Posts by Steve Evans

Can Western Digital drives vary their spin speeds?

I dunno...

I have a nice selection of 400Gig RE2 drives here that vary their spin speed... They spin up... Click... Spin down... spin up... Click... Spin down...

Worldwide GPS may die in 2010, say US gov

I wonder...

...how much the powers that be have bunged this chap to say this...

I can almost hear the EU reaching for their begging bowls to fund their own (now essential) GPS system...

Forgive me for being so suspicious, but we're talking about politicians here!

Missing: 1TB of Clinton White House data

Errr...

They had a terabyte drive during the Clinton years? Oh how the other half live!

I assume this (amazingly advanced for it's time) removable drive was encrypted of course?

3 has no place Like Home

@Kevin Johnston

Quite correct, I'm not sure which mobile phones Shane has been using, but every Nokia I have ever owned has supported maual network selection. Currently that's an N95, so a reasonably new smart phone.

I'm actually sad enough that I've checked out the tariffs in advance before travelling abroad and made a list of preferred networks to use! (Getting the tarriffs can be a bit of a battle though!)

Oddly enough when I was in France a few years ago it was better for me to use any network other than Orange FR... Even though I'm an Orange UK customer!

Charges against London tube tourist snapper thrown out

The sensible thing...

By the sound of it the guy was reasonable, he apologised and deleted the picture.

The transport police should have used some common... Told the father that they would detain the photographer, taken the photographer to their detention room, apologised to him, but asked him to remain there for a few minutes until the knuckle draggers had got on a train. Then they could have just let him go again! Everyone happy!

Dell designs 10in netbook for Bash Street

@Jon Brunson

Yup, I said "owch"... and that was after it had been amended to £290 (ex VAT).

Lenovo S10 is £260 *INC* VAT from laptopsdirect

Chinese screw sex theme park

@Steve Swann

LMAO!

Prism Firefox extension hits beta

Full circle...

So first there were applications, then websites, then websites that looked like applications and now applications that run websites like application...

Thank God for broadband, cos with all those layers it'll never fit on a floppy!

OpenOffice 3.1 ready to lick Microsoft's suite?

Auto update...

Looks like the update notification from 3.0.1 isn't working...

All it keeps telling me is that there is an update to the French dictionary... Why I would want that in the UK I don't know...

Hulu recognizes Blighty existence

Hmmm...

Hope they add 'merkin subtitles or they're gonna be screwed...

Think Austin Powers scene with Michael Caine talking "British"... Hehehehe

Arnie pops up in Terminator Salvation

"just good enough sequel"

Oh *that* good eh?

Too much sunshine makes you commit suicide

Hmmm...

Looks like another study from the dept of the bleedin' obvious.

Sleep deprivation as has been mentioned by pretty much every comments is most probably the cause.

Although my theory works the other way round...

Darkness tends to make people sleepy.

It's hard to kill yourself when you're snoring.

Unless you happen to be driving a truck of course, but then that's an accident, not deliberate.

Mine's the one with the shift workers eye mask in the pocket.

An unthinking programmer's guide to the new C++

At this rate...

...by 2010 every C++ project is going to have to be supplied with it's own Rosetta stone!

/me rapidly returns to the nice structured and strictly typed world of Delphi where basic operators are still words.

Ahhh... That's better... *sigh*

US braces for 'bio-Katrina'

bio-Katrina?

Does that mean they are going to abandon half a southern state to it?

Missile data, medical records found on discarded hard disks

@A J Stiles

Re speed camera detectors...

IIRC that was tested in court, and failed... The camera detector doesn't allow you to listen to the transmission, or decode any content from it, it simply tells you there is one... A subtle difference, but enough.

Although I'm sure that 2 weeks after that they made it illegal to own, see or even hear about such devices on pain of death.

Super Micro rack-mounts micro Atom server

@Hein-Pieter van Braam

Why not? You could have complete redundancy by using two, and still have the green glow of eco-friendliness :-)

Browncasting: Why can't Downing Street do digital?

@Greg Fleming

It might be a face that would frighten the French, but he's so busy kissing their arses they have yet to see it!

Google sued for 'stealing' Android name

Would you really want to p*ss off google?

They could make you effectively vanish from the intarweb!

if (search_result->domain_name=="android-data.com") {

ranking-=500;

}

French lead world in eating and sleeping

@Greg Fleming

Very true... I can only explain one of those... The drinking.

Thanks to our 11pm "everybody out!" licensing laws, us Brits evolved the ability to sink 12 hours worth of booze in 3 hours. This in itself wouldn't be too much of a problem if the then sozzled people weren't all thrown out of all the pub doors into the local high street at exactly the same time! Could you think of a better recipe for conflict?

Luckily the 11pm closing as been relaxed a bit in recent years. Unfortunately it's going to take a while for the glass lifting right arm action to be slowed down enough for us to make it much past 2am without serious alcohol poisoning!

Oh, and we all know who's fault those opening hours were... The French... (Well okay, it was the Germans, but if the French had sorted them out on their own in 1914 we wouldn't have needed that 11pm law!).

Satellite to offer 10Mbit broadband to entire UK

Re: On the net from an undefined location.

...but with your credit card and billing address information...

So the latency issue is still an issue...

And the data limit is still an issue...

The only person I can possibly think of that could use something like this would be a friend who works on oil rig supply ships, but then again you'd never keep the dish pointing in the right direction when you're bouncing about in the north sea!

Nothing new here... Move along!

Apple moves to patent mobile color

@Rolf Howarth

Well they're probably not patenting more than any other US company...

That is one screwed up patent system!

I hear there is a new bible in the US... It appears the meek are out, the lawyers will inherit the earth.

Twitter breach gives behind-the-scenes Obama peek

Dictionary passwords?

OMG! Anyone still using pure alphabetic passwords that can be found in Dr Johnson's 250 year old book really deserve to be lined up against the wall...

Any that are administrators of anything should be lined up with any of their offspring/siblings just to remove the faulty gene from the pool!

Pig plague 2.0: Can't spell 'pandemic' without 'panic'

Watch...

For HM Govt to try sneaking some bad news out whilst everyone is running about in a flu panic...

Oh no, I just sneezed....I DON'T WANNA DIE!

Oh hang on, it's hay fever...

Carphone Warehouse linked to Tiscali buy-up (again)

@A/C 15:00 27th April 2009

Why are they willing to pay for these customers instead of jumping in when it goes under? Well the longer they leave it the smaller that group of customers will get. It is quite amusing as the Indian call centre have a new script to read when you ask for a MAC... They say "Is this because of the bankruptcy rumours? That won't affect you sir, Tiscali UK and Italy are completely separate..."

@Les Matthew... Well as I just said, there will be less than 1.8 million, but the thought of even half that number of people, all without MACs is kinda terrifying... Personally as a MAC is valid to 30 days (I think), I would ring Tiscali and ask for it... Then ask for a new one every couple of weeks, just so that when it does all go belly up you already have the code! It might make the chaos a little easier on you.

Musician dumps instruments for iPhone

Let's hope...

He's playing percussion... With a 7lb club hammer...

Number 10 doubles as 'House of Flying Nokias'

should be safe...

Given his monocular vision, I would image his depth perception to be particularly weak and trajectory calculations inaccurate... Hell, his calculations would be inaccurate anyway, look at the economy!

Mine's the one with the yellow builders hat (can't be too careful).

Private ID scans leave fetish club-goers feeling exposed

The middle road...

Surely the middle road solution here would be for the scanning equipment to not be quite so complex... What if it was just an optical scanner of sorts or a digi cam... Take a picture of the person, take a picture of the ID. Everything is stored as an image (and only ever an image) which will reduce the datamining ability to pretty much zero. Keep the pictures for say 6 months, then delete.

This system (c) 2009 by me, can read any and every ID that is human readable.

If there is any problem, well it won't take long to look through the pictures and ID the trouble makers. In fact unless the IDs currently being used contain details like hair colour and number of facial piercings, this step will have to be performed even with their current system.

Atom UMPC first casualty of OQO money woes?

@Ian McNee

Thanks for the first laugh of my day! Not bad, it's only 5:30 :-)

Cabinet Office stuck with creaking PCs for five years

Old machines = Green ???

Can keeping these old machines really be classed as being green? Pentium 4s glowing away all hours of the day?

Surely if they really want to be green they sell the old machines off to one of the many PC recycling companies (complete with all the private data still on the hard drive of course - this is UK gov after all) and then replace them with something like an atom based eeeBox that sip less than 35watts and cost £200.

Sure eeeboxs don't run vista, but business doesn't need/want vista. Sure they suck at games, well maybe they'll get more work done. Sure they don't have a CD/DVD drive, well good, cos that'll stop people burning or trying to install things off that they shouldn't!

Pirate Bay judge and pro-copyright lobbyist accused of bias

What?!

He doesn't think that is a conflict of interest...? Would he please tell us what else he would have to do to qualify?!!!!

'Soon soldiers will have 3 tiny choppers in their pocket'

Looks like fun...

But I have serious doubts about how something that light would handle the slight breezes that occur in some place, you know, like outside!

Still I guess it's a neat way to check out a building (assuming they haven't blown all the windows in/out with bullets and stun grenades and let that nasty draft in.

I'm off to secure my premises with one of those panning fans... On level 3... Muwahahahaha!

Can the iPhone save NFC?

There is one use...

That's already quite common... Tagging animals.

So with your suitably equipped iphone you too can read this tag and be able to confirm the identify of the cat curled round your legs at the front door. This will prevent sneaky cats belonging to neighbours from performing convincing impersonations and having a free meal.

Tesla Roadster runs for 241 miles in Monte Carlo e-rally

@Dave

Please hurry up and squash them all for me... I'll personally blow a gasket if I get stuck behind one of those in the mountains!

BT still struggling to fix Olympic problems

@Steve Foster

It's okay Steve, the tubes are on the surface there.

Although part of me would love to see the chaos if they had hit a tube!

Paris: Because she thinks all holes should be well documented

Photocops: Home Office concedes concern

Not all of them!

I was a little cheeky the other week... I saw two motorcycle cops parked up on the Mall, and thought they'd make an interesting picture... So I asked if they minded, and they were perfectly friendly and even asked if I'd like them to pose in any particular way!

However, if confronted by a Nazi, sorry I mean member of the force who is over stepping his authority, just remember that most of them are about as technically savvy as an 8 year old. Be friendly, compliant, and show them your photos so they can Identify which ones that offend them. Delete the pictures.

Then before taking any more, swap your memory card... It's only FAT, so undelete!

BT does Italian Job on London traffic lights

@Samson Chan

Totally possible...

Your broadband connection is only piggybacked on your phone line on the local loop, and jumps off it at your local exchange. From there the two signal paths are separate.

As you have broadband, but no analogue phone, either only the phone line goes via the broken tunnel and the IP data goes a different route, or the IP data is on one of the other links in the tunnel which survived...

So give it a day or two and I'm sure they'll manage to damage the IP datapath too :-)

Conficker zombie botnet drops to 3.5 million

How about...

How about this for a revolutionary idea...

As this analysis is based on the IPs of the infected machines, how about emailing the ISPs who control these IPs and asking them to inform the user who had that IP allocated at the time of their infection, and pass them some useful links to help them remove the infection...

The mechanism almost already exists on some ISPs to allow the RIAA to pump out the automated "You are an evil pirate, prepare to be cut off!" emails.

This does assume the ISPs give a sh*t of course!

UK operation patents DVD lockdown

Hmmm...

I hope that in the USA they still get the phone number to link to the card number, otherwise you could use a prepaid credit card to get the unlock codes, and then bin the card and share the codes with all your friends.

Plus, CLI is all well and good, but at the moment calls breaking out from VOIP can have some very strange numbers, and of course be faked to contain any number you like.

Nokia E75

@AC 2nd April 2009 13:31 GMT

The N97 isn't available yet... It's release date got pulled back a couple of months, about the same time as Orange et al started bitching about the built in Skype calls having the ability to go over wifi.

I'm sure, as we speak, Nokia are bending to the will of the carriers and knobbling the VOIP features so they only work over GPRS/3G and not wifi... Same as they did with the N95...

Hopefully the N97 will be equally simple to "fix" afterwards.

Unauthorised Wolverine claws his way onto interwebs

@Code Monkey

My g/f made exactly the same comment the other day. I can't remember what film we were watching, but the anti piracy thing was even more in your face as usual... They truly are only one step away from the IT Crowd version these days!

UK.gov to get power to force ISPs to block child porn

Anonymous Coward @AC 2nd April 2009 12:17 GMT

"Why is no one in charge clued up on this?"

A very good question... But do you really think we need another 100 civil servants, even techie ones to help them with these things?

Personally I'm quite happy for the Govt to go round making stupid statements like this, and then to sit back and watch as the reality of what they are requesting slowly dawns.

We all suspect they are idiots, so why not let them open their mouths and remove all doubt!

Vulture Central on total G20 terror lockdown

What?!

No beards?

So no Linux articles this week then?

Android tethering app tossed

Why?

Why should it matter? They have a data volume cap, so if you blow it in a couple of hours from a tethered laptop, why should they care?

Workers take Caterpillar Inc managers hostage

Okay...

1 is a shock

2 is a unexpected

But getting yourself caught in the third incident is just plain stupid! surely any manager with more than a couple of braincells to run together would refuse to meet any workers in an office with only one exit... From the far side of a chain link fence is currently recommended!

Wacky Jacqui spanked by husband

More to the point...

WTF are we doing paying for her to have cable TV at all! I don't have it at home, I don't think it comes under a necessary expense, especially with the option of freeview, or don't they have to justify any expenses?

Windows 7 RC download page reveals May ship date

Specs...

I thought they said Windoze 7 would work fine on netbooks? As A/C 19:48 correctly observed, translating those requirements into real world numbers exceeds any netbook on the market.

Remember XP - at least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)

And Vista - 512 MB of system memory

So either M$ are being honest for once, or W7 is an even worse system hog than Vista!

Firefox exploit sends Mozilla into 'high-priority fire drill' mode

High priority...

and we have to wait 5 days?

Now I know that's faster than M$ or Apple will respond, but it's still a long time to be wandering naked on the interwibble!

Budvar beats Anheuser-Busch in latest Budweiser battle

@AC (miles back up there somewhere)...

"Someone from Berlin is a Berliner"... Errrr... JFK tried that one... Doughnut (literally).

Anyway, nice to see that good taste has prevailed :-)

I think most of my favourite Euro beers are safe from trademark jumping, the Polish ones don't have enough vowels to be pronounced, let alone trademarked!

Na zdrowie :-)

LibDems uncover over 10,000 RIPA yarns

The Lib Dems...

They do make a good opposition some times, and I would be tempted to vote for them and let them try running the place for once, if it wasn't for their blind loyalty to Europe and it's financial albatross.

Sun packs 150 billion web pages into meat locker

Come on...

Where's the rest of it... The aircon! I don't see any evaporators on that container, and there is no way those suits would be able to wearing anything more than speedos if that sweat box didn't have the wind chill factor of the Antarctic!

Love the loose and missing mounting bolts! I wonder how many head crashes a magnitude 7 would cause, even with the fancy (unbolted) spring mounts?