Posts by TimBiller

Happy new year, readers. Yes, we have threaded comments, an image-lite mode, and more...

A threaded discussion/commenting system? What, like CIX had with Ameol in ooh, 1994? I say, well done.

Sticking with one mobile provider gets you... Oh. Price rises, big exit fees, and lovely, lovely lock-in

Re: And another thing.....

I moved from contract with 02 to contract with Orange, then to SIM-only with EE, then to SIM-only with EE Business. All on the same number since 1998.

Both my wife and daughter have also been moved from Orange contract to SIM-only with EE - same number kept throughout.

Someone at EE was screwing with you.

No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that?

I blame Alan Sugar

This ridiculous method of holding a phone was introduced, pioneered and continues to be used by contestants in "The Apprentice" as a way to get both sides of the conversation recorded, despite the programme shooting both sides of the call locally anyway.

I continue to point and laugh at anyone I see doing this. And you should too.

Astronaut took camera on spacewalk, but forgot SD memory card

/pedant

Memory isn't storage.

Storage isn't memory.

Big Blue drops a billion dollars to refresh its pig herd's lipstick

I always thought Spectrum was green ...

Russian boffins race to meteorite crash lake as shard prices go sky-high

Yes, a perfectly circular hole. After an alleged impact of that magnitude I'm astonished that there's actually any water left in the lake at all!

HDS's young HUS array gets BIG new brother

Why does IBM's storage suck?

Peugeot 3008 HYbrid4

Citroen DS5 has the same drivetrain

And that launch is imminent. It's my next choice for a company car depending on lease costs and handling (in that order).

;-)

Tim

Google drive cloud to rain on Apple, Dropbox parade

iCloud on ONLY Apple devices?

"Apple went on to build its own storage offering, iCloud, but it only works from Apple devices"

I must be imagining being able to use in on this Windows laptop then.

Ten... boomboxes

Ion

My wife uses one of the single dock Ion units for all her dance teaching and Zumba classes, with a wireless headset receiver in the aux input. I've even played my Roland drums through it - works really well.

It is VERY loud!

Recommended for places were volume's needed over fidelity - which is not usually a problem when mp3 and aac files are being played.

Tim

Nikon Coolpix P7100 compact camera

Price

It's not £500 quid anywhere.

"That said, the price tag on this camera will by itself exclude most happy snappers"

Why is this even mentioned when the link to amazon.co.uk shows their price as £359 and others as low as £333?

Tim

CA handles La Perla's substantial assets

Data volume inversely proportional to story length ...

3TB? Is that all? I have more than that at home.

Any excuse for El Reg to publish a picture of a girl in her knickers, you guys!

Merry Christmas.

Naked vegans target Prince Harry over meaty 12-incher

Those two, vegans?

There's no way those two are vegans - clear skin, bright eyes. Vegans are sallow, skinny, unhealthy looking mush-eaters.

'iTunes in the Cloud' has arrived in iTunes 10.5 update

Match seems to be US-only

No Music option here in the UK, just Apps and Books.

That's nice.

Tim

Cloud startup's business model defies laws of physics

Encryped data is random.

I'd love to know how they they are deduplicating encrypted files?

I can understand transmitting them as random rubbish but it's not possible to dedup data in this form.

Tim

Marathon for iPad

It's 1994 all over again

and I'm back playing Marathon on a Power Macintosh 6100. Except now it's while sitting on a train on an iPad.

The original cheat mode featuring the infamous "pirated Copland beta" is also avalable for those of us still not l33t enough to get through "Bigger Guns Nearby" without dying over and over again, even on "Normal" mode.

I hope the other two episodes are coming too.

Tim

Royal Weddings, PCs and Cameron's brass balls

PC for more than $3700?

Trivially easy. Just visit the Apple store and configure a 17in MBP with 8GB RAM and a 500SSD.

iPhone 4 SURVIVES plunge from plane

He's the jump master

He doesn't jump - he "encourages" the grunts to jump. Perfectly good aeroplane anyway, so why jump out of it? ;-)

He happened to look out and down and the phone fell out of his pocket as they were passing 1000ft altitude.

Tim

Nominet to flog short domains

.com is NOT handled by Nominet

Nominet doles out UK addresses. BT.com (clue is in the name)

Tim

One-third of iPad fanbois don't download apps

corrected for you Sarah

That'll be "bourgewaaaah" surely?

Tim

Eric Schmidt warns Berliners: 'We know where you are'

I was 13 and I wanted a Jaunting Belt, desperately.

From Wikipedia:

All incarnations of the show concerned the emergence of the next stage of human evolution (homo superior) known colloquially as Tomorrow People. Born to human parents, an apparently normal child might at some point between childhood and late adolescence experience a process called "breaking out", when they develop their special abilities. These abilities include psionic powers such as telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation. However, their psychological makeup prevents them from intentionally killing others.

Damn.

Want nips like church coat pegs? Click here

Idiots

The phrase is " .... like CHAPEL hat pegs." Churches have hooks, not pegs. I ask you, honestly!

Tim

PC World gets almost-exclusive iPad deal

PC World branches already sell all Apple's range

I was in my local PC World (Nottingham) the other week and there was a mini Apple Store in a very prominent position. I asked the attending black-clad hipster for the grif, daddy-o and he said he worked for Apple UK, not DSGi. There was a full range of Apple stuff, from 30in displays to mice - so it's not surprising that you can get an iPad from a PC World store, and a lot of them contain an official Apple store!

Tim

Cash-strapped trolley dollies in nude calendar protest

More pix

Here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1262754/Naked-Spanish-cabin-crew-model-wages.html

(purely in the interests of completeness)

Tim

Apple details iPad's 'breakthrough' mobile contract

@Matt

Matt - it's just a glorified iPod touch. It syncs with a computer. All the data on my iPhone is backed up as part of a sync. There's nothing on it I don't have elsewhere.

Oh and personalising stuff is for girls ... ;-)

Tim

Freed Peter Moore will be 'paid in full' for time as Iraq hostage

Um

So as soon as he was kidnapped they stopped paying him?

Tim

Paramount prepares to scale Dune

Please please please

Don't have it rain at the end.

Tim

Manchester journo gets first ID card - late

This person is a journalist?

"Of course, Epstein understands some people have reservations about the ID card. "As I’ve said before I understand why people have their reservations, but I personally can’t see what there is to lose if you’re a law abiding citizen with nothing to hide."

Having nothing to hide is NOT the same as it being NONE of the government's business!

I give up, truly.

Tim

TomTom iPhone Car Kit

Bluetooth pairing

Thanks for the review. So, to get this to work with my car's Bluetooth system would involve first pairing the iPhone with the car kit, then pairing the car kit with the car? Is that even possible?

Why on earth didn't TomTom use the dock connector to link the iPhone to the car kit?

The potential for failure is high here.

Tim

Court kicks YouTube rant missus into touch

MILF

Stifler's Mom lives! ;-)

Kindle to come to Blighty on 19 October

Extra costs not mentioned

This is great news BUT what about import duty? VAT?

That's got to be there, surely?

Tim

WriteRoom

price has doubled since the review (hours!)

Now £2.99. Just sayin' ...

Yank slams El Reg 'zio-fruitcake' Playmobil 'crap'

Only a small change needed

C'mon people - change "zio" to "zion"

Now it makes slightly more sense. A bit.

Tim

Spotify adds PayPal in bid for profitability

@lukewarmdog

Yes but if you want Spotify _on_your_iPhone_ you need a paid account.

Minister attacks drunken topless lovelies with tangler-bazooka

This story needs ...

LEGO!!

;-)

Tim

Wheels come off O2's data network

Broken here too ...

... up in sunny Nottingham. Oh well, back to wifi.

Tim

Hitachi highlights gesture-controlled HD TV

HHGTTG

They already tried this on the "Heart of Gold". It meant sitting infuriatingly still....

Tim

DARPA seeks spraycan wound-polyfilla* for injured troops

Hollywood has the answer ...

DARPA should ask Josh Wheadon for advice. I saw this very gunk being used on a wound in "Serenity"

Tim

RIM Vodafone BlackBerry Storm

No current HSDPA link is ever going to get close to proper broadband.

>No current HSDPA link is ever going to get close to proper broadband.

Oh I dunno ... I got 400kb/sec downloading a Blackberry desktop software upgrade today via my T-Mobile HSDPA USB donglet this afternoon.

7.2Mbit isn't exactly sluggish.

Tim

VoIP is coming to the iPod Touch

@Richard Cartledge

No, neither generation of the iPod Touch has a mike, hence the reference in the article to having to buy one.

The 2nd Gen does have a (crappy beyond belief) speaker, so a dangly bit of expensive doorbell wire (doubtless in "mug me, I have an expensive and desireable gadget white") is required.

Tim

Taurid meteors promise Guy Fawkes fireball show

Roll up, roll up get your blindfolds here ...

Triffids anyone?

<shiver>

Tim

Sepaton's tape library de-duplication guarantee

@AC

Imagine you have an large Oracle database server (or any DB server) which has several large databases running from it - say they are 50GB each.

If you back them (usually) as full backups every day then after say, five days you'll have 250GB of data on tape.

If you back them up with a de-duplicating VTL after five days you'll have 50GB stored on the virtual tape. (assuming there are no changes day to day)

Of course, in the real world there are changes, but the VTL will only write the changes to its storage and track these changes in its own database.

That's one example - there are many others of course where dedupe makes perfect sense, both operationally (you only store deduplicated data so if replication is required then you onlly replicate a fraction of the backups) and from a cost and admin perspective (keeping petabytes of data on tape in huge silos plus the manual costs of copying them to offsite storage.)

<pulls up comfy chair>

Tim

Mills and Boon thrusts into pr0n market

I just spat out my post-lunch café noir

".. sex as grudging quid pro quo for fixing the dishwasher."

Outstanding!

Tim

O2 buckles under 3G iPhone demand

Scenes from a CPW

Same story at 10am in CPW Loughborough Road, Nottingham. About a dozen people waiting for credit checks (02 also require a credit check for an upgrade and the shop staff told me that credit checks for new customers are computerised, whereas for upgrades a real person has to approve it)

Anyway, there is currently a 4 hour wait for approvals, 02's internal systems are "down" and the pre--ordered phones (including mine) are on a Citylink truck "en route" with no ETA.

The shop had 2x16GB and 8x8GB (all black) in stock at 8am, all those are now sold to walk-ins as soon as their credit checks are cleared.

What fun. Ugly scenes abound elsewhere, so I read.

Tim

Carphone Warehouse now taking iPhone 3G orders

Ordered a 16GB version from CPW this morning

Yup, unlike 02, CPW had them available online for delivery/collection from my local store so I ordered in hope and got the confirming text message soon afterwards.

Let the porting commence!

Tim.

So, what can you photograph?

Marriage registers

"As of last week, the government has forbidden couples getting married in registry offices from having their photograph taken as they sign the wedding register."

Surely this not new? There has always been a law against photographing a marriage register in such a way that the writing can be deciphered,

I've been a photographer for 30 years and have done a few weddings in my time, and in ALL cases, whether church or civil, the minister/priest/vicar/registrar has produced a "dummy" register so that the couple can be photographed pretending to sign it, pen-in-hand, heads-together, with no issues whatsoever.

Tim

Firefox 3 Download Day falls flat on face

Non-story chaps, come on ...

Just downloaded it, no issues whatsoever. The usual El Reg hyperbole ;-)

Tim

The iPhone - yours for €1

@Richard Cartledge

£259?

Announced where please? 02 website only says says "coming soon ..."

Tim

Asus quietly demos Eee Box

@Giles

Giles,

FWIW I completely agree with you.

However, beware the fate of those who have the audacity to state obvious facts related to how much we pay here in the UK versus everywhere else will only result in corrective statements from people with nothing better to do that point out that 1) we pay VAT 2) they pay sales tax and 3) by the time you add the shipping costs actually the differential isn't actually worth the airfare.

Just so you know ...

Tim

US imposes 72 hour pre-reg for Visa waiver travellers

Those crafty Spaniards ...

Spain already wants this for UK residents travelling there. I just had to fill the details in on the airline website for a planned family holiday there next month. All they wanted were names, ages and passport numbers. Hardly onerous.

Of course, the green US VW form also requires details of the intended place of residence during your stay, so how will the new pre-registration handle that if it's valid for 2 years?

Tim