Posts by Karl Lattimer

Where do I sign up?

I hear all the rhetoric about free speech and all, but seriously there is a limit, this is a money grabbing cult and I want to sign up to this campaign of destroying them

/me tottles off to a payphone to harass scientologists.

so...

the lines of mums with one kid in the car are going to come to an end?

but mums love their 4x4s they make them feel so safe and look so menacing!

occam's razor actually

"All things being equal often the simplest solution is the correct one"

Patent blocking

Surely you can't file a patent for something which is the only sensible way of doing something... wouldn't that be monopolistic behavior?

Simple solution...

never give your credentials out to anyone who calls you... I have had a number of arguments with my bank (natwest) over them calling me, and asking me to "confirm" my birthdate, address, and ACCOUNT DETAILS! I don't have caller ID, I don't have it linked up to a database of genuine callers. Anyone, even my bank asking me details like that will get shouted at... I had an argument for nearly an hour with some mindless tart who couldn't understand that calling me up and asking me for my details was insecure.

The M41-A was nothing

In comparison to the predator... shoulder cannon, spear, frisbee and forky knives in the arm thing.

Still, lightsabre is my no.1

at least...

someone told them it was a daft idea... I've been saying it for years.

@Albert Steinstra

"Windows Vista with IE7 works fine for me on my main PC, even without virus scanner."

LOL. You're an idiot...

It might look like its working fine, but in the background there lurks malware. IE7 isn't secure, didn't you know.

after reading comments I'd like to garner peoples opinion on this...

I am part of a facebook group we call "Evil geniuses for a better tomorrow", we set this up as a larf, we added pics of sharks with frickin laser beams, atom bomb plans and various other odds and sods. Now here's the strange thing, we have an invisible member! Don't believe me, check the group out, there's always <visible members>+1 in the number of members list.

Who is this invisible member, I didn't even know you could do that with facebook, is this monitoring?

simple solution

make people drink proper drinks and ban alcopops and alike. These things are full of mind bending E numbers and sugars. They mess with your mind on a far higher level than, say ale or whisk(e)y.

Bastard judges

Imposing the rule of law like this! They should be round up and shot, or detained like Pakistan or Zimbabwe (as mentioned in the first post)...

Tsk Tsk, fair and free judiciary, they're a joke, they never side with the government...

scientists change their research

Its been shown in recent years especially that the government policy is influencing scientists research. For instance I heard of one research team that was investigating the decline in the mating habits of some rodent, they were denied funding until they tacked on "as a result of climate change".

The scientists will do whatever they can to get funding, the government have an agenda for climate change which has more to do with the energy crisis in terms of russias control of gas and the middle east control of oil than it has to do with the changing climate.

This is why a government of an insignificant CO2 contributer like the UK is pushing the climate change agenda to the public, and the public are lapping it up.

For the record, the only reason they want you to save energy is to try and prevent a third world war, it has nothing to do with the climate which is obviously changing.

Also the scientists who have done research which proves climate change is part of a longer cycle of earth changes and climate patterns have been brushed under the carpet, and those who entertain the governments "save the world" policy are getting increased funding.

I agree, the government needs to stop setting the scientific agenda and instead start listening to the facts which aren't skewed through the availability of research grants.

Anyone else thinking about the RIP bill

Doesn't the RIP Bill in the UK require you to incriminate yourself in such cases?

Providing encryption keys on request or face upto 2 years jail time? If that's the case then the scenario mentioned by David Wiernicki is possibly in the UK.

scientists?

How can these people be called scientists?

As mentioned by David Greaves they could not quantify their results effectively, and the stats are questionable.

I'd like to see clear quantifiable evidence, where humans get it right 100% of the time (at this point the porcine flying league should be well into its 3rd year) as a benchmark.

Anyone remember...

Archimedes Plutonium had a theory about the blackest of black boxes... Now we have something to test his craziness with :P

@Devon Buchanan

They were talking about desktop search, not web search in firefox... With ubuntu you now use tracker, other linux's support tracker and beagle, the two are pretty interchangeable.

WRT Apple tying in these things... They don't!

Sure the email client uses webkit, and so does safari, you can remove safari and you still have webkit! If you remove IE, trident/mshtml is gone and windows craps out.

Desktop search via Spotlight on a mac isn't heavily integrated or tied in to other parts of the platform in ways that make it impossible to remove, whereas desktop search on vista I am led to believe is.

Its not about them "Bundling" their own apps, its about making it so the platform can't exist without them, its kinda like Xv vs DirectShow, directshow and WMP are heavily tied together, and without directshow you can't access video acceleration adequately, with Xv any app can use it, its part of the X11 API.

After they tie together apps, they then skew them off in a direction which makes it difficult if not impossible for a competitor to reach the same kind of feature parity. This is why microsoft are anti-competitive in software, they are also anti-competitive in business but that's a different matter entirely, and one far more difficult to prosecute without willing victims of microsofts underhanded tactics coming forward.

hang on a minute

everyone's banging on about privacy but its OK for our government to GIVE this info to the US (as in its US against the world), without our prior written consent... In a country where we've already got people kicking up a fuss over the DNA database?

I'm with the virus writers idea, come on lads, put a stop to it! You used to fight for all that was free and just!

RE: Linux users should accept that security is also problem on this platform

as a massive linux advocate I have to agree 100% here, there's no excuse for shoddy sys admin skills. Good firewalls, package updates and the regular round of sysadmin paranoia that someone is out to hack them are all good doses for us to take.

I've had countless old mambo installations hijacked by worms, running on linux, and apache. They are generally easy enough to remove because of the quarantine aspect of proper user separation (the apache user can't write to /bin). However this doesn't at all mean that the server wouldn't be trying to hijack other machines or visitors machines. The intrinsic security of Linux can only be broken by bad sys admins and all too regularly it is.

Upscale?

Hmm, even using a bilinear interpolation DVD's don't upscale well from 576 lines to 1080, its almost double the resolution! Of course, there are plenty of people out there who simply won't know the difference and will walk out of currys thinking all their DVDs are now HDDVDs...

I'm sure the sale of goods act will have something to say about this...

sounds like...

an epoch bug. I imagine that they're using timestamps for this, the first timestamp is 0, the second is 86399, obviously the second one is calculated from the first with the addition of the 86400 - 1.

What idiots!

AVP: the game

anyone who played Aliens vs. Predator will fondly remember the triumph to be had when playing a death match as the horrifically handicapped marine only to stumble across ALICE...

ALICE was a modified powerloader, equip with many handy tools to even out balance between the invisible predator or the nails aliens.

First for everything

"The final release date is based on quality"... whaddya know, if he's telling the truth it might actually work, or be here in 2009/10/11/<enter year of your choice>...

I still won't use it though, as a matter of principle

RE: @amanfrommars

Yay cameo!

Get to it el-reg!

PS. Why has the amanfrommars icon gone?

Of course this has nothing to do with...

Jeff Hans research http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/

he did pretty much invent the multi-touch idea and technology as it stands today, surface is just a rip off of that

doesn't this mean that...

Microsoft's exclusivity deals with companies like dell you know the "satisfy demand by don't create demand" strategy is also illegal or at least questionable? And of course microsoft making incentives to schools to be microsoft only camps, and offering licenses almost free...

bloody EFF hippies

I mean, I support some of the cause they stand for, but to say prosecuting someone who has bullied someone else into suicide will set a dangerous president is just EFF FUD.

Broadcom should bugger off unless...

Broadcom should bugger off unless they can provide Linux drivers for all of their hardware, their wifi and some bluetooth products simply take the piss! They don't release tech specs and they won't release decent drivers.

For instance http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/

@Booze is the way - bloody hippies again!

there's another misconception the hippies put out...

there is not enough actual land on the planet earth to create enough bioethanol to fuel all of the worlds cars, in fact there's probably enough land to fuel about 20% of existing cars, then you've got the problem of... WHERE DO WE GROW THE FOOD WE EAT!

That and don't forget that palm oil production creates more carbon waste than a coal power station... and we'd end up chopping down the entire rain forest to try and accommodate production.

EDS need to get out of uk.gov

Has EDS had a successful, on budget, launched project?

They've managed to turn the "Fast, Cheap, Good - pick any two" mantra into "Fast, Cheap, Good - you must be joking we're EDS, at least our quotes are low"

looks like

something out of enemy territory quake wars!

RE: A new green energy source?

Soylent energy IS PEOPLE!

Had to be done!

American?

American? I didn't know that was a language, but there again, I always thought that the language spoken by the Chinese was mandarin...

Hmm, incompatible?

"Elliott goes further, saying that significant amounts of renewables and nuclear cannot coexist on the same power grid, owing to "operational conflicts"."

So electricity from nuclear sources is incompatible with electricity from renewable sources... Strange that, I thought there was only one kind of electron.

erm binary yahoo widgets?

I seem to remember a talk at Guadec 2007 where Stuart Langridge stated yahoo! widgets started using a binary format from version 3 or 4...

So I take it they're now reversing that decision?

so when will the Olmecs get the credit?

According to the long count calendar the solar maxima happens in 2012... Which by pure co-incidence is the same year they believed the world would come to an end... again...

I will start selling Tin Foil hats on ebay, branded with "I told you we're all gonna die" written on them from 2011, unfortunately no pre-orders will be taken.

If^2

If the education system put more emphasis on moral and social guidance of children than technology for the sake of technology (e.g. monitoring a childs education?!?!WTF!), the upshot factor of this would be;

A generally more respectful society

Better attendance to class

Better attentiveness in class

Etc...

The government did themselves a disservice by pulling 'God' from schools in every way other than studying the dogma of 'all' religions in 'Religious Education', the whole Christianity thing is a cheap and effective way of teaching morality to children (I still don't agree with a huge amount of it but hey! its cheap!)... Now they're combating the upshot of pulling God with the ASBO and spending a lot of money on pointless technology projects which are intended to provide a more inclusive classroom?

Go back to the drawing board guv, and try and come up with an educational plan which doesn't make teenage boys compete at who is the most stupid!

Did they read the reg's other articles today

@abigsmurf: "Windows is so incredibly unlikely to corrupt a file"

Let me direct your eyes to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/31/home_server/

unlikely huh?

Missing entries

I hope;

* America looses the international domination of technology they've had in recent years as a result of the coming economic depression

* The UK actually starts to invest in science & technology rather than just talking about it

I suspect that;

* America will prop up their economy with more wars led by economic and materialistic needs

* Microsoft will push the release dates back of their service packs and still release them before they're ready for market

* Apple's desktop share will increase

* Linux desktop share will increase

* Microsoft's market share on desktop OS's will decrease

* Someone will invite ballmer to an empty conference room full of neat rows of chairs and announce to him the bad news that microsoft is no longer on top followed by "The furniture is already paid for, knock yourself out"

ahem?

"Readers and scanners for two-dimensional barcodes were still comparatively expensive"

My phone does it (n95)! It ain't difficult to do this with a cheap digital camera and a little knowledge about how barcodes work!

People shouldn't give these things implicit trust... Regardless of the imaginary barriers.

lol

They call this a server?

fuel vs. engine efficiency

It is true that hydrocarbon fuels contain a lot more energy than you can get into a battery. However electric motors are more or less 100% efficient... I'd like to see that kind of efficiency in a petrol engine... That would give you something like 100mpg!

Hmm I wonder...

Does it work with unplug in mozilla to get the source flv files (drm free!)?

hehehehe