* Posts by g e

3255 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jul 2007

Paying a TV tax makes you happy - BBC

g e

Re: Oh FFS.

You live in the UK and have a choice about paying for a license when you have a TV? How do you manage that.

This new learning amazes me, explain to me once more how sheep bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.

It's hard to avoid buying stuff that's advertised on TV because just about everything is advertised on TV. Unless you want to buy non-brand stuff you've never heard of from Bob's non-advertised corner-shop or is too luxurious to be advertised on TV.

g e
Facepalm

Re: Compare costs with Sky

That's what time-shifting is for, or did you just get the cheap box without the Plus(?) features.

I pay SKY (HD) around £85/month. For that I get a bucketload of TV (most of which I don't watch but there's at least half a dozen extra channels there worth having in addition to terrestrial and I don't have sports or movies), unlimited 40MBit fibre (actually 40MBit, not like 32.6MBit, and actually uncapped - at least I've not found a limit yet), phone line and essentially free phone calls as we never go over the minutes in the package. Before you say 'that's seven times the TV license (which I also have the compulsory privilege of paying on top), if you broke out phone line, calls, internet and TV into separate providers it'd be way more.

I don't even know if the aerial socket on my TV actually works.

Microsoft issues manual on Brits to Cambridge exports

g e
Facepalm

Classic Yanklish

Surprised there's no mention of driving on the left or that you shouldn't confuse 'fanny' with 'arse' unless you want most English chicks (that you'd take home to yo momma, leastways) to give you a ruddy good punch up the bracket on First Night. [Edit: or 'arse' with 'ass' for that matter though the four-legged friend may be more forgiving, at least]

Sounds like they've been drinking from the Dick van Dyke water fountain. I look forward to a full leaked version in due course.

Mind you I did used to tell directions-to-the-castle-asking US tourists that they should come to the Public Hanging on Sunday as hanging is "still a local by-law in this town, and has a great turnout".

Apple's marketing honcho Schiller attacks Android, Samsung

g e
Holmes

Ouch

Sound like your grapes are extra sour. Stick to ios development, then and leave Android to everyone else.

Ten pi-fect projects for your new Raspberry Pi

g e
Go

Not to mention a WiFi Access Point

If a LAMP server qualifies then this easily does!

www.pi-point.co.uk

Czechs check cheques, reject £680m 4G auction

g e
Holmes

Couldn't the regulator threaten to cap data prices too?

Maybe not

g e
Go

Prague rocks

I thoroughly recommend it. Plus the Czech sense of humour is great.

Outbreaks of common sense are also more common there (Czech republic) than most other places.

En Garde! Villagers FIGHT OFF FRENCH INVASION MENACE

g e

Stick a mast atop the cliffs

And charge the Froggies!!!

Zut alors!

Era of the Pharaohs: Climate was hotter than now, without CO2

g e
Holmes

Re: Personally,

It'd be fascinating to see if the doomsday message persisted if all financial motivation was removed from Warmology.

Of course that's never gonna happen so people who essentially get paid for shouting about the end of the world will keep doing what they have to do to keep getting paid. Which is shouting about the end of the world. If you even tried they'd shout even louder till someone chucked them some money. Like a wind turbine manufacturer or something.

Basic tenets of the modern world:

1. If someone tells you something a _lot_ then always question how they stand to benefit from your believing them.

2. If there's money involved you should distrust it in direct proportional to the amount of money stood to be lost/gained.

Apple ordered to surrender coveted docs in iOS privacy lawsuit

g e
Holmes

Perhaps

$1M/day fine for non-compliance might help focus Apple's attention

Congratulations, copyright infringers: You are the five per cent

g e
Thumb Up

Maybe uk.gov is actually being canny?

While paying lip-service to their corporate paymasters they recognise that it's all a bunch of bullshit and the media industry actually needs to move its business into the third millennium which will only be done when it's less painful to do than not do.

Hence they give the megacorps the semblance of what they demand while pulling all its teeth out.

What are the chances they actually have the public's basic interests at heart? (Yeah, slim to nil, I know)

Intel, Apple forging chip-baking deal?

g e
Holmes

Oh yeah, Sammy put their prices up didn't they

By, if accounts are to be believed around $1BN which was the same as that court judgement amount handed down.

Which has just been reduced by around $450M.

Bargain :oD

Amazon yanks SimCity download from store

g e
Joke

Re: EA

But first EA would need to be able to tell the difference between cow and bull

Bacon sarnies can kill: Official

g e
Holmes

In other news

People who ate more 'processed' meats also smoked, drank too much and took negligible exercise but we're having an anti-meat day today so we'll leave that out.

BRITAIN MUST DECLARE WAR on Cervinaean menace

g e
Holmes

Because

You're not supposed to eat people. Hence my vote for Wild Boar :o)

g e
Joke

In other news

The head of the CRU has shares in a specialist venison abbatoir. Also in a lawnmower company, too - expect grass to be a new climate-evil next week.

g e

And can I pop in a vote

For some Wild Boar, too, please.

Very tasty.

Need a <NOM> icon :oD

Samsung grabs Sharp shard, brings pain to Apple supply chain

g e
Go

And presumably...

Sammy can get a line put in to a Sharp production site to make stuff to their QA standards while leaving the Apple display lines to do whatever. Plus presumably they'll get access to sensor-in-pixel manufacturing tech if they don't already have it.

$111M sounds like a bargain for that, plus it's probably its own return on the investment for work Sammy will put through Sharp.

Android 'splits' into the Good and the lovechild of Bad and Ugly

g e

Windsor seems very keen on WinPhone

While sticking the boot in a fraction too much on Android (though not necessarily wrong, just the semantics of how it was said) - what's his relationship to Redmond I wonder.

The supercomputers LIED: UK rainfall is rising, but won't drown our phones

g e
Joke

"gets in the way of the microwave"

I'm sure they have a backup.

A toaster, perhaps?

g e
Headmaster

Time-travelling climatey-wimatey

'Temperate', surely, not 'Temporal' ?

Or does the guy really have a blue police box, maybe...

'Million-strong' zombie army devours Raspberry Pi's crunchy base

g e
Black Helicopters

Hang on a sec...

Haven't they sold about a million Pi's...?

Spooky

Gnome cofounder: Desktop Linux is a CHERNOBYL of FAIL

g e
Facepalm

Perhaps he says this because

He's still using Debian Sarge

g e
FAIL

Re: Huh.

Ubuntu... do-release-upgrade

Nuff said.

No.10 guru: UK tech scene is AN EXPLODING CHEESE

g e
Holmes

What a load of old guff

let the icon speak.

Don't believe the IT hype: Ye cannae change the laws of physics

g e

Re: Estate Agents

A lot of the time Eastings and Northings are good enough, too, given that they're commonly provided in UK data. Keep your maths in the integer domain, especially if a box search is good enough and you don't need to compute a real radial distance.

Pirate Bay 'seeks asylum' in, er, 'North Korea'

g e

Actually

They only need to mirror critical infrastructure in NK, so it can't be touched and can be used as a master replication point or similar. Other servers can still live wherever they fancy.

Note it says 'Virtual Asylum' which implies they're not upping sticks and going NORK in entirety. Though if true what NK thinks they're gaining from this I don't know. Free access to 99%-state-censored Die Hard movies?

I thought they had a network of RAM-only boxen in place these days, or are they still trying to implement that?

Samsung's next smartphone to scroll by watching your eyes

g e
Meh

Re: Er... Anyone thought about the camera?

They can likely turn the camera on for 50mS or something to shoot a frame then off again. It'd probably be the frontcam that does the existing smartstay, too. Doesn't muller my S3 battery.

Well I say that I always have smartstay on.. more accurate to say I get 2.5 - 3 days (Friday 16.30 to Monday 9am when it's not docked on a desk) out of one charge on it with my usage pattern. Which is perfectly reasonable.

g e
Holmes

Half assed features

And they're still a superior device for all that, whether or not you can get over that fact.

And yes I've also used 'competitors' devices before you go misty-eyed and spout the competitor's mantra

g e
Holmes

It might be lit by the phone

As on the S3 the proximity sensor next to the front cam appear to emit IR light (imho) which could then of course double up as illlumination for the front cam in low light for eyeball tracking.

Military-industrial patent troll demands BEEELLIONS from Cisco

g e

Spin it out for ages

Then, when that 'Troll pays all costs' law comes in (if it does) move for a retrial which would fall under that new governance.

Moscow's speed cameras 'knackered' by MYSTERY malware

g e
Go

Most excellent

Can we get some of that speedcam-knackering malware lovin' over here in the UK please?

So much easier than driving around dousing them in petrol or cutting them down with detcord...

Take that, freetards: First music sales uptick in over a decade

g e
Pirate

Tell us again

How 'piracy' is damaging your revenue.

And while you're at it let us point out to you that we were right all along about you having to modernise your outdated old-boys business model into the digital age.

Music industry raises NBN fears as legal digital sales take off

g e
Holmes

Re: Clearly I'm unusual

While, of course, they still make CDs

g e
Devil

Classic MAFIAA non-commutative maths

Increasing Piracy == reduced Sales

Increasing Sales != reduced Piracy

Despite having been dragged (just about) kicking and screaming into the third millennium they left their brains behind. Or perhaps it's more that their brains are in their behinds.

Can't help but believe that if they churned out no more new music product ever again then they would claim that silence was being pirated and still think they were entitled to a cut of it. It's amazing that any entity in the universe can produce so much disingenuous rhetoric and not implode.

El Reg, we need a 'You can fuck right off' icon, too. Or perhaps a 'Burning grunties' icon for liar liar pants on fire.

Samsung Wallet slavishly copies inspired by Apple Passbook

g e
Facepalm

Copying, really?

When the airline, etc systems don't support NFC but do support barcodes then whaddya gonna use?

If the interface/api/facility is there by airlines and others to do this then you're going to implement it, aren't you.

You may as well claim that everyone apart from the first company to implement it is a copycat for using PDQ terminals to take payments in shops, regardless of the fact that the facility is obviously provided to be used by more than one entity.

Apple CEO Cook's investor-meeting reveal: 'Dog bites man'

g e

Re: No bathrooms

I thought that was Paxil that shoved people to suicide (and to often murder their families immediately prior) or is one the USA brand name of the UK other perhaps?

Jimmy Wales: 'I'm Wikipedia's monarch'

g e
Holmes

Not _quite_ like the Queen

Cos he's a shit ambassador for his 'nation'. He'd kill for a tenth the international respect Lizzie2 has ;o)

Anonymous leaks 'Bank of America secrets' in spy revenge hack

g e
Facepalm

"hosted in Israel"

Or in other words a Mossad honeytrap

Google+ goes single sign-in, exec roasts Zuck's 'frictionless sharing'

g e
Big Brother

Facebook. Frictionless sharing.

Slippery sharing, more like. It's a question of semantics.

Apple patents situational awareness for oblivious fanbois

g e

Re: Um, were the US PTO asleep when this went across their desk ?

My old Sharp Aquos LCD TV had this about 7 years ago... 'dynamic brightness mode' to lower the screen's brightness in darker ambient lighting to save power, etc.

Surely Google have this nailed, too, in the self-driving car gadgetry?

Yet more world+dog patent suits, this time over encryption

g e
FAIL

What in the name of Bloody Hell?????

" into an “event”"

What do these clowns think a UI button press or menu selection 'event' is and has been for thirty years?

World+Dog don't care about climate change, never have done

g e
Holmes

Doesn't matter

That's what the scientists are for, even you, dear poster, could possibly be capable of simply reporting what they said.

Even if some of that science disagrees with the doomsayers (though I guess you could suppress that, of course)

It begins: Six-strikes copyright smackdown starts in US

g e
Holmes

Nope

They distribute the torrent themselves and fit you up.

g e
Holmes

Re: There's a reason for Geolocation lockouts.

Or maybe the global (C) differences are yet another artificial construct to aid price-fixing in different regions in the same way studios charge production companies comical amounts for Hollywood Accounting.

"Oh we're sorry", said a Vivendi-Universal spokesperson, "we have no control of the pricing in Holland as it's under a different copyright licensee". Where the 'licensee' is Vivendi-Universal Netherlands, a separate but tenuously related company.

g e

And confusing

Civil infringement with criminal acts as defined by the law itself.

g e
Go

Slight refinement on the infinite pool

They think they have infinite entitlement to whatever cash is available.

I seriously hope Netflix's approach with stuff like House of Cards brings about a paradigm shift in entertainment creation that gives the MAFIAA a fatal agonising (and preferably humiliating) stroke. Assuming the MAFIAA gets no dibs on the revenue if it's a totally private-funded production. Maybe 'membership' of the MAFIAA is compulsory to be able to trade in that industry, hope not.

RIAA: Google failing on anti-piracy push

g e
Holmes

SO. RIAA say Google are failing utterly

While they take two months to add up the numbers they had in December?

Maybe they need a new acronym the...

Horrendously

Unbelievably

Bad

Recording

Industry

Society

Microsoft latest to 'fess up to Java-based Mac attack

g e
Facepalm

Stop using bloody Java

Oh, what's that? You bet the farm, on it?

Sucks to be you....

US woman cuffed for 'booking strippers for 16th birthday bash'

g e
Holmes

You know how the UK is labelled a 'Nanny State', yes?

We just lost our mindless intrusive nannying crown big time.