Posts by BatCat

MPs lambast BBFC over Batman

Did I keep blinking or something???

We went to see it as a family (including 2 kids @ 12 & 13) and I didn't see any actual knifings, I must have kept blinking just at the wrong moment! Yes there was plenty of implied violence, but other than a bit of fisticuffs, the detail was left to the viewer's imagination. Even my two daughters commented that Two Face's injuries were unrealistic as there was no blood.

BTW, we saw the IMAX version, the IMAX scenes were awesome, but the fight scenes that were just scaled up were hard to watch with so much close-up action on such a big screen. They should have shot all the action scenes in IMAX really.

UK ISPs agree to menace their filesharing users

Damn, my ISP's not one of the six :o(

From the beeb "BT, Virgin, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse have all signed up." That means all the freeloading idiots will be migrating to other ISPs including mine and hogging my bandwidth downloading crappy quality renditions of crappy films and crappy music. I think I'll write to my ISP and complain that they haven't signed up. Maybe if all the idiots sharing copyrighted material were kicked off, our ISPs wouldn't need to throttle P2P protocols and we could use them more effectively for distributing software or our home produced media...

Canon EOS 400D digital SLR

Mine's great

I almost went for a 30D instead of the 400D when I was looking. I'm glad I didn't. The 400D body is fine for my use and I was able to spend about £500 on a couple of good lenses instead of blowing all my budget on the 30D.

UK cops arrest six alleged BitTorrent music uploaders

There's also a

Hollywood and lots of Californias...

Truphone becomes a true phone

Still not practical though...

I gave truphone a try, mainly because the launch offer included free calls to UK land lines and about 40 other countries. So, using my home broadband, the calls were effectively free. I was very impressed with the call quality - a lot better than skype for example plus the convenience of integration with my handset - but there was one huge flaw in the plan. With WiFi in use, my phone's battery lasted about 30 mins and I usually get pretty good life out of it. Yes, since I was using it from home I could keep it on charge, but out-and-about it renders the service useless...

Stem cell researchers claim victory in battle with Church

Think of the money...

The only reason this has been given the green-light is to make sure that the life-sciences industry in the UK is able to cash in. As always, the driver behind this political decision is purely economic - that's why it doesn't matter if this technique is useful or not, so long as some pharmaceutical company is willing to spend millions on it right here in he UK.

Google under fire again for handing user info to police

Erm.... Read behind the headline!

FFS! the bloke wasn't arrested for saying he hated her, or expressing his political views.

From the ExpressIndia page:

"he police said that hating Sonia Gandhi is a personal opinion of the person who formed the community and having a personal opinion about someone is not an offence as per the law."

He was arrested for posting:

"content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi"

I think that you'll find that even in the UK, if you make libelous / slanderous comments about people you could end up facing prosecution.

Moral of this story; If you want to make your political opinions known, keep it clean - specially in India.

PS3 update fails to fix Grand Theft Auto IV woes

My Atari 2600...

... never crashed.

Cartridge games on my C64 always loaded perfectly - I agree that audio tape made lousy data storage mechanism.

My Super Nintendo had days (and nights) of continuous use without any problems.

I don't remember having problems with PS1 or PS2 games.

My Wii seems pretty robust too, though I must admit that these days I don't spend multiple days of continuous game playing like I did on the other consoles.

It just seems like there's an issue with every other new title that gets released on the XBox 360 or PS3.

Anybody else remember...

...when games consoles just worked?

Might as well run games on a PC if the console manufacturers can't guarantee the games will be properly compatible.

Jeez!

GTA IV PS3 fights off resolution woes in the UK

PS2

Neither of them look that much better than the GTA San Andreas I have on my PS2 & since the game play is effectively the same, why would anyone want to by a "next gen" console just for this?

Ubuntu man Shuttleworth dissects Hardy Heron's arrival

Harry Hill's OS Burp...

Windows / Mac / (insert distro of choice) Linux, which is best? Only one way to find out...

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Cue portly MS gent in business suit, stylish Mac dude and a bunch of fat, spotty, long-haired geeks having a punch up. :o)

This is a bit like the US presidency race, while the Democrat candidates are busy fighting each other, the republican ends up winning.

All very amusing...

eBay slams UK.gov touting ban

Non-paying bidder

1. Set up an ebay account with bogus details.

2. Get some auction sniping software

3. Set up huge bids for every ticket sale you can find

4. Win all the auctions

5. Don't pay

6. Touts have to relist

Repeat until a) touts stop listing or b) the ticketed event has been and gone, leaving touts with worthless tickets.

Quake rocks Britain

QUAKE CASUALTIES CONFIRMED!!!

In rural Lincolnshire, part of a church tower was caused to collapse into the graveyard. Local police have recovered 30 bodies, but fear there may be dozens more...

BBC mulls dropping Flash as iPlayer meets iPhone

Free cloud access to BBC

Dang! I thought the free access to BBC via the cloud was my little secret. I often stream BBC podcasts to my iPod Touch for free at airports and other Cloud sites. Being able to watch telly for free at the airport will be a great bonus!

BTW, it's free for any wireless device, not just apple ones.

Panasonic preps Wiimote-proof TV

LASER / laser / lazer etc...

If the term LASER is an acronym, why are you typing it in mixed / lower case. Surely it should correctly be LASER.

Turning a Nokia phone into a hotspot

Cool!

I was waiting for something like this to hook my iPod Touch up to my N95. They could have added some basic security like MAC filtering though :o(

Microsoft! bids! $44.6bn! for! Yahoo!

Yahoo is crap anyhow...

I remember when the choice of search engines was AltaVista and Yahoo. Google blew them both into the dirt. No idea why Microsoft is bothering with them, it certainly can't be for their search site. GMail is a stack better than either hotmail or yahoo mail too.

Apple on the lookout for one million unlocked iPhones

@Gavin Taylor

If you're so utilitarian with your gadgets, how come you have a "Smart Phone"?

Surely a Nokia 1110 (SIM free £30) or similar would be adequate for your telephony needs rather than the overly functional Sony Smart Phone when all you do is make calls and send the odd text?

There you go, I've saved you a few quid next time you come to renew your phone contract. No need to thank me ;o)

I think you'll find you're in a minority when it comes to people who have to do stuff on the move, nobody wants to carry a bag load of electronics around with them when they're traveling. On that basis, I'm holding out until the (n)Gen iPhone is released that will do everything my N95 can do, but with the cool iTouch UI and big screen. And, if the Apple bean counters are reading this, I'd happily pay upto £500 for such a device, network lock free. I understand exactly how the maths works behind phones on contract, so I'm happy to pay for the phone out right and pay for the network services separately.

Cheers.

BOFH: What GPS is for

Best GPS trick...

... I've done is setting some poor geographically challenged visiting Road Warrior's Home address to somewhere completely different. They just jump in the car, fire up TomTom and hit Home as the destination. I wonder how long it is before they realise they're heading in completely the wrong direction...

:o)

Apple's iPhone numbers do not add up

2/3 of iPhones hacked....

I surveyed a representative sample*** of iPhone users in the UK and found that 2/3 of them are running a hacked handset on a network other than O2 that were bought and never activated.

Personally I'm in the 16GB iPod Touch + Nokia N95 phone camp. I'll get an iPhone as soon as the 16GB ( or preferably 32GB ), 3.5G HSDPA with video capable 5Mp autofocus camera comes out - along with a hack to run it on Vodafone. Unless the fabled blue-tooth activation hack is discovered for the iPod Touch before then, in which case I'll stick with what I have.

*** Sample was 2 work colleagues and 1 client staff member. ;o)

Autothrottle problems suspected in Heathrow 777 crash

Maybe it was the pilot / co-pilot's fault after all...

Anybody remember the case of the 'plane that crashed near east midlands airport in the UK in 1989? Apparently, a warning light came on indicating a fault in one engine and the pilot shut down the other good one by mistake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/8/newsid_2506000/2506665.stm

"As the aircraft began its descent the remaining engine failed too.

Experts said later the chance of suffering such a double engine failure was a hundred million to one. "

"A report by the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch later found the flight crew had shut down the wrong engine."

Heathrow 777 crash flattens servers

Out of Fuel

My money is on empty tanks being the cause - though I'm sure it'll never come to light if it was.

There's plenty of stories of airlines being reprimanded for flying into Heathrow without enough spare fuel to stay stacked in the holding pattern long enough at busy times. This was a long-haul flight against the prevailing weather, so possibly used more fuel than expected. The fact it cut out so close to the airport makes me think that the fuel reserve was marginal, if they had been miles out they would have diverted to a closer airport.

Surely BA the British Flag Carrier wouldn't risk the safety of an aircraft due to insufficient fuel?

"On Feb. 20, a British Airways [BAB] 747 (Flight 268 en route from Los Angeles to Heathrow) diverted itself to Manchester after declaring a Mayday for being short on fuel."

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0UBT/is_8_19/ai_n11844072

And an actual AAIB documented example...

http://www.aaib.dft.gov.uk/cms_resources/Boeing%20747-443,%20G-VROM%2007-07.pdf

More cases...

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFDA143BF934A15752C0A966958260

Clarkson's 'steal my ID' stunt backfires

Fuss about nothing Mk II

All very amusing, but it is just a prank as direct debit payments are protected in 2 important ways:

1) Direct debits can only be set up for payments to beneficiaries that are approved ‘originators’ of direct debits. In order to be approved, these beneficiaries are subjected to careful vetting procedures – and, once approved, they are required to give indemnity guarantees through their banks.

2) The direct debit guarantee provides for the customer’s bank to refund disputed payments without question, pending further investigation.

So, it's a bit tricky to exploit the direct debit system to actually steal people's money.

Would have been much funnier if they had set up a DD to Friends Of The Earth.

Turns out Clarkson is wrong twice about the same thing - ought to stick to writing about cars and not stuff he doesn't know anything about.

How to be a failure at Guitar Hero III

fishing? Adventure?

you're kidding, right?

BTW GHIII on the wii rocks!

Click here to turn your HP laptop into a brick

borrowed windows install media

even if you're lucky enough to get windows os cd chances are it and the serial number will be locked to the oem that supplied it. i've tried installing windows onto a toshiba laptop from a dell issued cd it detects the non dell bios and refuses to install. likewise trying to use the toshiba serial number and a borrowed non oem cd also fails. then they wonder why people resort to using bent copies of windows.

if you can live with the limitations, switch to linux.

brick fix...

... Can be found at www.ubuntu.com

N95 struggles to find itself

Google Maps

I hadn't even noticed that Nokia maps functionality had changed post upgrade as I use Google Maps for "you are here" style functionality. It will also position you based on your GSM cell then refine the accuracy as the GPS satellites are located, which I don't think the Nokia maps did.

I've got TomTom for proper route planning...

Dell spills its Guts over Ubuntu gear

If it wasn't for those pesky kids...

... we'd be a windows free household too.

However....

1) Still no Adobe Shockwave support

"Dad, why can't I run those games on miniclip.com that all my mates say are great"

2) Limited MSN support

"Dad, I know I can chat to my mates on pidgin, but why can't I see their webcam / nudges / winks / smiley central stuff"

These two things might sound trivial to tech-savvy adults, but they're what most "normal" kids use PCs for - that and playing non-flash games, though thankfully I've convinced them that games consoles are the best way to play games ;o)

Yes, I know I can install the Windows version of Firefox with wine and work round point 1, but I've not found a solution for point 2 yet - windows live messenger thingy won't install with wine. Much easier for me to just leave them on XP and use an Acronis image of the windows primary partition to restore when (inevitably) the XP OS gets virus infected / corrupted / degenerates.

IMHO, PC vendors should be legally obliged to supply their full range of hardware without ANY pre-installed OS, priced at the same level as the systems with a bundled OS less the cost of the OEM OS license.

As user friendly as Ubuntu 7.10 is, running Linux is still a significant compromise while ever 99.999% of the population are running windows. If Linus Torvalds had chosen to develop an open source version of windows rather than unix, we might have gotten somewhere...

US teen trades hacked iPhone for Nissan 350Z

Driving School

David Wiernicki - "Hopefully the kid can go to a competition driving school so he doesn't get himself kilt."

Best not go to David Coulthard's driving school then...

Serial eBay fraudster jailed for two years

Anyone with half a brain can spot bogus sellers on eBay....

I've bought and sold tons of stuff on eBay and never had a problem. Maybe that's because I take care who I buy from and don't get suckered into too-good-to-be-true deals, "I only accept cash / PO / Cheque payments because..." type crap, or suspicious / missing feedback history.

If you buy with paypal, or better still a credit card, you're covered against fraud anyway. Same goes for any online purchase. Have a look at Section 75 of Consumer Credit Act 1974 - then cancel your "fraud protection insurance" kindly sold to you by your bank, you don't need it, they do.

Compact Disc: 25 years old today

What about the 3 sided LP?

Monty Python released a 3 sided LP once. One side had 2 concentric tracks so you randomly got one of the two tracks depending upon whichever the needle picked up on the lead-in.

Try doing that with a CD, MP3 or other digital format...

Is Chernobyl behind academic slump in Sweden?

Selective Migration

What's most likely is that intelligent people, including the best teachers, who could get work elsewhere legged it when the rain started glowing in the dark. This selective migration would lower the average intelligence and teacher quality having a compound effect on academic outcomes.

Similar effects are seen in UK where the best teachers choose to work at schools in nice areas and leave rough inner-city establishments lumbered with inexperienced or rubbish staff - with corresponding discrepancies in academic outcomes.