Posts by Wortel

Yorkshire lass eBays cheating boyf's Xmas prezzies

sad

that people still can´t stop cheating on each other. hope the lass has a strong heart, certainly appears to have spirit. kind of her to turn her loss into something positive for another.

Unused phone lines to be taxed for rural broadband

“Treasury”

Who else read “Treasury” as “Treachery”? I know I did.

Nokia N900 Linux smartphone

Excellent

Got mine over the weekend, and i´m hooked. sent this via the built-in browser ;)

Nintendo posts DSi XL promo

Interesting

Starting to look like an e-reader, especially the brown version looks like a leather bound pocket notebook. Hmmm..

T-Orange puts names on dotted lines

Ah

So soon both networks will be shit^2. Thanks for the heads up! :P

Home sec puts McKinnon extradition on hold

Oh come on.

How long has it been now, 7 years? pointless bickering over a non-issue by government airheads whom themselves are barely able to remember their own mobile phone PIN. Let McKinnon go already, 7 years of being the centre of a silly game of semantics tug of war with the promise of more hurt is more than long enough torture for any human being.

@Venomous A.Cowards

And you know who you are.

Stuff your mindless drivel. Let's see you being jerked around by the noose around your neck for 7 years. Do you believe you will be the same person once they finally decide to drop the hatch beneath your feet, or cut the rope instead and set you free?

Punishment is to fit the crime. "Punishment" however, if you have any brain left to think about it, is a rather broad subject involving all physical, mental, and historical facets of human existence. How much of it do you seek to apply to McKinnon after 7 years? Haven't thought about that very much have you. Forgot about Alan Turing already have we?

Can we have an icon for 'Lack of Evolutionary Progress' please? I find the lack of brains of today's living generations disturbing.

Hitachi Data Systems fingered in Sidekick disaster

Heh

Backups, backups, backups! ...oh wait

Dumping exclusivity could double iPhone sales

Pft

Would be a bit late if they lifted the exclusivity.

Microsoft rubberstamps Windows XP Mode

Heh

"We expect many Windows XP applications to be compatible [with] Windows 7," reads a blog post from Microsoft, "however Windows XP Mode is meant to serve as an added safety net so small and mid-sized businesses can migrate and run Windows 7 without any road blocks."

Yeah, all the +100 apps that live on the networks I maintain and were manufactured before 2003 are surely classed as 'Windows XP applications'. Not.

Sony pulls plug on cabled power

Nikola Tesla

is rolling in his grave.

Dell confirms oh-so-skinny Latitude Z laptop

Eh?

1600x900 display? Ha ha, no.

Opera lobby dubs IE ballot screen 'threatening and confusing'

Pft.

Meanwhile in the real world, Windows 7 Enterprise is already on my desk. Yes, legally via volume licensing. It shows no signs of Microsoft's proposed changes. Did you expect any different?

Time for a change on the desktop?

@A.Coward Monday 21st September 2009 14:14 GMT

--

Switch to Linux - kill unproductivity, unsupportability and unmaintainability

--

There, corrected it for you. Now that everything is running properly, I seem to have some spare time. Now where is that coffee? two lumps, hop to it!

EU to shout at media player makers over noise levels

Hm.

Sounds like an old idea. I believe Apple already pulled something similar over here (Netherlands) some years ago with their iPods. Firmwares were locked to only allow a certain volume level. Creative users however found out that there were re-flashing options to remove the lock. Was it not? I forget. oh well.

Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge'

@Doug Glass 08:00 GMT

Yeah, and you seemed to have missed the point. 'Linux', the kernel lest you forget, has developed much faster than any Microsoft product. And marketing? don't get me started. Marketing was invented by assholes with an exceptional ability to enhance the truth. Keep watching those happy happy joy joy Microsoft Vista television ads mate.

So,

Linus answers honestly. Don't see a problem there. Some of you negative commenters forget this man enabled us to have a very flexible OS in every corner of our lives, with all freedoms, in as short a timeframe as 15 years. Have you forgotten how long ago it was that Microsoft started putting out an OS? what are it's limits? Yeah i'll stop there.

USB 3.0 slouches towards Bethlehem

Thanks NEC

**

NEC claims that the SoC/controller marriage creates a "de facto industry standard" that will allow its customers to "reduce risk, improve efficiency and speed time to market, while allowing customers to focus on developing their own differentiated logic" when building their own USB 3.0 devices.

**

Exactly where we were when USB1 was released, in driver hell. Universal my foot!

iPhone anti-phishing protection goes AWOL

@Replies

Sorry, perhaps i'm addressing the wrong demographic here. I've honestly tried it myself but that's how I feel about anything that gives more scrolling, zooming, and expensive bandwidth usage than actual value. But as with all things, horses for (personal?) courses.

And

does anyone actually, seriously, do any browsing on a phone? squinting at a tiny screen, with your fingers constantly in the way while scrolling, ...

If i'm using a mobile phone to browse at all, it will be on a laptop using it as a bluetooth modem with a proper browser.

Wii web update wallops BBC iPlayer

Well

Before the 'update', support for flash was shit on the Wii anyway, I don't see the problem. It still skips more frames than it plays, sound and image aren't in sync, colour depth and saturation is crap, but then so is 'regular' flash on modern PCs.

For just some casual browsing and getting the news, no problems. Displays The Reg fine, despite the tacky fixed-width setup with the huge ad blocks used for the entire site.

Heidemarie 'Toolbag' Piper resigns as NASA astronaut

<title>

Get off her back already, it was just a bloody toolbag. Much rather have a bag drift off than an astronaut. She did her best and that's all she had to do in the first place. Two thumbs up for a job well done Captain Stefanyshyn-Piper!

Parallels unfurls desktop virt for Windows, Linux

Interesting.

And then there's VMware Fusion.

Microsoft sneak peeks embedded Windows 7

Ah

Soon we can enjoy UAC pissing us off when we go fetch some cash from the machine on the street corner, laced with a careful selection of the finest and latest malware. culinary masterpiece ;p

SMBs unimpressed by netbooks

Opinions vary

Rightly so, because A's needs are not necessarily B's needs.

I've been in discussions about netbooks with various people in IT. General consensus is that netbooks do not deliver value for money and proper usability, because of the lack of enough screen real-estate, bad keyboards, and XP Home are just not going to work out for the desired applications, unless you're just a simple home user.

* Screens are for most models limited to a 600 pixel height, a showstopper for educational and financial applications. Expecting or convincing software companies to downscale their apps is not realistic.

* Keyboards vary - Kids can handle some small layouts, many will complain, adults will refuse, because they are used to regular notebook or desktop keyboards.

* XP Home under Microsoft's "low cost small notebook PC" license. XP Home can't join domains, and the license limits application of the entire setup.

* Removing XP Home in favour of XP Pro, Vista or 7: prepare to nearly double or triple your purchase price per unit, depending on choice of version. Don't forget eligibility in license.

* BIOS is consumer market oriented, lacking business type features such as on-boot asset tag messages and full hardware configuration.

* Lifetime of the product leaves to be desired. For IT projects it is desirable to purchase in bulk, from a single production date so the hardware doesn't vary, because varying hardware increases workload (building, maintaining and retaining software images, as an example). Not going to happen with netbooks, because it's the 'new' thing, and new models are replacing 'old' models too quickly right now.

That said, i'm quite happy with my Samsung NC10, but I don't run business applications on it either as it simply doesn't fit.

Nokia announces Linux-based smartphone

N900 eh?

That looks good. Now to get my hands on one for a bit of testing to see if it makes good on it's promising looks.

Lightning-gun tech 'approaching weaponisation'

Sounds like

The shock rifle from Unreal Tournament.

What’s the point of desktop virtualization?

Two words

VMware ThinApp.

Wireless power gets lovely shiny logo

Nikola Tesla

Read up on him.

Samsung gets 'stupid fast' in gaming grab

Am I the only one

Who doesn't want harddrives/flash drives to be that enormous in capacity? the more you can store on a single disk, the more you risk losing when it breaks.

And you need equal or larger backup storage to keep up with big drives. Costly.

Sony promises clarity on virtualization-free Vaio PCs

title

When will people learn that a higher price doesn't mean better equipment nowadays? Sony stopped being interesting since the mid-90s when they stopped building for function, now it builds shiny turds for executives with big wallets.

NASA review: Forget about boots on Mars by 2030

Meh

With current technology levels they could have sent a pack of robots up there already some years ago; i'm talking ASIMO and similar. These are small, relatively light (no requirement for suit and oxygen tanks, etc.), and versatile enough to be useful at a distance, and can be packed securely enough to survive transport and landing, just like the little bots on the moon today. They could have helped us discover what it's like up there and build infrastructure in preparation of human followers, but no we're squabbling about budget and lack of experience instead.

Microsoft under threat from Linux - it's official

@A.Coward 13:12 GMT

You obviously have different experiences than I have. I can't be of much use to you without hardware details however other than suggestion you could have a look at Mandriva as they are also good with netbooks/laptops, so for the rest i'll point you towards LinuxQuestions.org where you're welcome to ask as much as you like.

@A.Coward 08:33 GMT

And you admit liking and using Linux? ouch. When was the last time you installed a new (version of your) distro?

Is Google spending $106.5m to open source a codec?

Who the hell

is "On2"? never heard of it. Ogg would be a great standard in my opinion, it just works and we don't need another dozen wheels on the wagon, there are far too many codecs as it is.

KDE 4.3 promises polish, polish, polish

Good, hurry up already.

They could have just worked a bit longer on it while keeping 3.x in the air, sadly they didn't. At least they didn't do an Amarok 2, but it was still a painful transition for everyone. Hopefully this release will also let people like me whom hate the 'cashew' with a passion, to take it out back and shoot it till there is nothing left. Bloody pointless eye sore that should have been stuck into the KDE Control Center.

@Michael Fremlins:

KDE (3 or 4, your pick) actually runs quite nice for me, even on one of my old fossils, an IBM Thinkpad R31 with just 256MB RAM and the much loved (cough, cough) Intel i810 graphics chipset.

You could try a LiveCD such as Mandriva One to see if a 'clean' environment gives you a better experience with KDE4, then perhaps see if there's any differences that can be solved. Then again, you may not like KDE at all, in that case forget I said anything about it. :)

McKinnon lawyers vow to take fight to US Supremes

This is still going on?

Imbeciles. 7 years on, the man is still here and gains more support by the day, and still they want to play their wargames. Uncle Sam needs to wash the dirt out of his eyes and ears.

Company wins US patent for podcasting

Ha ha ha

Bye Podcasting! What brilliance, patent prior art and thereby steal it from the original author(s). NOOBS!!

Nokia admits killing off Widsets

And so Nokia

kills yet another feature. What's new here? oh yeah, the 'newer' functions cost money now, like Maps. useful one year, dead the next.

US court upholds penalty for phone records seller

Long description

".. The scandal exposed a practice known as pretexting, in which unscrupulous investigators misrepresent their identities to phone company representatives in an attempt to trick them into revealing the billing records of people."

We call that 'social engineering'.

Masked passwords must go

Cue

Malware taking covert screenshots of input areas on windows that have focus and are receiving keyboard attention and then send off the results. Can already be done with AutoHotkey by the way, it's not rocket science you know, to cook up something ridiculously simple to pwn such idiotic 'guru' ideas.

Nokia pulls memory-gobbling Java overhaul

Heh

Sure, fix up the fancy schmancy phones I can't even buy in this bloody country yet, and completely forget models like the N95, that suffer from constant crashing and data corruption problems. I'm lucky I can still make calls on it after the last so called 'update'.

Oh sure, could take it to a service point, at a price of their choosing, no thanks.

Oh and I hate Java too.

Thanks for the new icons Reg

MS names ship date for free security suite

@Grease Monkey

"Malware often spreads because of users not the OS they use."

Ah, rudimentary thinking right there. So it's not really about the OS after all, is it?

Before you answer that, take a moment to chew on the fact that UNIX, and all our *NIX derived friends, were all designed from the very start, from top to bottom, to be multi-user, with separation between user and system. These systems are inherently more (I said more, note that too) secure than any Windows created by Microsoft, as they designed their system to be single-user, from the start, throughout the entire system. Anything they have started since XP and then pushed through more with Vista, and now shoved it further into 7 with some minor 'usability' tweaks, is all afterthought. "Hmm, people are having problems.. guess we need to fix that thing they call an 'issue' some time." it echoes in the boardroom after a long late lunch. Forget about educating the users too, manuals are so passé, right?. Too little, too late guys.

Be realistic about it. Microsoft's lack of vision in the security department still causes endless streams of drama all over the planet, in every home, in every business. Sorry, but that's a cold hard fact. Yes you can secure Windows to a degree, but that's a whole other can of worms right there mate, and you know damn well as I do that it ends in the same answer. Afterthought! after all we're all the user needs right?.

Call me a basher, but I grew up with this crap. I use Microsoft products every day for a good 15 years now, and I sure as hell don't need any glasses to see what's going on here.

ITU calls for cooperation in keeping kids safe online

Still

Need to teach today's parents these things, so their children will teach their children later on. Parents, parents, parents!

Germany poised to impose police-run block list

Censorship

Is a cancer in the blood of democracy. There are better ways to solve these issues.

Britain looks to export net censorship model to Europe

Ah

So they can't find enough support in the UK and come looking for a shoulder to cry on across the border? That'll work.

Hydrogen-powered two-seater car unveiled

Pity

About the lease, that's a sad deal breaker for many as it's just too expensive. As for missing some boot space, the average working person can live with that as they only carry a briefcase and laptop around. For them this vehicle is a nice city hopper.

I'm personally more interested in the generator part of this vehicle, and wouldn't mind seeing a similar, slightly scaled up (in relation to vehicle purpose) version appear in more electric vehicles.

French offer gunshot-locator flying robots

Should

just incorporate sonic location equipment into the guns held by ground troops. Campers always get shot first :P

Pirate Bay launches encrypted private network

Will just raise suspicion

And then the legal charges for monetizing on (making it possible to do potentially) illegal activities will come.

Palm politely cuts Pre tether

Ah, so

Just another brand NOT to buy, then.