Posts by Tony Green

BlackBerry rejected Justin Bieber as brand ambassador

To be fair...

...if they'd accepted, then it would have deterred anybody who wasn't a pre-pubescent girl with an IQ in double figures from using a BlackBerry. So it may not have been such a bad decision after all.

London businesses to signal UNSWERVING LOYALTY to capital with .london domain

More likely...

...They're scared someone else will grab theirName.london so they need to get it first.

Not necessarily because they actually WANT it.

Firefox's plugin-blocker slams into beta - but don't jump for joy, Flash haters

Re: How will it work in practice?

These are EXTENSIONS, not PLUGINS.

Big difference.

Digital radio may replace FM altogether - even though nobody wants it

Summer? There's a simple explanation

During hot weather, the DAB signal becomes useless. That's why digital listening declined during the hot summer.

I live less than ten miles from the BBC's huge Manningtree DAB transmitter. I have an outside aerial pointing directly at the transmitter. But on hot days during the summer, the signal was forever dropping out, either for seconds or hours at a time.

So funnily enough, my digital listening declined a hell of a lot this summer, as I was forced back to FM

Bacteria-chomping phages could kill off HOSPITAL SUPERBUGS

"the most abundant life form in the universe"

Phew! Some claim.

I'd love to see the evidence to back that one up.

Microsoft pulls Win 8.1 RT code which upgraded Surface 'slabs into BRICKS

Re: Bricked or somewhat confused.

For the average user I don't think that's a particularly relevant distinction.

For someone with enough (WIndows-specific) technical skills, recovering from something like this might be reasonably easy. But for the average person (ie someone un-technical enough to have been daft enough to buy one of these) it amounts to the same thing.

Former Microsoftie in AUTOMATIC BEER MAKER funding plea

Come back when...

... you can use it to make beer as good as the monks at St Sixtus in Westvleteren do it.

Blighty's great digital radio switchover targets missed AGAIN

Reliabilty is a big problem

Let's be clear, I LOVE my DAB tuner. I can plug it into a USB port of a computer and access every channel in whatever MUX it's tuned to simultaneously, so it's fantastic for a timeshifting application.

The trouble is, DAB just isn't as robust as FM. I live less than nine miles from a major DAB mast and I have an external aerial pointing at it. But when there's a high-pressure system (which there was quite a lot this summer) it drops out on a regular basis - sometimes for hours on end.

Even though my timeshifting was buggered up, at least I could listen to Radio Four on my FM tuner instead, something I won't be able to do if they switch them off.

Bill Gates: Yes, Ctrl-Alt-Del salute was a MISTAKE

I don't think it was a mistake at all

Had it been a single key it would have been all too easy to hit it by mistake and reboot your computer. The great thing about Ctrl-Alt-Del is that you have to REALLY mean to do it.

Very much in the same way that 999 was chosen as the emergency number - in the days of loop/disconnect dialling the chances of any random line conditions, even on a seriously faulty pair, accidentally generating three nines in succession was extremely low. Had it been 111 there would have been lots of false calls by accident.

Boris Johnson floats idea of 'London visa' to attract tech talent

The logic of this...

... is that there will have to be controls to stop people leaving London without the proper paperwork.

And if that keeps a few million Cockney Wankers from infesting the rest of the country, I'd vote for it!

Google chap reverse engineers Sinclair Scientific Calculator

A bargain as a kit

It was fifty quid if you bought the ready-made one. But you could buy a kit and build it yourself for £16, which as an apprentice telephone engineer at the time was the same as my weekly gross wage. And extra geek points (before we'd even HEARD of geek points) for having built it yourself.

Funny thing about its use of RPN was that although it was hard to get used to, once you did it was very hard to get used to "normal" calculator operations. Rather like the way I now instinctively find myself using vi key-sequences whatever I'm editing in.

'Symbolic' Grauniad drive-smash was not just a storage fail

It wasn't about putting the data beyond use

It was all about intimidation.

"We don't like the fact that you're exposing our dirty-works so we're going to show you how we can order you about".

That's how government works today. And in truth, has always worked. In its OWN interests, not those of the people it's supposed to serve.

Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic

What time was that then?

Since El Reg is a British site (well, I'm guessing .co.uk means that), why do you expect your readers to have the foggiest idea when "4:37pm Pacific Time" was?

Because it means bugger all to me. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Just add creepiness: Google Search gets even more personal

Re: @Martin

Missing the (+) operator? use quotes instead. So instead of:

+register

do

"register"

Totally bonkers, but that's the way they changed it.

End of an era as Firefox bins 'blink' tag

Can't include it?

"* We would have loved to honour HTML syntax and surround the word "blink" with angle brackets, but doing so risked making the story unreadable in some browsers or causing El Reg's publishing apps to choke on tag we don't use."

Is El-Reg REALLY so bad at HTML? Does nobody there know the HTML entities < and > ?

Sky falling: 119,000 Brits flee O2, Be after Murdoch broadband gobble

No need for a Mac

Not sure why you appear to think you need a Mac to use Andrews & Arnold. They'll support you WHATEVER platform you use. And they'll support you extremely well, too.

(Very satisfied customer of many years standing).

US Marine Corps misses target, finds and bombs Nemo

"They're flying aircraft that cannot land with external ordnance aboard without probably killing everyone."

Well what wanker designed that then?

Re: splash or SPLASH

A bit bloody stupid taking bombs out if you're not going to be able to bring them back if you have to.

And just so they can practice murdering anybody who gets in Uncle Sam's way.

UK parliament presses for pardon for Alan Turing

It needs to go beyond Turing

Turing's persecution was just one example of many thousands of men persecuted for being gay. Some of the men with similar convictions are still alive and in many cases they're still on the sex-offenders' register.

All of these men need to have their convictions rescinded (not pardoned) and their names properly cleared.

Ex-prez Carter: 'America has no functioning democracy' with PRISM

Carter's one of very few Americans for whom I have ANY respect

Not only the only post WW2 US president to never attack another country, but apparently still virtually the only US politician with even the slightest vestige of human decency and honesty.

Though somewhat deluded if he believes the US has ever had any "moral authority".

Fedora back on track with Schrödinger's cat

Re: There is nothing wrong with KDE

Having recently decided to give KDE another try, after dumping it fairly early in the KDE4 cycle, I have to say that there certainly IS plenty wrong with KDE.

Yes, it looks fantastic. But by default it still insists on running all kinds of un-wanted crap around the pointless Nepomuk (which still seems to me to be a solution in search of a problem) and takes a lot of digging to work out how to disable what you don't want. (My guess is they want to make it hard to get rid of in case people realise how little use it is).

But just try something as basic as adding an icon to launch one of your own programs or scripts into a panel! On XFCE it's just a couple of clicks and the job's done. As far as I could work out, this can only be achieved on KDE by editing the menus, then copying a menu entry to the panel. It may be that there IS an easier way, but if there is, they've hidden it well.

Bolivian president's jet grounded so officials can look for Snowden

Obama leaning on other countries?

It'll be interesting when it eventually leaks out what sort of threats Obama is making to ensure nobody gives Snowden asylum.

"Take him and the bombers go in".

Report: Android malware up 614% as smartphone scams go industrial

The Gingerbread 2.3 Android build is still the most used mobile OS and it lacks crucial protections.

Maybe because of crap supplier updates? It seems that most Huawei G300 users who've tried to install the Vodafone "upgrade" to ICS have found that it's totally buggered up their devices, so they've reverted (when they could).

I don't know the Android ecosystem well enough to know if this is typical, but it's certainly why my device is still on Gingerbread. And even though it's a cheap device, I'm not confident enough to risk any of the (probably very good) third-party ROMs.

Leaked Obama brief reveals US cyber defense, offense policy

"Where actions could benefit the interests of the United States"

Not just "defending the US if it's attacked". This means essentially they can (and no doubt will) use it to spy on non-US companies to benefit US big business.

And they call Iran a "rogue state"!

US spyboss: Yes, we ARE snooping on you, but think of the TERRORISTS

“The unauthorised disclosure of a top-secret US court document threatens potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,”

No bad thing, in my opinion.

The US is a threat to every other nation on the planet, so the less that terrorist state itself knows about those it wants to attack, the better.

Obama administration defends mass call-data slurping

Surprised? No

Anybody who happily orders murderous attacks on civilians going about their lawful business, such as (shock horror!) having a wedding party, or simply tending goats in a field, is clearly a man of no decent principles whatsoever.

Can the Nobel committee rescind a prize? It's about bloody time they did.

Murdoch hate sparks mass bitchin', rapid evacuation from O2, BE

Re: I'm going

Can I suggest Andrews & Arnold instead?

Slightly more expensive than some, but first-rate for speed, reliability and customer service. Recently came out in a big poll as the highest-rated ISP. I've been with them for years and never had anything about their service I wasn't happy with.

Firefox 21 ships with performance-profiling Health Report

Startup time could be misleading

My Firefox is showing an average startup time of about 15 seconds. But this is because it's auto-started when I log into my Linux desktop, along with lots of other things that are triggered by me logging in, plus system services that are also starting up at the time.

Starting it manually later, it only takes about a second and a half. So any stats they get from me aren't going to tell them much that's useful.

Redmond probes new IE 8 vulnerability

Eh?

'Microsoft says the vulnerability “exists in the way that Internet Explorer access an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated.”'

When I see English like that, I normally assume a scam from someone whose first language isn't English. Though I suppose, as Microsoft is a 'merkin company...

Nick Clegg: Snooper's Charter 'isn't going to happen'

Amazing timing

How strange that Clegg should suddenly rediscover Liberal principles a few days before County Council elections in which the LibDems are widely expected to get hammered, not least through pissing off former supporters by lurching so far to the right.

I'm sure it's coincidence (he lied).

Amazon: We're expanding into TWO HUNDRED countries

Paying tax in any of them?

Thought not.

jQuery 2.0 kicks old Internet Explorer versions to the curb

Re: Kicks to the what now?

This is "theregister.co.UK"

Wikileaker Manning peace gong petition backed by thousands

Beware of signing the petition

The bastards then take it as carte blanche to spam you about all kinds of things you have no interest in whatsoever.

Good job I always create a new email address whenever I sign up to anything new...

Re: Ugh

He drew attention to the systematic war crimes of the world's biggest rogue nation. Frankly, ANYBODY who betrays a country like that is a Good Bloke in my eyes.

Re: Poster boy for capitol punishment

The quality of your thinking is evident from the quality of your spelling.

Swedish judge explains big obstacles to US Assange extradition

The whole extradition thing is just a red-herring

Considering the one-sided extradition treaty that Blunkett sneaked in without even putting it to Parliament, he's a far easier mark for extradition to the United States of Terrorism while he's in the UK than he'd ever be in Sweden.

RAF graduates first class of new groundbased 'pilots'

Funny how suicide-bombers are always labelled "cowards"...

...while we'll be told that these people, who will be murdering other from the safety of thousands of miles away, are heroic.

What a fucked-up world we live in.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

Another reason to love being Linux-only

"You using Windows? Sorry I don't know anything about it."

Inside Adastral: BT's Belgium-sized broadband boffinry base

Re: poisoner's palace

During most of my years there (up to 2005) the staff canteen (sorry, Hub!) was so dire and over-priced that even in the worst weather it was still preferable to walk to the sandwich shop on the industrial estate. Fun to wind up the canteen manager by sitting in the lounge scoffing on bought-in grub though...

Dongle smut Twitstorm claims second scalp

I hate sexual discrimiation with a passion...

...but this sounds more like some stupid bastard (Merkin?) who's decided she's going to interpret anything she possibly can as discriminatory.

It reminds me of a situation a few years ago on a company Usenet group when a woman who'd obviously done all the "anti-discrimination" courses (but not the "having a brain" course) slapped down a friend of mine for his "homophobic" comments. And then became strangely quiet after my response, "Hey Darren, do you reckon there's something about you she doesn't know?"

(For the benefit of Merkins, Darren's gay).

Bacon sarnies can kill: Official

Hardly news

It's been well-known for years that people who eat stuff like bacon, sausages, etc. have greatly-increased cancer rates compared to people who don't.

I seem to remember the main problem was the large amount of nitrates pumped into the meat.

MWC 2013: The Chinese are coming - and you ain't seen nothing yet

Re: G300

Can't fault the G300 on value for money. I searched around second-hand dealers for a cheap Android 'phone and couldn't find anything to match its spec for less than twice the hundred quid it cost me.

The ICS upgrade they and Vodafone rolled out was a complete mess for a lot of people (myself included) but sticking to Gingerbread it's a good device for the money.

Not sure I trust Huawei not to have installed a back-door in it, given their connections to the Chinese government, but I doubt I'm someone they're going to be interested in anyway. (And if I'd been mug enough to go for a Windows 'phone I'd be just as worried about a back-door for Uncle Sam).

The universe speaks: 'It's time to get off your rock!'

Considering the mess we've made of this planet...

...is it really a good idea for us to infest another one?

Pope resigns months after launching social networking effort

As a Hitler Youth volunteer...

...he's probably off to spend more time with his swastikas.

Google Doodle honors British bone-finder Mary Leakey

Honors?

Surely, honours?

Or isn't this theregister.co.UK?

Cable Cowboy lassoes Virgin Media with HUGE £15bn deal

Bugger!

I was planning to go over to them for my broadband so I could ditch the BT line. Branson's an arse, but I could tolerate him. Not sure I can tolerate a Yank arse though.

WORLD temporarily FREED from BURDEN of TWITTER!

Oh no!

How will I cope with not knowing when Stephen Fry's having his afternoon shit?

You thought watching cat videos was harmless fun? Think AGAIN

If only we were allowed to kill these bloody vermin!

In my garden, bloody cats cause far more damage than all the natural pests put together. I've had goldfish taken out of the pond and killed, any seeds I sow get dug up and EVERYTHING gets shat on by the filthy creatures.

And the sort of selfish sods who let these pests loose think I should consider it a privilege!

Firefox for Android now runs on EVEN OLDER, slower kit

Shame it's not very good

I thought having FF on my Android would give me the same good experience as it does on the desktop. WRONG!

Bad enough not being able to have it open up on the page of my choice. But the fact that it won't even let me choose what page thumbnails are displayed on its opening page but insists on choosing them itself. Apart from the fact that I reckon I know better than FF which pages I most want to go to, there are (ahem!) certain pages I don't particularly want prominently displayed on my 'phone when I use it in public...

Sharp-elbowed BT dives into 4G spectrum auction

Here we go again

After being virtually bankrupted because the company "had to have" a 3g license, you'd think BT management would have learned their lesson.

Unfortunately, the lesson was that you can take a multi-million pound golden parachute for yourself by ruining the company.