Posts by Colin Wilson 2
64 posts • joined Monday 26th October 2009 15:24 GMT
Re: Chinese rockets
>> Failing that - you can kidnap a few Nazi's
Is that ein Großer Apostrophe?? !
Re: Using a default username and password isn't hacking
If I don't lock my front door, is it illegal for my neighbour to pop in with a flask of home-made soup, because they know I'm feeling poorly. "We didn't ring the bell because we could see you were asleep on the sofa".
It happened to my Mum he other day. She was very grateful. She didn't call the police!
Just one user?
iPad user's privates? Not a big deal. Unless you meant iPad users' privates.
Write your own browser...
Every programmer should write their own browser, with it's own layout code, rendering engine, JS interpretter etc. It's not going to work very well - unless you're really talented and really persistent. But it will give you something to do do witter away those long winter nights.
Grab a copy of the RFCs, your favourite C compiler and get pushing those pixels!
That's really the point of this discussion. WIthout good standards there's no way to do this. And with a single reference implementation (Webkit) the standards could deteriorate until it becomes 'the standard is what the code does'. At least it's open source.
Re: Of course there is always
Funnily enough, Apple - the Beatles one were in the electronics business way before Apple the computer company.
Google 'Magic Alex' sometime...
iCloud??
"Phil Schiller suggested iPad owners could use the extra space on their tablets to store all their work and media without needing "their old PCs”."
I thought that's what the iCloud was for
Re: ios 6 hmm
>Thinking I will skip ios 6 entirely and wait for ios7 with a jailbreak for my iPAD 2
And what makes you think that ios7 will support an iPad 2 ?
Re: "... what was yours?"
Pink Austin 1100.
Well it was meant to be red, but it had faded so much over the years that pink describes it better.
And seeing as I was young then it had all the required add ons. Small steering wheel. Faux Leopardskin furry seat covers. 6 band graphic equaliser. Triple air horns. Gear knob in the shape of a skull etc.
Those were the days!
Posted in Ten… top tech cock-ups of 2012
Re: 3=1, etc.
There are problems with the Apple Maps software - not just the data.
1. The colours are ridiculous. Stupid. Who's bright idea was it to make almost all roads pale grey on a pale yellow background?
2. It doesn't understand U.K addresses. In particular, it often seems to take the town from your postcode and thinks that's where you live. So if your address is '1 High street, Cookham, SL6 1AX'. It sees the 'SL' bit and thinks you live at '1 High street, Slough' - which is miles away.
Re: Still flogging that horse I see
>> You also have FA chance of getting them all back if you ban guns outright <<
I see this argument used a lot in these discussions, but it's missing the point. - which is to to reduce the number of guns in circulation over time until legally held ones are very uncommon, and illegal ones are much harder to come by.
Once you've banned them you slowly remove them from circulatiion, with government 'buy back' programs, cash-for guns schemes, 'no-questions-asked' amnesties, etc.
Its probably not going to stop next years massacre. But hopefully it will stop these incidents being so common as the years go by.
The next step would be to tie it with the iPhone ring-fenced location thing so that it automatically opened the garage door as you drove up your road. It would have to monitor your speed too, so it could tell that you are driving, not walking.
The only snag is that Apple Maps currently thinks I live a couple of miles away from my house. I'd have to drive to where it thinks I live to trigger the thing, then race back before the doors had timed out and shut themselves again.
But I'm sure they will fix it - eventually!
Separated by a common language...
A baton??
Ok - you use your bread stick. I'll use a truncheon!
The world's oldest dinosaur?
The leaf-munching dinosaurs in the picture's background look even older
Posted in Help-desk hell
Re: My funniest one
It reminds me of when I had my first job - at a small Apple dealer. We had one guy come in with his Apple ][e and two 5.25" floppy drives. He'd only had it a week., and both the floppy drives had stopped working.
He was apoplectic. Red faced with anger. I think it was the first time I'd heard the word 'Crapple'!
I opened up the disk drive cases and extracted from each one a slice of processed cheese. It turns out his two year old son had been playing...
Posted in Help-desk hell
Re: Ask it where I live!
It was in Crowthorne in Berkshire. We had an ancient PDP-4 too which originally came from the Harwell Nuclear place, and which we slowly renovated and pieced together.
Big blue cabinets, 18-bit accumulator, fully transistorised except for the valves in the power supply, banks of 30000 uF capacitors strapped together to make a very rudimentary UPS, KSR-35 - the Rolls-Royce of teletypes, DEC tape, a weird circular VDU with a light pen (we never got that working).
For my A level Computer Science project I wrote a text editor in PDP-4 machine language. Goodness knows how they marked it :)
Good times!
Posted in Help-desk hell
Ask it where I live!
When I was at school in the 70s the school had one computer - a Digital PDP8-f. A few of us were really into it, and for speech day we were given the task of demonstrating it to parents who had wandered as far as the maths block.
We wanted it to look impressive, so we set it up with the lights on the front blinking in groovy patterns, the teletype clattering away, the VDU endlessly solving 'The Towers of Hanoi' etc. We were delighted with the results.
Eventually one mother came in, immaculately dressed, trotting along on high heals, and with a cute, pale blue wide-brimmed hat, which she'd probably worn at Ascot. She took her time looking at the whirring contraptions, then finally said:
"Ask it where I live"
We mumbled some reply about it not being Mystic Meg, and after she left we fell about with gleeful scorn. How could anyone be so thick??! For years afterwards I used this story to illustrate the vast gulf between the expectations of people who understood computers, and the great unwashed.
But suddenly we have phones with things like Siri. You say "Siri, where do I live?" and it tells you. It even shows you on a map.
1-0 to the muggles!
Only once - when you first get your iPhone. The short conversation invariably ends with "I can see straight up your nose!"
Re: Oh I see
"In December 1970 Dirk sued Stig and Nasty, Barry sued Dirk, Nasty sued Stig and Barry, and Stig sued himself accidently. It was the end of a golden era, and the beginning of another one for lawyers everywhere."
I knew I'd seen all this before!
Re: 4G
When I bought my iPhone 5 from on a 2 year contract from T-Mobile in September it was advertised as '4g ready'. They now tell me that if I want to use 4g I have to start a new contract, and that there's no point anyway because its not available in my area (Reading).
So yeah. 4G's a mugs game at the moment. And I'm one of the mugs :(
Posted in iPad Mini's quite a handful
I like the way Apple got Phil Schiller to present this the other day. He's a big bloke. Hands like bunches of bananas!
Well, what did he expect?
If Judge Jacob was so flippant as to say "Samsung can't be infringing Apple's iPad design because it's not as cool", I don't see how he can complain when Apple post in their apology "Samsung doesn't infringe our patent with their tablet because the Judge says it's not as cool as our iPad".
I mean, he did say it didn't he. It's on record. Apple would be misleading their customers if they didn't point it out. What's his problem?
Posted in The new Mac mini eviscerated with ease
Re: Mac Mini - what's its main purpose?
You need to run Xcode (Apple's IDE) to develop software for iPhones & iPads. The Mac Mini is the cheapest computer that lets you do this.
Write your killer app. Put it in the app store. Get your share of the $6 Billion that Apple have paid out to developers over the last 2 years. Profit!
That's the theory anyway. YMMV
Re: iPad mini at £269 =
"the iPad 3 has the A6 "
No it doesn't - it has an A5X.
Posted in WoW cities wiped out by 'exploit'
Re: Been a while since I last played WoW
"We canceled our accounts earlier this year when Blizzard decided to take the game from Lord of the Rings-esque epic fantasy to fucking Kung-Fu Panda"
Strange as it may seem, the new Panda expansion is turning out to be brilliantly done and a refreshing change from all that molten lava in the previous expansion.
"You'll be back!" mwhahaha
Re: It's like Microsoft, post Gates
> It happened to Armstorng-Vicars too.
What? The Army Surplice people?
Re: Maybe other causes?
> How does the USA manage to have five times the rate of road deaths as the UK
It's because they all drive on the wrong side of the road there!
Re: Looks like it's still trying to figure out how to work the camera.....
It does seem to need a better way of taking photos of itself in it's surroundings.
I wonder if micro Quadrotors (with miniature cameras) would work on Mars? Is there enough atmosphere for them? If so - maybe next time!
Posted in UK ISPs crippled by undersea cable snap
Re: World of Warcraft
> Do people still play that?
/wave
Not malicious?
"This was almost certainly not malicious on the part of the dev"
On the other hand, it's hard to see how it could have got into the application bundle. Did the developer think - "Oooh look - there's a .exe. Let's drag in into my project in XCode"?. Maybe he keeps all his source files in his 'Downloads' folder and uses some sort of scripting to do his builds - but that would be a bit nuts(!)
Hopefully there's not something more sinister going on - like some Mac malware that targets development systems.
Re: But...but...but...
Legem Muphry percutit iterum?
Re: Interesting BBC documentry about altitude
(... why you really should have a pressure suit above 65k feet ...)
It's strange to think that Concorde flew every day for years and years at 60k feet, supercruising faster than any F-22 with 100 passengers and no pressure suits, oxygen masks or anything. Just Gins & Tonics
Huh??
What language is this article written in?
I mean, I can read the words - they go 'blah, blah, blah'. But I tried and failed to decipher any meaning in them.
Posted in Ten... two-bay Nas boxes
Re: I still dont get the use of iTunes server?
So you can stream to you Apple TV/iPad/iPhone without having to have your PC running & iTunes loaded
Posted in Basic instinct: how we used to code
Re: BASIC...we could only DREAM of BASIC!
I'll see your FOCAL, and raise you... RogAlgol :)
It's called a Radiogram
Funny how things stay the same. My Gran had a Radiogram - or Stereogram as it was very posh. Walnut veneer'ed cabinet with a Hi-Fi inside. Made by Dynatron I seem to remember.
B2B? WTF??
I Googled B2B. Business-to-Business apparently. Whatever that means...
The Queen's English??
The Queen: Tell me hi to get to Mr Cemeron's Hice!
Siri: WTF??
The Big One?
I hope these new solar flares don't mean the Sun's getting ready for the Big One...
The one where the whole thing explodes into a vast solar flare and instantly vapourizes us. The one that's scheduled for December 31st
I don't know why anyone is surprised by all this newspapaer scandal stuff. The only thing that surprises me about it is that it's confined to the NOTW.
I mean, we all know what being a newspaper scribe is like. It's black and white. Night time. Raining. The office echos with the clatter of Remington typewriters. Everyone smokes. Drinks bourbon. You have contacts. Big Shots. Hoods. Wise Guys. Snitches and Floozies. You rummage through the trash. Tap wires. Apply some heat. Anything, anything to get the scoop.
Three rounds of ammunition? Yeah - and the rest!
No Prize? WTF!
Stop being a bunch of tight-wads El Reg!. Open the goodie bag and give the poor bloke some stuff. A paper aeroplane, some Playmobil figures and a fondleslab should do the trick
SCART??
I can't think of a more irritating, badly designed, glumphing connector than SCART. Does anyone still use it these days?
Posted in Android users more likely to put out
Madeira m'dear?
Android users more likely to put out...
... the cat, the wine, their cigars or the lamps?
Power supply
They really need to change the power supply too. Both the old, and new 'even better' Openreach modem that you get with BT Infinity say '700mA' on the back. The ultra-cheap 'wall wart' power supply they provide with it says '600mA'.
And they wonder why they're not reliable.
des-uh-what??
What sort of a dictionary claims that decimate is pronounced 'des-uh-meyt'?
Perhaps the one that Loyd Grossman uses? In the volume marked 'Shudder toThink'
Exclusive...
Ouch :( Yes - you're right - the license (in iBooks Author) is quite clear.
Thumbs down...
... for using the ghastly new 'K-12' thing when you meant 'school'
Apple like to make their products flexible and give their customers choice ;)
So it's an option. Settings/Music/Use Cellular Data, and Settings/Store/Use Cellular Data
Allegedly?
Did anyone actually read the Daily Telegraph article? It contains lines like:
"But 'their efforts have reportedly met with' a legal challenge with Apple allegedly threatening to sue the toy maker unless they cease trading."
Reportedly? Allegedly?? Isn't that just Journo code for 'We made it up'?
Of course, we'd all love it to be true :)
Whenever I read articles about the Chief Rabbi, I try and try not to mentally add a 'T' on the end.
But I always fail :(
