* Posts by Il Midga di Macaroni

159 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Feb 2009

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Pope tells priests - get to grips with blogs, web vids

Il Midga di Macaroni
FAIL

Gutenberg?

If, as the article imples, the church has usually been behind the times, can someone please tell me what the first mass-produced book might have been?

Google Chrome 4 lands (Windows) extensions on world+dog

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Up

42% performance improvement?!?

I'd expect IE9 to have a 42% improvement over IE8 because IE8 is still about a tenth the speed of any other browser, but Chrome, already one of the fastest browsers available?!

They must have some fairly smart cookies there in the Chocolate Factory.

China denies role in cyber attacks on Google

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

Can we take China's word for it?

Can we take China's word for it that they had nothing to do with the attacks?

I mean, if they were doing anything shady, they'd come out and admit it right away, wouldn't they?

Grenade because it adequately sums up everything I have to say to the regime there.

NASA pegs Noughties as hottest decade on record

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

What's the significance of 1.5%?

I had to read the article through twice. What's the significance of the 48 states totalling 1.5% of the earth's surface?

The only conclusion I can come up with is that this warming was only measured on mainland USA - which means it's totally irrelevant in global terms.

Microsoft predicts Linux will fail mobile 'quality' test

Il Midga di Macaroni
Linux

Linux not scaleable???

So Micro$oft, tell me what OS runs most of the major servers of the web? There are a HUGE number of stories where M$ went in and replaced 4 Linux servers with 1200 Windows servers and then the client went back to Linux because the Windows cluster didn't scale.

Although I agree we're going to see some consolidation in the Linux based mobile OSes. Right now everyone's riding the iPhone-led "smartphone wave", smartphones are selling like hotcakes and there's plenty of R&D money floating around to write kernels with. That won't last. And like everything, writing is one thing, maintaining is another - several Linuxes on the fringe are going to either be cut off and left to die or will be merged with another. For a guess I'd say we'll eventually see two or three Linux based mobile OSes at the most. I give it three years.

Is it art or is it pr0n? Australia decides it's ALL filth

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Down

Not fundies. Pollies.

Don't blame the fundies for this. It's the pollies that are doing this, they need to be seen to be doing something about the problem - which hardly exists outside the sensationalism in the papers.

Oz firm seeks talented IT developer

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

Work ethic?

What kind of work ethic are they after? I'd have just cut that last bit right out.

This reminds me of an article Toll (another Oz transport company) got in one of the papers a while back. It seems they are the soft hearted saviours of the community because they put former outcasts of society into good solid jobs. One of their receptionists was a former prostitute...

Paris because... just because.

Microsoft sees its chance in Googlephone

Il Midga di Macaroni
Go

Who is Google's customer?

The bottom line is, every business has to do what's best for its customer. The question is, who is Google's customer?

In the purest sense, the people who buy ads are - they're the ones that pay $$$ to Google. In a smaller way, people who buy phones are - they also pay $$$, but the revenue stream from phones will be a drop in the bucket compared to ads.

The only reason Google should pay any attention to Motorola or Verizon (or for that matter, HTC or T-Mobile) is if they consider that keeping those companies happy will allow Google to give better service to their customers.

Unfortunately the real losers here are the phone users. (Losers as in the ones who lose out of the deal, not lusers.) They/we would really love to have all Android phones equal in software - none of this rubbish where 2.1 is only available on the Nexus One, 1.6 is incompatible with 2.0, etc. Ditto for the developers - they don't want to have to rehash their code every time a new version of the OS comes out.

Hopefully Android turns out like Java a few years back - 1.1.8 was incompatible with 1.3 and we all had two versions of Java running on our systems, until 1.4.2 came along and brought the code bases back together. /me is looking forward to Android 3.0...

Roboplane tech can deal with air-traffic control directly

Il Midga di Macaroni
Go

Bring on speech recog and synth!

Easy way to get around the legal problems of needing to respond to ATC instructions - a voice recog on one end and a voice synth on the other! Hey presto, a plane that responds to voice commands!

And for the people who don't trust electronics - every plane since the A320 has been fully fly-by-wire - the computer takes the pilots input and translates it into control surface movement. If you don't trust the computer, you have nothing.

Google to outline smartphone strategy tomorrow

Il Midga di Macaroni
Coffee/keyboard

@ subtitle

"Don't be evil and don't be Apple"? Isn't that a repetitive redundancy?

Homemade airship prang closes highway in Oklahoma

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Up

Having a project keeps you sane

If he just sat around doing nothing all day, he'd be dead or insane within a year.

I don't see any difference between this incident and any of the thousands of light plane forced landings which happen every year.

Nuke-bunker-nobbling US megabomb delayed

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

No urgency, red tape gets in the way

Back in 1941 Barnes Wallis felt the urgency of wartime conditions and worked 18 hours a day on the earthquake bomb to get it finished in six months or so. Now we have the Government Accountability Office which pokes its nose into every worthwhile project and suggests stupid ways of saving money by cutting out all safeguards against delays.

Red Tape, the most prolific disease in western society today.

BOFH: Key performance undertakers

Il Midga di Macaroni
Go

... for a long holiday

We know the BOFH has built up immunity to voltage over his blood-stained career, so obviously this won't hurt him enough to be more than an inconvenience. But a liberal interpretation of the symptoms by a tame doctor will ensure the BOFH gets a good long break over Christmas/New Year with no emergency call-outs. On full pay, of course.

Doing the maths on Copenhagen

Il Midga di Macaroni
FAIL

A tax reduces consumption, does it?

So tell me - to what extent did the 23p Kyoto levy affect petrol usage in the UK? Approximately 0%?

Can anyone explain the chunnel fiasco?

Il Midga di Macaroni

You think you have problems!

Out here in Australia, we have two parallel rail lines running from Melbourne to Albury, and because one is for intrastate passenger services and the other for interstate freight, they operate on separate radio frequencies - and have no way of communicating. So when a freight train derailed and spewed billets of steel all over the passenger track, a passenger train ploughed into it because the message didn't get through in time.

I used the trains in the UK extensively on my last two visits, and everything seems to work incredibly smoothly by our standards. Hold a public enquiry by all means, but don't forget the things that DO work.

Oz anti-censorship site is censored

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

auDA procedures are the point at issue

Kevin (Just Kevin) is correct. Much as I hate to say it, auDA were correct to take it down as it contravened the rules for a .com.au address. (Long live http://stephen-conroy.com/ !)

The real question is whether the three hour deadline is standard procedure. If it isn't, then it was a politically-motivated move and someone should lose their job over it.

Personally, I find it VERY difficult to believe that it would be standard procedure for a deadline as short as three hours would be given over an asynchronous form of communication such as email.

Google 'in talks' over Googlenetbook

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Up

Obvious way to subsidise

The obvious way to subsidise the cost of the hardware would be to have a banner ad at the bottom of every page served. That's a LOT of ad impressions, even if people only use it for half an hour a day.

Hopefully Google don't go down the path of getting the very cheapest possible components, I'd like to see some real quality in the hardware.

To really capture the market's attention they'd need some amazing new piece of technology and useability - I don't want to see a simple rebranding of some other manufacturer's netbook.

Google weighs in to Aussie firewall row

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

What Christians are backing it?

Name six Christians or Christian groups that are backing this scheme. I know a LOT of Christians and NONE of them are in favour.

And since Christians make up about 20% of the population, and as quoted above, 95% of the population are against any form of internet censorship, it's obvious that the few people that do back Conroy can't possibly even be representative of Christians.

Grenade, for fitting nasally into Mr Conroy's cranium after removing the pin. And the result, of course, is to be posted on youtube along with instructions for how to achieve the best possible results when "dealing" with politicians.

Google accused of scrubbing bloody Berlusconi pics

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

Why shoot the messenger?

Would you blame a newsagent for selling a newspaper that runs an anti-government story? It's a classic case of DUH, do we understand these newfangled computer thingies people?

Also, what gives a prime minister the right to try to remove his own photos from the net? There might be photos out there of me that I don't want a million people to see, can I take Google to court about them?

Paris because she's smarter than this lot.

Dell tech flashes woman with (her own) jubblies

Il Midga di Macaroni
Stop

@ kissingthecarpet

Political correctness has no place on El Reg. Go post that on the Guardian instead.

Coolie simply means an unskilled labourer - it's a Central Asian word but it's not a "racial slur".

Google contradicts self, confirms own Googlephone

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

High time something like that happened

The phone companies are charging through the nasal cavity for mobile data services, when really it's no more difficult to provide than a call and SMS service. And then they try to lock us out of VOIP services, the bastards.

If Google are big and ugly enough to build their own mobile internet infrastructure, and then offer VOIP on it to make it into a phone, I say good luck and please roll the thing out to Australia when you're done killing AT&T, because Telstra and Optus need the same treatment.

Grenade because I wish I could send a bunch of them to our two biggest telcos as an early Christmas present.

RAF's new military airlifter finally lumbers into the air

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

It all dates back to 1958...

I think it was 1958 - the infamous Duncan Sandys report on the future of warfare. All wars are going to be fought with guided missiles, said Duncan. So we don't need any more aircraft, ever. Oh, I guess the V-bombers are too far along in their development to cancel, what a shame.

At that moment Britain lost the lead in the development of military aircraft, and has not regained it since. All the attempts to do so have been in conjunction with the whole of Europe, which has naturally doomed them to fail.

Find the man and string him up. He did more harm than all the Soviet forces put together.

Google Phone: What's it gonna be?

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Up

Additional suggestions

Fairly comprehensive list Paul. From my experiences with the G1 I'd like to add:

- USB host capabilities - it should be possible to add a dongle that provides a USB port, which would mean I could download photos from my camera to my phone without having a computer nearby. Great for travellers who don't want to rely on internet cafes or carry a laptop as well as everything else.

- USB modem function - I know lots of phones have this but apparently either the G1 or the service plan I have it on specifically prevent this

All the rest of the issues I have with the G1 can be solved with software. For instance, wouldn't it be cool to have a clock reader like the barcode reader? Just point the camera at any digital clock and bingo! The phone's time is updated with second-accuracy.

Pitchfork-wielding mobs encircle smart meters

Il Midga di Macaroni
Go

Peak surcharges are coming, get over it

In these days of rabid environmentalism (which makes building more power plants a politically risky business, if not impossible), we ARE going to see governments and power companies attempting to restrict peak power usage. It's going to happen, there's nothing any of us can do about it, so get used to it.

Personally I have no problem with this - as long as I know what's happening. I want a VERY CLEAR communication from the power company that power usage from (to take numbers out of the air) 7am to 9am will be charged at a 50% surcharge and from midnight to 4am at a 50% discount. That way I can decide not to switch on the air con until after 9am.

The logical next step from there is this Smart Meter - instead of making me consciously reset the air con every 7am I can get the meter to do it for me.

What's the problem?

BOFH: Made of win

Il Midga di Macaroni
Pint

Perfectly in character

The boss's consciousness was necessary to get at the lager. The Dynamic Duo aren't automatons that kill everything in sight, they have GOALS in mind. One of those goals is beer. And if they don't have to pay for it, so much the better.

Thanks Simon. I *really* needed a BOFH episode today.

Google to anoint Android, Chrome OS love (eventually)

Il Midga di Macaroni
Pint

Bring it on

It was practically inevitable. The devil is going to be in the detail (eg how to make the same OS deal with keyboard/mouse on a netbook and touchscreen on a smartphone) but there will be obvious advantages to merging the two.

Hopefully my Android 1.0 HTC Dream will be supported...

iPhone conquers half the (smartphone) world

Il Midga di Macaroni
Linux

Of course they're skewed figures...

... what's interesting is why. It means iPhone app devs are no longer happy to do it for free out of service to the planet, and that iTards are happy to look at ads. I know if I see ads on any Android app I'm interested in, if it's not VERY unobtrusive I get rid of it straight away and either find another or write it myself.

Taiwanese online hunk lures 20 women into bed

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

No Paris icon yet?

I can't believe nobody has yet finished a comment with "Paris because..."!

Paris because she must be feeling left out at the moment.

Apple seeks OS-jacking advert patent

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

It won't stand up in court

A friend of mine here in Melbourne (the capital of Victoria, Australia for the more ignorant of us) started up a company called "802!" which provided free open wifi in certain areas which was funded by a scheme like this. That must have been at least five years back, probably more. Sorry Jobs, you were beaten to the punch.

Paris because even she'd know enough to avoid a device with this sort of thing installed.

Google Docs set for 'get rid of' Office moment

Il Midga di Macaroni
Happy

Bring on the improvements!

I use Google Docs quite a lot, it works great for collaborative efforts. But I agree a lot more work needs to be done on it. A few bug fixes, a few feature additions, keep boosting performance, and it will be a Good Thing.

World's first iPhone worm Rickrolls angry fanbois

Il Midga di Macaroni

The old, old story

One more case of the old, old story. If you don't take security seriously, you're at risk.

Security by Obscurity (ie running a less common OS for which there aren't as many worms in circulation) is only good up to a point.

Moral of the story: if you don't know anything about computer security, find someone who does.

T-Mobile: Google to open Android Market to Win Mo apps

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Down

Or it could be a mistake in the ad...

It could easily be that they said "Android Market" when they meant something else.

More than half of touchphone users will go back to buttons

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Up

Obvious Robert has it!

Obvious Robert is correct. A physical keyboard is much faster to type on than a touchscreen keyboard, but for navigation and stuff a touchscreen can be very effective.

Google sued for super-skinny Chrome polishing

Il Midga di Macaroni
Pint

It won't stand up in court

To sink a patent case it's only necessary to point out that someone else was doing the same thing before the plaintiff claims to have invented it. That makes it not their patent, therefore there's no case.

I'm sure there's a few people in Google who've been around the industry long enough to point this out.

Personally, I just think it's a pity the IT industry isn't run by geeks any more. It's run by businessmen, who think in terms of commercial advantage, intellectual property and legal action instead of "Hey that's cool! Can I use that too? I'll credit you in the comments at the top of the source code!"

I raise my glass to the late lamented IT industry.

Aussie censor wants power to ban iPhone apps

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

Don't judge us by our esteemed leaders

Approximately 0% of Australians back Mr Rudd and Mr Conroy on any of this. They were elected as a protest against John Howard and have repeatedly proven their complete uselessness as effective leaders.

Paris because she's smarter than Rudd, Swan and Conroy put together.

Man posed as teen lesbian to snare girl's nude photos

Il Midga di Macaroni
Flame

What he said

You tell them Pierre.

I only want to add: why is this newsworthy? It might give dirty old men ideas. The media in general have a "gentleman's agreement" with the police not to over-publicise suicide cases as it can give people ideas. Why not the same on this sort of thing?

iPhones and social networking add to IT security headaches

Il Midga di Macaroni
Joke

Thanks for the subtitle!

Thanks El Reg for the subtitle! As a former Pirate of Penzance myself I have to ask - if he had been the very model of a modern Major-General by today's standards, would General Stanley have been an MCSE?

BOFH: Baitin' switch

Il Midga di Macaroni
Pint

Graham given a sporting chance?

Graham was given more than a sporting chance - he was given the whole story! Normal trainees don't get anything like that. I was almost expecting him to join the team for a moment there...

Nissan demos leaning e-car

Il Midga di Macaroni
Boffin

Old tech...

Aircraft have been leaning into turns for over 100 years... why does it take so long for cars to catch up?

US to export riot-roasting raygun

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

One day...

... there will be fewer bleeding-hearts in the world and a slightly higher clue factor. But that day is (apparently) not today.

FACT: It is physiologically impossible to temporarily disable a person without the risk of permanent damage. Even a humble water cannon or smoke bomb can potentially kill someone who already has a heart condition. At some point, rioters have to take the consequences of their actions!

FACT: Any government which tries hard enough (that excludes NONE so far) will eventually get hold of the weapons it wants. This has been the case throughout recorded history. Why act all surprised? Get a grip.

Grenade because it's cool.

BOFH: Weapon of choice

Il Midga di Macaroni
Grenade

Quite rightly hammer time

I've seen a few cases of shoddy maintenance and suchlike in my 15 years of involvement with printers, but that takes the cake.

RULE #1 FOR ALL PRINTERS, COPIERS AND MFDs is that if you treat them right, they'll treat you right. Any engineer that treats a device of mine like that will get Hammer Time and worse.

Give the poor thing to me Simon, I'll have it printing your pay cheque in no time flat. Oh, you'll share your good fortune with me won't you?

Grenade because that's the least of what "engineers" like that deserve to have inserted into their large intestines.

Microsoft's web world shrinks

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

@sandman et al "who cares"

The problem with heaps of people still using IE6 is that they think the internet is that slow/buggy/full of ads/etc. Or worse, that computers in general were the lovechild of Bill's large intestine and Satan's chief henchman.

It's no skin off my nose in general, except that I have to do tech support for these people.

Paris because I'd do tech support for her any day, even on half pay.

Bank sues Google for identity of Gmail user

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

Recalled emails

For those that don't know, there IS a feature that allows emails to be recalled - but only if it hasn't been read. The fact that recalling was unsuccessful says to me that the recipient DID receive the email - which therefore allows us to assume he/she received the bank's request to delete it. Lack of a response implies non-cooperation. The bank are right to do all they can to protect their clients' personal details (apart from funding the invention of the time machine and not making the blunder in the first place) - but Google are also right to protect their own clients' details.

And to all the tinfoil hatted Google scaremongers - the same would happen if you use POP and a local mail client. Instead of Google your ISP would be telling the bank to apply for a subpoena. And your ISP has your billing address and credit card number as well as your mobile number. If you want to be safe from identity theft, steal your neighbour's wifi and do everything at about 2400 baud.

Paris because her daddy's hotels have unstealable wifi (encrypted with your room number!)

Dell 2145cn colour laser

Il Midga di Macaroni
WTF?

@Nigel 11

Colour laser a dead technology? What is in the wings to replace it? Wet inks are a thoroughly troublesome technology (leaving pages to dry, taking as long as an old dot matrix to output a page, tiny cartridges due to the problem of ink drying out, etc) and offset printing isn't exactly suited to a home or office setting.

I would be more inclined to say inkjet tech is ready to be superseded!

New gizmo means working electropulse rayguns at last

Il Midga di Macaroni
Thumb Up

Biggles adventures come true!

Every second Biggles adventure at least mentions a frightening new device which can affect a plane's magnetic compass and then kill its ignition to bring it down. 60 years later, it *might* be happening. Why don't we all just go and live in the world of fiction? Things are easier to invent there.

Slime-powered Toyota Prius demoed

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

@Numbers (everyone's)

All those highly detailed posts talking about the numbers involved with energy usage of a Prius forget one significant factor. Electricity is distributed via a power grid, with minimal loss of energy. Petrol is distributed via a massive fleet of trucks and service stations.

I don't know about the UK or USA, but in Australia we have one refinery per major city, so fuel has to be transported up to 30km before it gets anywhere near your Prius's fuel tank. A fuel tanker will move about 30,000 litres of petrol (weighing just over 22t) in a rig weighing about 40t, and at 60l/100km consumption (that's conservative) and 50g/t-km CO2 emissions (also conservative) that means each litre of fuel you use has already caused 60kg of CO2 emissions. Add to that the running of the refinery and you have an apples vs apples comparison with measuring the emissions of an electric vehicle.

Paris because... hey does there have to be a reason?

Oz government sites floored in firewall protests

Il Midga di Macaroni
Paris Hilton

Bad idea

Clued people like myself and other Reg readers will know this isn't true, but as all pollies know, you can fool most of the people most of the time and that's usually enough. How easy would it be for Mr Rudd and Mr Conroy to point to the attacks and say "Look, this is a type of e-crime! Our filter stops some types of e-crime! Just imagine if that was your web site - and don't forget if you're a business you make money from your web site! You need our filter to protect your job!"

The proper way to stop this filter from happening is to dress up in a white lab coat, stand in front of a server farm and tell the Australian public that 1) it won't work and 2) it will make the internet crawl. Then tell them to write to their MP. Especially if their MP is one of the two holding the balance of power.

Paris because she's smarter than Mr Conroy.

Gmail in massive web outage

Il Midga di Macaroni

So you've never had a hard disk go down?

To those saying "This is what it means to go cloud-based" - have you ever had a hard disk on your email server go down? Does it take slightly longer to come up again than an hour and a half?

And do you have people on call 24x7x365 to deal with this sort of thing? Only very large corporations do. I'm the IT manager for a small business, and I only have one hardware geek. If we had 90 minutes of downtime in two years (the length of time I've been using gmail for my personal stuff) I'd be a happy man - and probably heading to the director's office asking for a pay rise.

Multitaskers: suckers for irrelevancy, easily distracted

Il Midga di Macaroni
Happy

Well duh!

This study (flawed and unscientific as it is) points out the folly of thinking about ADD and other labels as a mental disorder or learning difficulty. They're not - they have their advantages and disadvantages, which gives a person with ADD strengths and weaknesses. It's the same as visual, auditory and kinesthetic learners - once you know what your specialty is and can find a job that suits it, you can be many times more effective in it than someone whose brain isn't wired for it. And of course they in their job will be equally more effective than you would be.

Long live the multitaskers, they're the ones that can answer a help desk call when it comes in and then go back to speccing up a new box without forgetting where they were. And long live the single taskers, they're the ones that can nut out weird inconsistencies in network timeouts that baffle 2nd level support.

Bubbly-belly-bugging boffins battle bovine belch peril

Il Midga di Macaroni
Go

Let's be scientifically rigorous here

CSIRO research back when I was getting their mag in the 90s (before climate change became politically correct) indicated that cow methane was only a problem on lab fed animals. As soon as they were put in an open paddock and fed grass the methane level dropped way off and was considered not a significant contributor to greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.

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