Posts by Karl Lattimer

waypoints work fine,

just set your start and end points on the map, then drag the line off to your waypoint... Magic :)

How does hydrogen become reactive?

I expect that's supposed to be radioactive... thats pretty simple, it gains an extra neutron (making deuterium), further increasing the mass of the exhaust, further increasing velocity :)

RE: simple diagnosis

He's on crack then?

Is that the same Honeywell as...

the honeywell mentioned here? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/29/dalek_tech_goes_mainstream/

as that would probably explain why no-one can get to their website today!

Clarify some points to the public

@Morely Dotes: You didn't even read the article did you? To quote you "They're both proprietary", erm... moonlight isn't, its open source and free, and cross platform. Read before you comment your ignorance read first, this is intended to kick the proprietary butt of microsoft.

@Anthony: to quote "I hadn't heard of this particular branch of the Mozilla project ;)", This is nothing to do with Mozilla, its from Novell's mono project of which Miguel is the shining example of how to reinvent the wheel without needing to buy the car :)

In an effort to prevent further mishaps

The buggers have whiteout-ed the sections they don't want us to read, and scanned it rather than using microsofts wonderful black out text features which can be circumvented by selecting the text.

+1 for military intelligence, which makes a change from the oxymoron nature of the term.

Da Vinci

Da Vinci could draw a perfect circle, they accused him of witchcraft after they measured it! I do doubt that she can draw a perfect circle, as it is almost impossible to draw, the reasons behind this, the human nervous system does not allow flawless dexterous control, pens will cause variance, surfaces will cause variance, given these simple points, to draw a perfect circle I would imagine it to incur some variation on a 'perfect circle'

For the record Da Vinci did it on a plaster covered wall in charcoal, quite largely using his shoulder as the pivot, which as it is the way I've ever seen a perfect circle being hand drawn.

The biggest problem I see with this is like most people that the test will be massively inaccurate, and this little girl will have to live with whatever her parents subject her to throughout her life.

The "Go on luv do it for mummy" philosophy of parenting.

Not to give credence too but...

I'm pretty chuffed that this has happened, its not a science however I have an interesting point to make about creationism and intelligent design.

It seems to me that religious education (a lesson from which I was excluded in school) teaches more about the witch doctoring aspects of religion rather than the real theology behind the big questions. It seems more to do with religious tolerance than education.

For instance, the main argument of most religions and with intelligent design is that God or some (intelligent) creator exists. This argument should be carried into the classroom, children should be given some information on the subject and debate the point in RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.

I do subscribe to the belief that the universe is too complex to have just happened, but I don't believe that some deity has done it all, much in the same way as I think that just because some watery tart throws a septa at you doesn't mean you're the king of england.

In all seriousness the points that should be raised in RE are as follows;

Was the universe created by an intelligent being, or was it just that complexity grew from the chaos that existed before?

-- It is within the realm of thermodynamics to state that entropy will grow to a maximum value where complexity begins within an enclosed system, thereby decreasing entropy within the system. It should also be noted that the level of complexity currently visible in the universe could be party to some form of governing intelligence however this doesn't mean that the existing intelligence within the universe is the same one that created it.

Is religion a method of spreading peace and harmony, or xenophobia and hate?

In the 90% of war which has begun with religious difference has religion offered any positive influence great enough to displace some of the negativity of war?

And when the RE class has finished answering those questions, we become a secular nation :)

If I'm reading this right...

"DVD products, alone or in combination with other DVD products, shall not be designed to descramble scrambled CSS data when the DVD disc containing such CSS data and associated CSS keys is not physically present in the DVD player or DVD drive (as applicable)"

Which essentially means that I can't use mencoder to rip my DVD's to the hard drive, when the original DVD isn't in the drive.

Sweet, I'll continue archiving my DVDs to stop them decaying away with time :)

So to emphasize the issue in most of james' words, "This would, if successful, oblige you to have the original disc in your DVD drive every time you watched [THE ORIGINAL DISC]".

Seems to be so full of its own leagalese that it misses the point that the disc is in the drive while copying takes place, but after which I really don't give a damn about the DVD as my derived material (not a copy, but a recoding) is exempt from this rule.

Totally laughable :)

Firefox extension!

I'd pay for it! LOL

This is actually a really sensible idea, instead of getting the phishing warning stuff in firefox when you visit a site, say it sends in about 10,000 fake card details silently behind the scenes, now if the number of respondents (idiot clickers) in other browsers is less than 1/10000*the number of respondents in firefox, then the majority of the data in their collection system is going to be bogus. Therefore they'll eventually just give up on that method of phishing.

This is similar to but most likely more effective than the LAD Vampire thing which exceeds the bandwidth of phishing sites.

The idea reminds me of that WW2 comic about poisoning the water supply of ze germans with thallium. phish poisoning eh, could it catch on?

What about us...

What about us...poor souls who have suffered post traumatic stress disorder after playing doom3!

Its like watching the exorcist with the devil on halloween that game, it has shockingly disturbed my very being!

Mind you, I still clocked it. Tremors and all :)

They didn't fail

Nobody cared!

MS have done their utmost to push vista onto consumers, including blanket adverts on TV, Dell not allowed to ship XP (u-turned), and all the rest of the hype.

The reason its failing isn't because they didn't push it, its because people just don't want it. 90% of reviews go like this;

"The install took x long on my brand new top of the line y machine, so i had time to invade mongolia, and still had time to build a pyramid"

"Once I got into the desktop, it kept bothering me about security"

"It took me ages to copy a few of my audio tracks over the network, 3+ days"

etc. etc. etc.

People don't want vista, after 5yrs, everyone just wants a mac, at least they can deliver in the same year as they promise to.

With features like this...

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

UNITY! NOW THAT ROCKS!

This made my day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60IKlyAnhtk

A movie moment springs to mind

In enemy of the state on character turns to another and says, something like "we've got teenagers downloading encryption systems that we can't break"...

Cut to Zimmerman smiling broadly, with an almost blofeld-esq pitch to his adjoined fingers in a pose not unlike praying however more Machiavellian than that ;)

In all seriousness this kind of publicity needs to be stopped, but by who? Everyone who makes it is essentially playing to what the government wants. Fear Uncertainty and Doubt about the security of our country, so we can up military spending and brutalize our citizens... Or at least thats the impression I'm getting.

There should be a new law/amendment on broadcasting, that any statement which is intended to generate fear, or is capable of generating fear within the population without credible evidence to back up the statement made within the same broadcast medium at the same time, the statement is classified as a terrorist act.

Terrorism is by definition utilising any method to instill fear and terror within a population.

If we amended broadcasting laws, it would shut Tony Blair right up, and maybe we (not me personally) wouldn't all be afraid of Muslims any more.

RE: Minimum levels

"It's a very easy answer: cost."

Don't be an idiot. Not everything must be microsoft mandated miniumum. Edubuntu does a great job and its free, and doesn't need massive hardware to work.

Schools do need a minimum of software security, this should include a recent fully patched OS on all machines, MS sell licenses to schools for 10$ a pop, WindowsXP will run on computers built for under £200 now, there are some pretty damn easy things to do to stop this kind of injustice from happening very cheaply, but it seems that "cost" comes into it as a get out clause for the upheaval of updating.

When MS pull the plug on updates to an OS, then you have two coices, upgrade to the latest MS OS and the hardware requirements too, or you change your OS to a free Linux/BSD/Solaris based system.

If the Education department of the United Fundamentalist Nutters of America (My new name for a Bush ran US) want to really enhance their computing infrastructure then why don't they approach Sun microsystems which can easily put together something ideally targetted for them. Instead of believing that God will protect them...

RE: Yeah, Paramount Comedy

I've sent numerous complaints to Paramount Comedy for the excessive loudness of their adverts. A dB for those who don't know is a decibel characterised by the smallest change in volume which is apparent to the human ear. When you're going from a cosy 8dB show to a 16dB advert, that is an exponential increase similar to that of 8bits 256 dec, to 16bits, 65,536 dec however the effect is more pronounced with sound.

This has been referred to in some quarters as the TV shouting at you while you're in the kitchen making a cup of tea.

I stopped watching ITV about 5 years ago, nothing to see here, move along... ahh channel 4.

Its time this was properly regulated, I don't want Cilit bang being screeched at me every time the adverts come on. and while we're at it, how about having all of the channels with slightly offset ad breaks so I can channel surf properly, instead of hitting 300 channels with adverts on at the same time.

Counter Strike player?

Counter Terrorists Win

Or at least they will if they manage to catch the guys

Props to Lester

His unwavering sarcasm when it comes to celebrities is what keeps bringing us back to read elreg and the satirical look some of the reporters have of the world.

Vive La Lester Haines!

BTW: Don't you think "Highly talented" was taking it a little too far?

Thanks to all you JFGI warriors

I should probably have mentioned that I was looking at a IRL paper version of the book, not simply a digital version.

Of all the online translations available, there are quite a few variations. The best ones I found still didn't really hold up to unbiased translation of the texts.

To Danny if he's still listening, I think creationism has had its day, 2000 years of it. Now a days I puzzle not on the question of "HOW", because natural selection and evolution are the "HOW", it _CAN_ be reproduced albeit not biologically the essence of the engineering is still valid in software genetic algorithms.

The real answers are in the WHY, and as far as they WHY goes my current thoughts revolve around the complexity of the universe, by laying this off as "It is Gods will" that we exist is a nonsense, and as one commenter put it, dodging the complexity and its a weak argument.

Complexity is after all the center of this argument, with 138billion interacting neurons, where data is fed in and out of the real world, coupled with around 6 billion people on earth there is a great maddening complexity of existence, the HOW is merely a medium, the WHY is the same reason any network will self organise, and more importantly WHY the second law of thermodynamics is more than just "entropy tends to increase" (creationist, bullsh!t), or "entropy in an enclosed system tends to increase" (real science), but it is more like "entropy in an enclosed system will increase until a maximum point, whereupon the rules of the system, coupled with minor variations will allow a complex system to form" (small world theory + science).

I started off by pointing out the modern day reproductions of the bible miss out some very large parts, one of which, the book of Enoch is written to give you knowledge not take it from you, there are many other parts of the bible like this, for the record I'd also like to point out that Jesus was just a man, as written in Romans "Born the seed of David" he was the literal king of the Jews, and people wonder why they pinned him to a cross ;)

K,

His children heard him

Muttering down with big brother in his sleep, and turned him in to the thought police...

Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?

Oh please

The SUN ultra workstations have better graphics cards, more memory and are generally faster, AND cheaper!

Why buy second best?

There was a time...

Where microsoft were happy about piracy, thems were the OS/2 days where microsoft couldn't beat them on price AND features, so the beat them on one simple thing, enabling piracy, in fact, actively encouraging it in some ways.

The reason microsoft got ticked off enough in the first place to crack down on copyright infringement was that they saw themselves actually loosing market share, in a big way. Entire governments moving over to Ubuntu or redhat making microsoft consider capitalising on the piracy market they originally made flourish.

They did this with fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) fud is microsofts way of making people remember they are in control, but what we have to remember is that all other operating systems have much more civil EULAs, in point of fact take MacOSX, when you buy a boxed copy of it, there is no serial number and no individual product identification, moreover, it comes with 4 licenses for a single copy. This is apples 'family' license concept, which basically means, people will buy the new OSX at 90£ if they can use it on all of their families macs, and people do. Its not one copy per machine, it doesn't cost 400£ and apple have really out done themselves with such a social licensing model. Of course, they do lock down other packages (final cut as one example) but iLife, iWork, OSX and a bunch of other products actually come with the 4 'software vouchers' which are the equivalent of licenses.

On the other hand, ubuntu is free, share it PLEASE SHARE IT! :)

It amazes me...

That the stupidity of some women still allows them to follow a long forgotten instinct, and in fact accentuate that instinct by making it the sole focus of their existence.

I am of course talking about gathering. In the old, old, old days, women did the gathering, you know berries, spuds, and alike, while the men did the hunting deer, antelope, you get the idea.

So although I'm not criticising women for following the instinct of gathering, and only certain women have lost the plot, I am certainly going to criticise them for GATHERING SHOES!!!!

The latent instinct now carries no necessity in our existence, men still do to some degree hunt, this is illustrated in the shopping habits of the earth bound male, a quick in and out, got what I wanted, end of.

No need to browse.

No need to seek the opinion, of the over opinionated shop attendant

It seems it has become socially acceptable in modern years for women to rack up credit card bills equal to the US national debt on shoes, handbags etc... then get it written off with an IVA stating "I was too stupid to stop spending".

What a world we live in.

We could of course send them all hops picking (could become a punishment for those women with shoe related IVA's), they actually get the exact same satisfaction out of picking fruit as they do picking shoes, however, hops is a far more important resource than shoes...

Firewall?

The concept of a firewall (something I am very familiar with having designed more than one) is to block, throttle, and allow traffic appropriately. The firewall generally sits between the internet and the computers. Why then would an SQL server be allowed to sit within a DMZ thereby allowing the slammer worm to attack, looks to me that the defense contracts being sold to the lowest bidder is starting to have its problems. Maybe they should stop using microsoft server systems and use something that actually works, doesn't disrupt elections and isn't the fat jaba the hut of a target windows is to virus writers.

How can he be bailed

How can he be bailed for an offense he hasn't committed, which is the result of police stupidity regarding a plastic gun attached to a mannequin.

You can't prosecute someone for firearms offenses for having a plastic gun, or a cap gun so why has this guy been bailed? He should have been released without charge, with an apology.

So bandwagons eh

We've got the "slight reflection" bandwagon, the "i" bandwagon, the "web 2.0" bandwagon, AND the "re-branding to better reach our customers" bandwagon.

You really should limit your articles to one bandwagon per company

Easy fix

When MS come knock knock knocking at your door, as they apparently have and will according to this thorough article http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/

Then all you've got to do is take out your check book. Fill out the usual details and write a nice fat 0 in the amount payable field.

"Thats right, Mr Ballmer, we didn't pay for the software perse, we paid for the service those wonderful engineers do making the software cuddly and installable. How many patents does that infringe on, erm... none you say. Oh well Mr Ballmer, try selling more copies of Vista, I'm sure public confidence in it will grow after service pack 3"

Anti-competitive?

Walk into a PC 'planet' shop, they only have one OS on sale for PC (exclude intel macs because osx doesn't run on PC) and charging £350 for the only product on the shelves (previous windows versions are being removed) is not simply anti-competitive it is extortion.

I'd love to know what would happen if PC 'planet' got a pack of free CDs from Ubuntu ShipIt and put them on the shelf right by vista with a big sign saying, "Free Operating System", and a price tag of £0...

That would be a little competition...

Think vista would sell to the demographic of people who simply don't care what OS they have as long as it works?

Think microsoft would continue to charge £350 for it when it is actually being displayed adjacent to a competitor?

The competition commission should look at forcing software stockists to do this in order to improve competition in the market place.

All I have to say is...

I've got your number ;P

Missing something

Erm intel chipsets are missing the GL_ARB_Fragment extension so I don't see why anyone would be wanting to use vista on intel. I have the same problem with my macbook and beryl, I just can't get the hardware to do the blurfx so that means the aero glass effects are out for vista too. Well unless they use a horrific GLSL software rendering technique, which I've seen in some examples but this is extremely heavy on CPU and the quality just isn't there.

I think nvidia will win out for vista and linux in the short term, unless intel come up with that brand spanking new graphics chip they've been hinting. Intel on Linux is still cool though, open source drivers and all ;)

Slap the previous poster, he's a moron

Firstly, Graphic files, text files, everything on a computer is binary, regardless of the method of encoding used.

Any buffer which is incorrectly terminated or allows for unspecified length copying larger than the size of the actual buffer can overflow into the stack. Similarly with much larger binary chunks (eggs) the heap can spew all over the stack, and point the EIP (extended instruction pointer) into a point inside of the buffer called a nop sled. The nop sled will then run a bunch of 0x90's all the way down to a shell code (the final and most important part of an egg), this in turn will execute and execute it will arbitrary code.

All the programmer needs to do is accidentally allow for something larger than the allocated memory slot to be copied into that block, an easy mistake, originally discovered as a result of stray strcpy commands copying service instructions for eg. apache into other buffers, however it has been demonstrated on much more rudimentary routines such as memcpy.

The standard fix for this kind of bug is strncpy or using sizeof and truncation methods to prevent a buffer larger than the target memory slot from being copied.

Image files are not immune, you are a moron.

Peace out reg.

Hardly wii style

Sounds more like the accelerometers and tilt sensors in the MacBook/Powerbook. The Wii has a full 6 degree sense which provides feedback of pitch, roll, yaw and acceleration for each, as well as, and this is the crucial bit which makes it differ...

The wiimote also has a pair of fresneltastic IR sensors in the remote which pick up the direction the wiimote is pointing in at the screen (the sensor bar has the IR transmitters in it in case you're wondering what kind of hogwash I'm on about) giving you that ever so cool mouse style pointer which doesn't require moving a joystick back and forth until you manage to get the cursor to stop on the CORRECT button!

I can't see dear old aunt sally who has parkinsons being able to achieve any great deal of control, frail old men and women without parkinsons would also have trouble, lifting and maneuvering the device between their bifocals (poor visible angle/glare on the screen) and their weak wrists (how much does it weigh?).

If they were given to engineers, we all know which one handed activity they'd be using an internet tablet for ;)

And for all I'm not gonna jump on this band wagon. I've been picking up windows machines and shaking them for years. It would be nice if it came with a free 3 finger salute.

So let me get this straight...

Apparently, I need to pay for an opt-in ID card in order to vote in an opt-in election which is supposed to be a secret ballot, where I... erm what? Insert my ID card with all of my personal details on it into a machine which can be easily cracked (diebold??! need i say more) which then lets me enter a vote onto a touch screen which could have been pressed so many times the calibration is so out of whack that I end up using my ID card to vote for the party which supports id cards rather than the one which will abolish them.

I'm confused, when did we loose the right to free and fair elections?

"I just don't see the point in voting, if the choice is between giant douche and a turd sandwich" - Stan Marsh, Southpark

There is an easier way

Catgut - http://www.juststrings.com/lab-hg600.html

The specrum names weren't anything to do with the year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80

They were Zilog processor revisions...

Remember the hamster

Fortunately we are only starting to feel the effects of when nostradamus ate my hamster, Jim and John are currently supping a quiet pint in the flying swan and hitlers time machine has been disposed of accordingly.

Brentford (the unofficial centre of the universe don't you know) has cheered up, as now Jim and John are back from their adventure they bought a round. Neville would tell you its a first, but he's only there part time.

Its a popular distro...

Ubuntu are of course aware of the problems, its simply a load matter. There servers can't handle it, unfortunately its stopping people from getting the amazing new OS in all its glory (i tried it, it's grrrrrreat)

There is now a mirror list up at the main site as they've shifted things around by the look of things to try and cool off the release.

Fiesty is available here http://www.ubuntu.com/ (USE A MIRROR)

Or get the bittorrent http://www.bittorrent.com/users/zizazat/torrents/Ubuntu_7.04__Feisty_Fawn__Beta/6e15fbbaa0fc1024886c37da68010f7f930663bc

and update it to using the builtin package updater.

Wouldn't be so bad if...

Every time the fob was used, for a login, it generated a different number, rather than having the number valid for any number of logins until expiry.

Duh!

Re: Crime of Passion

"Because it is only through guns that tyrants are kept in check."

You're an idiot

"Maybe if we closed our borders and kicked everyone the hell out that wasn't born here, we could get back to the "You leave us alone, We'll leave you alone" attitude from our early history"

You're a fascist, WASP American KKK, NRA Supporting nut case, you are the reason you attack the rest of the world, psycho christian pro-gun nut jobs that put Bush in power.

In the words of Jake Burns in the song, "Roots, Radics, Rockers and Reggae"

"Throw away the guns and the war is all gone."

Restrict access to weapons, shut down the arms trade, and people will stop killing each other. Its not difficult to understand, but your bloody constitution and right to bare arms which is a throw back to when the english kept kicking your arse is now irrelevant. Update your constitution, that is what amendments are for.

FYI, THE CONSTITUTION OF THE US ISN'T SET IN STONE!!! IT CAN BE CHANGED!

Beware, critical mass is about to be observed

Ballmer must be going nuclear at this, chair chucking, thats nothing! when the big guy goes green nothing can stop his furniture wrath...

Who the f**k uses windows live anyway? Google == Multivac ;) This level of hypocrisy is rarely found outside of religious institutions.

gplviolation?

Will they insist on violating the gpl in order to prevent us linux hacks from using their hardware?

Looks like gplviolations.org will have to step in again if they don't give us a way to at the very least reverse engineer the client portion of their software.

When will the reg actually get it right!

OK, where did the reg get the idea that nokia were using safari?

http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/S60browser/

http://webkit.org/

which might LOOK a little like safari was that the extent of your research?

Doesn't look like safari to me, it looks like the already open source WebKit from KDE.

This framework has nothing more to do with apple than the Deepfish browser. This is the second time that the reg have mis-represented WebKit as belonging to apple, it is FREE as in freedom, open source technology attributed to the KDE project. That is why it isn't using the ASPL license, and is instead built on BSD/LGPL.

You need to start getting your facts straight on this, safari is nothing more than a browser shell built on top of WebKit, they rarely if ever send patches back to the originating project, and when they do they are monolithic and never mung into head properly.

Posting stories like this takes the glory away from KDE, of which they are due for webkit.

The Smug is too large

For fans of southpark...

The Smug cloud over los angeles will collide with the smug cloud from US Senator Barbara Boxer's recent lightbulb speech. All the smug created by those prius' and lightbulbs is too much, there is gonna be a big smug storm...

what about o

If they are too dumb to use the A-Z you can assure yourself they're smart enough to spell too with two o's

Is it just powerpoint

Or does the same apply to Keynote?

My keynote presentations are full of the glamor which is apple, small bursts of text, some pretty pictures and me speaking the IMPORTANT information rather than having it onscreen, if it was all onscreen what would be the point in me being there, I could get a 5 year old to read off a screen, I'm there to show my perspective, understanding and most of all, fill in the gaps to the points which I have highlighted...

Braindead windows monkeys don't know the first thing about public speaking, ask an expert or even better ask jono bacon how to give good presentations.

Where's all the ram gone?

So where exactly do the system resources that are required to run vista go?

In linux I use about 27Mb to run beryl, my composite manager that runs all of the visual effects I want, and seriously kicks aero glass out of the window(s). As a result of the composite manager taking over control of the visuals, I use far less ram on Xorg.

My file system indexing agent beagle, uses 18Mb ram.

I don't need UAC because its UNIX, so its already got all that stuff like, erm, builtin (since what like the 70s?) so to speak...

So my question still remains, how is it that vista requires so much in the way of system resources to run?

Me thinks they have inefficient memory slicing, do nothing loops etc... Typical microsoft, I mean, what do they do, is it commission based programming, you get paid by the line, more lines of code, more money?

Filed under bloatware... Doesn't provide anything of worth, slows down your computer, leaves fewer resources free for running applications... Complete worthless crap...

PS: Compiz (another composite manager), beagle etc... essentially everything in vista, runs on SLED from Novell, I had this out performing XP by a helluva way on a 2Ghz Celeron from 4 years ago, and 256Mb ram and a crappy mobile radeon, in an old dell laptop. It was like using a brand new machine!

What a difference a good OS can make ;)

Four words spring to mind

South

Park

Barbara

Streisand

Megastreisand, Megastreisand ... I'm sure you remember the tune...