspects (I nearly wet myself when I saw an advert for Vista proudly proclaiming it could do 2 things at once - rather than as many as you fancy with good old Amiga TRUE hardware multitasking) - I just hope the golden day of computing haven't gone forever.

I remeber when all this was bits, far as the eye can see..... And they all stood for something then, not like these upstarts you see today. Loads of 1's and 0's hanging about, serving no purpous... I blame the OS's, they don't raise them like they used to...

Fit for print

It seems anything is fit for print these days. The amount of times the BBC or Sky News or whoever have gone with some story they've got off some dodgy blog is ridiculous. Then whenever they do get caught out it's an "eleborate hoax" rather than a "piss poor researcher".

This kind of "internet knowledge base" has a lot to answer for. The amount of people I know that think that Wiki is some kind of bastion of truth. Most of the subjects I've looked up that I do have an extensive knowledge of are largely tripe. Even popular ones, such as cars or firearms. (should be easy to get the basics right on those at least)

Oh and as for that group (or whatever) saying they're not making music anymore because they're sick of piracy: lulz;

It's amazing how many people still think 1 download = 1 lost sale. Almost all of the people who would have downloaded a small bands music like that would have never, ever heard of them if it wasn't for torrents. And the rest of the people who download things HAVE NO MONEY. Why can't these people just be happy that their music is gaining popularity? I must admit, it's a bit harder for musicians, as a load of MP3s is the same quality as a CD. (rather than most film torrents compared to DVD's)

Still tho - you cannot protect this kind of media. At some point, that audio has to come out of your speakers. There's no way to stop you from directing that back to line in, and taking a perfect copy.

I use DBPro, and recently bought a model pack for it. I still haven't got it, as they only gave me a download for FPS Creator (site stated they were available for both), requiring a FPS Creator key, which I don't have, as FPS Creator is ropey. When I tried to get the files from them, they said I couldn't have it, as people had been putting them up on torrent sites! Nice. You can buy this, but you can't have it in case your a stinking pirate. (Downloaded the FPS Creator version and used an "aquired" key to get the files out - I've paid for them!) Do they not realise you can't stop people copying these kind of files!?! (Unless they put DRM into every file in windows - Oh god no...)

Woah - sorry about the rant there. Went a bit off topic really....

IFPI wins Danish block on Pirate Bay

DNS Server

If you don't fancy BIND, you can use Tree Walk also.. Seemed to work fine for me.

But sticking a redirect in your hosts file is probably the easiest thing.

Seriously, what a pointless move. It's like trying to bring down a criminal organisation by taking their number out of the phone book.

100Mbit/s sewer broadband rollout coming your way

Teh interwebs

Well all knew the internet was not a big truck, but it appears it may, in fact, be a series of tubes.

Who'd have thought it? The prophecy has been fulfilled.

Manhunt 2 banned

How stupid do you need to be...

I just re-read my last post, and realised it sounded a bit dodgy. I'm not condoning child porn or rape, I just meant normal, common or garden pornography.

How stupid do you need to be...

In order to need to play a game or watch a film in order to work out how to kill someone. Like there's all these people sat around thinking, "God, I wish I knew how to murderise people." until they play Manhunt 2.. "Of course! You wrap the lead pipe around their head! And there was me trying to kill people by hugging and kissing them."

To my mind playing violent games and watching violent films is escapism. It may allow people with problems with violence to sate their blood lust temporarily. There's a certain amount of evidence that pedophiles and rapists are more likely to commit real offences when sources of pornography are removed from them, and I don't see that violence should be any different.

And yeah, this is ridicualously good advertisment. I played the first game and didn't really enjoy it that much.. Too much sneaking around, too dark (lighting not theme) and too dull. Having heard this I really want to find a copy of Manhunt 2, just to see how bad it is, which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise.

Say goodbye to Office 2003, Microsoft tells PC builders

Twice as ineffecient

Anyone have any idea why the new version of Office needs twice as much memory in order to run the spell checker?

Maybe the added all the stupid new words from the last 4 years and doubled the dictionary size...