Posts by Bernie 2

Want Gmail? Best have your mobile handy

@ AC 12:35

"I still get SMS messages from the uninformed, but they're empty. I have to call them, if I can discern who it is from, tell them not to do that anymore, what did they want, and, what the Hell was so problematic about using the same phone to actually call me and speak to me personally? Sheesh..."

I can see where you're coming from but it just sounds like you're being deliberately obtuse.

Wouldn't it be much easier and less problematic to just allow your phone to receive text messages? As you're still going to receive blank messages even with SMS turned off. Might as well enable SMS so you can see the actual text and save yourself the trouble of winding up your friends.

but

it won't work at reducing the deluge of spam.

Spammers spoof addresses anyway, they don't use gmail.

sheesh.

Besides, Google's spam filter is one of the best. I do get plenty of spam sent to my gmail account but I never see any of it.

And they aren't getting my mobile number that's for sure.

AVG update gags iTunes

@ AC 12:36

"AVG have already lost my business due to their aggressive pop-ups"

That would be your business where you download their software and don't give them any money would it?

I'm sure they're sorry to see you go.

MoD sticks with 'most decrepit browser in the world'

@ Syd Lawrence

"And while we are at it, I don't see any point on why they need to spend money researching these fancy new tanks / planes / guns, bring back the musket."

You owe me a new keyboard.

Fujifilm confirms 'world's first' 3D stills and films compact

I want one

and I don't even have a 2d camera atm.

Drobos flying off the shelves

Really?

Well lets hope that drives down the price then as those things will set you back a limb.

Unpatched Firefox flaw lets fox into henhouse

Re: Chirs Miller

"If NoScript is the answer, what was the question?"

I think the question is "how best to make your internet browsing experience a miserable one"

- bernie

China halts memory-wiping electric shocks for net addicts

ECT, drugs and exercise?

Surely just the exercise on its own would work? It would get them away from the PC at least

Sounds like he's just combined a whole bunch of completely random and different treatments into one so he can charge top dollar for it. Classy.

Mobile directory blames press for latest failure

From my brief experience using the system

It wasn't even tested for two weeks. At least not by anyone competent.

It took me 10 minutes to identify huge flaws, at the very least in the way they query their database, but more than likely in the way the database was constructed to begin with.

If your entire business relies on a single database, you had better spend longer than a fortnight testing it.

*smacks forehead*

Net sleuth calls eBay on carpet over shill bidding

eBay

Everyone goes through a phase when they first sign up.

Firstly they auction of all their valuables for half what they're worth, then they spend £100s on useless tat that will end up packed away in storage boxes in a matter of months.

You need to exercise plenty of common sense and caution with eBay, this would be the case with or without shill bidders.

There's always going to be a bunch of people cheating the system. You therefore owe it to yourself to become an astute eBayer so you can avoid giving them any of your money. That way eBay is left with idiots scamming other idiots. And while I don't condone it, I'm rational enough to realise that we can't stop it with anything short of a draconian new rules and massive levels of scrutinisation that would only make eBay more unpleasant.

Google Oompa-Loompas dream of virus-free OS

ROM

Some of the people commenting above seem to forget that Google are not designing the hardware.

Maybe they're planning to design all their own hardware, or specify that netbook manufacturers only allow ROM, but I haven't heard any words to that effect. Google will therefore have very little control over what hardware it gets installed on. Which means no ROM.

And besides, people are going to want storage.

"Sorry Jimmy, you're not allowed to have any of your own files stored on your own computer, isn't it much better to have them stored on the internet by a massive faceless corporation so that you are only able to exert as much control over them as we say you can "

Moderatrix to gain even more sinister powers

Internet monitoring by the back door.

Any site attempting to implement this frankly ridiculous idea is automatically losing me as a user/customer.

I use different login credentials for every major site I use to make it impossible for all of my accounts to be compromised at once when one account goes tits up. I don't need something like this neatly combining all my online identities into one easily pwned package.

And what problem do these lunatics think their spyware is solving this time? Antisocial behavior on the internet doesn't bother me, or anyone else who takes the 2 seconds necessary to realise you can just ignore it.

If kids (or their parents) are bothered by stuff they see on the internet, kick them off. These are expensive and powerful resources they're playing with. Not lego. I'm tired of hearing how we've got to put up with censorship to protect children when no one ever said the internet was for children in the first place.

/Anyway I'm getting off topic.

Google strips beta wrapper from Gmail, Docs et al

I only read the title.

How interesting can a story about a webmail client coming out of beta possibly be?

*yawn*

Google polishes Chrome into netbook OS

Re: LuMan

"However, don't forget that PC users are becoming more and more tech-savvy. Before long the PC-using populous will be at the point where they'll be more confident to choose which OS they use."

read as:

"However, don't forget that PC users are becoming more and more tech-savvy. Before long the PC-using populous will be at the point where they'll be more confident with turning a PC on."

Interesting

I actually can't wait to test this out on some of the low powered P3 machines and other obsolete hardware I have kicking around.

Could it be a good way to turn last centuries PCs into reasonably nimble web machines?

Of course, this would only be to satisfy my own geeky curiosity rather than through any kind of necessity. If I actually wanted low powered web machines I'd buy ones based off the atom chip. As it turns out, I don’t.

So will it succeed? On netbooks, quite possibly. On desktop PCs? No. Despite their grandiose claims.

Too thick to boil an egg? Buy 'em preboiled

That's eggceptional.

Well not really I just wanted to say it.

Windows users ambushed by attack on fresh IE flaw

another Re: Be smarter

Yeah NoScript is a great add-on, if you want to b0rk the web and spend the rest of your life white-listing stuff to fix it again.

It's like an over zealous firewall asking you to confirm or deny every little thing.

Lots of hassle, no real protection.

Toyota preps plug-in Prius for mass production

18 miles...

wow.

/sarcasm

Can't get to work and back on that.

Won't Toyota just admit that the petrol + leccy thing was a huge mistake and continues to be a monumental failure?

I guess not.

Police told to use Wikipedia for court preparation

Re: Reid Malenfant

"Absolutely EVERYTHING ELSE is regarded as just too boring and geeky to give even a second thought to; most people I know actually delight in their computer illiteracy"

True, I saw a colleague reading the BBC News Tech section and told him that he should read The Register if he cared about technology.

His response was that BBC News is good enough. True, for most people the BBCs simplistic tech stories are all they feel they need to know, or in most cases more than they feel they need to know.

Chirpy guff about Twitter and some guy nicking virtual money in a MMORPG is cutting edge high tech stuff to most people.

Grand Theft Auto IV coming to the iPhone?

Don't be silly...

the hardware needed to render GTA IV would drain a phone battery in seconds.

Demand for IT staff jumps, claims employment agency

Re: Francis Fish

You worked 3 months for free?

lol you've been had mate.

Europe won't pay more for Windows 7. Really!

I thought this site was for tech professionals?

Why is everyone so miserable that Windows 7, which from what I've heard still doesn't have any major advantage over Vista - or even XP*, won't be shipping with IE in Europe?

*oh it has touch screen support now? Who has a touch screen? That's right, nobody. Poor show.

Masked passwords must go

@ AC 08:23

"bearing in mind, most people reuse the same password for pretty much everything"

Are people really that dumb?

At least choose different log in details for different groups of sites (e.g. financial, social networking, forums etc) jeez

Why would anyone run their own base station?

hmmm

"but with a femtocell we can have ubiquitous networking, and mobile phone coverage too, without having to muck about with settings or change IP addresses - which seems a reasonable thing on which to spend 160 quid"

I wouldn't pay £80 for ubiquitous networking and mobile phone coverage.

Is it really that hard to make a distinction between the work you do outside using your phone/laptop and the work you do inside using your computer? really?

Call my old fashioned but I keep work at work and it works just fine.

UK.gov decides best form of cyber defence is attack

so...

a whole bunch of government computers got pwned by script kiddies (PEBKAC) and now they want to take over the internet.

great.

Microsoft begins Security Essentials downloads

you mean Windows isn't a secure OS?

*sniggers*

Opera Software reinvents complete irrelevance

oh noes Ted wrote an article on the register

I'm never coming back!

/get over yourselves.

WD 2TB Caviar Black appears on promo card

cache

"The RE4-GP 2TB model has a 64GB cache"

hmm don't think so somehow.

Facebook tackles potent click fraud scam

One more nail in the coffin.

Can't wait...

Microsoft bribes Oz to ditch Firefox

Gee...

...you'd think M$ could afford a nicer price.

It'd take you half an hour to win more money than that on most cheapo day time TV game shows.

Maybe if they were pitching a Ferrari or a new house or your own call girl or something it might be worth installing a UA switcher on Firefox and giving it a go.

As it stands, who cares.

US city demands FaceSpaceGooHoo log-ins from job seekers

urmm

you'd have to be a moron to put login details on a job application.

Perhaps that's part of the test, as has been suggested in earlier comments.

But if it's not a trick question and they seriously want the info, I can't imagine they're going to have many successful applicants.

And why do they want passwords anyway? Surely usernames alone would be enough to give them access to the publicly available information, which is all they're allowed to see.

Student leader demands lectures be 'put against the wall'

this is a title

Isn't the whole point of going to Uni to gain knowledge and wisdom from your lecturers?

If you replace them with "online learning" or "virtual learning environments" or whatever he was banging on about then you're getting no more insight than you can already get for free using Google or your local library.

I say the entire concept of University is outdated and obsolete. Why do you need a degree to get a good job anyway? It's arbitrary elitist nonsense.

The sooner we convince companies that they should actually, oh I dunno, train their employees properly, the sooner they can start hiring people who actually want to do the job. With everyone being trained from scratched in how to do their dream job, everyone would suddenly become happy and fulfilled. Unemployment would all but cease and with universal job satisfaction crime would stop overnight.

People wouldn't always get their first choice of job, but there are plenty of alternatives out there, they'd find something they enjoyed soon enough.

So maybe a few important people might slip through the net and become doctors or surgeons or something but I'd rather live in a world with total job satisfaction and then possibly have my life cut short by some maniac pretending to be a surgeon than live a long and empty life filling in forms for the government.

Broadband tax of £6 per year to fund rural fibre rollout

Re: A J Stiles

"Instead of introducing broadband so that people in rural areas can benefit from Internet-only shopping deals, for instance, why aren't we insisting for businesses to make their goods available at the same price in bricks-and-mortar stores for the benefit of non-computer owners?"

Because that's just stupid.

Do you not understand that goods are cheaper online because a warehouse + website is cheaper to run than a store?

If someone said "you have to sell things in store for the same price you do online" they'd just put the prices up online and your good intentions would mean thousands of people suffer.

Opera to take web back to the old days

They had me up until

"Routing is handled by servers at Opera"

sounds a bit crap really.

Microsoft to bomb Europe with IE-free Windows 7

re: Mike OReilly

"Europeans can now look forward to the hassle of installing IE on their own"

If it's anything like my experience of trying to install Windows Live Messenger on a Vista Ultimate box, you're right, it will be a massive hassle.

But seriously, who the hell would opt in to using IE? (assuming they don't keep their update site IE-only, which is what the EU should actually be worried about)

Here's a simple solution: Microsoft should put a set of icons on the desktop; "Install IE", "Install Firefox", "Install Opera" etc. Let users click one (or several) and delete the rest. Wasn't that easy? You don't even need 18 different versions.