Posts by Vic

Re: Sad

> The uploading (distribution) turns it from a civil offence to a criminal offence.

Does anyone have a link to a decent translatoin of Finnish copyright law?

Because the above is most certainly untrue in the UK...

Vic.

Re: Mint is great

> make it ext4 and you can easily resize it anyway

ext3 is just as easy to resize...

I'm coming to the position that ext4 should be avoided on laptops if at all possible. Laptops have a tendency to shut down uncleanly - particularly if they're as crap as mine are. ext3 can take a long time to clean up afterwards, but I've had quite a few situations on ext4 where fsck cannot sort the disk out. I've been dropped to a command prompt on many occasions, and I've lost quite a bit of data. Neither of these is a good situation, and for the novice user, an enforced CLI is a show-stopper.

ext4 is much quicker than ext3, but if there's a chance of losing power, I really wouldn't recommend it.

Vic.

Re: As a sailor, that's hardly practical.

> I suspect that the place in Namibia where they tested it was similar

The point about the Namibia testing range is that the angles are right - the wind comes onshore at the irght angle to the shoreline, and the seafloor slope is such that the waves are tolerable.

Disclosure: I used to sit and chat to Malcolm about this on the ferry over to the IoW when they were testing the first boat.

Vic.

Re: So...

> It means that your company internal emails stay private, even when piped through to company mobiles

So do mine, and without a BES.

ConnectBot is rather wonderful :-)

Vic.

Re: Patten on the run? - a pedant explains

> the only possible meaning of the sentence is that Patten wasn't available.

Not so.

You're interpreting "he" as a reflexive. That is one possible meaning, or else it could refer to someone referred to in the previous sentence - namely "the peer", meaning Lord Hall.

> Back to writing school for you Fiveash

Back to reading school for you, Millar.

Vic.

> So they MUST be relevant.

No, they *may* be relevant.

The Judge has already said he's not asure about what Samsung are doing here, but he's being scrupulously fair; the rules of discovery permit Samsung's lawyers to know the content of this deal, and he's damn well going to let them know, even if he doesn't think it will help.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. None of us know, because we haven't seen the HTC agreement. If it does contain what Samsung thinks it does, it will scupper Apple's "irreparable harm" claim. But it might not contain any such thing.

Vic.

Re: Brainwashing

> it's just a shortcut to PayDayLoans/CashConverters...

Indeed. That's where I bought my Mac Mini.

I went in and offered them a price *far* below the ticket price in the window. I was most surprised when they accepted...

Vic.

Re: The world of retail is changing

> The future for electrical retailers is a hybrid of in town small retail stores

The future for electrical retailers is entirely on-line. Their former premises will be taken over by collection depots, who receive your on-line orders on your behalf and let you pick them up at a convenient time...

Vic.

Re: Or it could do like VMware Workstation/Player does

> the same build process can be initiated to build the module again for the updated kernel

Yes, that's the dkms route.

It requires dkms to be run on boot, it requires the kernel-dev stuff to be installed, it needs a compiler available.

It's still a very long shot. I don't see this as a significant threat.

Vic.

Re: Microsoft V. Google is like

> But some method patents are valid.

I don't see many fitting into that category...

> A great deal or work, imagination and cleverness can go into working out a new way of compressing images

It can do, but most of that is grunt work; working out how to tune well-known algorithms to fit the sort of sequence you are expecting.

> MPEG-4 has methods by which it checks forward and backward to reference frames

So do most video compressors. That was old hat when I got into the industry. Even if it were patentable originally, that ship has long sailed.

> It's a lot of work.

It is[1]. But it's not a lot of *invention*. And patents cover invention, not sweat-of-the-brow labour.

> Should the people who worked hard on developing those solutions not be recompensed

They *are* being recompensed; the purpose of these standards is to sell encoding and decoding equipment. Standards are required to ensure that the market for such devices exists.

If I lay a road, that's a lot of work. Should you have to pay me for every journey you make over that road?

Vic.

[1] I did a fair amount of that work...

Re: The Internet is evil and must be punished

> there's plenty of evidence that we can trust those in authority to be lily-white

Precisely.

That nice old gent in the big chair, for example. You know the one - he "fixes" it so kids can do things they've always wanted to do...

Vic.

Re: Note that *accuracy* prized over speed

>> This is a a *true* decimal computer with counting by 10's built (literally) into the hardware.

> Still true of modern PCs and Macs!

No, not true of modern computers.

> Some 8-bit BCD instructions are buried in the 8086 instruction layer

Yes, but those are BCD instructions. The machine itself is a binary computer.

The machine in question is a *decimal* computer. Each storage node stores decimal values, not binary ones.

Vic.

Re: Nobody buys an OS for Xmas

> people don't rush out to buy an OS

My friend's husband bought her a copy of Windows 7 one Christmas.

He's now her ex-husband. But I'm sure that's unrelated.

Vic.

Re: @Ben Tasker

> Not really a Non-Windows person

Shame, given your username here.

There's a rather nice Forth compiler available for the Linux platform.

Disclosure: I wrote some of it :-)

Vic.

Re: Im actually kind of against charities

> At least with a charity we can make our own choices.

How about discretionary taxes?

You pay an amount according to your earnings, but you get to decide where some of it goes...

Vic.

Re: For Real

> pragmatism on her part would suggest she simply take out the olives as she ate.

That might not be enough.

If she has some sort of reaction to the olives, the food might still make her ill even after removing the olives[1].

I have an explosive reaction to mushrooms. It's painful having to explain to waiters that I'm not going to accept this meal that they assured me was free from mushrooms, and I'm not going to pick them out as that will still make me ill.

Vic.

[1] If she does have a reaction to olives, it would make it a rather silly thing to do to go to a mediterranean-style restaurant. Nonetheless, that doesn't excuse the restaurateur's behaviour...

Re: Not much of a sale

> Gold plated ends create input/output impedence problems

Errr - why?

Vic.

Re: Multinational profits made in a country should be taxed in that country.

> look at how much they sell in the UK, minus what it costs to make that revenue

And that's exactly where the loophole exists.

What it "costs" to make that revenue includes things like the price of their *unique* ingredients, plus licencing fees to the global brand owner. The difference between what they take and what they pay is negligible - hence the tiny tax bill.

What's needed is to find a way to prevent excessive transfer pricing - but that's not a simple thing when you've got multiple legal entities trading across international borders, and it's even harder when some of the countries involved will bring significant political muscle to bear to protect "their" companies...

Vic.

Re: GUIs are supposed to be for newbies.

> mouse pointer and icons were not – and never have been – intended as the primary interface

So - we're holding it wrong, then?

Vic.

Re: Exactly where is the BCC information stripped out?

> Is there any real secrecy in the BCC?

Yes, if you have physical control over your own kit.

> At what point in the process is the BCC information stripped out

At the oubound MTA.

> I wouldn't be a bit surprised to find out that the sysop of any server included in the

> list of addresses also has transient access to the complete list.

You'd be wrong.

> Secret? Email? Dream on, MacDuff

Email is as secure as you want it to be. For most people, that means "insecure", because securing it takes a little bit of work, and thinking is hard, apparently.

Vic.

Re: Call me Stupid?

> wouldn't it be possible to travel faster-than-light through the same area through which they are using gravitational lensing?

No.

Vic.

Re: wtf

> "ARMOURS stands for, believe it or not, Antenna and fRont-end Modules for pUblic Regulated Service."

Well.

There We Are, Then.

Vic.

Re: A Current Wwworldly Problem for Wiser Sage Solution

> someone who tries to highlight an uncomfortable truth is insinuated as being schizo

Not "Someone". AMFM...

Vic.

Re: Of course they won't

> Quite possibly. I don't know the case

You don't know the SCO story?

Do go read up a bit.

> i think it quite likely IBM's strategy as it unfolded lead them to greater cost than was expected

I think you'd be wrong. IBM knew what it was doing. It stood its ground for very good reason.

> If IBM knew the cost of litigation would be higher than buying, don't you think they would have bought ?

No. IBM always knew the cost of litigation would be higher than buying. IBM had a point to prove, and it did so.

Vic.

Re: "[a] citizen from Athens... would be among the...most intellectually alive of our colleagues..."

> And tell them about atoms, molecules, penicillin, internal combustion, etc...

...And be branded a nutjob who needs locking up for his own good?

Vic.

Re: I remember...

> storing the complete collection from Prog 1 to the present is taking up a lot of shelf space..

I can help you with that... :-)

Vic.

Re: I don't buy it

> You need multiple antennas to support multiple bands

That's not *necessarily* true.

What we did years ago was to build trapped aerials - you insert one or more pairs of parallel tuned circuits into a longer antenna. At the resonant frequency of the trap, the outer bits are effectively disconnected (because the circuit goes high-Z), leaving you with the shorter antenna only.

Whether you could build a trapped antenna for a mobile phone is a question I'll leave to others with more recent experience...

Vic.

Re: @Scott

> I did try soft contact lenses many years ago

Contact lenses have changed quite a bit in recent years. I wear mine for a month at a time, and I rarely even remember they're there.

Once a month, I have to take them out. I wake up blind the next morning, and wonder what's gone wrong (for a couple of seconds, anyawy).

Vic.

Re: Oracle's RHEL update service?

> in every religious manner, they are stealing RedHats livelihood.

Please go and read the GPL before you start spouting off such tosh.

Vic.

Re: More options to berate apple please, many more.

> or is that the bizarro 'your foster parents' one nowadays?

Yep. Say the phrase in an Austrian accent, and it makes a bit more sense...

Vic.

Re: Interesting.

> I can't see any basis for their comments apart from animosity towards AO.

Whilst such animosity is often warranted, I don't think yuo have to look that far in this case.

When someone seems to be defending the indefensible, it's often a good idea to look at his posting history. If substantially all those posts are in support of (or in opposition to) one company or other, it's a fair bet you've got a poster with an axe to grind.

It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide whether or not any particular poster has been paid to grind said axe...

Vic.

Re: It's not a patent, ya dildos

> it's a DESIGN patent.

It still needs to be of an appropriate subject matter. See http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1620156 above. "Clearly a design that simulates a well-known or naturally occurring object or person is not original as required by the statute. "

> About 99% of the above commentards ... need to educate themselves

Do you imagine yourself in the 1% that doesn't? I might have some bad news for you...

Vic.

Re: Who wrote the laws

>> write better laws

> I suspect that wil be an outcome.

It would be a first...

Vic.