Posts by ratfox

FCC official: AT&T deal faces 'steep climb' for approval

On the face of it...

There is no need for a year of thinking about it.

The answer should be NO, and not only NO, but HELL NO.

I don't even see the point of pretending otherwise... Apart from the obvious corruption that will be involved, of course.

BlackBerry bans drink-drive apps

Why don't the police buy the app?

Then they can move the checkpoint whenever it is reported

Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

So THAT is why!

I have been wondering about these URLs for months. I actually thought it was a weird random bug in the web site.

Thank you for the explanation, good sir. Have a cold one.

Judgment stalls Google book settlement

Huh?

I don't get it. Can a judge stop a settlement agreed between parties?

Not that he is wrong, really. I guess Google will appeal until the Supreme Court has its say...

China rejects Google snoop claims

If they really want to go back to China

They'd better keep their mouth shut.

RIM BlackBerry PlayBook tablet release slips

Japan

That might be a reason for the delay. Earthquakes and stuff.

Microsoft+IE9: Holier than Apple open web convert?

Incredible

How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low!

Microsoft is afraid of becoming irrelevant on the web.

Amazon is best hope of a viable alternative to iPad

Title

Isn't market fragmentation precisely a reason to choose to develop an iPhone App? There are few other models that are sold in greater numbers. If you develop for android, you have to be ready to debug for the many handsets, which are way more varied than the iPhone models.

IBM accused of bribery in China, South Korea

What choice do they have?

You might as well forbid them of doing business in these countries...

Note that the only problem comes from the fact that in these backward places, they do not have a extended system of corru^H^H^H^H^H lobbying like the US have.

Pr0n domain approved by ICANN

Victory.

He got what he wanted. Loads of web acreage, and he is the one who gets to rent it.

I still don't get why they ever took this seriously.

Apple 'gay-cure' app severely slapped

Really?

I think you will find out that these apps are few and far between, as they are rarely let through by the Apple thought police.

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

Whiplash

Just coming from the New York Times website, I feel a strong case of whiplash. (The big title there says: "Frantic Effort at Plant as Japan Raises Warning Level")

Though I do feel that the concerns about the nuclear reactor are overblown considering the thousands of deaths due to the tsunami, Lewis does sound like an ostrich.

Supercomputer charts killer tsunami's course

They were "lucky"

300'000 people in Indonesia 2004... "Only" 10'000-15'000 people in Japan, with the earthquake right next to their shore.

Google copyright purge leaves Android developers exposed

Aaarrgh

I still find it incredible that after all this time, we still have all this trouble with writing up licenses that mean what we want.

Power and cooling in the data centre

It's okay

They are pouring in seawater to cool it. It will be under control soon.

...What is that? Wrong article you say?

European parliament loves the Tobin tax

Careful

The author does explain why financial activity is desirable. It is important for business to be able to diminish their risks by trading in options and futures.

You should also not state an assumption that 1% of financial transactions are involved in financing real activities, then ask "Disprove if you can". If you have an opinion, it is your business to defend it. Otherwise you just invite answers of the type: "I believe you have no idea what you are talking about. Disprove if you can".

There is no reason to believe that a transaction that is extremely low profit is unrelated to the financing of real activities. A small business is in constant need of small sums to be repaid next week. Whenever you order something, the business you buy it from has to build it first, give it to you, then ask for your money. Where do you think they get the money for the materials? They make a small loan, for a couple of weeks. Of course, the transactions are low-profit, because the bank does not charge much interest for such a small period. One of the largest impact of the recent crisis on small businesses is that they were unable to secure these small loans from banks, because banks were too scared to lend.

Facebook poaches Google exec to go on M&A hunt

Good

Whatever hiring competition between Google and Facebook can only mean reg readers get hired more often and at higher salaries.

Anonymous collective begins leaking Bank of America emails

Thanks for the explanation

Looking forward to see what Wikileaks has.

Huh? What of WikiLeaks?

I thought that WikiLeaks was able to somewhat function without Assange... Why aren't they releasing the info? Lost the password to the web site??

Microsoft pushes back cut 'n' paste update

Beat me to it

It was already strange for the iPhone, 4 years ago, but now you really wonder what they were thinking.

Emergency declared at second quake-wracked Japanese nuke plant

They did have diesel generators

They worked for an hour before stopping working due to being damaged by the tsunami.

They had also batteries, but these last only eight hours.

They will probably release the pressure into the atmosphere before a meltdown can happen. This would however release radiation.

Politically motivated exploits target activists on Google

Politically motivated?

Can anybody guess who the

Hackers are working for?

I wonder what could be the

Nation that would do such

A thing... Heh.

App Store not invited to web's date with destiny

Good points

The web is great because of the URLs linking from site to site. Not because it allows us to download programs and run them on our computers.

iPhone 5 design drawings spied on web

Stop reporting obviously fake leaks

The faceplates from before are obviously photoshopped.

Considering the white iPad 2 has a white menu button, it is highly doubtful that they would go for a black button for the iPhone.

There is no way that this can be genuine.

Apple bans iPhone 3G patch omission talk from forum

Ah see, that was the mistake

He admitted to being a reader of the Reg...

The icon is what Apple would like to see happen!

Google man opens curtain on cloud apps firewall glitch

Argh

The fix involves whitelisting gmail, and in the discussion, people are saying that Gmail is blacklisted by policy. Wonderful.

I will count that as a Fail from Google, I'm afraid. They should have seen this coming. Considering how much they are hoping to convince people to use Google Apps, this looks really bad.

Apple frees iOS 4.3 two days before iPad 2 Arrival™

What terms?

Is it $4.99 per installation on a Mac, or $4.99 per developer?

I don't really get the need for this. This must really be a drop in the ocean for Apple as far as revenue is concerned...

Google ads banned from Facebook apps

I don't get it

Isn't the whole point of targeted advertising that the ads are more likely to advertise something that is of interest to the viewer? Isn't Google top in advertising because they do that well?

If the ad provider does not use data from the viewer, doesn't it remove the whole premise of targeted advertising, meaning they can only show random ads that are less likely to be of interest to the viewer?

Not that I care, but it seems to me that Facebook is opting to have irrelevant ads.

Courtney Love coughs up $430k in Twitter rant settlement

Indeed

The Salon article is worth a read.

Kentucky man denies drunk driving, blames blow job

You do need to explain

Is there a beer called Paris now?

Apple cures iPad buyer's remorse

Nice to see slack in the system

A friend of mine hadn't realized that after buying an Apple care package, he had to register it for his macBook Pro in order to get insured. Two years later, he brought the malfunctioning laptop with the still unopened Apple care package. He still had his laptop repaired for free, even though it should have been way too late.

Apple iPad 2 snapped in all its skinny glory

Wait a day

You will have all the details

iPhone 'Death Grip' effect is real, plastic cases don't help

And I thought the case was required for my iPhone to work

I guess it is working pretty well, with or without case, then.

Apple fanbois leak secrets of Mac OS X Lion

Oh woes, oh woes

- What shall we do Steve? Everybody is trying to find out our secrets! Even though we are trying so hard to keep them secret, EVERYBODY IS TALKING ABOUT OUR UPCOMING PRODUCTS!

- Calm down, Tim. I will explain to you again how this works, more slowly this time.

Michael still does not get that one.

Gmail users howl in anguish at 'disappeared' accounts

For non-professionals, Gmail is fine

Ok, sure, having backups is even better.

But for most of us, the likelihood of losing data managed by GMail is probably way smaller than the likelihood of losing the same data managed by ourselves. Their computers have less chances of being infected by viruses, they have multiple backups, they have people working 24/7 to ensure that it works. Few of us can ever hope to reach as reliable a system by anything we would organize ourselves.

Seriously, I could have my own mail server, and back it up myself daily, and I would still be less worried about GMail losing my data.

Phone seller pre-peddles white iPhone 4 for UNDER A GRAND!

Pot of white paint, £10

The one with the white stains, please

Apple's MacBook Pros chucked out ahead of iPad 2

Good

Honestly, there are too few advantages to Blu-Ray over DVD for me to want to have one in a laptop. Much higher price for very little reason.

Of course, Apple could give you the CHOICE of having a Blu-Ray or a DVD, but that would assume that Apple likes to give choices to its customers...

Cobol cabal will take over THE WORLD Australia

Same old in Switzerland

Well, at least Cobol was still on the mainframe of the bank I worked for in 2003. With 3-4 greying coders managing the code.

...at the time, they were talking on replacing it with Java, but I left before any of that was on rails.

Fifa, Uefa lose free-to-view footie challenge

Good

One thing that Football does not need is more money thrown at it.

The Doctor Who Experience

What is this doing in Reg Hardware??

I am genuinely curious.

Steve Jobs unveils 30% subs model for ... everything

Choice between A) easy and B) hard is left to users

The problem is that users are likely to prefer buying from their shiny iThing. The easiest way to do that is to use iTunes, since the new T&C FORBID putting a link to the web site of the publisher to allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

The users can click twice and have the content through iTunes, or they can go hunt for the website of the publisher by hand. So practically every user will use iTunes, as they do not care who gets the money, and they want to have what they want, fast.

So basically, the publishers have to offer users the possibility of buying content in a much more easier way that makes them lose 30%. And they have to make the other possibility harder. I am not sure many publishers have a 30% margin they can give away like that...

Australian group buying soars

grow by 284% !!

...capturing 0.1% of retail market.

Erm, hey, I bet that last year it grew from an even bigger percentage, when it captured 0.03% of the market. Wonderful. Great. Wake me up when it is at 3%, 'kay?

Microsoft, Nokia, and MeeGo: Are they all doomed?

Facepalm

Question: Of these two operating systems for cell phones, which is currently more successful?

1) Windows

2) Android

Which one has to be licensed?

1) Windows

2) Android

Which one did Nokia choose?

1) Windows

2) Android

Facepalm, facepalm, facepalm. Google would have welcomed Nokia into Android with open arms.

Amazon threatens Texas exit over tax bill

They have balls

But seriously, Amazon has been adding VAT to sales in Europe for years, depending on the country of the buyer. There is no reason it could not do that for sales tax in the US. That they were able to not do it, and pull it off for so long, is an indictment on the US tax system.

Geeky gifts for Valentine's Day

egg shaped transmitter

Does it have a vibrate mode??

PH, natch.

Patent attack launched on Google's open video codec

We cannot accept that people will have stuff for free

Damned leeches

Kid spanks a grand on Xbox using Mum's bank card

The plan worked

The way I see it, this is exactly what developers hoped for when they added the possibility of buying items for a game...

419ers strip lonely heart mum of £80k

"Hundreds of other women must be getting conned right now"

I believe that actually few are as gullible...

Chaps tolerant of girl-on-girl cheating by other halves

The other part was more surprising

That the men mind less when their GF goes at it with a woman, well of course. Not only they hope for some 3-way action, they do not feel as threatened that they will be replaced.

I am rather surprised about the other way, though. I really thought that women believed gay men were sexy. Also, I would assume they would feel more threatened if the other is female, because they can bring something that a man cannot, but any woman can bring the same.

What would Paris do?

Verizon backpedals on unlimited iPhone data

Now if only they stopped with their "free minutes"

You can buy either buy cheap plans that give you no free minutes, and it costs an arm and a leg every time you phone, or you can buy plans that cost an arm and a leg, and give you ten times the free minutes you need.

I wish they would simply use a smooth price function, with a decreasing marginal price for the next phone call.