Re: ICBM's navigation
Last time I looked, ICBM's flew above cloud cover...
Posts by Ross K
688 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Feb 2011
China switches on 'BDS' civilian nav-sat rival to GPS
Israel plots gigabit fibre-to-home rollout
Friday 28th December 2012 11:11 GMT 
Don't Make Me Laugh
As IEC’s chairman, Yiftach Ron-Tal, put it, the venture will “put Israel on a par with developed countries.”
Mr. Ron-Tal, I think you'll find you need more than FTTH to be accepted as a developed country.
All the same, I suppose even illegal settlers need more bandwidth.
Go Israel. Good to see you've got no other pressing matters to attend to...
Lego quad-copter: your ultimate drone nightmare
Friday 21st December 2012 13:08 GMT
@Scott Pedigo
I guess Israel will have to block the import of LEGO into the Gaza Strip and Palestine now.
Earlier I was thinking along the lines of CIA-controlled LEGO drones launching a missile strike on a house full of people celebrating a wedding somewhere in Afghanistan.
Ole Christiansen would be turning in his grave.
VCDX: The elite certification just 105 people hold
Tuesday 18th December 2012 18:21 GMT
Re: Err...
having seen what people who have done chemistry, philosophy and sizemology phd courses have gone through, I can't say that this would fit with their experience.
Reminds me of a joke I heard once...
What do you say to someone with a philosophy doctorate?
"Large Big Mac meal with Coke please"
Tuesday 18th December 2012 12:50 GMT 
A Doctorate, You Say?
Chief Technology Officer Steve Herrod has likened it to attaining doctorate in VMware.
I'm sure anybody who's put in a LOT more than 350 hours obtaining a real doctorate in something useful like education, nursing, or engineering would be highly insulted at having their qualification compared to this nonsense. Utter wank.
Seagate slips out super-silent 2.5in video hard drive
Monday 17th December 2012 15:38 GMT
I dunno
Sky+ HD boxes are kitted out for a 3.5" drive. Would they make the change to 2.5" before the next hardware refresh (whenever that is)? Yeah they could use some kind of 2.5->3.5 bracket, but it's probably cheaper for them to continue using bog-standard desktop drives and say "bugger the environment".
500Gb is nothing to write home about anyway. Aren't Tivo selling a 2TB model these days?
Pentagon hacker McKinnon will NOT be prosecuted in the UK
Sunday 16th December 2012 13:07 GMT
Re: Looks like cruel and unusual punishment to me.
@MyBackDoor:
In America and England you cannot commit a crime, then get caught for that crime, and just walk away without a consequence of some kind.
You must not be from this planet. Or you're very naive when it comes to the workings of legal systems.
Stallman: Ubuntu spyware makes it JUST AS BAD as Windows
Monday 10th December 2012 13:45 GMT
Re: I like ubuntu and the shopping lens....
Exactly, hippies with beards live in their own little dream world when it comes to Linux.
I think it gives them somewhere to direct their OCD and/or autistic tendencies.
The way I see it, Ubuntu us at least trying to bring Linux to the mainstream.
As long as you have nerds squabbling over whether KDE is better than Gnome (or whatever the latest "thing" is), the Linux will remain the non-entity of an OS that it is...
Sunday 9th December 2012 21:21 GMT
Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (In Any Sense Of The Word "Free")
That type of behavior is a strict no-no to the free software maven, who lumps it in with DRM and hidden back doors as malicious practices that should result in the offending code being treated as malware.
Luckily nobody cares what Stallman thinks.
If it wasn't for the popularity Ubuntu, there would be a lot less people using Linux.
Canonical should tell Stallman to go and do one...
Kim Dotcom shows off new mega service
Apple: 27-inch iMac won't ship until next year
Saturday 8th December 2012 20:02 GMT
Re: Much as I love...
There are 51 articles on the front page of El Reg. Of them, 7 are about Apple, and another 4 mention Apple or iDevices either in passing, or alongside competing devices.
Wow! I can't believe someone was anal enough to take what I wrote LITERALLY, and count all the articles in the front page that referenced Apple.
You, sir, need to get a life.
Tim Cook: Apple to manufacture Macs in US in 2013
Friday 7th December 2012 11:16 GMT
Re: Not like they didn't already build in a high-cost economy...
Finance-wise Ireland isn't a high cost country, so if you invest a lot in automation (as opposed to workers) then its a low cost place for them.
Production line staff are mostly temporary agency workers so would presumably be funded from a cost center other than HR.
They're brought in for the busy periods, and send downtown to sign on at the dole office when things get quiet. So whether it makes sense for Apple Ireland to invest a lot in automation is debatable.
Friday 7th December 2012 00:36 GMT
Re: Not like they didn't already build in a high-cost economy...
Apple's existing directly-operated manufacturing facility was is in Ireland, albeit actually in a large council estate, but still not a particularly low-cost economy.
It's in the process of expanding at the moment. Not thanks to manufacturing though - the new jobs are tech support and office jobs. They make the Mac Pro alright, but I suppose they're priced high enough to somewhat absorb the extra manufacturing cost.
And let's not kid ourselves; Apple wouldn't be doing anything in Ireland if it wasn't for the creative accounting practices they're able to get away with...
Court ruling means Kim Dotcom can sue NZ spooks
Apple's new 'Assembled in USA' iMac a bear to upgrade, repair
Wednesday 5th December 2012 00:20 GMT
Re: fuss over nothing
I would personally argue that that has given us one very good plus and one very bad minus:
+ cheap PCs
- tie in to archaic standards like BIOS, IDE, PCI that should have died years ago.
BIOS, IDE, PCI?
You looked at a PC recently? They got standards called EFI and SATA these days...
I understand what you're saying about all-in-ones - they're all shit whether it's a Sony, Apple, HP or Lenovo. Only a moron would buy one.
Tuesday 4th December 2012 10:51 GMT 
Assembled in...
I know that when I worked for Compaq at the end of the last milennium "Assembled in UK" meant sticking RAM and a keyboard on a container-load of otherwise finished laptops from Taiwan.
The 1U Proliants of the time were the same - adding disks and RAM was the only assembly done here.
Can't see other manufacturers being much different.
A cynic might say Apple are trying this "Assembled in the USA" approach on foot of the recent reports from China about mistreatment of subcontractors. Flame away.
Samsung: Demand for mobes forced 16hr days on factory slaves
Titsup Windows 8 PayPal payments snare upgraders
Prisoner found with phone + charger in anal cavity
Dell launches Sputnik Linux Ultrabook
America planned to NUKE THE MOON
Hotel blames burglaries on hacked Onity card locks
BOFH: The Great Patch Mismatch
Friday 23rd November 2012 21:03 GMT
Re: This brings me happy memories
I never got the point of halon.
Let's prevent deaths from smoke inhalation by killing anybody who might be in the room wanting to breathe.
One quick call to your PFY-supplier and you're back in business once the halon's cleared and the body dragged out back behind the smoking nut.
Dead PFYs and service engineers are less of a headache these days as you can always get a few "interns" to work for free...
Bolton biz kingpin tables '7 figure' offer for Comet website
Friday 23rd November 2012 20:47 GMT
So basically...
John Roberts, the man behind Bolton-based white goods etailer Appliances Online has confirmed he put in a "seven figure offer" for the web stores.
He said his firm expected to continue using the Comet name on the net
A seven-figure sum for the comet.co.uk domain name, with a redirect to http://www.appliancesonline.co.uk/ ?
No jobs being saved there then?
Texan schoolgirl expelled for refusing to wear RFID tag
Thursday 22nd November 2012 10:35 GMT
Re: I predict...
Can you imagine the lawsuit of the child is at school, walks off campus and gets hurt or injured in an accident? You can bet your bottom dollar that there is going to be some lawyer ready to sue the school district over letting the kid leave campus.
Rubbish. I don't think kids bunking off school is a problem of such magnitude that tracking needs to be implemented. I don't think I've ever read about a school being sued for an non-academic off-campus accident involving a student.
The bottom line is that this scheme is all about the $2million.
And yes, I swipe in and out at work using a simple mag stripe card. I'm sure my boss would love to have me RFID tracked every time I go for a piss, but the day that happens is the day I look for another job.
Thursday 22nd November 2012 00:36 GMT
Re: I predict...
Ok, I'll entertain your pedantic comment: what's to say a student doesn't receive a bunch of "faulty" tags, one after the other?
RFID tags or not, a school that prevents a student from using a toilet while acting in loco parentis would want to ensure they have good legal representation for when they get sued.
Want to run your own Apple shop? Start with £70k of German chairs
Felix Baumgartner sadly turns out to be blinkered FOOL
HP warns consumers: Don't downgrade Win8 PCs to Win7
Friday 9th November 2012 01:37 GMT
Pfft. I haven't bought a HP since..
...they were busy knocking out all those shitty laptops with dodgy motherboards.
While they did the honourable thing and replaced the faulty motherboards FOR A WHILE, they replaced them with other faulty motherboards with the same design problem.
Fucking shite-peddlers.
Accidental discounts land Apple in NZ's Disputes Tribunal
Tuesday 6th November 2012 10:17 GMT
Re: Huh.
@ben edwards: Maybe you didn't read the post above mine. New Zealand has a thing called the "Contractual Mistakes Act 1979", so Apple could argue that the mistake wasn't noticed until after the payment was made.
What you know about UK or US consumer law doesn't really apply to a country on the other side of the globe...
Tuesday 6th November 2012 00:33 GMT
So can this tribunal force Apple to sell him $1600 worth of accessories for $35?
It's pretty obvious he didn't buy $1600 worth of Apple cases as an end user, but rather to resell them for a quick buck.
Perhaps the Reg can tell us from the chat logs they've seen whether or not the guy went through each individual item's price with the CSR to ensure they were all correct? Or did he just ask the CSR if all prices on the website were up to date?
Monday 5th November 2012 23:40 GMT
He Was Hoping To Get $89 Worth Of Stuff For $0.83 - Really?
This guy must be new to the internet. Companies stopped honouring pricing mistakes on websites a long long time ago...
Seriously. I couldn't get a Chinese knockoff iPod skin on eBay for $0.83, never mind Twelve South accessories off the Apple website.
Did he receive an order confirmation from Apple?
http://store.apple.com/nz/open/salespolicies#placingyourorder
5.7 Information contained on the Apple Store Web Site constitutes an invitation to treat. No such information constitutes an offer by us to supply any Products.
KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds
Monday 5th November 2012 13:09 GMT
Re: Why doesn't he make his own GUI if he finds them all so rubbish?
Don't worry, he's just another Richard Stallman-esque blowhard who likes the sound of his own voice.
I would have thought a hardcore geek such as Torvalds would do his computing through the command line.
Surely the medium of a GUI is beneath him?
Consumer group urges Aussies to spoof IP addresses
Thursday 25th October 2012 22:31 GMT 
"Channel BT"
I like that term.
As a huge downloader of TV torrents I've noticed that Sky, in the last year or two, has taken to airing popular shows a couple of weeks after they air in the US (as opposed to what, a year after, previously).
Actually I don't know why I'm still paying my cable company for a TV signal. Must go about changing that...
Apple unveils iPad mini, upgrades its big brother
Tuesday 23rd October 2012 19:37 GMT 
How Appropriate...
Apple's marketing honcho Phil Schiller reveals the pricing of the full iPad line...
shill [shil]
noun
1. a person who poses as a customer in order to decoy others into participating, as at a gambling house, auction, confidence game, etc.
2. a person who publicizes or praises something or someone for reasons of self-interest, personal profit, or friendship or loyalty.
verb (used without object)
3. to work as a shill: He shills for a large casino.
verb (used with object)
4. to advertise or promote (a product) as or in the manner of a huckster; hustle: He was hired to shill a new TV show.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
