* Posts by ratfox

3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007

Verizon iPhone due 'early 2011'

ratfox
Happy

Rumours

How long did it take again, for the one about the Apple tablet to become true?

Utah Attorney General tweets execution go-ahead

ratfox
Grenade

Humane killing?

...not!

I'd piss in fear every single time I'm escorted down a corridor...

Maybe the most humane way would be to slip them a sleeping pill, then execute them in their sleep.

Pakistani lawyer petitions for death of Mark Zuckerberg

ratfox
Unhappy

Disconnect

It is sad to see people like these, who feel they do not get enough respect from us, but react in ways that are so crazy to us that we lose what little respect we had for them.

Firefoxers howl as privacy add-on auto updates with 'bloatware'

ratfox
Jobs Horns

Unjobsian?

I remember PC users of iTunes got Safari pushed to them in a very similar way...

Apple's fresh Mac mini stripped naked

ratfox
Alert

Internal power supply

Was this not fingered as the cause of numerous failures of the time capsule?

Something about being difficult to cool the CPU when you have a damn heater in the box...

Ten Essential... 500GB Portable Hard Drives

ratfox
FAIL

Seconded

Comparing the article reveals that higher is better, but this was far from obvious looking at the graph.

Sarko to walk tall in factory visit

ratfox
Pint

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

I guess the difference is that Obama does not pick people of the right color to appear with him so as to make him look good...

Cheers!

iPhone manufacturer to shutter China factories

ratfox
Thumb Down

Good move

I bet that will help the suicide rates.

800'000 people?? Thank god this is in China and not, say, Swtzerland...

Apple lifted 'make web go away' button from open source

ratfox

Well, that's what Open Source means

Ok, not exactly, and there are many variants. But I guess that people doing open source should expect their code to be used, possibly even by soulless corporations like Micro^H^H^H^H^HGoog^H^H^H^HApple.

Telling the Readability project people would have been polite, but hey...

AT&T to ax unlimited data plans on iPhone Monday

ratfox
Go

Third reason

There is a perfectly good reason to cut prices, even for nasty greedy corporation, and that is to grab more market share. Then of course, they claim that 65% of customers do not use more than 200MB on average, but that could well mean they all use more every three months.

So far, I have mostly seen two types of reaction:

"How dare they!? How can I watch three hours a day of video with only 2GB?"

and

"Cool! I use less than 50MB anyway, welcome to low bills!"

Anyway, to those who gloat at the misfortune of AT&T customers, beware: Your turn WILL come.

The question is WHEN, not IF, other telcos will follow.

Wikileaks denies Tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start

ratfox

I believe I found a new oxymoron

- Military intelligence

- Microsoft works

And now, I claim:

- Internet security

It is incredible how much supposedly secret stuff can be found

apparently just by scooping it with a ladle.

Mac spyware infiltrates popular download sites

ratfox
Go

Better jump to Linux, then

It's going to be a while before anybody deems it interesting enough to hack...

Then FreeBSD, then... BeOS?

Google misses German regulator Street Car Wi-Fi data grab deadline

ratfox
Thumb Down

Who will watch the watchmen?

I believe the regulator is a little bit to hasty in claiming that the protection of private data does not apply when giving it to the regulator. In the United States, I have absolutely no doubt that this would lead to a class action, especially with such fat targets as Google and the government.

Computing smart-scope gunsight for US snipers

ratfox

The US solution

In Yugoslavia, the merkins got rid of snipers with a subtle AC-130

Google programming Frankenstein is a Go

ratfox
Paris Hilton

Sounds dangerous

How to mix better the disadvantages of both languages? Significant whitespace PLUS mandatory brackets PLUS apparently, implicit semi-colons. Add a bit of Perl do-what-I-mean, and maybe, who knows, undefined behavior, in the good ol' C tradition.

Do they have compiler macros too!?

Oz customs search lappies and mobes for smut

ratfox
FAIL

Meet the government

I am reminded of de Niro in "Meet the parents":

- Have you ever smoked marijuana?

- Have you ever watched porn?

Google backs open codec against patent trolls

ratfox
Flame

Stupid patent system

It seems really hard to just say: "We want this to be freely usable by anybody"

Maybe it would be easier to ban patent lawyers

Canadian mobe firm sued over disappearing husband

ratfox
Flame

Only in AMERICA

Yes, it happened in AMERICA.

You are not the only people on this continent all you US citizens.

The IT security blame game

ratfox
WTF?

No academics?

I did not fill the poll, but I am surprised this is not a choice under "type of business"...

'Martin Mills you are a LEGEND!'

ratfox
FAIL

@Dom S

Why do you stop at music? Why don't you claim that nobody should ever earn a salary, because they should just do what they like and give it away for free?

...Maybe it could be because you earn a salary yourself, and are not willing to give it up?

You mean you are doing your job for the money? Why don't you quit your job, forgo your salary and do something you ENJOY, you capitalist pig?

The iPad: Unsubsidised, unaffordable, unloved?

ratfox
Happy

Welcome to middle-age

You just discovered that the world is not composed of other UNIX and storage administrators.

Ellison slams former Sun CEO for blogginess

ratfox
Pint

Agree with this one

Having a CEO blog away means the CEO has too much time on his hands...

Either because the company is doing so well, or because he is ignoring the problems.

Plus, between the two, I think there is no doubt whatsoever who is the best CEO.

Plus, I don't like ponytails.

Another suicide at Apple's Chinese supplier

ratfox

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Actually, China has the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world where women suicide more often than men...

ratfox
Dead Vulture

Come on, reg, write some real news stories

6 or 8 suicides on a workforce of 300'000 people?

The suicide rate in China is around 13 per 100'000, according to the Wikicult.

If the company had only 8 suicides this year, they are already way under the national average.

It might well be that people suicide for reasons that are entirely unrelated to their job, you know...

Apple in shock talks with Reg reader

ratfox
Pint

Poor Steve

Gedikian - not the other

I don't think it is good for you when your boss forwards you complaints from the customers...

Cheer up, have a beer

50 million user Scribd scraps Flash for HTML5

ratfox
Pint

Silicon Valley cult

Don't say that, you will never get invited to their events now!

NASA tests amazing bailout rocket which will never be used

ratfox
Go

Why not?

They had spent untold millions to build it, why not just spend an extra million to test it, just to see if it works? Anyway, the budget must have already been attributed for this test long ago.

And really, it makes no sense to spend 99% of your budget to build something, then throw away the result without checking if it works, just to save the remaining 1%. It is almost certain that the knowledge will be useful at some point, even if not for this particular project.

'Minimalist, whimsical' Google search given Bing-like overhaul

ratfox

Don't have a sidebar either

But I note that if I look for Gordon Brown, I get in fifth place a sub-box with a scroll bar which continuously adds latest results for Gordon Brown, twitter-style. Never noticed this before...

Applesoft, Ogg, and the future of web video

ratfox
Pint

Methinks the biggest problem is...

Ogg is a weird name. It does not sound good. If they had chosen a better name*, I am sure more people would be interested.

*No, not Weatherwax

US boffin builds ultra-dense nanodot memory

ratfox
Thumb Up

Easy to solve

Just ask the specialists at Dell to store it in a cardboard box. Or six.

Apple rejects crazy canuck's seal bludgeon game

ratfox
Pint

This is inconsistent indeed, but...

The whole society is inconsistent in this precise manner. Nothing to do with Apple, really.

In fact, Apple is rather consistent in the sense that they are inconsistent at all times.

IT consultant gets 5 years for plundering $2m

ratfox
Pint

Good that he got caught

But actually, I wonder why crooks like these do not escape before getting caught.

Or maybe we only get to hear about those that did not escape...

New drug spray 'makes men as soppy as girls'

ratfox
Thumb Down

Sexist

Show me Cute Overload any day, and I will coo and blubber too!

SCO: jurors too busy Facebooking to rule on Unix claim

ratfox
WTF?

Incredible

- No

- We want a bench trial!

- No

- We want a jury!

- No

- We want another jury... or a bench trial again... anything!

- What *** part of NO don't you understand??

SCO should get a soap opera award.

Microsoft's Linux patent bingo hits Google's Android

ratfox
Flame

Revolting

Basically, Microsoft can lean on about any company in the world, and say:

"We think that maybe you owe us money. Now there's the easy way, and that is very easy. You pay a license fee, and that's the end of it.

Of course, you can also try the hard way. We have plenty of lawyers. We have plenty of money and we think nothing of a ten-years long legal battle, which would take 50% of your resources, and 0.1% of ours. Now which will it be?"

Schoolyard bully... On the other hand, Vetinari would be proud.

California's 'Zero Energy House' is actually massive fossil hog

ratfox
Boffin

Not quite

124 miles/Gallon would be about 1.897 litres per 100km.

The proper Yank unit for 3 litres per 100km is 78.4 miles/Gallon

Even if you mean the ol' Imperial Gallon instead of the Yank one,

it would still mean 2.278 litres per 100km, not 3.

Cops raid Gizmodo editor in pursuit of iPhone 4G 'felony'

ratfox
Pint

Well, Gizmodo wins too

Gizmodo is getting advertisement like never before, and I am sure that Jason Chen himself is not regretting for a minute whatever it was that he did. As an aspirant journalist, he will likely consider it as a badge of honor. I doubt very much he will end up in jail, especially since he did eventually give back the iPhone.

Scammers plunder gullible iPad owners' backdoors

ratfox
Paris Hilton

lot of disposable income and not much sense...

I suppose PH bought one?

Kent police bring obscenity charge over online chat

ratfox
FAIL

What about mangas?

Many mangas talk of killing children. Say, Naruto. It contains multiple occurrences of attempts on the lives of underage teenagers.

Microsoft wins big in Chinese piracy lawsuit

ratfox

Irrational? Not so much...

After all, since they can find people who actually buy it... Why not?

I am willing to bet that somebody at Microsoft made estimations, for each pricing, of how many people would buy versus would pirate it. And they put the price where they thought they would earn the most MONEY. Actually quite reasonable.

Adobe gives up on the iPhone

ratfox

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

All right, I think I get it. Apple does not want apps based on Flash, because it would flood the iTunes stores with apps of "lower quality of experience" that would bring down the level of apps as a whole.

Fair enough, I guess. There may be 100'000 apps already, but there are millions of Flash games. And it would certainly be a let-down if people start saying that apps are just like flash games on the web, except you need to pay for them.

...Of course, that might be ignoring the fart apps, but I do get that if you have a very rosy-colored view of what an app should be, you might turn up your nose at flash games.

ratfox
WTF?

Why not do a code translator?

Is it that hard to make a pre-compiler that would read a flash app and output the equivalent in Objective-C code? Is Apple going to study every code and try to guess whether it was translated or not? Silly me, of course Apple would. But would they really be able to tell the difference? There is no end to the obfuscation you could go to in order to make it look like a human being typed the code from scratch.

I can imagine Apple starting to randomly refuse apps because they look like they might have been translated...

Space Station lightsabre-sparring hoverdroids to be upgraded

ratfox
Paris Hilton

power transfer through resonant inductive coupling

Oh, is that how you youngsters are calling it these days? *snigger*

PH of course

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language

ratfox

Conciseness

Maybe it's me, but conciseness does not mean readability, or even fast development. E.g. Perl can be very concise too

School secretly snapped 1000s of students at home

ratfox
FAIL

Heads are gonna roll...

Hard to believe they thought they could do this

Italian toads predicted L'Aquila earthquake

ratfox
FAIL

Revoke their biology license

It's astonishing that somebody could publish such a load of bull (toad) crap.

Repeat after me: Correlation is not causation.

Taiwanese chip co asks ITC to ban iPad imports

ratfox
Thumb Down

TItle

Insert standard rant against patents.

Steve Jobs spotted not hating Eric Schmidt

ratfox
Thumb Up

I can only admire these people

I wonder how it feels to know that world+dog is following your steps, and to calculate each of your appearances to that level. Steve Jobs could probably give lessons to the most media-savvy movie star.

I think it was their wives. Must be.

Steve Jobs and governator tout transplant reform

ratfox

Anyway, good for him

I don't begrudge him his good luck, no matter how much his money may have played a role.

Honestly, I can't even bring myself to claim it is unfair.

ratfox

So how come he was chosen?

Not that I claim he should have gracefully let somebody go in front of him. I certainly would spend quite a bit of money in order to survive. Not very moral, but certainly normal...