* Posts by Steve

366 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Aug 2007

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Doctors: Third babies are the same as patio heaters

Steve

It'll happen whether we like it or not.

Voluntary control, or millions dying in famines. There is a limit to the number of people planet Earth can support, and if we're not there now, we'll get there soon. Maybe we need to get Geldof & co. promoting condoms instead of BandAid.

Gov pulls plug on prison PlayStations

Steve
Thumb Down

@Liam

> i agree that not evetryone should get the niceties.. it should be a reward for being well behaved...

Sod that. The only reward for being well-behaved should be that you get out when the judge said you would.

North Americans just don't steal handsets, apparently...

Steve
Happy

Grannies

> I doubt that'd happen in England; your grannies are WAY too mannerly to go around bricking people in the head.

Don't you believe it...

http://tinyurl.com/5ek7ws

Spaniards show off touchscreen moto-computer tech

Steve

But...

How much more electronics do they need to have before just sitting in one of these gets you done for using a non-handsfree mobile phone while driving?

@AC

100 -> 0 in 3 seconds is 1.5g by my calculation. Not quite so eye-popping, but I'd still have my eyes closed if I needed to do it :)

CE giants pitch yet another wireless HD standard

Steve

FEC?

"Any errors in the wireless channel are not noticed as they only affect the less important bits. "

Amazing, they actually know where the errors will be, so they can use those for the less important data. That is REAL forward error correction...

Divorce for shouty YouTube wife

Steve

@NT

> Gender as a synonym for sex is, sadly, pretty firmly dug in by now: the Online Etymology Dictionary dates that usage to 1963.

But I predate that, so I claim precedent :)

Steve
Coat

Gender

Gender is a quality of grammar, being masculine/feminine/neuter. The petition you want here is to have her deported from her _sex_ (being the distinction between male and female). Sadly the PC brigade in the US are so frightened to say "sex" that they prefer to use a longer and inaccurate word instead. El Reg should have more respect for the Queen's English, or at the very least it should have less respect for PCness.

</pedant mode>

Dell hits all the wrong keys – again

Steve

choice is good...

Amazing how they can *wrongly* do this so easily, but if I WANT a US keyboard, say to match the one I use in work, they tell me it isn't possible...

Japan to fund creation of 40W, 40in OLED TV

Steve

Re: Theory

OLED is an active technology, i.e. it generates light, unlike LCD which has a backlight whose output is blocked to get black (well, dark grey), so you only really need to light up one OLED pixel at a time. That must help a lot with power consumption.

Rabbit murderer stalks Ruhr Valley

Steve
Joke

Reminds me...

A guy is sitting watching TV one night, and his dog comes in. Seeing that the dog has something in it's mouth he takes a closer look, and realises that it's a dead rabbit. Fearing the worst, he looks out the window into the neighbour's garden. Yes, the hutch is empty. Oh dear...

He can't face telling the nice kids next door that his dog killed their pet rabbit, and after a while he has a brainwave. The rabbit isn't badly mauled, no sign of doggy toothmarks, and he knows it's quite a few years old. Waiting until it's dark, he tidies the dirt off its fur, sneaks over the fence and puts the rabbit back in the hutch, hoping that they'll assume it just died of old age.

Next morning he's out in the garden when he hears great distress and crying from next door. Swallowing the lump of shame in his throat he looks over the fence, and sees the kids in tears, being comforted by their Dad.

"Oh, is the rabbit dead?", with false concern and guilty smile. "No wonder the kids are upset. They've had it for quite a while, though."

"Yes", says the Dad. "In fact it died last weekend. Because they were a bit sad, we gave it a little funeral, and buried it in the flowerbed. Would you believe some sicko's dug it up and put it back in the hutch?"

Google penetrates fake sex world with Lively

Steve

Re:Yet Another Virtual World

"maybe people just aren't very impressive creatures when they are in a space with no social constraints or reputation or responsibility."

Or maybe it's the reverse. Only people who want no social constraints go to virtual worlds, the majority of us are happy in the real one. I've never felt the slightest inclination to visit Sadville, or WoW for that matter. The beer's better in a real pub ayway.

David Davis tells El Reg that Labour is 'mesmerised' by tech

Steve

Representative democracy

"a fair, democratic vote was taken within the UK parliamentary democracy system and it went contrary to Mr. Davis' views. So, rather than be a man he threw his toys out of the pram and acted the cunt."

The UK's parliamentary system is not a democracy (that would require us all to be consulted individually on everything) it is a representative democracy. We elect 600+ people to represent us, and on this issue it seems that there is significant doubt whether the result of their vote was in fact representative of the wishes of the electorate.

Davis has taken a perfectly reasonable step, which is *not* to say "I disagree with the vote", but rather to say "I think this vote was unrepresentative", and to offer people a chance to express their views directly. If he is wrong, then people are entitled to not re-elect him, or not to turn out.

Of course Brown & his cabinet know that the vote was unrepresentative, just like many others that they have whipped through, and so they refuse to contenance anyone standing against Davis, so that they can (as other posters have noted) respond to the result with "Well, we weren't playing, so the result doesn't count"

The result will be largely irrelevant in itself, but the message it sends may have some influence on the second chamber, when they come to vote on this issue again. If they send it back to the Commons it will be even harder for Brown & gang to force it through.

TVonics MFR-300 micro digital TV set-top box

Steve

Re:7 Channel Tuner

This is what you want. Not cheap though, about £400 I think, but hardly surprising since it contains multiple receivers and modulators. It's designed for hotel use, so that the hotel doesn't have to replace hundreds of analogue TVs. A domestic version could probably be develped more cheaply, but it's unlikely to be worthwhile.

http://multibox.se/6t/

Consider yourself Moderatrixed

Steve
Coat

Absinthe

Makes the heart grow fonder. Keep drinking...

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

Steve
Boffin

@Chris C

> It looks like LCD panels don't "scale" very well in terms of energy efficiency or power savings over CRT.

Probably true. Much of the power consumed in a CRT is by the deflection coils that scan the electron beam to and fro. That power is proportional to the deflection angle, not the absolute screen size. Most CRTs today have a consistent 110° deflection angle, no matter what the screen size is.

The actual illumination is caused by the electron beam hitting phosphors on the front of the tube, and since only one group of phosphors is targetted at a time this again will not be directly proportional to screen size. Bigger screens may have bigger dots, and require a more powerful beam, but the actual power difference is minor in terms of watts.

LCD TVs, on the other hand, illuminate the whole face of the screen all the time. That is proportional to the square of the screen size (usually given as a diagonal).

So it isn't at all surprising that LCD power consumption scales very non-linearly with size, and is much greater than that of a CRT TV at larger sizes.

The Moderatrix will see you now

Steve
Coat

Re: Non-geeky teccie men - do they exist?

> deodorant outlawed ... co-ordinating colour shirt and tie so difficult?

Ties?

Are you sure you're working with geeks, and haven't strayed into a French marketing convention in error?

> Why don't tall, good looking men go into engineering?

Modesty forbids...

Steve
Coat

Safety words?

Who ever needs anything other than PLUGH and XYZZY ?

BOFH: The admin gene

Steve

The gene

It's true, it must be. It's the same gene that means my wife can try something electronic or mechanical 3-4 times and it won't work, but when *I* reach over and push the same button - bingo first time.

Ah, I can feel a warm smug weekend coming on...

TSA says 'checkpoint friendly' laptop bags on the way

Steve
Flame

...there won't be any confusion about what passes...

Fat chance. Even within one airport the security hitlers (sorry, Godwin) don't all apply the same rules, never mind when connecting through different airports on a long journey. Train the security monkeys consistently first, then worry about designer laptop bags.

Better yet, forget the its-only-for-show-anyway security crap and just get the planes there on time.

Dualit DAB Lite radio

Steve

EU power adaptor

So does it handle Band L DAB as (barely) used elswhere in the EU, or just Band II DAB as used in the UK ?

Don't get me wrong, I think DAB is a good idea and I wish I could get a DAB signal here, but a little bit of coherent design would help...

UK abandons train and tube scanners

Steve

Re: What kind of fuckwit do we have running our country?

An elected one, sadly... For as long as we take the attitude "they're all he same, I don't care enough to vote/stand/complain/..." we have to take some of the blame.

San Franciscans prep monument to US prez

Steve

@james

No, I mean "se rendre". "rendre", the infinitive of the verb to give something up (i.e. 'render') and "se", the standard prefix to make a verb reflexive.

Check it in a dictionary if you like, my Robert (French) and my CollinsRobert (French/English) both agree with me :)

Steve
Coat

@Secretgeek

> and 'We surrender' is French is it?

Well, technically yes.

surrender comes from the French "se rendre", meaning "to give oneself up"

I know, I know, but it's too hot for a coat today...

100,000 sign for BT Fon wi-fi love-in

Steve

sounds familiar

Don't you remember the Fonera lake?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/29/fon_network_disruption/

'Untraceable' phone fraudsters eye your credit card

Steve

@Jim

If you set your office PBX up to divert calls to your mobile, then (if it is properly configured) it will add the signalling info from the inbound call to the outbound, and the exchange being called will get signalling information containing both numbers. i.e. it will have both the original caller's number, and the number from your PBX. It is up to the receiving exchange which of those numbers to present as caller. Most will present the original number if it was not withheld, otherwise they will present the number from the intermediate PBX. I do this all the time, and my mobile almost always displays the real caller's number, with no special config on my office PBX.

Of course, if you have full control over the PBX then you can add any other signalling info you want, to make the call look as if it came from elsewhere, so the presented caller ID is rubbish. The receiving telco should, though, be able to retrieve at least the PBX number. In the UK that would, AFAIK, require a police request with a court warrant.

Fire at The Planet takes down thousands of websites

Steve

@Dick

I agree that appropriate DR needs to be matched to the service they are selling. If their customers are happy with an SLA that allows a 48+ hour outage then that's fine. The people I deal with will get upset (putting it mildly) over a 2-hour outage.

There's no need to have an idle data centre elsewhere, though. It could be doing useful work with some spare capacity ready to pick up the load from a site that fails, giving reduced service rather than a full outage. As with all HA/BCDR solutions its a tradeoff of cost versus RPO/RTO matched to the service agreement that you're selling to your customers. The likes of the Nasdaq or the NYSE will have very different DR requirements to a small company that will be only mildly inconvenienced by a two-day outage.

Personally I wouldn't trust my business to a company with all its data centres in one city, though. There are way too many possible common-mode failures there.

Steve

@Richard

"nothing to do with poor disaster recovery"

Yes it is. Good DR requires that you have a backup installation sufficiently far from the primary site to withstand events like 9/11, New Orleans, Chernobyl etc.

If a few exploding transformers that take out some racks and cables put you off air, you do not have a valid DR plan. A UPS and generators might provide some measure of local high availability (HA), they don't cut it for DR.

And yes, DR costs more than HA. Just like insurance, you have to pay for adequate protection, or pay the price. There are a number of reports around which show that ~40% of businesses without a DR plan go bust after a disaster. The rest have a very painful few years.

Steve
Boffin

Unashamed plug for open source DR community

If our El Reg moderatrix will permit it (pretty please, Sarah), may I invite Dr Trevor Marshall and other interested parties to join us for discussions at:

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/

and/or

http://blogs.sun.com/SC/

and look particularly for entries related to the Geographic Edition.

Phorm opponents to picket BT shareholders

Steve

Shareholder resolution?

What about getting enough shareholders to sign up to put an anti-phorm resolution on the AGM agenda? Then lobby the institutional shareholders.

Boeing starts leak tests on nuke-nobbler raygun jumbo

Steve
Coat

full power photon arse-kicker

Photons have arses? Fascinating.

See him? He's as tight as photon's arse...

Sony promises 27in OLED screen

Steve
Coat

Greenies

The O in OLED is Organic, so just let Tesco put them on display beside the 'organic' veggies (daft name, who wants /inorganic/ veggies?) and all the Greenies will be buying them to help save the environment. PT Barnum will be laughing...

Split on support for 'old' Java in next Eclipse

Steve
Thumb Up

PDP-11

"There's not much worth doing that can't be done in PDP11 Fortran IV. "

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building

"The overlays can get a bit tricky sometimes, given that there's only 64kB to play with, but..."

128k if you have an I/D space machine... Now if only I could get some bootable RSX-11M media for mine :(

Phoenix prepares to flex its muscles

Steve
Coat

Earthlings?

Shouldn't that be "Earth creatures" ?

Where's the kaboom...?

Indian gov denied BlackBerry snoop

Steve

@David Pollard

Sounds like a BT test number. People think it can show if they're being tapped? That's more a reflection on what 'recreational substances' can do to your brain :)

Revealed! The new face of the Eee PC

Steve
Thumb Up

Who cares about her cooking

I'd cook dinner for her anytime...

Russell T Davies bows out of Doctor Who

Steve

Last of the Time Lords?

Isn't there something inherently contradictory about someone who can travel in time constantly whining that he's the 'last' of something? Hey Doc, just pop back a few millennia...

And as for Billie Piper as 'companion', the only good thing I can say about her is that Catherine Bloody Tate is worse.

A videogame that truly takes the p*ss

Steve
Happy

Aiming

The urinals in Schipol airport have the image of a fly (the aerial sort, not the button/zip variety) embedded in the porcelain. Seems that the amusement value of aiming at it actually helps keep the floors cleaner...

Yorkshire police head off pillow fight anarchy

Steve
Coat

Pillow?

Maybe they thought it was a 'pilau' fight? All that rice in the fountains, could have been a very sticky situation...

DisplayPort to do DVI to death, analyst claims

Steve
Thumb Down

@Liam

"i hope you mean you use s-video for pc to Tv connections not for any dvd to tv etc connections. if so get yourself an RGB scart and see a massive quality difference"

Not so much. The encoding on a standard DVD is YUV, i.e. component, with the UV part substantially reduced in bandwidth during the encoding since the human eye is must less sensitive to colur then brightness. S-Video (Y/C) just encodes the UV into a single C(hrominance) signal with very little additional loss.

The only real difference between linking with RGB versus S-Video is where the conversion to RGB is done, in the TV or in the DVD player, and the respective quality of those circuits.

Of course, if you've spent £200 on a gold-plated RGB SCART cable, you'll certainly want to believe there's a difference, but... :)

Can't decide how to vote? Publicwhip.org will tell you

Steve
Flame

@rise of the centre

You think the centre is represented by the libdems? :)

These days NuLab and the Cameroons are so desperate to be all things to all people that they're the only parties fighting over the centre. Lib Dems are drifting leftwards. Maybe one day we'll get back to parties who define policies based on their beliefs, and work to persuade voters to support them, instead of parties that change their policies daily depending on what the latest poll suggests 'the centre' wants :( If they stopped treating votecounts like the price of a share in Britain PLC we'd all be better off.

Sharp claims record mobile fuel cell power density

Steve

Great on long plane journeys

"What would you like to drink, Sir?"

"Glass of red wine please, and a shot of vodka for the laptop"

UK punters love Nokia, hate McDonalds

Steve

@Henry Helmet

Cheap filth? I think it is fair to say that any filth you might get from ParisH is likely to be very, very expensive.

You may be thinking of Paris France, where cheap filth abounds on every pavement, which is why everyone walks around scowling at the ground, in case they stand in it in their Guccis...

Gordon Brown claims a Brit invented the iPod

Steve

@Peyton

The Scandinavians probably invented the ski, and used it for transport cross-country, but it was the Brits who pioneered ('invented" is a dodgy word) the idea of climbing up a mountain (near Chamonix) just so they could slide down it again.

These days it's only the French army recruits who have to do that, the rest of us can use ski lifts. Bet those boy soldiers just love us for that...

Steve

Not an iPod

I reckon Gordo's getting the iPod confused with the Web. That *was* invented by a Brit, even if he was in Switzerland at the time. The confusion explains a lot about NuLabour's education policy, they clearly wouldn't know a good education if it bit them in the arse. PissUp/Brewery and all that.

BOFH: Shiny new computer room

Steve

So...

One assumes that they don't have a disaster recovery plan either, then...?

Better not mention those containerized datacentre thingies, though. Make it all tooo easy.

Swiss start-up re-broadcasting UK TV channels

Steve

Nationalism

Hey guys, so what if Johnny Foreigner can watch the BBC for free. You can all watch French/German/Italian TV for free too, even though the citizens of those countries have to pay a licence fee.

What's that? You don't parlez Francais or sprechen Deutsch? Well, that's no excuse...

Japanese council worker in 750k smut site pornathon

Steve
Stop

Banned?

but, but, but...

There hasn't been a Paris Hilton story for the last month. You lot are all too busy playing with your weebles and playmobils

BOFH: The Boss gets Grandpa Simpson syndrome

Steve

Rubbish!

Hearing an 11/780 boot floppy came a long time after the crash. The first thing you heard was that unmistakable LA120 console printer rhythm

zzzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiippppppppp

zzzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiippppppppp

zzzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiippppppppp

zzzzzzzzziiiiiiiiiippppppppp

zip

zip

zip

zip

...

of crash info followed by kernel stack dump. I can still hear it...

Ah, maybe I should go and boot my 11/73, that was a real co{{~{{{{~~{{{

NO CARRIER

Police nick 460 a day for using mobiles while driving

Steve
Stop

@Some opinions worth more than others

The difference that you're ignoring is that it is impossible to define a safe speed for a given road, since it varies with circumstances. What may be safe on a clear dry Sunday at 6am could be totally unsafe (yet still legal) on a grey wet Friday at 3pm. If the speed limit (and hence the revenue camera trigger) is set on the high side it will be ineffective, so it tends to be set on the low side. The consequence is that for many roads the camera settings are too low most of the time. A well-trained driver (wishful thinking that there should be no other sort) is capable of making that judgement call.

A trained traffic cop can also use judgement and decide that booking someone for doing 31 in a 30 zone is pointless, or that someone doing 55 in a 50 zone should be let off with a good bollocking. And, of course, can decide that 25 in a 30 zone at schools-out time is still too dangerous, no matter what the speed limit sign says.

Instead we have a simple 'x is good, x+1 is bad' model, which causes people to concentrate on x to the exclusion of everything else. It is plain idiocy.

Phone use, on the other hand, requires concentration, and no driver should ever be giving less that 100% of their concentration to their driving, no matter what the conditions. It's as black & white as driving drunk, and should be penalised in a similar way. What about a 3-month ban for a first offence, 1 year for a second, and take the car & crush it for everytime after that?

MS supplies cops with DIY forensics tool

Steve

MS

Ah, Microsoft. OK.

I read M&S the first time. That would have been much more interesting

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