Posts by Pirate Dave

Mozilla plans to tie Firefox 3.7 pigtails in pretty Ribbon

DAMN

I've liked FF since it was the Phoenix days. Too bad they're gonna screw it up now just to follow MS's horrible ribbon interface. Monkey see, monkey do.

Average Brit shags 2.8m people

"other sexual orientation"

"Other" being vegetables and inflatable vinyl life-partners.

Texas Instruments aims lawyers at calculator hackers

Soooo.....

How many OS-replacing hacks exist for the higher-end Casio and HP calculators? And do (or would) either of those companies care? I'm guessing HP would probably shit themselfs, but they're just that way. What about Casio? I've had calcs from all three, and my fave is still the relatively low-end HP 24s that I bought in 1990 for ~$25.

I'm kinda surprised at TI's response to this. I always saw them as more hobbyist-friendly, not hobbyist-averse, but perhaps the component side is different from the calculator side.

Maybe they should have used keys that are of a length that's impractical to crack. At least "impractical" for the next 2 or 3 years. They seem more interested in protecting the old guard than refreshing their wares. DMCA may make it illegal to circumvent their protections, but it can't physically stop folks from figuring it out, and TI needs to remember that - at some point any encryption can be broken. If they're going to rely on encryption to protect their product they need to plan on keeping it updated, including obsoleting or de-certifying equipment that is too easily hacked.

Facebook hack service smells fishy

Western Union

During the day, they promise to hack facebook accounts for $100 by Western Union. At night, they glam-up the Russian bride websites promising they'll come love you long time if you'll only send them $2,500-$5,000 by Western Union, and they PROMISE to pay it back. It's just a loan. Yeah, right.

Might as well help Colonel Mtumbo's widow get the $24,000,000 out of Nigeria, at least then I'd get half...

World's nastiest trojan fools AV software

world's nastiest trojan

I'd think that would be any that Ron Jeremy takes off.

Sorry, I'm just leaving...

Power grid takedown: A new how-to

China

So China knows more about the western US electric grid than the US does? As a Merican, that sorta scares me. I hope they aren't also studying our milk supply or our toy-painting infrastructure...

Warning: Showers can seriously damage your health

This needed a scientific study?

We needed scientists to tell us that crud builds up on showerheads and that said crud is icky? Or did those scientists just need to find a study that needed funding?

And Rob Dobs, no offense man, but you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about cleaning showers and bathrooms.

Microsoft harries XP-loving biz customers on to Windows 7

To quote...

"Unsurprisingly, Microsoft disagrees with that notion. It feels super confident that now is the time to move on from XP, forget about the painful upgrade process users were shackled with when Vista rocked up, and get with the Windows 7 install program, people."

Erm, didn't MS say the pretty much the same thing 2 years ago about upgrading from XP to Vista? "Now is the time, People. Don't wait. Vista is so wonderful you will make mayonaise all day long while using it." And now they're trying the same tired mantra with Win7. Truth is, only the hardcore MS fanbois really give a shit about Vista or Win7, the rest of us just want an OS that won't make the helldesk phone ring off the hook. And after 8 years, XP still fits that bill.

The only way MS will get a massive migration to Win7 is if they can convince a large proportion of the apps vendors to drop support for XP and support Vista SP3, um, I mean, Windows 7 only. But the vendors aren't in a hurry to do that because their customers are quite happy with XP.

Most expensive RAF aircraft ever takes to the skies

Look at it this way

You really couldn't do much sub-hunting with 3 1/2 Space Shuttles, now could you? Be honest!

It is a pretty plane though. Very art-deco looking.

NZ scientists identify giant, man-eating eagle

giant man eating eagle?

so the hobbits were safe, then?

Alabama judges take hard line on dildos

It's Alabama...

Where the state motto is "At least we're not Mississippi"...

Google Maps Monopoly board folds under server strain

cool but dumb

The site is more responsive today, but still gives lots of error messages.

The game is a cool concept, but like Nick 6 said, if the other players can't "land" on my property, what's the point? There's no interaction among players except buying/selling streets and hazard sabotage, and with the entire world available, why would anyone need to buy a street from someone else? This is not Monopoly as we know it, more like a glacially slow Sim City.

A telling statement

Funny, how even BEFORE the rush, at 5:15 AM, the blog had the statement

"Keep trying if you don't get in first turn - F5 away... ". Sounds like they expected the players were going to have a hard time playing. Not a great way to start an online game.

Microsoft pulls Windows 7 balloons from Euro 'launch parties'

Launch party

Will these massive Launch "parties" be followed by massive Suicide "parties" once all of the attendees of the Launch parties realize they have no life whatsoever? I do hope MS planned for that...

Vista and Lotus: Knowing when to let go of a brand

If they change the name

how will IBM differentiate the resulting software from the 45,792 other apps/programs/systems/solutions that IBM sells to world+dog? At least the name "Lotus Notes" has some brand awareness, and folks know it's an email system, AND they know whether they want it or not. If IBM changes the name to, say, "IBM Email That's Not Exchange", well, there's not going to be much brand awareness there.

This coming from a 6-year Groupwise admin, and we never get any love either...

Microsoft adds Ping to Bing, leaves Windows Live in dark

why

...would someone want to share a search query that returns movie times? Why not just say "Hey, the movie starts at 8:00, OK?" Or more generally, why would anyone want to share a search query at all? Are the facebook crowd too dense to think up their own queries?

Microsoft can still sell Word

Too bad...

It might have done M$ some good if they'd have had to THINK their way out of this mess, instead of paying the lawyers to do their thinking for them.

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

Not geoengineering

What's needed to save the planet is not some new "geoengineering", but regular old engineering providing faster, more efficient ways to kill more humans. That would fix the problem right up.

But with a human-free planet, I'm not sure who the Robot Overlords could enslave when they arrive in a few thousand years. Maybe polar bears?

GSM connectivity now enjoyed by 4 billion

4 Billion?

I'm guessing that's American billions, not official El Reg billions.

But still, there are 4 BILLION cellphones in current use? Wow, a lot of folks sure do like to chit-chat...

Old-school virus threatens Delphi files

FreePascal too?

I wonder if this also affects/infects FreePascal installations, since FPK is more or less a Delphi clone?

As to "are there people still using Delphi", I don't know about Delphi proper, but there are still quite a few of us using FPK. Old habits are hard to break...

When is an operating system not an operating system?

Application virtualization

"do you see a role for so called 'application virtualization', whereby applications are captured in a container that plugs onto a hypervisor?"

Funny, in the DOS days we used to call them "executable programs". My how far progress has brought us.

Tesla speeds to $1m profit

Money well spent?

Soooo, what do we "average" Mericans, who could only buy a $100,000 car if we won the Lotto, get from the half-billion* dollar loan/handout our gov gave to a producer of high-end elitist sports cars? Oh, a $40,000 sedan that most of us still can't afford. Nice move there. Maybe next they'll loan a billion or so to the company that makes Ellison's yachts. Obviously that's tax-money well endangered.

*That's Merican billions, not official Reg billions.

Brazilian TV ad: Save water, piss in the shower

Cartoons

Maybe I'm getting old, but that cartoon artist seemed to really REALLY like to show pics of guys pissing. I mean, couldn't they have just as well gotten their point across with only 2 or 3 scenes of pissing?

Oh, and what were they implying in the scene where the father and son are in the tub together? The son's stream was going down, the father's was arching up...

Guess I'm just too out-of-date to understand these newfangled pissing cartoons.

Blade Runner tops sci-fi movie poll

What....?

No Logan's Run or Soylent Green?

And how can any list claiming to be a Top 10 Sci-Fi list not contain an entry for Spaceballs?

Apple says jailbroken iPhones endanger cell towers

The REAL reason ...

Jobs & Co sat back and had a long think about why punters shouldn't be allowed to jailbreak the Iphones that they own. The debate raged back and forth until Jobs himself asked "What Would Jesus Do?". Obviously, Jesus wouldn't want Jobs to lose any money in Iphone sales, nor cause untold chaos and devastation across the land. So it was settled that jailbreaking was bad, because Jesus said so.

Verizon chief exec pnked in privacy prank

House?

The CEO of Verizon lives in a house like that? I would've expected a mansion with a black wrought-iron fence around the yard and several satellite dishes on the rooftop. Not that rather upper-middle-class looking house with its uninspiring yard.

Vulture Central plans Brit-Yank dictionary

how about...

"kaniggets". As in "I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur-king. You and all your silly English Kaniggets."

Or the one I see all the time here in the comments - "IT Angle"? So what IS the "IT Angle"?

I'm Merican and we don't wear coats in the summer, so I'll just be leaving, thanks.

Opera CEO: Unite not a security risk

I'm sure...

in the early days, Microsoft didn't consider IIS to be a security risk either...

Web browser makers line up battleships

Browser that you are most comfortable using?

So Microsoft has taken over development of Lynx then? I never have any virus problems when I'm browsing the intertubes with Lynx. In fact, it never crosses my mind. Oh sure, IE and FF and the rest do the fancy pictures and annoying Flash, but really, if I'm not browsing for porn, why do I need pictures?

Dell accidentally sells 140,000 monitors for $15 a pop

Compensate the buyers for the mistake...

Dude, yer not gettin a Dell.

Side note: I see that selecting an icon has gone Web1.5. No more HTML 1.0 radio buttons here, thanks...

Man+dog plunged into 'faecal lagoon'

Must be the translation

"sludge lagoon maintained by Kramfors municipality to store and dry sewage from a number of wells".

Here in Merica, we get drinking water from wells. Sewage would be a bad thing....

El Reg commentards offered extra iconography

Thanks Beer Monster

I get it now.

Perhaps it's best reserved for those infrequent times when we get a new BOFH story... better even when it's a funny one that doesn't mention the Platinum Cookies.

so many icons to choose from

...why do I always pick the jolly roger?

What IS that Esc icon for?

Dreamliner first flight delayed yet again

Err really...

So a week or so before they were planning to test fly it, they are STILL finding areas that need structural reinforcement? I'm not an aero-engineer, but that does seem to be cutting things a bit close. I think I'll walk from now on...

Fiancée discovers boyf is grumble flick stud

So...

how hot are the women that male porn stars marry? Do they go after looks or can she cook or is Daddy a millionaire?

Microsoft fans call for Opera boycott

Blame Opera?

Lessee .. Opera Software is a small piss-ant of a company that puts out a browser that's not very popular outside of the smartphone universe. Microsoft is a heavy-handed monopolist that likes to bear down on the OEMs who bundle its products with their computers, and has been convicted of such by at least two different governments. Oh, I see it now. Microsoft's plight is SO OBVIOUSLY Opera's fault.

GPS-guided wreckers flatten wrong house

@Andrew Moore

Nah, not lunatics. Loonies can still use decent grammar. These folks are in Carrolton, which is just south of that redneck stronghold known as Villa Rica. Besides we just talk like that here in Georgia, and we's is always looking forwart to our heavenly home. Amen.

Site news: Unique commenter handles coming

Hooray!

I'm still a Pirate named Dave...

Mitsubishi finalises mass-market e-car production plans

So $47,000???

So not a car for the masses then... Only for the rich eco-freaks who like to smell their own farts.

2060: Humvee-sized, bulletproof meat-eating spiders attack

Humvee sized spiders?

Well then, wouldn't the obvious solution to this problem be to make our humvees bigger so we can squish the humvee-sized spider with our Liebherr-T282-sized Humvees?

Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail

Polar Coordinate System

Meh, maybe I'm being to hard on this new product, but it has nothing on "polar coordinate system" other than a related input to "Polar, Wisconsin". C'mon, polar coordinates are pretty handy in math, aren't they? How else are we supposed to remember how to calculate sine and cosine?

Microsoft to spin out more non-update Windows 7 updates

I don't think they waited

I installed the RC on Friday morning, and later that day there were 10 updates that had been installed and it requested a reboot. Good to know they were phoney though - I wondered how broken the new OS would have been if it had 10 updates 2 days after the download went live... but then, this _is_ Windows, so I wasn't totally surprised.

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

If I wanted to do that, I would code in Pascal

You say that like it's a bad thing...

SCO threatened with Chapter 7 destruction

To SCO...

I fart in your general direction...

BOFH: Spontaneous Legal Combustion

lead cookies

I guess there's a reason I'm a "lead cookie" Reg reader. I didn't get this BOFH. Zoom, right over my head it went. Thick as lead I must be...

Swiss woman rolled over Facebook

Sickies

maybe it's because I'm 'merican, but what's the big deal with sickies? Some of you guys sound like your employer owns your soul. I'd think that if you're an important and functional part of the company that your boss would value your worth and have no problem with you taking an occassional day off to goof-around. I mean, hell, we have Jobs to further our Life, right? We don't have Lives to further our Jobs, do we?

Or maybe I've just been working at a college for too long and have become too lax. I don't miss corporate life in the slightest.

Supersonic stealth jumpjet passes hover thrust test

SO...

if a pilot takes off from a carrier and for some reason has to land quickly thereafter, he has to dump his fuel and (expensive) armament in the ocean before he can land? Sounds like a good idea if you're the guy selling armament, but to us taxpayers, not so much. Who thought-up this idea? Haliburton?

Apple eyes patent for web silence

Eh?

Audio controls in a web browser are so novel that they need a patent? Man, our (US) patent system is certainly broken irrepairably.

Sun sells two Constellation supers for $30m

So what exactly does Sun do?

Chips from Intel? OS from Red Hat? Sun has sold a huge system just to push their new Infiniband switch and to get a little support $$$? That's not the Sun I used to know. No Sparc, no Slowlaris? What's the world coming to?

Hefty 'battle strength' electro-laser breaks 100kW barrier

Lockheed better get busy

beefing up their SuperSoldier Exoskeleton thingy. 1.5 tonnes + power is gonna need big legs to make mobile.

Luckily that big shiny box doesn't yet look like it can fit in a T-800 frame...