Posts by Rod MacLean

Microsoft to send users 4 critical patches on Valentine's Day

Well...

...wouldn't it be a nice present from Microsoft if they wrote decent software to start with and didn't need to patch it all the time?!?!

Anonymous hackers leak Scotland Yard-FBI conference call

Well...

...these guys can hack into anything!

Serial killer PYTHONS stalk Florida's Everglades

RE: Eeek

Kill them with fake exploding mammals.

North Korea labels phone users war criminals

RE: oh well

They can't complain by phone anyway...

10 years ago today: Bill Gates kicks arse over security

"Sunday marks the tenth anniversary of Bill Gates' Trustworthy computing memo, which made designing security into applications from the ground up a key priority at Microsoft for the first time."

...didn't they do a good job?

The TARDIS through the ages

Tardis

The Tardis is cool but my favourite part is when Tom Baker (4th Doctor) offered Davros a Jelly Baby!

HELL ON EARTH: The Great Dying

Ouch!

Let's hope it doesn't happen again!

Yates of the Yard cleared of misconduct

Errr...

...of course there's no corruption in the police force!

Chief inspector sacked for 'advertising uniformed self online for sex'

Well...

I wonder if he boasted about the size of his "truncheon"?

Booze giant's Facebook tie-up sparks ad concerns

Yep

And they see them on the sides of buses, on football teams shirts and well, everywhere really!

Virgin Media puts Dave and Gold on the block

RE: Money Saving Tip

I *am* a Virgin Media customer and they still send me spam mail. Only about 1/2 the amount I get from Sky though! As for BT and TalkTalk - I'm going to get a sign put on my door asking the postman to route all the junk I get from them directly to a recycling plant! I get about a three trees worth each year from Sky, BT and TalkTalk. You think they would have realised by now that I'm not going to switch!

Primate-phobic Brit attacked by crab-eating Macaques

RE: But quite seriously...

They didn't mention the house prices but they estimate that a native with a monkey-bite can be replaced by 4 or 5 immigrant workers.

New attack bypasses virtually all AV protection

RE: Re: Wrong

"One remaining curiousity: How could a 1960s-vintage design error pass Microsoft's Secure Development Lifecycle code reviews and make it into, of all things, the Grand Central Dispatcher for *all* system services?"

This is Microsoft we're talking about here ffs!

Jobsian Vendetta - Flash stabbed by Mac the Knife

RE: The real scoop ...

That'll be why you can already get so many pieces of free software on the app store already then, won't it?

Hawking: Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad News

"Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad News"

As soon as I read that, I imagined the aliens would be something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_News

... maybe Hawking will be wrong and the aliens will be more like Spinal Tap?

Marmite sends in the lawyers against BNP

Hate party.

I really hate Marmite.

Having said that, I'd glady eat my way through a truckful of it if I could only kick Nick Griffin in the stones, just once.

Pinhead Mac Trojan sticks it to fanbois

RE: ...give or take a 100

"http://www.iantivirus.com/threats/ has one or two."

I looked.

Mostly malware that requires admin priviledges to actually delete a system file.

One or two is what we get PER DAY on Windows...

OSX has been going longer than a day last I looked.

So your point is?

Apple sued over iPhone aqua sensors

RE: Clean water does not cause damage

Yep. My ex-flatmate put his phone through an entire washing machine cycle and it still worked.

One drunken night he dropped it in a puddle and it was forever dead.

I think it might be dependent on what the phone was doing when it got wet. If it's not up to much, you might be OK...

Herd of sheep, off tits on drugs, savagely Tased

Accurate testing

Sheep are unlikely to resist arrest after tasering. Scientists are unlikely to feel malevolent towards a cornered sheep...

Did they try this test: hold the sheep down and repeatedly taser it until it stopped struggling to get away (or "spasming with electro-convulsions" as it's also known).

That's what's going to happen to some real tasered subjects. Problem is, when you stop struggling it means you're dead.

iPhone 4.0 SDK bars un-Jobsian code translation

RE: A joke?

...and have you seen Microsoft's stuff on the Mac?

Murdoch tells old media to 'stand up' to Google, Bing

"Pay wall"

"“Most newspapers in this country are going to have to put a pay wall up,” he said."

Yeah because they need to compete with free sites like the BBC news .... oh, wait.

iPad security broken in less than 24 hours

RE: Undocumented API Outrage

You mean like on Amiga Workbench 2.0 and 3.0 where all kinds of software didn't work because the developers had expioted functionality which wasn't in the API and which was then changed before the next release (where it WAS in the API)...

There's a reason some things are left hidden, you know!

Opera alerts EU to hidden Windows browser-ballot

RE: Colour me cynical...again...

"Since I don't run MS-Windows at home, I have to do more imagining than most, of course. :-)"

Your imagination reflects reality almost exactly. Are you psychic?

Mozilla: 'no plans' to bundle Flash with Firefox

@Matthew 4

You've made it obvious that you're a windows fanboi.

I've been using OSX for 7 years and it's crashed three times in total. Twice it was due to Flash.

Now, Windows on the other hand I've been using since 1995 and I have to admit that it crashed more times than that in the first week (in fact, it crashed as soon as I plugged my scanner in while setting it up!)

I've yet to see El Reg post any articles about OSX exploits in the wild. Look for examples of Windows exploits and you'd be here all day!!

Video giant embraces Flash-phobic iPad with HTML 5

RE: Yak yak yak

"Enter HTML5, driven along most notably by the Firefox and Opera pragmatists. And now we are looking down the barrel of another codec war with Apple and Microsoft favouring the potentially pay-to-play but impressively standards sounding H.264, Firefox and Opera favouring the presumably free but proprietary and distinctively sounding Ogg and Google happy to jump into bed with anyone who'll look at them and apparently Adobe has got it all wrong?"

Umm. I decided to do a little experiment, I downloaded a few video files that normally Flash would play for me. They say they are .flv files. When I look inside them, the video codec used is... H.264 (for almost all!)

So Adobe hasn't got it wrong, they (or programmers who use Flash) have picked exactly the same video format as the HTML5 guys. Adobe have however, inserted an unnecessary layer around the video. Why do we need it?

Apple uncloaks deep details of its 11 iPad apps

@Mat

"Is Safari the only browser you can have?"

Since Google already have one for the iPhone and I believe Opera are working on one, I would say no.

Lords: Analogue radio must die

"Cash for trannies scheme"

That sounds like it might suit certain members of the House of Lords a great deal.

The Ladyboys of Bangkok won't lose out either!

Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers

RE: Yes, there is value in it. Precisely £0. So nothing to refund.

Yep, windows is worth £0 - it's rubbish.

Windows Phone 7 Series gets Timotei rinse

RE: Flash

You've obviously never visited a web page where flash crashes your browser. (or slows it down, or makes annoying noises, etc etc)

If you think there are any Flash games that are going to keep someone entertained for more than 1/2 an hour or which can compete with commercial games then please let us know!

Flash is also crap for video. Some of us use a video format for those files instead!

Facebook warns over password reset scam

RE: exe's

There are certain operating systems that will warn you about exes that have been downloaded or sent by email and throw up a warning asking if you're sure you really want to run code from the internet.

Obviously, windows isn't one of those operating systems.

Net downloads cause 'millions of lost jobs'

X Factor

"In the unlikely event of anyone in the music business reading this - make it better and I'll buy like I used to... just stop churning out shit."

That means Simon Cowell and his ilk...!

Cowell wonders why people buy the X Factor single straight after the show has been on air for 10 weeks but have forgotten all about the artists 2 months later when the album has been released.

It's because it's crap and the public only bought the single because of the ten week long advert on prime-time TV! Once the public have heard the single, they don't need to hear the album - it's more of the same! (People still share them on torrent sites though - no idea why!)

RE: Let me get this right

I'll clear the matter up for you:

1, If I listen to music on the radio and like it then I'll buy it.

2, The music on the radio is almost 100% saccharin coated pap

3, I need to look somewhere else for music, so I download it.

4, If I like something I've downloaded, I'll buy it. If not, I'll delete it.

Without the internet, I would buy about 1 album per year. At the moment, the floor in my flat is groaning underneath the huge piles of CDs.

"I'm beginning to see the problem with you freetards - almost all anonymous to a man."

I chose not to go anonymous. I see you didn't. That's the problem with you paytards - amost all anonymous to a man ;)

El Reg insults 'millions of Irish Catholics'

RE: Tough choice

"At least the Miller has a bit of flavour though."

Yeah, tastes like horse piss

Apple details iPad's 'breakthrough' mobile contract

RE: ipad = an obensent iphone, no thank you!

I'll bet it has a built in spell checker though.

WTF does "obensent" mean? I googled it but there were only two hits - one in a foreign language and the other one to your post... I think you've invented a new word!

Virgin signals start of telegraph pole broadband test

RE: No history students then?

"BT strung fibre from poles in Wales around 30 years ago and proved it worked. Virgin needs to catch up"

What were the poles for? (I assume it wasn't broadband internet!)

Top exorcist says Satan at work in Vatican

"Top" excorcist

Everyone knows that Olly Reid was the top exorcist...

...he always managed to dispose of more spirits than anyone else!

Max Clifford takes £1m to drop hack probe

RE: Max Clifford?

...well, he thinks so.

FA launches security probe after England team bugged

RE: Who would want to listen to....

Come on, conversations like this are few and far beteen:

1: What did you have for lunch?

2: my wife made me a lunch box. what did u have?

1: I went out for a curry.

<pause>

1: looking forward to the game on saturday?

2: yep

3: me too

1: blah blah blah

etc

Tories ask: Why BBC3, BBC4?

@Nigel Callaghan

"Does anyone have any statistics on how many times each episode of Dr Who has actually been transmitted?"

No, I can tell you this though. In December there were more ads featuring David Tennant as Dr Who (and which were NOT for Dr Who) that these adverts had more airtime than Dr Who actually had...

Umm

I can't see why anyone would want to ditch 3 and keep 4.

I watch 4 from time to time, I watch 3 almost every night (Family Guy is on just when my flatmate goes to bed).

There's also Charlie Brooker's show (which raises a few laughs) and don't forget that good shows like "The Inbetweeners" started on BBC3 and have now migrated to BBC1/2.

Personally, if it was up to me, I have more reason to stop BBC1 and BBC2. Most of the output is complete crap. Weekday TV has "The One Show" and "Eastenders", both of which I could easily live without). Weekend TV seems to consist of celebrities learning to dance/skate and a crowd booing if anyone says they're anything less than perfect. I can do without that too, tyvm.

I wouldn't want to lose QI XL though!

Employers call for end to Mickey Mouse degrees

Degrees

I remember a joke that was doing the rounds when I was a student:

Q: What do arts students say after they graduate?

A: Do you want fries with that?

These day you can get degrees in things like "BA in nose picking" and "BSc in scratching own arse", so I'm not really surprised that they're considered "mickey mouse". It's because they're completely pointless and valueless!

Exiled iPhone Wi-Fi apps move to Cydia

FUD

"referring to the fact that when version 3.0 of the iPhone OS came out all the Wi-Fi-scanning applications stopped working. Those applications then had to be changed, and resubmitted to the iTunes store where Apple happily approved them despite the fact that they clearly made use of private APIs - they couldn't exist any other way."

Except that they can (and do) exist without relying on a 3rd party API - there are still apps on the store that do Wi-Fi scaning!

So this is just FUD!

DARPA wants military iPhone and Android apps

RE: And what about gloves?

If you need to operate a touchscreen with gloves then simply glue a slice of carrot to the end of the fingertip of your gloves. You could alternatively use a frankfurter sausage as a stylus.

^^You will of course need to moisten the carrot periodically (preferably while not in use)

Gmail Labs' experiments: What's in, what's out?

RE: @aaron emm

Don't know why anyone's marked Steven Raith's post down. He wasn't wrong, you know. They were experimental features.

... and aaron emm was completely wrong about incorporating stuff into gmail. We all know (by now) that only one thing was added, it's now been sorted and you can easily opt out. Besides which, anyone with a mail client could read/post with POP3/SMTP anyway and not even have to log in to the Google web site.

US pinpoints author of Google attack code, says report

Govt related?!

"A day later, representatives of both schools denied involvement to the Chinese state news agency"

Just like the government told them to, no doubt!

Chuck Norris botnet doesn't infect routers...

c'mon Austin

"Chuck Norris can be removed by restarting the device."

We all know that Chuck Norris can never be removed unless he wants to be - anyone who tries gets round-house kicked into submission.

Global warming worst case = Only slight misery increase

@jake

They may have been growing vines along Hadrian's wall 2,000 years ago but that wasn't as a result of a period of MAN MADE warming.

If we don't stop it then yes, perhaps we will be able to grow vines there again - for a decade or two, just before it turns into a desert...

@EvilGav 1

"Climate Change != Anthropogenic Global Warming"

Except in this case it provably does.

MPs obsess about expenses, ignore data security

Slightly out of touch or something?

"They may be reading a book but I doubt whether they're undertaking serious work or study, reading reports or amending reports that MPs do when they travel."

Yeah, he's undoubtedly right - ALL students can EASILY afford to travel first class!

Argentinians invade Falkland Islands website

You know what the fuss is really about?

The fuss is really about a very large oil field.

Because fossil fuel hasn't caused any problems or pollution so far, has it?