Posts by TkH11

@Keith Williams

I don't know if the extreme p*n laws in the UK evolved to this, but there certainly was talk in the development phase of these laws that they would create a new age of thought crime.

It sounds as if in Canada they already have that!

The idea is no longer that you are guilty of a particular offence based on simple evidence, but that the law tries to get inside your head and make a judgement of how you interpret the image.

And everyone interprets images differently, so for some people, they'll be guilty of the offence, for others they wouldn't be.

It's an absolutely crazy Orwellian concept.

Limiting a SIM to data only

Data transmissions and voice calls are made using different transmitters by the mobile phone and on different frequencies.

It's absolutely trivial to limit a mobile phone to data only. Indeed, I recently had to replace a SIM for my T Mobile 3G stick, and they provided me with a conventional voice call SIM, which then had to be configured (converted) to data only.

I'm not a mobile comms expert, but this feature will be implemented in either:

a list of services inside the SIM card, or a list of services for that particular SIM is able to use, which is held by the network.

I work in a telcoms/data comms company: everything is about services routed over telecoms equipment, everything is service based. Voice traffic will be a service, data traffic will be a different service. The idea that a telecoms provider can't control/restrict the services for a particular subscriber is just nonsense.

@JaitcH

I commend both The Register and Jaitch. What JaitcH said was entirely true and many newpapers with online forums will not post such a comment.

Code reviews

Don't they do code reviews at Microsoft?

Don't they test adequitely?

I mean, just because a piece of code should never process negative numbers doesn't mean to say you shouldn't throw negative numbers at that code and see what it does.

Isn't that how you find bugs? !!!

Jurasdiction

The kick backs were paid by the French company Alcatel to companies in Latin America and Asia.

Where are the limits of jurasdiction here, how is it that the USA government investigate and demand that the new company Alcatel-Lucent pay the US government? !!

The kick backs weren't paid to American companies!

The american arm of Alcatel-Lucent was Lucent Technologies, who were even implicated in the original kickbacks anyway! So as far as I can see, there's been no American involvement, no crimes committed on American soil, so how is it that Alcatel-Lucent ends up having to pay the US government for something which was committed by the French arm of the company for crimes committed in non USA countries?

Does this mean the USA government can approach any company of any country in the world, make allegations of bribery and demand those companies then pay a fine to the US government?

@Trev2, AV software

I've been given an Acer Laptop, which clearly has got some stub for Norton installed. It's not the full installation (yet), it's an annoying little pop-up, let me say that again, it's a f**ng annoying pop-up which gives me a choice: Install Norton now, or remind me in a week.

I don't want to install Norton now, and not in one week, and not in one month, not ever! But there is no f**ng option to cancel this pop-up!!

So, I'm now going to have to go away and research how to stop this fu**ng pop-up.

I've got something similar with MacAffee, some trial software has been installed and now it's going to keep harassing me until I either uninstall it, or b) accept the upgrade and pay for it.

It's about time these suppliers of computers stopped working in leagues with companies like Symantec (providers of the Norton anti-virus software) and give us a proper choice of what AV software we want or don't want installing.

I wouldn't touch Norton or MacAffee AV with a barge poll.

Windows 7

I've just been given a laptop with Windows 7 on it, and it's a dual core machine, and it runs like a dog. It's slower than Windows XP running on a single core!

What seems to be happening, is that it's much more resource hungry than any other operating system previously provided by Microsoft, and companies are just throwing it on to laptops without considering the performance implications.

When I buy a new laptop today, with a new operating system on it, a laptop which has much more powerful hardware than my other laptop, I'd expect that new laptop to run more quickly.

It's an absolutely stupid world we live in, where buying a new computer doesn't give you something faster, you actually take a backwards step.

Inefficiency

Too many layers of software, that's your problem. This API, that API, that middle layer..

One second is a shed load of time in terms of processing cycles (and instruction cycles).

Software these days is far too inefficient. Go back and take a look in the good old days with what could be done with a 2MHz 8 bit 6502 processor running at it's peak 1 MIP, with most instructions being slower than that.

Reduced Thermal noise

The cold temperatures should help reduce noise and enable the detectors and electronics to be more sensitive.

Density

if you want higher densities in the same physical form factor, then failure rates have to increase.

And as time goes by, as the feature size of the integrated circuit technology reduces, failure rates will increase.

I'm not convinced everything needs to be as small (and as least reliable) as possible.

I look at electronics from the 1980's, using say 3 micron geometries. I've seen chips from before then lasting 25 years and still going strong, I don't buy this attitude that motherboards don't need to last long because people will replace them within 3 years.

Commonsense prevails

This smacks of an attempt at protectionism by the Scottish and English football leagues, anyone with half a brain would take the commonsense approach which the judge has also settled upon.

Just a case of the leagues, trying it on, they knew it must have been a very tenuous case, trying to apply copyright laws of the UK to a company with equipment in a different country.

The judge made the right decision. Let's hope the music producers/publishers also take note of this judgement.

Gun to the head

"Tell us who they were otherwise we send you to prison".

So much for the right to remain silent, and this isn't even a criminal trial!

This is an abuse of democracy, of our rights.

nostalgia

Whilst some may look down upon how much time we spent hanging out in arcades as teenagers, I think it was actually quite a good thing.

If you visit any arcade today, the video games have all but gone, with fruit machines dominating.

Some arcades (in seaside towns such as Bournemouth) do have video games, but they're mostly old, nothing innovative (except the multi-screen Sega Airline Pilots).

I still go into the arcades, to check them out, to see if there's any games worth playing, but rarely there is these days. (I suspect my girlfriend thinks I'm a bit weird going into the arcades, but when you've grown up in a seaside town with little to do but hang-out on the seafront and hang around in the arcades, it's a must)

These days, everyone's playing there Xbox or Wii at home. We developed our social interaction skills as kids hanging out in arcades, we got out and about, we weren't mollycoddled and wrapped in cotton wool and protected from the 'dangerous' outside.

I play Defender on the PC (original ROMS running under emulation), but it's not the same as being in an arcade, standing up against the game chassis, with all the real buttons and having friends around with you, taking it in turns, watching others play, joining in the excitement.

@Dave15

You say that Americans didn't lend us didly squat, not in WW2 or the Falklands.

That's not actually true, in a literal sense it is, because they didn't lend equipment to us, we bought it from them. But the thrust of your post was that American's haven't helped us out.

This isn't true.

During 1982 in the Falkland's war the American's offered us, expedited the supply of a new version of Sidewinder air to air missile which had a good enough heat seaking head to enable the missle to be launched head on to an oncomming enemy aircraft. This was a brand new and key piece of armament for the harriers which helped us win that war.

The current version of the sidewinders we had in stock could only be launched from behind an enemy aircraft, in order to detect the hot jet exhaust and tail pipe of the engines.

@jaitch

It's not so much signal degradation on the line that's the issue, it's the plain simple fact that telephones are bandwidth limited to approximiately 4KHz, reduced from around 20KHz for normal human hearing.

There's so much information lost , but it's not a degredation, that loss is designed in from the very start.

Flat diaphrams

Helps control phase shift do they? Gimmicky.

I have a set of Dynaudio Acoustics professional grade active studio monitors, fairly pricy and weight wise, the 8Kg or so of these ones is light by comparison. The Dynaudio weigh in at 23Kg each.

And they don't have flat diaphragms and I'm willing to bet they sound a fair bit better than these ones.

If you stick to good solid design, speaker design and design of the electronics active filters on the inside, you don't need gimmicks.

Protective rubber bits - and I'm not talking condoms...

This idea about providing a moderate level of protection because the corners are rounded off and enclosed in rubber, it's nonsense.

Why is it nonsense? If you're not sure whether the device will survive the fall to the ground, then the fact it has bits of added rubber are irrelevant, you have to treat the device as if it would become damaged, you have to treat it with great care. Which means you're going to have to treat the device as if it had NO protection at all, which then defeats the object of having the bits of rubber and the extra price that goes with that.

Either it's been subjected to drop testing and passed or it hasn't. If it hasn't been subject to drop testing at all then you might as well forget it has the extra protective bits added.

can't hit a supersonic target

GWS Seawolf designed decades ago could hit supersonic targets.

Another messed up military project. Government needs to start banging heads together and firing people.

Windows Copy

They could at least fix the Windows explorer so it actually didn't stop Windows from multi-tasking when it copies. That'd be a start.

Try copying a 30GB file in Windows and then try to continue working...

Not a chance. Always struck me as odd, that in 20 years Microsoft never got this to work.

I don't use Win 7 so I don't know if this pain-in-the-arse has been fixed.

Copper lined rooms

So what they gonna do to protect us from this?

Build iron and copper lined houses? Office buildings, super markets?

Give us big metal doors with berillium copper finger strips down the edges and we're to keep the doors shut all the time? Remove all glass windows from Office buildings?

DT 100's

I've never tried the Beyer DT100's, I have a pair of Beyer DT250s which are pretty good, but I really need better.

I guess, I've got so used to listening to by Dynaudio active near field monitors, that I've become fussy. Too damn fussy.

@Simon Westerby 1

Cheap battery replacement doesn't mean to say it is defective and will catch fire.

if the batteries from that supplier has no previous history of reliability problems then it's quite reasonable for the employer to use them to provide the new batteries.

By suggesting that the battery is a cheap-knock off, you are in fact attempting to pass the blame onto the employer (unreasonably so).

@ac claiming on line

Two points:

The first is that you say claiming online is a big reduction in overhead for the DWP.

I disagree. I had to sign-on not so long ago. I did it by telephone, I then had to go for an 'interview' with DWP at the job centre where they sat me down for around 20mins and simply verified the information on all the forms I have previously given.

Even if you complete the application for unemployment benefit online, they will still call you in for the interview, so they still employ that large army of people to check your details because they don't trust you to give them accurate information (and also to keep themselves in a job).

Secondly, there comes a point where the money spent on advertising and the benefit it gives in the reduction of staff isn't worthwhile: the money could be spent on employing more people!

I suspect it's not about that, I suspect DWP is trying to use the web as a means of communication with the public. But it's ill thought out, unless they start random pop-up advertising (which would cause a public outcry and it's much more blatent what's being done), people only end up at the DWP site because they're actively searching for it.

I think it's just a case of the dumb DWP people haven't thought it through.

As them for the justification of why the £1m budget was set for this particular activity.

You'll probably find it was purely an arbitrary figure that someone conjured up out of thin air with no good rationale behind it.

A Freedom of Information Act request needs to be submitted to find out what their real strategy is and how have they measured the success of that strategy.

I'm willing to bet, there is no measurement of success criteria, that would be far too forward thinking for a civil service department, where they can just get away with wasting our money with no accountability. Even if you could point the finger at one individual, they will never be fired

These civil service organisations ( I worked in one), regularly say in team meetings, there's an acute awareness that they have to get good value for money for the tax payer..they know it's not their money to burn, but yet, there they carry on, time after time wasting out money with no accountability..

Justice?

I don't have much confidence in the Indian judicial system!

They've had in in a cell for a week, have they actually charged him with a crime yet?

Idiot

He handed the computer to the Police knowing there were images on there despite the consequences for himself....the guy is an idiot. Delete them first then, at least give yourself a chance at not getting caught!

We all know they can recover deleted images unless more advanced precautions are taken but the Police would have been looking for websites accessed, emails etc.

One thing you can never ever do, is trust the Police. May be you think yo are helping them find your child, but at the end of the day, any chance to screw you, and they will take it. Always do.

Market?

I'm not really convinced there's a market for this item. It's clearly intended to be nostalgic and is aimed at people in their 30's and 40's that owned them as kids. But, we want them with the actual innards!

Creating a computer in the same case as a C64 but with totally different innards doesn't make it a C64!

It's being marketed as a C64 and so clearly aimed at the nostalgic market but the kids of today won't have that nostalgic feeling: they weren't even born when the C64 was around! So what's in it for the teenagers of today?

To make it nostalgic means it has to be able to play the original games of yesterday and will those games appeal to the kids of today when they're lacking the blazing 3D graphics.

Let's be honest, I love playing old games like PacMan, Defender but I get bored with them very rapidly now, they don't hold my attention like the Far Cry, Half Life 2.

If it's intended as a games computer then there are other consoles which already do that, so this new C64 needs to have some unique selling point, perhaps that's the price..perhaps not.

To gain a low price point requires a large market, the games console manufacturers in the past have regularly sold consoles at below the cost of manfacture in order to achieve market penetration and made up the losses in the sales - and higher than otherwise would be- price of the software.

Does anyone really think this nostalgic C64 is going to have as large a market as say a Wii games console?

Relevance

In response to comments that computing courses in school have no purpose:

I disagree. Admittedly, having taken a look at current GCSE courses in Computing/ICT they seem to me to be quite useless.

When I studied A level Computer Science back in 1984-1986, it was definitely extremely worthwhile. We studied everything from relatonal databases (what there was back then!), to data structures (linked lists, stacks, binary trees), to high level languages and low level languages including compiliation and assembly..

These things were relevant back then and they're still very relevant today.

Now, the real question is, has A levels in Computer Science been dumbed down? Has the course content been changed so much that they are now like the GCSE's - completely useless?>

harm

The argument that's nearly always used is that downloading the pics causes the abuse to take place, it creates a market.

In this case, (and I'm sure many of these types of cases) such an argument is invalid.

No abuse took place: there was no victim.

So are we punishing people because they've caused harm?

@Oliver 7 - The real scandal

I disagree with you on the the point that the real scandal is the much lower upload speed.

Most people download webpages and so the assymetry is appropriate. Whilst the upload speed is considerable slower than the download speed how many people do you know have complained that the web is too slow?

The outgoing http request to the webserver is tiny compared to the amount of data being downloaded of the webpage itself.

How many of those webpages being too slow to load are down to the how long it takes for the outgoing http request to be transmitted to web server over your broadband connection?

Answer: an incredibly small number.

For most people, the slower upload speed isn't an issue. If it were, IT professionals would be all over it, we'd be the first to complain about it.

I accept however, some people may need, some businesses may need a symetrical connection speed (where download and upload speeds are equal).

There are companies which provide higher upload speeds, and no doubt people with this requirement are sufficiently technically aware to seek these companies out on the web (as I have done very recently).

My criticism in respect of the asymetry between upload/download speeds is that there aren't enough companies providing higher upload speeds (trading off the download speed), and ISPs don't give you a choice on what upload/download ratio you would like.

If they could do that, then that would be great. Let us the user decide on what we actually want and need for our specific applications we're running.