Posts by James Pickett

42 mice, surely?

If those are pan-dimensional white mice, as encountered by Arthur Dent, then I'm impressed. If they're ordinary house mice, then Roadrunner is about as clever as my cat...

(PH, as I'd like to know where she features on this scale)

Looks real enough to me

Anyone going to that amount of trouble to stage it would have taken better quality videos.

This might be useful in mitigation:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/18/computer_chucking_german/

Alternative

Some friends of mine, who really were Elvis fans, called their daughter Elvisa. She seems pretty happy with it...

Chinooks

The article implies that the HC2 version is OK. IIRC, that was the one that crashed in Mull, taking out a fair chunk of our military intelligence (assuming their is such a thing) and a pair of pilots who had resisted the mission because the chopper's engine control system (FADEC) was so unreliable. Naturally, the MOD couldn't bring themselves to corroborate this, so they blamed the dead pilots instead.

I daresay they work better in conditions where the pilots can actually see where they're going, but it seems odd that the MOD should carry on shopping for more...

Barrel scraping

Those Californian lawyers are sharp, though. How long has Google been around now..?

@MS Tax

"if you want a decent size hdd, you gotta pay for Windows!"

I think you'll find it's the other way round. If you ain't got Windoze, you don't need an HD (and these machines shouldn't have one). Eff off Ballmer - this is the future and you're not included.

Oh yeah?

"working with more than 20 OEMs"

Twisting their arms and getting them in a headlock, more likely. I can see them giving away XP rather than let Linux in. If only the OEMs realised that the Beast needs them more than they need XP...

Necessary?

I should have thought that straight Polish (e.g. Wojciech Mazurczyk and Krzysztof Szczypiorski) was enough encoding for the CIA, who only acquired Arabic speakers relatively recently. The sheer volume of data travelling around the globe must be a pretty effective mask already...

Good for Yang

Nice to see a CEO with some backbone. Shareholders are notoriously fickle - look how many mutual building societies in the UK were turned into (now failing) banks, all because the original deal included a bribe/windfall for account holders.

About time

Their domestic leaflets (as in Sunday supplements) also show ex VAT and delivery prices, so the 'business only' excuse doesn't hold up. I've always thought their carriage prices ridiculous - saying that it's the same for all systems just makes it look even sillier for laptops, which can easily be sent, insured, for about £12.

And where are the Linux versions they promised?

This will be..

..the same gorgeous, pouting Ms.Smith who recently deported a man whose wife was accidentally killed when our NHS put spinal anaesthetic in her arm (thus removing his need to be here).

What is it about the Home Office that turns reasonable (ish) politicians into complete bastards, every time?

Advice

"continue to wonder what that advice might have been"

Shades of the Attorney General's advice to Blair about the Iraq War, which no-one appears to have seen, either. If I was Ms Sanderson, I'd look for a job that didn't require me to lie for my employer every five minutes...

World state

Look forward to the health IT contract for that!

Just because JC is an Irish singer doesn't make him wrong about 9/11 (or 11/9 as I prefer to think of it) though. Less well known is that the Oklahoma bombing (chief stooge, T.McVeigh) was an inside job too - you can't focus the blast from a truck bomb, which would have done relatively little structural damage on its own.

Information

"the articles were viewed in France on the internet"

How is that different from viewing them in France on paper? I'm all in favour of tabloids being sued, but this does sound a bit, er, French...

Paris, of course.

Query

Is SSD a real substitute for an HD? I thought flash memory had a limited write-cycle life, which is not a problem for saving photos, but might be if faced with virtual memory management by Windows!

Advice

"mad enough to employ the likes of Accenture/Fujitsu/IBM/BT/EDS/TCS etc"

Who are also all 'consultants' whose function in life is change/bugger up everything. When did you ever hear a consultant say: "That bit's working OK, let's leave it as it is"?

The irony is that the NHS has in-house IT depts who could draw up a sensible spec for this sort of thing, but this government always gives preference to people who charge ten times as much.

@sky2

"I pay Sky a monthly stipend"

That'll be the Murdoch tax, then. Makes the Beeb one look like one of the bargains of all time...

Non-lethal

"low-voltage charge meant to cause pain"

So what's the high-voltage one supposed to do..?

Maths

407,000 sq.ft @1.5kW per sq.ft = over 600MW, but their substation is less than half that. Do I detect a bit of hyperbole?

And why can't they do something useful with the waste heat?

Oh dear

I enjoyed this though (the possible double entendre only struck me later)...

"When you have a hammer, you treat every screw as a nail."

It's going to be tricky charge to make stick, though. How, exactly, does one determine the age of a person depicted in a drawing?

Security

As the parent of the 10-year old, I can empathise with those who feel that phones give some security, although that is tempered by the thought that he can't be mugged for it if he hasn't got one. Also, his developing brain is quite precious, and his school doesn't permit them (phones, not brains) on site. Children who take them have to hand them in at the door and collect them on their way out, which seems pretty sensible to me. If he's desperate to talk to his friends when they're not actually within earshot, we have a telephone in the house...

But..

..is it sandproof? It still seems to have conventional buttons and a sliding lens cover. Good effort, I'm sure, but I'll wager that an excursion in salt water followed by contact with the beach will finish it.

Names

Cue Kenneth Williams calling out: "I'm a cult you know - oh yes.."

@Lukin

"while fillings do leak mercury, they do so in sub-lethal amounts"

So rotting your brain is OK, then? IIRC, there was a short period around 1850 when mercury fillings were outlawed, but as usual, the medical profession put profit before patient welfare and got it repealed.

That the "BDA rules forbid dentists from questioning the health values of mercury amalgam, or advising against them on anything other than aesthetic grounds" tells you all you need to know, IMHO...

Really?

This seems to imply that the only thing defining a paedophile is age difference. IIRC, I was quite interested in sex before I was 36...

PH - as I still am.

Alternative

I've just been looking at PA systems and some of these are now amplified 2.1 setups. £200 will buy you a 400W (RMS) system with a serious subwoofer and decent satellites that would blow this stuff into the weeds. And you can plug your CD player into it...

Wasn't me guv...

Except he can't admit it, of course, since Uncle Gordon's been taking all the credit for the general Western prosperity of the last decade. Actually, if he hadn't spent quite so much of it on consultants and mad PFI schemes (and sold all our gold at the bottom of the market) we might have a bit in reserve for the seven lean years just starting. Every Pharoah needs a Joseph...

Not so much cashback..

..as a refund for the Windows tax. And given that MS charges more now for Office, when it has millions of customers (and DVD's cost pence) than it did when they had thousands of customers, and the suite came in a proper box, with proper manuals and anything up to 30 floppies, it seems only fair...

At last..

A use for spam! I'm tempted to sign up for some 'medication' and put a .gov.uk address...

I wonder

"any losses through fraud are covered by the bank"

Perhaps that's the way to get their attention, then? Transfer someone else's money (preferably that belonging to the bank CEO, as he'll have plenty) to your own account, get a written statement, and then hack it out again (to a numbered account somewhere) and claim a refund...

Not an Eee competitor

Unless/until it ditches Windows, the HD and the big price.

BTW, 1024 x 600 isn't 16:10 (or 16:9, come to that)

Response

That MS apparently equates 'near instantaneous' search times with finding things 'within minutes' probably tells you all you need to know about their grasp on reality.

Funny how Google can locate even a single relevant web page from a pool of billions in a fraction of a second...

Oh, and howcome the MS document isn't available any more? Did they inadvertently release some facts?

Rory Bremner..

..seems to know more about this than most, especially GB! Estimates for the trident replacement are now heading towards £100bn, so some savings possible there, I think. If I were a potential enemy, I'd be more worried about a few old Tridents with rusty catches than a new, untested version full of software that will probably ask 'are you sure?' before actually detonating.

I'm not that keen on mutually assured destruction, either...

Work

"failing to disclose the nature of his wife's work "

Seems a bit harsh - it could have been a hobby. I bet it's not what she puts on her tax form, at any rate...

PH angle, almost!

Hmm...

I'd be interested to know how you activate the effing thing where there's no phone or internet. And may we know the price difference between the two versions? Presumably the MS one will require loads more memory, as well as the Windows tax...

Hmm...

"a regular-looking game controller with analogue pressure sensors"

That's anything with an analogue joystick then? Only in America...

Time limit

You'd think 42 days would be long enough...

BTW, Tom Welsh, that would be funny if it weren't so tragic.

PH, because Jacqui Smith makes her look so intelligent.

Er...

Still not quite sure why EDS is regarded as an asset. Even our government is beginning to realise that they couldn't run a bath, and IIRC, the HMRC discs fiasco was triggered by the (EDS) consultants demanding £5k to strip the unwanted data, while the in-house guys stood by helpless, because those sort of jobs always went to the contractors...

@Ted

"Apple is about quality, not trendy"

Sorry - lost for words..

@Spitefulgod

"Anywho having installed and run the software flawlessly I am presently surprised"

So even MS fanboys are taken aback when something of theirs works..!

Culture shock

I'm not surprised the locals are taken with such things - if every girl you've seen hitherto has been clad from head to foot in a burqua, it must be an absolute revelation!

Paris - well, she could encourage the troops...

Noooo!

"The deal would be HP's biggest since buying Compaq"

And even more disastrous, I imagine...

Looks promising

I've been using the current (previous) version of Fedora and am well impressed. It's very polished and I've yet to find a hardware combination it can't cope with. That includes my old 933MHz desktop (which rejected several versions of Ubuntu) and a brand-new dual-core laptop. I'll certainly try the USB route - I'm looking forward to kissing Bill and Steve goodbye...