Posts by Mark McC

@Grease Monkey

Congratulations on your short (<140 characters) and completely irrelevant comment. I know a certain Web service that might cater perfectly to your needs.

Backfiring marvellously

This explains why both Trafigura and Carter-Ruck are in the top 10 trending topics on that hotbed of irrelevance, Twitter. In an effort to prevent reporting of whatever it may have been, they've managed to raise awareness of it in the minds of hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise wouldn't have given a toss about it, myself included.

What, no immigrants?

If only there'd be an immigrant angle to spin on this, the Daily Mail would have reached its own pinnacle of perfection and imploded, forming a singularity of middle-class outrage.

B- : Could try harder

Replace the DW with the actual TARDIS. Throw in some animation of the police box light spinning round, creating some moody lighting and ominous shadows and it might be OK.

At least a new logo helps promote a clean break from Russell T Davies and the era of fart jokes. Although having watched the recent Torchwood mini-series Children of Men, he can write a damn good story when he tries (and I despised everything Torchwood before that). Shame he waited until leaving DW before pulling it out of his hat.

sonic screwdriver, pocket, etc.

5000 miles a week?

OK, someone needs to tell him that driving the missus down to Tesco's doesn't involve going through the Channel Tunnel and a round trip via Hamburg, despite what his TomTom says.

Not so hot on the redesign of users' profile pages

In an attempt to turn them into some kind of Facebook-lite, Yahoo! has revamped users' profile pages, including publishing their age based on the (in my case false) date of birth I entered while signing up back when people still cared about Yahoo!.

Shame they didn't think to provide any way for users to correct their age or, more desirably, stop it being displayed to the world altogether - especially considering no-one was ever asked to provide consent for it to be shown.

I'm not an expert on such matters, but surely the Data Protection Act has some rules against companies deciding to publicly publish user data for which consent was never given?

@frank ly

Your reference to South Park's underwear-stealing gnomes is strangely appropriate, since both parties seem to follow the same 3-stage business plan.

1. Collect underwear / tweets.

2. ??

3. Profit!

Not such thing as a free MS lunch

Oh, I need to install your Silverlight plugin? *sigh* I was probably going to have to do that at some point anyway. *click*

OK, Silverlight installed - now can I has Feynmann? Whoops, it seems my browser (Opera) isn't capable of streaming video content. Strange, all that Youtube and iPlayer stuff must have been my imagination.

Switch to backup browser (Chrome). Damn, seems Google (the people behind Youtube and the guys touting HTML5) didn't bother to write video playback into their browser either. Silly Google.

Internet Explorer it is then! Time for some Feynma..."Internet Explorer has encountered an error and needs to close".

Thankfully, for people lumbered with inferior browsers or those of us too dumb to run IE for more than 5 minutes without it crashing, bittorrent is there to help with higher-quality versions to watch at our convenience.

This could have been a nice philanthropic gesture garnering some praise for Microsoft but they just couldn't resist the chance to wrap it in a clumsy attempt to push IE onto more people.

Newer browsers may be better for surfing the web...

But many government IT systems I've had experience of are still tied into shoddily written intranet systems that downright refuse to work properly in any browser that isn't an old version of Internet Explorer laden with ActiveX. Some of them provide a limited subset of features for users of Netscape Navigator(!)

If you want to use Firefox or any Webkit-based browser you're out of luck as the apps in question are often coded to reject outright any browser other than the versions of IE they were designed for.

To paraphrase Troughton-era Doctor Who

"Technology doesn't prevent idiots from being wrong, it just allows them to be wrong with more authority".

Well, it's a change from the 101 Hitchhikers' Guide references bound to get attached to this story.

@Fuzzy Wotnot

I'm no scientist but I'm pretty sure the Cillit Bang effect is down to the acid (phosphoric?) in fizzy drinks rather than the sugar content. You could probably clean your pennies just as well using organic hand-squeezed by Tibetan monks orange juice which is even more acidic than fizzy drinks.

Having said that, neither of the above are anywhere near as acidic as the stuff already in your digestive system. Swallowing a penny might well result in it coming out the other end just as shiny (well, after you gave it a rinse down to remove any attached matter :S ).

I don't care who is credited with the improvements...

... just so long as they work.

I went back to Linux recently and the graphics subsystem was utterly abysmal compared to the complicated (but reliable) XFree86 days. I discovered my laptop's Radeon chipset is no longer supported by ATI's current drivers, while the last supported version won't compile against 2.6.29 or higher kernels,

Switching to the open-source radeon driver (which claimed to support my chipset) resulted in my laptop booting to a blank screen. It later turned out that the driver cleverly defaults to the external VGA port on laptops, even when no VGA monitor is connected. Turning to xrandr got my laptop's panel activated but then disabled the external monitor when I finally connected it. GNOME's display manager applet insisted I had only one monitor. xrandr reported both monitors, but telling it via the command line to activate the second monitor reported success but did nothing except flicker the display slightly.

After dropping to a command line and editing xorg.conf by hand (you know, the step all these 'improvements' were supposed to negate) I finally got a dual-screen setup. Well, for about 5 minutes until the graphics subsystem locked up completely while trying to open a video on the second screen. 3 days of endless configuration resulting in zero success was not the new user-friendly Linux I'd hoped for.

Final solution: reinstalled XP, clicked the single checkbox "Extend my desktop to this monitor". End of story, not a single lockup or crash in the months since. I don't care who gets credit for improving the abomination that is Linux video, just so long as someone does it.

He's confusing reach with control

The Internet was not designed as a place the government couldn't reach. .gov was one of the first TLDs created, and one only needs to cringe at Gordon Brown's Youtube broadcasts to see that the government reaches all parts of the Internet.

What he really means is control; even then the government already has all the control it needs. If I commit an Internet-related crime, whether hacking, fraud or distribution of illegal material, the government has the legislation in place to prosecute me.

But if this Labour government's past history is anything to go by, his idea of control extends beyond prosecuting people engaged in criminal activity and into the realms of government as self-appointed moral guardians of what is acceptable for ordinary folks to see/hear/think while online.

I'll be interested to see if Obama does appoint a US counterpart. After all, his was the campaign that spent millions fostering the support of online activist communities who were sick and tired of the previous administration. Would such a campaign be as successful if the incumbent government had control over what content made it onto the Internet?

Scary, but it's no Chuck Norris

When someone exploits a vulnerability that steals your passwords, edits your details and finishes off by roundhouse kicking your monitor through a window, then, and only then, will they be entitled to use the Chuck Norris analogy.

@Andrew Norton

It would be nice if it where that simple, but life rarely is. Apart from being illegal, what happens when a bug in the hypothetical Conficker disabler you speak of accidentally corrupts the Windows system files of half the machines it gets installed on? Do you think a major software vendor would accept responsibility for any losses and own up to illegally downloading their fix onto millions of PCs without the users' consent?

Secondly, if Conficker is as well-written as the security folks tell us it is, then it's not going to accept just any old update. It will only install a new payload if it has been signed in some way by the original authors, much like a typical antivirus program will only install updates it can verify as having come from its parent company.

/Tux and I will be sitting down with our popcorn come April 1 to watch the fireworks (or damp squibs).

He makes me cringe, but I think I see his point...

Yes, Javascript code is open in that you can see it, but it isn't free. I'm pretty sure every major tech company who has invested in developing AJAX platforms has every line of it patented to the high heavens. All of which is completely irrelevant to users.

The flipside of Javascript code being visible to all is that it tends to get 'borrowed' by other developers for their own purposes, without regard to whatever copyright claims and dire threats against misuse may be hidden away in the legal section of the original owner's website.

So your company rolls out its new Web 3.0 ultra-spiffy AJAX-fest of a website, nurtures a loyal following among users and amasses several billion in venture capital (OK, maybe not that last one in these harsh times). All is good until your legal dept. receives a none-too-friendly letter from Google/Amazon/whoever your developers 'borrowed' the code from, citing US Patent #289388494. The copyright was clearly stated in subsection 13.21 on page 9 of the legal section of their website and since they can also see your Javascript, they noticed your developers didn't even bother removing the original source comments when they did a cut-and-paste job.

Stallman tends to bluster a lot, but often his core ideas have some merit. Javascript is moving from a handy way to add functionality in plain old HTML towards a full-blown application layer. I don't believe every company writing Javascript should freely release their code for reuse without restriction, but having a large GPL-style library for developers to use rather than the code 'borrowing' that's widespread today seems a sound enough idea.

I'm happy enough to let Stallman rant about whatever has currently got his goat. Anything to keep him from singing that damn Free Software song again.

/mine's the gnu-suede jacket with a copy of the LGPL in the pocket

Gun, meet foot

Dear music industry,

Hardball negotiation tactics generally only work if the other party needs you more than you need them. In these tough times of economic downturn and rampant piracy, you're the guys who need whatever income and goodwill you can scrape together, not Google.

Losing one of your largest outlets for advertising your product and further demonising yourself in the eyes of your customers (no matter who's at fault, the music industry will bear the blame for this) is not a wise move.

Then again, you've been a bit short on smart moves recently. Maybe you should accept Google's offer, on the condition that they throw in a few of their gurus to teach you how to develop a business strategy that your customers can actually tolerate.

Yours,

Internet.

He didn't plan ahead

He should have created an unreasonably long passphrase constructed from random characters and symbols that couldn't possibly be memorized, written it down on a piece of paper and locked it in a safe.

This can't be real?

If you have a tidy desktop, you're a tidy person and if you have an unorganized desktop you're an unorganized person? And this qualifies as research?

Presumably if your employer implements a locked desktop group policy where you can't change the wallpaper or add/remove icons it means they've stolen your soul, leaving you an empty flesh shell chained to a desk.

I think you're onto something...

"We at Vulture Central favour Zac Ephron as Douglas Quaid..."

Hollywood, forget the CGI advancements and give us Total Recall: The Musical, featuring the songs

- I'll Remember You (Wholesale)

- Kuato's Lament

- Just Another Dream?

- Johnnycab Rap

- Air Today, Gone Tomorrow

- Mutant Martian Miner Medley

Not sure who could play the leads, but Verne Troyer is a shoe-in to play the stomach-dwelling psychic Kuato.

Re: Standards working in Firefox, failing in IE8

I'm guessing the reason sites work in other standards-compliant browsers but fail in IE8 is because many of these sites will have some kind of user-agent detection to determine what browser they're rendering to and altering the HTML accordingly.

Pseudo-code time:

if (browser.agent == "Firefox/Opera/Safari/Chrome/Konqueror/anything except IE")

{

<original standards-compliant HTML lovingly crafted by developer>

} else {

<bastardised collection of hacks and dodgy HTML to get the site working in IE, liberally

sprinkled with colourful expletives questioning the parentage of BillG>

}

Even if IE8 is more compliant, many websites will still give it the botched-up HTML needed to display the site in IE6 rather than the standard HTML. Having IE8 masquerade itself as Firefox might solve some of these problems except that IE8 still isn't standards-compliant enough to render everything that would then be given to it.

I wonder if that "eating your own dog food" quote is still as popular in Redmond as it used to be?

Mind the (God of the) Gaps.

"... the questions that evolution can't answer can still be atributed to a god..."

No, they can't. By labelling everything unknown as 'God did it', you're espousing the very opposite of scientific theory. When a scientist encounters an unknown quantity in a formula, or lacks a theory to rationally explain something, the correct answer is "I don't know". Admitting your ignorance is not shameful, and highlights areas where other people should focus their research. To assume that anything that can't be explained has to be the work of God is to admit that there's no point trying to find an answer.

I wouldn't be typing this now if at some point in the past scientists had given up trying to explain electricity and just declared it was angry sparks hurled from the sky by God. The electron gun in my monitor wouldn't exist if science hadn't discovered the atom and its fundamental particles. Back then, they couldn't see these particles first-hand so their solution should have been to accept that everything was made of magic God-stuff and leave it at that?

Most importantly, using God as an explanation is simply replacing one unknown quantity with another. Many people with your reasoning often attribute the Big Bang to God, since the universe can't just have been created from nothing, right? Maybe, but this doesn't answer the question - it just raises more. If God made the Big Bang, who made God? What is God made of? Is there more than one God? What physical phenomena or stimulii caused the God to react to form a Big Bang? Can we reproduce the God in controlled experiments?

OK, silly, but the point is that it's much more scientific to say "we don't know, but let's research the hell out of it and get some answers" than to say "we don't know so God must have done it, case closed. Let's cancel all research and go sing us some Kum Ba Ya".

And how is this worse than XP->Vista?

XP Professional can't be upgraded to Vista Home Basic/Premium, but sometimes can be upgraded to Business or Ultimate. XP Media Centre can be upgraded to Home Basic, but NOT Home Premium, but does upgrade to Vista Business/Ultimate. If you try to upgrade XP-64 to Vista 64, a MS exec comes round your house and pisses in your teapot.

And when you finally do pick'n'mix two versions that are upgradable, you'll find the upgrade process makes a complete pig's ear out of it and you have to go back to wiping the installation and installing clean.

At least Microsoft are being honest and admitting that upgrading is and always has been an exercise in futility.

More TG4

TG4 is the Irish television channel devoted to Gaelic and is doing quite well for itself. It seems that early on they realised that anyone who might have even a passing interest in the language is also the kind of person likely to be interested in shows of a historical, cultural or artistic bent.

They cut down heavily on the whole 'take a popular show and redub it in Gaelic' thing (with the exception of dubbed South Park which is hilarious when you know the episodes well enough not to need English). Instead they focused on providing shows about Irish history, culture, local sports, documentaries from far-flung corners of the world and foreign 'arthouse' movies.

Most of their content is still spoken or dubbed in Gaelic with English subtitles but by branching out into areas that are poorly covered by mainstream channels they've picked up a respectable and loyal share of the market, including many people who don't speak Gaelic. Maybe even a few of the non-Gaelic speakers have even picked up an interest in the language because of this.

If/when the BBC start to provide an Ulster-Scots channel for Northern Ireland, then we will have something worthy of derision.

/Paris could teach the Beeb a thing or two about cunning linguists.

Scientology helped your career?

No, you signed up for a low-key voiceover gig with The Simpsons, which then became one of the most successful TV shows ever, with millions of people seeing your name across their television screens every week. I think that contributed more to your subsequent career than any Thetan voodoo nonsense.

Hail Xenu!

We're all freetards now?

Since when did the hideous term 'freetard' expand from "those who defend their right to download copyright material without paying" to "anyone who uses something that is free"? Since El Reg doesn't ask readers to pay a membership fee for the site, I guess everyone reading this article is now officially a freetard.

The Thanksgiving angle

Perhaps during Thanksgiving Windows users are off celebrating with their families, leaving the Internet free for the lonely Linux/OS X nerds to capture a larger share as they tuck into their family-sized bag of turkey-flavoured Doritos.

I bet a Tux filled with sage stuffing would be mighty tasty.

I've never been called well-informed before

I never thought of myself as a dedicated or better informed film buff (no idea what's even showing at the cinema this week), but I've seen this plastered over several non-movie websites/blogs for months now including the sneakily-filmed trailer.

Mine's the one with the neon blue tubing down the sleeves and keys to a light cycle in the pocket.

One overlooked pro-PSP point.

Some people have commented on the bulky media involved with the PSP. This is quite true, but most of the people I know who own one don't play many UMD games on it.

Personally, I use mine mostly for playing old SNES/MegaDrive/PSOne games from memory card. It also comes in handy as a PDF reader, IRC client and on occasion I've used it to VNC into my home PC from afar. I'm sure this holds true for the other consoles reviewed as well; the really interesting uses are those unofficial ones that homebrew people invent.

Paris knows all about interesting homemade content.

Never mind the (underage) bollocks

Ignoring the paedophile aspect, what is there about Gary Glitter's music that makes it recommended listening to GCSE students? A few disposable glam rock hits and nothing more. There must be plenty of more worthy artists that could fill his slot (fnarr).

Paris had a similarly brief and awful music career, but she kept her porn escapades legal.

Re: Bitching about automatic updates

Google said >"The Software that you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the Services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the Services."

By participating in Google's public beta testing, you agreed to the program automatically updating itself. If you want a browser that doesn't do this, try Firefox, Opera, IE, Safari, Konqueror or any of the others that aren't still in the early beta stages.

Alternatively, uninstall Chrome and wait for the 1.1 release which will probably have an option to disable this (or at least, make a note in your will asking you grandchildren to install it).

/mine's the one with the EULA printout in the pocket.

Re: 'FAIL' IS NOT A NOUN!!!

Ignoring the common Interweb usage of the word as a noun, we have Chambers:

fail (noun):

a failure, especially in an exam.

Wiktionary says:

fail (noun).

a failure, especially of a financial transaction; a failing grade in an academic examination; : To not achieve a particular goal.

I mark your comment a FAIL.

I may be over-simplifying but...

Surely the code in the voting system has but one purpose - to add incoming votes to the running totals for each candidate. How on earth do you screw up a code to add one number to another?

And why were the cards being erased? That's like having a paper ballot where the volunteer county-votey folk set fire to each ballot after they've added it to their running total.

For governments that seem so obsessed with beaurocracy, safety checks and endless paperwork, it seems odd that they would have a built-in erase function on the (e)-paper trail for the single most important set of figures in any democracy.

/mine's the one with the pocketful of hanging chads

Only Islamic terrorists, or what about the Irish?

In Northern Ireland, I can walk into any bargain book store and pick up a shelf of biographies written by former IRA/UVF men, reminiscing about their 'glory days' within their respective organisations. I can also find many books covering the role of the security forces in fighting the IRA, all of which are chock full of tips for terrorists wanting to learn how other operations were foiled.

Should I report these shops to my local anti-terrorist branch? They're not only making terrorist material available to the public - those carefully stacked displays are actively promoting it.

/mine's the one with the Gerry Adams biography in the inner pocket.

Anger isn't the answer

“...we are aggressively working on a fix which should be within a short time frame.”

I'd feel better if they were calmly and systematically working on a fix instead of going at it like angry kittens with a ball of string.

Tiscali

212.139.132.41/42 both scored great on all fronts. Which is surprising, because everything else about them is a bit pants.

All sound recordings?

"The BPI has confirmed to us that no record company member of BPI or PPL has given permission to an individual to communicate sound recordings to the public via the peer-to-peer network that has been operated using your internet connection."

So anyone out there creating music (or any other form of sound recording), even in their own bedroom, should first obtain permission from the BPI before letting others hear it?

Paris, she knows all about amateur bedroom recording.

All valid fears except...

The Europeans, Russians, Chinese and Americans all drive on the same side of the road.

It's the British and Australian space programmes we need to fear.