Posts by mrlumpy

Teletext toddles off as licence taken

Sometimes I don't wonder why us techies are despised

My 71 year old mother was an avid user of teletext, she loved it.

I got her a computer a while back as teletext was going with the digital switchover, she hasn't quite got the hang of it yet and at 71 she probably never will.

She could use teletext when she wanted whereas she has to sit at the pc to use the internet and can't do anything else at the same time - she was able to multi-task well before the phrase was coined.

A big part of her multi-media experience has been culled with the death of teletext, as someone in IT she has looked to me to help her fill the gap, what am I supposed to try next? An iPad?

We might not miss the end of teletext but when the world starts and stops with us techies it will be a sad sad day.

Steve Jobs uncloaks the 'iPad'

Wat???

Seriously, what a waste of time, it is a high powered netbook sized iphone, hardly a revolution.

How long after this goes to market will the forums be full of "my screen cracked" topics?

Chris Morris jihad film good to go

I so want to see this

That is even better than I thought it would be, shame it hasn't got a distributor yet.

MS spins IE security disaster into Windows 7 upgrade opportunity

FFS!

"Worse still, it’s doing this even though the firm cannot offer a watertight guarantee that those later editions of Internet Explorer won’t also be exposed to the same security flaw. In fact, they are at risk from the same attack."

So potentially the last 3 desktop OSes by Microsoft are borked? They released XP with this vulnerability, then Vista with the same hole and finally Windows7.

I use linux, solaris, windows and OSX and I am mightily peed off that all OS and software vendors keep jamming in functions and add-ons and upgrades yet can not create stable, secure and reliable products.

If car manufacturers did this there would be an uproar, imagine parking your car in a car park only to return later and find that your stereo was missing due to a design fault that meant a thief could gain entry easily with minimal effort (and I'm not talking about windows). Or your front door could be opened by a burglar wriggling the handle a funny way?

But software vendors get away with it and we let them time after time after time.

I for one am sick of it.

Yanks floored by nail guns, computers and baseballs

it's not her mind she has to worry about!

Surely the more pressing matter is what is going through her....oops, family website, better stop there.

Lightning catches up with Thunderbird

oh yeah, hail the gods of opensource!

Yay! my email client is now back to full functionality and I never need to miss another meeting, or know which bin to put out or the wife's birthday!

Facebookers made into fans of Berlsuconi in post-attack row

@Gaius

To be fair, he deserves being hit with something much heavier than what he was hit with. 73 or not, the bloke is still a twat and got what has been coming for sometime. He is still owed a fair bit as well which would be good to be handed out before he shuffles off the mortal coil.

Google: We avoid hiring too many smart people...

I'm not too smartz

Hey google, give me a job on mega-bucks, that will help the rest of the tech community from getting too smartz.

Boffins: Stress of family Xmas can cause fatal diseases

I hate the word boffin

With a passion!

I also hate it when lazy journalists start an article with "Scientists have discovered..." I also can't stand "Computer whiz-kids" either.

Queen's Speech slammed by small biz

@Anonymous Coward @14:54

Not as out of date as you think I am:

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/10/oxford-universitywealth-school

Trouble is though Ted

The next lot who no undoubtedly will be voted in have had even less exposure to the real world having lived off Mater and Pater's inherited wealth and have no concept that not everyone else does.

Us scruffy oiks will have it even worse once they're polluting Whitehall with WebCameron, helping Uncle Rupert charge for webcontent, legitimate torrenters being put in stocks and re-implementing the failed model of capitalism that got us into the mess in the 80s, 90s and ultimately today.

@ It wasn't me

This country has never had an elected Prime Minister - the concept of an elected Prime Minister is as notional as a megabite.

Now, to the matter of the pathetic target of 2mb broadband. If you set your goals low enough and constantly fail to achieve them you become what we are today, a miserable little country. We used to think big, set ourselves ambitious targets and meet them if not surpass them, we couldn't establish the Empire today, build the railways or create the NHS and it sickens me.

Years and years of successive crapness throughout the country has lead everyone from the powers that be to the man in the street thinking small and delivering smaller.

Fedora 12 debuts after Halloween slippage

Who cares about numbers

@J 3 - What a strange comment.

"The Fedora project doesn't track downloads because requiring any kind of registration or putting in any kind of tracking is anathema to the open source community. But Frields says that since Fedora 7 was launched in May 2007, the project has tracked over 17.7 million unique IP addresses that have come to the site and checked for updates for various Fedora releases."

Again - "The Fedora project doesn't track downloads because requiring any kind of registration or putting in any kind of tracking is anathema to the open source community."

So, the interviewer probably pushed for a number and Frields came out with a fairly logical reply based on the number of unique IPs.

But, who really cares how many Fedora users there are? Does it have any relevance to the OS? As a community lead project the more user there are the better the OS will become but in a "my dad is bigger than your dad" way it has no relevance.

Missing dot sends Sweden tumbling off internet

Yay!!! It's not just me that does this then!

I've done this about 3 times in 2 years, not block out Sweden but miss a trailing dot in a dns file when updating dns entries. It is a bit of a timebomb that hits about 5 hours later on our network and causes a fair old bit of fun until dmesg shows where I have gone wrong.

You can't beat good old fashioned 'uman error! Not just lusers who have pebcak issues.

The state of desktop support

if we can't kill 'em, please we train 'em

Using facebook and iplayer does not qualify someone to be able to use business systems on a business network. The people who double click hyperlinks, quadruple click the excel shortcut 5 times, save things twice "to make sure it saves" should be taken out and shot,..er trained how to do things properly.

"..it isn't showing anything on the tellything.." "..oh, that right click, I didn't know you could click that.." "..it just won't do it.." "..how can I sort these rows by colour?" "..well I don't know, how am I supposed to know that, I'm not technical.." these people who shouldn't be left alone with a mobile phone let alone a dual core, 2gb ram, 150gb hdd pc connected to a 100mb network with web-apps and confidential data.

You can't knit a jumper without knowing how to knit yet everyday people are let loose on machines with no idea what they are doing.

4 in 10 Brits feel lonely without a daily texting

lol

"I always thought LOL stood for Lots of Love" - So did my wife! Why did I try to explain what "All of your base now belong to us" meant when it was on the Charlie Brooker's Gameswipe the other night? I then had to try and explain memes which took me to lolcats then I just gave up and came out with "You just don't spend enough time on the internet" which is a rather sad indictment of me and how I spend my time.

World's nastiest trojan fools AV software

thunderbird with lightning & google provider plugins

Can't remember if office will run in wine but I use thunderbird with lightning & google provider plugins and it does the job for me.

The whole IT community has to work together to come to a better security model, instead of constantly bitching about which OS is "best" - infected PCs and nasties on the web have knock-ons for all of us, as was on el reg a while ago we need a seat-beat moment.

I for one am sick of having to dedicate so much time to making systems "secure" to then have to lather rinse and repeat when the next vulnerability raises its head. We have to stop vendors releasing incomplete, insecure and buggy code as we are the ones that suffer at the sharp end.

Linux: More contributors, more code

Yes!!! We must weigh more printed code!

I think we have something here guys, we can finally settle the which OS is best, print it out and weigh it, which ever is heavier wins.

D'oh! I guess that would be Vista.

Paris as I'd like to weigh here ifyerknowhaddamean.

Gartner: Windows 7 upgrade catch for XP converts

@ Steve Roper and his critics.

Well done Steve! The average office worker can be just as productive on open source products and the cost savings in licenses can be redirected to either assist with the migration or training. Modern database packages should have a webfront end and can be accessed on linux, OSX, smart phones and windows.

I have worked with a lot of bean counters who can only see savings in making staff redundant yet fail to see the savings that can be made in free software.

If more It departments could enlighten the bean counters as to the benefits we could stop Microsoft and others from taking money out of our pockets.

BOFH: Stick this

Why don't people listen?

We didn't write the software we just look after the servers and the pc you are working on. If the people who make your client or the mail software say there is a filesize limit then please just move some of your emails and everything will work nicely again.

Google to fund 'video Street View' for Central London

Only a start

I have been involved with this project working with my colleague Avril Poisson and I think this will bring many benefits to all residents of London initially and then the rest of the country as we widen the scope of th eporject.

IE8 for Windows 7 beta in 'reliability update'

Why not send on an ER on a beta?

Surely this is the point of a beta? When it breaks, let the manufacturer know? I broke IE8 on W7 on the first day of use and sent the report in so that when the time comes that I am forced to support it hopefully the issue I found will be fixed.

When there is an issue with a production OS or software why do people not send the error reports either? It could be a simple fix for the developers who are only human after all.

For the record, this post was written on FF3 running on Fedora9 - no windows fan boy here, just someone who wants IT to work.

Boffins: Send robot lawn tractors to the Moon

Moon district council

Can't see them getting planning permission.

What are the security threats?

PEBCAK

Most security problems occur due to the people driving the computers on desks. Whenever I make a deskside visit I usually see the little yellow shield in the systray and when I make a move to install updates.."oh, it always bloody does that, sooo annoying" I ask why they don't let it install the updates and to date haven't had a good answer. - Same with AV dat files, unless all updates are set to install automatically they don't get done.