* Posts by spiny norman

300 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2007

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UK gov unleashes biometric IDs

spiny norman
Stop

If the TV Licence and post code databases are anything to go by ...

About 30 years ago the house we live in was split into 2 tenancies, 1 called "The Flat", the other "The Cottage". About 20 years ago the new owner re-combined the two into one dwelling, called "The Cottage". When we moved in 10 years ago we bought a TV licence for "The Cottage", but started getting letters addressed to "The Flat" about not having a licence. Eventually I managed to convince TVLA that "The Flat" hadn't existed for at least 10 years and the letters stopped. Meanwhile, we changed the name of the house. The post code database admins happily removed the old name, but have since failed to add the new one, despite being told by the local authority that they approved the change. Now anyone looking up our postcode can't find the address and the last TV Licence renewal came addressed to "The Flat". So I'm not expecting much from an ID database.

Father of Playmobil dies at 79

spiny norman
Thumb Up

Re: RIP Herr Playmobil

>>Oh, and what's the IT Angle, exactly?

>Oh do fuck off.

If that had been in capitals it could have been FotW.

Red Dwarf finally returns to Earth

spiny norman
Stop

Half the genius

It was the writing team of Grant and Naylor that produced the best of red Dwarf, up to series 6. After that it went into terminal decline and it would have been a very good idea to let it rest in peace.

Brits decline to 'think outside the box'

spiny norman
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Americans

There's such a constant stream of this stuff coming out of the US it's impossible for mere mortals to keep up with. Seems they just can't bear to keep using words that have served the rest of us for centuries. Some additions I now suffer on a daily basis: "interlock" = "agree", "share" = "give", "reach out" = "ask".

Beeb to cut the f**king swearing

spiny norman
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@I have a theory

At least it explains Eastenders, where everyone is permanently at 3 and go to 4 at the drop of a rating.

Satanic net neologisms - nominations invited

spiny norman
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@A word in defence of Automagic

Please explain the difference the addition of "auto" makes to the perfectly adequate word "magic".

"OK I'd better dust off the automagic code generator then"

"OK I'd better dust off the magic code generator then"

"Aha, a job for the automagic data analysis tools"

"Aha, a job for the magic data analysis tools"

Tens of thousands of kids need to be protected from ContactPoint users

spiny norman
Pirate

Horse, door, stable?

So when the records are first loaded they are not protected. Then someone has to realise that an individual potentially needs to be protected, then they have to apply for protection, then their case has to be assessed (and of course no delays whatsoever will be caused by lack of staff to do these assessments), then the decision that no protection is justified has to be appealed, and eventually the record gets protected.

In the months while this is going on, the people from whom the records need to be protected will, of course, put their rapacious desires and motives on hold, for the good of the community.

The only hope for this is that the infrastructure it runs on will be so under-specified it collapses in a heap the first time two people log on simultaneously.

Pirate logo cos there isn't one for cowboys.

Brown promises £250bn bailout will save SMEs

spiny norman
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Galbraith

I've started re-reading Galbraith's book on the 1929 crash. Then, as now, the banks fell over themselves to lend money to people who had no way of paying it back. Governments and the business community propped up the system for as long as they could, to preserve the illusion of prosperity, but in the end the collapse overwhelmed them. The controls that were put in place to prevent this happening again were swept away by the Thatcher/Reagan monetarist alliance of the 1980s and the only thing that is surprising is that it took so long. Giving money to the banks now to continue the insanity will only postpone the inevitable.

UK.gov 'to drop' überdatabase from snoop Bill

spiny norman
Stop

Smith

It's a shame Jacqui Smith doesn't want to spend more time with her family, though I can see why they wouldn't want to spend more time with her.

eBay: don't come on our US site without protection

spiny norman
Black Helicopters

@Paypal froze my account

yes, they froze mine too, when my son tried to repay some money I lent him - and which I had successfully sent to him via ..... Paypal. The problem there is European regulations, initiated by Her Majesty's Gordonment, designed to "starve terrorists of funds". It's not what it's for that's the problem, it's the amount you receive over the period of a year, and the status of your account. It's fairly easy to fix and not really Paypal's fault.

spiny norman
Dead Vulture

Read the announcement, not the headline.

As was pointed out way back in the early comments, the headline is misleading. There is no Paypal only policy, just the removal of cheques and money orders as an option. Along with the statement about Google and Amazon, the FAQ also says "eBay will offer several other electronic payment options in addition to PayPal, namely ProPay to start, with more electronic payment providers to be added in coming months." All the "I'll never use eBay again" comments are expected, probably from the same people who say it every time eBay is mentioned, and about as useful as writing to The Daily Telegraph threatening to cancel your subscription. Or should that be The Sun, based on El Reg's new reporting standards?

Hilton documentary reveals hidden side of Paris

spiny norman
Gates Halo

The IT angle

"I do really detailed excel spread sheets as shot lists breaking down every shot prop, camera and lighting change as well just so I can communicate with my crew properly and this is a big key to a successful shoot for me." Adria Petty http://blog.wiseelephant.com/?p=1343

Google News farce triggers Wall Street sell-off

spiny norman
Stop

This is new?

I regularly use Google to search for tech news articles and, as often as not, the ones that come to the top are several years out of date. Mostly they have date lines, but not always. I tried setting Google's "Advanced Search" to look for articles no more than a month old, but the same ones still come up. Often the only way to be sure is to look for other corroborating articles, or go to the subject's web site. No date, no story.

I would expect anyone who uses Google in the course of their job to know this.

Portsmouth punts naval boy-on-boy to innocent kiddies

spiny norman
Linux

Fred Wedlock

The captain's name was Gladys and he wore a dress of red

Which could have been the reason why he was not marr-eye-ed.

He was a gay old sea bitch and it was his favourite joy

To take a turn around the deck with the handsome cabin boy.

'Googlebomb' blows up in Daily Mail hack's face

spiny norman
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Playmobile mockup

Google-bombing Julie Moult. Where is it?

Prof says fatties a bigger menace than bin Laden

spiny norman

Don't know if you've noticed, but .....

there are a load of IT stories out there, some of them quite interesting, that never make their way into the register, but self-serving drivel like this does. "Biting the hand of ....." what? Not IT anyway.

Did we say you can read that?

spiny norman
Stop

@JohnG

Reading a book, whether it is "Mein Kampf", "Terrorism for Dummies" or the complete works of the Marquis de Sade, harms no one and it would be impossible to prove "beyond reasonable doubt" what anyone's intention was in reading such books. That is why the government have overturned the fundamental principles of English law, which have served us well for centuries, and put the burden of proof on the defendant.

Your car thief analogy doesn't work, because someone in a car park with the tools for car stealing is in the same position as someone with a bomb in Waitrose. The analogy you are looking for is a student downloading "The Zen Guide to Car Breaking". Should that be illegal?

The current wave of terrorism has killed less people in this country than a fortnight of traffic accidents, yet the government is prepared rip up the rules of evidence and send the police out looking for people with books.

Hasbro kills Colonel Mustard in the corporate office with the marketing ploy

spiny norman

Updating to when exactly?

It seems to have gone from 1930s English detective novel to 1970/80s detective TV series, along the lines of "Columbo" or "Murder She Wrote". Which arguably says more about the age and interests of Hasbro marketing executives than it does about the children who will, maybe, play it.

Brown's website is Web2.0tastic

spiny norman

Prime Minister's Questions from the youth of today

Y wont u let us by nifes, there well wikkid innit?

IBM solves world's 'paper or plastic' crisis

spiny norman
Happy

Mama's got a brand new bag

I never realised shopping was such hard work. According to the patent people may have different packaging preferences for each item they buy. Worse, they're suggesting the packaging preference for each item could be communicated by a voice message or tone, so going through Tescos on Friday evening could sound like the end of Close Encounters.

This also raises the possibility of customised packaging, so the Ferrero Rocher for the wife's birthday gets gift wrapped and the hemeroids cream is put in a plain brown bag and hidden under the frozen peas (though the voice message announcing this might defeat the point).

The first cited article is a gem - "means for comparing said characteristic of said article as identified by said article identifying means with the characteristic of the actual article to confirm the identity of the article bagged by a bag formed by said bag forming apparatus, whereby to prevent both deliberate fraud and inadvertent mistake in the self-service checkout of said one or more articles."

Doctor Who fans told to lay off Hamlet

spiny norman

RSC

I think you'll find that Patrick Stewart has some pretty impressive stage acting on his CV. Tennant's also been at the RSC before Dr Who. There's a long and glorious tradition of RSC alumni making it in TV or film and coming back to give some gloss to the dull old bard. David Bradley, a fine actor by anyone's standards, has had some big leads since landing Filch in Harry Potter.

At least they haven't got Catherine Tate as Ophelia (I assume, I haven't checked).

Apple is Fisher-Price of sound quality, says Neil Young

spiny norman
Heart

That stereophile site

"I kept cleaning my stylus. I revisited my cartridge's alignment. I meticulously scrubbed the records and double-checked the positioning of my Wilson Audio Sophia 2 loudspeakers. I experimented and made sure that the door and windows were opened just so, and made my Catahoula Zippy curl up in exactly the right spot. Everything mattered, and all of it seemed to bug me."

900 quid for a cable and all for Creedence Clearwater Revival and Dire Straits. You really do have to admire these people.

http://stereophile.com/cables/207stereovox/

http://www.highendcable.co.uk/StereoVox%20Reference%20SEI%20600II%20&%20BAL600%20interconnects.htm

BAA 'invented green superjumbo' to OK Heathrow plans

spiny norman

Maplin

The Maplin proposal was a case study on my economics degree course in 1972. The environmental impact was dreadful then and I can't imagine how it would be better now.

Attack of the Italian space pod parachute babes

spiny norman

Royal we

>>For the benefit of those readers who happen to be our wife, we'd like to note that we had no personal contact with any of them.

Either there was a multi-person, all-male Reg team on this assignment, in which case it should be "our wives", or this is a lone reporter attempting to imply some kind of phony group responsibility for his exploits and coming up horribly short grammatically.

I've never quite understood why a single reporter commenting on his/her own experience can't use the first person singular like the rest of us.

Blears pitches prize draws and online polls at young votes

spiny norman

@Thurstan R McDougle

>> Labour voters are generally the poorer people

Is this still true? Since NuLab seems determined to make life easy for billionaires and is grinding the faces of the poor more effectively than top-hatted Victorian Capitalists used to, I have my doubts.

HP's big splash on EDS all about shrinkage

spiny norman
Thumb Up

It might just work

All this IT and people consolidation wouldn't normally stand a snowball's chance in hell of being successful (remember Fiorina's missed earnings episode, blamed on the SAP migration), but they pinched Randolph C Mott from Dell and he walks on water.

Google penetrates fake sex world with Lively

spiny norman

@Don Mitchell

Why do social 3D worlds fail? To answer that I was trying to think of a real world equivalent - how well would that work? So, take an aircraft hanger in the middle of nowhere and open it up to anyone. On arrival everyone puts on a full head mask and body suit that restricts vision and movement, so walking straight is a new skill you have to master. There is no organised activity, just a few people milling about that you don't know and probably have nothing in common with. So now what?

Trousers Brown: Blighty faces 'food security' threat

spiny norman
Black Helicopters

This is what they want.

A while ago there was a piece on food waste on Today on Radio 4. They had some academic from the University of Nowhere and a woman who remembered WWII when wasting food was illegal apparently. Both got terribly excited as she recalled a woman in her street who was fined for throwing bread crusts away. This time round it'll probably be a jail term.

Top Tory resigns on principle over 42 days bill

spiny norman
Black Helicopters

A Place in the Sun

Kelvin MacKenzie may stand against Davis, with the backing of Rupert Murdoch. Well, at least now we know who is really running the country, if we were ever in any doubt.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jun/13/daviddavis.conservatives1

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Eaerlier MacKenzie told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that there were two reasons he could run. "One is that the Sun is very, very hostile to David Davis because of his 28-day stand, and the Sun has always been up for 42 days, or perhaps even 420 days, frankly. And secondly this is a bizarre cost to the taxpayer."

He said that if he stood it would be with the backing of Rupert Murdoch, the head of News International, which publishes the Sun, and Rebekah Wade, the paper's editor, who both felt "that democracy would not be best served by a walkover".

UK is not a surveillance society, MPs claim

spiny norman

So, why?

The interesting question, which El Reg might like to investigate, is why the UK particularly has gone this way. I can see 2 possibilities - 1) a cock-up theory - the government, of whichever party, under constant pressure from the media to "do something about" loads of things they actually can't fix, so new and increasingly broadly framed laws and surveillance, is all they can do. 2) conspiracy theory - with global warming, increasing fuel costs, collapsing financial systems, over-privileged, under-taxed, under-worked mega rich, eventually the middle class are going to have had enough and will actually start some serious dissent, in which case having the mechanism in place to dispose of the activists would be very handy.

20 years of massive single-party majorities, destruction of trade unions and emasculation of the House of Lords hasn't helped.

Google tips hat to St George - finally

spiny norman
Unhappy

No pleasing ...

I see they've completely ignored Shakespeare's birthday.

Mega-mortuary creaks open its doors in Westminster

spiny norman
Coat

Mr Dead

I bet they got this second-hand from CSI.

Doctor Who and the moody Dane

spiny norman
IT Angle

Very good as far as it goes

but with crucial omissions

Who plays Ophelia? Billie Piper or Kylie Minogue?

Does Laertes get a spin-off series set in Cardiff?

What's Fortinbras going to say when he turns up to find them all happily playing Scabble?

Facebook loses a few bitches

spiny norman

Flawed business model?

Whether or not you think FaceBook is a good idea or useful at all is not the point of the original article; the question is, how do Facebook and other social networking schemes make money, when they have already given away everything anyone might value about their service? Friends Reunited was free to sign up, but to make contact with anyone you had to subscribe. So, it was a short-lived income stream, as once you discovered that the girl you fancied in junior school had already left her husband for the former captain of the under-10s football team, there was really no reason to stay. But, it was income. Facebook et al seem to be left with plundering their membership data for demographic data to sell (never popular), or attracting advertising. Now, if you're El Reg you can go to potential advertisers with a fairly watertight story about how your readership is of a certain age and work in IT. If you're Facebook, what's the story? Aged between 12 and 35, with a lot time on their hands and want everything for free?

Jane Fonda c-word slip shocks US

spiny norman
Paris Hilton

Let me get this right

Using the word "Vagina" over breakfast is OK. But another word that means exactly the same thing is not.

So is this because American children don't understand words with 3 syllables?

Paris, cos she's got one and Bill Gates hasn't.

Luddite and paranoid - why the big record labels failed at digital

spiny norman

Exploitation

Years ago I used to write articles for computer magazines. The standard contract was that you were paid so much per word and the publisher got total global rights to the material. Take it or leave it. Articles I wrote were reused years later and I even found one on the web translated into Finnish. I got not a penny more.

I'm not complaining. After a while I concluded I didn't know how to play the game well enough to make a living and went back to the day job. Obviously other people do make a living at it, people who rather oddly seem to support the idea of musicians getting paid for life for an afternoon's work they did in 1957.

It's not only folk musicians who successfully work for a living. I cite The Hamsters, a blues rock band with a huge following in small clubs and festivals, who didn't look ragged, hungry or covered in soot last time I saw them. Likewise Dr Feelgood, who did have the odd "hit" in the past, but clearly aren't living off them. Both fine bands - go and see them, you'll have a better night than you ever will in the O2 Arena.

Recording industry puts stake in ground with Jammie Thomas case

spiny norman

Nothing new

In the 1760s the thing to do if you were hip was to go to Rome during Holy Week to hear Allegri's Miserere in the Sistine Chapel. This was the only place you could hear the work performed and only 3 authorised copies of the manuscript existed. Copying it whole or in part was punishable by excommunication. Mozart, aged 14, heard the work and wrote it out from memory, but being a good Catholic, kept it private. However, an non-Catholic Englishman called Burney published a version in 1771 and after that copies appeared all over Europe.

So a) this is not a new problem, people have been trying and failing to control the distribution of music for centuries b) far from destroying music and musician's livelihoods, copying and embellishment of existing works has resulted in a far richer heritage in the classical music tradition than anything produced by the RIAA c) the RIAA will be pleased to know that they are acting like mediaeval popes - not that they would have the faintest clue what that means.

Babbling net software sparks international incident

spiny norman
Flame

@Bollocks

Sometimes you have to complain till you're blue in the mouth - Babel Fish doesn't support Hebrew. So either this story is using BF as a generic term for web translation or it is complete balls.

stars21.com does support Hebrew. Running the quoted passage into Hebrew and back into English delivers "Bud of the those, enclosed five from the questions in honor of the foreign minister : The mother of your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed of your brain on the conflict is Palestinian Israeli, and on Israel relatively Holland". Which is a lot better, obviously.

Analysts ecstatic over AMD's $226m loss in Q3

spiny norman

Stock market analysts

Remember when Dell used to hold earnings calls? All the analysts falling over themselves to have Kevin Rollins' babies? Bring back Steve Milunovich, I say.

RIAA aims lawyers at usenet newsgroup service

spiny norman
Stop

Here we go again

I'm surprise the Chief Vulture enabled comments on this one as its blatantly going to go round the same "RIAA scumbags" vs "Thieving freeloaders" loop as all the others.

In this case, couldn't Usenet.com, EasyNews, Usenext and others just pay a levy to the RIAA, which they could pass on as a small increase in their currently quite low subscription rates?

@Craig Foster: Isn't Usenext based in Germany? Which would make them a harder target.

Plan for 20mph urban speed-cam zones touted

spiny norman

When I were a nipper

The police came to our primary school at least once every year. They would lay out temporary kerbs to form a road down the middle of the playground (remember them?), with assorted accessories like a pedestrian crossing. We watched from a relatively safe distance either side of the "road". The best part of the road safety demonstration was when one of the policemen, out of uniform, attempted to cross the "road" without looking, while one of his colleagues drove the police car, a large black Wolsey with bells, the length of the playground. So, the car probably reached 30mph at the most and the police knew what they were doing, so there was no danger, but it thrilled/scared most of us enough to remember to look before crossing the road.

Ian McKellen keen to reprise Gandalf

spiny norman

Diet of Worms

I enjoyed LoTR, both books and films, but The Hobbit is a much lesser work. They're going to have to deviate quite a lot from the book to make a decent film out of it. And if anyone suggests filming The Silmarillion, they really do need to be stopped.

Digital Switchover: town to lose BBC 2 tomorrow

spiny norman
Unhappy

Hooray for Sweden

Frankly the less efficiently we do the British analogue switch-off the happier I'll be. If it didn't happen till 2089 that would be quite efficient enough.

AI egghead: Human-robot humping, marriage by 2050

spiny norman
Go

Seems like a good idea

At least when the in-laws come round you can switch them off.

The RIAA will come to regret its court win

spiny norman

@Robert Hill

Type "music piracy" into the search box on the knowledge@wharton site. These are also from 2002/3, so maybe different Wharton professors have different views, or they say one thing in public and something else to insiders.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=635

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=863

The second article is particularly relevant to Guy's original piece. The issue isn't whether the people who create, record and market music should get paid, it's whether the current tactics of the major labels are the best way to ensure their business survives. Some people don't think they are.

spiny norman

@Robert Hill

Unfortunately the "Wharton model" that you claimed to quote in your first post actually says that b166er's friends would end up with more than they would lose if their record company allowed those that want to share the album to do so, and that no good ever came of suing your customers or competitors in defence of intellectual property.

Wharton also points to bottled water as an example of a product that competes successfully with free. Instead of giving publicity to p2p networks by suing them and their customers the music business would be better to concentrate on a) making a compelling product b) marketing it well c) selling it in packages that people find easy and convenient and at an affordable price.

"Affordable price" in the iPod era means being able to fill up 40Gb without taking out a mortgage. You can't pretend that technology doesn't exist.

spiny norman

@Bollocks...utter and complete bollocks

"Every single real piece of academic research that I have seen (i.e., real economic modelling and studies done by Wharton School of Business) indicates that the rise of piracy leads to a terrible musical landscape."

Really? Type "music piracy" into the search box on the knowledge@wharton site. These two articles are quite old, but they just happen to be the ones that have the best summary of their position.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=635

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=863

a) The "buzz" from file sharing benefits the music business by more than they lose, according to Wharton's model.

b) The only research suggesting the opposite was commissioned by the RIAA.

c) "innovation always drives the prices of yesterday’s technology into the dirt. The way to respond to the demise of the commercial CD is not to sue Internet-users. It is to figure out new ways to make money on music."

iPod Nano in airport trouser conflagration horror

spiny norman

Need to know basis

What was the "glossy paper" in his pockets? That old Bronco/Jeyes toilet paper we used to have in school? Playboy? The Radio Times?

And what for?

Lawmaker shows nudie pic to high school seniors

spiny norman
Jobs Halo

MS brilliance

Presumably this only happened because of Microsoft's fabulous Autoplay feature. Pure genius.

PS I have no idea what the icon is. It appears to be Sir Ming Campbell with a halo.

Terror police lock down Soho to smoke out 9lbs of chillis

spiny norman

Plod

Is this the first time this restaurant has cooked chillies? If the police had officers patrolling on foot and taking notice of what is happening in the local community - which is what they keep telling us they are doing - they would have known what this was without having to close streets, search for 3 hours and break doors down.

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