* Posts by Dazed and Confused

2385 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007

BlackBerry sees iPhone shrink in rear view mirror

Dazed and Confused

Wot no Nokia?

So this is presumably a survey of all the phones that aren't made by Nokia then?

Or perhaps the definition of a smart phone is one not made by a Finish company?

US court rules FCC can't ban BitTorrent busting

Dazed and Confused

Biggest crime

Comcasts biggest crime was difinetly that they were spoofing network packets from their customers. They were inserting into the data stream packets that the customers computer had not sent.

I'm amazed that no one has used this as a defence against any claimed wrong doing on the internet.

"But you sent these lan packets".

"No, your honor, it weren't me"

"But only your PC can send packets from your IP addresses"

"No, your honor, my ISP can and they do routinely send packets claiming they came from me. They have the ability to have sent these packets, can the prosecution prove that it was me and not my ISP that sent these packets?"

Errrrrrrrr no.

Case dismissed, Have a nice day y'all

Microsoft roasted for Office 2010 standards FAIL

Dazed and Confused

Freedom of information acts around the world

So I presume now that all Governments around the world that have freedom on information acts will ban the production of any documentation in any software package that does not confirm to ISO standards and that consequently M$ will be barred from supplying software to all such government agencies, schools ... etc. until they are compliant with their very own personal ISO standard.

Funny how you can still see the fly pigs even when all the windows are shuttered and it's dark outside.

Apple drops HTML from iPhone and iPad

Dazed and Confused

Greystripe business sense

Suprised Greystripe didn't pointed out the business sense of moving all adverstising to iHTML (TM) as the only people you would ever want to do business with would have iApple devices. This would allow advertisers to avoid the hoy per loy.

PS. This only count before noon.

BBC, big business leer creepily at orphan works

Dazed and Confused

Re: AC true but...

They wouldn't be orphaned, but...

There is this great picture on such and such a page which we'd like to use. We know who's page it is so we guess they own it.... Damn we'll have to pay them.

No hang on, if I go down to the internet cafe down the road and copy it to another page then you can ask me if I know who's it is and I can say sorry can't remember saw it, liked it used it on my page.

Ah! so you mean it's orphaned then.

Yeah, guess it must be.

I wonder how long before freetards are using this as a get out of jail free card.

You have been accused of ripping off a copy of the new XYZ album,

Nah M'lord, I erd it on some website and they couldn't remember where it came from 'onest so I just copied it I did - It's orphan it is. Oo's XYZ, never eard of them, only ever listen to orphan works me, never heard of no groups no not none.

Bet it works for big business stealing from the little guy. Bet the little guys still getr screwed by big business.

Wide-eyed kiddies in Scarface school play shocker

Dazed and Confused
Big Brother

better than most school plays

The school plays put on at my kids schools are just an exercise in political indoctrination. Wouldn't be too bad if they bothered to keep up to date but the last one I had to sit through was full of issues which were out lawed years before any of the kids were born.

Are you a 'supertasker'? Probably not

Dazed and Confused

driving and talking

So are we going to see a ban on carrying passengers?

Child seats in cars should be made completely illegal? If you think talking on the phone is bad the kids are far more distracting.

How about banning car radios too? Drivers argue with the presenter.

That's before we get onto driving while bored and therefore day dreaming.

Why is all this research always highlighting the use of mobes.

MSI tells 97,000 customers to 'Read The F***ing Manual'

Dazed and Confused

You don't want customers who read the manual

I used to work in support for a major vendor.

We had one customer who did used to read the manuals. He'd then place support calls and insist we logged defect reports for all the spelling and grammatical errors.

Apple pries iPad moniker from Fujitsu

Dazed and Confused

It's a question of noughts

> We can only guess the extent of back-room cajoling, bargaining, arm-twisting, and carrot-and-sticking

I doubt any of this went on. It will have been a conversation along the lines of

We own that, what you going to give us?

$%)*$&"

I don't think you understand, We own that, you can't sell something called an iPad unless you buy it from us. What you going to give us?

$%)*$&"0

OK, so you've worked out the rules of this little game. Now you just need to work out which ball park we're playing it in.

$%)*$&"00

Now you really aren't trying hard enough are you.

$%)*$&"000

A little better, but you've got to understand things from our point of view. You are the richest computer company with the highest profit margin since someone worked out how to sell a service pack as a whole new experience... So, what you going to give us?

$%)*$&"00000

... and so on.

Now just bend over this isn't going to hurt "me" much.

Games console 'killer' powers Avatar 3D power package

Dazed and Confused

Latency

Latency is going to be the real killer for this. A thirtyith of second? so about 30ms. Pinging the data centre down the road shows a latency time of 22.5ms on a clear line. It's 18ms to the ISPs kit.

But ADSL is a contended service. Get others online and those figures will grow. Any other traffic on the ADSL line and those figures can grow significantly. I doubt that the UKs current infrastructure can deliver a consistent 30ms latency time. Many areas of the US will be worse.

From home, in the UK, the Eastern seaboard is 90ms, the West coast is 180ms. So you are going to need a lot of data centres to cover that land area with a sub 30ms delay.

Perhaps South Korea has low enough latencies to deliver this.

Yes, Internet Explorer is on the wane in Europe

Dazed and Confused

@John Smite 19

Well my systems gave me the Ballot and IE is not my default browser. I found it annoying since there didn't seem to be a simple way to tell it to go away I've already made my choice and I don't want to have you download another browsers - again. I've already downloaded the ones I want to use.

Dazed and Confused

Home v Work usage

That's an amusing comment that IE usage drops at the weekend. It presumably mean that most people are forced to suffer/use (delete as you see fit) IE by their companies IT dept. where the desktop team's management are rampant M$ fanbois. (As opposed to the actual techies, most of the Windows admins I know loath Windows with a vengeance that few Linux fans could muster).

Energizer site still plagued by data-stealing trojan

Dazed and Confused

@Pete 8

Nah, Governments are too prudish for that.

Nah, what they are doing is bugging the owners of vibrators as they are obviously deviants and perverts and need to put on a list somewhere.

Court bars charges against teen who posed semi-nude

Dazed and Confused

Prosecuting the wrong people

Oh look kiddies take pictures of themselves with no clothes on, if I confiscate their phone and go through the pictures then I can see the little girlies in the nude. ...

Surely they should be investigating the indiscriminate searching of children's phone in the hope of finding indecent pictures of the owners of the phone. This looks more like a case should be brought against the school authorities than the kids. To me it sounds like a load of grumpy frustrated old farts grumbling that the kids today are enjoying themselves more than they were allowed to do. Tough! get a life of your own rather than trying to wreck other peoples.

Flat-pack plug designer wins top award

Dazed and Confused

But when can I buy one

Has she got "type approval" for it yet.

Is she allowed to sell it?

Is anyone going to make it?

Like all the best ideas it is so obvious once you've seen it. It is a wonderfully simple design and an answer to a real problem. The plug for my netbook is a real pain.

(Mind the power supply for my new full sized laptop is so big it damn near needs wheels, so an elegant mini plug is hardly needed there)

Sky gets Five HD

Dazed and Confused

Re: Sky dish and Freesat

I believe that you can use the Sky dish and even the SkyHD box to watch Freesat.

I recently pulled the Sky+HD box out of the mother in laws (she never watches it and doesn't even ever use the digital on her TV either). When I cancelled her Sky contract the very helpful woman in their call centre said she could continue to use the box and dish to view freesat.

Nikon D3s

Dazed and Confused

Impressive

Those 12800 ASA photos looked amazing.

I love my D300 but those were in a different league.

HMRC may get hands on missing bank data

Dazed and Confused

Stolen property

Presumably the "former IT" worker wasn't entitled to the data and therefore it is stolen. If the HMRC were to "receive" it they would be guilty of receiving or handling stolen property and should therefore be prosecuted. Bet it will be a case of one law for them and another for us, as usual.

Google, Facebook cop for preposterous patent potshot

Dazed and Confused

Becoming a lawyer

Can't help thinking I should have become a lawyer, coz only they are going to win.

Home Sec says 17m ID cards in circulation by 2017

Dazed and Confused

M?

Was that 17M as in

M == Million

or

M === MMMmmmmmmmmmm we think so

Enquiring minds want to know.

Steve Jobs says 'No' to iPhone-to-iPad tether

Dazed and Confused

Sent from my iPhone

Why do these damn emails always say this.

Like who gives a flying F*&^% what you sent it from.

Men lie more in online dating - except about their weight

Dazed and Confused

truth?

Does anyone every tell the truth online?

I thought their were RFCs about that.

SCO's Linux litigation architect angles for SCO's mobile biz

Dazed and Confused

that's sure going to help

$35K is going to buy about 30seconds worth of legal battle.

Can't someone just put thing sad thing out of its misery.

Sexy is as sexy does: UK.gov struggles with sexualisation

Dazed and Confused

Evidence based research

The problem with relying on evidence based research is that they keep finding evidence that does comply with current political objectives. This can not be accepted and we are therefore forced to cut their funding. Reducing funding leads to job losses amongst academics and the sorts of bad publicity our PR people tell us we don't need.

So we have decided to avoid evidence as a basis for policy making.

Since the statistics office have managed to get there own PR dept. and won't allow us to lie using stats, we have been forced to avoid statistics as the basis for policy making.

This leads us to the most tried and tested approach. Personal prejudice and out right jealously.

BT could face criminal case over Phorm trials

Dazed and Confused

What's the complexity

They're guilty as sin, they've never denied they intercepted customers data without informed consent.

Good to hear it's finally happening, nothing to do with an impending election I'm sure.

Now where did I put that black cap and the damn rope.

Mozilla warns of 'Microsoft monoculture' in South Korea

Dazed and Confused

Re: the AC troll

Well having just come back from another trip to South Korea to work with a major Korean company and their many many large Unix machines.

I also found that many of the techies out there were running Firefox on there desktops.

Maybe the have to use IE to access the bank but there are people using FF.

Car thieves making clean getaway with GPS jammers

Dazed and Confused
Happy

what a surprise

enough said.

if you invent a way of detecting a crime the crims will invent a way to avoid it.

It is just surprising it has taken this long. Probably hasn't professional gangs have probably been doing this for sometime.

Next you'll find the the electronic warfare suppliers can fit a pod to the police choppers to spot a 2W transmitter. All they'll need to do is to remove the automatic targeting and missile delivery system that such toys probably come with as standard.

Apple strips top shelf, leaves corporate smut in place

Dazed and Confused

Do Apple care?

My youngest had set his heart of having an iPod Touch for his birthday (dream on) so I spent some time investigating it. Not only won't it work with nearly every website he likes (no flash) but it doesn't have any kiddie filtering software. I asked in shops and friends who have them and they didn't know of any.

There is little point in worrying about what is in Apple's store if you can just go to 99% of the internet and gawp at what ever pr0n cranks your particular handle.

Ex-Army man cracks popular security chip

Dazed and Confused

Re: just how microscopic are those needles?

I used to work for a chip maker doing testing. We needed to be able to put a probe onto a line to take measurements. Line sizes have shrunk since then but I'm sure the test equipment manufactures have kept pace. The problem isn't just the needles but the micro manipulators to position them. Then you have loads of fun keeping it all still enough.

Minister deploys 'dodgy' DNA case study

Dazed and Confused

Admin errors

never occur so it is quite acceptable to retain DNA data for ever since it will only ever be used correctly and no mistakes in handling will ever occur.

Obviously

US sorority girls in booze-fuelled orgy of violence

Dazed and Confused

You don't hit girls

was certainly a lesson that was driven into us at home.

Besides my sister had a left hook you wouldn't have volunteered to take a second time!

PS. what's wrong with lady Rugby players. I used to go out with the Welsh Hooker :-)

MEPs to US: Hands off our bank accounts

Dazed and Confused

? Post 911

Even post 911 I've heard senior US politicians arguing that there are major differences between the Irish who they classify as "Freedom Fighters" and Arabs who don't vote for them and are therefore terrorists. Even post 911 there is still a faction within the US who feel that fighting the British is OK as long as you don't fight Uncle Sam.

Intel's 'Tukwila' Itaniums - hot n' pricey

Dazed and Confused

system prices

From the system uilders point of view the key thing about these new Itanium processors is that they are pin compatable with the new high end Xeons. So the likes of HP do not have to develop different hardware platforms for the two CPU lines.

OpenOffice is the new David Hasselhoff

Dazed and Confused

method problems

While I'm not suprised by some of these results, I would think that people who run OpenOffice are also more likely to be running FireFox and so may well be running noscript.

Half a million PCs can access Schengen's 'secure' database

Dazed and Confused

ie6

So out of this half million boxes how many belong to bot nets? how many run IE6? how many are in offices with contract cleaning staff, how many are ... the list goes on.

And if all else fails, how many are left on the train.

Microscope-wielding boffins crack cordless phone crypto

Dazed and Confused

Hack v wire tap

Your gov may find it easy to wire tap you, a foreign one may well find it easier to listen in to the wireless chit chat.

There is no obscurity about this protocol. DECT phones are made all over the world. Therefore governments all over the world know how it works. It would be naive to believe that spy agencies don't know how to do this already.

20years is a good run for an encryption system, but the problem with consumer standards is that people expect them to last.

Peer review 20years ago might have helped avoiding silly errors, but there could still be the chance of brute force attacks. An encryption system that was pushing the limits of affordable tech 20years ago could easily reach the point of being susceptible to attack now.

Encryption system have an in built obsolescence. Users of encryption need to learn to live with that. Whether it is smart card system, phone systems or DVDs. No system will last.

Save DAB! Send FM radios to Africa

Dazed and Confused

Not just the sticks

I live in the Thames Valley in what is laughing called the Silicon cooridoor (this country not being about afford a whole valley dedicated to "high tech")

I can get loads of commercial c£*p stations on DAB but in order to pick up Radio 4 I need a thumping great big roof mounted aerial, a number of my el'cheapo FM radios don't even need any external aerial. Now needing a roof mounted one might not be too much of a deal breaker, I could run aerial cabling around my house, the builders stuffed it into quite a few rooms already, but none of the DAB radios I've used have had a socket for attaching one. So you end up having to bodge it.

When I was looking at buying a DAB radio, the sales man was suggesting using rechargeable batteries and running mains powered when ever possible. I can't remember when I last changed the batteries in some of my radios.

As to quality, I don't think I own a either a good FM or a good DAB radio, but the sound quality on a pair of head phones seems better on my FM ones. Most peoples first exposure to digital was CDs. A cheap CD player sounds better than all but the best analogue music systems. OK a friend who had several grands worth turntable could outperform any CD player I've heard, or when I another friend had a Revox 1/2 track play and various studio cut tapes then sure they were better. But for the vast majority of the population CDs were better than anything they'd had before. Digital TV was mostly helped by being released at the same time as flat screens, so firstly people upgraded to those and got digital at the same time, then HD came along and offered the hope of higher quality.

This is just not true for DAB. So there is no need to change.

French mock British G-spot probe

Dazed and Confused

probed?

The problem with the research is that they didn't probe anything. They didn't go looking for anything. They asked a group of identical and non identical twin sisters and then tried to find a difference between the two.

Now on that methodology if 100% of there sample had said yes I have a G spot the answer coming out of the research would have still said G-Spots don't exist.

Now in my limited experience of twin sisters I'd say they are usually pretty damn close. I would have thought that if one sis found her G-Spot then within minutes of coming down again she'd be on the phone to sis giving full details.

As far as I know they didn't include a control sample of randomly chosen pairs of women to see whether the incidence of G-spot discovery in twins is the same as the incident in non twins.

It would also have been nice if they'd included a figure as to the simple percentage of people in their sample groups who claimed to have one.

BPI rejects scareletter approach to possible pirates

Dazed and Confused

False allogations

I would have thought that the guy who was accused of sharing porn would be in a good position to sue these scum for slander.

Apple iPad vs netbooks: fight not over yet

Dazed and Confused

Screens

The iPad is 1024x768? sorry was this a boast?

That is as bad as the Gates man proudly claiming that some of their Win2K boxes had managed up times of 80 days.

My early netbook has a 1280x768 display, anything lest than 1920x1080 is officially classified these days as low res and can't do video.

Aussie censor balks at bijou boobs

Dazed and Confused

School girls

As someone pointed out in the smutty cartoon thread this morning, are they going to out law the Brittany Spears vid where she parades around as a highly sexualised school girl?

What about just about every fancy dress party in all of Oz, gone raid those too?

Me, I don't want my wife to be forced to have a boob job, I happen to love her the way she is. Even if she doesn't quite score an A in the cup dept.

Ellison to recruit thousands for Sun integration army

Dazed and Confused

Technical jobs

Good to see someone investing in technical jobs for a change rather than taking the approach of firing everyone useful to cut costs and sod the income.

Steve Jobs uncloaks the 'iPad'

Dazed and Confused
Thumb Down

Looks kinda clunky

I'd have thought they have done video to the edge or at least damn close.

With that big black outline around it if looks dated even before it's shipped.

Which? warns on pirate letters

Dazed and Confused

Threatening behaviour

The laws on threatening behaviour need to be amended to include sending out legal threats when there is no reliable evidence. If the law firms behind these bullying tatics knew that an inappropriate threat could see ALL the partners spending a considerable amount of time sleeping at one of those "hotels" with high walls, at Her Majesties Pleasure, then we might see an end to this practice.

Perhaps they should also include the parties on who's behalf the letters claim to be sent and so the pigopolists were likewise at risk if^H^Hwhen they get it wrong.

I got threaten by these scum a few years ago over an incorrectly sent out mobile phone bill. They weren't interested in the legal situation, they just wanted me to send them money. Letters from Ofcom saying the mobe firm admitted they'd made mistake didn't seem to interest them.

Oz eyes Chinese cane toad market

Dazed and Confused

If they could catch them

They wouldn't have a problem, they'd have wiped them out already.

The worry about going after them commercially is that some bright spark will farm them, and more will then escape.

Adultery website boosted by Christian publicity campaign

Dazed and Confused

There are worse sights ... or better?

Don't know why they are picking on that website, the whole internet is filled with far worse (or better depending on your point of view) sights promoting pass times that these people choose not to approve of.

How would they feel if the members of the sect of the worshippers of the beast with the two backs were to complain about what you get up to?

UK.gov uses booze to lure London kids into ID scheme

Dazed and Confused
Grenade

@Bryan B

In Europe?

Pahhhh!

Our ancestors didn't spend years digging out the English Channel to be "In Europe"

Dazed and Confused

16-18?

So please tell me again, why would a 16year old want some proof of ID they were 16. Give'm one that says they're 18 so it's OK to sell'm booze and they might get some takers.

The last thing I'd have wanted at 16 was a piece of evidence.

Government expects £277m from vetting scheme

Dazed and Confused

voluntary work

So, because I help out at the local football club so the kids can play soccer, I'm going to be asked to fork out £64 on top of a whole load of my time.

I need about 4 of the parents to be "checked too" anyone who goes within 2M of the touch line in theory should be checked. So for a 7 aside kids team the government want £256.

Now, I live in what many might conciser an affluent area, this demand for money is going to piss people off, but probably not stop the kids getting their football.

How's this going to work in a deprived inner city area?

MPs frozen out of super-secret copyright talks

Dazed and Confused

@raving angry loony

> I vote the new rules be called "copytheft"

Copyleft was the precursor to the Open Software GPL.