Posts by Simon Painter

Feds seize biker gang's trademark

NFW

You just can't take a biker group seriously if it's got a website.

Unless they kicked the shit out of some geek with bats until he made it for them.

Gmail cuts out the meatspace with canned replies

it's all about the 20%

So google has this huge money machine and they make a habit of employing the brightest people they can get their grubby and well greased paws on. They lure the obsessive geeks in with huge paychecks, bean bags and free food but the killer is this: 20%. Any true nerd spends at least a few hours outside of work time doing stuff that interests them (writing little code projects, contributing to open source stuff or just hacking about with things) if you give that same geek one day of his working week to do stuff that interests him, and give him access to all the engineering resources of google then it's really not surprising that the features are going to keep coming. A whole lot of the google labs stuff is born from the fact that google people can have an idea and then run with it until it's big enough to throw out there to the general public but of course for every good feature you will also get the odd nut job feature.

I get good ideas every now and again but either lack the skills of the resources or both... these google people have the skills and the resources to realise every idea on a massive scale regardless of if it's a good idea or a bad one.

It won't be long before some google guy or gal uses his 20% time to fit sharks with frikkin lasers.

Taliban extends mobile shutdown order

Haha...

Muppets. If their forces were in any way disciplined then this order would be unnecessary as they could just turn off the phone. This is blatantly about cutting comms to other locals who are unfriendly to them. The US should airdrop iridium phones throughout the areas where the shutdown occurs (having of course fitted a independent battery backed gps chip to them) that way the locals can phone in the the presence of the bearded ones and if the dog haters get hold of them they are traceable.

The Jesus Phone NDA - No one cares but you

Customers? Like fcuking lice...

When will the general public learn that big business does not care about you. This is not just limited to Apple or even IT as a whole it's a global thing where the big businesses are only going to play nice if there is money to be made or government regulation to force it. Organising a resistance to this sort of thing is only going to happen if people co-operate but we are generally selfish creatures so that does not happen on the scale necessary.

Petrol is an example of this... prices went up and we could have exercised co-ordinated buying power to force petrol prices down but it's all too much hassle. In the end it took a supermarket wishing to increase their revenue further to bring on the price war that is holding prices lower at the moment. Once the price war is over we will go back to paying 20p a litre more for our already expensive petrol.

It's also why the government takes the piss... it knows that we won't bother doing anything about it. They could introduce a law stating that we had to wear sack cloth on fridays and we would all comply because we assume everyone else is doing it and not want to stick out.

That's why most companies outsourced customer care to india... they care very little for it and want it handled by the cheapest possible people. They give them very limited mandates so all the customer can do is shout and scream at a dollar a day monkey who can't do anything about it and does not give a toss anyway.

UK.gov says: Regulate the internet

Where china leads...

...the west follows.

Tech gadgetry brings about pet-o-geddon

TFI Friday

Thank you for drawing our attention to the technological menace which is harming the nation's pets. It's just one short step from here to mechanoid kill bots who kill off the dogs in order to assist their flesh covered terminators in their infiltration of society.

Helicopters because there is no suitable killbot icon.

US judge rejects lawsuit against God

erm

*COUGH*cock*COUGH*

Das überdatabase: Inside Wacky Jacqui's motherbrain

@steve

"The bit about Area 51 is just them trying to sound glamourous and it probably wasn't *all* communications. However, we do have an American listening base at RAF Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. So you're probably looking for an old airbase somewhere in the mid-west with very few actual planes and an unusually high proportion of Oxbridge educated Brits.

We can't spy on our own people, but you can spy on ours and we can spy on yours and then swap data."

Or, this being America we are dealing with, they can spy on us and we can't spy on them.

McCain gets pair of personal cellphone towers

Is it friday already?

This is such a non story. He's the presidential nomination for the GOP and as such is offered Secret Service detail (as is the nominee from the democrats). If he is running his campaign or spending a lot of time in an area then it makes very good sense for the wireless networks to pop some kit nearby. They have only put temporary kit in place and will no doubt rip it down in mid November when they notice that nobody is using it any more apart from the McCains.

Go make up some real news (with Playmobile and stuff).

Airport baggage screener charged with stealing passengers' stuff

It's not just the TSA, it's all baggage handler sorts

I flew back from Prague and my sony hd video camera was swiped. If you're flying don't put anything in the hold that you value because the feckers can't be trusted.

The fact that it was a TSA employee rather than a baggage handler makes no difference in this case, once you part with your bags you expect them to be looked after until they are given back to you.

Black widows: Coming soon to a kitchen sink near you

@What's for dinner

They eat scorpions? Now *that* is one double hard bastard. That's like my saying I eat ninja.

Blu-ray Disc a 'bag of hurt', says Jobs

Sony are still desperate...

...to win a format war. They beat out HD-DVD but that was mainly because nobody wanted either yet. They have got the uptake numbers because they forced the PS3 owners to have a BluRay drive rather than offering it as an optional extra for people who want it but they still have not beaten the download guys to the finish line.

Sony got beat on Betamax and they have never quite gotten over it, they have always done well with other peoples formats but whenever they try to create their own format they balls it up because someone else offers a cheaper alternative that does not have to be licensed by Sony. Minidisks were great but they were unable to compete with MP3 because anyone could make an MP3 player without having to pay a license to Sony. BluRay might be the one that finally wins a format war for them but I doubt it. To get a benefit from BluRay you need to have a full HD TV, a player and a bunch of disks which you can't play on your laptop while you are on the plane. My first DVD drive (and CD for that matter) was in a computer and the stuff in the front room followed from that so if Sony want to get BluRay out there they need to make cheap drives for computers, laptops and also get the BluRay tech into the xbox (else the xbox users will just turn to downloading HD content like I do).

Compressed-air car to go commercial next year?

moving the energy consumption elsewhere

what's the carbon footprint of the compressor?

Microsoft seeds second comms server release

@Who wants this crap?

Because Asterix varies in stability from one version to the next and the support options are shit. We have it at work and can't wait to rip it out.

Home Secretary rejects McKinnon anti-extradition plea

@David Simpson

So hang on... we are bound by a treaty that they are legally prevented from honouring? How is that a treaty? If I make a treaty with you to not stab you in the face if you don't do the same to me and then I stab you repeatedly in the face would you still stand there and take it?

This is where we need a government with a pair of stones to stand up to this fucking stupidity. I don't care if he is innocent or guilty, I do object to him being shipped off to a country that has the death penalty when he could adequately be tried and serve his time here.

Does the EU not have some rights on this related to extraditing to police states with capital punishment? Surely the right to a fair trial of his peers as stated in the Magna Carta should hold true if we had an ounce of sovereignty anymore.

Deloitte loses hundreds of thousands of pension details

Techie news needs techie reporters to ask techie questions.

*What* encryption? Was it Winmagic, Safeboot, Pointsec etc or was it something noddy like a password on excel? It makes a pretty big difference and it's the sort of question you should expect people to ask and we should expect you to answer.

London and Wales to get fast fibre

hmm.. kit in the cabs?

So they are putting some expensive kit in those cabinets that can be opened with a radiator bleed key?

OLO promises Foleo-style iPhone-Air laptop combo

genius...

Take a small and useless device and make it into a large and pointless device!

Seriously though, if you want to lug around something the size of a laptop then just lug around a laptop - that way you get extra processing power and, provided you don't buy a Mac, the option to install an operating system that lets you do stuff that Jobsworth didn't expressly permit.

As to the likelyhood of this selling; if someone is dumb enough to buy an iPhone then they are probably dumb enough to buy one of these.

Canada sex shop heist shafts proprietress

Sarah...

I love you.

Secret docs loser to appear in court

Wooo showtrial!

Showtrial with a rap on the knuckles for the civil servant! Can't wait. I wonder if their identity will be hidden so that they never have to actually _go_ to prison.

This page has been intentionally left blank

What's the...

blah blah IT angle blah.

It has 'hyperlinks' to 'online content'. What more do you need?

The Paris Hilton angle was a little tenuous. Like saying "here's a phone, the iPhone is also a phone... see we mentioned iPhone" - oh wait, that's classic Register reporting.

UK.gov and UK.biz pour £60m into IT skills gap

yay

More paper MCSEs flooding the job market.

No mile-high pr0n for Delta passengers

@VPN/RDP

Quantas are offering cached content only so will no doubt just direct you to a proxy which has been loaded up with the days news and suchlike. Latency on live network use will be horrible due to the fact that this stuff is going to be going via a satellite and so RDP will be horrible (if allowed) and VPN will no doubt be restricted to those in business class who pay the premium while the scum in the back just get slow proxied shite web access.

Thomas Crown blagger recruits decoy dupes on internet

With a large cigar in his hand...

"floating down the Skykomish River in an inner tube stashed earlier by a creek"

What a great day out... rob a bank, confuse the plods and then float gently down the river on an inner tube puffing on a big old hamlet.

Reg competition: Cisco goes isup

Russell Tea Lady

It was Russell T Davis. He used the 'ardis to 'ranspor' all of them to the Medusa Cascaid.

'I can see dinosaurs from my back porch'

Let's have some balance...

If we are going to teach Christian creation beliefs as science then we need to have some balance. Let's have US public schools teaching Muslim creation beliefs. Muslim creationism is more compatible with evolution so would present a good middle ground between pure science and pure hocus pocus.

Right: Which one of you lot invented 'tw*tdangle', eh?

@Ian Twatdangle

"It was my dad - he was called Heronimus Twatdangle."

Was he from the Hampshire Twatdangles? I am a bit of an armchair twatdanglologist and have been tracing the family lines back as far as William of Twatdangle in 1337 who was lord of the now lost village of Twatdangle in Somerset.

US Army unit deployed to home front

oopss

did el reg just balls up an email link?

David Blaine tw*tdangle ends in controversy

@drunk.smile

I concur and call for a twatdangle icon for when people are doing stupid things in public for the sake of publicity to the mindless masses.

El Reg dresses The IT Crowd

FAIL and you...

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Tried to subscribe because I am quite desperate to win (almost to the pants wetting stage) and got an error. Have checked that I have not been doing something userish and even 'switched it off and back on again'.

Mayor Boris wants 'WiFi London'

Municipal wifi

Municipal wifi would be ace for London. Throttle it to something like a half megabit (so that people who want faster connections still have an incentive to pay for home broadband or faster wifi from commercial sources) and use the existing municipal infrastructure of bus shelters, phone boxes, street lights etc to deliver the hotspots.

Googlephone unworthy of Satan tag

So there is no support for anything useful...

So there is no support for anything useful at the moment and a small dedicated bunch of unpaid developers are expected to fill in the gaps and create stuff to make this OS able to take on the big boys. I suppose it's understandable that people are not optimistic about this, they weren't with Linux either.

EFF reveals vastly expanded search policy at US borders

Ah, the travellers paradox...

Don't encrypt stuff and you risk having it copied or snooped.

Encrypt stuff and you just draw attention to the fact that you may have something to hide, so they force you to hand over the keys.

Solution: Have a recently factory reset eeepc with you. Leave all your docs at home and then SSH/VPN back to your home network to get at your files while you are away. When it's time to go home just upload the files to home again and hit the factory reset button on the eeepc again (or use DBAN style military grade wiper for magnetic media).

Dell offers XP option for £44k

Flame on...

Microsoft: 44 grand for a six year old operating system and people still love it.

Linux: Can't even give it away for free!

3G Americas warns against text warning systems

for this read...

"we don't like the idea of paying for all the capacity that an emergency notification system would require so we are going to talk the government out of it so they don't insert it in as a clause in our license"

Oh, and Avast!

Oz woman sold mobe with preloaded smut

And there we have the crux of the matter...

"The rattled victim and her partner "met with Dick Smith Electronic's area and state manager late yesterday in a bid to reach a compensation settlement "

I doubt most people would be *that* offended but if there is a chance to make a buck...

London Olympics gets IT chief

Couldn't we outsource the Olympics to China?

Surely there are countries like China and Australia that we could outsource the Olympics to? As a nation we are not really very good at anything so if we do it ourselves we are just going to make a pigs ear of it and be humiliated.

Royal Society: Schools should show creationism 'respect'

But the creationists know it's only a faith...

The creationists themselves are the first to point out that the absence of scientific evidence leaves ID and creationism firmly in the field of faith rather than science. Let's keep this stuff for the theology classes and save the science lessons for stuff that has some sort of evidence to support it.

Oz minister walks plank for dancing drunk in his smalls

I'd vote for him

better the guy who gets drunk and dances in his pants than the guys who take bribes to ask questions and then lie about it

French storm the bastille over 'Sarkozy's Big Sister' database

It wouldn't happen over here...

The creation of a similar database might happen but the idea that the general public have some sort of say in these matters is frankly laughable. The idea that something condemned by everyone as a bad idea and petitioned against by the 'voters' would be stopped in the name of some sort of idea of 'democracy' is just silly liberal idealism.

Boffinry bitchslap brouhaha: Higgs and Hawking head to head

Mary Whitehouse

See that Higgs Boson particle.

That's *you* that is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UMedd03JCA

Rogue SF sysadmin may cost city over $1m

Keeping stuff safe...

How can he be keeping stuff safe if he was introducing new risks to the system. That password should have been in a safe somewhere that someone else had access to in case the sysadmin got hit by a bus.

United 'bankruptcy' points to new stock scam techniques

@tony

Yeah, google forcing conditions on the sites it indexes for news... nice idea but most of them would just remove all dates because they don't *want* to be indexed and provide people with news for free when they could be forcing them to register or buy antiquated paper versions of their news websites.

Google's Street View fleet - 100 spots and counting

Maidenhead

My cousin spotted it in Maidenhead according to his facebook status. I has asked if he as got a picture and will forward if he has.

Yes, there was a viable liquid bomb plot

Blah blah terrorism blah...

We beat the IRA by not being scared. The only way to beat the threats by minority islamic fundamentalists is to get on with our normal life and take reasonable precautions while not letting our basic civil liberties disappear. Airport rules are a pain but regular travellers can work around them and nobody cares about the Daily Mail readers who fly from Gatwick to Spain and now can't bring back vast quantities of undrinkable green spirits.

London Stock Exchange limps back online

Shit at being a money market too now?

is there anything that 'Great' Britain is actually good at any more? Maybe we should outsource this as well.

Ivan O'Toole? That's nothing, snorts Hugh Jass

CSI

The S in JASS is slightly lifted and is consistent across both of them, something you would expect from a single letter punch being mis-aligned. If this was a photoshop job then you would expect them to be inconsistent with each other or uniform on the baseline.

Still, it does not prove that some guy didn't sign up for a nectar card with a fake name. I would be more convinced with a drivers license or a debit card (but not a credit card as you can add duplicate cards on to your account with any name).

Academic wants to 'free up' English spelling

@Sarah

"Pry my apostrophe's from my cold dead hand's, Prof."

Please let that be ironic. PLEASE!

Facebook - The Movie! Exclusive storyboard peek

I want one of those...

I want a giant james bond killbot.

Judge slaps Fasthosts for rubbish kit and support

New icon

Can we have a new icon with an anvil for when we want to same something with a little irony?