Posts by Mahatma Coat
904 posts • joined Thursday 11th June 2009 14:00 GMT
Coldplay and Kesha?
There should have been an additional $10,000 fine on grounds of taste.
Bush Koch
Admit it, you sniggered too.
Posted in El Reg contemplates the ultimate cuppa
It's a very personal thing...
...But my own preference is Earl Grey left to stew until it's almost cold. No milk or sugar. Great in a hot climate.
Posted in Paper computers: Not mere pulp fiction
Paper wins
I have roughly half a metric tonne of books. Not one has ever failed (apart from one I was reading in the bath and fell asleep). Not one has had a flat battery. Not one has had a blue screen of death. I've never dropped one and thought "shit, I've just lost my entire book collection" as it splintered across the floor. The publisher and retailer don't know when I read their books.
Long live dead trees.
It's good that Mozilla uses WebRTC...
...but Google seem to be using WebOrrrTC.
And do software people have any other adjectives than "great" and "awesome"?
I suppose it's possible...
...that this bloke is right and everyone is wrong. Statistics aren't exactly my field but, you know...
Re: Prior art ?
The Apple shops are very different to all others. There's a far higher concentration of pillocks among staff and customers.
"speeds of at least 2Mbit/s to 90 per cent "
It's good to see them aiming so high.
Re: Questions Questions
The Alf Garnett Fan Club is in the house.
We need to hurry up and get to Mars to bring some of the mystique back.
I tend to agree but have the feeling that when the ship lands it will probably find a Chinese base there full of children making iPhones. It's be Scott/Amundsen all over again.
Re: "before returning safely to Earth"
Silly me. I thought that when the first four words of the article said "Iran’s first monkey astronaut " I thought it meant it was Iran's first monkey astronaut. I shall go to bed without supper tonight feeling suitably chastised..
"before returning safely to Earth"
That's not bad for a first attempt. Certainly better than some countries with bigger budgets managed.
Maps, schmaps, who stole my comms?
While the south east corner of Queensland was doing the usual headless chicken routine, the rest of the state was without internet, mobile and landline services. An area containing most of the largest cities outside of the capital were in a communication breakdown for 22 hours, and this is the middle of our nasty natural disaster season.
Even worse was that the media didn't report on this until 2pm when the failure occurred at 6pm the previous day. The only reason we found out then was that a journalist asked the state premier about it. The premier said "we didn't know about it until 6am this morning".
Words almost fail me.
And we had the same weather system hit us with flooding several days earlier.
She said "graph"
Graph must be the new cyber.
Re: A translation is required
para 2 reads: we've given the NSA a back door.
From this very organ in 2008:
This is cool
Something that lasts more than a week after the warranty expires.
A translation is required
"Microsoft has an ongoing commitment to collaborate with advocates, industry partners and governments worldwide to develop solutions and promote effective public policies that help protect people's online safety and privacy."
What this means in plain English is "Fuck off, we don't care".
Re: He stuck to his convictions.
Even kernel hackers have to eat occasionally.
Re: Not easy to like this guy
he is a businessman hoping to make a few more dollars
Exactly. Had it been otherwise he'd have called himself Kim DotOrg.
Re: I'm sorry...
useful internal routes were lost
But if it's Ryanair then a flight from say Paris to Marseilles probably took and landed at Calais.
It may be crazy...
...but if these greedy tax avoiding companies actually paid a fair amount in the first place then the craziness wouldn't be needed.
Views vs Thumbs Up
I believe that the Views count isn't updated in real time but the Thumbs Up are. You may find it rises considerably in a while.
Say it ain't so
He was so cute and cuddly and all Apple products are all so perfect and highly original. How could anyone libel the saintly Steve like this?
I feel the need to burn some incense on my Steve shrine.
Om.
Re: Only two questions
I can answer one of those questions:
Keon model: Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 1Ghz
Peak model: Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2Ghz x2.
Oh dear...
...they said cyber.
Where's the icon that represents taxes being flushed down the khazi?
Count me in
Probably a lot less scummy than the competition.
Digital warriors?
I can imagine the interviews for civil servants that want to become digital warriors.
Re: Java
Plus I think Mozilla has been brainwashed by HTML5 gurus
If it wasn't for Mozilla's righteous and relentless push for standards adherence by browser companies over the last decade we'd all still be writing crappy code that only works in IE5.
Re: Eich developed JavaScript for Netscape’s Navigator, for which we thank him
I thank the author of NoScript a bit more.
No surprise
stuck on a quarter of web surfers with the baton handed to Google’s Chrome.
If Google plastered ads for Firefox on everything, as they do with Chrome, I'm sure the market share would be higher.
I wonder who might be on their list?
If only there was someone on their wanted list using cave-based kidney dialysis...
I bet I can out-pedant you
From Mr Berners-Lee's Web FAQ:
Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?
A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.
I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web".
The bloke was kind enough to give his idea to the world for free. The least we can do is respect his spelling preference.
Beware the fanbois
As it happens, I worked on the UK launch of the Star kit (in Brum, IIRC) for Rank Xerox. It was in 1981, two years before the Lisa appeared.
Impressive
Nice work, chaps and chapesses.
Of course there's a link
This very morning I played Quake III for an hour and subsequently couldn't help myself. I hatched a cunning plan to drop an anvil on a wily coyote.
"licence plates of unmarked police cars"
Someone should warn the police about this. They drive around with these plates on public display. Self-arrest might prove embarrassing.
Re: Dodgy coating
That may have had something to do with the stealth coating breaking down in the "high" humidity of the European continent
The story going around at the time (which may be wrong/propaganda/misdirection) was that the Serbs used three very low rent radars. These were so bad that when they cranked them up to 11 all they got was lots of noise back except from the location of the 117. The three units were networked and the combined signals were processed. Basically, they just had to look for a hole in all the surrounding noise and fire their SAMs at it.
If the story is true then it's an excellent hack.
The Serbs managed that in 1999
The word is that the yanks were slightly peeved when their stealth planes were detected easily by Jindalee.
Serbian forces not only detected but also shot down an F-117 using 1961 vintage SAMs back in 1999. I bet they were more peeved about that.
Other test ranges could include...
...any of the "UFO hot spots" in far north Queensland. There is plenty of choice.
But, but, but...
The forecaster has published a blog detailing an alleged "series of factual inaccuracies about the Met Office and its science" made in a Daily Mail article written by James Delingpole.
The blog provides a point by point rebuttal of the Mail story, headlined "The crazy climate change obsession that's made the Met Office a menace".
Posted in Technology, bushfires and AM radio
a 98% population coverage
See, this is the flaw in your argument. The mobile networks may cover 98% of the population (city dwellers) but the people that usually get affected by fire, flood and cyclone often live in the areas (the bush) that make up the other 2%.
The other problem is that the alerts only go to Telstra customers. Optus and Voda users don't get them, or so my usually reliable source tells me.
Re: Does it affect the Foxit standalone reader?
I have my FF set to "Open in external app" rather than "open with plugin"
Same here but I use the excellent SumatraPDF reader. It's open source with portable and installable versions.
"Better than Adobe"
That's like boasting about having a two inch cock.
Posted in Technology, bushfires and AM radio
Text alerts = useless
In the run up to Cyclone Yasi we received a government text alert advising that we should evacuate. That may sound pretty useful but it wasn't. It didn't even hint as to where we should evacuate to.
A quick word about our geography. You can't evacuate to the east. That's the Pacific ocean and it's also where the cyclones come from. You can't evacuate to the west either. There isn't really a road to anywhere and if there was was you'd just be trying to outrun the cyclone. There are roads to the north and south but the cyclone was so big that trying to leave the area was pretty pointless.
I do agree about the radio. The ABC do a superb job on updates and you know the info is as sound and current as possible. Radios, as mentioned in the article, work anywhere and you don't need mains power to use them. Yasi damaged all the power, phones, Net, water, rail and road infrastructure around here but the radio towers survived and kept on working.
Old tech is sometimes the best option.
They can start with Adobe
The pre-ticked box on the Flash download page that bundles McAfee foistware is very annoying when I'm updating Windows boxes.
Re: Oddly enough...
Why would anyone worry about being monitored while micro-blogging? It's a public forum where you EXPECT people to listen to you!
Twitter direct messages, for example, are not public. Not only that but governments do employ join-the-dots technologies too. Adding another dot is trivial to them.
"I'm being followed by MOSSAD", "So what, I'm being followed by FSB and CIA".
How are you supposed to know the true identity of that random account that follows you? There are Twitter accounts that follow many people but never utter a word. Maybe they are just shy folk or simply like earwigging...who knows? FWIW I'm one of those. I use Twitter to follow news sites; it's not a two-way medium for me.
There's a big difference between monitoring a public forum and the, sometimes related, arrival of an unmarked van in the middle of the night to take you on an unexpected holiday at a re-education camp
Good luck sailing that van from China to Australia. Don't forget your lifejacket.
Oddly enough...
...I'd be less worried about the Chinese govt monitoring my micro-blogging usage than western governments.
Re: Confused?
There's nothing wrong with Texas.
Martin Amis: "Doesn't Texas sometimes seem to resemble a country like Saudi Arabia, with its great heat, its oil wealth, its brimming houses of worship, and its weekly executions?"
Uses silent packets?
This wouldn't work on Mrs Coat's calls. I can't get a word in edgewise.
Why does this story keep reappearing everywhere?
Or is it different from the one that Discovery Channel published a month ago?
