* Posts by Chris 3

601 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jul 2009

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Details of all internet traffic should be logged – MEP

Chris 3
Unhappy

Oh...

I don't think we's let a little thing like that stop us

We like zombies… because we are zombies

Chris 3

Precisely

Everyone knows that Sci-Fi monsters echo societal paranoias, todays big ones are pandemics, global warming, economic breakdown. Zombies work very well with the pandemic threat,

Google+ opens up to enterprises and apps

Chris 3

I saw you say 'opens up to enterprises' ...

And thought you meant that they were now encouraging companies to sign up with Acme-Co accounts.

Has that happened yet? companies, rather than personal accounts?

Web czar: 'Drag your nan online'

Chris 3

The problem is...

... by this stage the people who aren't online already probably have a particular reason for not doing so. That might be that there are totally intransigent and the last thing they want is someone (again) trying to get them to go online.

It may be that they are too poor to have a machine at home and hate the idea of being tutored in a public library.

I'd be very interested to see some data from the survey to see what proportion of the "have not used" are open to the idea of using the Web.

My parents, in their 80s made the conscious decision to go online because "that's the way the world's going" - I'm ever so glad I installed LogMeInFree on their machine, however.

Can the iPad save newspapers?

Chris 3

The value proposition..

"So the value proposition is clear: a tenner for offline content."

I'm trying out the Guardian on an iPad at the moment, for me the value proposition is two-fold - it's quite a lot cheaper than a paper copy and it is delivered to my breakfast table by 6am each morning. These are both reasonable reasons to consider it.

Personally, I still prefer the paper version, but the early morning delivery makes it quite tempting.

The Guardian iPad Edition

Chris 3
Facepalm

They're trying to turn a profit

shockingly enough.

As the article says the electronic copy is significantly cheaper than a paper one.

Hands on with the Motorola Razr

Chris 3

Since you set up the question

What *are* the issues that exist on a 4sS, bit not on a RAZR?

Ballmer disses Android as cheap and complex

Chris 3

To be honest

9 year olds are probably the *most* adept at working with badly designed interfaces - see historical jokes about small children and video recorders.

Not saying that Android is necessarily complicated or badly designed, I'm just opinting out that your counter-argument is a bit weak.

Chris 3
Coffee/keyboard

I'm not sure

I think the pace of Apple's iOS innovation on both UI and core technology side is slowing a bit. There *is* an opportunity for MS to jump in with something that looks really slick and has novelty value., perhaps.

icon chosen pre-emptively.

Apple iPhone 4S

Chris 3

You really sound quite cross

It's a phone, not a choice of religions. FWIW, I can't see that buying a 4s if you have a 4 makes a lot of sense in most cases.

Which actor should play Steve in upcoming biopic?

Chris 3

Agreed

He was also eremarkably good as Septimus in Stardust.

Dubstep ringtone wins Nokia compo

Chris 3
Facepalm

Let's see...

... the authors ironically set themselves up as being old and out of touch and then you hilariously and iromically suggest they are old and out of touch.

That's a right royal ribtickler you managed there.

Can general relativity explain the OPERA neutrino result?

Chris 3
Pint

Indeed Indeed

I ermmber wondering as a youngster whether we could travel backwards in (local swimming pool time) if we sat submerged in a pool full ofa substance through which light travels rather slowly.

Actually, that still puzzles me.

HTC Android handsets spew private data to ANY app

Chris 3

Londoners killed in freak bus accident

Presumably you reckon that's about 7 million dead?

Pandemonium as Microsoft AV nukes Chrome browser

Chris 3
WTF?

And what's wrong with MSE. precisely? It seem to work in an unobjectionable manner for the most part.

Larry Page sees 'tragic' future for Google

Chris 3

"there are basically no companies that have good slow decisions"

How long did it take Apple to decide to get into the phone market - or the tablet market, for that point.

Virgin Media goes cloudy for biz punters

Chris 3
Joke

Speaking as someone who has wittnessed the train wreck of their V.Stuff cloud-based backup services etc., I'd say stay well away.

Facebook: 'We don't track logged-out users'

Chris 3

And what would the expected behaviour be if you were logged out?

Chris 3
Facepalm

Because

You can like one aspect of a service, without liking all aspects of it.

Incredible, I know.

Mac malware uses Windows-style PDF camouflage ruse

Chris 3

I presume that when you try to open this 'PDF' the Mac will put up the standard 'this is is a program you have downloaded from the internet - you are abouttorunit for the first time - are you sure you want to run it?' alert.

Memo to open source moralists: Put a sock in it

Chris 3
Facepalm

@Turtle

"To me, there is nothing "moral" about forcing people to do what is "moral". And personally, I have only contempt for any ideology which is against people getting paid for their work."

It's a good thing that no-one is forcing you to use the GPL then.

The point about the GPL is that it is a voluntary licence that people who create code are *free* to use if they would like to make their work available for others to freely use. It allows the people who have chosen that license to place an important restriction on those who want to re-use it "You can do what you want with it, but if you create some more software based on it, the recipients of that software must be free to do what they want with it too - you can't snaffle my work and then close it down".

Yes, it is a fundamentally ideological license - it is designed to service a particularly ideology, but there is no coercion involved - people who like the free ideology can choose to publish their software under the GPL if they wish, and people who want to build software on that code can use it - or not if they don't like the license.

As for "an ideology which is against people getting paid for their work.", there is absolutely nothing to stop anyone publishing their original code under a dual license.

Lancs shale to yield '15 years' of gas for UK

Chris 3
Alert

Fair enough, the UK does have its fair share of nimbies, but I don't think you can dismiss the concerns over fracking as merely the result of rabid environmentalists.

I'm not entirely clear from this story, is extraction via fracking?

Round two for Larry vs Larry Java face-off

Chris 3

Or...

The CEOs should only be allow to claim rights on patents that they can personally recite the claims to. The judge should read out random patent numbers, if a Larry can't identify it and what it's about, it goes in the bin.

Google reveals 'leap smear' NTP technique

Chris 3
Alert

"What can we do about that, Google? Eh? "

Please, please don't tempt them.

RIM share price nosedives following stinky numbers

Chris 3
Facepalm

Thanks for calling me a lazy idiot, I actually did a fair bit of research and looked at a couple of Andriod tablets before opting for an iPod2.

They were cheaper yes, but what are your criteria to measure "better"?

'Find My Car' iPhone app finds anyone’s car

Chris 3

Looks like ParkAssist have done the right thing..

The blogger has updated his post, looks like the company involved have dealt with this is in a laudibly frank and efficient way to try and sort it out.

End of UK local dialling in sight as numbers run out

Chris 3

Presumably you don't live in London...

... or another large city?

Apple's iCloud runs on Microsoft and Amazon services

Chris 3
Holmes

Fairly widely know...

This was reported back in June. The original reportage at Infinite Apple seems to be down at the moment, but here's a report on that report.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/06/16/icloud-mystery-is-apple-using-azure-amazon/

Apple after Steve Jobs is still Steve Jobs' Apple

Chris 3
Unhappy

The rumoured non-Mac Mac

I'm sad to see Jobs go, simply on a human level, but it is interesting that the rumours of a radically redesigned Mac surfaced a few days ago. I believe them a little more now. I wonder whether Jobs felt that having pointed the Mac business in a new direction, he had completed as much of the mission as he had time for.

I'll miss him, even though he was infuriating at times.

Cabinet Office shuns open-source in IT-tracking deal

Chris 3

Much as I like open source solutions...

There are occassions where the proprietary offerings are more fully featured, or polished. So perhaps the Cabinet Office just chose the more appropriate package.

Insulin pump attack prompts call for federal probe

Chris 3
Facepalm

Not that it hasn't happened yet...

... just that it hasn't happened to "their knowledge". Of course, its not quite clear how they would have known about it *had* happened, given that it was a risk they were unaware of and weren't looking for.

HP board gives Leo $10bn more funny money

Chris 3
Black Helicopters

Hmmm.

Looking for an exit strategy are you, Mr Coward?

On counterfeits, fakes and Apple stores

Chris 3
WTF?

Ummm...

Where in your story is there any indication that the story might be fake? As you point out, Resellers can't call themselves Apple Stores - the photos in the original story conspicuously show the Apple Store moniker.

So - you haven't been able to verify the story for yourself first hand, but so what?

CERN 'gags' physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

Chris 3
Coffee/keyboard

Please stop trotting out this nonsense.

I was happily reading through the comments, staying on a even keel until this old chestnut was wheeled out:

"Carbon dioxide is essential to life on the planet."

So what? How is that relevant to *anything*? did you sit there in front of the Japanese tsunami footage smugly opining: "Ah yes, well water is essential to life on the planet".?

Whether something is essential to life is irrelevant.

It's nearly up there with:

"Climate changes, and always will." Yes, and as we know large climate changes have historically caused mass extinctions. So...?

Everything Everywhere boss jacks it in

Chris 3

How about...

... by forcing PIN change on first use?

Lying Facebook app offers Google+ invites

Chris 3
Headmaster

When you said, "plain wrong"...

... you clearly meant to say "epic fail" come on daddio, get with the lingo.

Many parents are only on Facebook to stalk their kids

Chris 3

Actually, the *really* clever kids...

... would have worked out how to use the non-intuitive 'Lists' feature

Facebook, Google, and the war to lock you in

Chris 3

...They do at least...

... give you the opportunity to export your data out.

Sony says no to YouView

Chris 3
WTF?

Come on El Reg..

... up your game a bit, at least tell us if he gave reasons for the non-support. What's going on here?

Google shutters Realtime Search after Twitter deal expires

Chris 3

Not really

I expect Google did some fairly hefty analysis to see how often it was used.

Boffins fix dead satellite using 'dirty hack' in space

Chris 3

I just wish

You had given us more detail on what the clever hack entailed. I love that kind of stuff.

'Lion' Apple Mac OS X 10.7: Sneak Preview

Chris 3

Not really

Oddly enough I Am someone who usually dives straight in for Apple OS uodates - they usually have functionality I desire and they're resobnable priced.

On the other hand, I'm still using Office v.X has my workhorse productivity suite - and why not, it's fast, and does everything I need. I also have old (legal) copies of Photoshop, Quark Xpress & Dreamweaver that I have absolutely no intention of upgrading since I only use them about twice a year.

I agree I'm probably atypical, but the lack of Rosetta is a pain. I suspect I'll probably have to update office and work out some kind of dual-boot system for the other stuff in the long term.

Reg Hardware launches review looker-upper

Chris 3
Facepalm

The Apps section is a bit weak....

... without a way to filter for OS/Platform, surely

90% of visitors declined ICO website's opt-out cookie

Chris 3
Facepalm

Why, as a matter of interest?

Don;t you like the idea of the Web site that you're using doing basic analytics to improve their Web site?

Alpha.gov.uk preps for beta, prays for funding

Chris 3

And what exactly is wrong...

... with the name 'DirectGov'?

Faking reviews? You should fret about more than illegality

Chris 3

Rarely...

... have I seen a troll so well fed in a thread.

Chris 3
Megaphone

Well it depends...

... if the company is caught astroturfing, and there's a nice site somewhere with good page rank that records instances of said astroturfing, I think you'll find the memory will live on for quite some time - hopefully for as long as people type 'CompanyX Review' into a search engine.

Apple's new Final Cut Pro X 'not actually for pros'

Chris 3

It does sound like the iMovie transition

iMovie HD was a good old fashioned linear editing app. iMovie '08 was a 'What the hell' moment as the entire way you worked was thrown out of the Window, iMovie '09 returned most of the capabilities that went missing in the previous version, but still in a form that would make anyone familiar with the traditional approaches really disorientated.

I had to buy my first ever Missing Manual to get my head around iMovie '09 It's bloodyt powerful, but even now I still find myself fighting it and not quite getting my head around the new way of doing things.

Child of Eden

Chris 3
Headmaster

From the opening of the article...

The word "Precluding". I do not think it means what you think it means.

Try a different word, perhaps?

World braces for domain name EXPLOSION

Chris 3
FAIL

Nope.

>This extension to the naming system will significantly relieve the pressure and diversify the eco system.

No. it just means that the registered owner of 'Example-brand' will need to register

.example-brand as well as example-brand.com example-brand.net example-brand.co.uk example-brand.org etc.

It does nothing to expand the namespace.

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