Posts by wowfood

Universal Music mulls 'all you can eat' buffet of song downloads

Alternative Option

Do a streaming service, people subscribe to monthly, and as part of that monthly sign up give them a discount. "Buy this track for £1.99 from iTunes, or if you're signed up to our subscription service, only £1

Plusnet shunts blame for dodgy DNS traffic onto customers' routers

Re: Found this on a tp link router last night

I actually started using comodo recently. Can't exactly remember why, never even heard of iceDragon before, so I'll give it a look.

I've actually been caught out by this problem a few times in the past, and by I I mean my family and I've had to go through and change settings for them. As a note, Orange routers are terrible, at one point were were having the DNS changed on us almost monthly.

Fee fie Firefox: Mozilla's lawyers probe Dell over browser install charge

Are they blond?

A Dell spokeswoman said the fee covered the time taken to install Firefox, rather than the product itself.

The Mozilla product must be without cost and its distribution (whether by download or other media) may not be subject to a fee, or tied to subscribing to or purchasing a service, or the collection of personal information.

I'm pretty certain that charging for the time taken to install firefox would come under "Distribution may not be subject to a fee"

And £16.25 to install firefox? Even assuming a slow installation of around 5 minutes, that's touching on £200 an hour.

eBay stockholders! There's MORE to COME, thunders Carl Icahn

Survery questions

Majority of investors want the board to change. With no figures I can only assume this majority is 50.1% of something equally low

43% of investors want to split off paypal.

Isn't it great how he goes by the number of investors, rather than how big their investment is? 20 biggest investors vs 43% of what remains. I don't think he has a hope in hell. Then again at this point the douche should just start saying the opposite of what he wants to do.

Apple to grieving sons: NO, you cannot have access to your dead mum's iPad

From my look at it, the "we can use it as a shiny placemat" and the "false economy" of going through the process of getting the court order. I think at this point it's stubborn british pride. The device was left to him by his mother, apple are preventing him from using the device, so he's taking action about it.

Dark matter killed the dinosaurs, boffins suggest

If dinosaurs aren't real. Is Philosoraptor a mass delusion?

Re: A paper based on "what if"?????

What we need is hubert farnsworths what if machine.

CIA snoops snooped on Senate to spy spy torture report – report

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

We must tell the guardians a 'noble lie'.[1] The noble lie will assure them that they are better than those they serve and it is therefore their responsibility to guard and protect those lesser than themselves. We will instill in them a distaste for power or privilege; they will rule because they believe it right, not because they desire it.

Looks like we can now see what Platos republic would have led to.

HTML is a sexually transmitted disease, say many Americans

Re: Bozhe moi...

I had assumed a PETAbyte would be one of the few insects left, whom PETA have made their poster child for some reason or another.

Icahn and I will: Carl's war on eBay goes NUCLEAR over Skype

I'm surprised

nobody has attempted to take ICahn to court yet, accusations of insider trading (effectively) and directly confronting that guy whose name I forget, sounds a bit like slander to me.

German freemail firms defend AdBlock-nobbling campaign

Re: /sigh

Ars Technica did that a while back as an experiment.

They changed their page so that if adblock was enabled, not only were adds removed, but so was all the content. Apparently the idea was to start a debate on pretty much this kind of topic. Users were given 3 options, pay subscription, whitelist the site, or deal with it. Apparently the 'deal with it' crowd were rather vocal.

However not long after they did this, adblock changed the extension so it worked around the content strip.

This brings about two thoughts for me personally

I actually somewhat approve of this system, it seems... fair. Either pay for ad free, or don't and deal with adverts. I'll agree that sites need to get funding from somewhere. But I can also see a level of potential abuse, namely getting the most annoying adverts ever, and effectively pushing people towards paying protection money, i mean subscriptions to avoid them.

I grabbed adblock personally because I was getting peeved going to sites which had those banner ads that popped out and covered half the screen (normally funnily enough right as you clicked on something) or the ones with audio. Right now I have adblock set to allow unobtrusive adverts and that works for me. I still don't generate any revenue because I never click the darn things, but still.

Pakistan's YouTube ban may end after Google removes anti-Muslim vid

Re: Setting precedence

As one who is easily offended, your lack of empathy to my kind offends me. I demand you retract your post and issue a public apology.

Say WHAT? Qualcomm, MediaTek scrap over who has best 'marketing gimmick' octacore

And yet I still get a better shave using the 2 blade when I can find it. I find the 5 4 and occasionally even the 3 blades get clogged up with hair after the first shave. Still usable for a few weeks but nowhere near as comfortable and getting worse each time. The 2 blade? Run it under the tap and boom, clog free and works like a dream.

Microsoft shunts top exec Julie Larson-Green sideways to make way for Stephen Elop

lol

Elop, who was a rumoured contender for the position of top dog at Microsoft after the retirement of current CEO Steve Ballmer, will be working on devices like Xbox and Surface tablets

That's pure genius, put the guy who watned to get rid of the xbox division in charge of xbox. I mean, that is pure brilliance right there. Then again, while trying to make a success out of Nokia he single handedly drove them into the ground, so maybe by trying to drive something into the ground he'll actually make it better?

Java or .NET bod in the Midlands? Congrats - you've got a DOUBLE DIGIT payrise

Re: DOUBLE DIGIT payrise

We're in an international market people. Clearly it's ¥11

Amazon fuses LoveFilm, subs service, calls it Prime Instant Video

Well

They're streaming services which you can get on Linux with a bit of jiggerypokery. I can't remember the details off hand, but it was something to do with WINE and the windows version of firefox. There are other methods, this was the one I found simplest... I'm sure the instructions are out there somewhere.

Magnets to stick stuff to tablets: Yup, there's an Apple patent application for that

Re: Confused

I always liked the idea of having it so your GPS would link to your cars speedometer, and then feedback whether you're going above the speed limit. Perhaps in a future of electric cars having it so that it automatically caps your top speed to 5mp above the speed limit. At least it would kind've eliminate some of the stupidity you see on the road, even if a lot of drivers would hate it.

Chihuahua TERROR: Packs of TINY hounds menace Arizona

Re: In the words of Ron Swanson:

Anything that bounces when it barks is not a dog. It's a chew toy.

Google's paid link settlement plan will lead to fresh wave of abuses, claims Euro rival

Re: Idiots

Google shopping might be shite, but foundem is far worse.

Search for item on foundem and I'm given about 5 items all at, lets say... £10 + shipping. Search the same thing on google and I'm finding hundreds of pages of items (okay so only the first 3 pages are relevant) priced at £8.99 with free shipping.

Not only that, google shopping has saved me a fair bit of cash over the years. Are there other price comparison sites? Yes, and I've used them, and on occasion they work out cheaper than google for specific things, but 9/10 google gives me the same, or better deals.

Japanese fanboi first in queue for, er, iPhone 6

Re: This is old news...

I'm looking forward to the iPhone 8. I hear you can side load windows on it.

Re: I'll have a go at translation

And on the translation front ,9.75million yen is aprox £58,000. So the number it cost the airline isn't nearly as bad as it sounds.

It's a scientific fact: Online comment trolls are sadists

Does that mean

Those who feed the trolls are masochists?

Someone's snatched my yummy Brit COTTAGE PIE – Viv Reding

Re: Some say...

You know things are bad when they don't invade England because of food and weather, but then go full steam into Russia instead.

Re: Cheese? In a cottage pie?

I know some folks make cottage pie with cheese either grated atop, or mixed in with the maxh. Whenever we make it at home we've taken to using a mix of normal and sweet potato mash instead. No cheese though.

Hey El Reg ,we've had the perfect tea, the perfect bacon sarnie. Isn't it time for the perfect cottage pie?

Trials of 'Iron Man' military exoskeleton due in June

Timeline of events

Today they promise us exoskeleton armour to rival that of Iron Man. A month or so before teh deadline, they'll tell us that instead they have fully functioning unmanned droids, and then all we'll get is some robots that can salute.

Tinfoil hats proven useless by eleven-year mobe radiation study

aww

Reading the title I honestly thought an 11 year old kid had done a study on the effectiveness of tinfoil hats for a science fair or something.

John McAfee declares war on Android

so basically

turning mobile phones into chromebooks?

I'm all for somebody doing this except for one thing, and by one I mean one and three. I don't have very good wireless in the toilets at work, and I gotta play angry birds while I poop.

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

Re: PE

http://fit.webmd.com/teen/move/article/exercise-boosts-brain

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/teens-exercise-regularly-better-grades-study-article-1.1494199

And of course, not to mention the growing number of people in school who suffer from depression and go untreated. With statistics showing an increase in the suicide rate.

http://news.sky.com/story/1041290/significant-rise-in-the-number-of-suicides

Because as we all know, exercise is one of the best anti-depressants out there.

http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/exercise-depression

Minecraft developer kills Kickstarted Minecraft movie

Re: Rule zero of movies - Get the rights *first*

It's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Doesn't make it right.

Sony set to axe 5,000 workers worldwide as it flings PC biz overboard

Re: Their market

I've actually found the novatech laptops to be a pretty high quality thus far.

www.novatech.co.uk

First man/machine nerve grafts restore amputee's sense of touch

Why can I see

This tech being adopted by the military for their Talos project, or something similar. I mean sure having somebody in an ironman style suit is nice and all, but without a sense of touch the feedback is hard to grasp

(speaking from semi experience here of playing about with a mechanical glove picking up virtual objects at Reading Uni. You could see the object, you could see the virtual hand grasp them, you could feel the pressure being pushed back against the glove even. But with no sense of touch it was hard to keep hold of anything.)

I mean I'm not saying it'll be used exclusively for military uses. But I can easily see this being appropriated as such.

On the main subject of the article though. That is pretty damn amazing. And considering they had to implant electrodes into his arm, I'm surprised they didn't let him keep it for more long term testing. No idea how long those electrodes will last.

Google will dodge EU MONSTER FINES by 'promoting' rival search services

Re: I don't get it

Just tested this myself got slightly different results, BBC black death was 4th on google rather than 2nd, 2nd place went to Science News about DNA or something. The one thing I did notice though.

Bing has changed a lot since I last used it, but I wouldn't say it was an improvement. I'd say it was a cloning of google from a few years back. I mean if you swapped the logo I'd think it was google.

UK internet filtering shouldn't rely on knee tappers, says Tory MP

Re: Ahem!

No no it's opt in, the government just flipped stuff around to confuse folks.

You have to opt-in to get porn, rather than opt out of being filtered.

Sony on the ropes after Moody's downgrade to junk

@Phil O'Sophical

the 50% excess in price

I'm curious, which TV 'range' was that? A couple of weeks ago I was shopping for a new TV (42") and for a comparable feature set there was hardly any price difference between the Sony, LG and (slightly larger) Samsung (a few euros at most).

Honestly, it was about 6-7 yearsa go now. The cheapest Sony I could find while looking was around the £600 mark, while same size of LG was closer to £300. I haven't really looked more recently, so the price gap may very well have closed on the TV makret.

Re: How the Mighty Have Fallen

I'd still personally count sony as the best, but it's not the best so far as value is concerned.

Do I believe the quality of Sony Bravia TV X is better than the nearest competitor? (Samsung, LG) Yes I do. Do I think it's a large difference? Not really, marginal at best, and most would barely notice it. Do I think it's worth paying the 50% excess in price for that TV? Not on your life.

It's the same for their laptops, I love sony laptops, they always call out to me. But I'm not paying £1000 for the sony Vaio when I can grab the same spec laptop off novatech (sans OS) for £450.

I'm still of the mind that Sony should just pull out of the PC market,

Hah, that's a good thought. Maybe sony should scrap their PC division, and turn it into a Steam division making nice shiny steam boxes. Then when the 'console' generation begins to grind to a halt (I honestly don't think consoles have much more left in them, one more gen tops) they can shift their library / IP to PC via Steam.

Yes, HP will still sue you if you make cartridges for its inkjet printers

Few things

1: Never buying an HP printer.

2: I need to buy a new printer soon anyway. Anyone who can give me recommendations? I'd prefer one with scanner / photocopy capabilities.

'I don't understand why they feel like they own the word CANDY'

yeah, the candy crush thing to me is ridiculous. The last two comics on penny-arcade, and another comic on CAD both sum up my thoughts on the candy trademark thing pretty well. Would post links, but I'm at work.

As an over exaggeration, it'd be like nintendo trademarking use of italians in games because they had mario first. Bye bye assassins creed. "But they had an italian in the game, and the second game DIRECTLY REFERENCE MARIO!"

Techies CAN sue Google, Apple, Intel et al accused of wage-strangling pact

Re: That's the beauty of this

"Well this has been going on for, from OUR evidence, at least 10 years. In the years prior o that, employees were generally being offered 10k per year more to jump ship, as well as a bonus of 10k for jumping ship. Using these figures, and the fact one of these deals may go down every year for given employees, based on evidence of this one employee here, we can safely aassume that everyone on their "do not poach" lists could have recieved similar offers. so that's 20k per year effectively over 10 years, 200k per plaintiff, and because of the harm in the long term this amount should be doubled, if not trebled.

600k per plaintiff, 100 plaintiffs, we want 6 million 60 million plug lawyers fees.

I imagine it'll go something like that.

Fine! We'll keep updating WinXP's malware sniffer after April, says Microsoft

So effectively it'd be

"You have security essentials, it'll keep you up to date on malware and viruses... virusi? Virus'? Whatever"

"Woohoo, my computer is totally secure for another year!

"No, it's only secure for virus cover and malware, there are still manual exploits hackers can use which we can't stop"

"Totally secure"

Google appeals against French data watchdog over privacy policy fine

Question time,

Which will cost them more? the 150,000 euro fine. Or the lawyers fees they're liable to spend on the upcoming appeal.

Take off, nuke 'em from orbit: Kill patent trolls NOW, says FTC bigwig

Re: Only one option really...

Basically that'd be more for patents in scientific computations where holograms etc would be a key point in it, doesn't really apply in 99% of cases.

Re: Only one option really...

I was thinking much the same as charles. Traditional patent systems are still fairly applicable, The key fault here is design / software patents.

In my mind at least, consumer facing software patents should be lowered to say 5 years. (3 years to gain a market lead, 2 more as a 'bonus round') while business facing software patents (software on embedded systems for businesses etc) should be protected for a bit longer, since it takes longer to gain a market lead on the business end (since peoplel hate spending money on new stuff) lets say 15 years (10 to gain the market lead, 5 for bonus round)

Design patents etc should be removed all together, and instead replaced with trademarked design. Patents award far too much protection for a design that, quite frankly anyone could come up with. And if we had this design patent nonsense all those years ago we probably wouldn't even be driving cars the way we do right now.

I could however still approve of longer lasting software patents on algoryhtms etc, y'know cryptographic bits, some complex equation that allows you to perfectly simulate real world physics stuff like that.

The reason for this teired approach is that it's the front facing patents that are causing the most trouble.

Naked Aussie gets wedged in washing machine

How many aussies does it take to pull a naked man out of a washing machine

20

1 to lube him up, 2 to pull, and the rest to point and laugh.

Google BLASTS BACK at Apple, Microsoft, Sony in Android patent WAR

Re: is Sony the height of absurdity

I imagine them buying into it as a protection point. "If we go in with them, we'll be safe" and more then likely they wanted some of the other patents for their different product sections.

Picture this: Data-wrangling boffins say they have made JPEGs OBSOLETE

Bring out your jpegs! Bring out your jpegs!

So what format is killing jpeg now? First it was PNG, then webP, and I'm sure there have been others in between. Poor jpeg, why not bring out a new format to herrald the death of GIF instead?

UK payday loaners cop MEGA £175K fine for 'misleading' SMS spam

Re: Interest-ing

Nah that'd be cruel and unusual punishment.

Two Brits face criminal trial for sending 'menacing' tweets

Re: Bit sexist really

As a man I find her comment that it's all men sending her abuse to be discriminatory. Can I press charges for that?

Google's patent chief slammed the US patent office – now she's the agency's acting director

Mayhaps a better solution

would be additional charges for failure. As a bad example with figures from the air.

A patent costs £500 to register

Instead of charging the £500, double the fee to £1000. If the patent is successful, the extra £500 is returned to the inventor etc, if the patent fails, the money remains with the USPTO as a "you wasted our time and yours" fee. I bet that'd also encourage the USPTO to be a bit less lenient with which patents they allow.

Then again I'd also like to see them completely remove software design patents, and limit software patents in general to specific algorithms or proceses, rather tahn "A device that puts stuff somewhere"

Microsoft: Don't listen to 4chan ... especially the bit about bricking Xbox Ones

Re: How does it brick the console though?

More than likely it's a classic MS move. No dev ID needed to be input to put it into dev mode, but a dev id is needed to do anything after putting it in dev mode, including a factory reset. So not bricked, more like password protected with no idea what the password is.

World's OLDEST human DNA found in leg bone – but that's not the only boning going on...

So you're saying that for all these years, everyone has been lying to me? And rather than Darwins theory of evolution, it was in fact Darwins hypothesis of evolution?

I need to go reevaluate my life