Re: And affordable CTI, Fuggedaboutdit

Cisco have (or had, it's been 2 years now...) a TAPI driver for Windows. Install it, supply with your phone userID and password, and those modem dial commands now drive the VOIP phone.

Then you can dial direct from Outlook, etc just as you describe. There was no extra licence over the one already there for the phone. There's a little clunkyness in places dud to pretending to be a modem, etc, but it was perfectly useable.

reflaction

I seem to have invented a new word. I meant refraction (assuming that the "reflection" in the article is caused by total internal refraction.... (if it isn't then I meant relection, of course... :-) )

Beer icon because I clearly need one.

Re: Ever see a Fresnel Lens?

But a Fresnel Lens is just a normal lens with as much of the 'useless' middle bit removed as possible. [useless because the bending of light you want a lens to do happens at the air/glass interface] The distortions that the 'steps' create mean it's only useful for focusing homogeneous light rather than, say, images.

This is aiming to reduce reflaction, which I would think was almost the opposite effect (except that I can't tell from the Reg article if that's how it works)

Re: If you encrypt something more than once...

Depends on the algorithm... As you point out, DES is an algorithm where this is good. However most of the analysis on this is directed to the it's of a brute-force attack, whereas I think the point here is not to increase the crypto strength but to have 3 keys in different people's hands so that a compromise of one doesn't leak your files. Eg: provider hacked, keys stolen - still secure as they need your keys too.

Re: Bluebox?

Well, I bet a lot of the phone systems won't deal correctly with the DTMF tones for 'A' 'B' 'C' and 'D' (the original DTMF keypad had four extra keys on the right side to make a 4x4 grid -- I remember the phone we had as a kid after our dial phones were replaced having those keys) In my first fulltime IT job I was at a hospital and we had an local numberic pager system that hung off the phone system and you sent DTMF codes to display on the pager. The additional codes (which you couldn't get from the phone keypads, but a modem would generate) displayed interesting symbols (not the letters abcd) on the 7-segment displays on the pagers. We used this as a prank on a colleague by making his pager display odd messages... Ahhhh the old days.....

Re: Cupertino's idiot-tax outfit

This is The Register. There are no serious stories.

Re: Overnight charge only?

It already is 20W - My iPad2 is, at least. The Apple-supplied charger is rated at 2A * 5 = 20W. I'm in New Zealand - is the charger in your country smaller?

<pedant mode>

There are no dinosaurs in the La Brea tar pits. They're from the wrong era. Mammoths, dire wolves and sabre-toothed cats by the dozen, but no dinosaurs

</pedant mode>

Mines the one with the Lonely Planet guide to LA in the pocket....

TiVo in NZ

The fact that they don't have guide data for 2 of the free-to-air TV channels in NZ (one of which is Prime - a channel a lot of people watch as it has Dr Who and Downton Abbey among others) has seriously hobbled it in NZ.

I don't understand why they can't source 3rd party guide data on the shows and claim that the schedule (ie: titles and times) is 'facts' and not copyrightable, but my colleagues argue that the joint venture in NZ partners with Telecom which protects it's own collections of 'facts' (think the WhitePages) and doesn't want precidents set in court.... More likely they just don't want the hastle of fighting it out.