Posts by DirkGently

Microsoft shoots Windows Live Messenger, brings in Skype IM

MSN

I still get nostalgic about MSN IRC (not the comic chat though - that was crap).

Judge GIVES APPLE THE FINGER in multitouch iDevice patent case

... or Ensues?

Everything Everywhere prices up UK 4G

EE:

Extremely Expensive

Hero police robot back on duty after 'unstable man' blasts it with shotgun

ED-209

Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.

Deep-fried planets discovery offers hope for Earth’s future

"Astronomers expect the Earth’s sun to go through a similar process in about five billion years time."

Just time for another bath! Pass me the sponge someone would you please?

Potential ALIEN LIFE habitats FOUND ON MOONS

Probes

By the time any probes we send out reach these planets, the civilisations will probably have been and gone - even if they haven't already.

Apple bashes 'gay cure' app

Has anyone written an app...

... to cure religious tendencies? After all, isn't it a kind of insanity?

Anti-religious campaigners smack down census Jedis

Just add another Yes/No question:

Practising?

Virgin Media to issue firmware update after Superhub slows to crawl

RE: I wont be a new Virgin Customer now

You're better off with Be - I play online PC games and the people with the best connections are on Be.

Unusable

I've been an NTL/VM customer for 10 years and decided to upgrade to 50Mbit in January as my 10Mbit service had become unusable at peak times since about November. The new router made absolutely no difference so I got it cranked back down to 10Mbit and for the lack of service from VM I'm now moving service provider. Not sure if it's the router or the UBR (do a Google search for "UBR fault Peterborough"), but VM doesn't seem to be addressing the problem with any urgency.

AOL buys Huffington Post

1 + 1 = 1

If we're talking Boolean Algebra.

Ofcom okays Derren Brown psychic-baiting

RE: Where's the IT angle?

It mentions Ofcom?

Hobbit helmsman Jackson hit by $190K credit card scam

RE: Ugh

Since the film version came out, maybe. The gollum in the Radio 4 series was much better.

Conficker's 6m strong botnet confounds security probes

Have you tried...

... turning it off and on again?

Dell outsourcer lifts US woman's saucy pix from PC

Just confirms the expression

"Only in America"

MS preps emergency patch for Windows shortcut peril

RE: The clue's in the name

The HAL from IBM is an urban myth so it's probably true that the other is too... unless of course you can come up with a reliable citation.

More iPhone 4 angst: fanbois howl over head sensor

Think of the vocabulary

Sorry if you think me a pedant, but I'm concerned for the future of the English language:

Remember there's a difference between "your" and "you're" and don't forget "there", "their" and "they're". Mobile phones have a lot to answer for!

Nine year-old blamed for US school system hack

Racist!

I thought blackboard was banned by the PC brigade... it should be chalkboard. Maybe the child just wanted to alert people of this crime. lol

Mandybill: All the Commons drama

I'm not worried

I'll just create a new Hotmail account when they cut me off! So there!

Bletchley Park earns first ever lottery grant

OMG!

It seems that signing a petition actually works sometimes.

Whining serial commentard bemoans Reg bullying

Meme

Incident Report

Priority: 1 (affecting all users)

Subject: Getting spurious errors

Cause: Database is kempfed

Police may have had a duty to notify phone-hacking victims

No brainer

Illegal activity == criminal charges

Orange UK exiles Firefox from call centres

@dave hands RE: STOP

Yeah, I didn't think it was a very funny joke either.

Regarding tabbed browsing, why don't they ask if they can use something like Avant Browser? I hate it, but at least it won't break most apps written for IE 6.

Europe won't pay more for Windows 7. Really!

@Daniel Harris 1

"Win7 is better than XP though"

Exactly how is Windows 7 better than XP? I've played with Windows 7 and apart from the fancy graphics and DX10 for games, I don't see any benefit in switching. It still doesn't like some of my legacy apps that Vista baulked at (and they're not very old apps).

Britney Spears dead hacked

Well duh!

Most of us know it isn't 4 feet wide because we've seen the photos!

Millions opted into UK mobile phone directory

Found

I can find me, but at the address where I lived 2 years ago! Not exactly current data.

US team create carbon nanotube ultra-memory

Q: What's that?

A: Oh that's what archaeologists call a Blue Screen Off Death.

BakBone's SMB continuous data protection

NetVault

I hope they've improved the nasty, unintuitive, cobbled-together GUI that they had 5 years ago.

Sky dishes up iPlayer-style service for Xbox 360

Ok for some

If you haven't got cable, I suppose this is a good alternative to having a nasty lump of metal on the side of your house. I'll stick with my free cable TV from Virgin - okay I don't get Sky One, but that's no great loss.

KOffice 2.0 available for early adopters

Contribution

I'd love to know what, if anything, all the critics of FOSS projects contribute apart from negative criticism.

Welsh mum amazed by Marmite Messiah

I'm Glad

Glad to see the Register is spreading the good news.

Actually, according to the law of averages, someone on the lookout for these kind of images has probably seen it in a pile of dog poo. I guess it would be unlikely they'd call the local rag for that though.

Virgin space mothership test details posted online

Virgin Galactic??

That's a bit cheeky - it'll be a long time before manned spaceships are inter-planetary, let alone leaving the Solar System and traversing the galaxy.

YouTube flooded with porn

RE: how will they ever stop this?

Because hopefully people like me will report it.

NZ couple do bunk with £3.9m bank error

Banks are businesses too

Yes I know that £3.9m is nothing to a bank, but they will make sure it's the customers that pay out to correct the bottom line. I'd have tried to move the money into an interest paying account and waited until they asked for it back.

RE: Good on 'em

You won't mind paying extra bank charges to help cover the bank's loss then.

Fox terminates The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Re: Re: Re moderatrix apostrophe's

There'll still be a pocket of punctuation sanity in the KDE project. Well as long as I'm a part of it anyway.

@Sarah Bee

He must have read Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Maybe...

Maybe it would have faired better if the lead actor had got banged up for drink-driving.

Asus Eee PC 1008HA Seashell

Display

Yet another pathetic resolution. 1024 width is so last millennium!!

RE: Who'dve thunk it?

"But I suspect this could be the perfect little travelling computer for folk who have zero interest in upgrading or hanging lots of peripherals off it"

And don't mind a repair bill when the battery dies...

Kanye West doesn't have a f***ing Twitter, OK?

How do we know?

It could be a fake Kanye West who hacked his site and wrote the blog to try to bring down the real Kanye West who is really a Twitter addict.

Adblock developer offers 'please unblock me' tag to sites

"Intrusive"

That word is open to interpretation. I have no qualms about blocking ads being served on under-performing servers that cause the page to take ages to finish loading. These are actually more annoying than sites that have popups - at least you can close down the popup - or use badly coded flash apps that fill up your available RAM.

Darth Vader tops movie misquote poll

RE: 2001 - A Space Odyssey

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

HAL: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.

Tombstone because it's the nearest thing to the monolith in 2001.

Call for heads to roll over failed spook IT system

Unnamed Supplier

"The Cabinet Office is now negotiating its way out of a huge contract with an unnamed private sector IT supplier."

I wonder if this is EDS again...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/11/08/government_cocks_up_another_computer/

That time is was a £300m cock up. And that was in the days when £300 million was considered to be a lot of money!

Ireland bucks trend with anti-blasphemy law

Defender of the Faith

Obviously Ahern is taking it literally. Let's face it, their god is so impotent he needs legislation to defend him now. Maybe they need the money to buy their god a new hearing aid, wheel chair and an eternity's supply of incontinent pads.

Vatican damns Angels and Demons as 'quite harmless'

I know...

... it's straw man not straw bear... you know what I meant I hope.

RE: Wonderful!

That's a nice straw bear argument you're carrying there. Did you make it yourself?

"Mostly Harmless"???!!!?

Apparently the editor had to trim it a bit, but it's still and improvement over "Harmless". Seems there's a Douglas Adams fan in the Vatican... or is it just an improbable coincidence?

Apple brands UK tabloid 'obscene'

Categorization

I agree - The Sun shouldn't be categorized under news... it should be under fiction.

Ron Howard accuses Pope of scuppering Dan Brown movie

Tedium ad Nauseum my child

It'll be interesting to see how different the film of Angels & Demons is from DaVinci Code. Reading the book gave me strong feelings of deja vu. I had to keep looking at the cover to check I hadn't picked up DaVinci Code instead.