Posts by Jason Togneri
396 posts • joined Saturday 31st March 2007 17:29 GMT
I'm just surprised that nobody has apparently noticed that this use of "Google" in a word has a meaning of "something which can't be found via an online search", but with specific links to Google since it's part of the word. Thus, it's implied that "something which can't be found via Google" which in turn implies that other non-Google search engines might be more useful. If I were Google, I'd be most unhappy that my name was being used to hint that I was unable to perform my primary function, while there is no mention of my competitors being equally as useless.
I kinda parsed RM as "Royal Marines".
I got confused by the URL
Although El Reg is by now quite well known for its URL typos, this one was particularly amusing. I thought for a moment that there were hackers keeping websites online when their owners wanted to shut them down:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/23/egyptology_site_forced_online_by_hackers/ forced ONLINE
Re: I like it
> Also if anyone makes this ap I'm suing for stealing my invention.
This is quite possibly why so many cool apps that would benefit us all just aren't getting made. I'm quite sure your idea is neither new nor unique - as this story itself tends to suggest - and with the world full of idiots running around threatening to sue each other, all that's doing is stifling innovation. Maybe we should try working together to get stuff done rather than shafting each other in a pointless orgy of greed and selfishness.
Re: ...spend “is not proportional to its effectiveness”
"Because in the real world, those kids will want a job when they leave school, and Windows has the market share to help them with that. I've never seen a job advert asking for OpenOffice skills, but many asking for Microsoft Office, Word, Excel skills."
Not true, unless you're taking the ad extremely literally. Asking for skill in "Word and Excel" is just lazy shorthand, what they really mean a lot of the time (and what used to be more common in job ads) is employees with skill in "word processing and spreadsheets". It's just the same as saying "skill at Googling" when they mean using search engines, or asking for a housemaid with skill at "using a Hoover" when any vacuum cleaner would do, because most if not all of the skills and knowledge, not counting specific UI familiarity which in Office has changed between pre- and post-Ribbon anyway, is entirely transferable.
Harder to stride is the gap between a real desktop-based spreadsheet and Google Spreadsheet...
Re: Oh go on, I'll feed em...
"2) Tightly integrating malware protection into the OS is something MS are trying to do but there is massive resistance from the software devs"
No, it's not the software devs and certainly not the FOSS lunatic fringe. It's the core userbase, who are used to having it easy (at the expense of security). MS made a botched attempt at locking down root with Vista's invasive UAC, and finally got it right in Windows 7's more subtle UAC. Remember, this is a feature that *nix users take for granted, not running with superuser rights without specific necessity to do so. But suddenly it's an annoyance that Windows users, installing from day 1 with Administrator accounts, never had to get used to. It's as much in the end-users' resistance to change as anything else. I'm by no means a Microsoft fanboi, but you can't say they aren't at least trying, and it isn't all their fault.
Additionally, I do use Microsoft Security Essentials on many of my Windows machines - it's lightweight, relatively effective, and does pretty well when partnered with a competent hardware firewall. However, although I agree with other posters that making security more an integral part of the OS is an essential goal, how many anti-trust suits do you think the AV market and the anti-MS brigade will bring if Microsoft started bundling their AV solution with their OS? It would be the IE browser wars all over again, but this time in a bad way. Choice is fine, but not at the expense of security.
Posted in Assault on battery
Wireless for mice, yes please
I'm a fan of wireless for mice. I find the cables get tangled, or catch on things, or are just never as long as you need. Keyboards, though, certainly not, with the exception of the venerable media center box. My Logitech M705 is an awesome mouse for which the manufacturer claims 3 years on a single set of AA batteries. This seems to be holding true so far (one year in and counting). And yes, I do play games.
As to the iPhone comment in Alastair's footnote bio thing, I have the same ethos with my Android phone (Galaxy S Plus). I use Elixir Widget to put some functional buttons on my phone's main screen, so I can turn Wifi and 3G on and off very quickly. I can also disable sync, so that 3G won't check emails or marketplace updates when activated, if all I want to do is check one app or surf on the browser. I can go several days easily without running out of battery, and if I use this strategy in combination with the excellent EBB-U10 (Samsung's official battery add-on pack case thing), I can get a week's use out of it easily (this combination is great if I go out hiking for a long weekend, up to 4-5 days). And the power and connectivity of the phone is still available whenever I want it!
And, more importantly, when will governments and agencies learn not to keep sensitive documents on internet-facing servers? They should restrict them to private LANs and internal networks only.
Re: No offence to Stephen Fry
Or this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/18/stephen_frytard/
Posted in Pano does browser-thin virty desktops
WANT.
Want one set to play with. At that price, the setup is even within the range of the home user, although my primary interest is for our testing environments at work. I wonder if you can set it up to work with some sort of GPU-accelerated (RemoteFX/PCoIP/etc) backend environment?
I have a lizard in a terrarium and I just point a webcam at her and have it serving itself all the time. That way, I can check if the bulbs are okay and the temperatures look good (digital ones lose enough to the camera to be readable). There's a pretty decent webcam viewing app for Android ("tinyCam Monitor FREE"), so I can use that well enough. And my employer pays for my phone, so I don't worry about viewing a webcam on 3G :-)
Re: Project
"So I intend to roll my own, probably a embedded Linux box, with analog to digital hardware to connect probes (flow meters, pH, EC, DOC etc), and some relays to control pumps, lights etc."
Can't you already do this easily and cheaply (adding all the sensors etc that you would want) with an Arduino or similar?
Best Vatican-related movie ever...
...is the little-known Bruce Willis classic "Hudson Hawk". I could watch it over and over again easily, and I can never get that damned song out of my head.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102070/
Posted in Fujitsu cracks 278-digit crypto
Or, to put it another way,
should we all now be doing this?
http://pastebin.com/MT8k9iRg
Posted in Acorn Archimedes is 25
Re: Memories....
"Have you tried replacing the hard drive with an emulator? There are projects out there that replace the floppy and hard drives of old kit with something that can interface to USB."
Sounds overly complex to me. An old 1GB CF card and a cheapo 99p CF <-> IDE adapter from eBay, and my RiscPC has both an upgrade and an extension to its life. It's also miraculously silent - I didn't realise that for years, the loud whirring noise wasn't fans or other components, it was my clunky old 800M HDD!
Posted in Acorn Archimedes is 25
Some factual errors
There are even more rabid fanboys than I in the RISC OS world, so I'll preempt them (or maybe just warm them up) with a few points:
"Risc", as you point out, is an acronym. Thus it should be RISC. Ditto "RiscOS", which should also be two words: RISC OS. "Rom" should be ROM. Confusingly, the last Acorn machine was the RiscPC (in lower case), but the official logotype has a sort of half-space, so most people write is all joined up as I do. Finally, the mouse buttons on an Acorn machine were referred to as Select, Menu and... Adjust, not "Alter".
There seems to be some confusion about the difference between Lander and Zarch: the former was a demo of the latter. The demo (Lander) shipped with most machines in this era, while the game (Zarch) was a commercial full product. It was exactly the same game on the PC, but known as Virus. The player's ship in that was not triangular (it was non-symmetrically pentagonal), and is the same shape as the Copperhead ship from Bell and Braben's game Elite.
Two final points. First: "Archimedes morphed into the Risc PC line, a series of ARM-based boxes designed to run Windows – on a co-processor, and presented in a Risc OS window." No. Just no. The RISC PC was never *designed* to run Windows - it was designed to run RISC OS natively, and use hardware-based emulation to run Windows within RISC OS. The "co-processor" wasn't a true one in the sense you seem to be inferring; the primary CPU was an ARM610, 710 or some variant of the StrongARM processor, while the secondary CPU was a specially designed 4x86 or 5x86 card which could *only* be used by the emulated copy of Windows. It was also not a default item included with the RiscPC, but usually a seperate purchase.
Finally, there's the fact that you say the line stopped with the death of Acorn/Element 14, without mentioning anything about the two spin-off companies RISC OS Ltd or Castle Ltd. Acorn's demise left RISC OS at 4.02, and ROL/CTL developed this further in two confusingly-numbered parallel brances, known as RISC OS 5 and RISC OS 6 (also known under the names RISC OS Select and RISC OS Adjust). There were also the the Iyonix, the Omega, and some other hardware designed and sold in the post-Acorn era. And last but not least, there are ongoing efforts to port RISC OS to small boards like the BeagleBoard and the Raspberry Pi, these mostly happening through RISC OS Open Ltd (ROOL), a spin-off created when Castle decided to open parts of the RISC OS source.
@madra / Re: Does anyone proof-read any more?
"But when your contributors sink to the primary school level of; not being able to"
Eh? You're complaining about the quality of this article and demonstrating how superior you are at grammar and you use a construction like "of; not"? You totally displayed your utter lack of grammar skill, showing yourself to be an arrogant hypocrite who can't even use a simple semi-colon properly! Go and learn proper grammar yourself, before being so presumptuous as to try and correct others.
Posted in WIN an HTC One X with Reg Hardware
Penta-core?
Both your blurb here and the review on the compo site say "penta-core" but the competition options for CPU are only single, dual and quad. Is this a trick question? And more to the point, do I win one for pointing it out?
"... including children"
Oh dear god, heaven forbid that children learn that people are all fundamentally IDENTICAL underneath the clothes we wear. All men have penises, all women have vaginas, most computer programmers have as much tits as women, and many of us are flabby and wrinkled. I'd hate to break the stereotype of the idealised mid-20s Aryan body figure but seriously, is it so bad if kids learn that a human body is just, basically, a human body?
Posted in Laptop computers are crap
Viewing angles on mobile screen
...privacy?
Not everybody likes to be in public (which, frankly, is the principal advantage that laptops have over desktops - portability) where any stranger sitting anywhere vaguely near you could easily read or watch whatever is on your screen.
Posted in Sir Isaac Newton's life rendered as KML
Use some imagination
Surely a more interesting use for this - particularly in historical studies - would be to map the progression of an historical event (skirmishes in a war, the movements of the Sarajevo assassin, the march of Garibaldi, etc) rather than the life of an individual, particularly if it is what that person DID, conceptually, which is important, more than where that person WAS at any given point in time?
Cute idea though.
@ Facebook is not relevant to work
> "this is work, Facebook is not work therefore it is not relevant to this process"
Really? This is an IT forum, on an IT news site. I'm betting that for quite a few of us, it *is* directly relevant. I myself work for a large entertainment organisation which has just released a major (and very popular) app onto Facebook. There are others with various apps, services, and plug-ins. Facebook and the use (and knowledge) thereof is quite valuable to us. Say what you like about idiots who use it, but hey, they're helping to pay my bills.
That said, I would create a testing account and not use my *real* profile, whether for an interview or a production app...
The fix, say I...
I can't believe nobody's thought of this, but... why not just *not* have all your sensitive and private information on Facebook in the first place?
Additionally, don't add random strangers to your friends list. This doesn't bypass the issue of malicious friends, but in that case, you'd best start re-evaluating your life. With friends like that, etc.
Re: Progress :-(
Yes, it's only Apple products as far as I can tell, every smartphone around here (Samsung, Nokia, Ericsson et al) have removeable ones. I do keep the awesome EBB-U10 around for my Galaxy S Plus, though, because it's an external battery as well as a hard shell, and as a bonus charges via USB port so there's no swapping of batteries (and thus no shutdown/reboot when battery is low) to worry about.
As for the Psion, yes, I had a 3, 3C, Revo and 5MX and they were wonderful little things. However, throw on bluetooth and wifi and I very much doubt you'd get much life out of your 2xAA any longer...
Re: "Microsoft encourages developers to be careful with their memory use "
"OK, take a lesson on memory management from the Great God Vista."
They did. It was called Windows 7, and works quite nicely. Sheesh.
Posted in iOnRoad Augmented Driving
Knee-jerks
I was going to write a long post about how I'm a good driver, and how I use a sat-nav when needed but don't follow it slavishly, how I know how to drive yet don't mind something just keeping me on the right track (we're only human, after all), and about how this is helpful for even when you're driving perfectly and then some idiot cuts in or whatever.
But frankly, AUGMENTED REALITY. I want a HUD in my car like a fighter jet. I want a Terminator-style optical recognition and enhancement overlay. I want to be a cyborg. And THAT is why this tech is cool :-)
Posted in Samsung Galaxy Note
Did you notice that today's level (day 5) of the Angry Birds Advent Calendar is all themed around the Galaxy Note?
http://chrome.angrybirds.com/
It's all just a bit of fun, innit.
Key differentiator?
"This mirrors the key differentiator that Google has claimed for its own social network over Facebook – the ability to categorize friends in 'circles' and share different items with each group."
You can already do that on Facebook (you can order your friends into groups, and post items specifically to - or specifically blocked from - any group, combination of groups, or combination of groups and individuals.
I've tried to use G+ (my employer uses Google Apps, Gmail, Google Code, etc, and they're replacing their intranet with G+) but it's nonintuitive and silly. I see where they're coming from and all, but I couldn't even transfer my contacts from Gmail - which is where the Official Company Address Book resides - and had to do the old export to CSV, import to G+ dance. I work in a high-tech firm, but everyone else seems just as stumped.
If I wasn't forced into it by my employer, I'd just give the whole thing a miss, to be honest. A good old-fashioned BBS or even a forum like PHPBB would do me just grand for an internal messageboard. G+ is just too sloppy and unintuitive.
@ laird cummings re: @ Pete Smith 2
> > Rule 35.
> > That is all.
> Actually, that's Rule 34.
> http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rule-34
Actually, that's Rule 35. Read the article again.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RulesOfTheInternet
Posted in Google dumps + from Boolean search tool
@ Cordwainer 1, 2-Part Return, et al
In Firefox at least, and presumably you can fiddle similarly with the config of other browsers:
In the URL bar, type about:config. Locate keyword.URL and change its value to http://www.google.com/search?nfpr=1&q= (or whatever other default domain you prefer).
It's the nfpr=1 part of the URL which prevents Google from showing search results for keywords it *thinks* you intended to enter, and instead forces it to return your actual query as stated.
Sorted.
@ AC, 24th October 2011 23:33
"When I, and I suspect most people, put a single word in quotes it means that we don't actually mean what is written"
English fail indeed - but unfortunately *your* fail, not theirs. Partial quotations are used in English to help paraphrase; check out the BBC's RSS feeds, they do it all the time (looking at it right now, I see things like: Syrians 'tortured' in hospitals; Writer hails 'genius' Steve Jobs). This means that a word or phrase was lifted directly from the original source and is a quotation from, rather than something the author has included by himself. While it "can" be used for varying types of emphasis, this is only where options such as italics are unavailable (such as in these comments) and really isn't the correct way to use it. Just because it's "common" on the internet doesn't make it in any way grammatically "correct". Go back to school.
Posted in Google dumps + from Boolean search tool
Alternatives to Google/moronic 'intelligent' autocorrections
One alternative is to write a script to reformat the search or its results. I find the Greasemonkey scripting community to be handy for this. In terms of moronic autocorrections, I find this one works wonderfully: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/103507 - it parses your original query, and only supplies the "Did you mean...?" as alternatives, not as the main results. Also instructions for modifying the Firefox search bar to do the same thing. It's worth searching for other scripts to handle any other new Google/Facebook/whatever functions that you don't like, the GM scripters are quite prolific.
To the downvoted gautam...
"There are more interesting stories in US tabloids if you troll enough, then. Just dont foist it uppon us , here in UK."
No, there are more interesting stories in the US tabloids if your trawl them. There are more interesting comments in the comments section if you troll them. Congratulations, you have now experienced both. This is what is known as a homophone (two words which are different but which sound the same or very similar). Have a good day, sir.
Disclaimer: I'm also Scottish but from a different part of the country
"VM engineers now busy making up a new batch of batter with added <insert rat poison of choice>. All they now need to do is keep the locals away......"
Keep the locals away? Surely it'd be better to let them eat it too :-)
Well done, Microsoft
*cough* http://i.imgur.com/vd2WA.jpg *cough*
Since there's a bandwagon...
Subject: looks like Buddy Christ from Dogma
Classification: blatant
Obligatory Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Christ
There, that ought to do it.
As for "mocking and belittling core Christian beliefs", surely those are things like love thy neighbour, sleepeth not with another man's wife, do not worship false idols, and things like that. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I didn't realise that the physical figure of Jesus was an actual "core belief", rather than just a representation of their god.
What? No XKCD?
I'm surprised at you lot:
http://xkcd.com/327/
@ Adrian Esdaile / Geiger counters
Funny you should say that, because I have several old British military ones (there's something unbearably cute about the phrase "Ratemeter Scintillation Portable", ahh the military and their own peculiar jargon). You find them in old house clearances where people have kept them since the '60s and suchlike. Looking for one in an antiques shop is just asking for daylight robbery, however.
One note, however: I brought my dosemeters from the UK to another EU country just earlier this year, in main luggage. There's certainly nothing dangerous or illegal about them - they *measure* radiation, but they don't *contain* any, as a surprising number of people seem to think.
Hmm, my nice old RSP 1413A is a very pretty wooden one stamped with the markings of "Isotope Developments Ltd, Aldershot, England" - the home of the UK's wartime nuclear research facilities. I wonder it it'll be worth a bob or two to a collector...
@ Jesus Puncher
"It's a shame the ingredients bill ran so high, otherwise he could have purchased some Mr Muscle® Oven Cleaner..."
You did realise that they already use household detergent to clean out disused nuclear reactors? True story:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8217772.stm
@AC 23.7 11:52 / Rootkit
"How exactly is that the same as them containing persistent malware that has the potential to give control over that computer regardless of how many times you re-install the OS or maybe even overide safety protocols to make the battery explode?"*
They have been putting "persistent malware" on hard drives and flash BIOS chips for years. It's called rootkits.
*paraphrased slightly for legibility
Posted in Anonymous hackers hacked by young Turks
@ Rombizio
"So much to say to the world but a tenous grasp of English."
I'm sorry, a what grasp of English? Do you play tenous often? I prefer badminton myself.
Or is English not your native language?
@CraigRoberts/"giving away all my personal information"
What? I use Facebook, and I didn't give away anything personal - at least, nothing that wasnn't already in the public domain and that I don't mind being there (and you can find a hell of a lot more information about me through a simple WHOIS of one of my domains than you can on Facebook).
It's not *compulsory* to give them your phone number, date of birth, email address, or anything else - this latter is used to sign in, but it needn't be a real one, some disposable freemail thing is good enough. The only reason they might have this is that you gave it to them *voluntarily*, you moron - and complaining about it just makes you look like an the knee-jerk reactionary ignoramus that you apparently are.
Sheesh, some people are so desperate to blame the Big Evil Corporation that they'll sink to any depths of hypocracy in order to do so. Fail.
The obligatory XKCD...
...is this one: http://xkcd.com/908/
Gotta love XKCD. He's got everything covered.
Posted in Sony unveils PlayStation telly
@ Not a new idea...
"Couple go to cinema, girl sees romantic comedy, bloke sees porn. Everyone happy!"
Yeah, until she starts crying at a soppy moment while you're enjoying the pizza delivery man's entrance, or similar unwanted reactions to the 'other' movie (and since you'll be watching porn, I dread to think how inappropriate /your/ sounds and actions are going to be during her romantic scenes...)
@ Say hi to Sheena 5
Obscure? Not at all. I was about to post the very same thing myself!
Spying companies vs moronic (ab)users
"Now that THAT is said, whats next from Tomtom? Altering your route to take you into a waiting cop trap?"
A waiting cop trap? Is this where they trick you into driving above the perfectly well-known legal maximum speed limit, just so that they can catch you and give you an unfair fine? I see nothing wrong with police on the roads - since I drive safely and legally, I have nothing to worry about. Quite the opposite, in fact: they're taking all the dangeous and speeding morons off the roads, leaving it safer and calmer for me. I applaud the police. Speed cameras aren't a "trick" or a "trap". Surely, if you're driving legally, you have no reason to worry about them? Idiot.
A whole variety of good sagas and standalones
Trilogies:
- David Brin's "Uplift" saga
- Gregory Benford's "Galactic Center" saga
- Charles Sheffield's "Heritage Universe" series
- Greg Bear's "Forge of God" series, or the "Darwin" series
- Peter F. Hamilton's "Void" trilogy or his "Commonwealth Saga"
Individual films:
- Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man", or any of his other works too
- Peter F. Hamilton's "Escape Route" would make an excellent couple of hours' viewing, and "Fallen Dragon" would be a really good Starship Troopers type entertainment, although a bit more serious
- Greg Bear's "Moving Mars"
Off the top of my head, that's all - but I'm sure there are plenty of others.
Posted in Wanted: Nude female web coders
@ naked on furniture, etc
Sheesh. Didn't any of you actually view the website? It says quite clearly on one of their six pages (a couple more images of nekkid girls to be found, too) that they provide things to put on the chairs before sitting, which are disposed of each daily and changed as often as necessary. Good grief, you're an incredibly lazy bunch of commentards.
@ various and sundry
"I often wonder why there is this need for security anyhow. [...] Most mobile surfers just want to do a spot of email checking or check the footy result and wotnot."
Really? Obviously you don't have any shared devices or folders on your network. If you use it *purely* for internet access, and your machines are all locked down, then maybe. I know I share folders between machines and have NAS boxen.
But even if it's internet-only, what's to stop them downloading kiddie pr0n and then running away, leaving you to be faced with the criminal investigation...? I know that if I wanted to do something illegal, I'd find some other sod's internet connection to do it on, rather than at home.
@ LaserJet 4L
I can confirm that mine works under both Vista and 7. You obviously suck at configuring your system.
@ Security with a single button?
It really works 100%. That is, if the button in question is the one built in to the side of the mains socket. Let's see you hack my wireless /now/.
Posted in Fukushima reactor shell ruptured?
Chernobyl
"There's one bit of history, however, that TEPCO won't repeat: due to the radically different designs of the Chernobyl and Fukushima power plants, it is vanishingly unlikely that such an explosive catastrophe as occurred on April 26, 1986 in Ukraine will befall the residents of Japan."
You only got one our of two things correct. It isn't really the design so much (although that's part of it; the overpressure mechanisms are different) - it's the training. Fukushima is the result of a series of high-order natural disasters and bad luck, while Chernobyl was a man-made disaster through the incomptence of the engineers involved.
So no, this can easily get a lot worse, but there will have to be some more extreme and unlikely events before there's even a chance that this could be "another Chernobyl".
