* Posts by Dazed and Confused

2385 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007

iPhone users get more sex than Android fans

Dazed and Confused

attractiveness stats

It is more likely that people who own an SLR camera are more interested in taking photographs and have a better appreciation of what is likely to make you look more attractive in a photo than the average camera phone or point&shoot user.

UK ICT classes killing kids' interest in tech

Dazed and Confused

Make it fun

If you want children to learn you need enthusiastic teachers and a curriculum. It also helps if the teachers know what they are doing.

When I did a college course years ago I used to sit at the back of the class and get on with my own stuff except when the teacher was stuck, then I'd show the teacher what they needed to do next, and then get back to work.

I've liked most of my kids primary school teachers, but it would be naive in the extreme to expect them to be able to teach programming. I'm sure a good number of the kids would manage to learn it if you gave them something fun to do. But lets face it they don't even teach trig in primary schools these days, how are they going to teach programming?

There is then the problem of keeping up to date. The subject moves so quickly.

Lastly there is the issue that most kids aren't going to end up in the IT industry. They probably all need to know about WP and Spreadsheets, like they all need to be able to read and add up. But that isn't computer science.

I had a discussion with an Indian support engineer recently. His take was that when he went through college IT was the hot prospect for good jobs. Now it isn't, even in Bangalore. He was intending to guide his kids away from it.

Court slaps down coppers in photography case

Dazed and Confused

because

A) really nasty people are harder to find than law abiding citizens

B) really nasty people usual make complaints and that raises too much paperwork.

Android surges past iPhone in smartphone sales

Dazed and Confused

Making money

> Perhaps the rise of Android will make Apple think about their obsession with the 'experience' but somehow I doubt it.

Apple is making money hand over fist, they're more profitable than anyone else in their market, their cap is ludicrously high.

Why would they want to think?

Ever since they stopped making the Apple II they've stopped wanting to be open and play nicely with anyone else.

Dazed and Confused

Is this American sales again?

How does this work out in the rest of the world?

Women, gorillas likelier to have sex with men wearing red

Dazed and Confused
WTF?

shopping

SO perhaps, even as a bloke, it is time to go shopping

Czechs toast Bud-beating beer win

Dazed and Confused
Pint

In France

> i fear it will simply be called "Bud" which will annoy me.

Hasn't it been simply called Bub in France for the last 10->15 years already for this very reason. I thought the French had decided against the US giant on this years ago and banned them using the name. At least I'm sure that is what the French barman I used to know told me.

Ballmer and Softies sacrifice sleep to catch iPad

Dazed and Confused

We've got the software, We've got the bloat

Where an iPad seems to score over Windows based netbooks is that it is smaller and lighter. I guess the OS it runs is also smaller and lighter.

Perhaps we have finally reached a point where their are enough people who are happy to buy a device which isn't a general purpose computer that can run all their apps from their desktop and laptops. So unless they can slim Windows down to a point where they can compete with the iPad in terms of size, weight and battery life and still offer good enough performance then this will be a market segment they will have missed.

Personally I'd be happy to not have either and iPad nor Windows, but I can see why each appeal to some others.

But I've felt that for years there was likely to be a huge demand for something simpler than a full blown WIndows PC. Plenty of non IT people just want a few simple apps, web, email simple WP and spreadsheet. full stop, end of story. A Windows box is too complex for this market place.

Not many people start off with a new computer wondering how good the assembler is these days.

Oracle and HP make a deal for Solaris on ProLiants

Dazed and Confused

Solaris sales

I'm sure some time ago the Reg carried an article saying that HP sold more Solaris systems than anyone else, including Sun. There is more Solaris on x86 servers, and HP sells more x86 servers...

Swiss do lady-friendly iPhone 4 launch

Dazed and Confused

Ladies don't sweat

They glow

sweaty palm are far more conductive and therefore far more likely to exacerbate the problem.

Android's UK phone sales quadruple

Dazed and Confused
Coffee/keyboard

75%

> Apple, conversely, saw its UK market share decline from 75 per cent to 64 per cent during the same period.

Sorry I can not believe that Apple had 75% on the UK market share. No matter how popular they are that figure doesn't make sense.

Just how do they define this market segment. What phones are included in it?

The Wrath of Jobs' latest victim: Motorola

Dazed and Confused
Black Helicopters

Perhaps

It just took them a long time to find out how to hold one so as to cause a problem.

Or perhaps to wait for a natural drop in signal that coincided with them picking one up.

MPs call for crackdown on pre-paid credit cards

Dazed and Confused

Needs to be an international initive

There is no good banning these in the UK when you can walk into any store in the US (or I guess anywhere else on the planet) and buy one of these things.

Pre-paid credit cards are a great anti fraud tool. Rather than giving companies I don't know and don't necessarily trust my real credit card number, which could then be hit for lots of dosh and I'd end up with a big argument with the cc firm, I just use a pre-paid one when shopping on sites I don't know too well. That way I know the sum total of my exposure is £100. Much safer. Not sure I feel the need for an anonymous one, especially now the Stalinist dictatorship have been given the heave ho.

Perv scanner code of practice still a balls-up

Dazed and Confused

only coz he was a dork did he fail

the existing airport scanners at the time let him through with his bomb twice.

Dazed and Confused

Why scan your shoes?

Because some retard really did try to set off a bomb in his shoe on a transatlantic flight a few years back. This one is not a merely theoretical threat.

Cameron asks Obama for McKinnon compromise

Dazed and Confused

But

last week the European Court of Criminal ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Human Rights said that extraditing Abu Hamza would breach his human rights because he might be given a long prison sentence.

So if you publicly proclaiming you'd like to people killed it is OK, but guessing a few passwords is such a serious offence that you can be extradited no matter what you are facing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10551784

PC gone mad?

Cops taser Somerset chap's nether regions

Dazed and Confused

what a balls up

I'll get my coat

German webcam hack perv suspect cuffed

Dazed and Confused

Re: , well, children aren't really people are they

They also can not legally enter into contracts so they can click what they like and it means even less didly squat than when the rest of it do.

Dazed and Confused

case have been found in the following countries

And don't forget school districts in the US where they thought it was OK to watch kids in their bedrooms.

Phonemakers cry foul on Steve Jobs 'We're all alike' attack

Dazed and Confused

cue the lawyers

Could be fun watching them duke it out

Secret sub tech hints at spooks' TEMPEST-busting bugs

Dazed and Confused
Happy

The ability to transmit power wirelessly has also been recently

By just about every electric toothbrush on the market for the last 20 years.

The Register comment guidelines 2010

Dazed and Confused

Re umacf24

OK, so El Reg isn't paying anyone to be nice or nasty, but they've always made it clear they are open to bribery.

Dazed and Confused

Good job

I think that you generally do a good job and allow us commentards to sail much closer to the wind than most places allow.

Nice to see somewhere criticism isn't stifled.

Torrent sites: Here today, gone tomorrow and no one even cares

Dazed and Confused

Usenet

views censorship as damage and routes around it

Same is going to apply here

UK.gov abandons 2012 rural broadband pledge

Dazed and Confused

Sound more like

The government making promises with bothering to ask anyone whether it was technically feasible with the available infrastructure. It is easy of politician and managers to make promises they don't have to actually do the work. Making good broadband available to 100% of the population means laying a lot of fibre. Are we even at 100% for mains electricity?

If you try and dig up rural valleys to lay this lot, or to build towers for mobile connectivity then environmentalist will start to scream and demand public enquiries which will always take years and the lawyers will spend your money faster than you can print it.

Freeview reaches out to EPG-less DVR owners

Dazed and Confused

Argh!

And there was me thinking I'd done something wrong. Tried to re-tune our FVRT200 a couple of nights ago as C4 reception had gone totally SH1T and then found all the program guides had gone.

You couldn't add a list of the effected models to the story could you.

Yorks cops charge Segway rider under 1835 road law

Dazed and Confused

No motive force?

If the rider leans forward, their top half should go forward and their feet should go backwards. The Segway is pushing forward to stop them hitting the ground so that they are kept in a constant state of falling. The energy to move forward is not coming from the potential energy of the person standing up relative to the person nose down in the dirt. It is coming from the Segway. So it my book that counts as motorised.

A simpler test would be.

Are there any motors in the Segway?

Are they connected to the wheels?

Dazed and Confused

4MPH

OK, I might like to walk faster but 4MPH is still a lot faster than most people walk. I hate to bring up the "Think of the kids" argument, but many of our pavements are infested with sub-adult creatures who are quite out of control of their disinterested parents. These things are going to do a lot of damage to a toddler I don't fancy being hit one.

I don't know what the answer is, probably there should be some sort of driving test and a license to use one which can be revoked for inconsiderate use.

Dazed and Confused

Get them off the pavement

There are enough problems round here with mobility scooters trying to mow down pedestrians. This guy might drive his Segway carefully and with consideration for other users of the pavement, but if he wins then soon enough there will be plenty of selfish/arrogant b*******ds threatening life & limb.

Pressure mounts on Apple to recall iPhone 4

Dazed and Confused
Grenade

But where are they putting the duct tape?

I thought they'd adopted a policy of silencing all criticism. Perhaps that is what the duct tape is for?

Dazed and Confused

In denial

It's not just Apple customers that will go into denial about a defect. I had a N95_8GB, every now and then it wouldn't work in handset mode, only on loudspeaker or headset. Drove me up the wall. I mate also had one, so I asked whether his did it, "No, never a problem" but watching him use it, every now and then he'd answer calls, clearly be having problems and then he'd hit the loudspeaker button and handle the rest of the call that. way. Didn't admit to the problem though.

Mother faked ID to 'disappear' child from school waiting list

Dazed and Confused

@AC & class warfare

Not at all sure what middle class has got to do with this. I've never noticed that being a pushy mother is limited to only one part of society.

Dazed and Confused

Re: at FOUR FRICKIN YEARS OLD

Mego, I don't know what country you live in, but in the UK kids start school at 4.

So expecting 4 year olds to be on the waiting list isn't really very surprising.

Telco sets honey pot for nuisance marketers

Dazed and Confused

VOIP a Firebrick?

Sounds like some of the ideas he put into his firewall box years ago to potentially keep hackers online, but slowly, rather than just dropping them. :-)

Pity BT wouldn't fund their Ad campaign using the "sod.ms" domain.

SCO rises from the dead (again)

Dazed and Confused

-9

kill -9 only delivers a non blockable signal. It doesn't really kill anything.

If the target process is a zombie (as in the case of SCO, it's dead just no one has swept up the pieces) or is currently blocked in a high priority, non signalable sleep state, then the SIGKILL will be delivered but will not be acted upon.

To get rid of zombies you need to get the parent process to issue a wait(2) (or equivalent) call or to set SIGCHLD to SIGIGNORE. Since it is typically not possible to get the parent to do this, it is usually necessary to kill the parent process. At which point the orphaned zombie will be inherited by init which will issue the required wait call.

As to the parenthood of SCO, some might argue that given it's recent behaviour, it doesn't actually have any parents, or at the very least it's parenthood is somewhat unknown (even to each other).

On another front, since in it's earliest form it was known as a purveyor of Xenix, so perhaps M$ might be seen as its parent. So hope for it to die is probably too much to ask.

Dazed and Confused

Zombie processes

Even zombie processes die if you reboot.

What more needs to be done to kill this beast?

Microsoft seeks patent on ebook page flip

Dazed and Confused

Why didn't we do it before?

Why don't we go from standard page to a standard page?

Well I've certainly written code that does just that. Animate the turns? WHY would I want to slow it down? But I wrote a demo app for a major computer company back in the early 90s where we displayed text in whole pages and could easily move between them. What are now called gestures we just thought of as mouse movements back then. Press the button and move up or right is obviously move forward, down or left is move back. Patent it, I didn't think you could, I certainly thought it was so mind blowing obvious.

I'm sure there was an application we used to read HP-UX manuals in back at the start of CD-ROMs which animated the page turns and I'm sure I've seen it in lots of other stuff.

Academics challenge moral consensus on sex and the net

Dazed and Confused

@ Michelle Knight

> Look out, you moral crusaders ... there are new kids on the block!

Sadly the "moral crusaders will simply label anyone who disagrees with as perverts or worse.

Apple iPad run rate hits 2m units a month

Dazed and Confused

summer hols

Time to buy shares in mobile companies then.

Don't these things take mini-sims. So the normal approach of going into the Vodafone(or who ever) kiosk at the airport and buying a local data SIM for a few Euros isn't likely to work. I wonder how fast people will hit the new limit of data roam costs. For data there isn't really any reason not to just use a local SIM, let's face it you don't care about the phone number.

Brighton NIMBYs complain over BT broadband upgrades

Dazed and Confused

if they don't want them

Fine, let them go to the back of the queue, let some other part of the country who would welcome faster network connections have them.

Dutch send submarine to fight Somali pirates

Dazed and Confused
Pirate

Torpedoes

I suspect the sub has a piece of artillery.

Pictures of Ubuntu: Linux's best photo shots at Windows and Mac

Dazed and Confused

I hate to say but

for XP M$ had some useful tools, the slide show option, the view a folder as filmstrip option and you could download some phototools from their website to do things like resize sets of images or all the ones in a folder.

W7 is a massive step backwards for photos.

Just to look at pictures on Linux I still like gqview.

(PS 24bit colour is also known as 8bit colour depth, 8 for red, 8 for green and 8 for blue. 24bits for each would be nice for things that vary gently, like the sky or black stream trains)

The 3G coverage picture that can't be published

Dazed and Confused

Oh PLEASE

Mobile users were making use of 3G internet access before the iPhone.

Mobile users were making use of 3G internet access while Apple still hadn't worked out how to do 3G and so were flogging 2G kit.

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

Jobs' solo Flashturbation lent unlikely second hand

Dazed and Confused

Formats, it's always formats.

So will the porno industry choose to go patent encumbered or follow Google to an open source codec?

It could prove t he deciding factor.

After all it was the porno crowd that choose VHS over Betamax and settled the tape wars, well once they'd finally given up their early dreams of video disks.

Dazed and Confused
Paris Hilton

The 12% rule

Shouldn't that section read

As much as 12% of websites AREN'T porn related

Paris because she's such a web star

Power line tech could crash aircraft and shut down the Archers

Dazed and Confused

Interference

A couple of years ago a couple of BT engineers knocked on our front door while I was off in some other corner of the world. The wife answered to be greeted with.

"We're investigating interference in the area and there seems to be a lot of interference emanating from your house madam".

At which point the wife starts to get very worried since my study looks like a cross between Mission control and a mad scientist's lab and she did fancy being made to go through everything there to work out what was causing the problem.

Fortunately he then looked at his equipment and pointed to the other corner of the house and said "It seems to be coming from over there" pointing at the living room. It turned out that the power supply for the PVR was up the creak.

Now I don't know if it is still the case but I know the GPO used to be able to prosecute you for causing interference. This didn't get that far since the Mrs was happy to just disconnect the PVR till I got home and bought a new power supply. But there was a definite implication that causing the level of interference wasn't acceptable.

Nokia demos finger flicking exercise for iPhone 4 users

Dazed and Confused

And who says

the Finns don't have a sense of humour

Observer columnist in online porn mixup

Dazed and Confused

knowing things

It might be excusable for the journo to know bog all about the internet and even bog all about porn, but you would expect that even if they don't know which one is a prefix and which one is a suffix that they could at least tell the two apart.

Panasonic Viera TX-L32S20B 32in LCD TV

Dazed and Confused

SD Slot

Far from the SD slot being next to useless I find it one of the best features of my Panasonic HD TV. Showing photos on the Telly is the next best thing to using a slide projector, but without all the faffing about with projectors, screen and needing to turn the lights off. I wasn't even aware of the feature when I bought the telly, but as I said I now find it really useful.

Pity it doesn't take CF cards too.

HP buys iTunes jailbreaker

Dazed and Confused

@Alastair7

I've always thought my wants from a Music Player are really really simple.

I have lots of CDs on my computers.

I want to easily choose which ones I want on my MP3 player today.

It doesn't sound like a lot to ask.