Posts by Natalie Gritpants

You are here => Earth is in 'the suburbs' of an immense heaven

Just look up on a dark clear winter night in the countryside. Space is mostly cold, dark and empty.

Siri: Helpful personal assistant or SERIAL APP KILLER?

Siri, how do I make a phone call?

Six of the best gaming keyboard and mouse combos

Re: citóg

Another right handed left mouse one here. My dressage trainer made me switch the mouse to the left. Helped my riding and less back pain.

Microsoft refuses to nip 'Windows 9' unzip lip slip

Windows 7 End of Life

Wouldn't having WIndows 9 and WIndows 8.x on sale mean that Windows 7 would be the third oldest OS version and that Microsoft would not have to maintain it anymore. I may be wrong but XP has been shot and Vista is on the naughty step and if a new major revision comes out that will mean Vista will be dead and Windows 7 not recommended anymore?

Roll up for El Reg's 3G/4G MONOPOLY DATA PUB CRAWL

Suspicious behaviour

Wandering around highly populated areas with a rucksack with aerials, it's a wonder you didn't get a couple of bullets to the head.

Kate Bush: Don't make me HAVE CONTACT with your iPHONE

@dan1980

Agreed, silly string is the best weapon. Short bursts so you can't be traced.

Eat up Martha! Microsoft slings handwriting recog into OneNote on Android

The buggers have sketched my house!

Must get the left hand side checked for subsidence.

Tiny transforming bots: Meet these self-assembling 'thoughtful' droids

Re: Link

Also that vodeo contains a rare sighting of the fast moving superhero: Interlaceman.

Love in the time of the GPS sees chap propose with Google Map

Disappointed

Riding around city blocks is too easy, I was expecting him to have ridden around in the desert.

And another thing, he didn't dot the i.

Stick a 4K in them: Super high-res TVs are DONE

Re: aware of the benefits of 4K

Never heard of anyone doing this but you could use a 4k screen to show 1080p with 30 bit per pixel colour. You have 4 24 bit pixels per source pixel and you can dither to get an extra 2 bits per channel per source pixel.

It's Google HQ - the British one: Reg man snaps covert shots INSIDE London offices

Re: those ... sofas?

Those are polished turds.

BMW's ConnectedDrive falls over, bosses blame upgrade snafu

Confession time

I drive in the middle lane sometimes. If it's very quiet it gives you two lots of cats-eyes to thud across while sleeping before you hit something. Other times the left lane is so deeply rutted by lorries that it's hard to keep a straight line.

Most of the time I stick to the fast lane as it feels safer, no idiots on the right and the speed differences are less than in the other two lanes.

Google Nest, ARM, Samsung pull out Thread to strangle ZigBee

"Something like a wireless light switch might be much easier to install"

I live in a house with no hallway so several rooms have more than one doorway. It's old but funnily enough there are light switches next to each doorway that were put in when it was last rewired (years ago). The exception is the bedrooms which have a IR remote near the bed (no installation required).

I can't see light switches being the must-have feature that drives this.

Europe's highest court: Apple CAN trademark its retail store layout

I've copyrighted the layout of my local plumber merchant

Scratched and dirty lino floor, faded prints on the wall, a big counter with no-one behind it when you walk in. After a five minute delay a customer service representative (in grubby brown overcoat thing) walks in and then walks out. Five minutes after that they come out again and speak to you in Dothrakian.

Computing student jailed after failing to hand over crypto keys

Re: Silly sod

Are you sure? Sounds like he a least knows how to make a system secure against police investigations.

F1? No, it's Formula E as electric racing cars hit the track

Screw wireless lets build big Scalextric

Royal Navy parks 470 double-decker buses on Queen Elizabeth

Propellers going backwards

Irony?

True fact: Your CAT wees ... like a racehorse

Re: Mogpiss Monday Blues

Elephants don't go over walls, they go through them.

Internet of Things fridges? Pfft. So how does my milk carton know when it's empty?

Nice attempt by some commentards

to figure out how to do it with cameras and shelf weight sensors. How do you cope with this? I take the 4 pint milk out to pour on my breakfast, close the door, slosh my weetabix and milk my coffee, turn on the microwave and then put the milk back in the fridge. Sometimes I forget to put the milk back until after eating. Have I just ordered another 4 pints of milk?

Wedding tackle started out as PROTO-SHARKS' LEGS, boffins say

Looks like fun

Must see if I can get a pair of placoderm suits for the weekend

Piketty thinks the 1% should cough up 80%. Discuss

Re: NHS air ambulances

The government would love to run the air ambulance service but luckily the people involved know what happens when government bureaucrats start to run things and won't play ball. Bit like the coastguards.

Google to plonk tentacles on 'unwired' world with $1bn launch of 180-satellite fleet

The poor is where the money is

Not much per person but there are so many of them

EE boffin: 5G will be the LAST WORD in mobe tech – literally

My nearest lamppost is 400m away

Never mind, 2G works OK-ish

95 floors in 43 SECONDS: Hitachi's new ultra-high-speed lift

Re: Needs sounds effects...

Yes, the lift is airtight. You do not want to be standing next to the doors when it gets to the top floor.

Reg man builds smart home rig, gains SUPREME CONTROL of DOMAIN – Pics

"I live in a solidly built Victorian house"

Only if you've had the bay window underpinned.

IRS boss on XP migration: 'Classic fix the airplane while you're flying it attempt'

Fixing an airborne aircraft

No-one has ever built an aircraft that cannot be landed and maintained. If your IT is in this state you only have yourself to blame. Plenty of other IT services have planned maintenance downtime. If yours does not have this feature you should resign and let someone competent take over.

Intel uncloaks next-gen 'Braswell' Atom, 64-bit Android KitKat kernel

Interesting that the penguin is centre stage

but the laptops for the other OSes are open. Maybe Tux's lappy is like the Arc of the Covenant, the contents are so spiffy you will burst into flames if you look upon them.

Amazon Workspaces: A dish best served later

Re: Typical useless Microsoft product

Can't speak for the android or chrome desktops but I've been using remote desktops on Linux for about twenty years, there were occasional glitches in keyboard input but zero problems in the last decade.

Not what I'd call a troll.

Sticky Tahr-fy pudding: Ubuntu 14.04 slickest Linux desktop ever

Top bars are bollox

Fitts law is OK when it comes to being easy to whiz to the file menu, but it doesn't address the larger distance who have to go to get the pointer back to where it started after you have done the file/thing menu pick.

Sidebars are much better for saving vertical space. WIndows 7 and KDE do the rather well, mate is OK ish, xfce and gnome were rubbish last time I checked.

Window resizing - meh, been in most X window managers for over twenty years.

Straight to 8: London's Met Police hatches Win XP escape plan

Unbelievable lack of stregic planning

These organizations should have a plan for what to do when WIndows 8 support ceases.

Maybe now is a good time to commit crime in London (and don't declare the income to the tax man).

Brawling neighbours challenge 'quiet' cul-de-sac myth

Re: Tip toe through the cat crap

I'd like to stand up for the hard working cats of this country and object to the word lazy. But I can't because that's what cats are. Calling a cat lazy is like calling a cloud wet, it just shows that you don't know much about them.

I don't know how slippery it is. I have a cat and it poos next door. If you don't want cat poo, get a cat. Cheap to run and will remove the mice from your house.

Bletchley Park board member quits amid TNMOC split-off spat

Lord Voldermort or Darth Vader for mediator

After the first few bureaucrats go up in smoke the rest should get on nicely.

Cameron pitches UK-Germany 5G collaboration to Cebit

British engineer here

Fuck you Cameron you disloyal twat.

Microsoft to push out penultimate XP patch on March Patch Tuesday

I see that your computer is infected with the leet virus. Good luck.

Women! You too can be 'cool' and 'fun' if you work in tech!

Wow this new monitor is the coolest

It doesn't even need a power cable. IT rules yay!!!

Cable thieves hang up on BT, cause MAJOR outage

No, please don't. We have enough stuff being treated as terrorism already. Terrorism usually ends up with people dying not just inconvenienced.

Hot racks and cool customers: Colocating in the capital

With that amount of diesel..

they could run a garage, would solve the problem of the diesel going off

Seagate's LaCie touts a 25TB (not a typo) box o' disks for your DESK

thus reading should be noticeably faster than random writing

I think you mean random writing will be noticeably slower than a glacier.

SMR is the technique used by helical scan tape drives (DDS) to pack the tracks closer than the width of the write head. They also suffer from terrible performance if you don't keep them streaming while writing.

Big Beardie's watching: Gaze into the screen... it shall gaze also into you

Wonder if it can recognize an evil glint in the eye and a box of matches and shut off the petrol pump.

Mac Pro fanbois can rack 'em and stack 'em like real sysadmins

Pah!

I could get eight on a rack that size.

Hear that, Sigourney? Common names 'may not constitute personal data'

Probably right verdict

after all how many Efifiom Edem's are there?

STRIPPED DOWN and EXPOSED: Business kit from the good old days

Yikes, you've stumbled into...

a terrorist cell. No way of tracking down letters from those typewriters. The bedding and gas mask is a hint as to what they were planning. Please leave the office, lock the door and report to your nearest police station.

Asus unveils dirt-cheap Chromebox desktops with Haswell chips

Re: Bye ChromeOS

Is it fanless? From the small vents it looks like it's fan cooled.

Reg snaps moment when Facebook turned air Blu: 1PB box for unloved pics

Keep clear of this in the data center

Looks like that front vertical section goes in and out and would probably go right across the alleyway. And it all goes into one bluray drive, hope that's a ruggedized one that can handle the load cycles.

Margaret Hodge, PAC are scaring off new biz: Treasury source

Re: How about...

We already do that. It's called VAT.

Re: How on earth can this happen ...

Except she has crossed the line and lost credibility. Accusing Google of being evil is ridiculous. Accusing others of immoral behaviour shows she is grandstanding as tax is not a moral issue.

UK smut filter may have sent game patch to sin-bin

Re: Somehow I don't think so.....

Wessex is an idea, not a place. Just saying.

Pint-glass-flashing FISHNAPPERS strike at Firefox daddy Mozilla

Fishnapper was right

"Tupac actually died" a few days after being returned. But that's OK, Mozilla got some fish back and they can now replace them. What's the half-life of a Tupac?

Suggest they get an aquarium screensaver.

Intel shutters BRAND NEW chip factory as PC market storm rages

Re: Its a mess on Intel "et al's" own making...

Like you say, you don't need a more powerful PC and you don't want another five 200W PC's in your home. But you might want twenty 0.1W devices controlling your light, heat and kitchen appliances. Microsoft have dropped the ball on this progress hence the shuttered factory, maybe Google can pick up the baton (Intel have an ARM license)

Tech titan Bill Gates: Polio-free India one of the 'most impressive accomplishments' ever

Re: Excellent news

Cutting the death rate of children tends to suppress the birth rate. This has happened n numerous countries at numerous times so no need to worry about the African population exploding just because Malaria is eradicated.