Posts by Mahatma Coat
883 posts • joined Thursday 11th June 2009 14:00 GMT
Simon Hackett...
...the bloke's a bloody legend, as the locals like to say.
I sometimes wonder if he and the rest of the Internode crew are the only ones that actually give a fuck about the Net in Australia.
Closed source comms
I think you have to start with the assumption that it is backdoored and make your decisions from there.
Posted in Porn found in Osama bin Laden compound
Dead men don't sue...
...so you can make up any old crap and it becomes fact.
FFS, El Reg, I thought you were beyond regurgitation of US propaganda. We're never going to learn the truth about bin Laden and this muddying of the waters isn't going to help.
Is his stash "massive" or "fairly extensive"? Probably the most risible line is "electronically recorded videos". I'm so glad to see he wasn't using that infidel gas powered video equipment.
Now where did I leave my tractor with the Boudicca-style wheel blades?
The artistes wll be happy...
...when the music companies share out all that cash.
Don't hold your breath, Shergal Farkey, I don't think you'll see a penny for that copy of Teenage Kicks I downloaded just to annoy you...and then deleted without listening.
Posted in Google dumps Aussie Wi-Fi data tracking
The company hired a new director of privacy...
...new? I wasn't aware there was already someone failing miserably in this job before.
ISTR 30% of the homeless are ex-services...
...and if that is the case it may go some way to reducing the problem of people living on the streets.
That said, I get the impression that a lot of ex-services people, especially those that joined up directly after leaving school, come out having zero experience of life outside of an institution and making decisions for themselves. Once the fibre roll-out is complete will they be left to fend for themselves on the streets again?
"only needs 7 megawatts of power"
Only? They must have one hell of a kettle in the tea room.
"These people don't lie"
And Vatican spokesmolester Cardinal Pinnochio agreed.
They need a fleet of PS3s to crack this...
...just hook it up to the PSN. Oh wait...
<-- Beer icon because that's something else they won't discover in his compound.
CMI = POS
The writer may be wearing rose-tinted specs. My exerience with a CMI was less than fulfilling.
I worked with Vince Clarke of Yazoo, another CMI owner, and I programmed all the A/V content for the first Yazoo tour.
Vince used a Linn to trigger the CMI and also had an interface built to trigger, via the Linn, an AVL Eagle* computer that controlled all the slide projector dissolve units and a 16mm B&H film projector.
The CMI was incredibly unreliable during the programming sessions and Vince decided to hire a backup machine for the tour. I think the going rate for rental was about a grand per week. The Linn was always good and never, if you'll pardon the pun, missed a beat.
Yazoo did a warm-up gig in the band's home town of Basildon and during the first song the Fairlght played up and the Linn/AVL interface died. The bloke that had been engaged to look after the visuals on the tour didn't have a clue what to do but I had been watching the show from backstage and had to intervene. From the second song until the last I had to manually cue all the visuals from memory (my memory) and there were probably well over 30 sync points in each song.
Ultimately the CMIs were dumped before the rest of the tour and the songs were dubbed on to a TEAC A3440 four track for playback and the A/V content was triggered by AVL's native timecode. A UKP500 Jap tape recorder was more reliable than the UKP20k CMI.
Yazoo geek trivia: Vince wrote many of his songs on an acoustic guitar and did his accounts on an early IBM PC. Alf Moyet's vocals were always live and always note perfect.
*The show was programmed on an Eagle but an AVL Roadrunner was used for the tour.
How fast does an app have to open?
I just stopwatched Firefox 3.3.16 on a 14 month old desktop machine and it took less than half a second to launch. How much faster does it have to get for you to class it as a good browser?
Where's the pointless arsewipe icon when you need one?
And it seems Android has a similar issue...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/21/android-phones-record-user-locations
Re: Australia
And about to get a lot worse. We'll be in the same section as Iran and Saudi Arabia when Conroy's censor boxes come online. They'll no doubt have a bit of ACTA love thrown in too.
Can't wait to see what happens when the NBN is finished and Conroy and his rabid Christian mates from the ACL have their grubby hands on the switch.
Re: Don't tell Jobs, god only knows what he'd do!
Steve Jobs *is* god. Ask any Apple fanboi.
I've been testing Moz nightlies from before the m/b days...
...and I admit to being a little disappointed to see Mozilla following Google's lead with more frequent versions/releases. If Google keep to the same versioning system they'll be up to v20something in a few years and it'll all start to look a bit stupid and confusing.
Fewer releases with more emphasis on stability and less on features should be the best way forward. Extensions can take care of features. The manufacturers can also add features via extensions if they want to.
We don't need another pointless bloat war.
Abuse of democracy
I hope those greedy pigfuckers in Hollywood and the politicians that they own in NZ are happy. They have managed to corrupt the democratic process on the back of grieving New Zealanders and others that lost their relatives in Christchurch.
Just how low will some people stoop to make money. These bastards could limbo under a pole that's nailed to the floor.
(and if the Moderatrix passes this I shall be amazed)
Halfords to the rescue...
...you could put out that fire with a 20 quid fire extinguisher.
<-- Grenade: probably a more effective way of sinking a rubber dinghy.
I guess Aus has given up...
...on trying to invent a beer that is drinkable on Earth.
I can only imagine how they will phrase these warnings
Twitter:
"Al Qaeda are coming!!!!!!!! lulz"
Facebook:
"We are expecting a terrorist attack by Al Qaeda"
"Abdul likes this."
Posted in iPads mooted for Qantas flight manuals
Phones vs avionics - myth?
In the mid 90s I was doing some contract work for an medium sized airline and asked my client about the mobile phone issue.
His remit included the in-flight phone system so I joked that it was just to make passengers use the airline's $8 per minute phones. He informed me that it cost the airline $10 per minute and the service was a loss leader.
He also told me that Airbus had carried out many tests and had not managed to find find conclusive evidence that phones had any effect on the avionics. Some of the tests were quite extreme including placing a French army mobile radar unit on a scaffold right next to the fuselage. It had no adverse effect al all.
His off the record conclusion was that problems with avionics were likely to be software issues rather than external forces. I assume he was being honest with me.
Posted in Swedish newlyweds enjoy lively honeymoon
Re: You've not been to Heathrow recently, have you?
Thankfully not :)
Sky Fairy influence in Aus politics...
...it's truly scary:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2011/04/06/3184075.htm
Our Prime Ranga claims to be an atheist but has yet to realise that, in the words of Frank Zappa, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.
Posted in Swedish newlyweds enjoy lively honeymoon
Hmmmm...
So they "battled their way to Cairns in Australia, which was swiftly battered by one of the worst cyclones in the Lucky Country's history" then "travelled to Brisbane, where they were met with extensive flooding, forcing a cross-country retreat to Perth" where they "narrowly escaped" raging bush fires"
Not that I'm doubting the Swedes but no-one "battles their way" by plane to anywhere these days. Cairns was hardly touched by Cyclone Yasi, the floods in Brisbane happened weeks before the cyclone and the Perth bush fires were, by definition, in the bush and not in Perth.
Call me cynical but my bullshit detector is flashing red right now.
Posted in Australia, give up your fixed broadband!
You may take the piss out of 3G...
...but it does have a very serious use where I live in Australia.
After a big cyclone in February we had no mains power for nearly four weeks. That meant no desktop PCs and no ADSL connectivity. However, the Telstra 3G service worked for a few days until the batteries at the rural exchanges ran flat. A USB 3G stick plugged into a netbook was the only communication we had with the outside world and I cannot begin to explain how useful that was.
Yes it's expensive and yes the coverage was patchy (had to drive up a nearby hill to get a signal) but when that's all you have you don't complain too much.
Posted in BBC-led RadioPlayer arrives at last
Also requires a spaghetti plateful of JavaScript from dozens of domains
And like a lot of sites the search function doesn't work without me giving Google permission to run code on my machines.
On the plus side there I haven't found any geoblocking.
Anyone know of Adblock for radio? :)
It made me look twice when I saw the ads in PE...
...but when I read the FAQs I realised it didn't play open and lossless formats such as FLAC. It's a shame because I've always wanted a lounge-friendly juke box.
Maybe it does...
...but Jenny doesn't know what an API is.
Kiwi accent...
...irritable vowel syndrome.
Posted in Harvey Norman warms to etail
If Harvey Norman goes into online retailing...
...the result will have slight smell of poo about it.
Like = Fail
I've seen stuff on Facebook about recent disasters where the Like function is massively inappropriate.
Example:
"10,000 killed in Japan tsunami."
"Jenny likes this."
I mean, FFS, can't they come up with a word better than Like?
Posted in Java daddy borged by Google
Everyone has a price
"Come and work for us."
"I couldn't do that, I'd look like a hypocrite."
"Here's a large bag of cash."
"When do I start?"
There's an encryption package called Mujhaddin Secrets?
That's just to fool you. It's actually a Halal perfume.
On Aussie TV tonight...
...a nuke expert from Imperial College, London, having to make a grovelling apology for saying it was all nothing to worry about a couple of nights earlier. Your move, Mr Page.
Nup
As Jeff 11 and two00lbwaster pointed out there are other reasons. Another one is that some users choose to keep their tweets private except for approved followers.
Broken Microsoft spelling checker
Seems it changed "the patent pool H.264 format" to "the industry-standard H.264 format".
Because he's worth it...
...Or not.
What was my point?
My point was one that you must have missed. I'm not talking about results, alternative sources of funding or anything else you mentioned. I'm talking about govt funds being used to finance propaganda centres for the terminally deluded. Schools are supposed to be places that kids go to learn facts not to be brainwashed.
Forcing religion down the throats of children too young to understand is nothing less than abuse.
It's 2011
So why should we be making any special allowances for Jews, Muslims, Christians, or any other group of gullible numpties.
We have science, we have reason, we have logic. Imaginary friends are redundant. Religious wars and sectarian bigotry have no place in the modern world.
Go away and stop trying to suck money out of the system for your special needs.
Problem Solving Award in 2010
"Speed Watch, has been running since 2001...the scheme, which has recently clocked its millionth speeding motorist"
1,000,000 speeding motorists? That doesn't sound like problem solved to me, that sounds like problem very much still exists.
Some days I get up earlier than usual...
...just so I can despise the likes of Google and Cameron a bit longer that day.
Cost difference between UK and Aus
BT will supply FTTP to 66% of UK (pop. 62m) for £2.5bn.
NBNco will supply FTTP to 90% of Aus (pop. 22m) for £27bn.
The difference can't all be in the distances between cities, surely? Does fibre optic string really cost that much?
There have been many odd calls since the cyclone
We were getting about 10 silent calls per day for a week. Several seconds of silence follower by a recorded voice of a lady saying "goodbye".
Also had one call from a gentleman with an accent that sounded like he was from the sub-continent offering advice on Windows (not a double glazing salesman) but I was too busy at the time to even tell him to shove his advice where the cyclone doesn't blow.
Grrrr
The whole version race thing is ridiculous.
How about all browser companies all call their next versions v10, then concentrate on getting the basics right and just offer new features as extensions?
Murdoch not the govt?
What country would that be? Seems like he almost rules the world these days.
I love the smell...
...of a desperate politician in the morning. Just like all of Kristina Keneally's stunts, this one is doomed to failure.
At first I thought this was an article about football...
...that spud photo has an uncanny likeness to Wayne Rooney.
