Random: well, Best of the Rest

[Pretty disparate bunch. Some long and intelligent, some short and stupid. Take your pick]

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Scunthorpe babe watch aims to prove Sun wrong

It is not often that a story is so searing that it makes me want to dig out my eyes with a rusty spoon to quell the hideous memories that haunt my mind.

You did it. I read the story when it came out (I read every word you guys write), and ignored the link. After reading the letters, I looked at the link. Bad, bad move. Given, there are a few good looking women on the page, but why dear god, why, do most of these women look like they are going to bite me? Do Scunny women snap at all body parts (I mean fingers! Get your mind back up into the gutter with mine!) poking through the bars of their cages? I think I need to spend the next 6 hours in the shower trying to get rid of that 'unclean' feeling. Damn. There goes another potentially decent weekend.

On a better note, one of the letters was from a fellow Minnesotan extolling the virtues of the Minesotan women. He is right. Check out this fine selection of women, and the men who love them, brought to you by the government of our capital city. This page has been providing me with a lift on a spiritual level for years now. Nothing like love to mend ones heart and mind. Enjoy.

http://www.stpaul.gov/depts/police/prostitution.html

Charlie Demerjian

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Mr Legoland Windsor sued over his Web site

Dear sirs

I read with great interest your relative pieces concerning Mr Craig Cottrell the "wacky" and "zany" guy who changed his name by deed poll for a drunken bet to Le Golan D Windsor and then registered the domain name legolandwindsor.co.uk.

Sadly, I feel obliged to report that your facts are way off the mark and I can only conclude that you received your information directly from Mr Cottrell himself and did not attempt any further investigation into his story.

At Bizarre magazine, where I am Associate Editor, we first heard from Mr Cottrell about four months ago. He had registered the domain name bizarremag.co.uk (we use bizarremag.com) and was asking us to pay him for the new domain. He threatened to post pornography on this site unless we bought it from him, which seemed risible given the content of our magazine.

At the same time as he had registered bizarremag.co.uk, Mr Cottrell had also registered legolandwindsor.co.uk and londondungeon.co.uk (easily verifiable through a whois search) and was also attempting to hold their sites to ransom. Please find attached a screen grab of the legoland site Mr Cottrell had put up, replete with puerile and amateur "legomen with sex written on them" images.

Having previously approached Legoland for money, Mr Cottrell had already been contacted by their legal representatives. At this stage he had NOT changed his name. He was simply attempting cynical cyber-squats, a rather foolish moneymaking ploy given that in March of this year, British courts ruled against one Jaei England who had registered the domain cosmopolitan.com and attempted a similar course of action. Mr England had been ordered to hand the domain name over to Cosmo and to pay their legal expenses, thereby creating a legal precedent for future cases of a similar nature.

Mr Cottrell had also posted the details of Legoland's legal representatives on the squatted site, one can only assume in an attempt to urge surfers to harrass them. Instead, it made it very easy for me to contact the solicitors in question to discuss Mr Cottrell's activities, which I duly did. They told me that he had been injuncted and would no longer be able to use the site without risking further legal action. He removed the site immediately.

I telephoned Mr Cottrell the following day and he clearly had not heard of the Jaei England case, nor did he have any grasp of the concept of legal precedent. He even refused to admit that he had been injuncted by Legoland but could give no reason for his removal of the site. I have this interview on tape should you care to listen to it.

We decided on an alternative course of action and I ran a piece about Mr Cottrell's activities in our August issue in an attempt to expose him as the fool he plainly is. I could go on.

Put simply, I believe that you have been duped by Mr Cottrell. He obviously stumbled across the idea of changing his name after the event in an attempt to gain some positive publicity. In retrospect, I feel that we should probably have ignored him but we went with the option of exposing him as an arse. We certainly made sure to check our facts.

It would appear to me that neither of you have been in contact with Legoland (please correct me if I am wrong), surely the first course of action when you receive such a story. Neither did your pieces make mention of prior court rulings in such cases, a fairly important aspect of the story. And I wonder where the figure £25,000, as quoted in the megastar piece, came from.

I am disappointed that two seemingly professional internet news services (one part of the Express Newspapers Group!!!) should display such a lack of journalistic rigour and would urge you to exercise more caution in future. My own feeling is that far from being "class" or "a computer buff" Mr Cottrell is a band-wagon-jumping, amateur chancer who suffers from an extremely pronounced case of short-sightedness. While cybersquatting might have been an inventive way of making money about a year and a half ago, anyone who attempts such a venture now is really rather stupid.

I hope this doesn't sound too earnest. I just felt that you should be given a bit more information on the "zany" and "crazy" guy that is Mr Le Golan D Windsor. I fully expect you to run the surely imminent story of his bankruptcy when courts award against him and he has to foot the bill for Legoland's rather expensive solicitors. It will amuse me greatly when Craig Cottrell is declared bankrupt and he is forced to attempt any futher business ventures under his "wacky" and "zany" new name, which I suspect is a complete fabrication.

Best regards

Mark Blacklock

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Intel drops Pentium III prices

The highest Intel clock speed available in Holland seems to be the 800MHz/933MHz Pentium III, while the AMD Athlon Thunderbird is available at 700MHz/800MHz. So I don't understand many of your stories and in general. I read many stories from The Register and it's always the same story: AMD is able to produce those Thunderbirds/Durons and Intel isn't able to produce it's Pentium III.

So that means that Intel in the USA isn't capable of producing Pentium III's above, say 700MHz/800MHz, and in Holland we have no problems? And AMD isn't capable of producing Athlon Thunderbirds above 700MHz/800MHz and in the USA you have no problems to find them?
That's strange, very strange.

I personal have a hard time to believe that AMD is capable of producing enough Thunderbirds as well as Durons. This is because I can't find any of these processors in my country. Two weeks ago I tried to find an AMD Thunderbird above 700MHz with no luck.
What I'm trying to say is that AMD announced the 1.1GHz Athlon Thunderbird, while the 800MHz is still not available here in Holland at many stores. So who's doing a paper launch? Intel did, but AMD also. In fact, Intel Pentium III's are much beter available than AMD's Thunderbird.

The story "Intel drops Pentium III prices" but that you're still waiting for a 1GHz price drop isn't fair. AMD price drops are nice but i can't buy a Thunderbird because there aren't any Thunderbirds to buy. So, the price drop from AMD is nice but they are useless.

Intel and limited quantities? AMD and limited quantities! That's more like it!
So stop telling everybody that Intel isn't able to produce it's Pentium III above 700MHz/800MHz because when you do, you have to write the complete story and not half of it! You have to write that AMD also isn't capable of producing Thunderbirds above 700MHz/800MHz.

When do we see the story that AMD isn't capable of producing enough Thunderbird processors and the fact that the Thunderbirds are available in limited (very limited) quantities?

Greetings,
Renso

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Phone number chaos on the horizon

Now you see, usually it's my own countrymen I laugh at when I laugh at bureaucrats. But I must say, this is a special privilege. I get to look at how the UK's phone companies are screwing you folks every few years. (Yes, I'm from the US.)

Over here, with Area Codes and Exchanges being the way we delineate chunks of phone customers, it's a lot easier to add new blocks of numbers. I was in the 412 area code when it split, and that area was centered around Pittsburgh, but engulfing the most of southwestern Pennsylvania. After a year of warning, the greater Pittsburgh area kept the 412 area code , and everyone else that USED to be 412 was now 724. A simple physical split. And even after the split we got to use both interchangeable and useable for six months before we had another six-month period where the call was blocked if you had the wrong area code, but you were stopped by a friendly message that you now had to dial the new area code.

While I hate to say it, maybe your Telcos need to look to us to see how a telco should be run. =-]

Jesus X

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Phone number chaos on the horizon

I was recently in Bali on holiday and went to make an international phone call, in their service book it gives the codes for country's and major cities round the world etc, it still had 071 and 081 for London, and then it dawned on me, every time BT (or however) decides to change the numbers every few years/months it isn't just businesses in London/England that get affected, think of every major business, multinational, hotel, telco, distributor, airports etc etc round the world that then has to reprint everything!

Shocking.

Jonathan

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Phone number chaos on the horizon

At the end, you say that Northern Ireland's codes change from (01232) to (028)90.

Not quite true.

NI has lots and lots of tiny area codes and they are all changing to (028). And then some digits. Every number in NI will have eight digits. It's an absolutely *huge* change. I have seen *no* advertising about it since the so-called changeover day.

Prior to April (or whenever it was), the ads all said that from phoneday you'd have to dial the full number. If I wanted to ring a local number - previously I would have just dialled six digits - I would have to dial the *full* eleven digits (ie. the 02890 too). The advertising made it quite clear that I couldn't just dial the six digits, and I most definitely couldn't just start sticking "90" on all the numbers that were previously six digits. I wouldn't be able to do /that/ until September sometime.

As it turned out, I /could/ just stick `90' in front of the number, so no worries there. Nobody seems to know whether this works dialling numbers outside Belfast - just using the new eight-digit code. It worked for me the one time I've tried it but other folk have reported it not working.

Anyway, this phone thing has been the biggest cockup I have ever seen. I kinda wish BT had been responsible for it, hard as that is to say. They would almost definitely have made a decent (*) job of it. As it is, whatever wunch of bankers are "in charge" of the current changeover... words fail me.

Sorry for ranting. The whole thing just gets me so angry. The change to the London codes is just *trivial* by comparison.

All the best,
Wesley

PS. 01232 is just Belfast. (028)90 is now Belfast.

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"The arithmetic logical unit (ALU) latency was better, the Pentium III delivering one nanosecond at one clock at 1GHz, with the Pentium 4 at .3 nanoseconds. "

"While this is mere speculation, conversation with colleagues produced a consensus that the headroom, in raw megahurts terms, may allow Intel to extend the clock speed to 5GHz or 6GHz over the next 18 months. We shall return to this topic over the weekend."

Speed of light = 3E8. Therefore, light travels 30cm in 1 nanosecond.

If the ALU operates at .3 ns at 1.4GHz, it will have to operate at (1.4 /
6) * .3ns = .07 ns at 6GHz.

Light can travel 21mm in .07ns.

If the P4 is 217mm^2, we can assume it's 14.7 mm on a side.

Now, consider that electrical signals travel about 1/100 the speed of light. Consider also that we have ignored the switching time of these signals. Finally, consider that the ALU's are connected to forwarding and bypass logic (ie, they are part of a system, and don't operate in isolation). Consequently, the signals will have to travel a reasonable, though small, fraction of the chip size. 6GHz Doesn't seem likely, does it?

Of course, the 6GHz estimate was based on a .13 process shrink. And Intel could scrap the double-pump feature and instead add more ALU's.