Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Been there, done that.

The C64 DTV:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C64_Direct-to-TV

Prosumer...?

It's a misspelling of the portmanteau word "pr0nsumer", which I think is self-explanatory.

Well, personally...

"I have a 12W LED that's supposedly equivalent to a 60W bulb, but is not noticeably darker than a 100W incandescent bulb and is certainly brighter than the sunlight through the window. If someone decided that they wanted the room to be lit with 5 of these to make the room painfully bright then that still only adds up to 60 W, 40% less than a single 100W bulb."

I've been waiting ages for cheap LEDs that I can string along behind the picture-rail in my living room in order to have an uplit ceiling with subtle differences in colour and intensity based on mood and time of day. I also have a fairly long L-shaped hall which has funny patterns of light and dark because of where the single light is located.

LEDs will probably end up being used in long strips rather than in single "bulbs".

Think the end of the "lamp post" and instead a great big row of LEDs stretching along the buildings at the side of the street casting uniform light on the pavement rather than a series of amber cones will dull patches in between.

Think aeroplane/cinema-aisle floor-lighting in most offices and public buildings, and think of that being considered a health and safety requirement, hence always on. Think of door-handles that glow constantly in a soft blue, and these being required by health and safety. Think of a stair that has all its edges lit up, and again think about how that ties in with health and safety.

Think of garden ornaments (although they'll probably have their own solar power).

Think of bicycles and motor vehicles with sidelights for added peace-of-mind.

Think of small lights inside all of your kitchen cupboards and appliances, rather than just the fridge and the oven.

Think of a keyboard with LEDs under each key so that the letter glows.

Think of beds with a string of LEDs in the headboard for reading.

Think of some other things that I'm not going to mention cos they might be patentable....

You might say....

You might say that using a small bookshelf containing multiple ring binders, each divided into multiple themed sections by pieces of coloured card, with multiple poly-pockets in each section, each containing a number of individual pieces of paper is overkill when you can just leave the pieces of paper in a messy heap on your desk.

I would have to say that I normally do the later, but I'll admit that when other people do the former, they generally find the bit of paper they're looking for a lot quicker than I do.

The OS is designed to do certain general functions. Tab grouping and ordering is application-specific. The OS does not do this. It is not the OS's job.

Well, personally...

"As for the Scarab and KeyTool, wouldn't you just remove these from your keychain before travelling? I would."

As it's a put-on-your-keyring-and-forget-about-it type of thing, I'd probably put in on my keyring and forget about it.

If they'd pitched it in the den, Bannatyne would have told them this and called it useless. Then Theo Paphitis would have broken it.

Re:,,, bit of a problem...

Your joke icon confuses me.

Anyway,

"are they trying to say that recignising anyone in any other way than a police controlled lineup does not count?"

No, they're trying to say staring at a picture for long enough will convince you you know the person in it.

If you see someone in the street and think "that was him", you phone the police and say "I think I saw the guy that did it."

Same with an on-line picture. You see it, you report it. You don't keep going back to the picture, or you overwrite your memory of the attacker with the memory of the picture. Clearly the person looks similar, which means that if it is the wrong person, you're going to end up forgetting what the actual perpetrator looked like.

And a Facebook mugshot is not generally of good enough quality to identify someone.

@Lionel Badin

"He actually has a point though, sheeple do not have the knowledge or understanding of what is possible with a modern smartphone"

There's a slight problem with that statement, I shall try to explain it.

The smartphone was not designed for "the elite", it was designed for "the masses".

What is possible with a modern smartphone should have been led by what "the masses" know -- this is the single most important rule in product design.

Android was written by geeks, as a fork of an OS originally written by geeks, for geeks.

When you talk to these people about UX they only think UI -- they ignore that the whole system is user space, even though to them it is. They think they can hide the system, and that this will be good enough.

No, you need an OS designed ground up from the perspective of "dumb user" -- that really means one of the *proper* mobile OSes, not some hacked-up version of a mail-server OS with a colourful screen on top.

The point of "like"...

The point of "like" is to allow Facebook to maximise the "interesting quotient" of their feeds. A note with lots of "likes" and comments is clearly interesting, so gets more widely seen.

Now, posts you might want to "dislike" are interesting and newsworthy, and increase the "information benefit" of Facebook, and I don't think Facebook would be opposed in principle to using it as a measure of importance. Instead, I think that the problem is more likely to be that it makes the interface less clean and potentially more confusing.

So I reckon the "Dave has broken his leg" posts are more collateral damage to the Gods of Simplicity and Usability than targets for assassination.

I heard that one...

...and I thought "who has lots of storage space, looks at photographs of houses and buys things in cash." I realised it wasn't a sophisticated international terror cell, but a professional housebreaker.

Re: Not worth..

You may have missed the reference there....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/26/foxconn_defacement_suicide_protest/

Crisp packet triangles

Folded crisp packets take up less bin space.

....but only if they're put in the bin.

Re: Yes and no

"Because the guy has waited 4 years to make the claim, there is certainly explorable doubt about his motives in producing it now and his reasons for sitting on it beforehand."

You know, even now there are plenty of people in the world who don't know what Facebook is.

It's entirely possible the guy just spotted it in the papers this morning and went "holy sh*t! That's my company!"

Zuckerberg had a duty to pay the guy, the guy didn't have to go asking for payment.

He's lucky that he just being asked for the guys contractual rights and isn't being sued over and above this for failing to report his earnings to his investor -- that would be seriously bad for him....

Re: no

"I have updated iPhones on both windoze and mac, and have been fine - suspect its just hype like all of the reporting so far."

I suspect it's a problem in tolerance and depends on the quality of the USB controller in your computer. Macs are more expensive than low-end Windows boxes because they use high-end components. Mid-to-high-end PCs use the same components as Macs.

If the iPhone USB slave chipset has a low tolerance to static (either in hardware on in the software config) and drops the connections too easily, it won't be an OS-specific problem but rather a hardware-specific incompatibility.

Many device manufacturers have shot themselves in the foot by taking liberties with the specs and producing items that aren't compatible with other devices operating on the same specification....

Actually, it's not BP's fault....

The US system is, as you might expect, based on a series of subcontracts that aim to increase efficiency.

Unfortunately, "increase efficiency" is US English for "cut corners and pocket the cash". It was not BP that built the rig and it was not BP that operated the rig. The company that built the rig was American and the company that operated the rig was American. These are the companies that fouled up, and BP's getting a raw deal simply because it's "foreign".

The reason this is less likely to happen in the North Sea is because of our evil "Big Government". The UK has something called "safety regulations" that are backed up by law. On the other hand, the US seems to expect that the invisible hand of the market will sort it out... probably by threat of lawsuit. Aye right -- even paying off the bereaved is generally cheaper than doing it safely in the first place, so everyone's just gambling on not having a big enough accident to wipe them out in one go.

Ah but...

Shorry, but you forgot one minor detail....

There´sh hair on your cat too, and he alwaysh drinksh tapwater. And it jusht sho happensh that you take him wherever you go.

You won't get away thish time!

<cue US marine frogmen entering lair>

@Sarah Bee

OMG!! You hyperbole Nazi -- I bet Mugabe would say exactly the same thing! This is just as bad as falling through a rusted safety barrier over a 100 foot wall into a VAT of acid which is being rapidly heated by the lava flowing from Ejafjallajokull!!!!

Point a browser at a video file?!!???!

You know what would happen, don't you? People would *gasp* DOWNLOAD THE VIDEOS! How would you get them to come back to your site then?

OK, sarcasm aside, it would mess up their licensing model for music videos if people could download them willy-nilly.

Hmm....

"iPhones might be popular, they might even be good, but they hardly invented mobile data."

I don't think anyone said they did, but they've certainly increased its use -- apps downloads, streaming video, etc etc. They've also made it more mainstream and less geeky.

The iPhone may be all hype, but the hype is working and placing a load on the networks....

@Chris Williams

I'd tell a commenter who said that to RTFA, but I gather you were the one who WTFA. ;-p

"On one occasion in April, the Russian government official, who was based at the UN, rumbled his surveillance team, according to the court documents. He returned to his office and only one of the usual MAC addresses, allegedly belonging to Chapman's laptop, was observed trying to communicate."

Clever Russian official -- he spotted Netstumbler without even booting up his laptop! This Russian technology is incredible. Where can I get some?

...or perhaps he just spotted the person tailing him.

Getty's not that good...

Have another look at the picture in the first version. A nice bit of processing has resulted in good contrast and colour-balance, but it was initially taken on a chronically cheap camera, so there's all sorts of lens flare and internal reflections going on.

Why do Getty accept moderately crap pics from amateurs with cheap cameras? Because they're willing to sell them for less, which means more profit for Getty. It also means market rates drop considerably, and the pros have to charge less.

The dream of everyone with a stake who either archives or uses stock photos is a workforce of "incidental photographers" who give their work away for free or near free.

So wave goodbye to the professional photographer, peeps....

Re: Some basic economics

"2) the cost price of an object is the cost to produce a new one. R&D, etc. are important but not when calculating the cost* though I'm not sure about the severance payments made to the relatives of terminated Foxconn employees."

By whose definition of cost?

None that I've come across ignores set up and development costs, which are traditional amortised across each unit sold.

More importantly, the *value* is in the configuration, not the components.

Which isn't to say that the iPhone isn't an overpriced piece of consumer tat -- it is. Just it's overpriced by the value of the configuration.

@Rattus Rattus

...and minus the "smart" part.

Re: Re: Warning needed

"I bet none of you who claim to be running for the bucket hand clasped to mouth are golden gods."

And that's where you're wrong. I am the 24-carat winged deity Archithonrix, and I lay Fabergé eggs.

Or looking at it another way...

...El Reg posts so many articles mocking climate change with very little substance that when they publish a decent report on a piece of proper science, everyone (both greenies and greenie-bashers) interprets it as greenie-bashing.

Ah but...

"I'd argue about the superiority of rangefinder cameras, too - I want to see what I'm photographing through the lens that's taking the picture, thank you - but I suppose that's horses for courses."

Well I want to see what I'm photographing too, and what I'm photographing should be what's in front of me when I press the button.

I don't even want a switchable lens -- my rangefinder has a fixed (moderately) wide-angle lens with a shutter in the iris. The short distance of travel for the shutter curtain gives me practically instant snaps. Much better for (eg) getting a picture of a dancer in which you can see his/her face mid-spin.