voice recognition txt msg?

what the hell? if you've got the time to speak your voice message into the phone, then why don't you just call them and have a frikken conversation?

and how smart is the software really? can it tell that someone over the age of 20 is dictating a SMS and so dictate their message word for word, but if the voice is more youthful sounded, will it translate on the fly from "Hi, how are you, what's the latest news?" to "how R U? N E new bants? lolz raaarrrr kthxby" ?

@Martin Lyne

Amen to that. the rights for the Kovacs movies are sitting in the grubby hands of some damn holywood producer and will be years (if ever) before it appears on screen, and yet they're willing to remake classics that they have no chance of improving upon

last time i'll ever watch the simpsons again

hang on, her dream before was to do voice-overs

and now she's a scientology-drone, she's famous for doing what? voice-overs

it doesn't occur to her that she's owes her fame to the show?

re: How much was he paid to change his mind?

i don't think anyone disputes that weather is warmer, but the question is, has mankind caused it, or is it just part of a 200 year (or 300 or 400 or even longer) cycle?

the samples of data that we have to work with (before so-called "scientists" started adjusting the data to suit their theories) is not really sufficient because the time-scale that the tempreture could fluctuate over is so large

safe to say, in about 150 years, we'll be able to say for certain whether it was mankind that caused it - of course, if it was, then by then it'll be too late :-)

re: Forget the SMS problems.....

well mine came off change this morning before i left for work - i upgraded to 2.2.1 last night - according to the usage screen it's been on standby for 5hours 45minutes and in use for 2hours 17minutes.

that 2 hours has been pretty much constant music playing on the journey to work and the last hour when i went out for a walk at lunch

the battery indicator is at 90% - 85% at worst

cold day in hell

before i let google store my data for me

how long before they release the "feature" that allows anyone in the world to search for keywords within your documents?

smoke me a kipper, i'll be back for easter

the title "back to earth" makes me worried though

surely they won't actually get there will they? i mean, the whole point was that we knew they would never ever get home, but they carried on anyway

still - smegging brilliant news that there's more Red Dwarf coming up. here's hoping it kick starts more seasons of the show

(to be honest though, you're months late with this news, i'm sure i read about it on the red dwarf website before xmas)

nostalgia

i still have a MacPlus and a Mac IIci - the ci is in a cupboard, wish i could find a use for it - the MacPlus is actually on display as an ornament - one of these days it'll be a macquarium

i did really like the Cube - never found a problem with the lack of expansion options (such as i don't find a problem with lack of expansion in my iMac now) and when it became too slow, i swapped out the processor and gave it another year or two of life. i should look at the mods that put a mac mini inside so i can keep using it

better solution

surely the better bet is to rush the back of the bus, it tips and begins to roll down the cliff side

then, everyone in the bus lines up in a row an surfs the bus down the cliffside, all leaning to one side or the other to angle it around the largest of the rocks - in theory (okay, okay, but the sequel would be a holywood movie and they get away with just improbable rubbish) they should get to the bottom without flipping over.

meanwhile, the Mafiosos were likely chasing them up the mountain pass road and will now realise, in a hilarious scene of slapstick comedy, that the gold is now at the bottom of the mountain and they are at the top

queue Benny Hill music and much high-speed footage of people racing up and down the mountain side

problem

to get to the point 'just air side' you'd have to inch down the bus a bit, wouldn't you?

and at the point where Charlie turns around to say "hang on lads....." he's already inched down the bus to the pivot point, and the front wheels are off the ground aren't they?

so how would they set the fire so that it melts the tires?

if the shoe was on the other foot

but if the Bank had debited that amount erroneously from Mr Pratt's account, who in the bank would be facing a trial for fraud?

car systems

do the car systems actually listen to the ambient noise and adjust the sound accordingly? or do they just automatically dial-down the volume to what the manufacturers think is a suitable volume for when you're parked?

cos, the Harmon Kardon hifi in my mini does the adjusting volume thing, but i'm sure it sounds a lot quieter when i start the car in a busy car park than it does when i'm at home

for that matter, when i've got the music pumping out full blast on the motorway, and then hit a traffic jam and crawl along at 10mph, it doesn't automatically drop the volume to a level where it's still audible above the other traffic noise

who needs trade shows?

i recon it's the internet that's doing the trade shows in

mostly you've already read about everyones new products on t'interwebs before the trade show

and it must cost the companies far less to put new product details online and will reach many many more people than a trade show can

only a matter of time

and if its so easy, this kind of attack happens all the time on linux then, does it?

haven't used the site in months

personally, i never bother typing in google.com and then searching, i just type the words i'm searching for straight into the search field in Safari and then browse the results.

maybe they were measuring usage of the iphone only front page but most people bypass it. and really, there's no need for a mobile version - the google front page loads fast enough.

only s'posed to blow the bloody doors off!!

re: I think people are missing one thing here

it's not a problem - once at the front, the weight of the gold will keep the coach level, this will allow one or more people to get off the bus and then find some of the rocks or concrete road markers to prop under the back of the bus to keep it there while they offload the gold

re: Everyone pile into the front

sadly your memory doesn't serve - there's no sign of a resturant in the film anywhere nearby - certainly not for the last several corners where Big Will had been throwing the bus around enthusiastically

also - can't let the bus fall down the hill with the gold. as the camera pans away from the bus at the end, you see the bottom of the cliff is a big lake isn' t it? so then you'd be faced with recovering it from under the lake - and the mafia and the italian police are still looking for you, you're not over the border yet, and the commotion created would be sure to attract their attention

a better plan is to get Marky Mark Whalberg and whoever had the idea for that godawful sequel to get on the bus as well - then, even if you lost the gold and everyone died, at least some good would have come from it

Re: Re: @What was the complaint?

so are we likely to a Girls of El Reg covershoot for this website? :-)

on topic, i would have thought that when IBM bought PSI after they complained, that's proof enough of a monopoly isn't it? if all your competition are so small that you can just buy them if they get out of line, sooner or later you'll be guilty of abusing your market position

darwin awards

if he had managed to kill himself, he'd surely be well placed to get this years Darwin's, no?

as it is, sadly, he's still part of our gene-pool

i'd buy that for a dollar

sadly, currently economic climet means i'm unlikely to be able to afford anything more expensive

still, unlike the sad volvo-loving gits who've posted before me, i am drooling at those pics

@olaf

if they're Cydia only then it probably means they require using methods that the official dev kit won't allow

which is an interesting point - i'm sure there was more than one article on El Reg saying about how the restrictive nature of the official apps would hamper the Apps Stores popularity

numbers

i think it was on the bbc site, they had a list of the estimated infected in countries - the UK and the US were the bottom of the list, only 3000 in the states and nearly 2000 in uk. the majority of infected were in china and eastern europe

so while it seems that western users are making use of the security patches, it's the rest of the world that are at risk

@E

no, you've got it all wrong

marble is just the codename - there has been ZERO indication of any graphical changes in the test releases of the OS so far - they've concentrated 100% on getting the "better tech under the hood", as you put it, right before bothering with the eye candy. that's why we're only finding out about it now, so soon to it's release

of course, with MS, i'd say you're bang on the button - but then, i haven't tried vista nor w7 - i'm just a biased fanboi

missing the point

you're all missing the point

if Apple didn't patent these, and then brought a product to market, some other patent troll would suddenly discover they had a patent who's description could be stretched to incorporate the production functionality.

it seems like the patent system blatantly doesn't work, the only solution is to patent everything possible yourself before someone else does. the best defence is a good offense, isn't that an american saying?

2 semesters?

surely it was just an opportune excuse for bunking off 2 semesters of college - that's 5 months is it? (not sure how long the terms are over there)

how can it take 5 months to realise that the operating system really isn't working for you and that you need to switch to (shudder) windows?

user/pass?

hang on - she was at a friends place, and started up their computer and typed in their username and password to log in? or did the article just make that up? or was the friend's password something ridiculous obvious?

because otherwise, surely sleep-emalling is nothing compared to sleep-hacking through the windows login screen?

re: apples fault? re: Not Apple's fault?

you are right

people shouldn't have to think for themselves and be proactive about anything

good grief!

no wonder we live in a nanny state

in this day and age, when we are constantly being told to protect our data and beware identity theft, who is stupid enough to just cancel a service without firsts making sure their data was removed and all syncing was stopped?

reminds me of the Fast Show

do you like (ch)eese?

do you like peas?

then you'll love Ubuntu's new distro, (ch)EasyPeasy!!

spin?

would they not just spin round and round very fast and rip through the fence like a tornado?

or eat it?

just asking for a HHGTTG quote

As noted by the late, great Douglas Adams:

"Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

ought to be a law against it

there ought to be a flipside to the patent laws that says that if it is discovered that you were just blatantly a patent troll who managed to get a patent for something that vaugely represents someone elses idea, then you are wide open to paying damages to them

QC3

meh - i tried out the QC3s at a Bose shop a few months ago, but was very unimpressed

you'd expect in the retailers shop they would have things set up to show the product to it's best, but while i could clearly hear the reduction in the outside noise when it was acivated, i was still able to hear the salesguy talking on the phone 5 feet away. for the price and the hassle of wearing big bulky headphones, i was not impressed, i've stuck with my in-earphones from Sony that block out far more external noise for 1/3 the cost.

still, would have been nice to see the QC3's in this review so I could use them as a benchmark to see if these two are any better

re: Hmmm, now consider this

well, historically, you would have been able to go to the Bank of England, hand them your score, and they'd exchange it for the correct amount of gold and the current rate.

however, these days, all they will do is probably laugh at you, but assuming you could convince them to exchange it for something, you'd probably just get an ayrton and a couple of deep sea divers.

partly this is problem with finance these days. money (i.e. notes) were only ever meant to represent wealth, they were bearer bonds or promisary notes that were backed by physical valuables and you had a right to realise them into their underlying value. but these days, the notes themselves are the wealth, which is why it's so easy to have so much debt. if you equated your monthly paycheck to a small handful of gold, you'd appreciate it more, and particularly appreciate how insignificant it is to the huge mountain of gold that represents the 5x mortgage that you need to repay, or the house-sized slab of gold that your credit card bills equate to

returning to the question posed by the article - what to do with finance middle-management?

i don't think there is an answer. these are not a resource - a resource is something that can be used in a useful and productive way. in my experience, middle-management does little but complain that you haven't done enough work, while refusing to believe that the reason why is because all your time was taking up generating weekly reports and timesheets and progress reports and milestone-target reports etc etc

the best use for them would be to turn them all into a fossil fuel replacement to keep our cars going until honda's hydrogen fuel cell reaches mass production

research?

despite the article author's claim that the $99 rumours had be squashed by the Wallmart announcement, it turns out that you can get an iPhone for $99

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/26/atandt-begins-selling-99-refurbished-iphone/

but i guess that wouldn't have had the sensationalist anti-apple angle that the author was looking for

there are some people who write for El Reg that actually do some research, but seems they are getting fewer and fewer in number. the quality and accuracy of articles on here is resembling more and more those on wikipedia

ignore option?

on social networking sites like MyFace and all that, we have the option to ignore/block someone so we don't see anything they write.

would it possible to have a similar thing on ElReg? So we can just block ignore all articles by writers who are just using this as a soap box from which to grind their axe?

or someway of telling who wrote the article from the front page so we do not have to bother clicking the link and presumably mistakenly making the article appear more popular to your stats that it really is.

the rating bar at the end of the articles just doesn't seem to be making much difference.

pictures

here's pictures -http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/22/iphone-nano-concept-photo/

although, they're almost certainly fakes - someone's just photoshopped the iPhone images down by 70%

i remain skeptical of this pre-MWSF rumour. Andy Bright says that there's plenty of demand left in the US for the current 3G - and the same is true here in the uk. one die-hard iphone hater friend of mine went out and bought himself one yesterday. another two of my friends are thinking of getting iphones for themselves for xmas

i don't see that the compatibiity with the AppStore apps is an issue.

if they announce this iPhone Nano next month, it's going to be quite a while before it's actually in the shops. plenty of time for iPhone App developers to port their code to a smaller screen format.

thin? yes - fragile? no

just to add - i was having a go with a friends MBA and when they weren't looking, i did try and flex it a little, to see how fragile it felt, and it didn't really feel like it was in any danger of snapping. i doubt it'd prove to be any more likely to break than any other laptop

excelletn

glad to see that there's as much work being done in El Reg Towers on xmas week as there is in my office here

i hope you haven't gone to all this effort in the hope that it will placate us for the rest of the week so you can knock off early for xmas - we're expecting a playmobile story tomorrow and wednesday now

previous victims

do the previous victims of the RIAA who were taken to court and ordered to pay thousands, do they now get to sue the RIAA because they were unfairly persecuted if all that is going to happen to the people found guilty of the same crime now is internet baning?

strange...

every company i've worked at, the opt-out was compulsory, there was no option. if you didn't opt-out, they wouldn't employ you

i guess financial institutions are a bit paranoid that there might be a massive crisis affecting the bank and suddenly everyone involved puts their coats on and goes home

@d

are you just spamming every apple related article with the same garbage? didn't you post that same rant on the other article about the OS patches?

doesn't el reg moderate these comments?

anyway - on topic with the article - i recon it is far more likely that everyone is waiting to see what is announced at MWSF09 - i know i am.

there's no point buying a desktop mac now when in all likelyhood it's going to be superceeded in 2 months time.

re: Interesting?

erm... you can organise the view on the Desktop to sort by Kind

that'll keep all the disks in the top right corner, and then folders and then files

re: they need more work!

I saw this mini cooper at the motor show 2 years ago.

http://www.minicarparts.net/News/Archive/electricminiQED.cfm

apparently it's capable of 150 mph - that's forward or reverse!! they have to use the equivalent of an engine managment unit to control the acceleration so it does spin the grip off the tires.

if all electric cars were like this, then a lot more people would have them i think

the real reason?

perhaps there are only 503 people in all of the uk who give enough of a damn about the environment to own/drive an EV

the rest of us are perfectly happy filling our tanks with super unleaded at exhorbitant prices and burning up and down motorways at a decent speed that doesn't bore you to death and take 2 weeks to get anywhere