Posts by M Gale 3500 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Apr 2007
And if users get control of the permission, what do you think will be among the first things turned off for adware apps (unless the app itself needs it for normal function)? Network access. This will probably start app devs packing some ads into their programs so they can't be blocked.
Good.
Sure the cockpit isn't where the craft's "joystick" is?
Think of where the pilot sits on early aircraft, and where the control stick is. Now you realise why it got the "joystick" moniker, and, possibly, why the bit of an aircraft where the pilot sits is the, ahem, "cockpit".
Urban Legend or Urban Myth? Not sure, but it's amusing enough.
And when Google Glass manages to prevent an accident due to pertinent information being right there when needed...
...we'll never know about it. I'd like to say "because accidents not happening isn't news", but more likely because it will be impossible, because fuckwits from the Peanut Gallery are colluding however unintentionally with fuckwits in government to get it banned BECAUSE IT JUST NEEDS TO BE BANNED. Oh, and glassholes. The way that word is spat out here makes it sound like it begins with an N.
I guess all Glassholes should get on the bus eh? The back of the bus?
People drove with doors unlocked
Silly question but, unless you're driving in a really bad part of town or travelling with young children (who should be in the back anyway), why would you lock the doors? In a crash, I would rather have a small chance of the doors being jammed, than an almost certainty.
As for the rest of the post, this belongs in the "all cars should have no seat belts and a nine inch iron spike in the middle of the steering wheel" field of fuckwittery that seems to infect some people. Fine. You first.
Certainly easy enough to use a gyro or combination of accelerometers to detect head orientation and throw a loud *BEEP* into the headphones if it detects you nodding off. Possibly not foolproof, but without actually looking at the eye and scanning for the visibility of an iris/pupils, a possibly useful helper.
But hey, let's ban it instead.
One of those few devices where parts are most definitely user serviceable, and for certain values of failure, are economically viable to fix when broken. Even economical to build your own out of parts.
I can see why some manufacturers would rather we all be using sealed netbooks and fondle-toys.
-- TiZen could make MS and Google less nettlesome, ms less meddlesome, and put sordid, convoluted patent trolls back into hot, roiling boiling kettles some...
Tizen is one of them Linux things, which means Microsoft will just carry on trolling. It might shut Oracle up though.
a)You need something to move TO
It's a bit geeky, but Retroshare is showing some promise. Decentralised too.
Chat, forums, mail and file sharing with a Web Of Trust network topology. Easy to set up, easy to use, and speedy enough to not get bored waiting for the latest lolcat picture to load. All it needs is a profile page and a wall that people can scrawl on, and you're done.
Of course, it's more for keeping in touch with your friends rather than keeping in touch with your "friends", so maybe not. But hey, maybe!
There's a reason that nitrogen-cooled freezer wagons have instructions to leave the doors open for 30 minutes before going inside. The first thing you'd notice about being in a nitrogen atmosphere is when you faceplant into the floor from oxygen deprivation.
That said, dumping nitrogen into the coolant reservoir might be an idea for an emergency "we need 120 seconds to shut everything down nicely" solution.
Rather than scraping the site and parsing hypertext directly, automate a browser. Find out where the relevant UI elements get rendered in the page and from then on it's "that input element at that position, whatever it's called and however many zero-margin DIVs it's embedded in."
And yay, yet more patents pending on software. Guess this'll be kicked into the long grass for the next 25 years, then.
User-defined avatars - we don't want to have to store avatars, or vet them, or get angry if someone changes avatar to something abusive.
Aw, please?
Think about it this way: The moment someone sends you goatse as a picture to review, you can invoke a "we don't want to see that shit" clause in the terms of use for this place. Rather than ban them, well, that's a use for up and downvotes. To get the ability for a custom avatar or selection of icons back, you're on probation and you need to get a 75/25 split in favour of upvotes over the last 200 (or so) votes on your posts with the count starting from the start of probation and continuing for as many votes as it takes to achieve 75/25 people from the last 200 liking your posts. Until then you're stuck with Anonymous Coward, Hello Kitty, or some other variety of dunce cap.
If it's something less gross, say annoyingly repeating attempts at trying to get the same disallowed image approved, you can implement the same sanction but maybe minus the enforced dunce cap and with a lower voting sample and easier ratio required to get it back.
I reckon there's enough people posting and voting for an idea like that to work, and I know I honestly couldn't care less about waiting a week to a month or more to see a batch of icons get approved. I know it's going to take someone a while to sift through the requests at first, and I don't think people will make that many requests when they realise it takes a week to a month or more for changes and updates to be approved.
If there's a hardware issue, you could always go the whole hog and make it a feature of a Register Plus Ad Free Paid Membership or something. Keep Free pretty much as it is (maybe fix the threading issues, oh please fix the threading issues), £10/year per member to hire a few terabytes in a rack somewhere, buy your own fat pipe and some boxes, or some kind of big blob of virtual cloudiness?
How much do you reckon you make per commentard (as opposed to, ahem, read-only viewers) from the ads at the minute? If the price is right, I reckon there's people here who'll buy into extra bells and whistles and a full page of news minus the ads, even if you can just run ABP+ for the latter feature.
If this is confirmed, I'd say Eclipse Internet deserve everything they've got coming to them.
Anyway, a domain name should take 24 hours or less to switch. Couldn't you do it anyway and publically put the blame where it belongs when the site comes back up? Give existing customers advance warning of an outage perhaps.
Indeed. It's not like they have any excuse either. Pretty much any server-side language worth its salt (heh) is going to have some kind of readily available Digest library. This could be fixed with.. well, I'm no huge expert but I'm reckoning less extra lines of code than I have fingers.
Keep on 'em, Reg. You wouldn't want to miss the inevitable massive hack attack. I'm wondering if they even sanitise dirty data? They going to get intimately familiar with Bobby Tables soon?
I suppose only General Motors should be allowed to have a company car fleet?
No haulage unless you're into postage?
Can a business buy a Ford Transit if it isn't a building firm?
Oh, and do the vending machines in the cafe have to be taken out if it's not a Starbucks?
Really, I'm not seeing the problem here. Google have struck a deal, a new terminal is being built. They ain't taking an existing one. They're not robbing people of the ability to get cheap flights to Bumfuck, Ohio. Wouldn't surprise me if part of the deal means it becomes even easier to do so.
But let's see, eh?
they want their own transportation that the serfs are not allowed to use.
Well I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like your car being co-opted by the Collective either.
If Google as a company need to shuffle hundreds of people over long distances each year, doesn't it make sense to do a deal to basically build your own terminals right next to where you need them to be? It's not like they are robbing people of the terminals that are already there, and do you think the council would be spending $85 million if they weren't getting something out of it? You know, something that might mean lower taxes, better services or both for the people living there?
I'm probably one of the more cynical people here, but all I see from this rainy island is win/win for everyone involved. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but time will tell.
Domain names with wildcard redirects. AS MANY EMAIL ADDRESSES AS YOU LIKE. My god, it's like concentrated cocaine.
On the plus side, it's amusing to see people trying to exploit majordomo@, listserve@, root1@, root2@, root3@...
Oh Mr Bayes, how I love you. As much as a man can love another man nonsexually.
GPS are only for those who can't read a map and are unable to hold basic route instructions in one's head.
I'm sure the various lorry drivers and other long distance, international types will love having to keep a whole box of maps for every area they drive though.
You do know that a GPS navigation device is basically a map with a homing ability, right? That's what those funny squiggles on the screen are. You know: roads.
If it stops motorcycles from weaving down the white line when the other traffic is "only" doing 65mph then fine, make helmets illegal
I get the feeling that you're exaggerating.
Don't get envious of the legal ability of motorbike riders to filter. Get a motorbike, and take advantage.
Henry Ford said something along the lines of "if I gave my customers what they wanted, I'd be in the business of making faster horses."
And people said the same thing about Steve "Seven Inch Tablets Are Way Too Small, and you really like iTunes, no you really do and you must have it" Jobs.
Mind you, at least the iPod and iPod Maxi ended up being somewhat popular.
Correct but remember we're talking about Google, who's entire business model is based on making money by leeching off other people's property.
Is this becoming a fashion? "lol Google steals ur stuff"? Thought-stopping cliché, much?
Plenty of things you can accuse Google of, but this is not one of them. Of course, you are free to rewrite your robots.txt so that Google never touches your site again. Even perhaps block the entire Google IP range from your servers.
Now why don't we talk about Microsoft, whose entire business model is based around, oh, leeching off other people's property. The golden screwdriver business model, with added overtones of extortion and racketeering. Or Apple, who so desperately desire to be Microsoft, even while Microsoft wish they were as "cool" as Apple?
Frankly I'll take Google any day over those bridge-trolls.
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/
The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted. This allows people to share the program and their improvements, if they are so minded. But it also allows uncooperative people to convert the program into proprietary software. They can make changes, many or few, and distribute the result as a proprietary product. People who receive the program in that modified form do not have the freedom that the original author gave them; the middleman has stripped it away.
Though you are probably thinking of the following paragraph:
Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so would make copyleft impossible. The “left” in “copyleft” is not a reference to the verb “to leave”—only to the direction which is the inverse of “right”.
See, I don't read that as "abandon all copyright". I read that as "abandoning the copyright on your product as a way of putting it into the public domain". Abandoning all copyright would mean that "proprietary", ie uncopyable, products would be impossible to legally enforce, and there would be no need for copyleft. Therefore, copyleft is invented as a means to subvert (or perhaps invert) copyright. Therefore, I don't think the people who invented copyleft would be all that bothered if the notion of intellectual property (note I did not say 'copyright' there, two very different beasts) went out of the window.
There is also the very second sentence in the GNU GPL preamble:
The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users.
Sounds pretty hippy-dippy-free-love-and-pass-the-flowers-around to me.
Of course I guess we would have to get an answer straight from Stallman, ESR or the various other GNU guys' mouths, to know for certain.
All those GPL variants so beloved of the GNU and many members of the FOSS communities?
Copyleft was invented to subvert copyright. I don't think the originators of that license would care too much if "intellectual property" as we know it completely ceased to exist.
Me, I can understand the advantage of some kinds of limited copyright. However "intellectual property" is, as I continue to maintain, a cancer.
Though what this has to do with the NSA spying on people, privacy in general or the tendency of large corporations to be obsessed with spying on their customers, I have no idea. It's an Orlowski article. I get the feeling he'd blame "the freetards" for shooting John F Kennedy, if he could.
Ask yourself why laptops sell more than desktop PCs.
Because they are shiny and you can take them with you. At least, that's why people were buying them when I was asking them as a computer salesman. Most of the time I'd just find them an appropriate laptop. Occasionally (like when it's obviously for a kid) I'd give it "err.. sure you wouldn't like something less delicate?"
They usually stuck with their choice. I suppose some commentards here would be trying to hide a smirk at the inevitable smashed-up junk that landed on the service desk three months later.
As far as the article goes? Hey, might make a nice little box to velcro to the back of a telly. It'll never be a gaming PC, but it might run a web browser. Which makes me wonder, why on earth is the only option £300 for a welded-in i5? Jokes aside, you don't need an i5 for Firefox, and £300 plus adding your own RAM and your own HDD? Bit pricey there.
That and "the general public" tend to not want to do all that super hyper advanced stuff like "put the memory stick in the slot". They want it all done for them. This box apparently doesn't do that. Oh, and then you need the license for Windows. Good luck trying to sell THAT on its own without Microsoft's special "only if you only sell Windows, and only built into a new PC, and if the motherboard dies you buy a new Windows" discount.
Many top-notch computer scientists and hackers have some kind of autistic spectrum disorder. It's one of those weird conditions that in milder cases can actually be beneficial if your job involves systems analysis and design. Not so much if it involves a lot of customer-facing work.
Though I do have to wonder exactly which one of the buttload of comments up there you were replying to?
The problem with the "If its not broke, don't fit it" attitude
And when the Damagement have the desire to fix everything regardless of whether it's broke, we end up with the Windows 8 UI. The problem is in how to educate the bosses enough that they understand what "maintenance" is without going batshit crazy on "new". Or worse, "better because it's newer".
Well, my adobe@ username has obviously been "pwned". None of the others have, allegedly. At least according to that site.
However according to an utterly massive data dump I (and many others) got from the Reg a while ago, my email address for this place is comprehensively pwned. Coff. Lucky I have at least semi-sensible passwords, eh?
As for being all super scared about entering your details into that web site, it's been around for quite the long while now. It's being run by someone who presumably wants you to use it. Doing nefarious things with the stuff you type into the search box is not going to be conducive to that. Besides, exactly what is the owner going to do with your username, when s/he apparently already has raw data from umpteen leaks to choose from?
Is this thread still going on?
Not acknowledged the links I provided which suggest this is a myth? Why would that be?
I think he's on drugs, myself. It's affected his reading comprehension. Seems to have seriously affected his comprehension of cause and effect, too. He still seems to think that all the problems caused by banning a herb are actually because of the herb.
And hey, apparently we're herd-buddies. At least that's what I assume by "Blowhard". He seems to have a problem remembering names when they're printed right in front of him, too.
I think the only thing Bryant is consistent at, is seemingly cocaine-fuelled rants. I'm wondering if he'll try and implicate people in some Penguinista conspiracy to dull the minds of potential future Microsoft developers, next.
And we might have to do something about that. Muahahaha.
I see "90% piracy rate" and call utter bullshit, sorry. I know too many people with smartphones and apps for them for that statistic to make any sense whatsoever. Even with that in mind, the various reports my Googling turns up (try ios piracy rate, or android piracy rate) seem to indicate that iOS has a high piracy rate too, with some reports claiming that it's higher than Android.
I take both cases with a pinch of salt. Wherever that piracy is allegedly happening, it isn't around here.
look at their interface design for anything - it's an unholy mess of random icons and text.
A logo, a text box, a "search" button and an "I'm feeling lucky" button. I don't know how it could get much more simple?
Unless you mean the phone OS, that has.. you know.. the same grid-of-icons display that mobile phones have had since the first mobile phone with a more capable display than "two lines of text and some indicators"? The one with the phone dialler right there on the front page?
I can see how you might get confused. If you're the sort of person who gets confused when the computer asks you to hit the "any" key.
I think it's more likely that Samsung would buy Apple than the reverse. In fact Samsung could probably buy Apple with the spare change found down the back of the CEO's sofa.
As already mentioned, Samsung is a gargantuan company. Apple make a few high-margin popular toys, but they really are a minnow in comparison.
Graduate from LJMU, BSc(hons) in Computer Games Technology. They taught C, and C++, and C# (amongst other languages/toolkits such as Matlab). C# has Mono and Unity3D behind it, and for computationally intensive tasks (like computer games), there really is no substitute for C and C++.
Well, asides assembly language perhaps, but I'm pretty sure even experienced ASM programmers only drop into it occasionally to optimise a C or C++ routine. Only really saw bits of Assembly language on the course as it related to using PS2 devkits. All I can say to that is "I pity the poor PS2 coders". God that was an awful system. The devkits look lovely though.
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