Posts by Christopher Martin

It's LEXUS

Obviously, they're making it because they know it will sell to rich greentards.

@silverlightards

Hell yes, there are alternatives. Who says the video has to be streaming?

They could just throw their video files into a torrent. It might take an incompetant intern about an hour to do this. Then the rest of the world could save them, watch them on the airplane, distribute them in other formats...

No one is saying they are obligated to provide us free content. But doing so with Silverlight and claiming purely altruistic motives is complete shit.

After watching the first lecture on a Windows machine on campus, I made a significant effort to watch this at home.

To everyone who has mentioned Moonlight - have you actually tried using it? Even if you change your user agent string to MSIE, you still can't get past the your-browser-is-bad page because it thinks you don't have Silverlight.

I do have an older machine with Win2k on it, so I tried that - and the playback is incredibly jittery (pauses every second or so, unwatchable). What the hell? I know this machine is capable of displaying streaming video. Silverlight fails.

I even tried installing IE6 in Wine, but the page says it's an unsupported browser (and I'm not aware of a UA-switcher extension for IE). Come on, Microsoft, haven't you yet learned the cardinal rule of checking browser compatibility - Don't use the UA string!

An idea

Seems like with any click-based ad model, cases of abuse are inevitable. And on the scale of Facebook and Google, they will be frequent. Instead of taking every instance to court, it seems like when advertisers sign up they should agree to let some arbiter make decisions regarding accusations of fraud.

Twitter?

It seems the boys in Redmond have set themselves up one of these newfangled "twitter" things, but they haven't quite figured out how to post on it yet...

@"Why twitter?"

Obviously he wanted attention - tech journalists aren't allowed to write stories that don't involve twitter.

File sharing software

Doesn't virtually any machine with a nic in it have "file sharing" software?

your web server, ssh daemon....

Tough shit.

Counting clickthroughs is, at best, a weak heuristic for measuring ad impact. Its status as a de facto standard shouldn't imply that anyone in the industry has a god-given right to utilize it successfully.

You have no idea why any click happened. The clicking user is probably not even aware of the financial transaction that occurs as a result. If the clicker did not agree to any conditions of clicking, I don't see how he can be found guilty of fraud for "misusing" a hyperlink.

If your business model is based on selling something using such terribly inaccurate and easily-manipulated metrics, sorry, but I'll not be quickly convinced that there's criminal activity afoot just because your numbers turned out shit-backwards wrong.

oh shitting fuck fuck

FREE CLOCK APP? I have got to get an iphone.

Maybe appropriate as a second vehicle

@Jim Coleman - Thanks for doing the math for us. Yep, this car definitely doesn't have the range for long trips.

When I read about these cars, my first reaction is that I sort of want one. The vast majority of my car activity consists of short trips around town. It would be cool if the vehicle ran quiet and could be charged at home.

However... I wouldn't want it to be my only car, because the range (and lack of electric charging stations) limit its versatility.

So maybe this justifies the price point. My theory is that if you're buying an electric car, you want it because of the novelty. And if you're buying a car as a toy, that probably means you have a good bit of cash to throw at it.

Good for you, Steve.

A country that keeps voting for jackasses who do nothing but tax and spend deserves what it gets when all of the commerce leaves for greener pastures.

Are these applications really necessary?

Does the Jesus phone not have a generic "RSS reader" program? Why do people need special software to read particular feeds?

Noscript saves the day again?

google-analytics.com is not on my whitelist...

don't care, don't care, don't care

Ever since I've decided to stop providing free help to Windows users, I've been a much happier person. Use Windows if you like. It's all good as long as I don't have to.

As for Asus, I'm convinced the whole Xandros thing was Microsoft propaganda - They hated Linux from day 1. If they actually wanted their users to stick with it, they would have shipped their machines with Ubuntu.

Regardless, anyone who cares about Linux understands that when you buy a laptop, you're buying hardware. My hardware distributor's opinion about operating systems does not mean a goddamn thing.

I love my eee, and I'd buy another. (unless their lovefest with microsoft makes their machines cost-prohibitive)

Who cares about a cat

I may not like your cat, but I will defend to the death your right to kill it.

If a squirrel is a slightly cuter rat, a cat is a slightly cuter squirrel. But potentially meaner.

@Chris

"... write 50 pence as either £0.50 or 0.50p ..."

There's a Verizon joke in there somewhere. Does the UK also get confused distinguishing between 0.02 dollars/pounds and 0.02 cents/pence?

If all of twitter is banality...

... then what is an article on what some random celebrity thinks about some website?

PANDORA

Pandora is the only application that makes me wish I had paid for an iphone and expensive data server... wait, nevermind.

@Cullen

Everything in that list of confiscated items probably has a few gigs of data storage. Still, 23 items? Either he has a lot of usb drives, or they just nabbed everything with a pcb in it.

Network activity light

Sounds like the most ill-inspired plot I've heard today (although it's only 12:30 am, so there's plenty more room for more bad ideas yet). I bet it will sell wildly to school IT "professionals" who think that the Internet is the web, so if the light is blinking they must be using the blue e...

@ helpful imperial unit people

Hah, I forgot we buy soft drinks by the liter in the US too :)

I guess I'm only about 10-15% of this guy's cola intake... I feel safe now.

@Bruce

I think Swing sucks, not Java. I'm sure you've *unknowningly* had a lot of perfectly fine interactions with Java. Web servers, for instance.

A legislator should be severely beaten every time he proposes a law

That'd make 'em think long and hard about whether they're actually worthwhile. Maybe they'd finally stop wasting everyone's time.

"How many blind people (if any) got run over by an electric car or an hybrid in the US because those vehicule were not noisy enough?" - Irrelevant. I'm pretty sure laws are based on how they appear at first glance to voters - what makes you think they would be judged by any real data on their utility?

Seriously, though, folks, let's propose a thought experiment. Suppose the car's initial invention had been electric, and loud rumbly engines had never existed. Would anyone have thought about mandating that they make noise for safety? Or are we just thinking about it now because the noise is what we're used to?

The vehicles that are required to make noise are big trucks when backing up - presumably because the driver can't see where he's going. Other drivers can see, so unless blind people are driving, or are in the habit of darting out at random into the road, maybe the solution is a kind reminder not to drive into pedestrians at crossing points.

Interesting pitch

I suppose they do need to give users a reason for the upgrade, but I've never heard of any of the IE8 features that alert is touting. I doubt anyone particularly cares about them. Couldn't they just tell the truth? "Your current browser is a worthless piece of shit that we're ashamed to have ever released."

This is a nice gesture, but I'd really like a public apology for IE6.

Hardware schmardware

It all runs linux... and it all will blend.

nettop?

Nettop is not a great name for this... considering that both laptop and desktop end in "-top". Also, even though the "net" prefix was already bullshit for "netbooks" that can do way more than web browsing, it's especially bullshit for a box that runs CoD4. Naming fail all around.

@Jason Harvey : trees on a bridge

It's true, I've seen them do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:North_5th_Street_Bridge_Georgia_Tech.jpg

I'm not sure if they can be quite as large as the artist's imagining (I might describe those in the photo I linked as more like shrubbery), but it's apparently a reasonable notion.

More profanity plz

Can I have a tv mod that replaces irritating beeps with random profanities?

Sad

If you're a company as big as Websense, and your job is to do web filtering, how does "whitelist" not make the list of features? Surely if there were such a list, cisco.com would be on it.

I'm somehow doubting we'll see many lead-lined tunnels

My rough estimation and wiki research suggests that lead is about 4 times as dense as your average rock. Even if the cost of material isn't prohibitive, it does seem like shipping enough of the stuff to maintain a 4:1 space to lead ratio would be a bit of a nuisance.

Any detection measure like this can be broken with enough effort. But I seriously doubt that every secret-cave-owner we might be looking for will suddenly jump on the opportunity to gravity-detector-proof his lair.

Protesting is silly

I've never understood what makes people feel that they should "protest" what they don't like. What was his argument - that he deserved to be making a certain amount of money by virtue of the fact that's what he was getting yesterday? Is there some human right that says our wages can go up but not down?

This argument sounds eerily familiar...

It is a completely legal technology that is offered by [Napster]. It is an open [application] where users themselves upload content. There is certainly a lot of copyrighted material but this is an internet problem, not a [Napster] problem.

Didn't we lose this battle already? :(

These articles are all the same

Not blaming El Reg... IE security stories are newsworthy, I guess. But it's just never anything I actually want to read, because I already know what it's going to say. Furthermore, it's depressing.

Maybe you guys can just maintain a histogram of critical IE holes. Then every time you're thinking about writing an article like this, just put another tick mark on the chart instead. And we can take a meaningful glance at it every so often to assure ourselves that the crackers are still out there working hard.

@ "Manufacturing?"

Yep, it's too bad the victims can't come forward without fear of being prosecuted for producing and distributing child pornography. And if this has been going on for over a year, some of them must have sent him pics while he was 17, so they would have made pornography available to a minor.

Hopefully this case will make at least a few people think about how the seriousness of sexual assault charges severely outweighs strictly pornography-related offenses.

"it'll take a legal ruling to enforce genuine standards on IE"

That'd be rich - we should legally force Microsoft to comply with a "standard" which, in the history of the web, has never once been properly implemented by anyone.

Harder than it should be?

This would be so simple if Windows just came with a package manager.

Put a little MakeTheInternetsWork.BAT script on the desktop, it prompts you and runs sudo apt-get install your-favorite-browser, and you're off and running.

"Where did the internets go?"

"Double-click MakeTheInternetsWork and click on the E or the fox"

"Okay."

Instant crazy-legislation compliance, easy to install a browser without bogging down the install process, and it only cost you maybe a day of some intern's time.

Congratulations, Microsoft!

They re-wrote Wine?

... I think somebody's late to their own party.

Information lacking

Did they explain what was "objectionable" about it? Does it do something the article hasn't described?

@hikaricore

Law enforcement has always tried to catch people who do illegal things, even if it happens on the Interwebs. I'd say this is pretty straightforward illegal, so we're right to track him down. This isn't the sort of stuff that dooms the Internet.

Can't wait to see the economic impact

I presume there's no good way to force overseas businesses to pay these e-taxes? If we want to make sure as few people as possible want to continue operating inside the US, I can't think of a better way than to tax the crap out of online services. Perhaps a few New Yorkers can get temporary jobs loading servers onto boats.

Not amazing, but a good start

Any way to add more screens to a desk makes life that much better.

Oh no!

At a rate of $5 mil per television, 2 million of these dangerous consoles will cause $10^13 worth of damage!