Posts by Tim Jenkins

Dongling P2P downloaders 2nd-biggest mobe data users

P2People

"done mainly by PAYG dongle downloaders seeking to avoid their residential address being identified"

Damn - I never thought of doing that!

minus 3d6 NRD points for 12 hours and a permanent -1on INT ; (

Ten... Premium Android smartphones

"under light use conditions can even squeeze two days out of it"

This year's festival season is going to be hilarious; Glastonbury will host 140,000 punters, with at least 50% owning phones that need to be recharged every day (and also raises the interesting prospect of the charging points having £20 000 000 of handsets passing through them)

Meanwhile my antique candybar Nokia 2310 will last the full week, and even makes those, you know, phonecall things...

Entire London 2012 Olympics' cultural events database held on Excel

Doom averted

"...surely the database contains hundreds if not thousands of entries..."

Nope; this is the Cutural Olympiad, not the other one.

The database will have about five entries, on the lines of

dancing, morris

rolling, cheese

drinking, tea

drinking, binge

poetry, bad

plus the contact details of three primary schools and one residential home for victims of senile dementia who have actually expressed an interest in taking part...

New Mac scareware variant installs without password

Anybody noticed the bad grammer?

Looks like the bad guys are using the same chap who translates all the phishing emails:

"To help protect your computer, Apple Web Security have detected Trojans and ready to remove them."

(http://sophosnews.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/mac-malware-06-big.jpg)

Shame no-one reads anything anymore...

Firefox add-on with 7m downloads can invade privacy

http://www.ant.com/video-downloader

"This addon is secure : it was verified by Norton Safe Web and McAfee's Site Advisor . It contains no malware. "

Phew. That's all right then.

</sarcasm>

Remastered 4K, 3D Titanic steams towards cinemas

B*stards

Now y'all done gone spoilt the plot for me....

Playboy sneaks NAKED LADIES onto iPad

Heff will be shocked.

Playboy has naked ladies?

I thought people read it for the articles on powerboats, Marlin fishing and great golf courses of the world...

Dixons warns it's getting worse

"passionate about delivering unrivalled standards of customer service"

Overheard in Currys:

Anxious elderly couple buying first computer: "but does it run Windows?"

Spotty DSG Youth on a mission to upsell: "oh yes; all computers run Windows; that's what makes it a computer"

Shame he was showing them £900 worth of iMac...

David Cameron wants to push all of Blighty online

2011 or 2001?

http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Remploy-ltd

2Ghz P4, OBG, 512Mb, XP with a 40Gb HD. Nice spec for a decade ago.

Your average chavs smartphone's got more welly than that these days, let alone the Xbox under the 50" plasma...

Pippa Middleton in $5m grumble flick offer

Nice to see Reg readers are such cunning linguists

That is all.

IE is tough on Flash cookies but ignores homegrown threat

King James version is more poetic ; )

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"

Sky in surprise duct-and-pole-sharing trial with BT

Battle of the White Vans

"assess "real costs" connected with ISPs deploying their own broadband network via the company's wholesale Openreach infrastructure"

Like bribing the Openreach engineer who knows which brick the cabinet key is hidden under with a nice cup of tea?

(and would his counterpart from Sky recognise a hole in the ground when he sees one? Should be OK with the ladder part, though.)

Apple seals $66bn in Jobsian wallet

"what Jobs & Co. plans to do with all that ready mazuma"

buy Google ; )

(or Facebook. Or wait till next year and buy both...)

Official iSteve biography gets 2012 release

"there was me thinking he designed some computers and gadgets"

Actually I suspect Mr Jobs has 'designed' f*ck all. That's never been his position within Apple. However, given his involvement over thirty years with a reasonably prominent technology company and having at least some influence on the arrival of "some computers and gadgets" like the Apple II, Apple Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad (not to mention NeXT , Pixar and $8 billion in personal net worth), I think he qualifies for a biography at least as much as, say, Cheryl Cole...

Panasonic TX-L37DT30 37in 3D LED backlit TV

All that money

and they still can't integrate a wifi chipset in there?

(Ah; I see - the 'official' Panasonic dongle is an £80 'optional extra'

http://www.johnlewis.com/231235540/Product.aspx?source=63258

The modern version of the £19.99 USB printer cable scam...)

MythBusters: Savage and Hyneman detonate truthiness

"whether a laptop in a bag can stop a bullet"

Myth: A laptop can stop a point-blank blast from a shotgun.

"Using a 12-gauge shotgun, the Build Team fired a load of birdshot at a 4-year-old laptop in a leather bag from point-blank range, with a block of ballistic gelatin behind it to stand for the owner’s body. The birdshot easily punctured every area of the laptop that was hit and damaged the gelatin severely. In a second test, they targeted the battery – the component with the highest density – and found that none of the pellets would go through it. The team classified the myth as plausible, since only a very lucky shot would be stopped"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%282010_season%29#Episode_154_-_Mini_Myth_Madness

Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet

Lovely (64-bit) jubblies

I always got a smile out of thinking how much incoming sun.com traffic was from proper UK geezers wanting to check out gorgeous Courtney from Croydon (34-26-32) and her in-depth knowledge of large-scale symmetric multiprocessing on SPARC...

iDect iHome Android phone

"condoms and snow chains"

Kinky ; )

Canonical pares Ubuntu down to 2 editions

Still the odd pitfall lurking

"never, not once, did it reduce or disappear or otherwise become less"

Mine just did. Upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 on a dual-boot with XP built using Wubi (netbook via pendrive). Now boots all the way to a GRUB console. Turns out Wubi, GRUB and the move to 10.10 isn't a good combination. Ho hum.

Still; at least the XP partition is still there ; )

Doctor Who co-star Nicholas Courtney dies at 81

Doctor: "But I don't exist in your world!"

Brigadier: "Then you won't feel the bullets when we shoot you"

Ah; the glory days of UNIT; repelling whole alien armies with a ragtop Landrover Defender, three expendable squaddies armed with L1A1s, and a decent chap with a REALLY good moustache...

Apple 'outstrips' all brands at box office

The Power to Save the World

Surely Apple have never had better product placement than in Independence Day (1996), where (as all El Reg readers will know) a PowerBook 5300 managed to interface with the alien motherships LAN to deliver the shield-crippling virus, presumably using its AppleTalk socket. Given how difficult it was to get a mid-90s Mac to talk to anything else even on this planet, and that the 5300 would have been out of battery before Smith and Goldblum even got into orbit, that's not bad going...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAmHl9fVDSk

Jacqui Smith 'shocked' to discover we're drowning in sea of porn

Yuch

If you squint, this story turns into

Jacqui Smith cracking down watched by her husband, pilloried over artisan-built bondage furniture

I feel soiled...

The Woz speaks: Fusion-io plans IPO

All hail the ubergeek!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube

Nvidia four-core chip to power quad-res Apple iPad

@ Fuzzy Wotnot

You forgot to mention the iPad X direct neural interface, which, due to insufficient pre-release testing, will require early adopters to retrofit themselves with a black polo-neck to hide the socket...

AOL buys Huffington Post

ATA : CONNECT

"Where does AOL get all this money from?"

As they once had thirty million paying punters worldwide, I suspect it's from all those antique Direct Debits and automated card payments still forking out $19.99 every month for 33.6kbs worth of dialup....

Antique Nimrod subhunters scrapped – THANK GOODNESS!

Rule Britannia, Britannnia rules the waves

The previous Nimrod was doing frightfully hush-hush stuff in Afghanistan – but 'hush-hush' isn't the same as 'appropriate' or 'cost effective'

You've got to admit though; they've done a damn good job at keeping the Taliban Navy from having any serious impact on our operations there...

Single complaint sparks police raid and total ban on rental movie

And tonights Film Club presentation is...

"A spokeswoman for that force said: "We have a duty to investigate such claims and in agreement with the manager of the shop took a copy away to view and check that it was the edition that has been approved by the British Board of Film Classification for distribution."

which implies that Northamptons finest now have to sit down with the confiscated version AND a pre-BBFC edit (from where, one asks - certainly not one of those naughty downloads, we hope), and note any differences. In slow motion. With replays.

Pass the popcorn...

BBC iPlayer in 'hugely popular at Xmas' shock

How quickly things change...

The only time we watch t'Beeb at all these days is via iPlayer on the Wii. Edwardian Farm, anyone?

Lane Fox promises sub-£100 PCs

"We're all better off when everyone's online - find out why"

Presumably the 3 dongle is to limit the activities of the "porn-monkey doleys", as referred to in the Telegraph reader comments on this story.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8263355/Computers-to-sell-for-98-under-Martha-Lane-Fox-scheme.html

Incidentally, nice to see that the campaign to get the 'non-lines' online links from their homepage to an FT story that's behind a paywall...

http://raceonline2012.org/

Assange to be released

Seasons Greetings

I do wish him a very good Christmas, because I suspect his New Year is going to be sh*te!

Windows 7 really was some girl's idea, rules ASA

ads were "overtly fictitious"

Hell; is that why I'm still waiting for my Citroen C4 to transform into an awesome ice-skating robot?

Judge puts Assange behind bars ahead of extradition hearing

and in other news...

Anonymous have knocked mastercard.com off the web today, in response to MC withdrawing wikileaks card payment facility.

http://twitter.com/Anon_Operation/statuses/12441051566448640

Lolz ; )

(which presumably makes the guy a terrorist by association, at least in the eyes of the merkins cyber-warfare division. That orange jumpsuit is getting closer, poor dude)

MP wants age verification for net smut

Good idea

but only if extended to include verification of gender, BMI, marital status and 'hotness', as assessed on the official Widdecombe - Watson scale, thus making online chat much less traumatic when Sylvie from Sidcup turns out to be Dave from Dagenham (or vice-versa, depending on your inclination)

Kingston HyperX Max USB 3.0 128GB external drive

The sooner the better

The best thing about these things is that your average punter ALREADY thinks their external 2.5" HDD is solid-state, and treats them accordingly. I've lost count of the times I've seen them unplugged while spinning, dropped, chucked into bags, turned upside down while writing and otherwise abused, and the owners always expresses suprise when I point out that they wouldn't treat their laptops that way and expect them to survive...

Falklands hero Marine: Save the Harrier, scrap the Tornado

</cretin>

"As for the Tornado fleet being decimated. well if you call six aircraft lost to various reasons being decimated, then you are a cretin"

Like I said up at the top there, a loss rate of 1 in 10 IS decimation. Just because duh meeja and others often misuse the word (usually confusing it with 'annihilation') doesn't mean we need to resort to name-calling here...

http://www.raf.mod.uk/gulf/loss.html

Latin: decimatio; decem = "ten"

Kudos to Lewis for the (rare) proper use of 'decimation'; 6 downed GR1s out of roughly 60 deployed in the 1991 Gulf conflict is indeed 1 in 10. Looks like all that expensive education wasn't wasted after all...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_%28Roman_army%29

(Nice article, BTW)

Hacker sinks Royal Navy website

Deja vu all over again...

"It's very unlikely that any confidential much yet secret material was kept on a public facing website"

Right, because that never happens....

Any bets on how long it takes before email 'backups' containing the current location of the on-patrol Vanguard hit the torrents?

Zuckerberg: the iPad 'is not mobile'

Zuckerberg who?

He's worth $6.7 billion dollars. He's guested on 'The Simpsons'. His company has 1/10 of the world as users. They just made a movie about him. He's younger than the Apple Mac.

Nice to see he can still blush...

Rocks, hard places and Congo minerals

Seriously?

"It would be nice to have been told why the DRC is the lowest cost producer"

Possibly somewhat lower labour costs and a little less requirement for spending on Health & Safety overheads than, say, Australia or Canada?

Panasonic bags Avatar 3D BD exclusive

Wecome to the 19th century

"The discs don't come in the box - you have to fill in a form, send it off and they'll be posted back to you"

Nice to see the movie and electronics industries are right at the cutting edge of mid-Victorian content delivery mechanisms...

Can I have mine delivered by a UPS stagecoach, complete with a guard riding shotgun, please?

NASA Mars rover leaves moist skidmarks in boggy struggle

The usual excuse will suffice

"wrong kind of (red) snow", obviously...

Coalition tears up net snoop plan's £2bn price tag

First rule of public sector IT procurement:

Whatever the final cost, the contractors quote will have been for about 1/20th of it...

Googlenet traffic now 6% of interwebs

Spooky...

I googled "How long before they go self aware?!?"

The second result was:

29th August 2012: the date Google becomes "aware" - Pocket-lint

Still, defending ourselves against homicidal self-drive StreetView cars should help take our minds off the Olympics...

Microsoft sings Happy Birthday to Windows 7

Nightmare

Steve Ballmer in ruby slippers is right up there with J. Edgar Hoover in a dress, as mental images I can do without but ones that I fear I am now stuck with...

Rooney exits Man U with a few choice words

Somebody call the Pulitzer people

"strumpet-friendly footballing Weeble"

Brilliant, just brilliant!

Where is your data?

Every good sysadin knows

security-wise, your data is everywhere and available to all, until the day you need to restore it from a backup. Then it is nowhere...

Foxconn faces leaked report of worker abuse, violence

Brave New World?

"The sole difference was that instead of manufacturing electronics the workers were doing slave labour in the textile industry"

I think a crucial difference is being overlooked; in the first industrial revolution (18th-19th century), humans became the 'intelligent' portion of various machines (powered looms, lathes etc), which gave them jobs but removed their autonomy. In the second revolution (mid to late 20th century), automation, computers and robots largely replaced people, which gave them back autonomy at the cost of their jobs. Now we are seeing humans replacing (and becoming) the robots, because it is cheaper and 'more efficient' to equip a production line with 100 000 ex-rice farmers than it is to automate it, particularly when any given product (TV, laptop, mobile, iThing) has a manufacturing and sales life-span measured in months, if not weeks. Why halt and re-tool a machine-based production line for every new form factor when you can 'reprogram' your workforce to put screw x into hole y instead of hole z for 60 hours a week instead? This means that millions of people are now doing the kind of repetitive pick/place, micro-soldering, insanely-small screw-driving type assembly work that only a few years ago would have been either machine based, and thus capital-expensive, or simply impossible to carry out on any scale. While working ankle-deep in paddyfield poo can hardly have been pleasant, it seems unlikely that we can expect humans to become clean-room automata overnight without a certain amount of 'equipment-failure', even if they are choosing to do so (rather than being forced by prevailing economic imperatives), and the moral culpability for the casualties lies at least in part on us and our rapacious desire for shiny new (and cheap) toys...

</rant>

Anti-piracy lawyers' email database leaked after hack

Epic ; )

mmmmmm; backing up email archives to a webserver...

Can we have a 'What Could Possibly Go Wrong?' icon, please?

(to be applied when, say, using a torrent to acquire the digital data of a law firm which makes a living by tracking down people who have used a torrent to acquire digital data; WCPGW?)

'Hyperbolic map' of the internet will save it from COLLAPSE

"Google will be trying to stay on the center of said sphere"

either that or a burning TARDIS.

I know which I'd prefer.

(P.S. Any chance of seeing that 'hyperbolic map' being carried through space on the backs of, say, four enormous elephants standing on a turtle?)

Apple goes social with musical Ping

Letter to Santa

99USD is 64GBP this morning (xe.com), so even after adding VAT (making it £75) the Apple TV is still going to be nearly £25 more here than it is in the States, and I doubt even the highest regional sales tax over there would add up to that kind of difference.

Damn shame; I'm kind of tempted, and £79 would be a much sweeter price point...