Posts by zedee

Microsoft will rest its jackboot on Windows 7, 8.1's throat on new Intel CPUs in 2018 – not 2017

So come July when the free upgrade deal for Win 10 expires, is the MS malware going to stop downloading gigs of install files to my laptop?

Anti-privacy unkillable super-cookies spreading around the world – study

Suspected of being O2...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/25/o2_hands_out_phone_numbers_to_websites/

At last, switching between rubbish broadband providers now easier

Re: When will they be made to advertise truthfully?

'VM and BT have some strange DNS manipulation going on, preventing access to sites and services that they don't want you to have.'

Care to elaborate? I'm being forced to consider BT unfortunately.

Atomic keyring's eerie blue glow lights SPB lab

My purple original still going strong-ish - well, at getting on for 1.3 half lives later it's noticeably dimmer.

Organic food: Pricey, not particularly healthy, won't save you from cancer

Rather like the recent dishwasher tablet adverts

"LESS CHEMICALS!!!!!"

So if there's less chemicals, and seeing as all substances* are elementary chemicals or chemical compounds of one name or another, then they must be selling smaller dishwasher tablets. Marketing wnakers.

Even the more grammatically correct "fewer chemicals" just means "we've removed some ingredients so there's higher amounts of others".

* Let's stick to regular matter eh?

Dyson takes Samsung to court in UK over vacuum cleaner

Re: While we're on the subject...

Watching Alan Partridge the other night were we?

AdBlock Plus BLOCKED from Google Play

Ad away now gone too

Just went to check it out on the strength of the above above - and it's had the same fate.

Only available on F-droid or a Google Project site.....

Behold: First look at Office 2013, with screenshots

It's like the 80's are back, in HIGH RES.

Carriers, prepare to bleed: EU pops a cap on data roaming

How does this tally with T-Mobile denying roaming data in the EU, unless you pre-buy a bundle - minimum size 10MB I think? I suppose if the actual per Mb price doesn't exceed the regulated rate it's within the regulations.

I asked repeatedly for bill-me-as-I-roam per KB pricing but they said buy a bundle or get nowt. I only wanted a few KB for a quick SSH connection!

Softphones strangled by smartphone battery life

Shoretel's real problem

is that you can't understand a word that the Shoretel user is saying (100Mbit connection), with me on a good quality old-tech copper pair.

I don't know what conversion/compression they use, but the speech is permanently unintelligible - no stutters or blank pauses, you just can't understand a word.

Skype though - anything above a 32Kbit connection and it's crystal.

Becrypt disk crypto earns first Brit spook kitemark

Truecrypt full disk encryption FTW

New Earth-observing satellite snaps 'blue marble' shot

Terribly distorted

More like "photo of a small portion of one hemisphere made to look passibly full-hemispheric".

It's like they used a fish-eye 'lens'.

Poorly faked, they think would anyone really believe Mexico takes up that much area of a hemisphere?

O2 smears 4G trial over capital

UK 3G/UMTS uses CDMA tech already (W-CDMA).

LTE is an evolution ("Long Term Evolution") of the existing architecture.

LTE phones will drop down to 3G signals where LTE is unavailable, and potentially GSM beyond that. So it's already designed in.

Check out the 3GPP LTE/IMS specs elsewhere, they're a thrilling read.

UK.gov threatens to 'pull plug' on smart meter rollout

Some plug-in watt monitors are very poor at accurately detecting low power use especially the ones which clamp around your house meter cable.

E.g. my LCD screen uses 150w according to the gizmo that NPower sent to me.

I went and bought a £3.99 watt monitor from Clas Ohlsen which you plug your appliance into directly, rated for a minimum current of 5w, and on that my LCD screen uses 38W. Its rated at 40W max on the back of the screen so seems more accurate.

Better monitors exist which start at 1W, at about £25.

Ten... earphones for mobiles

Or, if you're happy with a soldering iron, take the ear bits off your favourite but cheap buds (e.g. creative ep-630) and swap them with the crap ear bits of your phone's supplied headset.

Did it with my HTC headset and now they're great.

Nanotubes, sulfur expand battery storage

I sympathise with the above posters entirely - sulphur it shall always be.

Except if you ask IUPAC and the RSC. Tossers.

Detective on phone-hacking probe team is arrested

WTF is a 'proactive' operation?

Surely "active" or "ongoing".

Proactive is not a word. FFS.

German salesmen rewarded with meticulously organised orgy

Re: Has to be asked

I wanted to see what Lester could come up with!

Has to be asked

Where's the IT angle?

I know, I know, it's Friday, this is el reg etc....

O2 ups 3G speeds by 30%

Just done a quick check

and it looks like every HTC since mid 2009 supports UMTS900.

Hero ftw!

Gmail auto sorts bulk mail, notifications, forum messages

rt: remove the inbox label

You remove the Inbox label by archiving the message - access archived mail by clicking the "All Mail" label.

O2 to raise broadband prices by up to 27%

Not a coherent price hike then

My £10.21 service is 'only' going up to £13, according to the email I got.

Still, it's cheaper than a new customer would pay, and my connection will remain unthrottled and unshaped (unlike any new account or any upgraded/downgraded existing connection) .

Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals, dies at 85

Try Winfract - or fractint for old skool CLI users...

One of the first programs that made me sit up and think - 'Wow - computers and maths together? This could be quite interesting...."

Awesomeness from the stone soup group. Lots and lots of types of fractals and other mathematical phenomena.

German 4G auction winds up

Hehe

To2GER?

Todger more like

Man uses meat cleaver to fashion UK-ready iPad

Just showing off

that he's got a fancy GLOBAL knife with it's "samurai" heritage

Jesus Phone to exhibit holy gift of bilocation

All together now

Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!

Microsoft wants to put infected PCs in rubber room

Metronet

Metronet (smaller UK ISP which got bought by the Plusnet borg) was doing this back in 2005.

Infected by a bot, spewing spam traffic?

Automated port blocking, with browse redirection to a helpful page.

Tidy.

Unused phone lines to be taxed for rural broadband

You can be sure BT will be all over this

As soon as you move house and cancel the line, the wire gets physically removed in some way - cut, pulled, gouged, whatever.

And then the next day the new owner/tenant wants a phone line (solely for ADSL broadband because cable isn't available, natch)....

BT: "That'll be £120 for fitting a new line please sir!"

UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files

Corrupt Container

What if you give the correct key after being ordered to, but a fault on your own HD/USB disk has corrupted the original file rendering it undecryptable?

Plod: "That's the wrong key"

Perp: "No it's not"

Plod: "Oh yes it is"

etc.

Fat Reg slims down for spanking new mobile phone version

Browser-sniffing

Damn annoying when you want El Reg Gordo but you keep getting microReg forced down your throat (take note Times and Indy)

Russia planning nuclear-powered manned spaceship

@Jason Trolli

I can't even be arsed to tear you to shreds on so many basic errors in your misunderstanding of the principles of temperature and radiation/conduction of thermal energy, and your misapplication of this at the working temperatures of modern CPUs and nuclear reactors

Dell refunds PC user for rejecting Windows

@Andus

Did this laptop get its faulty screen after falling off the back of a lorry?

Back on topic: Old news, I got about £50 out of Dell 18 months ago for Vista Basic and Works which I didn't want. Took a couple of calls, but if you read the license terms to them over and over they will eventually find the part of the script that says "allow the refund".

So all things considered my RAM and HDD upgrades from basic spec were free.

One cellphone for every ten lags in UK prisons

Hardboard impregnated with iron filings

Anyone remember this? Can't find a linky.

The iron absorbs the microwaves in and out - was going to be used in cinemas.

Simply stick it on all external walls (weatherproofed of course) and hey presto, Johnny Hardknox can't talk to his crew.

Similar idea to http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8279549.stm

Met steps up stop and search with mobile phone scanner

Fairly invasive

To scan the IMEI barcode I reckon most phones need the battery out, which is to say you have to affect its operation and turn it off.

Is there reasonable suspicion of a phone being stolen due to it being possessed by someone who has been randomly stopped and searched?

Sure you can do *#06# but that's not the point.

T-Mobile picks Orange for merger

The obvious new brand

It's got to be Pekoe, innit?

Besieged by attacks, AT&T dumps celebrity hacker

@Emo

Not many PAYG opportunities because you pay for incoming as well as outgoing in US.

And the rate can depend where the call is coming from. Your credit would be there, and well, then it'd be gone because someone misdialled your number from abroad.

HTC Hero Android smartphone

Sync software

The Android sync software is on the included MicroSD card, at least it is when coming from T-Mobile UK.

@AC - got a link for the features removed from Magic?

Fancy dropping into Pitetsbkrrh?

@mittfh

Or the person just had no sense of rhythm

One fifth of humanity deprived of Milky Way

@Michael Nielsen

"Not that I'm an advocate for androgenic climate change...."

Climate change due to male hormones?

Or perhaps anthropogenic.

Pirate Party wins seat in European Parliament

@Dave Ross - use of 'buffon'

Boris Johnson is an example of a 'buffon'.

The BNP are actually a bunch of 'cnuts'.

Atlantis set for Monday lift-off

Is there no end to the cheese?

That crew photo is unbelievably gorgonzola-esque.

I mean - the background, the fixed ecstatic grins, the lip slugs!

Grav-mapping satellite fires ion engines

Range rather than defined point

I think nominally refers to "within upper and lower acceptable limits" whereas normally would refer to a single "normal" state.

But it does irk me slightly as well, the slow creep towards techspeak/management buzzwords etc becoming part of common vocabulary.

Budvar beats Anheuser-Busch in latest Budweiser battle

All fair and dandy but

Who buys (yank) Budweiser in Europe?

The local Stag brewery in west London produces the stuff, and they used to go on occasional forays trying to give the stuff away in my local and others nearby.

They put free pints in front of you, without you having to ask, so there was no effort in getting one.

One sip, just to remind ourselves of how minging it is. Then back to paying for beer we want to drink.

Knee X-ray biometrics plan to fight spoofing

Really well thought out

Especially when the rate of knee cancer (?) shoots up.

Wakefield does a Brum with possessive apostrophes

Prinsipel

Principle - an idea, a noun.

Principal - "of primary importance", adjective.

Simple, nez paz?

Lords, MPs go down on to the Erotic Awards

Don't get clever

'The' Hoi Polloi ?

Any scholar worth his MA (Oxon) would not redundify 'hoi' with 'the'.

;)

A380 too quiet, moan Emirates pilots

Lo-tech solution

Earplugs, anyone?

Copyright-bothering web TV outfit rises from the grave

Licensing?

The BBC licencing mafia should be all over this.

With this, every recent mobile device has been made capable of receiving live broadcast television. (the transmission medium doesn't matter does it? cable or radio waves...)

But - it's battery operated so exempt.

But - don't plug it in to charge or you'll need a TV licence!!!

One-eyed woman wants techno-vision

Heh

Surely Captain Cyborg can help here?