Posts by peter garner

Vetting database is mighty maths mess

One solution would be..

.. to try it on our MPs. After all, if they nothing to hide they nothing to fear..

What do you call a flash-based super?

Gordon, of course

Erm, that has negative connotations in the UK: can it add up? Is it expensive to run?

T-Mobile coughs to data theft

Help! Police!

No-one has mentioned the SFO so far - are we leaving it all to the ICO to sort out? That makes me feel a lot better.

Michael Jackson planned 'robot duplicate' of himself

Harrods will ..

.. no doubt snap these up and start constructing bespoke Jackos for er, all those discerning customers that they have..

Moribund Mexican litters Street View

skidmarks

Is that a rather long skidmark/tyre track next to his foot? If so I can only assume it was a monster truck that rode right over him :-((

Spain cuts off 3m pre-pay mobiles

But

what if the terrorists come from outside Spain and bring their own PAYG mobiles with them? Surely that will bypass the whole "security" exercise?

Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Don't upgrade

.. I've found its never straightforward in Lunix, so I usually do a fresh install and then restore my settings and docs from the memory stick. 9.10 works okay for me, but conquer the desktop market if punters have to keep having to track down libraries and drivers just to get the things we now take for granted working. MP3 players, DVD players, etc..

Steve Ballmer's Windows 7 dance party

8 million eh?

"the beta had more than eight million testers in more than 200 countries"...

so we'll know who to blame when we get the first first catastrophic worm/virus/trojan then..

Paramagnetic nanodot smartstuff offers 1TB micro-SD cards

Will a Civil Servant..

.. manage to lose the entire UK National Police State database held on one of these? Or perhaps a latter-day Mata Hari can smuggle that same database out of the country with it disguised as a false nail....

Orange data users turning red as data dries up

"Fibre break was due to vandalism"

If that's the case I hate to think what will happen if there's a terrorist attack. As I understand it, there's a procedure in place where the emergency services take over a major part of the mobile networks, but if the network's already damaged there'll not be a lot of point.

Mine's the one with the tin foil hat...

Firefox 4.0 developers granted year of living dangerously

Lightweight?! Yes please!!

Any chance Firefat can lose some weight by the next release? Its becoming increasingly slow and I don't see why it should regularly need 400K of memory.

Besieged by attacks, AT&T dumps celebrity hacker

Why doesn't he ..

.. run his own server, probably at home? Then if he's as technically capable as everyone says he is he'd only have himself to blame if he got hacked. I'm sure he could get a nice SDSL deal for $2K a month!

Jetpod 'flying taxi' inventor dies in prototype crash

Shame!!

@oh .,.

Doubly a shame - being able to escape from sh1te-hole Woking in 4 minutes would be something I'd gladly pay 50 quid for!

Robot cauliflower harvesters to replace vanishing migrants

So use the other workforce!!!

"Falling numbers of migrant labourers means that healthy crops cannot be gathered"

So, we have vast numbers of the long-term unemployed and petty criminals wandering around with tags and ASBOs as our prisons are too full - why not get them to harvest the crops? Or would that violate their human rights?

FFS.....

How to hack a Sony Reader

Ah, remember the PSP

This is good news, and I'm sure there'll be some truly useful/interesting/cool stuff written for it, but unless Sony have changd overnight it won't be long before this goes the way of the homebrew PSP..

Researcher: Twitter attack targeted anti-Russian blogger

Twitter down (2) ?

I tried to Tweet it, but couldn't ;-)

Mission control reacquires UK space cheddar

Maybe

.. it was the wrong kind of cheese? Too dense, or perhaps a bit too prone to crumbling in cold conditions at high altitude? I would have though a haloumi-style wedge would have been better.

Even so, a great step forward for Britain!

Bezos begs forgiveness for Amazon's Big Brother moment

We have the technology ..

What Amazon have done is basically shown the suckers, er, early adopters of Kindle just how powerful they are: they've waited until a shedload of customers downloaded the book and then deleted all traces, wholesale. Potential buyers are now only too aware that they shouldn't load unauthorised content onto the device as they know that it can be deleted, and in doing so, Amazon also know all the details that could be passed on to potentially litigious organisations.

Now all we need is for Apple to apply the same technology to the iPod range and then we'll see some real fireworks!

Cops and ISP in paedophile data mix up

Lucky ..

.. it wasn't a "terrorist" who might have unfortunately been shot in the head several times while being arrested..

Music industry busts jukebox piracy scheme

Wouldn't it be safer

.. if we just ditched recorded music completely and went back to making our own? Y'know, those quaint evenings when the whole family was clustered around the family piano, belting out some tunes that dad had composed?

FFS!

The 3G map Ofcom didn't want you to see

Re: How about an open source map?

Yes, well I'd happy to contribute to that after yesterday's farcical train ride from Reading to Birmingham: my T-Mobile GSM signal was non-existent for most of the way, let alone 3G and there were a couple of times when even the read "SOS only" icon didn't come up. I'd never seen so many bored business travellers unable to use their USB laptop dongles. What utter rubbish!!!

Ukraine slaps ban on all porn

I remember..

..the Bush era.. but that's all gone now..

Steve Jobs finds part-time work

It was probably ..

.. a lot easier to install than one of those Apple batteries.

Vodafone said to be mulling T-Mobile UK bid

Well hopefully

.. they'll ditch Vodafone's web site and use T-Mobile's instead. I used to have endless troubles with Vodafone and escaping to T-Mobile was a breath of fresh air.

Please don't eat your horse, EU asks owners

Re: Moderatrix Post-It

Unfair! Why not put your rant in the comments sexction like the rest of us? ;-)

Controversial mobile directory fails on launch

This wouldn't be ..

.. a UK government-sponsored company would it?

Spanish bar invites customer abuse

Re; Geniis idea

> Me caja en la madre que te parrio(or is that pario?) Quiero una cerveza, gordiflon

I box in which you Parrie mother (or is that parity?) I want a beer, gordiflon

que????

Bristol crim caught with mobile up jacksie

Hopefully not

.. a Nokia Maemo ;-)

That Digital Britain report in full

Time for another Internet

Mesh computing, in the hands of The People. How local do you want your news to be?

Opera to take web back to the old days

"Routing is handled by servers at Opera"

I really have a big issue with this after I tried (for a while) Opera's latest mobile phone browser and found that everything was routed via their servers. The main problem was the lack of speed, even noticeable on my phone's 3G broadband and in the end I just gave up. If they're going to pitch this concept seriously they'd better make sure they have the resources to handle it..

Remembering the true* first portable computer

..never actually used

Maybe the North Koreans bought some at a US end-of-line sale. No doubt we'll find out soon...

Israeli army develops one-eyed robot trouser snake

Re: Not new - roboboa

I can see it now .. Palestinians countering the attack after queueing up at Toys R' Us and buying their entire stock (and cheaper too)

Chinese firm hits back at cyberspy claims

Re: When they stop port scanning, I'll maybe listen

I've had this joker as well - they've been looking for open proxies on my web site every day for the past 3 weeks without success (obviously). What the Zigong Sciences Informations Academy (managed by the Data Communication Bureau Of Sichuan Province) wants on my site I can't imagine!

Webhost denies poor passwords led to catastrophic hack

Backups / cost

As I understand it, a lot of host services of this type can keep costs low simply because they don't run backups which obviously involve time, effort and cost.

Its only fair though that hosting services specifically inform the prospective customer when he/she signs up, and then its up to them whether they want to be sensible or irresponsible. I can't understand why some people find this concept so difficult to understand!

The return of the diskless PC

To get a feel of what it's like ..

.. you should try an Elonex One. Trust me on this one..

Wiltshire welcomes clutch of Great Bustards

Can we have..

the Dodo next?

Microsoft guns down 13 unlucky products

They haven't culled ..

.. Windows then. Shame ;-)

US firm says handheld puke ray is ready to go

In today's Police State Britain...

@Karim Bourouba

.. there is no longer such a thing as an innocent bystander - just go to any (legal) protest carrying a camera and you'll find out..

Gov spunks hundreds of thousands on mobe condom clip

Gawd, they missed the point *again*

I just registered so that'll bring the price down a bit.. Of course, what they totally fail to realise ("age" on the signup form) that although the legal age is 16, there are shedloads of under-16s having sex and getting up the duff on a regular basis. There are many reasons for this but surely the most recent one is it's now one of the few ways of getting on the property ladder!

'Della': Dell's very special site for women

domain name LOL

Sadly, www.della.com points to a wedding site. Irony, part of a cunning plan, or just someone "forgetting" to register the domain name?

Kent council plans giant 'Hollywood' erection

I'm also looking forward to..

..a similar erection in Pen1stone, Yorkshire. By 'eck!

http://www.penistone.uk.com/

Adobe PSD pushes programmer too far

@Inachu

> I would fire those lousy coders at adobe and force them to wite in batch file programming for the > next 20 years as punishment.

Using edlin.. no sense in making it too easy

EU tells members to get ready for disaster

We don't need no steenkeeng cyber attacks..

... when our government IT projects seem to crash and burn quite happily all by themselves.

Police ad urges: 'Trust no one'

No, but seriously..

"Ibrahim and a number of co-defendants: they had used hydrogen peroxide"

First photographers, now hair stylists feel the wrath of the government's security clampdown. Who shall be next, I wonder?

Still more Tasers for plods - but still not in London

For plastic police also?

God help us photographers if the PCSOs ever get issued with Tasers! Anyone carrying anything other than a compact camera is "fair game" and if they apply their usual level of intelligence we're stuffed!

http://www.flickr.com/search/groups/?q=PCSO&w=705632%40N23&m=discuss

Canon PowerShot G10

Battery level indicator?

I really rate the Powershot series and use my G7 for street photography where it's less likely to get noticed. I'm very tempted to get the G10 but the G7's working too well dammit!

They should really lose that stupid viewfinder though, and there's no mention of whether there's a battery-level meter yet. That's a glaring omission! Talking of glaring, I always found the red-eye actually *added* red-eye - hopefully that's all sorted now!

You did what? The trials of supporting remote users

Mouse fun

Admittedly some years ago:

Me: ".. and then you click on the Start button with your mouse.."

She: ".. oh I've never used a mouse before - how do it do that?"

Me: ".. Umm.. hold it like you a bar of soap and move it around the desk"

She: "I never use soap".

Silence - presumably she used shower gel though

Users: The weakest link in laptop security

Wireless ....

I did a wireless project a coupla years back and was surprised/not to find how many people on trains leave their WiFi switched on in ad-hoc mode, and/or Bluetooth with show and tell everyone what you've got. It can be a lot of fun out there..

Microsoft's IE 8 beta adds 'special' list

Lynx

That's the answer

Danish SWAT team surrounds PlayStation shoot-'em-up

Try doing without coppers

@elderlybloke .. Oh, you mean like in some parts of Britain, after 9pm?