* Posts by Matthew Ellen

93 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2008

Page:

Win 7 users shout: Where's my bloody ballot screen?

Matthew Ellen
Headmaster

@AC 2009-10-23 23:34

"Paris, because I wouldn't mind browsing her operating system."

What does that even mean? How does one browse an operating system? Paris's operating system? Her software that allows her to run other software? Her central nervous system? If the latter, then you are a very strange person. If the former, I didn't realise Paris had released an OS. Where can I download it? Is it proprietary or open source? Lets hope it doesn't come bundled with IE.

Man gets 3 years in clink for eBaying Adobe prods

Matthew Ellen

Obviously

Every $100 spent with Fair was $100 that Adobe didn't get. They can't say the buyer would have paid the full price because there is no evidence to suggest that, but Fair is profiting off Adobe's work, with little outlay to himself. Seems like Adobe is due the money.

Prof: Extremists tend to dominate debates

Matthew Ellen

pro-alcohol more vocal

It could just be that drunk people shout more.

The fervent anti-grog brigade may be just like everyone else, and it could just be pro-grog people who think everyone is with them, because they're drunk. Alcohol is shown to increase your self confidence.

This study needs to be re-run on a topic where one extremity of the specturm of opinion could be unaturally confident.

NZ town cans rabbit-chucking contest

Matthew Ellen
Happy

@ Richard IV

Thanks. Best laugh I've had today :D

Complex licensing hamstrings EU music market

Matthew Ellen
Terminator

The internet as a country

Make the internet a country in its own right.

I know I sound insane, but think of the problems that might solve. I call dibs on president.

US cedes control of net governance

Matthew Ellen

Serve?

"Vint Cerf commented: "[The agreement] fulfils a long-standing objective of the original formation of Icann: to create an organisation that can serve the world's interest in a robust, reliable and interoperable internet.""

Is that what ICANN will do, or will they continue to act as a way to control what people can and can't access?

Alabama judges take hard line on dildos

Matthew Ellen

@Matt32

You're right, states are allowed to make stupid laws.

The way the court enforced the law was to say that the advert of the dildo is immoral. It clearly isn't. It is the court who made a call on how to interpret a law about obscenity. Clearly they haven't grown up out of their playground mentality with regards to sex.

Matthew Ellen

not obscene

Quote: The justices noted: "As the 11th Circuit pithily and somewhat coarsely stated: 'There is nothing "private" or "consensual" about the advertising and sale of a dildo.'"

Nor is there anything obscene about it. The court's playground morality is telling.

Boffins: Stop trying to monetise us, you don't know how

Matthew Ellen
Stop

impatience

So the government won't fund (or makes such funding difficult to get) research that doesn't help the UK economy within a time frame they see as beneficial.

Was someone surprised?

We live in a country governed by and for impatient consumerists who enjoy the short cuts that technology gives them. It has been this way for a long time. This is the cause of the popularisation of many, many things; such as indoor plumbing, electricity in homes, the printing press, cars and so forth. We don't like having to give things up for the better in the long run - especially when the long run is so far off we have trouble accurately predicting it.

Researchers cannot fight the government and corporations. If there are researchers willing to work for them then they will get their marketable goods and ideas.

Enabling research for research's sake enriches a community by making creativity the cornerstone of how the community is perceived. It makes people want to work together. But it is a lot slower at producing results. In our nation our government tells us we should strive to be "better" than Germany, or Japan and this makes me sad. We should strive to be a more coherent community, less focused on wealth generation and more focused on quality of life.

Mono swings .NET development into iPhone

Matthew Ellen

£0.99

It's a good idea; writing C# is a lot easier than writing C. But the problem comes when the app writer tries to price their app. At $400+ per year will iPhone developers be able to sell their apps at a price people are willing to pay (less than $1)?

If one were to stop paying, does that mean that you can no longer develop with mono for iPhone, or that you no longer get support?

Orange prices up LG 3G watchphone for UK

Matthew Ellen
Coat

title

Calling Dick Tracy!

100 freetards an hour join Pirate Party UK

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

Good luck to them

If they are able to bring copyright laws into the public eye in a constructive way then I'm all for them.

Stargazers spy retrograde planetary bloater

Matthew Ellen
Headmaster

space

Density, Anon John. If the gas is more disbursed than the gas of Jupiter, then it can weight less.

High Court shields database state from blame

Matthew Ellen
Black Helicopters

title

We're all screwed.

What we need is self control, not centralised control.

Company wins US patent for podcasting

Matthew Ellen

huh?

Doesn't the entire newspaper publishing industry count as prior art?

HMRC can't corral non-EU counterfeits

Matthew Ellen

Eurovision

We'll be getting no more points from Finland then

Zend squeezes PHP into business suit

Matthew Ellen

Framework?

Since when was AJAX a framework? JQuery perhaps. That's a rival with Dojo, I believe. AJAX is what Dojo and JQuery help out with.

AJAX is just an idea, a label for a style of technology.

California skateboard dude swipes Reg logo

Matthew Ellen

@Natalie Gritpants

Not so fast:-

http://regmedia.co.uk/2005/12/06/reg_75.gif

The image clearly has a shoulder.

Amazon sued for cracks in Kindle

Matthew Ellen
Joke

@Michael Xion

Surely half of THE regurgitated kipper OF pain and suffering? Much more valuable. Taste the pain. Mmmm Sufferilicious

Apple preps iPhone face recognition

Matthew Ellen
Stop

recognition systems

Recognition systems should be un-patentable: prior are the human brain.

US senators demand boycott of Iran 'snoop' firms

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

@Lionel Baden

I will be building a rocket to the moon in my garden for the foreseeable future.

Matthew Ellen
Coffee/keyboard

Boycott

I think we should boycott all countries whose ruling bodies talk before they understand what they are saying.

Open-source .NET splits for extra Microsoft protection

Matthew Ellen

@Rich 2

Generalising is a great way to try and stir people up, but it doesn't produce accurate statements. (Over-generalisation can be a contributing factor to depression.)

The open source community is made up of lots of people, some who want to work with MS and some who don't.

Java has a lot in common with C# in terms of programming structure. It's been around for longer. However, the JVM is not supported by MS and is not supplied by default with installs of MS Windows, so it's installed base is far less (on Windows PCs) than that of the .NET framework. It makes sense for developers, therefore, to try to create an open source 'clone' of .NET so that open source software can be run in open source environments (e.g. Linux distros) as well as the closed source environment of Microsoft Windows, because this will give a larger potential install base for any .NET based applications.

IPO gives 'reputable' web pages prior art status

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

Good job

The fewer nonsense patents the better.

PC giants ship Chinese censorware anyway

Matthew Ellen
Stop

How do you make a phone call if you can't talk?

Re: Linux?

I guess Green Dam will probably stop them from typing Linux, etc.

Russians demand flying cars and telepathy

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

AI?

We already have AI! It's just not great.

There should have been a Skynet option.

Hotmail hack blamed for exposing extra-marital governor frolics

Matthew Ellen
Black Helicopters

Microsoft PR

"Maria claims her account was hacked in November, a few weeks before the emails were leaked, and she reported the issue to Hotmail at the time, who helped her to recover the account."

Sounds like the story was created to make Microsoft look good...

Oh! The convoluted depths to which marketing departments will stoop!

Google Android code goes native

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

interesting news

The android platform is looking more attractive, I wonder how long until we'll be able to merge native and non native code in the same application?

OT:

The reporter has made a grammatical error in paragraph 4, line 1. There is the substitution of 'there' with 'their'.

Recession will destroy 40,000 UK IT services jobs

Matthew Ellen

Accurate like the weather?

Since the met office can't accurately predict the weather, how can we take these figures seriously? Unless the economy is a simple affair that can be projected on the back of a napkin...

Punters 'confuse' netbooks with notebooks

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

Is that a problem for anyone other than Linux advocates?

*Sob* Damn you consumers wanting windows on your machines, and damn you vendors for giving consumers what they want!

/sarcasm

Seriously, though, when I first heard of SCCs and that they would be Linux based from the off, I wet my pants with excitement. This is exactly what I had been looking for, and in my price range too. I was very happy with my eee 901 until it broke (hardware fault, but asus are calling me retarded and swearing that it's a software error, without taking a look at the netbook).

I was hoping that this would spur consumer interest in Linux, but it didn't. This isn't the fault of the vendors, the consumers, or Microsoft.

Opera to take web back to the old days

Matthew Ellen

I agree

"But the real concern to most technically-minded users will be the security implications of allowing every Opera user to run their own addressable web server - even if everything is being routed through Opera's servers."

This is the first thing that crossed my mind.

This is just opening a can of worms, worms from troy.

Microsoft wins competition court case

Matthew Ellen
Linux

MS won?

It sounds more like all parties lost.

US extradition could push McKinnon 'towards suicide'

Matthew Ellen

In case anyone wondered

NHTCU = National Hi-Tech Crime Unit

Brown to Sugar: 'You're hired'

Matthew Ellen
Stop

@ac 2009-06-05 20:24 GMT

We know that on the whole the British public are stupid.

Why else does spam work, litter line our streets, reality TV spew forth, tobacco still sell well on the high street, and Jordan seem like a good role model for kids?

It's not because of our stellar intellect, is it?

Generally speaking the British people are lazy when it comes to thinking. Sure many people work hard, I have no doubt about that, but working hard at tasks without any understanding of how your life affects those unrelated to you rarely produces anything more than greed and paper work.

ECJ: One meeting can count as market-rigging

Matthew Ellen
Black Helicopters

anti-anti-competitive

Surely the anti-competitive law is anti-competitive and harms competition by its very existence?

It prevents competitive systems from competing with anti-competitive systems. If it then turns out that an anti-competitive system is better at surviving than a competitive one, shouldn't we just all learn to get along and stop trying to out do one another?

Altruism is better all around than selfishness.

Britain leads world in police state survey

Matthew Ellen

I bet the government are pleased

They've wanted this power all along, now they're told they're the best at using it. Why would they even consider changing?

US firm says handheld puke ray is ready to go

Matthew Ellen

counter measures

Surely just wear glasses that block out that frequency of light...

Google nukes Norks

Matthew Ellen
Coat

hahahaha

It looks like a penis.

If they can break the law, why can't we?

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

page 3 is missing something

"Nonetheless, this affair is bound to filter into attitudes towards compliance with the law. After all, why be quite so accurate in reporting one’s tax affairs, when it is clear that those who pass the laws think it"

What do they think? I think you deleted something by mistake there.

I wholeheartedly agree with the conclusion that we are less likely to abide by the spirit of the law.

The government frequently passes laws that suggest great swathes of the population cannot be trusted (the recent porn law springs to mind, as well as the marijuana classification debacle), when in reality what is needed is a greater understanding of the crimes that preceded these knee jerk laws.

Perhaps they think they can't trust us because they don't trust themselves.

Then there are the data retention laws that are causing such issues at the moment. The database of children, the ID cards, the now defunct centralised database of communications, and the new regulations of what ISPs store about our internet usage and what access police, MI5, etc., have to that data. I'd be a lot happier about the data retention if I could have confidence that the people accessing the data could be trusted not to leave it lying around and that the networks that it pass through have been thoroughly tested for security holes, be they technological or otherwise.

On top of this there is the growing feeling that the government and police can't be trusted with the power that they have because they'll just do something despicable (e.g. MP expenses) or misunderstand what they're meant to be doing (e.g. police confiscating cameras). Add to that they fact the government seem to be actively trying to decrease how much we feel we can trust each other by implying that anything you see that's out of the ordinary could be (read: is probably) a terrorist threat.

By criminalising so much behaviour that isn't actually negatively affecting anyone they're backing us into a corner, and with their recent and on going flaunting of our belief that holders of office should be morally sound they are angering and frustrating us. The public (en mass) is very much like a gorilla, so I can't recommend backing it into a corner and poking it with a stick.

Google accused of selling free clicks

Matthew Ellen

Not blaming Google

I'm with everyone not blaming Google. It sounds like much ado about something someone else is doing, i.e. the adware vendors and typo squatters.

And getting annoyed with Google for using Chrome to increase its revenue? Um, surely you jest?

More doubts on ID card readers

Matthew Ellen

Dumbstruck

I don't know who coined the term security theatre, but I heard it here on the Reg and it fits so well with most of what the government seems to do in the name of keeping us safe.

I find it hard to believe how stupid these schemes are.

Call for heads to roll over failed spook IT system

Matthew Ellen

This is not surprising

It's just another IT project that went out of scope!

Ireland bucks trend with anti-blasphemy law

Matthew Ellen

Government's opinion

Does this mean that the government consider the various religious group to be stupid and fat people clever enough to figure out how to kill the bullies and get away with it?

What if you're fat and religious? Do you get caught for ABH, but let off on grounds that your weight means that God cares more about you (more of you to love)?

World's smallest working fuel cell developed

Matthew Ellen

Parallel

Can you hook up the micro cells in parallel? Then you can generate an amp with 1000, and it would barely take up any space. 3m x 3m x 1m is quite large for 1 KA I suppose. How much power do you need?

Linux: this year's silver lining?

Matthew Ellen
Happy

@Mark, re:@vincent hump

Hi Mark,

You have to pay for support for Vista, but the phone number is: 0870 60 10 100

http://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?acty=ProductList&ctl=productlist&wf=PID&trl=PID~ProductList&ln=en-gb&prid=10295&gprid=436647

As for the Vista manual, have you pressed F1 lately? (You didn't say /good/ manual.)

Beeb names new Doctor Who

Matthew Ellen
Thumb Up

opinion

He's a bit creepy looking, isn't he? Has a bit of Christopher Morris about him. I hope they get an unknown actor for the companion, a fresh start could be most interesting.

Is Google's culture grab unstoppable?

Matthew Ellen
Coat

What was the song?

Money For Nothing?

Accused Scareware mongers held in contempt of court

Matthew Ellen

former

No, Belize is a _former_ British Colony. So it's very much like America.

Apple ejects iBoobs

Matthew Ellen

Objectionality

Perhaps Apple are worried that feminists browsing the app store would spot this app and rise up in disgust, seeing the app store as just another bastion of material objectifying the female form as nothing more than a plaything. But that seems unlikely. They're probably just worried about getting put on the sex offenders' register, for selling material potentially covered by that new law.

Chip boffins hone silicon-brain interface

Matthew Ellen
Happy

title

Just call me Denton, J.C. Denton.

Also: The Pope's a Catholic? Who Knew?

Page: