Posts by Cliff

Read Le Carré

Read the stack of John Le Carré novels (he was a former employee of the services), and you'll doubtless get a taste of the bluffs, double-bluffs and giving away false agents. And as a bonus, they're bloody good reads, too :-) You'll thank me once you get into his stuff, it's head and shoulders above most of the genre writers!

What's wrong with a server-side imagemap?

Remember imagemaps? Fallen from favour, but 'click the only circle inside a triangle' or similar tests are easy to parse for a human, damn hard for a computer, and all the processing is server-side for the imagemap.

Not sure how to make it blindness-proof, but it would cover the bulk of cases quickly, easily and un-OCR-ably

Hole in the middle

To make a hole in the middle converter, you could use a micro-SD card and a hole punch, just to cover all formats poorly and extend the gimmick

SsNAFU

SsNAFU

Comes with

It comes with a small vanity mirror, for simpler use.

What we really need is...

For the lovely QinteQ people to offer us another day, and throw it open to Reg readers to design and build devices that'll work at -56C and 70000'. Then we can all get boffining in our sheds, and test the whole darn lot in one go. I think we all //really// want this to work, don't we?

Trying to force the govt's hands?

With so many cuts, perhaps this is the contractor trying to force the govt to *not* cut this project. Or at least, to maximise the amount billable before it gets cut.

Where 32=16

Win 3 wasn't 32-bit, win95 was the start of that on the consumer side IIRC

Shazam?

Are the copies similar enough for Shazam to recognize? Would that be the acid test?

Grow small businesses...

Those of us with small businesses usually want to grow them to employ others (who don't want to run businesses - most people!), and a bit of help is always welcome. The transition from small service company to employing business is an awkward stage - you have all the overheads and costs of running a payroll, PAYE, NMW laws, etc. for part-time help, a few hours here or there. If we can get a leg up to get over that steep escalation in costs and hassle and paperwork, we can get employing others all the sooner.

Big employers grow from small employers, small employers grow from entrepreneurs. Look after the small guy, help him grow, and the whole economy grows, everyone wins.

That's *so* yesterday...

"The platform is based on Android 2.1, and it includes Google's Chrome browser with an Adobe Flash 10.1 plug-in. After all, you'll need Flash for YouTube."

A day is a long time in open sourcing of formerly closed video codecs...

Brilliant :-)

>>>But then the original engineers actually had an education in how computer systems worked, rather than focussing on making privacy policies fade out of view using Javascript.<<<

Gold star for Google

This is excellent news for HTML5, if browsers get behind a standardised codec for the <video> tag. Somebody had to do it, and this is absolutely the least evil thing they've done in years.

It'll piss off Adobe bigtime, mind.

Boot partition? Swap files?

I could see it finding its place

Microsoft Bob next!

I'm one of the few people to ever use MS Bob - the only thing more awkward than Win3.1 on my G1 would be MS Bob. Hmmm I must work on it ;-)

Richer Sounds Own Brand

Well technically it's an exclusive distribution deal for Cambridge Audio, a brand owned by Audio Partnership, which is majority owned by Julian Richer, so as near as dammit an own-brand machine. Just for info...

Read the linked article

It discusses just the fact that captivity raised frogs are non-toxic, then talks about synthesising the poison.

Disgusting

Implying it is low-energy just to sell fossil-fuel burners is sickening. And the fact that the state and newspapers endorse and celebrate it, even moreso.

Thanks to The Register for using actual counting before awarding a badge.

"Vail"?

Did they learn nothing from "One Care"?

Everyone?

I use Gmail on FF3.6.x, but the drag/drop doesn't seem to work for me - am I missing something?

What would Smiley say?

letting kids run around with secrets

Anonymous Tipster

Are these the same 'anonymous tipsters' who 'spot' media-hungry girls with their boobies out on private beaches for the tabloids and pretend they're news when they're really PR agency stunts?

Messy time ahead

If you're an Apple shareholder, you must get very very jumpy when you hear of Jobs' deteriorating health and megalomania (doubtless buoyed by dodging death) - the company is hanging off of the cult of one man, when he goes, the company will massively collapse I suspect. Sure, it won't vanish overnight, but I could imagine an unprecedentedly big share price crash

Why outsource?

If you can still be buggered by strikes etc?

Keeping an eye on doggers

Aye, easy gag there, but it suggests a wider solution - CCTV pay-per-view live web feeds. You can watch a fat hag funbling through a windscreen live, as it happens, blow by blow (easier gag).

If it's real, I'll be in the queue

Frankly a netbook flattened out to a basic tablet, yeah why not? Losing the keyb and hinges will reduce cost, touchscreen will increase it, etc - there'll be a sweet-spot. I doubt it's at $99, unless that's factoring in a subsidy for educational use, but I could see a simple mono touch-sensitive slate being pretty cheap to make in any kind of volume. You could certainly make them for $99 and have money over for shipping, a mars bar, and a cup of tea.

Brilliant!

Oh come on my luddite friends, think about this in reality - nobody will use this when there is real cash around, but stag nights in the pub, time to put another £20 into the kitty - *bang* done. Compared with going out to find a cashpoint, or using one in the pub with a £1.75 fee, and you're a bit tipsy, perfect storm. And iPhone cretins will be the perfect launch audience. I expect it'll have pretty animations of coins flying from one phone to the other too.

The article says you have to verify the transaction, so this is really just a gimmick to make the 'ok, what's your paypal account email?' stage disappear - boink, authorise, done. And as it's the devices handling the proxying, you need never reveal your account name, I guess?

That'll include this site then?

The Reg uses Google Analytics, quantserve and doubleclick for a second dose of Google tracking all on this very page. Thank you NoScript :-)

Just because you made it up doesn't mean it doesn't exist

Ahhhh I worked for a *VERY BIG* computer company, one that should have known better, when they were testing a new very big system. They decided to use <realusername>@bogus.com to send copies of <realusername>'s live billing information as test data. Some clever Business Analyst (with an MBA, no doubt) decided that because they *made up* sending it to *bogus.com* as opposed to *<ourcompanyname>.com* it wouldn't inconvenience our real staff with their test data. Just because you make something up doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If the folks over at bogus.com had checked their mailservers a few years back, they would have had so much commercially sensitive and personally identifiable information that the company could have been fined thousands (as well as the value of the contracts they could/should have lost if bogus.com had sold on the data).

This is why, for test purposes, you MUST HAVE real, verified false data. In US films, all phone numbers use the (verified false) area code 555 - otherwise you get dickheads phoning the number - and woe betide you if you end up phonebombing some innocent litigious family! Same with vehicle registration plates, etc. Just making up data can only mean trouble!

Register, and tell your loved ones.

It's probably the easiest thing you can do to save a life. It requires no work, no pain, no inconvenience, and is genuinely and easily the most chance you'll ever have to save the life of a stranger. Or if you're prepared for the smallest of inconveniences, give blood too, and you'll be a f*cking hero. Money can't make blood, money can't make organs, so make sure you give.

DO tell your relatives and next-of-kin though - tell them in no uncertain terms that you really want to do this. It's a way they can remember you as a hero, a lifesaver if they feel squeamish about it. They need to know as there is such a short window after death when your organs are usable, and they'll be in a total state having lost a loved one, and barely able to make any kind of decision or take in the news. Brief them well beforehand, make sure they know, make sure it's not news for them on the most stressful of days, and you make everyones life easier - and potentially save several lives as well.

Bloody Brilliant!

That's awesome. He deserves the win. The plug is also used in some other ex-colonies, it has a big potential market.

Bloody stupid.

We may snipe at Google's "Don't be evil", but Apple seem like a right bunch of c*nts to be honest, all smiles and fluffy sincerity whilst stabbing your baby. Real sociopaths.

If Google were feeling troublesome and wanting to defend their phone OS (which I use and like, having come from WinMo), they could publically offer to back HTC, and let the sabre-rattle begin. Only lawyers win, we consumers lose. Cheers Jobs.

Punched card IDE

Yep, I agree that there are plenty of good reasons to slogh off the IDE's that turn one job into 2 or more, at least sometimes. HTML is inherently pretty simple, but let any of the IDE/design tools near it and you get into a horrible cycle of trying to guess which style is coming from where, whether you have tables everywhere or pure CSS etc, some odd ideas about templating/inheritance, yuk.

But you got me thinking, what would a modern IDE for punched cards look like? Colour-coded cards? Automatically appearing libraries of thousands of boilerplate cards added to every project? Bits of string connecting boxes of punched cards to add references? It's quite a fun mental exercise.

Downloads the whole inbox?

Holy buggering pants, my GMail inbox runs to 6GB, and I should download that locally so it can index that lot on a platform less powerful than a laptop? I must be seriously misunderstanding something here!

Another use...

You could use this system (and control the relative exposure times of individual pixel groups) to increase the dynamic range of the camera too (eg group 1 at 20ms, group 2 at 10ms, group 3 at 5 ms, etc) then combine the images into an HDR image.

The Usenet Oracle 2.0

That is all.

"That's all Folks"

Best strapline of the month, genius.