* Posts by J 3

896 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Apple to unveil white iPod Touch alongside iPhone 5

J 3
Facepalm

Nano

The current (6th gen) nano is a design disaster, I hope they get it fixed. Just making the cheap "hold button" a "hold slider", as it was in my great 1st gen nano, would already make it 90% better.

And why would Apple release a 3G Touch? What next, let people have Skype on it, too? I believe they'd like to sell that other gadget of theirs too...

Netflix: How to completely screw up

J 3

I wonder whose fault it is...

Did Netflix screw up or were they forced to do so by the studios? After all, they'd been making grumbling noises towards Netflix for a while, if I remember correctly what I read a while ago. Might not be true anyway. But it wouldn't surprise me if the studios, wanting more money, had somehow forced this to happen.

Anyway, related to that, Netflix just started operating in Brazil, and I read the reviews from my favorite local newspaper. It sucks balls, and it might not be Netflix's fault in that case, I think. The reviewers say it's technically great, gets smooth, good DVD-quality image even with the somewhat flaky "broadband" there. But the selection of movies is horrible. As examples, they gave the following: search for movies by Spielberg. Neither "E.T." nor "Raiders of the Lost Ark" will be there. Now, doesn't that smell like the crazy licensing scam that the "content creators" like to impose on free international trade?

Cloud startup's business model defies laws of physics

J 3
Joke

Random data, really!?

Someone is selling quantum desktops and no one told me? Mean...

Nokia offers $10,000 for new ring tone

J 3
Facepalm

Hm...

I suspect they did not see this as paying for music, but paying for very cheap marketing.

Jesus appears, acquires vast following, bitchslaps Justin Bieber

J 3
Devil

@Show me yours first

Hey, I thought you were supposed to know it all already!

Domino's to serve pizzas on the Moon, apparently

J 3
Joke

Null title exception

"leading to the suspicion that this may be one of those crazy marketing stunts Japanese companies are so fond of"

It took you that long?

Apple's iTunes Match music service goes beta

J 3
Happy

Wow...

60 thousand dollars worth of music? Hm...

Worm spreads via RDP

J 3
Happy

Morto?

Means "dead" in Portuguese and Italian, hopefully it has nothing to do with the payload...

After Jobs: Apple and the Cult of Disruption

J 3
Happy

Unfair, I know...

But journalists (well, way too many of them at any rate) are the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, it seems to me. Or maybe I'm suffering from said effect, who knows.

Post-Jobs run on overpriced Apple shares fails to occur

J 3
Meh

Indeed...

Quite unexpectedly rational of the markets not to panic re: Apple, in my (uninformed, unwanted, but gladly shared) opinion. After all, it's not like things really changed. In the more distant future though, it's quite a different question... you know, after the current workhorses have run their courses and the company has to come up with new toys... At least Jonathan Ives is still there, that gives them hope to carry on as per the past few years.

Stephen on Steve: The most important man on Earth

J 3
Trollface

completely changed the way that human beings live

I started fuming about that, but then I read the first few lines of the "article" and suspected someone was pulling me leg. The other one's got bells on! By the way, signing "Team Register" was a bit cowardly, Mr... ;-)

But then I got to the end and there is a hint that it's actually not so fictitious! I'm afraid to listen. Don't have the time now, anyway, since I should be, er, working...

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple CEO

J 3
Mushroom

Damn...

I've read somewhere else that trading in Apple stocks was suspended before the announcement. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow...

Nuke plant shut down after US earthquake

J 3
Megaphone

Tilting?

Seriously!? I guess that, depending on the type of terrain it is on, it might be more concerning... I am 40 miles from the epicenter, and I didn't even leave my work building. At the 5th floor, we shook quite nicely, lighting fixtures moving, glassware tinkling in the lab shelves, but no need for panic... Buildings here will be inspected, as a precaution, but apart from a couple of walls in old houses, no other reports of damage have been made yet.

Sulphur-loving microbes might be oldest life

J 3
Happy

Indeed

Just remember that O2 is not exclusively waste product for plants (as CO2 is for us), because they also need it to perform respiration. And CO2 is both food and "excrement" for plants. Ew...

DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip

J 3
Childcatcher

Simulated pussy

Yeah, but does it purr?

PETA to launch .xxx smut site 'to help animals'

J 3
Devil

a mixture of curiosity and terror

Indeed...

Man reveals secret recipe behind undeletable cookies

J 3
Big Brother

@Missing the point

"* inventory what you buy, as well as what products you seem to look at.

* catalog those results and store them for later analysis."

Actually, yes, they appear to do that, at least here in Merka. Except for the "what products you seem to look at" (as far as I know, wouldn't be surprised...).

If you pay with a credit card, or, worse, use one of those "loyalty cards" things that give "discounts" (i.e. remove the artificial increase in price).

It's easy to know: go return/exchange a product to, say, Target or Apple. If you paid with CC, all they need is your CC to accept it, you don't need a receipt. It happened to me recently: my 6th gen nano (crap, but got as a gift from the GF...) broke the other day. I went to the Apple Store to exchange it, and had no receipt (but since the thing was released less than year ago, it must be under warranty). The guy got the serial number, and got me a new one. The receipt had my GF's name written on it, date it was bought, etc. When I told her that, she mentioned she had the same happen to her at Target. So, yeah, they do inventory what you buy, and I'm sure they use it later, and they don't ask for permission to collect nor keep the data -- at least I haven't been asked to sign anything.

Of course it's easy to not use either, pay cash... much easier to circumvent the disgusting web tracking those guys are doing.

Has Google wasted $12bn on a dud patent poker-chip?

J 3
Coat

Yeah, but...

Is it worse than being a Californian, are you sure?

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

J 3
Joke

Stocks!

Yeah, bring the stocks! I mean, pay them their benefits in stocks! How much would they have suffered this week, watching the markets tank...

(now I have to go search what you guys mean by "stocks" here)

DIY aerial drone monitors Wi-Fi, GSM networks

J 3
Mushroom

Hm...

"Luckily the ton of evil bit hasn't happened yet."

Convince the Japanese of that!

iPhone 5 now set for October launch

J 3
Facepalm

@the last two months of September

It must be in Texas, where even the months are so big they contain many months...

It's official: IE users are dumb as a bag of hammers

J 3
Paris Hilton

Ah...

Now we know how those, erm, mementos ended up leaking to the web!

'Missing heat': Is global warmth vanishing into space?

J 3
Joke

Where did the heat go?

I'd be inclined to say the Eastern USA, from the misery out there these days. And I'm not talking about Washington, DC hot air!

Lithium cells take salt to extend life

J 3
Paris Hilton

Patented salt?

I didn't know you could patent such things. I assumed it was like natural genes: you can patent its use in a certain process, but not the sequence itself. Do chemical compounds have the same rule? (i.e. naturally occurring, no patent; artificial creation, patent fine)

Ten... in-ear headphones

J 3
Thumb Up

CX500

I like my Sennheiser CX500, got it as a gift (but it cost about $28 at the time on Amazon, don't know how much it was in quids). Sounds very good, at least for MP3s (I have most encoded as 192 or 256kbps), isolates sound pretty well (but not completely, which for me is a plus), comfortable for hours, has a volume control slider, about 1 m of cable length (I think), does not come out of the ear easily (which sometimes is bad, e.g. when the cable gets tangled somewhere...). The cable can be noisy when it bounces around, hitting you, but it comes with a clip that can be attached anywhere in the cable, which you can use to hold the cable somewhere on your clothes -- as long as you do it in a way that avoids the cable part between the clip and your ears hitting anything, it works great. Sounds complicated, but it's not; after doing it two or three times you get the hang of it easily.

Nearly everyone in SOUTH KOREA HACKED IN ONE GO

J 3
Facepalm

a SIMS-like environment featuring avatars and virtual apartments

Gee, and I thought Facebook was the most annoying thing ever... But as I always say: nothing is so bad that it can't get worse.

Suspects in PayPal web attack not so anonymous after all

J 3
Facepalm

Didn't know?

Hm... hard to believe that a 26 year-old programmer (even is self taught) wouldn't have an idea that DDoS was somewhat illegal. If the guy was 14, I might believe he didn't know.

Now, the guy who just downloaded the attack software should be left alone -- unless he used the software in an attack, of course. Or is police now going to persecute people based on what they read or download? Oh, wait...

TSA officer accused of stealing from passenger luggage

J 3
Alert

@since all bags are unlocked

One can use one of those padlocks with the special little logo, which TSA can open, but other people (allegedly) can't. I've been using those for a few years already; the airline personnel take a look to see if it is the right type, and let it stay put. Does not make you safe from the TSA, of course, but better than nothing...

Apple eyeing Hulu acquisition, insiders say

J 3
Devil

@Apple TV

Knowing Apple's control freakery, it wouldn't surprise me if the walled garden was somehow creatively expanded to enclose this too...

Marketer taps browser flaw to see if you're pregnant

J 3
Joke

@YouPorn.com ?

I'm afraid the name is pretty descriptive, and a 12 year old would already know the site anyway...

19,000 papers leaked to protest 'war against knowledge'

J 3

@ Contract is broken

Well, that would be possible, of course. Sort of like arXiv or the like, sure (there's nothing like that, significant, in my area: biological sciences). But libraries and universities don't usually do typesetting, proofing, editing, peer reviewing (which, for good or evil, is going to continue being the system in publishing), distributing (how are the guys in China going to read your paper, or you theirs? At least a website has to be set up and managed), etc. My boss is one who always keeps saying that we should get away from journals and just put research results on web pages. Too big of a cultural shift, but might happen with time.

And, I forgot to mention in my first post, even if the public institutions do not subscribe for the content, you will still pay twice for it if you need it: first with your taxes that went to fund the work and pay for publication fees, and then when you pay again to privately access the content.

J 3
Flame

System is broken

The whole scientific publishing "business" is sort of broken -- at least for the tax payer, although not for the publishers, apparently.

The way it is now, the taxpayer pays TWICE for the information to be published:

- the first time around: there are, usually, fees for authors to publish, and they can run into the hundreds of dollars, when not more than $1000. Said fees are paid with grant money, which usually comes from government bodies (in my case, NIH and NSF, for example).

- the second time they pay: to read the papers, you have to subscribe, or be part of an institution that subscribes, to that journal. Public universities (or those that receive public money) could be using tax money again to pay for access to those papers. To buy an individual paper is ridiculously expensive, I usually see $30 as the price, never less than $15 or so. Hell, you can almost subscribe to some journals for that amount (the Systematic Biology journal for example is $40 to $60 a year, depending of your functional status).

One alternative being tried right now is the open access model. The author pays more to publish, but it is guaranteed that the paper can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. I got a paper accepted yesterday in one such journal -- it will cost about $1300 to publish that paper there, but at least we know we, or anyone else, won't be locked out of our work.

Adobe releases lengthy list of Apple Lion woes

J 3
Trollface

Oh, well

I don't think they will care, until their "monopoly" fades away, or is at least seriously challenged. Sure, there is other software out there that does pretty much the same thing, even if not as well sometimes. People are just too lazy to spend a little time learning a different program, and end up pirat^Hcopyi^H spending a lot of money on Photoshop, even if they could do the same with cheaper, or even free, programs. Some of the more pro stuff PS does is probably only doable, or at least easier, with PS, sure. But for the vast majority of people, they only use it because that's what they heard of or were exposed to.

But as long as the verb "to photoshop" is around, I don't think Adobe will really care. They will continue charging an obscene amount of money for a lot of old code, and people will keep paying.

Google sends warnings to machines with infected search

J 3
Alert

@Why is it down to the ISP's?

Look up "false dichotomy fallacy" -- you can even use Google for that! -- the last refuge of the hard of thinking.

'Wilful blindness? We've heard of it,' says Murdoch

J 3
Joke

just 1 per cent of his company

Ooh... just imagine how much dirt could be found under the remaining 99%, then, yum...

LulzSec say they'll release big Murdoch email archive

J 3
Happy

information seems to have come from, at best, an old database.

That, or... A database that has not been cleaned of old stuff. Happens a lot, y'know? Hard to believe, I know...

Scientists snap amazing technicolour dreamtoad

J 3
Alert

Scientists snap?

What? What rag am I reading? At El Reg they'd have gone with "boffins snap" for that headline!

Rebekah Brooks quits - Murdoch accepts this time

J 3
Coffee/keyboard

No comments, except...

The doll in the icon you used in the front page for this story is hilarious. Maybe it's just me...

Google top brass (and Zuck) hit Google+ privacy button

J 3
Joke

Wait...

So even Mark Zuckerberg has jumped ship, then?

US court test for rights not to hand over crypto keys

J 3
Mushroom

Boo hoo...

Poor little frightened person... Suck it up (or go read the Daily Mail). The law is (allegedly, although in practice...) to protect everyone from government arbitrariness, in order to keep the vast majority of non-scum safe. If every now and then a criminal is benefited... Well, collateral damage of a greater good. Or does "collateral damage" only applies to killing innocent brown people, as the term is usually applied in the US?

Entering a storage jail

J 3

@Ownership

Iḿ not sure, but maybe what the author meant was that they own the device's life, so to speak: if they decide to kill the device (i.e., not sell it anymore), you won't play your media anymore either -- since DRM won't allow other devices to do it. So basically we would be in their hands. Compare that with, say, a cassette player. If Sony never made another Walkman, we'd still have played our cassettes on countless other players.

J 3
Holmes

Fine, but...

If I can not do whatever I want with the information, then I don't own it. That's pretty obvious to me.

J 3
Joke

@What happens at the end of copyright protection?

I don't think anyone would live long enough to see anything get out of copyright protection... (if the work is new-ish, then this is actually not a joke!)

J 3
Happy

Er...

"What happens when we buy music and film and books from Apple or Amazon and store them on iPod, iPad and Kindle?"

I don't know about books, films, or Apple. But I've bought MANY albums from Amazon, and I can do whatever I want with the MP3s -- copy, store anywhere, listen to it anywhere, on any medium, etc.. Even give away to other people (which I don't do, but I could if I wanted to). I might be running afoul of some terms of whatever, but since I haven't read them...

Portuguese hackers strike back at Moody's downgrade

J 3
Mushroom

We sell some hunches and everyone believes them

Can't really argue with that, methinks...

Canuck ultralight pilot drops in on strip club

J 3
Paris Hilton

unless it's an emergency

I can think of many emergencies that would take me to land at such a place. Very understandable.

Samsung NC110 matte-screen netbook

J 3
Devil

@resolution, memory limitations....

I'm sure MS helped putting restrictions there (like not installing 2GB instead of 1 GB of RAM), but I suspect there is another problem: the Intel Atoms used in these machines only work with up to 2GB of RAM anyway -- or at least my 1015PN's CPU (the dual core, 64 bit N550) maxes out at that, from what I read at Intel's specs page.

Now, if that is because of technical limitations or artificial impositions like Microsoft's to protect higher end products, I don't know, really...

J 3
Flame

@Fan

I suspect that, without a fan, the processor would have to be changed quite dramatically here! I just got an Asus 1015PN, and the thing has a very active fan, blowing very hot air for most of the time. At least compared to my older 100-HE, which was just a bit lukewarm to the touch, and would only blow more hot air when under heavier loads.

J 3
Meh

See icon

This Samsung sounds very similar to theEee 1015PN I just got, although I paid $280 (notice: dollars) for it. Except the 1015PN has one HDMI output, and the Nvidia Ion graphics (which eat battery life like crazy, apparently); everything else sounds pretty much the same. I just ordered a 2 GB memory stick to it, too. Cheap way to make it much better when under heavier loads.

I wouldn't have gotten the 1015PN, since my 1000HE works very well still. But since my mother wanted a netbook for email and the like, I thought why not get the 1015PN, see if it worked well for me, and then pass the 1000HE to her. If I for some reason did not like the new one (say: battery life worse due to dual core, new graphics), then I'd keep the 1000HE.

Well, general OS performance of the nearly 3 year old machine and the newer one is not so different, although the 1015PN deals better with higher res YouTube videos -- the 1000HE can not play 720P, while the 1015PN can. Is not always perfectly smooth, but it plays well. I haven't tried 1080 content, marketing says it should play. But my opinion of marketing, being a tad abrasive and unprintable for such a family rag as El Reg, makes me suspect that it is probably not as good as advertized. I did boot the Win 7 partition, and it works fine (for a Windows OS), it was quite impressive (compared to what I've seen Vista do to much mightier machines). I mean just OS running, and Firefox a bit to test things. Seemed perfectly useable, although not exactly snappy. Since I don't need, even less want, Windows, I promptly installed Ubuntu on it anyway, and that runs fine too -- the only nag is that switching Ion on and off can not be done immediately, it needs a reboot (oh, and some third party scripts, it's not part of the OS). Not a big problem for me, since I keep it off most of the time when I need good battery life.

So, I decided to keep the 1015PN because it is slightly less bulky than the 1000HE, and it also has a bit better battery life (if I keep the Nvidia Ion off). Otherwise, remarkable lack of amount of hardware progress in 3 years...

Google Chrome extension busts Murdoch paywall

J 3
Pirate

@Paywalls are pointless

Not so simple as that, I'm afraid.

Maybe most of the news you are interested in is of that type you describe and it would be fine to just read blogs and trust the guy had a good grasp of whatever s/he was talking about.

But there was an interesting interview in "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" (Merkin comedy fake-news) this past week with a NYT guy, and quite a bit of it was about this issue. Some of his points were:

- bloggers won't be going to be sent to some remote country to investigate and report whatever is going on there. That costs a lot of money. Wanna rely on the local bloggers to do it? That could work, but it's a risky bet, I'd say. Most of what bloggers "report" is what they read in... the NYT or The Times or whatever large news org, or saw on TV, heard on the radio, etc.. If they read it from an aggregator (e.g. Google News, Yahoo, etc.), it does not matter. The source still spent a lot of money to generate it. Sure, we get the news somehow, but the fundamental problem that it costs money to produce and *someone* has to pay but most people haven't is not addressed. Which brings us to the second salient point mentioned in the interview...

- advertising on line is very poor compared to print, he said. Tiffany's had page 3 on NYT for over a century or whatever example he mentioned, and pay handsomely for that. Printed real estate is scarce and, therefore, very valuable and with good return to the product being advertised. Or some buzzwords like that. On line, everything is spread very thin, we are awash in ads, there is no shortage of it. Therefore, value goes down and the "paper" gets paid much, much less for it.

So, yeah, he admitted they are struggling to find a viable model.

See, I what I just did! Got someone's report and regurgitated it on line. Don't trust my quality though. :-)