Posts by M Gale

Kodak inkjets are pretty damned good on ink.

I know a couple of people who have Kodak inkjets for precisely that reason. I guess their only worry now should be how long will they be able to get hold of refills for?

Read Error B

This is why I <3 the old BBC. It loaded in regular-sized blocks and if one of them fouled up, the counter would stop and you'd just rewind the tape a bit and replay that block. Didn't stop it taking bloody ages just to load a 747 simulator that comprised of an instrument panel, a line for the horizon, and runways represented as very long quads. The first time I witnessed Acorn 1770 DFS in action I think it took me the rest of the day to scrape my jaw off the floor. Can we have an "old fart" icon please?

Really.

An iWotsit's battery performance isn't all that amazing if you're actually using the thing. A day or so if you're the type to play Angry Birds on the bus. My Arc S seems to last about the same length of time.

I've solved the problem myself with an external USB battery, one of the Energizer XPal things. £70, 8Ah and it'll charge the tablet once from empty or the phone about three or so times. Apparently the 16-20V output will power low-juice netbooks and laptops for "up to 3 hours" and Energizer promise "two free tips per year for life" for new products, but that's probably something for Reg Hardware to cover in more detail.

More on-topic though, I'm looking at this patent and scratching my head a bit. What measure could ensure that a stolen phone+PSU could not be used by the thief to recover a password, and how is this more convenient than putting the password recovery abilities in the phone itself? Especially considering what happens if you lose the charger?

Ooh, sarcasm.

I didn't say it costs nothing to build a network; quite the opposite in fact. However per-megabyte, the running costs of those carrier class routers and switches is so insignificant as to be nothing. The cost of the maintenance crew is far more, and doesn't go up when Joe Sixpack decides to download 10 gigabytes of high def pr0n.

Nobody is saying ISPs shouldn't make money, but I do think that charging per megabyte when ther is no magical reservoir of 1s and 0s to run out and no Peak Data catastrophe looming, is a rather crappy thing to do. And yes, that's directed at the ISPs' upstream providers, too.

I don't need to know the ins and outs of the money markets to know that pay day loan companies are largely sharks. I don't need to know the cost of a router to know the cost of a binary digit. Neither do you.

MARRS?

I think they're more used to pumping up the volume than inflating LOHAN's assets.

They can't?

I guess it's okay if someone with a few billion in the bank does it then. What do you think lobby groups are for?

Anyway, it's his site and the editors are with him. If the wikimedia foundation decides on a strike, are you suggesting the govt should step in and stop them? Good luck trying that.

Whether a wiki blackout will do anything other than give a few officials a bit of a smirk as they put the stamp of approval on SOPA however, is another subject.

So google have found a malicious app and... deleted it? While the article doesn't make it clear, I assume this also means it's been remotely nuked by Google's equally notorious kill switch. The only difference I see here is that Google have brought the Mighty Foot down on some malware, whereas Apple are likely to ban you for far more petty means even if they don't outright kill all trace of your app.

People do need to stop requesting silly permissions to throw birds at pigs or unravel a loo roll though.

Yes it is.

And it's still horribly misguided crap that will never support the DRM component and serves to give Microsoft false "interoperability" bragging rights, even though they are the very antithesis of the word.

"16:9 is just a fad on a device like this."

Good luck fitting a 4:3 device in your pocket at any viewable size.

Whereas this old Tab 7 with a case+built in bluetooth keyboard works quite nicely when using RDP on the bus (Remote RDP Free Edition, by the way). Granted the case makes the pocket size requirement more gargantuan than most, but it's still vastly more portable than anything Apple have come up with so far.

Now all I need is a stylus. Windows Server 2003 is really not finger-friendly.

DNS gougers, and general snoopers

Get yourself a dictionary file, have a script start randomly stringing domain names together and looking them up at a rate that won't get you in trouble with your ISP. The gougers will soon be stuffed even if they are only paying pennies on a domain name, and casual snoopers won't know what's real and what's not.

Same approach as using TrackMeNot: Why go under the radar when you can obliterate it with chaff?

checking news.bbc.co.uk

If you throw all of your content out for free and then expect people to pay for it post-fact, you are a fool.

The BBC should put their entire site behind a paywall if they want consistency. Make it so when you buy a TV license, you can have a login name and password for everyone in your house. As above, I've suggested a compromise that would continue to pay for the BBC and yet allow people who don't want, or even like the BBC to do without it.

But like I've already said, every time someone suggests a tax-free BBC, the sound of air sucking through teeth threatens to deafen. Bloody morons.

Uni age? Seriously?

There's a fine line between protecting children and wrapping them in a cotton wool coccoon. I'd say once the little sprogs are past 16 then they are legally old enough to marry (or join the Army if you like). Saying "thou shalt not play out past 9pm" without some logical reason like "I'm up early tomorrow and so are you" would be perhaps a little repressive and may even damage somebody that age. Or maybe some parents will find out the hard way that some 17 year olds have just enough hotheadedness to defy you to make a point, and just enough stupidity to not care about the consequences. Of course you could kick them out and make them live in a hostel, but.. yeah, good parenting, that.

Anyway, what's the betting that some kids are going to be swapping their "smart" phones for cheapy Nokias that don't act like nannies?

Doesn't ask it of me..

..though I do believe they'll want you to be logged in to view a video that has been flagged as containing potentially adult content. By "potentially adult" I mean "the moral minority hath spoken" rather than "phwoar", but still, that's possibly why you were asked for account details.

This is the Internet.

You seem new here. Hi.

Yep..

..because CarrierIQ or equivalent spyware will then be embedded so deeply that you can't remove it without failing the "secure" authentication. That's if you're even allowed to run anything except Microsoft Bloatware version 9 (with future versions requiring a new motherboard).

Who me, cynical?

Charities paying fees

Forgive me if I have this wrong, but does that mean that a bunch of nefarious ne'er-do-wells could "donate" a boatload of money from illegitimate sources to, say, a banker's bank account, and they'd lose money from it?

When I feel like being really annoying...

...and someone asks me what type of English I speak, I tend to respond with "English English".

You know, just in case I'm not hated enough.

this

or anything with a piston in it. Old engine perhaps.

1 7h1|\|k 7h3 0lD u53|\|37 h4x0r5 h4v3 4 f3w TR1x

Though to be honest, that title is probably far more offensive (to the eyes at least) than a few stray fucks and bollocks.

IANAPP*

I'd guess that between the sensor, whatever components inbetween and the retransmission equipment, component tolerances might get in the way a bit.

*Particle Physicist

I think you just invented...

...Billy Connolly's Jobbie Weecha.