Posts by GrahamT

Really?

The paper plane man

says thirty seconds is just

a matter of time.

I wouldn't change from Thunderbird

unless there was something a lot better.

I dual boot Linux and windows on my laptop, but with Thunderbird I can share the same inbox/calendar/contacts on both. I even managed to wean my very non-technical wife away from Outlook Express on to Thunderbird, because I was able to set up separate accounts and filters much more easily to separate her work and home accounts the way she wanted. Importing her contact list and email was trivial too.

I don't use IMAP, so that is not an issue for me, and the SMTP/POP3 support is fine; The junk filter works as it should; filtering does what I want; I prefer separate inboxes for my several accounts, which are a mixture of web mail and trad POP3 servers.

OK, I could do with a few more filter options and better Lightning integration, but it does what want without me having to do anything apart from open it.

US jurisdiction

Apparently (according to Radio 4) this fine can only be levied if the perps set foot on US soil.

As Kiwis, they were only fined £60,000 in New Zealand.

So, for the dubious punishment of never being able to visit the US, and a handfull of small change (for them) they carry on pushing their mostly harmless, but 100% useless potions.

They must be crying all the way to the bank.

Haiku

Beeston to Bawtry

and from Mansfield to Newark

tissue sales are down

Polarized with TV: not yet

The polarizing glasses you use for "Up" etc. have one eye horizontally polarized and one vertically polarized. The two projectors then have similar polarizers; take the glasses off and you see the two full colour pictures overlaid. This is a completely passive system and works very well with cinema, though it needs either two synced projectors or a special dual lens projector. The glasses though are very cheap. The 3D effect is streets ahead of the anaglyph method used by Channel 4.

That is the problem with TV, one source of light, and it isn't polarized. A new HD TV could have half the pixels horizontally and half vertically polarized, but that would need double the bandwidth, or the picture would be reduced definition, and the brightness would be reduced (half the light from each pixel). The advantage is that it would work with stereo and non-stereo images, though a 3D image viewed without glasses would be blurred.

Another system (IMAX 3D) uses glasses with electronic LCD shutters over each eye. An infrared beam then switches the eye on in sync with the frame being displayed, left and right being interleaved. This system could be used for TV with extra hardware (set-top box even) switching the glasses. The glasses are of course much more expensive and need batteries to be kept charged. Again double the bandwidth is needed, or frame rate is halved. Definition stays the same.

However, we are stuck with anaglyphs for current TVs.

My Space Facebook confusion

The above reminded me of one of the few good lines on Jam & Jerusalem:

Jennifer Saunders character:

"My husband loves the internet. He spends all night sitting on MyFace."

(may not be verbatim, but you get the idea)

Power cycle

"Mavzien did say they had tested a bike running Windows"

Gives a whole new meaning to "System Crash" and "Blue Screen (scream?) Of Death.

Presumably this is the English speaking world

I'm not sure the French would recognise the difference between English, Irish and Australian accents, but the French (sometimes) do find the "English" accent cute, when speaking French.

Mixed results

I updated both my Ubuntu Linux systems. Acer Aspire 5630 Laptop with Release Candidate, and PC with final release on day 2.

I had no display problems with the update from 9.04, neither with the Intel Graphics on my laptop, nor the ATI graphics on my desk PC (using open source drivers) and the desk PC went very smoothly overall. Everything appears to work.

However my laptop was a different story: Bluetooth has stopped working, Ubuntuone stopped working until I did a complete uninstall, autoclean and reinstall, and I have had several complete lock ups where the laptop wouldn't even reboot, and one Kernel oops (can't remember the last time I saw one of those). I have also had to fsck the ext3 filesystem on reboot after these lock-ups. I occassionally have PulseAudio crash, and even the reporting applet.

Several updates later, it now seems to have stabilised (though Bluetooth still isn't working).

I will persevere, but I think this has been the worst Ubuntu upgrade I have ever installed (since 6.10) I thought it was just me after seeing all the positive reviews.

I officially became old...

...when I received my bus pass through the post on Saturday.

Unless you are suffering from Alzheimers or similar, your brain won't decay as fast as your body. I can no longer walk 20 miles in one go, or run 100 metres in 15 seconds like when I was younger, but I can still solve quadratic equations, debug web pages and ride a motorbike safely in rush-hour traffic, and expect to do all of them well into the future.

When my tech-savvy 20-something kids have a problem with their computers, tvs, bikes, heating, plumbing or decorating, it is always Dad they call first. They at least understand that 40+ years of knowledge and experience don't disappear just because the birthdays come around quicker.

Technology might be unrecognisable in 10 years time, but that has applied every 10 years and I, and most other oldies, managed to keep up with that. If anything, things are easier with modern technology. Tuning my digital TV is now a question of pushing a button instead of twiddling tuning knobs; copying a file across a network is drag-and-drop instead of learning xcopy or ftp commands; recording a programme means selecting the programme I want from an electronic guide and pressing "OK" instead of finding a blank tape, cueing it up setting start time and length...etc, etc.

This study is fundementally flawed ageist crap.

Now what did I come in here for?

@No, you're not confused, Hollywood is!

If you really want to compare the book and film, Honey Ryder walks out of the sea naked in the book, but in a bikini in the film. That is far more sacreligous than how Dr No lost his paws.

To the tune of Cushy Butterfield

If you want a beer that's the finest by far,

Then the sign that to look for, is the famous Blue Star.

It's a good beer, it's a strong beer, with the Norths greatest sale,

Wherever you go say; Newcastle Broon Ale!

(Probably badly remembered lyrics)

It's a shame it is moving away from Newcastle, but I am a fan of Taddy Ales, so it could be worse.

I can't say I am surprised

I was on a course recently, and we were talking about security and the banning of private unencrypted USB keys in all our organisations - except for the guy from Brookes, who said they couldn't ban them as the students use them all the time, but they kept their virus checker signatures up to date.

Welcome to the real world. Prevention is better than cure.

Mangy-Cours ?

bit of a freudian slip there. Magny-Cours, circuit of the French Grand Prix, surely.

Was this an AMD pun: Many cores; circuit?

I'm disappointed

I thought this was an article about chicken farming.

another problem with 084

When we were in France at Easter my wife broke her arms. No problem getting treatment in France, but we needed to see the GP to get a referral to the hospital fracture clinic as soon as we got home. I Looked up the phone number on their website (no online booking) to find an 0844 number. It didn't work from France. There were no geographical numbers at all on the website.

Strangely, I used to to be able to book appointments online when they had a geographical number. I believe this is a clear case of forcing people to use a revenue earning phone number

In the end I had to phone my daughter to make the appointment.

I pointed all this out to them when we went to the surgery. They showed me a geographic number for calls from abroad, on the surgery wall! Great when you are 1000 miles from the surgery.

In contrast, the NHS fracture clinic was far better than the French hospital - more switched on staff, more modern equipment, more efficient systems. Shame the our GPs aren't as good as the French ones.

Beatles for Sale: For No One or the Taxman?

I read the Register eight days a week, even when the rain comes, even Yesterday, but Tomorrow Never Knows.

You don't have to be Dr Robert or a Paperback Writer to know that The Word is that writers copyright is 70 years after the death of (all) the composer(s), and McCartney is still very much alive. He's Here, There and Everywhere.

Recording copyright is 50 years after the release. The first releases were 1962 and Sgt Pepper was 1967, Let it Be 1970, so not available until 2012-2020 - in fact, when I'm Sixty-Four and I hope, In My Life..

From Me to You, I think Sky confused Apple computers with Apple Corp, who have had the Beatles on their books for years.

You may think I am a Nowhere Man, but I am the eggman - kook kook kajou. (I'm Getting Better)

Next comes the book burning

How long before a school bans one of these authors' books because it was written by someone who refuses to prove they are not a paedophile?

The girls were mentally ill..

They were cyclepaths.

Bootnotes?

Shouldn't this be in Reg Hardware?

Plod Cam

If they had given iPods to the Christian element of the Old Bill instead of cameras, would they be the Plod Pod God Squad?

Written by a foreigner?

Yet it was articulate, accurate, well-spelled and gramatically correct, all in what it appears is Technodude's second (or third?) language.

(Shame about the missing apostrophe, but I'll put that down to a transcription error.)

Why can't all Brits write as well as that?

Just a couple of things to add; I've been to Sweden and there are some stunning blonde women there - but not as many as in Denmark; secondly the other Scandinavian nations laugh at Swedes because of their lack of a GSOH - much like we like to think of the Germans.

This was demonstrated to me in a meeting in Stockholm where a single (non-British) guy around a large table shared jokes with us Brits while the rest were completely deadpan. After the meeting I discovered he was a sole Norwegian working with a large group of Swedes.

Number 9, Number 9...

Re: "wallabies which get blasted on the plant heads and hop around in circles" and "sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles."

That's why the authorities want to keep drugs out of proles' hands - they lead to revolutions.

Maybe it's not legal...

...but what a great idea.

I admire the spirit of these people. You have worked all your life to build up your savings, and some twonk of a financial adviser loses it all for you without batting an eyelid.

I have every symapthy for the old timers, and none at all for the FA (f***ing arsehole - Financial adviser: same thing.)

Nice design

Might need a bit of work for BS1363, but that won't affect HongKong and Malaysia and other countries that use the same plug.

@Nice but ..

Transformer? 90% of the world uses the same voltage as us, and there are dual voltage power supplies/chargers supplied with most laptops, phones, MP3 players, etc. nowadays, for the backwards countries that still use 110V.

However, the adaptor[s] you need to carry will be bigger than the plug.

item 6)

What's the big deal with boobs? You see one, you've seen them both.

RIP KX

My first colour slides were on Kodachrome 25, but I soon graduated to really fast colour film - AGFA 50 ASA - and 125 ASA FP4 B&W film.

I seem to remember dabbling with 6x6 Kodachrome in a TLR, but maybe it was Ektachrome if Kodachrome only came in 35mm, as someone said.

Before I switched to digital a few years ago, I was using various Kodak and Fufi slide and negative films and scanning directly from film, but I never seemed to be able to get the quality a direct digital SLR image gave, even though the pixel count was higher and both scanner and software were well rated..

So, although I am sorry that Kodachrome is going, I can't say that I will miss it too much.

Back in the mists of time

I worked in a place that had the main server called SnowWhite, followed by Sleepy (very slow) Dopey (underpowered) etc. Of course, this limited the size of the network, and no one could ever remember the name of the seventh one.

Availability of Mucky Vids

Quote: "Register readers seem evenly split on whether this was bad or good."

That'll be XY vs XX chromosomed readers then.

What the other hundred(s) said

I read it from issue 1 - I still have the first year's issues somewhere plus odd issues down the years, but stopped buying it regularly about a year ago when I found the previous month's copy still unread in its WH Smith's bag, so maybe I am one of the causes of its demise.

Still, I will miss having it around.

First Byte, now PCW; if Bike goes, life won't be worth living - except for El Reg.

Gordon's alive!

Another classic sub-head from the multiculturally literate sub-editor(s)

re: re: left hand etc.

This is the first time a comment of mine has triggered so many responses, and I must say I am impressed by the intelligence and thought that has gone into them. Makes you proud to be a Reg (and Guardian) reader.

@Mike Richards: I couldn't agree with you more; I hated that column, it made my blood boil. Not what you want over breakfast on a lazy Sunday. But what you said reinforces what AC at 11:59 said - these people can get away with it in traditional media if the correct editorial checks and balances aren't in place, but make them face their readers on-line and the weakness of their case(s) is soon exposed, and the Barefoot Doctor was dropped due to public demand - eventually.

There is also a definite difference between Guardian and Observer editorial slant. You rarely hear "Observer reader" used in the same way as "Guardian reader" - positively or negatively.

For me, Ben Goldacre's regular Guardian column more than makes up for past indiscretions in the Fashion supplement, I mean, Observer.

Another great sub-headline

That's all I have to say.

And the fact that IT people drink lots is news?

The BOFH is a documentary, not fiction.

@AC

"...for a whole generation now the word Bing is the surname of a character in a popular US sitcom"

And for several generations it is the first name of an American singer of the 40's, 50's and 60's. (where do you think the writers of Friends got the name from?)

The person that wrote the sub-head "It'll search its best for you, a rum pum pum pum" obviously knew this, though his duet with Bowie was done when Bing no longer knew who he was, let alone Bowie.

Archer Way

I thought it had been named after a certain author and ex-jailbird: from Butt Hole to arsehole.

Btw, I drove past Whipass lane on Sunday. No doubt that will succomb to the language police soon, despite it obviously referring to donkeys.

oh *swerving* down the road

I read it as swiving down the road - which is true, but not what was written.