Posts by John

Blu-ray brains create 3D taskforce

@sooty

You honesty think you can fit high quality 1080P on a DVD? The raw amount of data from 1080P is monstrous and even combined with the highly efficient x264 encoder you aren't going to get that onto a multi-layered dvd without compromise.

"it's the same way that dvd quality video was put onto cd's by most computer users before writable dvd's became common"

Oh please tell me you aren't talking about svcds. Not only were they encoded in mpeg2, but they couldn't hold a 2 hour film. Even taking into account mpeg4 which didn't arrive until quite late, you will not end up with 'dvd' quality.

O2 and Be customers suffer network congestion

They've Been Great For Us

While being a student we've been using Be with this being our third house with them and I really can't complain. For example our router had been acting up badly (hardware issue), following a phone call we had a new router at the door 2 days later.

To be honest I wouldn't be able to tell if it's Be or our house that would cause any slow down for me. With 5 students in a house its heavily used.

Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history

On Be...

Tried accessing http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and eventually it timed out saying "We're sorry. Your request failed to connect to our servers. This may be due to temporary problems in our data center, or difficulty serving a higher-than-usual volume of traffic. "

But while attempting I saw it connect through the 'http://iwfwebfilter.thus.net/web/20020124121058/http://www.bbc.co.uk/' pointed at above. I figure they arn't actually blocking the bbc, just that all requests through archive.org are routed through the IWF servers, and their servers have buggered up. I can't really see the BBC ever having hosted child porn.

I can access other websites on archive correctly though.

Rare Mac Trojan exploits Apple vuln

@ mods

You really shouldn't have let this slip through:

"Big news

By Art Vanderlay"

It could really ruin someones day if they accidentally ran it (not everyone who reads the register comments is a techy).

Ofcom slaps MTV with £255k fine

Number of Complaints

The level of stupidity displayed in this thread is far beyond the average for el reg. To begin with number of complaints isn't the reason they are fined, it is used as a reason for Ofcom to investigate said complaint and see if they breached broadcasting guidelines. People complain en masse for some programs, and Ofcoms ignores them because they havn't done anything technically wrong. There is no way for Ofcom to monitor all content broadcast, so this is the best available.

Similary people tend not to complain at all, and so when even 4 do, that represents a sizable number, especially for something like mtv, and I doubt any 14 year olds will be doing the complaining. Compare to complaints for adverts, where the average number of complaints to get an advert pulled is 1.3 (I think).

For the comments saying 'if it offends you, don't watch it' well this is utter nonce, by this stance all programs should broadcast whatever they want, and if it offends you turn over, nevermind the children watching.

IBM and Dell lick their lips as Microsoft and Google buy billions in gear

File Types

Considering the primary advantage vorbis has over mp3 is at low bitrates, why not produce the 'small crappy' version in vorbis instead? Considering it's supposedly meant to become an internet standard, why not use it.

PETA offers $1m for test tube chicken

soylent chicken

Interestingly if successful this would also benefit the worlds food shortage since animals gobble up so much grain, "760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/15/food.biofuels). Then on top of that if viable and done with cows rather than chickens it would also reduce global warming by stopping all those smelly farts. But unfortunately as others have pointed out by asking it to be competitive after only 4 years, its a bit unfair. Then again who knows how desperate vegetarians are to eat this stuff, a 10x premium could seem cheep.

Jodrell Bank offloaded on eBay

Uni Of Manchester

I spoke to my tutor about this last week (physics department) who is heavily involved with Jodrell and he was pretty bloody pissed off about it. He did say there is a lot of behind the scenes arguing going on and that there is funding to last like 18 months or so, but they will fight the whole way.

Trojans besiege online gamers

I don't undestand

Why people fall for these blatant fraudulent emails.

It wouldn't happen in real life imagine:

Someone knocks at the door, it's a foreign bloke and his English is so bad you can barely understand him, but you just about make out something along the lines of "can you give us the code for your alarm, we want to test it for security purposes".

How many people would actually fall for that?

Travelocity accidentally books 1,458 trips between US and Cuba

Aha, Found it

Yeah found one of the articles,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/cuba/story/0,,2024704,00.html

In short, Hilton banned some Cuban organisation from the hotel in Oslo, which applied to all European Hotels, large backlash, with many groups boycotting them.

Then followed by Hilton repealing the ban (based on that it was discriminatory).

Shows that pressure can have these descisions reversed.

UK problem as well

Trying to recall, but i'm pretty sure the goverment got quite pissed off when it turned out that american companies operating in the UK were discriminating against Cubans.

I think the Hilton hotel was an example, where they refused to accept anyone who had flown from Cuba.

May be worth contacting someone about lastminute.com

Governator vows to appeal ruling striking down video game law

Even more Needed Than For Films

With a film, at least the parent can watch it themselves before deciding whether they condiser it appropriate for their child, and since most people enjoy watching a film it's not really a problem.

However with games, you can't sit and play a game for 2 hours and work out whether the whole game is going to be similar, the first 2 hours can even just be a tutorial. Even then many people don't like playing games at all and anyway who wants to play only 2 hours of one and just give up.

A good rating system is the only way a parent can sensibly know whether a game is generally going to be suitible.