* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

WikiLeaks: East Timor knocked back high-tech Chinese spy base

ratfox
Thumb Up

How perceptive of Timor

They accepted the boats, though. What is the radar on these boats?

Google says Android 'club' makes phone makers 'do what we want'

ratfox

You only really value openness when..,

It favors your business. Amirite? That or you don't plan to make money.

I do not remember that anybody has ever been happy to see the destruction of his own company, but maybe the writer is willing to give examples?

MobileMe drove Steve Jobs to foul-mouthed fury

ratfox

Here in US?

You do know that Apple is headquartered in the US, right? This was not a public/corp event, it was a meeting with the MobileMe team.

Chinese iPad 2 fanboiz in frenzied fight

ratfox

Backfired?

You mean, it has backfired because there is yet another article in the Reg that covers the iPad 2, underscoring how much people want to have it since they fight for it?

That is not backfiring, it is marketing.

Dear Google and Facebook: You don't want Skype

ratfox
WTF?

Google already has a similar service

Why would they be interested?

End of the tether: Google plays nice with carriers

ratfox

Was it not Google...

Who insisted on this FCC regulation?

Is there anything to find on bin Laden's hard drive?

ratfox
Badgers

Seriously?

You think he would have spilled the beans?

RIM taps Microsoft Bing for phone and tablet search

ratfox

Ballmer "We're going to invest uniquely into the BlackBerry platform..."

How do you say "Motherf***" in Finnish?

Ubisoft to turn games into movies, TV shows

ratfox

Could be good

I think games like say Splinter Cell do have a very good chance.

Japanese boffins build internet kissing machine

ratfox
WTF?

Japanese are weird

No, seriously, they are!

Daddy, what were you doing when the 2011 Tsunami hit? Well, son, you see, I was developing my Internet kissing machine.

Wikileaks: Canadian piracy arrests were favor to movie biz man

ratfox

Finger pointing

The link from arrest to overdose is rather weak... And were it not for the overdose, this would be a non-story. The fact that the RCMP is not usually arresting cammers does not mean they should never do it. All in all, I am not schocked.

Beyoncé sued over aborted videogame deal

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Anything to do with video games...

Ends up on Reg Hardware.

No, I don't know why either...

China sets out space-station plan, asks public to name it

ratfox
Troll

Pure BS

Since when does the Chinese government ask the opinion of its citizens?

Airborne killer robot destroys Libyan anti-aircraft missile

ratfox
Happy

Drone destroying a SAM in flight

I thought the same too... but in my mind, the "destroying" part was done by flying still and getting hit.

'Anti alpha' mirror-matter made from gold in atomsmasher

ratfox
Pint

Let me get this straight (ha!)

If ever the probe on the ISS detects anything, it will mean that we are surrounded by anti-matter, and soon to disappear in a flash of energy?

Brilliant!

Apple component lock-ups jump 40%

ratfox
Jobs Halo

Impressive

Now THAT is a good use of money in the bank. Large commitments means cheap components, which means larger margins.

Apple seals $66bn in Jobsian wallet

ratfox
Jobs Halo

Dividends and buybacks

Historically, investors have regarded dividends and buybacks as admissions that the company did not know how to use the cash effectively. This is considered as a terrible failure.

Look at RIM: they bought back their stock last year... You would think this indicates confidence, and that market force should make the stock prize rise... But that has very much not been the case.

Robotic waiter service uses Kinect to see

ratfox

What about Roomba?

iRobot has offered a fully programmable version of their vacuum cleaner for years...

In fact, a team at IBM has made a robot detecting hot spots in data centers out of it:

http://domino.research.ibm.com/library/cyberdig.nsf/papers/FB4733344CA23D5B852577C400542369

BTW, I believe the "turtle" thing is meant to appeal to old fans of LOGO...

Japanese gov makes Fukushima evac zone compulsory

ratfox
Happy

In before...

Comments that the government is banning people from entering the zone in order to hide that the radioactivity level is far higher than they report.

Google Linux servers hit with $5m patent infringement verdict

ratfox
Flame

Sometimes I wish I was so shameless

Who needs to be productive and actually invent things, when you can just patent known techniques, wait ten years, and sue in hope that the company will pay?

A sum of $5 millions is calculated so that Google might just pay to get rid of the problem and hope they will go away bother somebody else.

Cops refuse to say if they secretly snarf cellphone data

ratfox
Thumb Down

Give them the money

Then sue them to get it back. The idea that a freedom of information request could be stopped by just asking arbitrary large amounts of money is frankly disturbing.

Hands up everybody who thinks the real cost of providing the information is anywhere that high? Thank you.

Sanity saver: Fedora 15 answers Ubuntu's Unity

ratfox
Pint

@relax: Oh, ok

Allrighty then.

Thanks for humoring us alarmists!

ratfox
WTF?

Hang on, no overlapping?

I did not try it, but people seem to say you cannot overlap windows...!?

Maybe *you* don't multitask, but I have seen people writing code while watching a video on youTube. And checking at the same time the stock market minute by minute in a third window. My question is: Can you do all that without alt-tabbing continuously?

Apple sues Samsung over Galaxy look-and-feel

ratfox
WTF?

Infringement of 6 trademarked icons!!

Example: FLOWER ICON

http://www.ptodirect.com/Results/Trademarks?query=%283%2C886%2C200%29[SN%2CRN]

"The color(s) yellow, blue, green, brown, black, gray and white is/are claimed as a feature of the mark. The mark consists of a gray, white, and blue rectangle with rounded corners depicting a stylized flower in the colors green, yellow, brown, black, white and gray."

You mean lawyers get paid to do this??

ratfox
WTF?

What's their point?

I thought that you needed to claim that a patent or something was infringed in order to sue...

I mean yeah, they do look very much the same, and the iThingies were inspiration but I am not sure that is illegal in any way... (and it is not clear to me that the design had never been used before)

I take it that aiming at a semi-friendly furnisher is a preparation for the big target starting with G.

Apple smears Web2.0rhea across online support

ratfox
Paris Hilton

What a high score brings?

I thought it gave you a longer, larger and more impressive... Sense of achievement. Right?

PH also gives a longer, larger, etc.

XXX domain names go live

ratfox
Coffee/keyboard

Success

I am in awe of the business gambit ICM just won. They practically created for themselves an eternal source of free money. Without contributing anything of any significance to society.

It makes me want to puke.

Apple spits out increment iOS version

ratfox

Relative ease?

It may be me, but I think that you underestimate the difficulty here, both of unlocking the platform and of developing a platform that cannot be unlocked at all.

Anyway, Apple has probably done a cost-analysis and estimated how much money they were willing to stop people from unlocking their iThings. I believe users are not that bothered by the patching... Except those that do want to unlock their toys, but that is the point, innit?

Google native code browser plug-in gets tickled

ratfox

Wait... People still use Tcl?

It has been a while since I have heard anything about it. Maybe I hang around the wrong people.

US Marines splurge on Brit troops' armoured pants

ratfox
Pint

Silk underwear?

Strewth! I need a beer.

UK is 15th best place in the world to do IT

ratfox

Semi-useless rankings

Well, not completely, but one should not sweat the details of who is just behind whom... This takes into account various stuff such as "broadband penetration" and "smartphone ownership" which can plumb a country without having much influence on the actual work conditions of IT employees.

ratfox
Dead Vulture

Good idea

Not that I am on dial-up, but this should IMO have been included in the article... Or at least, say, the position of US.

Bad reg!

Ex-Microsoft man charged with scamming Ballmer and Co

ratfox
Gates Halo

Crook. Go to jail. Do not pass Go.

In before jokes that M$ has way too much money anyway.

Writers sue Huffington Post for back pay

ratfox
Go

I'd be pissed off too, if I was one of the bloggers.

But then again, nobody forced them to post there. And whoever wrote the T&Cs certainly thought of a way to protect the site from this.

This is going to be VERY interesting.

Facebook twins lose court case

ratfox
Thumb Up

Completely agree, they are creepy

And I have proof! Using the Assange™ technique, we find:

71,800 Google results for "creepy Winklevoss twins"

Google hits 'prove we killed no Afghans' – Assange™

ratfox

florida pastor blood on hands

A cool 6,840,000 results... But get this:

bbc blood on hands – 28,900,000 results! Ouch.

Wonderful logic, Assange™

Duke Nukem Girls give it some on video

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Bad move

There are a few good FPS already... But if they want to compete in the titillating business, the competition is overwhelming.

Feds defend Twitter dragnet on WikiLeaks supporters

ratfox
FAIL

Learn to read

I was commenting on the creative spelling of the OP, not on the correct one. This is precisely why I said Hippocrates had nothing to do with it, because as you said, his name is very different from the *correct* spelling.

Next: The subject of the article is not an internal military memo, so your experience in the service is irrelevant. It is a legal filing. I fail to see how the disclosure of a request for Twitter records of WikiLeaks supporters can result in dead armed force personnel; but maybe you can imagine a contrived scenario for this?

ratfox

wrongdoings, hypocrisy

Leave Hippocrates alone, he had nothing to do with it.

...If they had not thought this objectionable, they would not have made the filing confidential.

US gov mulls issuing terrorist warnings on Twitter, Facebook

ratfox
Thumb Up

Sensible

Considering a government alternative would likely be, if not necessarily very expensive, certainly more expensive... And would likely reach less people.

Then again... http://xkcd.com/723/

Energy crisis over - for 250 years?

ratfox

In before...

Somebody suggests doing away with gas no matter what since we will have to do it in 250 years anyway. Assuming we don't find more until then.

Spanish cops rush to cuff 'webcam killer'

ratfox
Thumb Up

Good reaction time

Honestly, I would not have thought that the Romanian police could make the Spanish police act within 45 minutes.

We often complain about cops, but we should not forget to praise them when they do something right.

Baby Googles: The answer to the Chocolate Factory dominance?

ratfox

Paying for internet services

This already exists to some point... There are paying services out there, that are used by companies who don't mind spending money and like to have technical support. I understand you can even get support from Google if you pay for it.

But unless you find a way to make them illegal, there will always be free email on the web, and it is very likely that the general population will flock to it. And THIS is what Google is good at, not making people pay for its services.

Dell, HP badmouth Apple's iPad

ratfox

What's a VAR?

Even the article linked did not offer a definition.

Vendor... Affiliate... R... R... Rebate? Nah. Robot? That would be for android. Reseller? Ah, Vendor And Reseller? Weird. Ok, googled it: Value Added Resellers.

Funny, of the three words I had, Reseller is the one I would have doubted the most. I would think that the whole idea of "reseller" does not sit well with Apple. The way they see it, there is only one company allowed to sell anything to their customers; and anybody else is a parasite trying to leech off of their success. Maybe that could be why they don't encourage it?

Apple's 'App Store trademark': A farce of Jobsian proportions

ratfox
Troll

You mean logic should actually apply to Trademark laws?

Who would have thunk?

Take-Two talent call betrays Grand Theft Auto V

ratfox
Go

And already, I feel like playing it

Is this great advertising or what?

Google's 'clean' Linux headers: Are they really that dirty?

ratfox
Troll

Typical law argument

When both sides accuse the other of using Insane Troll Logic.

Comodo-gate hacker brags about forged certificate exploit

ratfox
FAIL

Single hacker

Yet we were told that only a government could pull it off. Seems like this is becoming a standard excuse in the industry: We are but a poor commercial company, what can we do against the secret hacking units of governments... This could not be possibly due to our own incompetence!

iPad 2 tougher than iPad 1. True

ratfox

Good commercial

For the repair shop, I mean. I assume that we will be able to see soon that it blends...

If they put more force on the iPad1 screen, it is because it is less flexible... The point being that they bended both over one inch, but only the iPad1 screen broke.

MySQL.com hacked via... SQL injection vuln

ratfox
FAIL

Doesn't anybody use prepared statements or what?

I fail to sympathize with any organization that fails to use prepared statements and gets hit by an SQL injection.