* Posts by LaeMing

2410 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Dec 2009

Russia: SEXY LIZARDS which landed FROM SPACE are all DEAD

LaeMing
Unhappy

Hope they were insured!

Australia deflates Valve with Steam sueball

LaeMing
Boffin

Well, for broken or otherwise 'unfit' goods, one presumes the game would have to be provably sufficiently unplayable or varient to advertised expectations to pass the definition (which numerous games have proved to be over the decades).

For un-wanted items, if the packaging (DRM) is unopened (never-activated) that should be fair evidence of not having played it.

I don't think Valve (or any other software supplier) is being asked anything unreasonable here.

Mozilla's 'Tiles' ads debut in new Firefox nightlies

LaeMing
Joke

Re: Stick a Fork in it!

Konqueror!!! (see icon)

LaeMing

I wasn't aware you could turn them off. Now I have.

LaeMing

Interested to see if

IceWeasel* strips this functionality or lets it stand.

*Debian's trademark-stripped-for-licencing-reasons version of FF.

Boffins attempt to prove the universe is just a hologram

LaeMing
Happy

Finally!

A real-world application of holographic memory!

Government report: average Oz user will want 15 Mbps by 2023

LaeMing
Thumb Down

Re: Sure.... want away

Says a frequent user of public roads, and other assorted public infrastructure. *rolleyes*

LaeMing

Re: What happens when

Easy! Turnbull will be retired to a Telstra board position long before then. S.E.P.

China hopes home-grown OS will oust Microsoft

LaeMing
Joke

Re: Red Flag...

Maybe Red Flag BSD this time?

Fast And Furious 6 cammer thrown in slammer for nearly three years

LaeMing

Whelp!

He is the best place possible ... for learning a whole raft of new skills.

NBN Co claims 96 mbps download speeds for FTTN trial

LaeMing
Unhappy

Yes.

Results only applicable for a perfect sphere moving through a vaccuum!

Aussie telcos to sell user location data to marketers

LaeMing
Unhappy

Which bank^H^H^H^H telco?

Every bloody bank^H^H^H^H telco!

Intel's Raspberry Pi rival Galileo can now run Windows

LaeMing

Re: Single-threat?

Just don't try to get it past the TSA!

This'll end well: US govt says car-to-car jibber-jabber will SAVE lives

LaeMing
Unhappy

Re: Bugger this... I'm walking.

That won't protect you from other's cars (which now can't see you at all since you don't have V2V built into your body... yet!)

Google's so smart it's discovered SHARKS HAVE TEETH

LaeMing
Alert

The sharks want their LASERs!

Re: "the shark-bite problem is specific to optical fibre cables rather than their retired copper predecessors"

Five Totally Believable Things Car Makers Must Do To Thwart Hackers

LaeMing
Meh

Re: We will all be driving $25.00 cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon

That crash at least once a day!

AMD's first 64-bit ARM cores star in ... Heatless in Seattle*

LaeMing

Re: How much?

Dev kits also tend to come with some very low-level engineering support bundled into that price.

HUMAN RACE PERIL: Not nukes, it'll be AI that kills us off, warns Musk

LaeMing
Terminator

Re: design to fail.

If the first-gen AIs are dumb enough to create a 2nd-gen to replace them, then they deserve the same fate as the humans who created them!

Turnbull to Big Content: Let your movies RUN FREE ... for a fair price

LaeMing

Re: Some thoughts...

The DVD rental store still pays a per-hire fee to the rights holder, so, yes, the rights-holder still has a loss. A very small one, but still a loss.

As I have said before. What I want is to be able to purchase - for a reasonable price - a business-card-sized* plastic chit which licences me to hold the content in any form I wish. I get the media in the format that suits my playback equipment (a Linux box at present, but may change ongoing) and the rights-holder gets paid (which, if the media is worth me having, I would like to pay /reasonable/ fee for if only to encourage more media of that type to be made!).

*Business-card-sized means conveniently-small but not misplacably-small and also wallets/boxes for storage are readily available.

Yes, Australia's government SHOULD store comms metadata

LaeMing
Mushroom

Of course they should.

And every time their 360k floppy disk is full, they just eject it, turn it over, reinsert it, and keep on storing. Like any good government minister's understanding of IT will dictate.

AMD dangles 64-bit ARM code developer kit over, well ... developers

LaeMing

Re: Good deal

Yes, you can't really compare prices for dev platforms with hobby platforms! Both are great in their place, but their place is quite different.

NBN Co adds apartments to FTTP rollout

LaeMing
Flame

That's why it is called the NBN

No Broadband Network

Lower prices are BAD FOR CONSUMERS, says Turnbull

LaeMing
Flame

Turnbull has been dining with the Devil,

and the cheque is now on its way.

Writing about an Australian Snowden would land Vulture South in the clink

LaeMing
Unhappy

Nah, they'd just lock us all up. Just to be sure.

LaeMing
Unhappy

Re: Tip of the Iceberg...

We, personally, may not deserve it, but we, taken as a group, ... Thomas is pretty right-on.

Spinning SPACE DUCK is comet-chasing Rosetta probe's PREY

LaeMing
Happy

Re: Human progress

Well, according to recent genetic studies, at some point we did exactly that.

Interview: Michael Cordover, voteware freedom-of-information crusader

LaeMing
Happy

Re: What a troublemaker

Downvoters may have missed the more obscure form of Aussie sarcasm there!

NBN Co execs: No FTTN product until 2015

LaeMing
Meh

I got mail!

Hmmm. I recieved a leaflet in my letter box yesterday explaining that in the next few months they would be digging up our area to install node boxes (and assuring us they would put the pavement, grass, trees, etc. back afterwards).

Not /REAL/ NBN, but better than nothing, I guess!

My mum, in a large regional centre down the coast, is still waiting to see if any-kind-of-wired-networking or death-by-old-age reaches her first.

Microsoft's anti-bug breakthrough: Wire devs to BRAIN SCANNERS

LaeMing
Devil

The trick will be in the feedback loop.

ie: Bad code electrifies the electrodes.

Data retention saves Australia from TERROR says Labor MP

LaeMing

Redundant?

Isn't the USA going to do this for us anyway?

Watch: DARPA shows off first successful test of STEERABLE bullet

LaeMing

Hax!

They use Hax! I don't want to play in this war any more!

I've got 99 problems, but a Facebook boycott ain't one

LaeMing
Megaphone

99 days?

Amateurs!

F1? No, it's Formula E as electric racing cars hit the track

LaeMing

Hmmmm

One interesting side-effect of wireless charging pads might be more people actually learning/bothering to park the proper distance from the curb and/or between the lines! And not on the *&$*& footpath!

LaeMing
Thumb Up

I was wondering if the relative quiet of e-vehicles might detract from the appeal, but from the video they sound a bit like distant jet engines.

iPhone user shamegasm: 'I beg of you', delete sex app from my purchase list

LaeMing
Go

Lister's Vindaloonian impression will have nothing on a mis-dial from this one!

Oh SNAP! Old-school '80s Unix hack to smack OSX, iOS, Red Hat?

LaeMing

Re: Confused heyrick... Ho humm this old saw again.

"I said many years ago, in response to "Linux is completely secure!" type statements, that Linux was secure THEN because it was not important enough to be an attack vector. With Windows 8 not flying out the door and many many mobile phones running a variant; it has now matured into something worth attacking"

Of course back many years ago, Windows was only a majority player on the Desktop, while the vast bulk of externally-connected servers (the ones serious hackers want to attack) were *NIX. These days, I believe, the spread between *NIX and Windows on the server is closer to 50:50, so by your argument attacks on *NIX systems should be going DOWN!

Remember the turbo button on PCs? New AWS instance has one for CPU burst

LaeMing
Happy

For those damned yoof amongst us:

The 'turbo' button on PCs of old was a button that, when activated, had the PC run at its full rated speed (generally 12 or 16 - or 20 if you were posh - MHz). When de-activated it would slow the PC down, preferably to 8MHz (though it often just halved the clock frequency).

Why would anyone want to slow down their PC? Well, some games back then, instead of using the PCs clock to pace themselves, relied on the processor speed for timing, so if you tried to play your game with the Turbo button on, it would run rather faster than you might find playable!

Why 'Turbo' on by default and not 'Slow' off by default? Marketing, of course.

NBN Co reveals THOUSAND-node FTTN trial built by Telstra

LaeMing
Meh

Re: interesting to know the ambient temperatures

And the ones in Canberra don't stand a chance against all that hot air emanating from under the big clothesline.

LaeMing
Unhappy

It's just a big....

...post-political-retirement board position just waiting to happen.

Supermodel Lily Cole: 'I got a little bit upset by that Register article'

LaeMing
Facepalm

Re: Bah.

In her social sphere, I am sure she knows plenty of people like that!

Australia.gov.au Alpha design revealed to grateful nation

LaeMing
Flame

Now all we need...

...is enough ports available in the exchanges so that everyone who wants to, can actually get on to the Internet to see the pretty sites.

600 school sysadmins sacked in New South Wales

LaeMing

Ah, the ol' "fact-finding mission to the Bahamas."

Sir Humphrey Appleby would be so proud.

Tech talk bloke compares girlfriend to irritating Java tool – did he deserve flames?

LaeMing
Meh

The Teacup weather report:

Storms.

It is a joke. Vaguely amusing, but far too generic to honestly offend anyone not trying very hard to take offence.

Verizon threatens Netflix in video lag blame game

LaeMing

'Crowded' is a rather polite way of putting it. They could have said several other words there with equal accuracy.

Londoners urged to cut landlines and take up wireless broadband

LaeMing
Boffin

Re: Bonkers.

Technically, 4G IS broadband: it is using a (relatively) broad section of the available bandwidth for its signal. But people have been trained to associate the word 'broadband' with speed because on an unshared copper wire the speed is, of course, very high. But it is the exclusiveness of the wire that makes it fast, not the 'broadband'. If we had to share that wire with everyone and their aunt, party-line-style, the 'broadband' wouldn't help us much there either.

Problem is that most customers for these kinds of services don't (want to be bothered to) understand what they are buying into. Sucks to be them, I guess!

(Except you then get people - like my mum - who knows full well what the score is, but can't do anything about it because the idiots in the government also believe wireless 'broadband' is magically not limited by the laws of physics - laws which aren't subject to corporate buy-out. It really really does suck to be caught unwillingly in that trap through no fault of one's own!)

Australia's first public swatting victim a nice bloke

LaeMing

In an ideal world,

these 'swatters' would be excluded from future police protection from anything.

'Fan docks' are about to become a thing

LaeMing

"For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme."

- Douglas Adams "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", Ch12.

Please be seated at your FOUR-LEGGED PC

LaeMing
Happy

I have actually been keeping an eye out for an antique-looking (though obviously not monetarily or historically valuable) writing desk to make into an integrated computer + TV desk for my mum.

Collecting lots of old valves (to bore out and LED-light) and some nice 'olde' meters, switches, dials and stuff too.

Samsung, Chipzilla in 4K monitor price cut pact

LaeMing

In the end,

it doesn't matter if Samsung's competitors also do well out of the deal. All that matters is if Samsung and Intel do better out of having the deal than from not having the deal. Business is about making money, not hamstringing oneself so spite the 'competition'. Samsung probably knows this.