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* Posts by Mike Bell

754 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2007

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EE sets October date to power up UK 4G network

Mike Bell
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Re: Pricing

"So if they choose to throttle you down to early dial up speeds but allow you to use all the data you've paid for eventually then you'd consider that ok?"

Of course not. I'd take my business elsewhere.

These guys should be partaking in competition, where they provide a continually improving service in order to retain my business. With a 4G monopoly in place, there is no competition, and that's why EE may be tempted to fleece their customers for what they can get away with. At least, that seems to be the general opinion here of what will happen.

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Mike Bell
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Re: Pricing

"so are you saying you want something better / faster and you don't think you should pay extra for it ?"

You're dead right that I want a faster connection without paying more. I pay for the amount of data that is transmitted, not the speed that it moves. I get a snappy connection on my home broadband and that doesn't cost me any more than the era of 14K modems (a lot less, in fact).

Charging extra for 4G would be profiteering. Like the bad old days when you were penalised for installing a wireless router in your home.

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Mike Bell

Pricing

I'm on Orange PAYG. If I want to use their speedy 4G network with a suitable phone, are they going to charge me more for the privilege? It wouldn't surprise me, though the logic of it from a punter's perspective would be baffling.

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Global action takes down tech support scam

Mike Bell
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Re: Hopefully that'll put an end to it ...

Yeah, it's great fun leading these chancers on.

Last time this happened to me, I wasn't feeling particularly imaginative and simply answered "yes" to every question that was put to me by some guy with a strong Indian accent. It took him several minutes to figure out what was going on and eventually vented his frustration by announcing that I was a "dirty dog".

Woof woof! That one cut me to the quick.

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Boffins suggest orbital dust-up to combat climate change

Mike Bell
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Just say no

What are these nitwits going to do when they find out that the heat Armageddon never comes to pass and, instead, we are lumbered with freezing weather instead, thanks to their meddling?

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Democratic congresswomen 'less feminine in appearance' than Republicans

Mike Bell

Fits in with Republican Ideology

Everyone can be a millionaire (just try hard enough and forget for a moment that if everyone had a million in the bank it would be worth very little as a consequence)

Everyone can be Governer of California (just try hard enough)

Everyone can be pretty (just try hard enough)

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Google's disco-dancing uncle Schmidt trashes Apple's patent war

Mike Bell

Here's Eric in a previous job...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqNPOuh4GwU

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Fans revolt over Amazon 'adware' in Ubuntu desktop search results

Mike Bell
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Doubleplusungood

"shopping suggestions" !!!

You might as well put some rats in a tube next to my face and call it educational.

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iPhone to account for half of US economy by 2030 - projection

Mike Bell
Mushroom

What happened to the shoe shop event horizon?

We're all buying phones to make ourselves happy these days.

Seriously, though, economists are mad, and so is the notion of money in the modern world.

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Akihabara unplugged: Tokyo's electric town falls flat

Mike Bell

Maids

The one lingering memory I will take with me from my recent visit there was the abundance of cuties in French Maid outfits touting their wares in the street. Don't book your plane ticket just yet! They're there to hustle for business in said cafes where you get charged an arm and a leg for service. And they don't take kindly to being photographed - you will get some severe verbal if you try to snap them in the street, which is a bit of a downer if you're a photographer. In the cafe, you will be dispensed a series of instruction cards telling you not to touch the maid, take photos etc., all rather depressing really. Not so much that you can't do those things, but the realisation that there are groping pervs about who try that kind of thing.

Shinjuku is much more fun. The maids aren't there but you will find rows of smiley uniformed ladies with loud squeaky voices in the doorways of electronics shops, all trying to get you inside to buy the latest mobile phone in a continuous stream of unintelligible Japanese. Awesome.

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Glaswegian scientists snap entangled particles

Mike Bell
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Re: Am I the only one...

The human retina can respond to single photon events. But these don't make it as far as your brain - otherwise it would be swamped with noise in low light.

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Facebook's Zuckerberg awarded privacy patent

Mike Bell
Facepalm

My favourite patent

http://www.planetpatent.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/US5443036A.pdf

I love the bit about "Cats are not characteristically disposed toward voluntary aerobic exercise."

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'Sacrifice another goat!: iCloud is Apple's biggest failure before Google

Mike Bell

Stop talking about MobileMe

It's dead. Deceased. An ex-cloud.

It was Apple's first foray into cloud computing and has now been retired, replaced by iCloud.

My experience with iCloud, for what it's worth, is that it's been excellent, unobtrusive and seamless. When I upgraded from an ipad2 to an ipad3, the effort involved in getting my music, documents, apps, contacts etc. involved little more than entering my credentials and making good use of a high-speed Internet connection.

I have one gripe: it's not currently possible to re-download paid-for movies from iCloud. This being the case, I'm currently not happy about buying movies from iTunes and I'll hang on until the copyright issues involved have been resolved.

I also spotted a glitch where some contacts were appearing twice in my contacts book. Shit happens. A bug, for sure, but easily resolved: turn off iCloud contacts on the device, accept the option to blitz contacts on the device, then turn on iCloud contacts again. Ta-da. All contacts back in place. Didn't need to 'sync' anything because it's the device's job to figure that out.

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Barnes & Noble: You won't need a Nook to read our ebooks

Mike Bell
Mushroom

Sex and the City - Free!

If I was unfortunate enough to own this book, I'd give it away for free as well!

Was it Channel 4 Big Breakfast who once sent a mobile wood chipper down the back streets of Blighty on their "Jeffrey Archer Amnesty Day"?

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Tablets, copycats and Weird Al Yankovic

Mike Bell
Meh

Relative Worth

The Judge's comments are worth more to Apple than any amount of money spent on marketing. Well worth the squashing of a few patents to them, I'd imagine.

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'Biologically accurate' robot legs walk like an Egyptian

Mike Bell
Facepalm

That's not walking

It's mincing!

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Watch out for the GIGANTIC ALIEN JELLYFISH, warns space boffin

Mike Bell
Boffin

The Ladybird Book of Astrobiology

Yeah, I read that too when I was a lad.

But surely it says there are only three civilisations active in the universe at any one time rather than four?

Quick! Someone get hold of Kevin Warwick for the definitive answer.

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Puny US particle punisher finds strong evidence for God particle

Mike Bell
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No Idiot's Answer, I'm Afraid

Quantum mechanics is pretty complicated stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism

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Facebook phone app attempts to seize ALL YOUR MAIL

Mike Bell
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I Hate Facebook

...and I hate the way that most youngsters can't seem to live without it. It is especially annoying when row after row of smartphones light up a cinema, with dopey teenagers sending their tedious messages to each other, even after a movie has started. I suppose I should feel sorry for them and their wretched chavvy lives, but – thanks to Zuckerberg – he's made a monster out of me and I want to thump his hapless victims nonetheless.

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Apple lobs pocket change to Proview, ending Chinese IPAD name row

Mike Bell

60 million - nice work if you can get it

And there's me doing stuff for a living

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Join the gov consultation on net porn ... and have your identity revealed

Mike Bell
FAIL

Big Fail

I started filling in their questionnaire for a bit of fun yesterday - after having been identified as at least two different people by the site. Half way though submitting the questionnaire (page 3 or thereabouts), I started seeing the question boxes already filled in from another punter.

I have to say that I agreed with the punter's sentiments exactly* and I couldn't be arsed to carry on monkeying about with that site, so I jacked it in.

* The usual stuff about safeguarding kids being the parents' responsibility, being stupid if you have blind faith in automatic filtering etc. i.e. exactly the kind of stuff that would be likely to confuse a Daily Fail reader.

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Ministers consult public on 'opt in for smut' plans

Mike Bell
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Fucking Ridiculous

Most kids know how the internet works a lot better than do their parents. They will be hitting the On switch way before their parents see the option.

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Ten... dual-band wireless routers

Mike Bell
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Stability

I have a veritable graveyard of routers in my house (mostly Netgear, I have to say, because of their ubiquity and my familiarity of setting them up). Every one has given me stability problems. I thought I'd try out a combination of a Draytek Vigor 120 modem and Apple's Airport Extreme a few months ago. Since then, I've never needed to reboot either device on any occasion. This makes my family very happy.

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Apple must be tried for the bug in every fanboi's pocket

Mike Bell

Not a bug

It takes a bit of programming effort to record and file that kind of data. How could that be a bug?

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Microsoft plots entry into tablet trade

Mike Bell
Meh

Critique

Those 'desktop' screen grabs look a bit like Tetris to me. Do you think Windows 9 will look like Pac-Man?

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Apple pulls in TomTom, kicks Google off iPhones

Mike Bell
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Re: Street View.

Thing is, the current iOS map offering is pretty good and seamless. Who wants to go monkeying about with other apps when you can just tab to a street view of the location you're looking at?

Plus, Apple's first stab at ditching Google maps in their iPhoto app has a technical description – SHITE.

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Google to show China what it's missing

Mike Bell
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Re: SSL

The Chinese authorities would be more than happy to block all SSL connections to Google, I'm sure.

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Space Station crew enter the Dragon

Mike Bell

"You want DVD?"

It would have been so much more memorable had there been a little Chinese fella waiting behind the hatch.

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Sunshine nudges asteroid into odd orbit

Mike Bell
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Boffin

Re: Oh, the agony!

Radiation pressure is much stronger than that produced by the solar wind (by about three orders of magnitude).

It's not negligible, however, and is taken into account when predicting the orbit of a GPS satellite to high precision, for example.

Unlike the solar wind, radiation pressure produces an off-axis force vector for a rotating body (in simple terms it gets hot, turns a bit, re-radiates as it cools).

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Ouch! Facebook slumps below IPO value on day 2

Mike Bell
Mushroom

Crash Ahoy!

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the FB share price eventually crashes to below 1% of its current value, when the people who bought into this scheme realise that the site can't actually make them any money. Cue a mad panic bailout.

The trouble is, the amount of cash involved is so huge that it's bound to have negative repercussions on the global economy.

In the meantime, Zuckerberg, who got really lucky in the first place, is laughing all the way to the bank. Your dwindling pension will be propping up his lifestyle if the shares take a nosedive. Which is nice.

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Will UK.gov crack down on itself for missing Cookie Law deadline?

Mike Bell
Boffin

Session Cookies?

Does any informed person know here if session cookies are exempted? I'm hearing conflicting stories. There is a loophole that says something to the effect that consent is not required if said cookies are necessary for a site's operation, and many sites do rely on session cookies to operate as designed. On the other hand, you could argue that they're not properly designed if there is such a reliance...

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Crooks sell skint fanbois potatoes instead of iPhones

Mike Bell
Meh

Spud-U-Like

Do you *have* to be driving a Vauxhall to commit this kind of crime?

Just wondering.

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Off-the-shelf forensics tool slurps iPhone data via iCloud

Mike Bell
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Re: "Cops don't need your actual phone any more"

iCloud backups are encrypted anyways - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4865

But if a dude manages to get hold of your User ID and password, your data is obtainable, as you might expect. Just like in a million other walks of life.

If that in itself worries you, and you have particularly sensitive stuff on your OS device, don't back it up to iCloud. You do have a choice.

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Knomo Folio iPad 3 case

Mike Bell
Thumb Up

Answers...

I just got one through the post. Very nice.

The magnetic put the iPad to sleep when it's closed and wakes it up when it's opened.

The inside material is soft.

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Red faces abound as boffins build gamma ray lens

Mike Bell
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Mushroom

Re: I just got an image

Morbius from "Forbidden Planet" managed to get "the number 10 raised almost literally to the power of infinity". So no worries!

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ARM creators Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber

Mike Bell
Boffin

Star Designer

Roger / Sophie WIlson is one of my all-time heroes.

I disassembled the 6502 code in one of the BEEB's ROMs to get some insight into programming (didn't get out much in those days) and was amused to find the last five bytes contained an ASCII representation of his first name.

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'Attitudes to robot sex will change'

Mike Bell
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More Human Than Human

I'd give "basic pleasure model" Pris from Blade Runner one. So long as she behaved herself.

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Swiss, German physicists split the electron

Mike Bell
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Boffin

Re: re: Bohr model was abandoned 40 years ago

Agreed. English language and the quantum world don't mix very well.

Physicists use maths (including lots of imaginary numbers) to very successfully describe that world. But trying to imagine something like an electron as an object made of other stuff just doesn't apply.

For example, Quantum Field Theory describes an electron as being something that is as big as the entire universe. It has a bit of "electronness" everywhere (the field being the whole universe and not just a football field). Only in some places and in some circumstances is it instantiated into something that you imagine a small point of charge to be.

Then you get onto equivalences. A photon can be a bit of light one moment, and a pair of particles the next. Stand in an accelerating lift and you can't tell whether you're in a strong gravitational field or are simply accelerating.

It's fascinating stuff, but so weird that it hurts my head thinking about it.

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BYOD sync 'n share

Mike Bell
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Boffin

Re: Not good enough on its own by a long chalk

"An utter joy, assuming the spreadsheet is no more than 2x2 cells."

Indeed. The kind of nitwit who can't be bothered to design a form for data entry is likely to have a joyless existence.

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Mike Bell
Gimp

Not good enough on its own by a long chalk

[self-confessed fanboi alert]

I've never had a problem with iCloud myself. It's a joy to tinker with a spreadsheet in the morning on my iPhone and update it in the evening on the iPad. Or if I'm out and about and add some contact info to the phone - bingo - there it is on the iPad when I get home. Emergency tooth repair requires a dentist appointment entry on the phone? Ta-Da, there it is on the iPad and my Outlook calendar as well. Take a snap with the phone at lunch-time: oh, there it is on my PC when I get back. Get a new Apple device? No problem, there's all my music on iCloud ready to be installed. No mucking about dragging and dropping stuff.

For the situations where I want to move my own multi-gig content around, I Air Share to a local network to get the move done.

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US sues Apple, publishers over ebook pricing strategy

Mike Bell
Facepalm

Why would Apple offer Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad?

Apple ask the question "why would Apple offer Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad?"

It's a simple question, and there is a simple answer:

Apple permit Kindle on the iPad because they know full well that the great majority of their user base will still favour their own iBook reader and take the easy life by purchasing stuff through the familiar iTunes route. To ban the Kindle, on the other hand, would be perceived immediately as an anti-competitive measure.

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German scientists link two labs with ‘universal quantum network’

Mike Bell
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Boffin

Re: FTL?

"Might this not be a means of communicating faster than light?"

It's complicated, because you have to take into account your frame of reference and how you define "faster than light".

Quantum Mechanics says that the remote state changes happen at the same time, but relativity puts a spanner in the works as to what you actually mean by time. From a photon's perspective, for example, it makes the entire journey - which may be 60 metres or 15 billion light years - in no time whatsoever. From its point of view space-time is so folded that every point it passes through is the same point, like the 3D world of its journey stapled together into something with no depth. And yet, from your point of view the photon takes as long as it takes to get there, courtesy of your very different frame of reference (i.e. you are moving very much slower).

So it's a matter of perspective. No *useful* information that you can use can be transmitted at what you consider to be faster than the speed of light, according to the theory.

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So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Mike Bell

Creepozoids (1987)

It was so bad, part of my brain has firewalled itself off so that I'm not permanently tortured by its awfulness.

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NASA unveils eye-popping molten moon and luna tour videos

Mike Bell
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Thumb Up

Re: NASA in the first video ...

The sound effects add a nice bit of drama to it, IMHO.

Since impact ejecta can often travel vast distances, I wonder what it might *really* sound like as fine-grain debris thumps into a microphone. Speeded up massively, of course, like the video itself.

Animations like this rarely show how things might appear in real time because, although asteroids can move fast, 20 or 30 miles a second, on the scale of something as large as the Moon, the apparent motion would appear quite a lot slower than watching a second hand moving around the perimeter of a watch face.

There is considerable debate as to the detailed mechanics of the Moon's very early origin. The video is reporting on what is pretty much known for sure.

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Rub Facebook pals in your wealth with 'social' credit card

Mike Bell
Facepalm

Golgafrincham B Ark

These guys must have lost their boarding pass.

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Workers can't escape Windows 8 Metro - Microsoft COO

Mike Bell
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Devil

Re: An Immersive Experience...

I was thinking more along the lines of how they used to test witches in the old days. Nice girl or bad witch: either way, your dunking won't turn out well.

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It never ends: TV exposé tags new Android privacy howler

Mike Bell
Thumb Up

Yay, Go Viviane!

Make the fuckers install an option on their OS that says

STOP TRACKING MY PERSONAL SHIT FROM WHEN I WAS TOO YOUNG, STUPID OR GULLIBLE TO KNOW ANY BETTER

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Dixons preps movie download service

Mike Bell
Facepalm

Marketing 101

Logik and KnowHow sound like a couple of names that might be dreamed up by those numpties at the beginning of a new series of The Apprentice!

Actually, it would be awesome to see The Apprentice numpties deliver a download service, with Sir Alan scrutinising their every move.

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Japanese boffins fire up 802 teraflops ceepie-geepie

Mike Bell
Thumb Up

Very Interesting

Suggestion for a future El Reg article:

Do some interviews with the end users of machines like this. I'm sure that 99% of this site's readership are well familiar with regular server operation, but for many, myself included, supercomputers are well in the land of boffinry. We often hear that they're used to do stuff like nuclear weapons research and chemistry. I'd like to hear from the users to describe the class of problems that require such performance, how they went about it, and what some of the results are.

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Now Siri brushes up on Russian, Japanese languages

Mike Bell
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Gimp

@keyboard lovers

All very well, but can you send a text like that on your mobile phone when you're driving?

Even at my desk, it's quicker to ask Siri a question like "Will it snow tomorrow?" (which I just did, as it happens) than it is to muck about checking weather sites.

Siri has its detractors, but I find it quite useful.

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