Posts by Ru

Oh, its quite obvious

You can't necessarily tell the difference between decent, honest, hard-working loyal and patriotic citizens of the US of A and freedom-hating, dirty, shiftless agents of evil foreign oppressive regimes without doing a decent bit of spying on them first.

In fact, it is impossible to tell that someone is not an agent of a foreign power unless you've spied on them from their birth to their death. Hence the need for these sorts of precautions. They're for your safety, citizen.

As a relatively happy dSLR user I'll disagree with you there. A decent EVIL (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens... not sure if this is a well known term!) camera can take the place of any other sort of camera with the exception of a super compact (it won't ever be as small) and it can perform most camera uses with the exception of sports/fast-paced photojournalism (because the autofocus is too slow).

You can put on a big zoom for wildlife or event photography, you can put on a macro lens that will vastly outperform anything on a non-interchangeable lens camera for small subjects and product photography, you can put on a mid-range lens for 'every day' use, you can put on a wide-aperture fast prime for evening/indoor events where you don't want to use flash. At all other times, you don't need to deal with the inconvenience of the features you don't need (eg, the bulk of a superzoom) and the whole package can still be reasonably discreet (with a pancake prime lens it'll be pocketable).

Like as not you'll end up with better image quality (which is utterly irrelevant for most people, but useful if you're making medium-sized or larger prints) and better low light performance than any smaller sensor digital camera (eg, any of the kinds you listed) and a device which can still do more things and do them better than a combination of super-compact and super-zoom.

"Bridge" cameras look a bit naff by comparison, superzooms too bulky when you don't need the zoom, and normal zooms not particularly versatile. The only thing that might be more useful for most people is a decent super-compact, because you can take it everywhere really easily... and people seem to prefer using their phones for that!

I hadn't seen that advert until you mentioned it

So not only is it particularly annoying, but I feel that it is now partially your fault.

Easy: iDiot Box

See title.

Oh, so cynical!

They allow semicompetent UI (or UX, as they're apparently called these days) devs to continue to write swooshy slidy interfaces without worrying about the fact that their grievously unoptimised eye-candy is crippling the usefulness of the hardware. By way of a bonus, it stimulates the economy by requiring you to charge up twice as often.

Much like the photon, yes

Strange things, gauge bosons.

Plural of Lumia?

Lumiae would work; it has an appropriate faux-latin feel.

£50 games bad value for money?

Depends on the game, no? If you can squeeze, say, 20 hours gameplay out of it, £2.50/hour for your leisure time isn't exactly breaking the bank. Cheaper than a night out, cheaper than a trip to the cinema... its probably even cheaper than a night in with a pizza and some booze. Even under 20 hours its price competetive, assuming you play enough games to amortize the cost of your console or whatever.

The fact you feel that you're being ripped off is just a matter of your perception, given the sheer number of things that people will happily engage in that burn through just as much cash in much less than half the time and leave you with nothing to show for it.

You are an idiot.

Their philosophies which you presumably disagree with don't seem interfere with their ability to do journalism. You may find that quite a few interesting things mentioned on the Reg first popped up in CSM.

By rejecting them on your perception of their faith, you end up no better than any other judgemental zealot out there.

Just for the record...

"It just works" is present here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/icloud/

I'm sure you could find other examples if you bothered.

The Reamde solution was much more interesting

As it provided some sort of clever head-bobbing-compensated display, IIRC.

Too hard to use a lappy on a treadmill to my mind; much too inconvenient and I note that it would cover up the 'emergency stop' button on the machines. Better off on the bikes, I reckon.

"I haven't seen any notable reaction to copyright"

Then I posit that you are singularly unqualified to talk about copyright in relation to this article. Perhaps this is why you are rambling on about patents.

You should visit stop43.org.uk so you may understand something about this issue, and the last time the 'orphan works' notion reared its ugly head. The issue was well covered on the Reg and elsewhere, and I am curious as to how you may have missed it.

Ahh, percentages

"the percentage in bondage is probably smaller"

0.1% isn't a very big percentage either, but y'know, the absolute value turns out to be quite a few pennies when you're talking about the size of Google's cashpile.

Yes

Gamma rays all the way up. Boring but true.

You've clearly clicked the wrong mouse

You <copulating> moron.

What on earth made you think that 'a' mouse referred specifically to the ones you had lying around? Try some others. You'll find the right one eventually.

Plenty of guilt to go round, here

How on earth did these devices end up publically accessible, with default or brute forceable passwords? Sure, string up the guys who took advantage of this loophole but the people responsible for exposing their customer's credit cards in this fashion need to be taught a serious lesson.

It also shows that CnP security isn't a magic bullet. I wonder when the banks and credit card companies will wake up to this fact.

Of course.

It would be embarassing for a regime installed by the US to come pre-enabled as an enemy of the state.

Or at least; embarassing to admit it.

"It's Linux underneath. Drivers won't be a problem"

Sir, surely you jest?

1. It is possible to provide source code so incredibly awful it is effectively opaque and unmaintainable, and offers little that purely black box reverse engineering could give you.

2. Binary blobs can be loaded and run by otherwise 'open' drivers. Not only are they a black box with a poorly defined interface, but they can have additional restrictions put upon them by vendors who can use copyright restrictions to limit the distribution of those blobs.

Drivers have been, are, and will continue to be a serious problem. Whether through malice, greed or incompetence is irrelevant to the poor schmucks trying to use their hardware on their own terms.

On percentages and absolute values

The number of obese people in the United States exceeds the total population of the United Kingdom.

Just thought I'd point that one out.

Like snake? or solitaire? Or Porn?

To quote the article, "And, let's be honest, Dredd vs Zombies is Angry Birds, with guns, the undead and better dialogue". You can replace 'Angry Birds' in that phrase with any of my examples.

You're not paid to assess risk

You're paid to churn out code. Get churning. Don't you dare waste company time on anything extraneous to the project requirements... if they don't mention any sort of security tasks then you are absolutely not allowed to 'secure' the software.