Posts by Lord Voldemortgage

The Dragon 32 is 30

Re: Microdrives

Microdrives were incorporated into the OPD and were indeed pretty reliable - dug one out of an old, dusty storebox in 1999 and it was still able to load Snake.

"My secretary is on my extension. He. He. He."

Re: Boots

I bought my copy of Elite for the BBC B from Boots, you're right, it does seem bonkers looking back.

Beak explodes at Samsung's evidence leak in Apple patent spat

" it's the judge who told Samsung to stop it. Not Apple."

I can't understand why anyone would get the two confused.

Microsoft: Gmail rival Outlook.com will 'look good on your iPad' 

Space for ads

There a sodding great ad bar down the right-hand side (when using outlook.com in a browser with no ad blocker) which I consider to be wasting quite a great deal of space.

Still on first viewing it seems as good as most webmail options.

Isaacson fights outing of heart-to-heart chats with Steve Jobs

"Mr Isaacson conducted numerous interviews during the time Mr Jobs was involved in negotiating Apple's entry into the eBook market. And Mr Jobs discussed Apple's eBook strategy and negotiations with Mr Isaacson,"

I guess if that's the case then this might be a relevant line of enquiry - seems plausible that one might be less guarded with a biographer whose end product you will get to censor as you wish, than you would be with more public utterances.

Apple reverses resistible rise of Android

Samsung

How much has Samsung been affected in that market? Would be good to see their figures separate from the rest of the Android field.

@UnSteveDorkland Twitter satirist faces 4 charges in US court

Costs

" costs associated with the computer fraud charges - with $5,000 for example spent on repatching the system that the defendant had allegedly breached.

Right, because being given a heads-up about a job you have not done properly 'costs'.

It's the sort of thing they probably pay consultants to tell them, and the work required to resolve it is a normal business overhead.

Apple, Samsung begin battle for billions in US patent smackdown

Re: WTF?!

I am sure the image of the phone could be shown without including Jobs's face.

Japanese fanboi builds FrankenPhone from 'bits of iPhone 5'

Re: Any phone manufacturers with the headphone slot at the bottom?

I prefer the headphone socket at the bottom - everything seems to be the right way round when you reach into your pocket and pull the thing out and then the cable doesn't trail over the screen.

Big biz 'struggling' to dump Windows XP

IE6

So Microsoft's attempt to lock people into the Windows environment has been too successful and it is keeping them from moving on within that environment?

Shame.

Twitter impostors stop at NOTHING to drag athletes through mud

as the athletes gain notoriety during the Games.

Is it too much to hope that more of them gain fame?

Never mind Azure: They BROKE Twitter!

I blame the Daily Mail

Happened just as I was going to follow @UnSteveDorkland

Nationwide DOUBLES card payments in fresh banking gaffe

Re: IT outsourced?

I might be wrong but I think I remember them outsourcing to BT.

Girls tricked by STEAMY message: Webcam spyware student jailed

This is why

I always wear a David Cameron mask at all times when using any camera-equipped computer.

Try getting any "subsequent sexual gratification" from that pervboy.

What happens when Facebook follows MySpace?

Re: Run your own server?

All good but still, I wonder how many times you will (have to) move that data over the next 30 years.

It's an interesting article - I have photographs that were taken by relatives that died before I was born, leafing through books of those is fun and if I had kids I'd pass these on to them but is anyone going to be bothered to trawl my home server and look at my pictures when I've kicked the bucket?

Pano does browser-thin virty desktops

This is a problem all round for thin client.

You are going to find it difficult to convince management to spend more than it costs to buy a PC on these clients just so they can connect to a yet more expensive back end system.

Something like Thinstation on an old PC comes in way cheaper, and is nearly equally stateless and reliable. It can connect to systems that require fewer back-end resources than VDI type setups too.

Apple Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

"iMessage is cool but useless unless you're already inside the walled garden"

That's how it came across. Is it really just another IM service but one that is limited to Apple devices? I don't understand why that would be worth bigging up. Does it link in with any other IM services?

HTML 5 gets forked up

Re: UWHATWGW3C

Web Hypertext Application Technology Task Force or WHAT TF for short.

'Sacrifice another goat!: iCloud is Apple's biggest failure before Google

I have to agree re Google

I am not particularly fond of Google's approach to many things but the technology really does work.

I've bought or been given almost every generation of portable computer including Newtons, Zodiacs, NetBooks, iPaqs, and iPods and nothing has ever come close to the simplicity of moving from one Android phone to another which was almost bafflingly straightforward for someone expecting a bit of hacking around.

I can't comment on Apple's own cloudiness but I use Google's services to keep my iPod Touch and my work Outlook in sync, it will even do contacts with my old Nokia phone.

Of course the upshot of this device coverage is that, like the author with his house full of Apple products, I don't feel tied to Google devices.

Readers fret over LOHAN's chilly bits

Re: Heaters gonna heat

That's what I was thinking and launch is going to be at a pre-determined height, isn't it? Presumably as near to the balloon burst as it is prudent to leave it.

So as long as the thing gets aloft, differences in weight didn't ought to have any effect.

Re: Need heat??

It's almost like you didn't bother reading the article or comments at all...

Heaters gonna heat

8 batteries weigh quite a bit ... which is lifting capacity you'd rather use to get your balloon to a higher launch altitude.

Is the payload weight going to have any impact on launch altitude?

Google ordered to censor 'torrent', 'megaupload' and more words

Re: Zut alors!

"dsylexic"

Someone call Alanis.

Re: Gotta love those Frogs.

what if someone wanted to look up a "torrent of rain"? Guess it's illegal in France.

They'd probably subvert this by searching in French.

Re: Zut alors!

Are they really banning all results containing the word "torrent"?

No.

They are just making it less likely that someone who wasn't looking for this sort of thing in the first place would find it. Which will obviously solve the whole issue of piracy at a stroke.

I guess they might cause moderate inconvenience to an extremely forgetful or dsylexic pirate this way.

Dumpling squid do it WHENEVER THEY CAN, FOR HOURS ON END!

Praise be

to their fondle-y appendages.

Study: Users prefer Google+ over Facebook

Re: Ghosttown?

"If I ever find myself "following a product" I'll drink drain cleaner."

If you enjoyed your Clog-B-Gon experience please like us on our Facebook page.

GMail

"I'm not even going to get started on the abject uselessness of Gmail, which won't even let you sort your inbox by sender."

Mad, isn't it?

Being Google, they'd probably suggest using the search box but you can pull up a list of mail from a particular sender by hovering over the sender name in the inbox and selecting the emails link in the box that pops up.

You can also set a rule to assign a label to mail from particular sources and then view by that label.

It's not intuitive if you've come from traditional mail clients but GMail is pretty flexible.

Olympic Security cock-up was down to that DARN software

Re: "They have promised to meet all costs faced by the police and armed forces."

In this case I think the people at the bottom might be okay - the security work they do will still need doing and they seem to get nothing in the way of job security / perks from G4S as it is.

Yahoo! hack! leaks! 453,000! unencrypted passwords!

Share doubt

Their share price hasn't collapsed yet.

I wonder if it will.

And who would be pleased if it did.

Formspring springs a leak: 28 MILLION passwords reset after raid

"Development and live should never be connected"

Reading between the lines it looks like they might have dumped a copy of the live database onto a development server - I've seen it done.

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

Re: Culture and Temperature

I'd guess that great empires depend significantly on efficiency in agriculture so that it is possible to feed many more people than it takes to produce the food giving spare manpower for fighting and thinking so it may well be easier to grow to the necessary size in warmer (within sane bounds) climes.

Re: ice faries

Every time.

Re: Oh wouldn't it be ironic!

Of course it would be relatively straightforward to release a large amount of CO2 quickly if it was found that reducing / slowing the rate of increase of our output was having a negative effect.

Revealed at last: Universe's intergalactic dark matter skeleton

Re: "Boffo"?

It's been used (albeit infrequently) for many decades to mean roughly "very good indeed"

There's also a Wodehouse character called Boffo but I don't know if that has any direct relevance.

Is the Higgs boson an imposter?

Re: End of physics?

Wikipedia (I know . . .) lists the Kelvin quote as disputed:

Although reportedly from an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1900), the quote is only duplicated without citation to any primary source in various books, including Superstring : A theory of everything? (1988) by Paul Davies and Julian Brown; also in Rebuilding the Matrix : Science and Faith in the 21st Century (2003) by Denis Alexander. To be more credible, a source prior to the 1980s and close to 1900 is needed.

Confusion may be due to Michelson who made a similar quote whilst mentioning Lord Kelvin: In 1894, Albert A. Michelson remarked that in physics there were no more fundamental discoveries to be made. Quoting Lord Kelvin, he continued, “An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals"