* Posts by sisk

2455 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Mar 2010

Judge says PSN hack can't spark class action

sisk

Re: Except

I've never even seen an XBox forum and I recall seeing that version of the story. I'm pretty sure El Reg initially reported it that way but later corrected themselves.

US court lifts ban on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

sisk

Re: Shagbag

I agree with you. I looked over the feature list for the iPhone 5 and can't for the life of me figure out why even a hardcore Apple fanboi would bother lining up for the things. I mean other than the fact that hardcore fanbois line up for anything with an Apple logo. I didn't see anything it offers over the iPhone 4 (let alone the 4S) that would be worth the upgrade for me.

Then again, I'm perfectly happy with my Galaxy S2, so maybe I just don't get it.

Apple iPhone 5 hands-on review

sisk

What's with that connector?

Will someone please explain to me why Apple refuses to use a microUSB connector? Seriously, I don't get it. If you're going to change connectors and there's an established industry standard why would you not switch to it? Why build another proprietary one and then have to make adapters to be in compliance with EU requirements?

Why is the iPhone so successful? 'Cause people love 'em

sisk

Having had to use a few iOS devices I have to say I'd be downright angry had it been my money that had been spent on them. The Woz had it right: someone who's willing to learn how to use a device won't get near as much out of an iPhone as they will from an Android, but the ones who don't want to bother with it will be happier with an iPhone.

I'm far happier with my Android devices than I would be with anything Apple has to offer, but I know people who wouldn't give up their iPhones for anything. To each their own I say. Just don't try to force me to use an iPhone. I'd hate it.

Police mistake reveals plan for Assange's Embassy capture

sisk

Re: Not exactly stymied

I have my doubts that the US will touch him. Doing so would be stupid in the extreme. If Assange were to disappear the whole world would know what happened to him. The damage he can do is already done, but making him vanish would be a PR nightmare for an already unpopular government given the following that Assange has.

As for the rape charges, they sound bogus to me but I'd rather see that proven in a court of law.

Jury awards Apple $1bn damages in Samsung patent case

sisk

Appeal, here we come

And maybe in the appeal they can get a judge who allows all the evidence to be shown and a jury with the intelligence to understand it.

This verdict is wrong on so many levels. Not only are most of the patents Apple claimed either so obvious that no one else ever thought to file for them or subject to prior art, but the idea that they get off with infringing a patent just because Intel has a license is ludicrous. Unless Intel's license specifically states that the can sell licenses to other companies they can't.

'Sex and the female brain are connected' - shock discovery

sisk

Semen ingested orally is a great cure for all kinds of nausea supposedly. I've been told by a gay friend that it even works in cases of stomach flu. I'll take his word for it and stick to flat cola for my nausea cure.

Goldeneye

sisk

Re: Its a good game....

"Goldeneye is a good game because it's a good game, graphics are irrelivent it's still a blast."

Such is the case with a lot of old school games. At some point the industry shifted it's focus from making games fun to making them pretty.

Study shows half of all websites use jQuery

sisk

The whole thing is built on YUI. Jquery wasn't around when Moodle was in its infancy. Why would they rewrite all their code just to switch to a different JS library?

sisk

JQuery is damn good

I can do anything that I've ever done with jQuery using vanilla Javascript. In fact, I HAVE done most of the things I do with jQuery using vanilla Javascript. JS has a pretty steep learning curve, but it's really not all that difficult once you learn it. I use jQuery because it drastically reduces the amount of code I have to write. I recently recreated an image gallery that I created just before my introduction to jQuery. The original was around 150 lines of Javascript. The recreation, using jQuery, was 20. In my experience that's pretty indicative of how it goes with jQuery. The amount of time it saves with no noticable overhead (most of the time) makes it well worth using.

Apple 'offered Samsung $30-per-mobe' patent licence truce

sisk
Mushroom

Re: Confusing headline...

That would be more appropriate, given where the technologies in question originated.

sisk

So the summary of this mess is....

Apple: We don't like the price you're asking for your FRAND patents, so we refuse to pay it. But here, we're charging you $30 per phone for our patents. We'll reduce it if you offer your patents to us for free.

Samsung: You can't refuse to pay and infringu our FRAND patent just because you don't think our pricing is fair and your so-called patents will never stand up in court even if we were infringing them, which we're not.

Meanwhile the public is getting sick and tired of the pissing match.

Deadly pussies kill more often than owners think

sisk

Suprised?

Who's honestly suprised by this? As cute as we find them and as friendly as they can be to their favored human slaves they are still predatory animals with a sadistic streak a mile wide.

Despite having known this for several years, they're still my favored pet. What does that say about me?

Apple patents shopping lists

sisk

Prior art

I had an Android app that made a shopping list from scanned barcodes or pictures of packaging several years back. I can't say for sure if it was around before 2008, but it seems likely. I wouldn't be suprised to see this patent revoked if they try to enforce it.

Alleged Anon arrested for planning gov DDoS attacks

sisk

Re: I am struggling

Indeed. I facepalmed as soon as I read "after he apparently bragged on Facebook". Some people are just too stupid to live.

Anonymous declares war after French firm trademarks its logo

sisk

One of two things is going on here. Either E-Flicker is a honeypot designed to catch Anonymous (which I find unlikely but possible) or somebody in that organization needs to have their head examined. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, picking a fight with Anonymous is a pretty stupid thing to do.

Jackson’s Hobbit becomes a trilogy

sisk

A trilogy of movies for one book?

Actually that sounds about right if you're going to do the book justice. I've always figured that one good novel was about three movies worth of material. That, I think, is why Hollywood can't seem to adapt a book into a movie without ripping it to shreds. Just look at what they did to John Carter (to name a recent offense).

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

sisk

Re: Edit for the author:

"The AR-15 is, by design, semiautomatic only. It is not an assault rifle."

I believe the legal definition of an assault rifle in the US is any automatic or semiautomatic rifle with an ammo capacity of 20 or more rounds. I may be mistaken about that, but I do know that the AR-15 is one of the rifles that fell under the assault rifle ban in the 90s because my dad was pondering selling his off before it became illegal to do so (he just uses it for target shooting).

Personally I wouldn't have been suprised had it blown up, but neither am I suprised that it just jammed. What would have suprised me is if it had worked flawlessly.

sisk

Legal ramifications?

Not so much. It's just like any other hobbiest making their own gun. I know a couple guys who've been doing that the old fashioned way (with workshops full of equipment) for years now. And no, they aren't survival nuts or psychos or anything like that. I'm not sure what all they have to do for them to be legal, if anything, but I'd imagine that printing a lower reciever would be about the same thing.

Story gone

sisk
Unhappy

UK residents only? Boo!

Ah well. I never win things like this anyway.

Microsoft unfurls patent lasso, snares Linux servers

sisk

Tis all a bunch of BS

I have serious doubts that these 235 patents that Linux supposedly violates exist and/or are enforceable. Said doubts will continue until Microsoft reveals which patents are supposedly being violated. There's simply no other reasonable explaination I can come up with for their refusal to reveal which patents are being violated.

Then again I suppose they could be refusing to reveal them so that Linux devs aren't able to work around them. To me that would be even more underhanded though. I don't think the current MS would sink quite that low, though I wouldn't put it past most previous versions of the company.

Now IPAD victor Proview is sued by its OWN law firm

sisk
Facepalm

Let me get this straight....they sued Apple and won after having already signed the trademark in question over to them, which was a fine bit of legal trickery that demonstrated a good bit of skill on the part of the legal team (and the bias of Chinese courts against American companies helped I'm sure). They then refused to pay the skillful lawyers who made it possible. That sound about right?

Someone high up in Proview must suffer from a brain cell deficiency.

Darth Vader is a pansy

sisk

Disagree

The problem with Max was not the color. The problem was that it was actually quite difficult to remain awake, attentive, and sane through enough of The Black Hole to actually see him. I'd willingly watch Battlefield Earth a dozen times in succession before I'd agree to sit through that turd of a movie again.

Rifle-waving Yank's premature detonation ruins city's big bang

sisk

Don't believe it

I'm just now seeing this article for some reason, but it rings as untrue on many counts. First, no lisenced pyrotechnician is going to store fireworks in a junkyard. Second, even if he were so foolish to do that, shooting them would not set them off unless he was using incendiary rounds. This ain't Hollywood people. High speed lead does not start fires.

Tablets, copycats and Weird Al Yankovic

sisk

Will it really make a difference?

Honestly I don't think the judges comments will make a difference one way or another on the market at large. True the kids won't want something that some old fuddy duddy of a judge thinks is cool, but how many of them are going to know about the judgement? For that matter how many adults are going to know about it? Patent warfare isn't exactly popular reading when you get outside of the tech sector.

sisk
Pint

Re: But

On Exhibit C, let's be fair. The kids think anything with alcohol in it is cool, probably because the grown ups say they aren't supposed to have any. It's been that way for several generations now.

Booze made from a shrubbery. Ni!

LOHAN to brew thermite for hot ignition action

sisk

Re: Alternatively...

That is bad idea on a several count. First, it wouldn't work. The air pressure inside the balloon would be the same as the pressure outside of it, or at least close enough as to make no difference. Second, how would you get the rocket into the balloon without damaging it? Third, yes the rocket could probably punch through the balloon, but it would use a significant portion of its kinetic energy to do so. Put into perspective for you, forgetting to take the cap off of the launch rod in a more traditional model rocket launch will cut your altitude to about a quarter of what you would normally see (speaking from experience here). That cap offers far less resistance than the skin of a weather balloon would, so I wouldn't expect to see the rocket achieve more than a few meters after punching through the balloon.

Yahoo! hack! leaks! 453,000! unencrypted passwords!

sisk

Ridiculous

Hey Yahoo! Did you learn NOTHING from Sony's recent walk of shame? Here, let me spell it out:

DO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT!!!!!

Did you get that? If you didn't, please report to your nearest cluebat wielding geek to have it beaten into your worthless skulls for further lessons.

Study: Climate was hotter in Roman, medieval times than now

sisk

Re: Frightening chart if accurate

That's one interpretation. Another is that the natural trend is reversing itself, as it has many times in the past.

I'm not advocating one or the other, just pointing out that there are multiple possibilities.

sisk

Explain one thing to me

Why is it that the people who throw hissy fits over the use of the term 'climate deniers' because of its supposed inaccuracy are perfectly ok with the term 'climate alarmist' and vice versa? If you find one of the terms offensive enough to ask others not to use it (or, in many cases, demand angrily that it not be used) shouldn't you have the courtesy to not use the other?

I just don't get how certain issues can reduce so many adults into name-calling adolescents.

Android games console scheme nets $2.5m

sisk

Re: XBMC?

Porting the Linux ARM build to Android would be pretty easy to do, but if your main focus is running XBMC wouldn't it be easier to use one of the various methods of installing a more traditional Linux distro as an Android app? I haven't done it (yet!) but from what I understand it's not a terribly difficult process.

Watch out for the GIGANTIC ALIEN JELLYFISH, warns space boffin

sisk
Coat

Aliens are giant gasbags?

Well, that certainly shines a different light on the conspiracy theories, given how many gasbags we have in elected offices.

Yeah, yeah. I'm going.

Numbers don't lie: Apple's ascent eviscerates Microsoft

sisk

Re: Eviscerated?

The AC is absolutely right. While there are a lot of people out there who could do their jobs on an iPad, who'd want to? I COULD do my work on a tablet, but I promise you my productivitiy would plummet without my dual monitors, a decent IDE, and a real keyboard. Comparing iOS and Windows is like comparing apples to oranges. They both have their strengths, but in a real world scenario there sales of one should only have minimal impact on the sales of the other. This only looks bad for Microsoft if you buy the hype that tablets are going to kill off desktops, which is a pretty ridiculous idea. They may replace desktops for those people who only use their computer for web browsing and email, but for the rest of us it would be pretty painful to give up our desktops for tablets.

And what's this nonsense about Windows falling out of its throne? Seriously, a 2:1 ratio would leave Windows in a pretty dominant position. Think of it in terms of sports. What would you think of a game that ended with a score of 6-3? And when you look at the only Apple product that really directly competes with Windows in its area of dominance the ratio is 19:1.

What is the Nokia Secret Plan if Windows 8 isn't Windows gr8?

sisk

What is the Nokia Secret Plan if Windows 8 isn't Windows gr8?

Easy. Bankruptcy or selling the company. If Windows 8 flops they're going to be out of all other options.

Twitter exposes Gov't requests for user data

sisk

Re: @B-D

Yes, but can a blank message really be the subject of a DMCA notice?

US federal boffins insist that mermaids DON'T exist

sisk

Re: Land of the free...

Not mad. We have a whole shedload of morons here who believe everything that looks like it might be non-fiction. Hence the whole controversy of DaVinci Code while Brown facepalmed with an exasperated exclaimation of "It's FICTION people". Or the outcry after Fox aired that 'alien autopsy' show back in the 90s. Or the need for a government agency to announce that mermaids don't exist, no doubt after much shaking of heads in disbelief.

sisk

One question...

What lunatic imagination made the leap from sonar surveys killing off whales and the Bloop to 'Mermaids are real'? That's got to be one of the most absurd leaps of (dis)logic I've ever seen.

Second win for Apple as Galaxy Nexus sales banned in US

sisk

Re: worse than the judge owning an i-thing

There's nothing wrong with American courts and politics that can't be solved by getting rid of all the politicians, judges, and lawyers.

sisk

Inappropriate

What the hell is this judge thinking? Preliminary injunctions are supposed to only happen if the product in question stands to do more damage to the plaintiff by being on the market than the defendant stands to loose from the injunction. There is no way in hell that Apple stands to loose more from any patents that the Nexus may infringe than Samsung stands to loose by being locked out of the market with it.

Two weeks 'til the internet disappears, for 58 Fortune 500 companies

sisk

So just a handful of computers won't be able to access the internet. Those'll be the office dummies who don't bother to look at the error messages their computers give them and whose support requests consist of 'It just quit working', with no indication of whether 'it' is the computer, a specific application, a printer, or the USB Christmas tree they bought last October at the dollar store.

Reg hack attempts gutsiest expenses claim EVER

sisk

Re: Dyscalculia

Do they have sales tax in Spain? If so that could account for the extra 9 euros. It'd be a high sales tax, but not quite the highest I've ever seen (though damn close to it).

Why do women pick IT as a career ?

sisk

Well, there's no shortage of women in our IT department. In this office (the main IT office) there are three men and 8 women. The rest of the IT (spread throughout the rest of the buildings for quick access when staff need help) is similarly heavily female, with a total of 11 woman and 8 men in IT outside of the main IT office.

Personally I don't think sexism has anything to do with it. In my experience most women simply aren't interested in computers (obviously I work with a lot of exceptions). You see the same thing in gaming. While there are a lot of gamer girls, you're far more likely to encounter a man in a games shop than a woman (I am, of course, excluding people who are there to get stuff for their kids).

Patent trolling cost the US $29bn in 2011

sisk

Now the real question...

Now that academia has delivered a paper that is essentially a bitchslap of a wakeup call to US lawmakers to overhaul the patent system will something be done about it? Or will the politicians, as they so often do with matters like this, give the paper a dirty look, utter a 'meh', and then roll over and go back to sleep on the issue? I'm gussing the latter.

Atari turns 40: Pong, Pac-Man and a $500 gamble

sisk

I found one in a used games shop just a couple years ago while I was on vacation. They had a nice selection of original cartridges to. Unfortunately my wife wouldn't let me pick it up. She was convinced it would end up just collecting dust.

I have some fond memories of spending hours playing Battletanks and Pitfall on the Atari.

Apple wins US ban on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1

sisk
Happy

Re: $2.6m

It's not hardly a monopoly. There are tons of 10in tablets in the market, and the Tab itself is already obsolete. My guess is that the market at large won't even notice.

Even Apples sometimes have worms in them, admits Cupertino

sisk

Re: iOS PCs?

@Jurassic

A trojan is a type of virus. The ones that install themselves are worms. But even if you only consider self-installing viruses then your statement that there's never been a Mac virus in circulation is still wrong. Just to name a few, Leap-A, Koobface, Inqtana have all been in the wild. They are not alone. OS X has long had viruses in the wild, despite Apple's irresponsible denial of the fact.

US trade body to 'revisit' Motorola's sole patent win over Apple

sisk

...including whether patents that are supposed to be licensed under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms can ever be used to ban imports.

Surely they can. Otherwise what's the point of even bothering to get a license, even on FRAND terms.

On the public interest angle, all the products in question are very popular. I'd be suprised if they found it to be within public interest to ban either of them.

Apple's iPhone 5 connector said to be a control freak

sisk

Wow...I as much as tell you a post is just a trolling with the icon and you still jump all over it.

As far as Android accessories, I don't care. That's probably just me, but I have neither the need nor the desire for the type of accessories that the iPhone plugs into. The only accessories I have or want for my phone are chargers (which are pretty much universal for anything except an iPhone these days), headphones (which are universal) and a case (which isn't quite universal, but has fit three phones in a row so it's close enough). Any other accessories I would get are bluetooth, so they're universal. I might someday pick up a dock that with a microusb plug on it (which, shocker, will be universal). My point is that accessories made for a specific model of phone are pointless, regardless of which model that may be.

sisk
Trollface

If they make all their old devices obsolete and their users are that upset about it, they could always vote with thier feet and buy something other than an iPhone the next go around.

Oh...wait, nevermind. I forgot we're talking about fanbois here.