Posts by Andrew Tyler

Hulu headed for subscription service scheme?

Good luck with that.

They're going to need much better content updated much more frequently for me to consider paying a subscription. And as mentioned, if they want a subscription *and* advertisements: no way in hell. Strangely, Hulu was the first service where I didn't really mind watching advertisements. One 30 or 15 second spot where there would normally be a 2+ minute commercial break is fine with me. That's how they ought to do it on normal television as well. 30 seconds isn't long enough to make it worth fast-forwarding, isn't long enough for me to wander off to fix a drink or change the channel and, really, isn't even long enough for me to space out, so I actually watch the commercial and more or less pay attention. They've found the magic balance. Downloading bootleg torrents surely wouldn't be worth the hassle in comparison.

Sky shoots Swan Lake in 3D

Lose the glasses

I don't ever see myself getting into this so long as you have to wear 3D glasses. Maybe if I wore glasses anyways and if you could get 3D glasses in the same form factor as regular thin-rimmed glasses it would be different, but the bulky LCD shutter glasses they have today: no chance. Maybe for video games or movie theaters (IMAX would be awesome) because you're typically wholly engrossed in those, but never TV at home. I saw some stuff at Disneyland(world?) about fifteen years ago that used simple glasses with oppositely polarized lenses and that was pretty cool, and it had none of that nauseating flickering nonsense. It was Micheal Jackson dancing around on spaceships and stuff. Thank god it wasn't his modern appearance. I don't think I could handle that.

Women coppers eager to drop trousers

US

They ought to do like female officers in the States: cover their waistline with an assortment of weapons. Once you have your belt on with your teargas, club, taser, pistol, ammunition, and handcuffs, it doesn't much matter what your pants look like.

Intel 'Pine Trail' amputates Atom's third chip

Rivers

"But it's unclear why Pine Trail is two words and Pineview is only one word"

I think they name them after rivers in northern California.

Taking a first bite out of Wolfram Alpha

Okay then

I seemed to get a lot of "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input."

However, in response to "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?" It did give "A woodchuck could chuck all the wood he could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood."

I'll keep an eye on it.

Google hires goat army for lawn maintenance

I had a friend...

...who tried this. The problem is that they'd rather eat all of the leaves off your trees, the shrubs and the assorted plants before getting around to the grass.

Peugeot preps 4WD diesel hybrid

@ Micheal Smith

I don't see any reason why the generator can't be in front. All you'd need to do is run a wire to the back. I do wonder why only the back brakes use regenerative power though. You'd think the fronts, which do most of the braking by a good margin, would give better results. Since I can assume their engineers know better than I do, there must be a good reason for it, but I'd be interested to know why if anyone can fill me in.

Virgin wi-fi rolls up two years late

Useful for schedules.

It would be useful if they could give you real time telemetry of the train's position, which could even perhaps be an unofficial app helpful passengers with GPS receivers could volunteer to run and send out via Twitter or a webpage--might be popular, make some money for the owner. That way you could look up the REAL schedule.

Pirate Bay loses trial: defendants face prison time, hefty fines

Ah well.

They had it coming. I imagine a lot of media publishers are breathing a huge sigh of relief (at least for now) and I sympathize.

It is a little disappointing though because I have downloaded legitimate torrents that linked to the pirate bay. They are good for people who can't afford their own bandwidth-- in my case, my friends' bands music and video game mods. Presumably they'll have to use one of those other torrent search engines, but what does this mean for torrent search engines in general? I suspect it is impossible to run a legitimate search engine on a larger scale, so are we just going to see no torrent search engines at all anymore? I'm not entirely clear on how torrents work exactly, but there has to be some sort of centralized matchmaker, yeah?

They may have been doing a disservice to every torrent search engine by not really denying anything and, at the very least, pretending to run a legitimate site.

The Borings renew Street View fight

Wow.

Who's their lawyer, James Stewart?

The Boss bitchslaps Ticketmaster

The Dead

Been a while, but I recall that the Grateful Dead sold the tickets themselves mail order specifically to avoid Ticketmaster. They probably didn't need much actual 'promoting' though as it was guaranteed they'd sell tens of thousands of tickets easily and months beforehand. If they could do it, Springsteen could do it without a doubt though. They also allowed people to record (from the soundboard even), and freely distribute their live performances. Good stuff. Of course, they were in a position to do this because they were already very popular and guaranteed to sell a ton of tickets because of the hippie circus following them around.

To the gentlemen who suggested an open auction: I like that idea, but the tickets do sell out, so they already sell at the price the market will bear (bare?). If it cuts Ticketmaster out of the loop though, that's just fine with me.

I friend of mine worked with Springsteen once. I hear he's a really nice guy.

'Bart Simpson' punts Church of Scientology

I wonder if...

Being borged by the Scientologists is just a good career move for a hollywood type similar to joining whatever country club the executives play at even though you hate golf. Of course, going on to donate $10M is just plain nuts. It can't be worth that much. I thought she didn't make all that much (relatively) doing the Simpsons anyways.

LG DVS450H 'floating' DVD player

Ornamental Electronics

I don't care for them. If I'm concerned about the appearance of my entertainment center, I want everything hidden as much possible; not displayed like a painting on the wall. There's no getting around it with the TV, but I don't want this principle applied to things that don't involve looking at them for their primary function.

I wouldn't mind having something about the size of a portable cd-player that sits on the end-table with wireless ability to transfer raw data to a receiver somewhere out of sight for processing/display. That would be best.

Wikipedia self-flagellates over vanishing 'farmsex'

What a freakshow.

That's all I have to say about that.

Robo-flower wilts as power burns

I like it.

We should all buy one and display it somewhere prominently in our homes. That way we will know we've done our part for energy conservation and we can say authoritatively, by pointing at our flower, that this whole global warming thing is somebody else's problem. I'm so excited about this that I'm going to set aside an entire circuit just for it.

US teen tops himself live online

That's a shame.

In the same situation, I would wonder if I would know how to go about contacting the medics. I couldn't just dial 911 and say "CandyJunky needs an ambulance, I think maybe he lives in Florida."

If there wasn't any contact information, or anything close to it, for his account, how would you do it? Contact the site and have them figure out a general location from his ip or have them get in touch with his ISP? This would probably all have to happen well within an hour. I'm sure there were many people frantically trying to figure this out the moment they saw the video.

It would have been better if someone could have contacted his family at the first sign of any suicidal intentions so that he could get help to be sure. If he has any family.

Roachzilla menaces Florida

Roach...

When I was younger I worked at a hardware store in California. Opened up a box of bolts one day, shipped from god knows where, and there was a roach in there that was easily four inches long--one of the most hideous things I've ever seen. Naturally, I took it outside and flung it in the bushes.

Florida is dependent on tourism. They already have those palmetto bugs and big spiders, but if they have five-inch-long hissing cockroaches, I will never set foot in the state again. I doubt my cowardice is uncommon. They had better do something. If nothing else, for the sake of Mickey Mouse.

US spec-ops get robot whispercopter kill fleet this month

Mountains...

As I understand it, from watching overly dramatic mountain climbing documentaries, that you can't do helicopter rescues from way up there because of atmospheric pressure and whatnot. Might an aircraft like this with a service ceiling of 30,000 feet be able to get the job done, theoretically anyways? Mt. Everest, for instance, is a thousand feet shy of that at its peak. I do imagine that most people need rescuing in bad, non-helicopter friendly weather though.

However, if it saves me having to watch another documentary about some guy who is a "hero" because he decided to climb Mt. Everest and then couldn't hack it and his toes fell off, that would be entirely worthwhile. You also wouldn't be risking the lives of rescue personnel, which is nice--you know, the actual hero types.

Fisker prevails in Tesla tech theft claim fight

Holy god...

...that is one of the most godawful ugly cars I have ever seen. It would be okay except for the front grill which is hideous. It has the same effect as a super model who grins to reveal rotten teeth. It looks like The Joker, which in turn reminds me of clowns, and then PeeWee's big adventure, and that's just horrible. Clowns are disgusting, evil creatures, and should not be allowed anywhere in public.

I can't help but wonder what psycho thought that would be a good idea.

Hands on with SanDisk's SlotMusic SD-not-CD player

Interesting.

1 Gigabyte, and it's got Mp3s on it? I would actually think it wasn't a bad idea if each card came with an uncompressed version of the album as well as a 320kbs Mp3 version on the card for convenience, which would fit nicely on a 1GB card. Better yet, give us a 96khz/24-bit uncompressed version or a 5.1 channel version on a larger card, and this would be pretty slick actually (not the player, the albums themselves).

Artemis Fowl scribe to pen sixth Hitchhiker's novel

Nooooo.....

Let him write one in the Hitchhiker universe, like all of the other knock-off fantasy books, but leave the original storyline and characters be. Given Adams' untimely demise, the ending of Mostly Harmless is a perfect conclusion to the series.

Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit futility

NPR

National Public Radio's tech correspondent said that the new feature it introduced was tabbed browsing. The interviewer, just the normal host, pointed out that his browser already had tabs. It went downhill from there.

Segway shock army to invade Department of Transport

Gimmick

I can't see the Segway as anything but a gimmick. I can't think of any real way in which this is better than a motorized scooter or a bicycle--it's just a lot more expensive and a lot less naturally stable. It's a neat little contraption for sure, but what's so revolutionary about it?

Emails allege ATI-Nvidia price fixing conspiracy

Cool.

So when do I get my check for $3.28?

Concrete-jet 'printers' to build houses, Moonbases in hours

Music

So long as it comes with a sound-system that plays Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse," while it works, I'm totally sold.

Pirate Bay evades Italian blockade

debate

Piracy is theft because I said so.

IBM solves world's 'paper or plastic' crisis

I dunno...

What if sometimes I want paper and sometimes I want plastic? It depends on how far I have to carry it, and whether or not I need more bags to clean out my cat's litter-box or whether I need more bags to put my paper recyclables in.

Anyways, the point is now moot. My local grocery store has already largely moved on to those 'self checkout' machines. The girl at the traditional checkout line is always trying to get me to use them because, she says, it's more convenient. Heaven forbid I should be inconvenienced by someone ringing up and bagging my groceries for me when I could so conveniently do it myself.

She deserves to be replaced by a machine.

Too much money? Bling your iPhone with the $1000 app

Brilliant.

Wish I'd thought of that.

Can you imagine Paris buying a copy when she sees it online? I thought so.

Black hats attack gaping DNS hole

Road Runner

Time Warner ( Road Runner) - 65.24.7.3

GREAT/GREAT at DNSOARC

DoxPara - Looks good to me. I guess.

Dud Nvidia GPUs tip up in Dell laptops

Nothing like...

...a software patch for a hardware problem.

Hackintosh maker gets legal greeting from Apple

Macs

Apple really should have released a version of OS/X without the Mac lock in. Given Vista's woes, they could potentially have taken a pretty big bite. I imagine it's not that simple though what with all of the different hardware that would require support and whatnot.

I hope Apple loses. I really do. I hope they set one of those precemadents.

Netflix will stream movies on Xbox 360

Netflix

99% of the Netflix 'instant view' films are terrible. There are a few good ones though, but I wouldn't subscribe to it if it weren't already a part of my Netflix DVD rental package. Their website interface for browsing content is infuriating and seems primarily designed around hiding how little quality content there is. There are obvious omissions such as searching categories by star-rating even though you can search overall by star-rating--probably because it would only demonstrate how poor the actual content is.

Anyways, if they invest more money and get more content, it will be a nice little system. It does require IE if you're going to be doing it on a PC though.

Mini-Me sues online celebrity muckraker over 'stolen' sex tape

Can't wait to see it...

I will be searching Youporn daily (er...), until I find it.

Mars whacked by object bigger than Pluto

Anyways...

I would like to see that. One planet crashing into another has got to be one of the coolest things you could possibly witness.

Start-up outfoxes Apple, Dell and HP by offering stock options with PCs

I'm in.

It's clearly revolutionary. It's going to change the face of computing as we know it, all while being good to mother earth. Most all of my friends have them pre-ordered already and we're going to camp out all night waiting for the delivery trucks to come. All of the hip people are going to want one, and the trendsetters will make sure to have one early. I even hear that Paris is ordering one in pink!

Drugs, hookers and cranked customers: Ex-Broadcom boss indicted

Bribery?

What's the difference between paying someone bribes to not divulge your drug habits and paying someone blackmail not to divulge your drug habits? Which one is illegal and who is breaking the law?

Hummer glummer on high oil price bummer

Hummer

The saddest thing about the recent Hummer's is that they're hardly Hummer's at all. The thing that made the original Humvee a Humvee was that it had hubbed axles giving it tremendous ground clearance which made it a good off-road vehicle, which was, of course, the point of the whole thing. The new ones are just ridiculously large, ugly bodies on a standard leaf-sprung pickup chassis. They have no redeeming features unless you are specifically looking for a car that will let people know you are an asshole. I suppose it's nice of these people to provide me with that service saving me the trouble of actually having to speak to them to find out though. Expect the number of Boxster sales in the US to skyrocket.

Netflix to sell set-top box for streamed movies

Netflix streaming...

You actually only need a $12 a month account for unlimited access to the streaming feature (though you only get 2 DVD rentals at a time). The video quality is decent, identical to a DVD so far as I can tell (a 90 minute movie, works out to be about 3 gigabytes) though you only get stereo sound. The performance is good as well, over my 8Mb connection there is typically only a 10sec delay before the video starts and no hitching or buffering thereafter.

To be honest though, as it stands the selection is pretty weak. There are some good films and television shows available, but most of those 10,000 titles aren't much use unless you enjoy exercise videos and TV shows like Charles in Charge. After a couple months of regular use, I have largely exhausted the possibilities. Apart from requiring Windows and the use of IE, it seems like a good platform for streaming films over the internet. Since I can connect my laptop to my television, I don't see much value in a dedicated box though, at least not until there is enough quality content for it to largely replace DVD rentals.

Activist coders aim to deafen Phorm with white noise

FUD

How about a good old fashioned grassroots FUD campaign? Viral videos (I've got a cat and he's willing to volunteer), making the whole Web 2.0 thing useful for a change and other such things. Using their marketing description it would sound like something not worth bothering about to most users; use a more accurate description and it sounds pretty evil. It is evil.

I'm not really interested in putting this sort of software on my computer. Maybe when a more professional version comes along, but not this. Dark Basic? Really?

Boffins chomp noggin-nobbling narcotics

beta blockers

I used to take a beta blocker before exams. I wouldn't say they increase concentration or anything of that nature. They just prevent the physical symptoms of being nervous- rapid heart-rate, sweaty palms, that sort of thing which can be distracting and make you blank on things you should know perfectly well. If anything, they probably slow your noodle down a bit. If you don't get nervous, you'd be better off without them. I don't see how they would help unless you were under a lot of immediate pressure to perform.

Australian man killed by suicide robot

"...altered by the sound of gunfire."

There's something strangely poetic about that.

'Freetard ? more like advert programmed PAYTARDS!'

Geez

I wish I had such a refined power of self-delusion that I could believe being a cheap bastard was somehow noble.

Northrop: battlefield rayguns to demo this year

The Future

Since force fields are probably out of the question for quite some time, I can imagine something like this being developed to the point where it takes the form of a disco-ball like object mounted on the top of a tank that can instantly shoot down all incoming projectiles.

Projecting out further into the future, I can imagine this being refined to a disco-ball like object that soldiers wear on the tops of their helmets. Then, rather than having to learn how to march around in boring lines, they would be instructed in all of Michael Jackson's moves and would dance into battle in Thriller formation shooting laser beams from their heads in all directions.

Anyways, the battlefield television coverage would be great.

'Facebook fatigue' kicks in as people tire of social networks

Um...

This article reminded me I have a facebook account. I just logged in to see what was going on and I'm greeted with a big blue box asking me to enter my e-mail address, which they already have, and my **e-mail password.**

Saywuh?

MPAA admits movie piracy study is 29% full of @$#%

I like fudge.

If it can be proven this was a deliberate fudge of their statistics, can they be held in contempt of Congress? I understand you get in a lot of trouble for that. Of course, I imagine that would be impossible to prove.

Anyways, whatever statistics they come up with are obviously garbage but that doesn't really change the fact that college kids shouldn't be pirating films. They should be studying. Or having sex. Maybe doing drugs. These kids are missing out.

US Army proto-Dalek combat robots enter testing

Buzz-Saw Balls

Speaking of Doctor Who, one of those new ones had those little floaty ball things with the head inside and the buzz saws- they probably had a name. Anyways, I'm reminded of that scene where a great dimensional crack opens in the sky and millions of those little computer-animated things come pouring out to enslave humanity.

I saw an army robot once on youtube that was basically a remote controlled helicopter with an automatic shotgun attached. Imagine if they could attach a shotgun to these, produce them in the hundred-thousands and then just unleash them in a magnificent deadly swarm on an enemy urban environment to corner, retinal scan, and do some calculations to decide whether the subject needs some shotgunning.

We wouldn't need soldiers anymore. Wouldn't need people at all. I give it forty years, tops. If you could produce them in the millions, whomever controls the software could rule the world. Even better than Daleks.

If you're an embedded systems programmer, I recommend getting a job with the US Army as soon as possible- only way to be safe. Put in a good word for me.

Now RIAA says copying your own CDs is illegal

So...

Now we can't copy our CDs onto our iPods? I mean, are they really that interested in totally destroying what little business they have left as to remove the only reason people would buy a CD these days? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

If they try to argue that copying a CD onto your computer and copying it onto an iPod are different things, I think that will be pretty much be the end of what little credibility they have left.

Man uses mobe as modem, rings up £27k phone bill

Holy #&$@*&!!!

Granted, he should have read all the small print, but it's simply ridiculous they can get away with implying such a contract is 'unlimited' based upon what they expect the average user to use. That is splitting infinitives on a gargantuan scale and any high school English teacher would do as an expert witness for his case.

I could understand throttling transfer rates beyond a certain quota, though I would still be hard pressed to believe this is actually unlimited. Of course, that bit of information is sort of missing from this article- did he simply believe it was unlimited or was it advertised as such? If the brochure uses the word unlimited to describe the contract, I would hardly consider him stupid for believing it actually was. Naive perhaps, but not stupid. Also, how do you get away with charging per-minute for data-transfer? I imagine there are a lot of 'convenient' (to the telco) 'network problems' limiting transfer rates.

Wishing you an EMF-free Christmas

Tasers?

I wonder if those foil-lined long-johns would protect you from the harmful effects of dimwitted government thugs.

Old Sony console outsold PS3 in US last month

Okay, Okay..

Look, you guys sort this out. In a year or two go ahead and let me know who won. I'll buy whichever one that is. Thanks.