Posts by J 3

"It displays web pages. What else do I need?"

Netscape 1.5 also displays web pages. So does Lynx.

Too early to tell

"readers should have access to the books in their digital library from any device, from anywhere, at any time"

Oh, they will be selling DRM-free files, then? Nice. But for some reason I doubt it.

I don't know why the skittishness though. Amazon sells DRM-free digital music, and apparently the world hasn't ended, last time I checked at least. Why should it be different for books?

Re: what's the catch?

"Call me paranoid, but I note they're using version 2 of the GPL, not version 3 which protects people from submarine patents."

I'm not sure, but it might be because the Linux kernel itself is not moving to GPL v 3 anytime soon, apparently. Or would it be possible to mix the two in the kernel? I would think so, but haven't read much about it lately.

Creepy...

So they can do that? I'll never be buying this crap until this situation changes, that's for sure. Before it was just too expensive. Now it is too immoral also.

RAW x jpeg

"RAW images appear a tad sharper than JPEGs too."

As always, I suspect. That is due to the noise reduction applied by the camera in making the JPEG, which Nikon seems to have a somewhat heavy hand compared to other manufacturers. That does not happen with the RAW, since it is unprocessed. How much noise you'll see later depends on the setting in the conversion software, in the computer. Which could be better than the in-camera one.

Re: the videos, I wish they'd stop this silliness of adding video the DSLRs. It sounds like it's usually crappy (except you buy a really expensive camera), and will only add complexity, fragility, and most of all price to the damn things. If I wanted video I'd buy a cheap camcorder and be much better off than with these DSLRs, I suspect.

And since I'm in the mood, what's up with all the stupidly confusing model naming? I suppose that must be on purpose, since they must make more money if people are confused, maybe? Coming up with a sensible naming scheme to make the hierarchy (is there one?) of their models would be too much to ask, I suppose. D5000 between D60 and D90? Or take my favorite brand, Pentax. All was well for a while, with the K10D and K20D being the top of their generations, then the K100D and K200D for the middle, and the K2000D (screwed up a little here, since this one was called K-m in some places) for the entry level. Now they released a great new model called... K-7 (no D). WTF? Sure it could be seen as a new family and all that, superior to the previous generations... Oh, well. I'll go lay down now.

@too tall? AC

"Well, that's google streetview stitched up good and proper then..."

Nah, they'll be fine. In fascist societies, corporations friendly to those in power can do whatever they want, laws are optional. Individuals though...

Falsely pretending?

Isn't that either redundant or a double negative? Pretending is passing as someone you aren't, so falsely pretending... surely means you are the real thing, and not pretending at all.

Anyway, yeah, if this was MS people would be screaming bloody murder -- which some are, mind. And as a Linux fanboy I'm not one to defend MS, to begin with. But what if they changed MS Office to only work with, say, files digitally signed to prove that they were created with MS Office? Or they made IE work only on websites hosted by an MS server? What Apple is doing is not very different, I think. You'd think they are not making any money from the iTunes store and only making money from hardware sales, since they don't want any other hardware to use their software.

Anyway, I'm using gtkPod to sync my MP3s to my old iPod, so life is good.

Damn...

I was so ready to praise Bill Gates too... But Silverlight, just to see videos?

Nice of him to make it available. Although I think nobody should have the rights to such things, to begin with. Why should Bill Gates (or Steve Jobs or Mark Shuttleworth or whatever rich person you name) have the rights to Da Vinci's works, for example? Or for Feynman's lectures?

I thought these rights were supposed to "protect the authors" (and, at a stretch, their families, although I myself don't see why someone's family should be making money out of of the work of some guy dead for, say, decades).

@Too many now

Furthermore, what do you have against articles, be they definite or indefinite? There was one lonely "the" there, and it was used incorrectly anyway, poor thing...

Wait a sec... Russian has no articles. Are you a Russian with a French handle?

Nice...

"But the country's Ministry of Health has come down hard on Yang, declaring that "Electroshock therapy for Internet addiction... has no foundation in clinical research or evidence and therefore is not appropriate for clinical application"."

Hey, could their MoH come over and do the same for all the "alternative" quackery that is freely sold to the public around here too, even if it has nothing but placebo effect?

Who's...

Who's the moron who coded their page, though? Some stupid JavaScript thing that is mostly not working...

from 129.5m units to 129.5m

Huh?

Wake up, editor!

Argh...

I acquired deep dislike for Silverlight during the last Olympics.

I wanted to watch videos on the official site here in the US, and the idiots were using this thing. Which did not work on my computers, which all run Linux. Even if there is a reason for Silverlight in addition to whatever we already have (that already works on most platforms, AFAIK), showing video is definitely not one of them. Therefore, I can only conclude that said official site was getting bribery money from Microsoft to use Silverlight (which was basically completely new at the time and not present in any significant quantity of computers).

@May I be the 1st...

"...what's this station wagon beast you speak off?"

At least in the USA, I believe those are called "crossover SUVs" nowadays, young one.

Too good to be true...

Is this guy real, or a pretend troll? Poe's law!

And also, how many Aaron Kempfs are there out there? I don't mean real ones, but fellow trolls having some fun with the name. There's someone with the handle "Mein Kempf" here, is that the same person or someone making fun? Something else? What's for diner?

Murano?

Oh, my... my great-grandfather came from there...

Yawn...

Wake me up when there's something new in the world of mini-notebooks.

one of the top men in the field of robotic bats

"one of the top men in the field of robotic bats"

You mean: the top man in the field of robotic bats, surely. That is his picture, right there.

Games?

AC: "if Linux gets it's head out of it's bowels and starts supporting games a bit more readily, it'll take up faster."

If AC gets his (I suppose) head out of his bowels, he will notice it's actually the other way around. Games have to be made for an OS, not an OS modified to support them (and while emulation or whatever it is Wine does helps, it's allegedly still not the same, but I haven't tried). One would think someone reading El Reg would know that, but wonders never cease.

Anyway, does anyone still play sophisticated games (not solitaire or Tetris, mind) on computers anymore? From what one hears here, I'd say so, but I don't know really.

If I played games I'd buy a console.

Beta

“We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase”

So, just remove the "beta tag", of course, since people are too stupid to decide in each case whether "beta" means something or not. All that matter is just perceptions anyway, right? Haven't they learned with their "colleagues" that you should release alpha software and give it a version number of at least 3.11 or 95 or 10.3, just to pick some random examples, and then fix stuff as people buy the newer versions? :-)

How much?

As expensive, or more, than the "old" 1000HE? Hard to justify, being mostly the same, at some points inferior...

Weird...

"collected car registration numbers of Catholics living in the town"

As AC asked above, how do they know? Do you have to state your religion in some document? Do they tell by people's family names? By region where they live? Bizarre.

Reminds me of a "joke" I've heard before here in the US, about this guy traveling in NI and being stopped by thugs at some checkpoint or so. He's then asked "Are you Catholic or Protestant?", but being an atheist the guy answers "I'm an atheist". That confuses the thugs, leading to a lot of head scratching. They finally ask "But are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?"

Anyway, I was hoping the monkeys over there had stopped fighting over imaginary issues, but I should have known I was going to be disappointed.

disgrace country?

Why does porn production disgrace the country? The biggest producer in the world seems to be doing rather OK in several fronts, although things surely could be improved.

I also wonder whether this "FoTW" is itself a joke... Poe's Law!

@Stephen Gray

"I was under the impression that all email is web based, I may be wrong, I'm sure someone will put me right if I am."

You are wrong.

What?

"Dell takes Reg readers to the Cloud

What's in it for them?"

Why, water vapour, of course.

Some dust and bacteria too, among other tiny stuff.

Count me in...

...as another user who'd never heard of Soapbox until this article. Amazing. And I read tech news (mostly El Reg, admittedly) almost every day.

Respect for the dead

I'm not really for respect for the dead, unless they actually deserve it. But I digress, since this shouldn't have anything to do with respect.

I had never heard of the dead bloke in question, but surely "AuntFlo" is quite right. And even if there weren't much less relevant people than him on Wikipedia anyway, it seems Swells still had enough accomplishments in cultural life to be deserving of reference, from what was written in this article here on El Reg.

I hope his family is coping well with the loss.

How much $$$

Who'd pay 200 (be it dollars, sterling, or euros) for an OS? Sounds ridiculous to me... specially in an age where a pretty good desktop can be bought for $300-400. What, you have no choice but to pay whatever they ask? Awww...

We've had a bit of each...

Here at the uni we have (and had) a little bit of each, and more: Hercules, Medusa, Neptune, Ramhorn, Grizzly, Linn, Newbler, Watson (as in Watson & Crick of DNA fame), among other similar stuff. We joke that the Mac cluster here should be called Sasquatch, since it's been heard of, but never seen live. :-)

My desktop was named "Maserati", but not by me... I'm more of a Ferrari tifoso, really.

@Ascylto

It's gullible, not gullIble.

Whose problem?

"Is that a problem for anyone other than Linux advocates?"

I'd say so. Well, it's a problem for anyone who wants a *cheap*, reliable machine to do NET stuff. You know, like the netbook was, but the mini-laptops aren't. I got a mini-laptop and love it, works very well (UNR 9.04), but it sure is no netbook. And the price wasn't a netbook's price, either. But I knew what I was getting myself into, so I'm not complaining about it.

People just don't know what they are buying and then whine. And they don't know what they're buying because the marketing is... well, marketing people are usually lying bastards who've heard of scruples, so what does one expect? For the users to know exactly what they're buying just by seeing ads? Is that an airborne swine I see over there? I thought not...

Sad...

But life goes on...

I wonder how long I'll be able to keep shooting with my K1000. My color pictures are all digital now, but I like to do B&W and my own big enlargements with fun darkroom effects, for which film and paper are still needed.

Hm...

Have the MS fanboys been running the collection plate around, I wonder? I mean, it's hard to believe anyone (even Microsoft) would invest in SCO nowadays, so it must have been someone crazy...

amanfromMars 1?

Do you mean there was more than one? Aaaargh!

placing a web server in every client

Yeah, my ISP here in the USA also forbids servers in their T&Cs. They have never enforced it though.

Ancient?

I still have to read the original research, but going by the Reg article only this "ancient" qualifier is a bit weird here... 120,000 years is nothing in bacterial terms, so while it would be really cool (ahem), it is really mostly a modern organism. Now, a 3 billion year old bacterium brought back to life, not THAT would be something crazy and alien.

Can you smell?

Can you smell the millions of dollars coming? Can you hear the approaching pack of ravenous lawyers, barking in the distance?

Browser not important?

Some are asking why all the fuss over the browser, specially when it is given for free...

Good question, which just proves you have no clue (neither do I, but that's the point). If the free browser does not matter, why then has MS been so desperate to keep control of that market (market that, by the way, they've been steadily losing EVEN given their OS position of power to ship it by default), for so many years? Do they like to waste money? Do they want to give a browser to the masses just out of the goodness of their hearts? (whomever believes that must also believe Apple users "think different" [sic?]) And why are the other browser makers trying to get the market? Bragging rights?

Congrats...

You did it, wintards -- yeah, you who kept saying "but we want to run Photoshop/CAD/[insert ludicrous thing] on our tiny NETbooks". You got it. I hope you're rich.

Anyway, a lecture, a classical performance by Microsoft on the only thing they are universally acknowledged to being good at: use dirty, borderline legal (or are they plain illegal?) practices to get a market they don't have, give away their stuff (XP) for nearly free, eliminate any possibility of competition, dominate that market, and then increase prices at will and force people to use (or at least pay for) what MS wants, screw what the people might actually want -- it's plain obvious to anyone that they will kill XP soon. It is of no importance that Windows 7 is "better", if someone does not want it for whatever reasons. As I've said months ago, the manufacturers are not exactly saddened by these turns of events, I suspect.

@Greg J Preece

Methinks you completely misunderstood Ben Bradley's post... Or did I do that?

@ AC

"Sure it has a nice user interface, but I find it really sad that this is enough to win over so many fans."

Welcome to the world of real people. Now get over it.

Note: I don't have, or even want, an iPhone. But it's fun to see how much hate it inspires on the lifeless geeks out there.

Wow...

I was the 3rd J, who would have imagined...

By the way, that IS how people call me. Not only that, but that's how it gets written down in most documents here at the university. So it wouldn't be anonymous.... were it unique. Anyway, now I wonder who the original J is, and what s/he has been writing here... Still gotta decide whether to keep my "J 3" or change it to something else too.