Posts by Tom 15

Sulky fans biggest threat to gaming, says Black Ops developer

Eh?

Treyarch? Innovation? Pull the other one...

Elon Musk looking to get into 'black' spy sat market

Nah

Internet geekdom love spy satellites; they love anything that erodes privacy.

Panorama stalks alleged stalker's twin brother

Please

Can people please watch the program before slating it? I caught it by mistake on SignZone at 1AM when I couldn't sleep and it wasn't that bad. The police case is only proceeding due to Panorama anyway.

You can call the BBC the Daily Mail all you like but The Register is far closer to the Daily Mail these days.

Ten... wireless keyboards

Volume

The louder a keyboard is the better... it's not a good keyboard unless your colleagues are forced to wear ear muffs!

Facebook system messages subverted by French pranksters

Eh?

"Hopefully this isn't a real vulnerability in their site that could allow someone to enter in arbitrary JavaScript or HTML code that could be malicious."

Yeah... hopefully... seems a bit of a weird thing to say.

Antique Nimrod subhunters scrapped – THANK GOODNESS!

Eh?

The BBC haven't really been arguing to keep them, in fact they did an article about 30 minutes ago talking about how crap they were and how they had to go...

PSP 2 'as powerful as PS3'

If it is just a portable PS3...

Why not make it the size of a Blu-ray disc and allow it to play Blu-rays and PS3 games straight from the discs?

BBC iPlayer in 'hugely popular at Xmas' shock

It will rise...

iPlayer usage still has a long way to rise... bring on YouView, etc.

Shocked mum muzzles foul-mouthed toy mutt

Hmm

Yeah, it does say bark but does sound a lot like fuck. Nothing to do with accent though?

Galileo euro-satnav 'driven by French military', says sacked CEO

Galileo is pointless...

Galileo is pointless for independence from the USA. If we're attacking a target the US don't mind us hitting we can use GPS, if we're not they'll simply jam Galileo.

Harder to read = easier to recall

The problem is...

The problem is fonts like Arial are meant to be much more legible for dyslexics, etc.

Microsoft sucks open source into its WebMatrix

*shudders*

WebMatrix is disgusting!

Google axes Jobsian codec in name of 'open'

Nonsense

It's not hypocrisy for Chrome to drop h.264 but keep Flash... Flash is a current generation technology and HTML5 is a future technology. It's absolutely fine to say that you'll keep the closed current generation technology when the current web is so dependent on it but it's another to say you'll support closed technologies for the next generation when trying to implement an open format.

Doctor Who to marry Doctor Who's daughter

Does David Tennant...?

Does David Tennant only go out with girls who were in Who? He was dating Sophia Myles before who played Madame de Pompadour in Series 2.

On a side note Georgia Moffett is only 26 but has a 10 year old son.

BT confirms broadband upgrades for rotten boroughs

Because...

The reason places with 23,000 people are overlooked sometimes is because FTTC has a per cabinet cost rather than per exchange, so really it's density around the cabs that is most important.

Mozilla vows Google 'Crankshaft' riposte

But...

But, that's just poor design, you've always been able to develop things that are unusable... a good developer should use jQuery and a little bit of their own JS and keep the files, etc, that are imported to under 100kb.

BT tests 1Gbit/s broadband

Facts

There seems to be a bit of confusion in these comments:

1. BT's FTTC/FTTP is open to other ISPs. Hopefully Be will give an offering soon with unlimited bandwidth and static IPs.

2. BT aren't currently getting government funding. They are saying they'd like some of the £0.8billion pot but that is open to Virgin and other providers too.

WTF is... up with e-book pricing?

Hmm

Everyone accepts they've got to cost money but they shouldn't cost more than their physical counterparts. For instance, a lot of books are lent around by people whereas you can't do that with e-books therefore e-books in the long run will sell more and should be discounted appropriately.

Money for nothing – and your (gambling) kicks for free

Yeah...

Yeah, people have been doing this for some years now... I made about £1000 on this at Uni and another £1500 or so on bonus bagging through casinos... obviously bonus bagging is more statistical rather than guaranteed win.

NHS enables Facebook to track surfers on health info website

Blah blah blah...

Blah, blah, blah, another media fuss about nothing...

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

PC Version

Bring on the PC version in February and a new graphics card.

What could possibly go wrong?

Surely...

Surely a 100% risk of failure isn't a gamble... 50% risk of failure is a gamble, 100% risk of failure is simply a failure.

Pole positions: Base station spotters scrap for prize

Surely...

Surely the give away with the masts disguised as trees is not the cabinet or the fence but the fact that they look absolutely nothing like trees?

Chinese bride sentenced to hard labour for retweet

Re-education through Labour?

Sounds scary... the 13 years of Re-education Through Labour we had over here were bad enough.....

Easynet blames network collapse on dodgy router update

Eh?

Unless I'm understanding something wrong 99.9% uptime allows up to 8.76 hours of downtime per year so 6 hours doesn't break that?

Those govt cuts - slasher horror or history-changing brilliance?

Sensible

Probably the most sensible post I've read on all of this in a long, long time.

Facebook engineer bashes Google for Gmail block

Eh?

Eh? "prevent their users from leaving Google products to use ones they like better instead"?

When did Facebook offer an email client?

First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft

Yeah...

Yes, there is an article on El Reg every other week about Firefox but they are generally negative, usually about the swath of new crippling bugs in it or how the next release has been pushed back another 6 months.

All hail Barbie Stalker Girl!

Call girl

They're also doing one with a phone called Barbie Call Girl

No wonder CompSci grads are unemployed

Hmm...

This article seems a tad exaggerated. I finished my CompSci course 3 years ago at Essex and whilst, yes, Java was the main language of the course, we started with C first and had options to also do C++, C# and Ruby as part of the syllabus.

I didn't do the C# module but now write it professionally, due to the fact that it's near identical to Java. So this idea that somehow learning Java doesn't prepare you for Microsoft jobs is a bit silly.

At my company though we do have major problems finding new Developers, this is mainly trying to find Seniors though, we get a lot of people who claim to have 10 years experience but can't do anything useful.

The main problem at the Unis though is the lecturers. Much like most Project Managers are failed Developers, so are University lecturers (on the whole). Why would you get paid ~£25k to teach programming when you could easily get twice that doing it?

Angry Birds addicts crash GetJar site

And what about...

And what about my Samsung TouchWiz?

Mozilla foot soldiers unleash 'Army of Awesome' on Twitter

I'm helping out too

I'm helping out, every time I'm asked a question, I recommend a switch to Chrome!

Germans radio tag ID cards and phones

This

This is what our ID cards should have been about, not illegal immigrants and terrorism. Shows the short-sightedness of all of the main political parties as something like this will be needed everywhere in the near future and we'll simply have to pay again for another ID card project.

Google menaces penguins with Street View Antarctica

Australia is definitely not a continent...

...but it's very arguable that Australasia is.

Warner Bros flogs Nikita on iTunes

If only

Now, if only they charged a price that wasn't quite so ridiculous then maybe they'd finally make some money online.

Google Instant blacklists the Slutskys

Err...

But "fucc" isn't how "fuck" is spelt...

DVLA says council snoopers are free to take the WEE

Eh?

I'm not against them using the DVLA database for such things but unless I'm being simple how does the DVLA database help catch somebody whose dog is out of control?

BBC new media boss defends iPlayer Flash, slaps Microsoft

Hmm

Actually, reading that thread it doesn't really seem there's an issue. Lots of PCs couldn't play HD in Flash 10 and then could in Flash 10.1 Beta due to experimental hardware acceleration which was disabled in 10.1 Beta 2 onwards because it was buggy. Seems like a non-issue to me, unfortunate for those with the issue but they're way below Adobe's required spec for HD.

BBC workers lose £240k of tech gear in two years

Expensive laptops

Each of those laptops was worth ~£1600?

Hack uses Google Street View data to stalk its victims

Your privacy was never safe...

If your router is set to the default password then you never had any privacy...

.NET for Android prepares to get probed

Well...

Well, it's not really £2.5k as it comes with 5 of the £250 dev licenses.

As for .NET, yes it (and C#) are Java ripoffs but I have to say that C# has really overtaken Java in recent years in terms of functionality and use.

Broadband advertising speed gap widens

How?

How can you offer a typical speed range on ADSL? "Connection is up to 24Mbps, typical speed range is 0-24Mbps"?

Android's UK phone sales quadruple

Yeah, but no...

HTC Desire is what you want, iPhone 3GS killer and still cheaper than an iPhone 3GS is now.

I understand what you mean about it being confusing but it's no more confusing than phones have been for years... as for Apple, they have a "one device suits nobody" policy, if HTC only offered one phone would that make you happier?

3D films fall flat

Actually...

Actually, 3D added a lot to Up and Toy Story 3. It's just a shame that Pixar are the only people who really understand that 3D is about depth of field, not about shoving things in your face.

Government WEEE's advisory board on quango bonfire

Leaving the EU would be silly...

It costs us under £4Billion/year and makes us far more than that... the EU itself should start streamlining though!

Firefox joins Microsoft in uncool kids class

Firebug

I use Chrome but I won't be able to fully move from Firefox until Firebug works well on it!

XBox Live: Why should Microsoft get all the money?

Yay!

Maybe this means we'll start to see games designed for PCs again rather than dodgy console ports!

Computer grads can't even get jobs offering personal services

Perhaps...

Perhaps it could be to do with the fact that most people coming out of Uni want to twaddle their thumbs for a few years... we're a C# development firm and want to expand but can't find good enough people!

ISP condemns new BT backbone

I don't understand...

Why are A&A commenting on this other than for PR reasons? Surely if, as an ISP, they are any good they will be using LLU in which case the state of BT's 21CN is a matter for BT's customers, not for them. I use Be and my broadband leaves BT at the exchange and hopefully never touches them again!

It's non-stop fun in Zero Carbon Britain, 2030

Well...

Well I think we all acknowledge that, on the whole, we eat too much meat, especially too much low grade, cheap meat just to bulk out recipes. We'd be a lot better of reducing meat consumption to once or twice a week for, say, a roast or steak, etc and going veggie for the rest.

Not only would it make the average meal in Britain healthier and probably tastier/more interesting it would massively reduce our carbon output and help pay farmers better.