* Posts by Craig McCormick

23 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2007

Google goes after 3 billion with super satellite

Craig McCormick
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@ Repo

Well put. My thoughts exactly, by the time I'd gotten a couple of paragraphs into the article.

It all smacks of forward planning. "Get our claws in while it's cheap, then, when somebody else has sorted out the poverty/health/famine problems over there and there's some money around, we'll reap the rewards of our early investments." Same with the rivals to the OLPC project. Maybe even OLPC themselves, if I'm gonna be really cynical.

Why provide computing and internet facilities to a areas where there are far more pressing matters to attend to? Chuck $600M at those problems, then these people can live and after you've then invested in the technology infrastructure, you'll be able to make them your paying customers.

Surely that's a slightly better philosophy?

Linux risks netbooks defeat to Microsoft

Craig McCormick
Unhappy

Money talks

M$ strikes again with its anti-competitive business practices.

I only read up here nowadays out of interest. This industry sucks massively with innovation and common sense being stifled to meet the needs of the M$ shareholders. I've left the IT profession altogether to do a 'feel good' job and stop banging my head against the wall, supporting crap software that has better equivalents which are being stifled by the bigger boys or held back by the idiotic in-fighting within the open source community.

It's only going to get worse. The Linux, UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems don't stand a chance against the all powerful marketing and ant-competition departments of Redmond. This, despite the Unices of the world powering some of the most mission critical systems around.

But idiots on the desktop will always tip the balance in M$'s favour.

IT has to be the most soul destroying industry there is.

G'night

Ubisoft pirates game fix from pirates

Craig McCormick

@ Joerg

Return to Monkey Island

Pro-Tennis Tour II

I was able to negate the copy protection on the Amiga releases of these games, within a few days of their being released for sale.

I do believe I was a teenager at the time. Might have had a pimple or two, even,

Nothing mythical about that.....

Cracking crews/groups have been around since there was something for them to crack and will continue to be.

@ the whole debate

disc check protection is pointless. I have the try before you buy mentality, so I'm accustomed to no-cd cracks and such like. If the game is good enough, I buy it. If not, I uninstall it and get rid of the disc I've made. End of story.

I don't want to base the purchasing decision on demos of the games, which will usually be very different from the finished product. Like movie trailers, you get 30 seconds worth of the best scenes in the film, to drag you in. Same with games.

When the vendors and software houses release software products that are worth the money and I can rely on the quality, before I hand over my hard earned, then I will start to show some faith in them. Until then it's a case of protecting my own consumer rights and avoiding getting ripped off with no recourse.

Torvalds brands Digg users 'W*nking Walruses'

Craig McCormick
Thumb Up

Tickets?

I'll buy tickets to watch Linus and Theo bicker at each other for a while. It could end up as a marathon.

My money would have to be on Theo though. He rocks!

BBC must reveal EastEnders costs

Craig McCormick
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Going by...

... how much they pay Jonny Woss, It's going to be astronomical. They do like to throw our money at things.

Asahi premiers pint-pulling robo-barman

Craig McCormick
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Re: Guinness @ Tony Smith

I've personally poured and drank many, many pints of Guinness. I can definitely taste the difference in a poorly poured pint. It's not a case of lapping up adverts, it's doing something properly. Go to Dublin and tell them it doesn't matter how it's poured. Go on, I dare ya!

And it's a far better pint than any glass of urine coloured rubbish that comes out of the other taps.

Sorry fella, but your ignorance was just too annoying to leave,

Vista on your iPhone - almost 'perfection'

Craig McCormick
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Next up.....

Microsoft sues Spec-Works. Apple kicks themselves for not suing Spec-Works first. Lawyers make coin and, 'out of interest' get somebody to put the Spec-Works skin onto their iPhones.

Newsworthy? Not yet.

Welsh Darth Vader dodges jail

Craig McCormick

@ Rob Holmes

It was an alli crutch, no real weight to it and he wasn't hit hard. It wasn't a kicking or anything. Get a grip. If one of them had been walloped hard and actually injured, then yes, different story.

If people act a twat in full public view, regardless whether on their own property or not, then they have to accept that they are going to attract proper nutters. That's how things are.

Now as far as assault is concerned, they didn't get assaulted, in my books. It was boyish high spirits, nothing else. If you think that's assault, try walking into my local. You'll claim 'assault' three times before you reach the bar.

I don't have a coat with me, but I presume your's is the 100% cotton wool puffy-style jacket?

Craig McCormick
Flame

With all due respect

ie, none.

Somebody went to the police, for that? Seriously? AND they pressed charges?

FFS, what is this world coming to? Sad enough to be in a Jedi church though, so this shouldn't be surprising. I would imagine their mums insisted that the big bully be brought to justice.

And yes, 'most of a 10 litre box of wine'? My arse!

'Ow! That kind of hurt'

and

'That's really quite painful'

or something? After that silly display, they were sort of asking for it, really. Certainly no need to call the old bill, especially as he capered off saying he was only joking.

They should have been told to bugger off and stop wasting people's and time.

MS supplies cops with DIY forensics tool

Craig McCormick

@ Ross Ryles

Not to mention the thought that if MS are true to form, any collection of 'specialised tools' that comes from them, will likely be so bloated as to need a 16GB USB stick, just to hold the software itself, let alone any room left for data retrieval.

Also as others have already said, there are plenty of Linux based liveCDs out there that do this already.

I would also hope it is a bootable stick, but then there are many more computers out there that can't boot from a USB device than there are that can't boot from a CD. If it all runs in an existing live Windows environment, then that really is defeating the object.

Still, the very principle of all this is giving me something to have an evil chuckle about. Mwuhuhuhuhuhuh.....

Brown opts for morality over science on 'lethal skunk'

Craig McCormick

@ @People who smoke cannabis By Anonymous Coward

In my opinion, home growers/users would be the sensible way to go. Make the unlicensed sale of cannabis illegal. Then the government can regulate, tax and profit from it. Obviously this would likely lead to dedicated branches of government, customes & excise and the police, to make sure that the home growers are not in fact small time sellers. More jobs for the old gang. Everybody wins!

It DOES have long term mental health effects though, I know this personally. I'm not going to go into depth, but believe me, I'm still working hard to get things back on track to some extent.

Borderline personality, susceptibility, whatever. We don't know enough to say exactly why and how it effects people in the longer-term, but it does happen, although obviously only in certain cases.

There have been some good and bad arguments on here, for and against. At least they have mainly been fairly reasoned, informed and heartfelt. Quite unlike Mr Brown's ignorant, arrogant rant.

The man really needs to go and take his bloody advisors with him.

Microsoft slings sack of green at US universities

Craig McCormick
Gates Horns

Not much, is it?

Half a million bucks in funding, split four ways? That's going to go a long way, isn't it? And as for Hypocritical, I think Joe Montana, above, has hit the nail on the head. Microsoft's bloat has been responsible for a steady upwards curve in the power consumption of the world's computers, for way too long now.

Half a million bucks? It's not even a start. Big, nonsensical, PR joke!

Governator outs Dubya's global-warming 'time bomb'

Craig McCormick
Thumb Up

@Alex McKenna

My sentiments exactly.

It's utter, utter lunacy.

BBC spreads free Wi-Fi Cloud over iPlayer delay

Craig McCormick
Coat

@Smell My Finger

...why? Does it smell of Ashley, Bill or Balm?

Craig McCormick
Flame

Clueless beeb

I really had to chuckle when I read "We do not believe there will be an impact on the infrastructure of the UK internet. It is more than capable of dealing with this level of demand,"

This is the outfit that can't keep messageboards running properly, have horribly bloated markup throughout their sites and stated that various text based services, like the messageboards for example, would need to be streamlined to allow for future streaming services.

On the subject of them issuing software compatible with non-M$ systems, damn right they should. You pay your TV license fee and you are not restricted to particular brands of TV and peripheral equipment. so why be restricted in your choice of OS?

PremiumTV also do this for the streamed media on their football oriented websites. Funny thing is, I've got a FLV (flash video) ripper that I can use to rip the flash stuff and then there's a reasonable little program I use to remove M$ DRM from .wmv files prior to converting them to iPod compatible .mp4

Anybody who has anything to gain from the copyrighted materials streamed over the net, will easily be able to get what they want. The only people this hurts are the general public who are being forced to use M$ products to get what they are due.

DRM sucks, as we all know. The BBC suck huge eggs and have never realy been answerable to the license fee paying public, who pay their frickin' wages and provide their budgets.

Aaaahhh.... much better now.

WTC collapse voted 'most memorable TV moment'

Craig McCormick

'Entertainment'

WRT 'slipping editorial standards', I have to admit that the bad link between the Entertainment category of El Reg and the WTC scenes did strike me as inappropriate. However I decided not to raise the point as I wouldn't want to be a picky tit.

Red Hat, Novell sued for patent infringment

Craig McCormick
Gates Horns

Roll on space tourism...

...just so that Steve Ballmer and Co can 'go missing' on a cruise to Mars or somewhere.

Sun grabs patent for magneto-hydrodynamic heatsink

Craig McCormick
Joke

@Chris

<quote>I can't imagine how this heatsink will operate without a fan.</quote>

It simply pipes said heat to /dev/null, silly...

I would imagine it can then be used to help generate entropy for RNG.

/Anorak -> Door

Thieves swipe biker's prosthetic hand

Craig McCormick

Where's his sense?

Knowle of all places?

I'm astounded that the bike was still there. It's gert like proper rough in Knowle, innit?

Windows recovery loophole lets hackers in

Craig McCormick

I never thought I#d do it...

Although a Unix fan, I have to say, so what?

With any user permission based file system that isn't encrypted, this is always a likelihood. It's up to administrators to make the machine physically secure, including making booting from external media a no go.

Linux, OpenBSD and various others that I have used are all open to this attack. What next, car windows are vulnerable to hammer blows?

Apple's Safari 3: a crashing experience for non-US users

Craig McCormick

Standards

Well said B Gracey!

I'm using this Safari Beta on WinXP Home SP2 all set up with UK English settings. No problems here. I'm usually an Opera user in Windows an Linux, use Firefox occasionally on both OS's and resort to IE7 when I am forced to, to view MS DRM'd online video content.

Not being a Safari user, I've only tested on sites that I know cause/have caused problems in IE/FF/Opera and am pleasantly surprised to see Safari cope perfectly on those sites.

I only really intend to use it to test that sites I design work the same in various browsers, which is annoying, as I prefer to keep sites XHTML Strict compliant, or transitional at the very least.

I'm not saying that Safari is great or anything. At this earlyish stage, it is no more or less good or bad, than any of the other browsers that I mention. Anything that is standards compliant is a plus. Opera, Firefox and Safari are still higher in my list of preferences than IE.

Sky takes ball and goes home

Craig McCormick

Murdoch and money

I originally moved from Telewest to Sky, more or less because of the interface. The cable box interface was slow and the box locked up all too often. Back last year, I was annoyed by NewsCorp's tactics with regards to the Sven/Sheikh sting and was on the verge of cancelling my Sky subscription and going back to Telewest.

With this latest show of greed from Murdoch's empire, along with their stake in ITV, I'm back to being a bit miffed with them again. To be fair, it is only The Simpsons on Sky One that I'll miss, as I was going to drop Sky Sports anyway.

As they're holding competitors to ransom, I don't see much point in going to any other subscription service and strongly resent paying Sky now. Freeview, here I come, I can see it having a decent future over the next few years and if Sky's greed continues this way, I can see them being a less attractive option for advertisers.

Given time, I can see Sky sticking Sky One on Freeview, to maximise advertising potential, anyway. The current, highly priced, select model will likely make way for the stack it high, sell it low one, when they see advertising revenues falling.

Still, I'm just a customer, but I am a customer with some sense of ethics. Whilst Virgin aren't entirely blameless and are appearing slightly foolish with some of their 'propaganda', Sky's arrogance and greed is just a bit too much for me to swallow. Buggrem, I'm orf!

New Zealanders flock to AdultSheepFinder.com

Craig McCormick

Wot no Wales?

Somebody had to, so I mailed the site owners explaining that the Welsh also enjoy the label 'Sheep shagger' ande the courteous people at AdultSheepFinder dot com have acknowledged this omission and will be including Wales in the country drop down list.

And the Welsh say that we English never do anything for them!