Posts by richard 7

Next-generation materials for post-Christmas repairs: Reg investigates

Araldite is cyanoacrylate

Nuh Uh, Its Epoxy based unsually. Have been using a metalised epoxy of late for laptop repairs and its damn near indestructable.

Apple's TV killer 'on shelves by summer 2012'

Just a thought.

Most phone users dont care about what their phone does as long as it makes calls and have lots and lots of sparkly extra bits, remeber we are talking about general public here NOT it professionals. Most professionals using a mac/pc do so for a reason. Home users, not so much.

So apple gets away with being revolutionary and for intents and perposes, putting flashy new bits on old stuff that someone else designed and selling it as just good enough to do the job its intended to and is noprmally behind the curve. Apple dont actually innovate that much in terms of the underlying tech and this is why we get the huge lists of missing features from time to time. On top of that they have a tendencay to charge for the brand in ways that fasion retailers would love to get away with. Not being controversial or bashing Apple, thats what they do, and they are actually good at it.

However there are two people that buy TVs in my mind. The 'Just have to have a TV' lot, who will still go and buy a Teknika POS from Tesco no matter what Apple do. And the people that take AV seriously, who will look at that missing spec list, look at the fact its basically a pig in lipstick and will walk on by. The difference being these are people who KNOW what they want and flashy lights isnt going to work in this market. Virgin have the Tivo now, but now look at the abortions that predated that. Sky just about managed to get it right third time round. Google never did. Microsoft seem to have just accepted its not happening and countless others have tried this and these are set top boxes. Now apple are saying they will tell you what display you are going to use too? No chance I think this is another crash and burn excercise.

Besides, if its over 19" they wont be able to ship it without breaking it :)

Anti-piracy laws will smash internet, US constitution - legal eagles

Troll or tool?

I didnt realise they were mutually exclusive

Japan, Russia in plan for elephant to birth CLONE MAMMOTH

More requests

9 - Dire wolf, then let it loose in North America, lets see thos b????ds shoot that sucker.

Apple files avatar automation, emotion patents

Lots of apps that already do this...

Most of which then silently install spyware and malware...oh, yes, point taken, I'll just get my coat

Chrome passes Firefox in global browser share

Agree with you there. IE, Safari and Chrome have a habbit of being inmstalled without you realising if you dont read the small print. Its actually one of the more common bits of foistware along with ASK.COm and McCrappee Security Scamyouintobyingourshit centre.

Chrome installs a hell of a lot of other crap with it too.

Malls suspend plan to track shoppers' cellphones

Because the manufacturers got better

Not many phones nowadays actively broadcast via Bluetooth unless you tell them to. I suspect watching Noklia get hammered by that virus that spread that way gave them all a reality check.

My home is bugged ... with temp sensors to save me cash

Been running this >4 years.

Same chips, grouped in clusters then bridged to RS485 and fed along to an embedded ethernet controller (X-Jack from Lantronix) All works perfectly and was untill recently all online. We've been working with this stuff a lot and I have set on my bench the beginning of a a whole range of products aimed at doing just this quickly and easilly, Watch this space.

It does make you realise quickly just how some bits of your house might be insulated slightly badly and you'll instantly see some serious gains. We dry-lined out outside walls and used the styrene sheet and although at the time it seemed horrednously expensive to do (£20 a roll) with the figures in front of you it makes you apreciate how much you've saved. Same with loft insulation et al. We expanded it a little over the years to give it per rad control and then started zoning and intelegent management of what gets heated when. Evenb on an 8 year old early Combi boiler it made a huge difference to the bill.

Best Buy UK spent £200m on failed megastores

Hmm...

'triumphant John Browett, boss at the retailer, said: "We are winning in the UK consumer electronics market."'

Not a defininition of 'winning' I'm familiar with

Colossal dead black neo-sphere approaching Earth

Hello, Mr Zorgs office....

.nuff said

Music biz presses BT to block The Pirate Bay

Hands up

All who saw this comming.

Oh BTW, Dear BPI/PRS/Otherscumbags.org Maybe you'll get more support when people arent trying to charge me £400 a year just to have a radio on in the workshop. Just a though?

PC shortages 'inevitable' says Gartner

Balance drives already in the Channel?

What bloody drives? Most of us small indies are now on rations with the suppliers that do have drives rationing them and the larger companies buying up all in sight.

Does El Reg have the pictures WD are sending out to customers of the facility?

Tosh Thai hard drive plant swamped

Target, Ebuyer and Aria are the same. Novatech have SOME drives but are selling through fast.

Not funny in the least,

Went to arrange for a restock of HDs this morning, noticed one of my suppliers (notorious for website issues) was showing with 1, yes 1, 160Gb 2.5" SATA drive in stock, a call to confirm that someone had broken the website again rewarded me with the news that hard drive production as all but stopped. In fact it seems that some of the big players are now stockpiling too.

Might be nice to have El Reg do a nice report on this as it seems its going to be a very big problem very quickly.

DeLorean goes electric for 2013 roll-out

Its all academic

About once avery 3 years we get all this roumour about a 'New DeLorean' and nothing ever happens. DMC2 kicked about for years and nothing happened, the re-release of the DMC12 is yet to happen....

And if they havent changed the geometry/setup from the DMC12 it'll be bloody awful to drive. Wanted one for years, got one, and it handles/performs like an old Routemaster bus and is a pig to keep clean. As for 88.8mph HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Unless the other issues are sorted not ta (For reference other issues include every major part bar the steering wheel, thats been OK so far....)

London 2012 Olympics: 17000 athletes, 11000 computers

Uh Oh

That would be the Acer Veritons that are will known for overheating, blowing caps and burning the DDR power supplies out?

Hell they'd be marginly better using those bloody awful Dell Optiplex GX270s

Thats going to be one hell of a turn over :(

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56

Kudos where due

Steve Jobs, like him or loathe him changed to world and not many people are able to do that. Those of us who'd rather not use Apple kit understand that what he did forced others to innovate to keep up. Id vouch companies outside Apple owe him a lot more than they realise because of this, HTC for one.

Its not a nice way to go and it is too young so lets not argue over right or wrong and just silently raise a glass at the pub today for someone who really did think different.

Innovatio targets Wi-Fi users with patent suits

Oh Croap :(

WIll be watching this carefully as we have a lot of hospitality sites running similar systems to Marriott et al and worse, its our own damn kit too. Might have to break out the reflow gun and pull the PCI express slots off the roter boards 'Honest, we dont integrate wifi guv'

This is utter rubbish by the way, someone wake me up when sanity is restored.

Amazon to whup Apple rivals when Kindle Fire hits UK

Are you insane?

'YouGov said £250 is the price people want to pay for tablets'

Erm how far up their arseare their collective heads? DId no one learn anything from the HP debacle? $199 <> £250 by a LONG shot.

I was actually looking forward to perhaps justifying spending money on one of these but once again we are getting shafted on price.

Red Hat engineer renews attack on Windows 8-certified secure boot

maybe i missed the point...

But didnt they say NoeXecute would save the world from rootkits and virii not long ago?

Samsung-Apple patent lawsuit tally hits 21, and counting

Dear God!

Make it stop! Please.

Russian rocket flub threatens to empty ISS

Alleged?

Having met, had dinner with and spent a not inconsiderable amount of time debating tech with Charlie Duke I have to say, you sir, are talking out of your bottom on the conspiricy theory.

Going to the moon changed the way Charlie (and the others) look at the world and civilisation in quite a major way, I somehow dont think that would happen in a Studio.

Ultra-cheap HP TouchPads to hit UK at 6pm

And,,,

Argos, Comet, Currys, Bestbuy, phone systems are down too.

Tesco wont price match :(

I actually had two in my basket ready to rock then Commets site hiccuped and all now out of stock.

Slow broadband blackspots mostly in south, not north

Crapola Kit

An how much of this is down to el crapola kit, old routers, 802.11b wireless kit in use + other wireless artifacts, Poor cabling, spyware infested PCs and more. Sorry but these stats really do mean little if anything.

I've had fair few customers say 'my 16Mb brodband is slow and it says I onlt get 2Mb'. Normally fixed by giving the PC some TLC or evicting the almost fossilized Linksys router downstairs between 3 brick walls, a sheet of lead and an army of DECT phones. 'Oh I didnt think we needed to plug that in' when questioned about the shiney new router still in its box.

DARPA shells out $21m for IBM cat brain chip

Or theres the Pratchett theory...

Cats are as/more intellegent than us and can talk but have worked out that if they let us in on this they will be put to work and expected to earn a living in some form.

Just easier to keep quiet and keep the food comming.

Books promo

And especially given

Those bricks scaled up would be like your or me being shot at with full sizable chunmks of building. Can only dream of the terror and devastation caused but somone firing a section of rail line at any speed, ouch!

Neurogaming set to be launched by Disney

So....

Time to fire up the groinal attachment Mr Lister sir?

Anonymous and LulzSec spew out largest ever police data dump

Now I'm not usually one to jump in on one side or the other but.....

Realsing informant data is supremely stupid, selfish and dangerous, way to go, you guys have probobly actually just killed at least one person.

Apple recalls 1TB Seagate HDDs

Known about some time

Issues with 500, 1Tb and 1.5Tb Seagate drives have been known about for quite some time. Assuming its the same issue its a firmware problem with a counter being overwritten and this disabling the drives firmware. Its possible to manually clear this with a terminal connected to the drive then flash a new firmware to it.

I had starting buying Seagate drives again, maybe that wasnt such a hot plan.

Freedoms Bill: Gov may U-turn on personal data and DNA retention

And dont forget

There have been at least two cases involving Chimeras wher the prosecution almost went the wrong way till common sense got in the way.

Councils and police to publish speed camera data

@Ms Bee

Off to co-op in a sec, want anything while you are watching. You KNOW this is possibly one thread that will run forever.

LG delays Optimus 2X Gingerbread update for Brits

WIshing I hadnt gone this route.

Had two older Lg Phones (anyone remeber the U820) and since then stayed away. Wanted to go get a new phone, I wanted a Desire Z but it'd been discontinued, Desire HD was huge and the new one not due out. SO I thought hey, Its Android, surely LG cant arse that up?

Well missing out the random black screens, reboots and crashes its a really really good phone. However reliability wise its everything i've come to expect from LG. I really hope this update fixes it because there are thousands in the same boat as me.

:(

Has UK gov lost the census to Lulzsec?

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

OOPS

That is all

Anonymous vows to attack Federal Reserve

Wait....What?

I'm not going to justify what Anon et all are up to but stop a second from bashing them and realise a few things....

What we grew up with, the world we grew up in (most of the posters on here are my age or older I suspect) has gone, forever. In the place of it is this huge uncorordinated, red tape heavy corrupt morass the is undeniably starting to do more harm than good. Everything we do is recorded regulated and mandated. God forbid you are seen to 'suceeed' those above push down harder to keep you down there. This is not make beleive or fantasy, this is fact, go digging and you'll find proof of all of the above.

The Governments and corporations rely on the fact that through apathy and a perceived lack of power though we might not like whats going on, there is nothing we can do about it in our eyes or the eyes of Joe Public. To quote a well known film.. 'truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror' (Yes I know I cut it short)

We've been told the Terrorists are comming to get us (BTW how many times did the IRA ACTUALLY blow us up)

We've been told boogy men lurk round every corner

We've been told to shut up and let the big boys play, you know nothing of banking so dont worry yourself, its all under control...

We;ve been told not to worry about Government, they are all good and they know their jobs.

Dont break the law, but if you gross over XXX we might ignore the fact you do

All along countered with OMG xxx has slept with XXX

Trajedy XXX is back on drugs...

Our Generation has sat back and let this mess happen.

Annoymous, Lolzsec and the rest may well be teen hacktivists, although I suspect the real brains arent. But think of what the hell they have to look forward to going on the course we are heading down now. We've got it bad now, they will have it worse. At least these guys have the balls to stand up and try and actually do something about this mess. Ok they are probobly doing it wrong but they are trying while the rest of us will go back home, flick on the tv and bitch to our SO about how shit the world is. So unless you have a better idea or you can put some effort into making your voice heard maybe lay off of them. Yes I realise its a crying shame you cant get on PSN/ACS Laws site or anything else that is a minor inconvienience to you but tbh, its probobly too late for you anyway. These guys and the legitimate people fighting the system are trying to fix their future, not the one you allowed to be built for you.

Yes I'm hacked of and disillusioned because I'm old/young enough to have seen the transistion to this state.

Notorious rootkit gets self-propagation powers

He's right

This thing is a pig to get rid off even before this update. Just one tool alone wont get it and it has a horrible habbit of comming back. Specially if you use fash/flash scans. Full scans only for this one.

Do-Not-Track laws gain US momentum

Sorry...

'"gratuitously" singles out advertising companies for special regulation.' Excellent, now stop your moaning and play fair. Get the message that people do NOT want advertising and tracking.

In another vein. I'm wondering what this means for companies involved in spy/adware?

PC rental store hid secret spy hardware in laptop, suit says

Not hard. Malware can.

Its not too difficult. Unless specifically told to Windows wont format a partition on install. OK XP asks but vista onwards wont and just goes over the top. This means alsorts can survive and indeed I've had Malware survive hidden in folders and the MBR. I should imagine bunging an autorun.ini in a hidden partition could be used to affect something similar. If the drive is properly formatted and not quickformatted/overwritten it becomes harder but you are assuming something didnt become resident when you booted from the cd. You assume that the BIOS booted the CD and not some nasty little bit of software thats made it look like the bios did it and is now in residence ready to drop itself down to the disk again.

Hidden flash drive/SD card? theres the soldered to the board angle and its something we use on our embedded systems for a recovery os system. SD card in the system then the hole covered with a rubber bung. I notice a few laptops of late (I'm looking at dell here) have had embedded flash.

There are a myriad of evil ways to keep things ticking over if you are determined and savvy enough although as previously posted, I dont think these guys are. My bets are on a simple hidden partitionand a linux/hirems based disk erase will nuke it.

I thought that too

I also thought, to paraphrase....

'He's making it up as he goes along'

I doubt there is any motherboard mod involved. Possiby tie ins to the management function in some lan cards but those machines are normally Broadcom chips. More likeley its some clueless oik misunderstanding whats going on. Its a shame as TBH the company is in the wrong, but if he insists on this line he may well loose just on the basis of it being proven to be bollocks :(

Oh, And soldered to the motherboard = impossible to remove? Hmm, better recall all those laptops repairs I've done and tell the owners they were impossible.

PSN gaming network outage sparks DDoS rumours

@Homehub using AC

Run netstumbler or similar and fins a clear is channel

Phone BT and ask please, could they turn off the BT FON service you didnt ask for. You did know this is broadcasting two open networks in addidtion to yours didnt you?

Then in the web UI diasble BTOpenZone and take the Wi-Fi channel off of Auto and set it to your clear channel.

These things are utter shite but the fact that each HomeHub uses three bastard channels is not helpful!

Jacqui Smith 'shocked' to discover we're drowning in sea of porn

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

You watch Scrubs too :P

Ombudsman slams DWP, HMRC data dumbnesses

Just a quick...

'Ms Abraham warned that unless government bodies get their act together, the public may lose their trust in them altogether'

I wouldnt say so much as closing the door after the door has bolted...

More sweeping up the debris after the hinges have rusted to dust, the door has decomposed and the paint has reverted to its original constituents.

WAKEY WAKEY The public have marginally more faith in the ability to predict weather from seaweed than the civil services ability to not totally shag something up.

Ofcom proposes UK phone numbers prefix re-org

Oh dear god, not again!

That is all

Oh Hnag on, isnt it time we utterly shagged up normal phone numbers again?

The year's best... laptops

Dell, admit a flaw?

HAHAHAHAHAHA Lets see

Dozens of models of Dell laptop miss identifying power supplies and batteries and not playing becasue it thinks they arent from Dell

Least 4 other models with crap hinges

GX270 and GX280, nothing more said. Along with half a dozen others

I could go on, but I'm gonna take the dog for a walk instead.

Dirty PCs: How much filth can you take?

this is a title

I'm glad I'm not the only one doing that. I'll have to post some of the laptop horror stories. Love the way customers selectively dont notice that the base of their laptop is hotter than the surface of the sun too.

Our PARIS becomes GLOBAL MEDIA SENSATION

And now on news.bbc.co.uk

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-11734084

Apple bolts chastity belt on super svelte MacBook Air

Audi did

Can you say Audi A2

Least VAG decided it was a bad idea pretty sharpish.

Google TV mimics Android's closed openness

When will these people learn?

People dont WANT ads. Especially the incredibly intrusive and irritating crap that we are now being forced to watch now.

Will I watch relevent ads? Hell no.

EU sues UK.gov over Phorm trials

On one hand good, on the other hand

Its us lot that will pay the fine :(

BT and Phorm should be the targets, or the people responsible for the non compliance, after all its just penalising the whole cuntry and they can carry on with inpunity knowing we'll be paying the fine.

Nutter repairmen scale 1,768ft TV mast

Bugger that for a game of soldiers!

I hate anything beyond first floor on a ladder.

Apple in 873-page legal claim to word 'Pod'

And how about

The device that converts my D Reg Landrover Defender into an Ambulance oddly called a 'POD'

Or PODs Couriers that have been around for years