Posts by Version 1.0
721 posts • joined Friday 19th June 2009 16:34 GMT
Re: Nate Amsden
A pretty typical US customer scenario - you expect to pay around $140 to $180 per month if you want reliable service throughout the US - you'll be with either AT&T or Verizon. You can get service for a lot less (~$50-60) in some areas if you're lucky enough to have coverage with T-Mobile or Sprint but they are both more or less limited to urban areas.
While this sounds competitive, in practice you have to switch phones if you want to transfer from one carrier to another, AT&T use Betamax while Verizon use VHS.
It's actually quite nice
I've been using Metro/Win-8 since it came out and while it's true that it's front end menu entry system is different, the fact is it's not that different from previous versions and is going to work a hell of a lot better in a touch environment than Win 7 style interfaces. I have no reason to love windows at all but realistically, once you start using the new interface, it's OK.
I suspect most of the moaners don't actually use Win-8 at all.
Prior Art
The description of the method sounds very much like the way that we believe the brain processes visual objects. Observing the patent system at work is like watching a couple of two year-old boys fighting over a sweet that just fell into the cat's water bowl.
Keeping up appearances
All of these companies are so busy keeping up the appearance of growth, raising revenues, becoming the only game in town for their customers, that the seem to be missing that fact that they more closely resemble cancers than health organizations.
@Esskay "you won't even notice the pixels"
However the razor burn does show up very nicely.
Porn has changed over the years and, as a lad who once was more than happy to stick the pages of Penthouse together, I find that Internet porn has become so boring as to be completely devalued. The Internet has done for porn what Justin Bieber has done for music.
Taste test
You would be surprised just how many herbs you can find growing wild - most it's just a case of knowing what to look for ... but here in Louisiana we can solve the flavor issues with hot sauce ...and again, locally you can usually grow the peppers all the time.
Basically - the diet may be boring when you try it for one week but over time it becomes much better with a little planning.
Is this a problem?
It sounds like a straightforward economic exchange straight of an Introductory Economics text book. Frankly, this sort of thing happens all the time - don't you folks every pay any attention to Politics?
Business Critical apps
Ah - so that would be cardfile.exe then?
I'd expect that the end-of-life for XP will simply mean that folks will start upgrading to Win7 faster. Win8 would be an option if they can fix it for the business (non-touch) environment.
Re: Not Android
I never did understand how they swung that one - FAT was clearly copied from existing file systems at the time.
So why don't they use it?
"Redmond has successfully argued that Google's Android OS is full of Microsoft-owned technology"
If this is the case then why is Windows such a crappy operating system?
No sex please, we're British?
So watching Hustler on your phone will become an offense while reading it in print will still be fine?
I guess this will improve the literacy rate.
Re: dupe files are where the moneyz are
"Or he could just look at his bandwidth meter."
Every time I've tried these cloudy backup data services the bandwidth graph pegs itself - pun intended. Stuffing data up the pipe just results in crap performance at some level no matter how you queue the data - web pages that load as fast as a 5.25 SSSD floppy.
The rise of the machines
It's everywhere - I went to an AT&T store to order new phone service last week and stood there looking at the scenery while the lad filled in a form on a tablet ... which told him to call his supervisor, who came out of the back to tell me that you can't order POTS lines at an AT&T store - you have to give them your phone number and someone will call you... and the poor sod with the tablet - he has a holster for it, walking around on the shop floor with a tablet stuck to his hip.
Tomorrow I have a doctors appointment - they called yesterday to remind me that they are now computerized and that I need to show up 15 minutes early to fill in new forms ... and to have patience as the new exciting service opportunities may mean a delay in all appointments - I am not making this up! Did I mention that I made the appointment in January via their web-based visit management system and that this is the first available appointment? No doubt they will blame it all on Obamacare - that's like the NHS to you Brits but run by Drs Trotsky and Lenin.
Tablets are fsking shitte for data entry.
How the PFY would have done this
Just archive all the emails on the server "for backup and recovery" and leave an FTP backdoor to the archive accessible from outside the firewall.
Data protection issues aside - he deserves the time simply for stupidity.
So what else is new?
Use WordPerfect or LibreOffice - otherwise you can restore the Word toolbars by sprinkling unicorn blood around the anykey.
Man up guys
Whatever happened to the concept of admitting that you were wrong?
I run into this every day with almost anyone under about 45 years old - they screw up because they failed to think the situation though and then, instead of fixing the problem, they spend hours "proving" that it wasn't their fault.
Politicians in training - come back Enoch Powell, all is forgiven.
There's a simple solution to this problem
This is why I always wear underwear ...
But I do wonder if she wouldn't have been better off to grab a few ping-pong balls and shot him. The Adventures of Britannie, Queen of the Petshop
Re: What's next...?
She's still got a husband and four kids - can't she sell them?
You could argue that the answer is "No, that's slavery" but then a fine of that magnitude is simply financial slavery - no different really from actual physical slavery.
Not on 28kbs
So the plan is " to shift the bulk of its IT spending from boxed code to cloud applications" ...
Don't you think that it would make more sense to make sure everyone in the US had a high-speed internet connection first?
Meanwhile in the USA
Baton Rouge to New Orleans
Ping to Big Easy 22ms.
Download 2.24mbps
Upload 250kbps
And we're paying COX $240 a month for this - my heart bleeds for you poor buggers.
Posted in Security report becomes security risk
What's really stupid is that this technique works so often - if that doesn't tell you something about the stupidity of so many people in upper management then you get just what you deserve.
Re: robots.txt is bollocks
My company has half a dozen live testing domains - all except the actual public domain are withheld from Google and other engines via ROBOTS.TXT - every engine from Alta-Vista onwards has honored the exclusions and the testing domains never show up in search results.
The reality is that you can't show a site where Google ignores a correctly formatted robots file.
Re: Nexus 4
My Nexus 4 just upgraded to 4.2.2 - no big deal, it's a bug fix and no doubt there will be more down the road. And that's why I bought the phones - because Google does fix the bugs. I love my N4 and just ordered one each for my wife and daughter.
Re: What a load of whinging about whinging
If you don't like in the big cities then Internet access is pitiful - I'm in Baton Rouge and get decent (for the US) DSL at 6Mb for which I pay $55/month - but my in-laws, in Mississippi get 13kbs - yes that's a k, not an M - and that's the best they can get at this time of year - it improves to about 21kbs in dry weather. Cable and DSL simply are not available when you like a couple of miles outside town.
Oh, those Microsoft Updates every month .... forget it.
WSJ = ignore
You Brits have to remember that the WSJ is the US equivalent of The Mail.
Taken into consideration
These chaps had a van and a winch - so it's likely that they have been ripping out a lot more copper than just these couple of incidents ... and they must have been able to get rid of the copper to someone too ...
but of course, tracking those down would take actual leg work from the police who are all busy on twitter at the moment.
Tough Sh*t Ars****es
I fly a lot and I'd guess that 50% of the time I go through the backscatter machines they pick up something on my right knee ... but there's never anything there except my knee.
But what they miss every single time is that I have my hands placed flat against the ceiling of the scanner where the machine can't see anything in my hands. I'm over 1.8 m tall and the machines seem to be made for much shorter, obese people.
The fact is ... this is all just security theater - anyone willing to put up with a minor amount of discomfort could walk any number of weapons or explosives through any of these checkpoints that rely on backscatter detection simply be stuffing it up ... well I'll leave the rest to your imagination. TSA security is nothing more than a CYA move by the politicians and a major subsidy to the fat cats in the Military Industrial complex.
Brazil - coming to your neighborhood soon
And I don't mean the country ... go watch the movie
In many ways I live a digital life ... not FB or any of the other craptastic "social" sites but I'm out there in places like this - this has never worried me too much because I'm generally law-abiding, if not socially approved in these things. But looking down the road, to my children's future (good bloody luck to them) I do wonder where we're going ... younger, we all thought that the Global Village would be a good thing but now it seems that it will be run by village idiots - I gotta watch Brazil again I think ,,,, hell, it;s a Christmas movie isn't it?
Q@#$R No Carrier
Damn, off to the public library I guess.
Is this a problem?
Intriguing
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this - I'm intrigued that a jury was able to sort out the pros and cons of the case in deciding between the CMU patent and the Marvel implementation of "similar" ideas. It would seem to me that this is the real issue here?
However the coverage in el Reg of the science behind this is so banal as to make and substantive discussion simply a commentard free for all. Come on, we all know that the patent system is worse than broken - what's there to discuss here if you're not going to discuss the science behind the patent?
I endorse this comment
It's all downhill from here
I've worked on several medical coding projects where, after analyzing the comment free code, it was obvious that the programmer had never really understood HOW the project was supposed to work ... my guess is that he wanted to get the job done, get paid and get out of there (which he did).
I do agree with AndrueC - bad comments are far worse that no comments at all and too many programers simply don't have the understanding of the project to write constructive comments.
Re: Windows Pinball
Written in 16-bit code, ported to 32-bit code and then (almost) ported to 64-bit code? I'm surprised that it even ran.
Income Stream
It seems these days, as an earlier El Reg article said, "Web 2.0 depends on someone not getting paid."
But Wikipedia does have its uses - it's occasionally entertaining when someone manages to get a quick edit in before the obituary researchers get chucked out of the pub and have to go to work - and it's useful for settling arguments - the first person to quote Wikipedia loses the argument.
You don't need a weatherman ...
"former FBI executive assistant director Shawn Henry said that foreign intelligence agencies and the hackers they use are the biggest threat the US faces, outside of a WMD attack."
Bird flu, foot and mouth disease, financial collapse, gun violence, drug violence, poverty, income disparity, the San Andreas fault, mindless stupidity, party politics ...
To a hammer, every problem is a nail ... and America has so many hammers.
But what about me?
I wonder if someone would get 10 years for posting naked pictures of me on the Internet?
I'd also be interested to hear how the sentence was calculated because there were several crimes here, Hacking into the account, impersonation and posting the pictures ...
Re: Enough!!
If you're just a punter and try that kind of trick they will throw you in jail fast - but the bankers we just let of the hook. They probably booked that as misc. expenses. A more appropriate punishment would be to tell them to stop doing any new business for a year - then they might start listening.
Criminals the lot of them.
Re: For the love of god, please...
Comic Sans is one of the very few fonts that "draws" it's letters in exactly the same way that we write them - who on Earth writes an "a" like that? Hence the popularity of Comic Sans with teachers.
Crash? What CrasDY$65c7#$@!4h?
I noticed a few problems but who for Gods sake realistically expects 100% up-time? Even I can't manage that ... Stuff like this happens even with the best planned services - it's usually no big deal if you learn from the experience.
I gotta go - gotta take a nap now...
Re: wait a minute ...
True - there's an upside and a downside to sharing information - but the obvious "need" for the data is to show you the flight options from the correct airport. And anyway, as soon as you turn your phone on the phone company knows where you are ... so I think that location is somewhat overblown.
Re: It's not the costs, it where the cost are.
Hey Dan 55, I never said that you'd like it.
You know, I felt much the same way as you when they released the 8080 - how do you repair it?
Frank Zappa
“Republicans stand for raw, unbridled evil and greed and ignorance smothered in balloons and ribbons.”
wait a minute ...
If you buy a ticket from Delta online (is there any other way?) then you already hand over all this information to get the ticket ... sure, you have to click the "I agree" box somewhere but nobody ever reads that ... (see recent El Reg story) - so realistically, what's the big deal with the mobile app? If you log into it with your Delta account then you have presumably already entered all this information and "agreed" ...
So now are we going to get a 53 page "terms and conditions" on mobile devices? With the size of the mobile screen and mandatory font sizes, it's probably going to mean checking that we've read the 420 page T&C...
Frankly, the Delta mobile app is a hell of a lot easier to use then their web site.
It's not the costs, it where the cost are.
When you have a product that's labor intensive to assemble then you make is somewhere where labor costs are cheap ... so if they plan to build the new devices in the US then you can probably bet that they are going to cost a lot less to assemble.
In other words, they are going to be made differently ... I'll leave the rest to your imagination...
My Linkedin profile still lists cat-wrangling and C2H5OH ... both virtues that I believe add substantially to my value to humanity.
@ Anonymous Coward 12:59 GMT
An Anonymous Coward said, "It's just one of those "Hip to be contrary" comments you get on the Reg"
No - how many images are available on Google let alone other search engines? And you're forgetting the newsgroups -- when alt.sex was widely distributed it was rife with child porn images and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of those are still archived somewhere. You see, "One! Million! Images!" sounds like a big number but in reality, when compared to the total number of images out there of all sorts, it's actually a very small number. And I'm not even claiming that there are any duplicates in that "One! Million! Images!" ... if you had any passing acquaintance with perversion then you'd know that (assuming that there really are that many images out there) probably two thirds of them are duplicates.
All I'm saying is that when someone quotes numbers at you - it helps to think about what they are saying and ask yourself what evidence they offer that they're not talking out the back of their arse. By the way - note that I posted using my handle here - if you want to make a contribution to the discussion then you ought to have the courage to not AC your talkbackl.
Re: Driving licences?
This anonymous comment is typical of the able-bodied response to disability - we simply don't think about what it's like to live a live where our senses and abilities are limited in some way. It's not that the post has no compassion, it's simply that they have never experienced being disabled.
One of the more interesting side effects of disabled accessibility is that in a great many cases, making disabled access a priority works very well for able bodied people too - it's something that we all benefit from - think wheelchair access kerbs and slopes, taps and soap dispensers that work automatically, doors that can be opened with a push, lights that that turn on and off with a tap.... we all benefit when we take care of our brothers and sisters.
The sky is falling! the sky is falling!
One million images? Including the Blind Faith and Supertramp album covers I assume? And all those naughty cherubs on the church ceilings? Frankly, given the scale of the Internet, it sounds like the problem is pretty much beat at this point - assuming that they're not just pulling numbers out of their arses to make the publicity release sound better.
It's not the images that are the problem - it's the abuse ... and that's something that happens locally, which is where it has to be stopped.
